The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts 9780748635245

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The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts

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The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts e d i t e d b y m a r k t h o rn to n bu rn ett, a d r i a n s t r e e t e an d ra mo n a wra y

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2011 © in the individual contributions is retained by the authors Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12 Goudy by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3523 8 (hardback) The right of the contributors to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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contents

CONTENTS

List of Figures Acknowledgements A Note on References Introduction Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray Part 1: Shakespeare and the Book 1 Textual Shakespeare Sonia Massai 2 Shakespeare and Poetry Peter Holbrook 3 Shakespeare and the Novel Marianne Novy 4 Shakespeare and Translation Alexander C. Y. Huang 5 Shakespeare Anthologized Kate Rumbold 6 Shakespeare and Biography David Bevington Part 2: Shakespeare and Music 7 Shakespeare and Early Modern Music Christopher R. Wilson 8 Shakespeare and Opera Adrian Streete 9 Shakespeare and Classical Music Julie Sanders 10 Shakespeare and Musical Theatre Fran Teague 11 Shakespeare, Ballet and Dance Rodney Stenning Edgecombe 12 Shakespeare and Popular Music Adam Hansen

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contents

Part 3: Shakespeare on Stage and in Performance 13 Shakespeare and Drama Lucy Munro 14 Shakespeare and the Renaissance Stage Edel Lamb 15 Shakespeare and the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Stage Fiona Ritchie 16 Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage Richard Foulkes 17 Shakespeare and the Modern Stage Christie Carson 18 Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance Spaces Andrew James Hartley Part 4: Shakespeare and Youth Culture 19 Shakespeare for Children Amy Scott-Douglass 20 Shakespeare and Teenagers Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr 21 Shakespeare and the Comic Book Michael P. Jensen Part 5: Shakespeare, Visual and Material Culture 22 Shakespeare, Portraiture, Painting and Prints Erin C. Blake 23 Shakespeare, Sculpture and the Material Arts Balz Engler 24 Shakespeare Exhibition and Festival Culture Mark Thornton Burnett Part 6: Shakespeare, Media and Culture 25 Shakespeare and Silent Film Judith Buchanan 26 Shakespeare on Film, 1930–90 Anne-Marie Costantini-Cornède 27 Shakespeare on Film, 1990–2010 Ramona Wray 28 Shakespeare on Television Stephen Purcell 29 Shakespeare and Radio Susanne Greenhalgh 30 Shakespeare on the Internet and in Digital Media Michael Best Notes on Contributors Index

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list of figures

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3

Figure 1.4

Figure 1.5 Figure 1.6

Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3

Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5

Figure 4.6 Figure 4.7 Figure 4.8

Title page of the First Quarto edition of King Lear (1608, STC 22292); © The British Library Board (C.34.k.17). The text of the sample scene [3.6], as printed in the First Quarto edition of 1608 (STC 22292; G3v-G4v). The text of the sample scene, marked as “Scena Sexta” in Act 3 in the First Folio edition of 1623 (STC 22273; rr4); blank spaces signal the absence of quarto-only lines. Woodcut illustrating King Lear in Nicholas Rowe’s edition of The works of Mr. William Shakespear (1709), vol. 5, p. 2467; © The British Library Board (2302.b.14). Opening of Act 3, Scene 9 [3.6] and apparatus in Pope’s edition (1725), vol. 3, p. 66; © The British Library Board (78.l.7–12). Opening of Act 3, Scene 6 in the Cambridge Shakespeare (1863–6), vol. 8, p. 350; © The British Library Board (11768.e.1). Covers of the 1807 and 1844 editions of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Zhou Xun as Qing Nü (Ophelia) in The Banquet (dir. Feng Xiaogang, 2006). Qing Nü (Ophelia) tells Emperor Li (Claudius) that the songdance to commemorate Prince Wu Luan (Hamlet) is her own idea, and that her father Minister Yin (Polonius) should not be blamed. Qing Nü performs the masked dance and sings “The Song of Yue”. Wu Hsing-kuo takes off his Beijing opera head-dress in Lear Is Here. Photo by Dirk Bleicker and provided by the Contemporary Legend Theatre, Taiwan. Mad Lear (Wu Hsing-kuo) in the storm. Photo by Dirk Bleicker and provided by the Contemporary Legend Theatre, Taiwan. Poster of David Tse’s King Lear. Courtesy of Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre. Page 2 of the script of Ong Keng Sen’s pan-Asian Lear.

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viii Figure 4.9

Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2 Figure 8.3 Figure 8.4 Figure 8.5 Figure 8.6 Figure 8.7 Figure 17.1 Figure 17.2

Figure 17.3

Figure 19.1 Figure 19.2

Figure 19.3

Figure 19.4 Figure 19.5 Figure 21.1

Figure 21.2

Figure 21.3

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list of figures Lear, a Japan Foundation Asia Center production, directed by Ong Keng Sen. Courtesy of Ong Keng Sen and TheatreWorks, Ltd, Singapore. Poster for the premiere of Verdi’s Otello, La Scala, Milan, 5 February 1887. © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library. Francesco Tamagno, creator of the title role of Verdi’s Otello, c. 1888. © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library. Giovanni Zenatello in the title role of Verdi’s Otello, 1909. © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library. Giovanni Martinelli in the title role of Verdi’s Otello, c. 1938. © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library. Franz Völker in the title role of Verdi’s Otello, c. 1938–40. © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library. Tito Gobbi as Iago in Verdi’s Otello. © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library. Plácido Domingo in the title role of Verdi’s Otello at the Vienna State Opera. © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library. The attentive international audience at Shakespeare’s Globe, August 1997. Photographer: Donald Cooper. The 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Peter Brook, starring Sara Kestelman as Titania and David Waller as Bottom. Photographer: Donald Cooper. The 1992 National Theatre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Robert Lepage and starring Jeffrey Kissoon as Oberon, Angela Laurier as Puck, Indra Ové as Hermia and Rupert Graves as Lysander. Photographer: Donald Cooper. Helen Stratton, frontispiece to The Lamb Shakespeare for the Young: Macbeth (New York: Duffield and Co., 1909). Frances Hodgson Burnett, Katherine and Petruchio. Reproduced in Edith Nesbit’s Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (Chicago: D. E. Cunningham, 1936). Max Bihn, Othello. Reproduced in Edith Nesbit’s Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (Chicago: D. E. Cunningham, 1936). J. R. Skelton, Shakespeare. Reproduced in Henry Gilbert’s Stories of Great Writers (London, NY: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1914). Shakespeare’s Birthday Bash, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, April 2008. Photo by Amy Scott-Douglass. Dominated by both Shakespeare’s text and modern translation, this page from The Tempest nonetheless finds an imaginative way to illustrate the storm. Art and translation are by Simon Greaves. Courtesy of the Shakespeare Comic Book Company © 2006. Romeo at the Apothecary’s shop in Classical Comics’ “Romeo and Juliet”: Original Text Edition (2009). The art is by Will Voley. Courtesy of Classical Comics Ltd © 2009. Japanese cultural motifs are a good fit for the manga

85 151 154 157 158 160 162 163 315

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Figure 22.1 Figure 22.2 Figure 22.3

Figure 22.4

Figure 22.5 Figure 22.6

Figure 22.7

Figure 22.8

Figure 22.9 Figure 22.10

Figure 22.11 Figure 22.12 Figure 22.13

Figure 22.14 Figure 22.15 Figure 22.16 Figure 23.1 Figure 24.1

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Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The art is by Sonia Leong. Courtesy of SelfMadeHero © 2007. Martin Droeshout, title page portrait from the First Folio. Engraving, 1623. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. William Marshall, This shadow is renowned Shakespear’s. Engraving, 1640. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Michael van der Gucht, Mr. William Shakespeare ob A.D. 1616, aet, 53. Engraving, 1709. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Gaspard Duchange after Benoît Arlaud, Mr. Wm. Shakespeare. Engraving, 1733 (first published 1709). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. George Vertue, William Shakespeare. Engraving, 1721. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. George Vertue, William Shakespeare . . . done from the original now in the possession of Robert Keck. Engraving, 1719. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Richard Earlom, William Shakespear, from an original picture by Cornelius Jansen in the collection of C. Jennens. Mezzotint, 1770. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. George Edward Perine and Charles T. Giles after Edouard Hamman, Shakespeare with his family, at Stratford, reciting the tragedy of Hamlet. Mezzotint, 1866. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Sanders Portrait. Oil on panel, 1603. Courtesy of Lloyd Sullivan. Roy Peterson, Some experts think even earlier versions of Shakespeare’s portrait exist. Original drawing, 2009. Courtesy of Roy Peterson, Orange County. Elisha Kirkhall after François Boitard, Hamlet, act III, sc. 4. Engraving, 1709. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Louis du Guernier, Hamlet, act III, sc. 4. Engraving, 1714. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. William Hogarth and Charles Grignion after William Hogarth, Mr. Garrick in the Character of Richard the 3d. Engraving, 1746. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. James Northcote, Romeo and Juliet, act V, sc. 3. Oil on canvas, 1790. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. J. Hinchcliff after G. F. Sargent, Mantua. Engraving, 1841. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. E. Blair Leighton. “Olivia” from The Graphic gallery of Shakespeare’s heroines. Colour gravure, 1896. The statue of William Shakespeare, Leicester Square, London, 1874. Courtesy of BigStock.Photo. Souvenir from the Hamlet Festival at Kronborg Castle, Elsinore, 1950. From Festpillene PAA Kronborg (København: S. Johnsen, 1950), p. 18. Courtesy of A. Dragsted Jewelry, Copenhagen.

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Figure 30.1

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list of figures The “Gulliver Theatre” in Galat¸i, Romania. Photo by Mark Thornton Burnett. The Palace of Justice hosts the “Shakespeareana” Festival at the Universitatea “Duna˘rea de Jos”, Galat¸i, Romania. Photo by Mark Thornton Burnett. Alciati’s Occasionem. Reproduced by permission of the University of Victoria Library from Livret des emblems de maistre Andre Alciat mis en rime francoyse (Paris: C. Wechel, 1536).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are immeasurably grateful to Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press for having been such a supportive and facilitative editor. We would also like to thank the contributors for their sterling efficiency, patience and responsiveness during the editorial process.

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A NOTE ON REFERENCES

Unless otherwise stated, contributors have used The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997), for all Shakespeare quotations.

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Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray

INTRODUCTION Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray

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n the courtyard of the “Casa di Giulietta” – and on the cover of this book – stands a striking embodiment of Shakespeare’s Juliet.1 In the same way that Montague, in Romeo and Juliet, memorializes Capulet’s daughter – “For I will raise her statue in pure gold” (5.3.298) – so has the city of Verona elected to honour and localize a character from the early modern English stage. The work of local artist, Nereo Costantini, the sculpture of Juliet was financed by the Lions’ Club of Verona, completed in 1968 and displayed, for the first time, in 1972. Dates are suggestive, and it was presumably in the wake of the success of the Franco Zeffirelli 1968 film version of Romeo and Juliet that the Italian municipality decided to commission its own memorial to Shakespeare’s creation. In so doing, the city authorities showed themselves responsive to a series of artistic rewritings and accretions. For Zeffirelli’s screen statement is but one entry in the continuum of envisionings of Romeo and Juliet, and prior to this the director had worked on Shakespearean stage productions and operatic interpretations. To pinpoint the inspiration for Juliet, then, is to acknowledge adaptations of the classic narrative that function across and through history in an intricately layered fashion. The physical constitution of the sculpture bears witness to the process. In that Juliet’s pose recalls that of Botticelli’s “Venus”, she is represented in terms of celebrated Renaissance art. At the same time, the curved lines of her combined demure and sexualized appearance – one hand rests at her shoulder, and the other holds the hem of her dress – point to an idea of womanhood that is firmly located in the 1960s. Given the multiple artistic contexts in which Juliet operates, it is perhaps appropriate that her face is impassive, even expressionless – devoid of meaning, she becomes instead the canvas, the artistic work, onto which a range of emotions are projected, with the sculpture coming to function as an object of longing, veneration and displacement. Immediately significant as a photographic opportunity – to possess a representation of this representation is a key imperative for the visitor – the sculpture is also a source of talismanic power. Touching Juliet’s right breast guarantees, apparently, luck in love; accordingly, thanks to a ritual that suggests both eroticism and infantilization, one side of the figure has been worn smooth, burnished by the rub of hands. In the wake of the manual friction that attends the sculpture, the dull bronze has been transformed into the semblance of glittering gold, reinforcing a sense of a valuable Shakespearean ancestry and associating Juliet with an idealization of a “golden age”. Certainly, Shakespeare is present in the courtyard of the “Casa di Giulietta”: a plaque with an apt quotation – “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” (2.1.44) –

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adorns the wall, and Shakespeare himself appears as a small sculpture – much smaller than that of Juliet – quill at the ready. Despite his facility with writing, Shakespeare the man has been overshadowed by his creation: the products have greater purchase than their originator. The graffiti that covers the walls leading into this courtyard suggests that anyone can be an artist and that the reproduction of Shakespearean genius is within the reach of all, while that effort to communicate discovers itself in more than one register. In particular, the sculpted Juliet is the spur to outpourings of feeling, and attempts to make connections, on a huge scale. On the so-called “Juliet Wall” of the courtyard are posted the numerous letters and missives – to Juliet herself – that request guidance in affairs of the heart. Frozen, as she is, Juliet cannot respond to these appeals; rather, her voice – the ghostly manifestation of her spirit – is ventriloquized by the “Juliet Club”, a fifteen-strong team of local volunteers, supported by the urban oligarchy, who reply to each letter and offer counsel. As part of that initiative, the “Casa di Giulietta” encourages participation in mythography. The dominant ideas – that it is possible to commune with Juliet; that love is female, universal and global; that Shakespeare is there for the asking; and that his Romeo and Juliet can constantly be relived – are picked up in a recent film. Letters to Juliet (dir. Gary Winick, 2010) invests heavily both in a Shakespeare-inspired plot, which works across the world and across time, and in a romantic mystification of the “Casa di Giulietta”. The latter feature announces itself in a mise-en-scène intensely preoccupied with balconies. Nor is Verona’s “Casa di Giulietta” exempt from a Hollywood-like makeover. For all its trappings of anteriority, including a balcony and gothic-style windows, the house and courtyard have a tenuous claim to “authenticity”. True, this was a medieval home owned by the dell Capello family, from whom the Capulet family may have taken their name; it has also been suggested that Giulietta Capello was the basis for Shakespeare’s Juliet. At the same time, a trajectory of faux “pastness” is apparent: the house was extensively renovated – made old – in the 1930s, the culmination of which was the provision of numerous antiquated features, including the balcony, an addition that, ever since, has facilitated the replay of Romeo and Juliet and its famous aubade. In the experience offered at the “Casa di Giulietta” we are sensitized to recreation and reconstruction even as we are also reminded of history and “originality”. No matter that Juliet is a simulacrum or a relatively recent fixture: her name alone legitimates her status as a quasi-spiritual point of reference and visitation, authorizes the touristic circus to which she is linked, and allows for her circulation on a global basis. To enter the courtyard, and to encounter Juliet, is to negotiate multiple expressions of Shakespeare: it is to engage in a phenomenon that looks backwards and forwards and at many points in between. We are invited to trace a route backwards in time to a book (one model of art) by a Renaissance playwright which returns to Italy via a host of European and global adaptations, each one of which casts Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in its own image. We are simultaneously encouraged to move forwards in time to experience a sculpture (another model of art) whose quasi-mystical influence continues into the here-and-now. And that immersion in the present carries in its train an active involvement in the cultures of tourism, in the bewildering variety of forms of mass communication, in the reproductive turn of postmodernity, and in the acceleration of hyperreality. So it is that Juliet – and Romeo and Juliet – are brought to mind in a conflux of acts of interpretation, appropriation and translation, each of which represents a multiplicity of points of intervention in the play and in the personality known as Shakespeare. The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts follows just such a multi-faceted, ongoing and accumulating movement. It delves into the past in its recovery of the condi-

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tions that enabled Shakespeare’s art and it traverses subsequent centuries, including the present, in detailing the extent to which the plays and poems have been reworked and revitalized in the arts of modernity. This collection understands “the arts” according to a generous franchise. It takes the arts to signify in their visual, literary and performing articulations, and it takes note of multiple creative endeavours and disciplines. The arts are defined as encompassing, variously, publishing, exhibiting, staging, reconstructing and disseminating; they are interpreted in the light of a spectrum of encounters and experiences; and they are embodied in the numerous means through which Shakespeare’s work is communicated. This range of artistic practices has wide historical coverage. The chapters assembled investigate the diverse mechanisms familiar to, and utilized by, Shakespeare in his day. They simultaneously explore how the Bardic name, and its associations, have been either parodied or appropriated from the sixteenth century onwards. Chapters are both surveys and interventions; that is, they make available syntheses of existing knowledge and pursue discrete discussions, debating the state of play in the critical field and suggesting particular applications. In the same way that the book approaches the arts in terms of the variety of their temporal habitations, so does it reflect on regional and international contexts; as far as possible, the book aims to keep local and global frames of reference in focus, with the chapters espousing emergent paradigms and domains that inflect Shakespeare in his manifold artistic guises. None of this is or can claim to be exhaustive or comprehensive; rather, the book offers case-studies for some of the most striking and important manifestations of Shakespeare and the arts and, in so doing, provides unique readings of the Bard’s cultural authority. Shakespeare is distinctive in The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts as a measure of global value, as the sculpture of Juliet may suggest: he also acts as a body of meaning to be adapted in a process that bolsters his legitimating imprimatur across periods and cultures. The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts is divided into six thematic sections designed to open up the differing but complementary dimensions of its subject. The first section, Shakespeare and the Book, takes the book – the First Folio – and looks at its point of departure. In the opening chapter, “Textual Shakespeare”, Sonia Massai reflects on the critical approaches whereby we explain the transmission of Shakespeare’s works from stage to print. Concentrating on the example of King Lear, she argues for the importance of textual and paratextual features, suggesting that editors and publishers have contributed substantially to the shaping and production of Shakespeare as a national icon. Early modern kinds of textual production, she concludes, are enriched by, and can be profitably compared with, the singular dissemination of new kinds of Shakespearean text in modern technology. In “Shakespeare and Poetry”, Peter Holbrook approaches the book in a contrasting way as Shakespeare’s kinship with, and deployment of, poetry. He argues that the various typologies of poetry in Shakespeare are often, surprisingly, treated satirically: poetry is linked to fantasy, to dubious claims, to an alienation from “reality”. There is a fruitful tension in Shakespeare, Holbrook maintains, between the “artful” and the “natural”, and this is taken up interestingly in the work of poets such as Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, who self-consciously cogitate the virtues of poetry as a communicative idiom. Where Peter Holbrook attends to poetry, Marianne Novy in “Shakespeare and the Novel” looks at prose. Noting the affinity between the novel and drama as generic forms, she reads a range of fiction as laudatory and critical responses to Shakespeare. The discussion, which ranges from George Eliot to Jane Smiley, demonstrates the ways in which Shakespeare in the novel functions as a marker of prestige, an opportunity for irony, an aid to

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characterization, literary shorthand, and an exercise in nostalgia. Turning to Shakespeare, Novy argues, novelists debate both Shakespeare’s uses and his relevance to culture more generally. Taking the adaptive endeavour into a cognate domain, Alexander C. Y. Huang in “Shakespeare and Translation” points up the creativity involved in translating Shakespeare’s plays into a variety of media. He rehearses several theories of translation before moving onto a consideration of specific instances – Asia and Germany – that discover translation as an exciting force for cultural interchange. The role of context, and the significance of genre, are equally assessed in a chapter that theorizes its theme in the light of the localization of globally circulating ideas. It is Shakespeare’s books anthologized that occupy Kate Rumbold in her chapter. In “Shakespeare Anthologized”, she outlines how quoting Shakespeare was a vital element in the elaboration of his reputation. Particularly over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she writes, the Bard’s imputed characteristics, and relationship to aesthetics and ethics, were reified through the publication of anthologies that cemented his place as a source of use and usefulness. The tradition continues, she concludes, in the construction of Shakespeare as a spokesperson for self-help in the present day. The section ends with David Bevington’s chapter on “Shakespeare and Biography”. Although there has been a glut of recent Shakespearean biographies that have returned to or else uncovered new documentary material about his life, Bevington’s question is whether we can legitimately extract a Shakespearean “real life” from his books. The answer is that there may be sufficient emotional to and fro in the plays, which embraces signature components of maturation, mortality and family, to hint at a material narrative trajectory, although caution should also be exercised, Bevington insists, in proposing strict or immovable parallels. The second section of the volume is concerned with Shakespeare and Music. What music featured in “original” Shakespearean performances? How did music consort with other forms of artistic expression? In what ways has music informed the business of Shakespearean adaptation? These are the issues preoccupying chapters that begin with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Shakespearean performance and end with his appropriation in twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular culture. In “Shakespeare and Early Modern Music”, Christopher R. Wilson pursues an archaeology of emotions, situations and materials, pinpointing when songs were sung and how, in the plays. He identifies the instruments used, and the meanings attached to them, in a chapter that singles out for comment vocal forms (the madrigal and the ayre), composers and genres as well as the part played by musical references in theatrical production. Continuing the theme of performance, Adrian Streete maps the contours of “Shakespeare and Opera” in the next chapter. Both Hector Berlioz and Giuseppe Verdi were dominant presences in the European obsession with opera in the nineteenth century, he points out, observing that opera itself was an art that raised important issues of authorship and authority. It is nineteenth-century Shakespearean operas like Verdi’s Otello that generally hold sway over twentieth-century works in modern opera houses, Streete notes, a state of affairs that he contextualizes in terms of developments in theatre and broader questions touching upon history and politics. As a related form, orchestral or symphonic music, which Julie Sanders discusses in “Shakespeare and Classical Music”, occupies a no less charged place in the history of Shakespearean transmission and reception. Sanders’ chapter alternates between figures as seemingly removed from each other as Henry Purcell and Hans Werner Henze in addressing, among other kinds of classical music, the sonata, film music and the symphonic poem and in exploring why particular plays are the recurring targets of musical treatment. If

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Shakespeare’s plays are themselves intricately dependent on music, then it is in musical theatre that they find a peculiarly intriguing expression, as Fran Teague argues in her chapter on “Shakespeare and Musical Theatre”. In the Broadway musical, Teague avers, we encounter a hybrid Shakespearean form, one that brings into play laughter, transgression and burlesque traditions. The musical, too, has counterparts in Shakespeare on film, Teague goes on to establish, and is as deserving of attention as an art with several afterlives in the world community. Shakespeare’s interconnections with music are investigated from another point of view in Rodney Stenning Edgecombe’s chapter on “Shakespeare, Ballet and Dance”. The position here is that Shakespeare’s plays possess proto-balletic dimensions that make them attractive to choreographic interpretation. It is a connection that is in part facilitated by the symbolic complexions of Shakespearean dramaturgy itself, Edgecombe contends, not least in Shakespeare’s comedies, which resemble ballet and the dance in their characteristic drive towards reconciliation and the restoration of order. Adam Hansen reflects on the partnership shared between Shakespeare and popular music in his chapter, maintaining that the dialogic relationship between the two lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s imbrication in musical styles like hip-hop, jazz, country and rap. There is every justification for the intermingling of the dramatist and these various forms, Hansen observes, referencing Shakespeare’s own absorption in balladry as part of a discussion of how reverence and resistance combine with each other in the translation of the plays into alternative aural mediums. The gravitation of Shakespeare to other homes presupposes a pre-existing theatrical point of origin. In the third section, which is entitled Shakespeare on Stage and in Performance, contributors look at the art that is the theatre, attending to what might be thought of as the Bard’s most naturalized habitus. The opening chapter on “Shakespeare and Drama” by Lucy Munro reminds us that Shakespeare adapted is most often Shakespeare adapted theatrically. Munro considers adaptation as product and process, underlining how generic changes and gender switches invariably informed the movement of Shakespeare from his own stage into other stages. Modern dramatic figures such as Mary Lou Rosato and Richard Curtis are illustrative here, as is the increasing prominence of multi-lingual modalities of performance. The bewildering variety of more recent theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare has a correlative in the shifting theatrical environment that Shakespeare himself inhabited. As Edel Lamb notes in her chapter on “Shakespeare and the Renaissance Stage”, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a breeding-ground for experimental representational practices at a time when theatre was evolving commercially, professionally and institutionally. The Tempest is the clearest instantiation of the situation, Lamb explains, and a play that abundantly reflects a contemporary explosion of artistic innovation. Quite how Shakespeare became the point of reference for theatrical adaptation is reflected upon by Fiona Ritchie in her chapter on “Shakespeare and the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Stage”. Shakespeare was not necessarily canonized during the Restoration, she points out. Rather, related to the promulgation of neoclassical ideals, the stress on morality, the rise of the female actress, and the predilection for rewriting dramatic endings so as to suit contemporary taste, Shakespeare became, by the end of the eighteenth century, an alternatively conceived figure, one more in keeping with an incipient bardolatry. By the nineteenth century, as Richard Foulkes states in his chapter on “Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage”, the position of Shakespeare as national icon was more firmly established. Yet that alteration in imaginings of Shakespeare was itself the product of concomitant tensions – a desire to keep Shakespearean performance within

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the capital and a move to extend performance into the provinces. At a moment of pictorial staging and actor-managers, acting dynasties wrestled to control the Shakespearean imprimatur in a competition for ownership of the Bard that paradoxically enabled the emergence of the first mass audience. Turning to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Christie Carson suggests in “Shakespeare and the Modern Stage” that several associated tendencies can be detected – a cultivation of theatrical “authenticity”, the overtaking of the local by the global, and the application of Shakespeare in projects of local self-definition. Centring on the Globe Theatre, the National Theatre and the RSC, Carson argues that touring and transculturation bode well for future theatrical practice, promising, as they do, mutual learning and interchange. The “local”, in particular, is what interests Andrew James Hartley in his chapter on “Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance Spaces”. His terrain is the US, and his plea is for a regional theatre; as such, his chapter offers a complementary contribution to the discussion, not least in its espousal of the localities of meaning that Shakespearean production creates. To assist discussion, Hartley reminds us of the physical properties of the performance space – acoustics and visual elements, for example – and in so doing proposes a version of Shakespeare which is shifting, surprising and dynamic. Audience, it hardly needs stating, is at the core of any Shakespearean encounter. “Youth” as an actual and potential audience for Shakespeare is the subject of the fourth section of this volume, Shakespeare and Youth Culture. Amy Scott-Douglass’ chapter on “Shakespeare for Children” kicks off: it might be thought, she argues, in a consideration of canonical writers such as the Bowdlers and the Lambs, and non-canonical writers such as Caroline Maxwell and Elizabeth Wright MacAuley, that Shakespeare-inspired literature for children exhibits a clear development from morality to liberalism. This is not the case, Scott-Douglass points out, substituting the more nuanced suggestion that it is primarily venue and application that have changed. What defines a “youthful” audience is a question that animates Kevin J. Wetmore Jr in his chapter. His “Shakespeare and Teenagers” points up the fact that “teenagers” are a modern category, one essentially alien to Shakespeare; as a result, he states, there has been the concomitant rise of the “TeenShake”, a version of Shakespeare directed at teenagers marked as “cool” and an instrument of “empowerment”. The revealing instance, in this connection, is the film of the high-school production of Shakespeare, a genre that, while appealing to a particular consumer, simultaneously mediates the Bard as an abiding locus of value. Any construction of Shakespeare for “youth”, the three contributors to this section agree, is predicated on an educative component. Hence, Michael P. Jensen in his chapter on “Shakespeare and the Comic Book” begins by recalling that comics have ever been envisaged as a pedagogical tool in the teaching of literature. He proceeds by clarifying choices about dialogue and visuals in comics based on Shakespeare’s plays, and he notes the differences and points of contact between comics in their British, American and Japanese incarnations. His final point is that comics constitute vital meditations on Shakespearean significances and that they invite interpretation according to issues of emphasis, distribution and marketing. The comic is a material product and a visual representation. So too, but more obviously, are portraits of Shakespeare, sculptures of Shakespeare and festivals dedicated to Shakespeare – these manifestations of the Bard in the arts are explored in the volume’s fifth section, Shakespeare, Visual and Material Culture. The most familiar likeness of Shakespeare is that by Martin Droeshout: his engraving decorates the opening pages of the 1623 First Folio. In her chapter on “Shakespeare, Portraiture, Painting and Prints”, Erin

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C. Blake discusses the engraving, paying particular attention to the extent to which it has been imitated, mocked and corrected. She also considers a rival likeness, the Chandos portrait, and related imaginings of the dramatist. Her salutary observation is that, in the plethora of images of Shakespeare, we experience not his “actuality” but only ideas and inventions of his appearance. From printed representations to public monuments is a small step. In his chapter on “Shakespeare, Sculpture and the Material Arts”, Balz Engler surveys the numerous statues of Shakespeare – in, for instance, Germany, England and the US – so as to argue that the Bard is both a figure of prestige and a conduit for the cultures of memory. And, in the positions and peregrinations traced by particular sculptures of Shakespeare, he suggests, there are revealing signs of an international rapprochement and reciprocity. Like sculpture, festivals and exhibitions dedicated to Shakespeare fulfilled important social and cultural purposes. In “Shakespeare Exhibition and Festival Culture”, Mark Thornton Burnett identifies six interrelated tendencies which, he argues, have their beginnings in the 1769 Stratford-upon-Avon Jubilee. The impulse to celebrate Shakespeare, Burnett suggests, has a nationalistic dimension, is implicated in cultures of pilgrimage and tourism, is responsive to the significance of the Bard as text, shows sensitivity to history and is educative in the sense that commemoration invariably enjoys an institutional purchase. Different embodiments notwithstanding, he maintains, Shakespearean festivals and exhibitions are characterized by arresting convergences and continuities. In modernity, it is not so much the material expression of Shakespeare that impresses as the media expression. That is, the technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are increasingly the first port of call for any Shakespeare experience. Taking this phenomenon as a framing device, the contributors to the sixth section of the volume, Shakespeare, Media and Culture, address the Shakespeare and media equation from complementary generic and temporal perspectives. “Shakespeare and Silent Film”, Judith Buchanan’s chapter, asks for a reappraisal of Shakespeare in his silent film appearances. Beginning with King John (1899), Buchanan notes that the films of the period are distinctive for encouraging moments of communion and stimulating imaginative effort. A landmark juncture, she suggests, was the point at which practitioners abandoned the stage to embrace new-found confidence in the cinematic medium. The subsequent period of Shakespearean filmmaking, which Anne-Marie Costantini-Cornède explores in her chapter on “Shakespeare on Film, 1930–90”, was hallmarked by richness and variety. The notable auteur figures she identifies include Akira Kurosawa, Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles, and the types of film she spotlights for critical attention extend to classical productions, film noirs and picturesque fantasies. For Ramona Wray in “Shakespeare on Film, 1990–2010”, the auteur represents one approach to a complex field; in addition, she suggests, we need to take account of the popularity of particular plays, the use of imaginative conceits, an investment in nostalgia, an immersion in postmodernism and the mechanics of adaptation adequately to explain a discrete and historically bound resurgence in Shakespearean filmmaking. In what is a highly intertextual corpus, she argues, the working practices of Shakespeare on film are migrating from the US and the UK to the newer locations of India and China. As these three contributors pick out key moments of production, so, too, does Stephen Purcell in a chapter on “Shakespeare on Television” that selects the BBC Television Shakespeare of 1978–85, the Animated Tales of 1992–4 and the ShakespeaRetold series of 2005 as decisive conjunctures. Television Shakespeare, he notes, is, like silent cinema, in urgent need of reconsideration. We watch Shakespeare in media; we also hear Shakespeare in media, as Susanne Greenhalgh establishes in her

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chapter on “Shakespeare and Radio”. Radio Shakespeare, she writes, is an “inter-medial” idiom that, often chiming with celebratory occasions, is a specific kind of engagement and a particular form of aesthetic appreciation with the potential to offer new Shakespeares based on aural virtues. All of these media constructions of Shakespeare have a place in cyberspace. As Michael Best argues in “Shakespeare on the Internet and in Digital Media”, hypertext, the library, the image and video are at home on our computer screens, and in such a way that possibilities for democracy are held in play. Highlighting the interconnections that Shakespeare enables in a rapidly changing environment, Best points towards a politically transformative role for the digital humanities. The digital humanities, in particular, stand as testimony to the transmutations and developments, projects and trajectories, which have overtaken “Shakespeare” since inception. In their graphic display of a mutable Shakespeare, they are surely akin to the sculpture of Juliet in Verona, that expressive instance of, and mute witness to, the continuing traffic of Bardic resurrection. Thus is Shakespeare perpetuated across time, culture and space – extracted from history, reinserted and artistically reanimated – so as to address the flux of contemporary preoccupations and requirements.

Notes 1. We are grateful to Giovanna Tamassia of the “Club de Giulietta” and Michelangelo Cappuccilli of “Verona Tourism” for providing information that assisted us in the writing of the introduction.

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TEXTUAL SHAKESPEARE Sonia Massai

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riting about the advent of print technologies and cultures in early modern England, Stephen Orgel argues that “the translation of manuscripts into print constituted the inauguration of an English literary canon” and that “the great originary figures are not Chaucer, Gower [and] Langland . . . but the first editors and publishers, Caxton, Pynson [and] Wynkyn de Worde” (Orgel, 2009, 517). This essay shows that Shakespeare’s early printers and publishers, commonly known as “stationers” in the early modern period, followed by a long line of editors and prestigious publishers from the eighteenth century to the present, have also shaped what and how we mean by “Shakespeare”. The initial transmission of Shakespeare’s dramatic works from theatrical manuscripts into printed playbooks and their frequent retransmission into different types of editions since then have anticipated critical approaches and made available the texts then used by subsequent generations of readers, translators and theatre practitioners. Even more crucially, the vast amount of scholarly and commercial efforts invested in the reproduction of Shakespeare in print has not merely preserved but rather contributed to fashion the myth of Shakespeare as a literary and cultural icon. The realization that literary value is as much culturally determined as it is connected to specific artistic qualities – vision, technique, ingenuity and novelty, among others – might seem more in keeping with mid- to late-twentieth-century theories of culture and cultural production than with an earlier, more positivist endorsement of Shakespeare’s intrinsic greatness and his universal appeal. However, even Shakespeare’s early editors seem to have appreciated the extent to which they were moulding rather than merely transmitting Shakespeare through the medium of print. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson, one of Shakespeare’s most discriminating readers and editors, used a memorable architectural metaphor to explain the impact of textual scholarship and the editorial tradition on the establishment of the Shakespeare myth: Of the first building that was raised, it might be with certainty determined that it was round or square, but whether it was spacious or lofty must have been referred to time. The Pythagorean scale of numbers was at once discovered to be perfect; but the poems of Homer we yet know not to transcend the common limits of human intelligence, but by remarking, that nation after nation, and century after century, has been able to do little more than transpose his incidents, new name his characters, and paraphrase his sentiments . . . It must [then] be at last confessed, that as we owe

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sonia massai every thing to [Shakespeare], he owes something to us; that, if much of his praise is paid by perception and judgement, much is likewise given by custom and veneration. (Johnson, 1765, I, vi–vii)

Also worth stressing is the significant role accorded by Johnson’s associate and collaborator, George Steevens, to the third and last member of the Tonson family, the most influential publishers of Shakespeare’s works in the eighteenth century. Steevens explains “with great regret” that the death of Jacob Tonson (1714–1767) will perhaps affect not only the works of Shakespeare, but of many other writers . . . He was the last commercial name of a family which will be long remembered; and if Horace thought it not improper to convey the SOSII to posterity; if rhetoric suffered no dishonour from Quintilian’s dedication to TRYPHO; let it not be thought that we disgrace Shakespeare, by appending to his works the name of TONSON. (Steevens, 1773, I, 78–9) This essay accordingly discusses those editors and publishers who played a formative and influential role in the establishment of Shakespeare in print by focusing on a selection of influential editions of the complete works. I chose to write about editions of the complete works because they redefine the significance of the entire body of Shakespeare’s textual remains more explicitly than other types of editions, such as single-text, performance or school editions. This essay will also illustrate the impact of different editorial approaches on the text of Shakespeare by discussing the range and type of variant readings introduced by subsequent generations of editors in a short sample scene in King Lear (generally marked as 3.6 in modern editions). As well as paying attention to the often minute changes undergone by Shakespeare’s text over time and to the scholarly debate generated by conflicting editorial approaches, this essay will consider the different strategies used by different editors and publishers to present Shakespeare’s text to their readers, including the size and content of the critical and textual apparatus, the size and format of individual volumes, the layout of the text and the balance between textual and paratextual features, or mise-en-page. Rather than simply ushering in the reader, the paratext in the Shakespeare editions discussed in this essay has a transformative effect on the reading experience: some editors hide their labour by presenting Shakespeare’s text unencumbered by notes and glosses; others expect their readers to divide their attention between the apparently linear stability of Shakespeare’s text and the often overwhelming amount of variation, emendation and conjecture recorded in their swelling commentaries that rise from the bottom of the page, leaving little space for a few lines of text stranded at the top. The first section of this essay will show that even the earliest publishers of Shakespeare’s works were acutely aware of the impact of the textual and paratextual features of their editions on their readers. The central section will trace the impact of the rise of a scholarly editorial tradition on the transmission of Shakespeare in print from the early eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. Finally, a brief conclusion will identify current editorial trends and reflect on how such trends will inform future encounters with “textual Shakespeare”.

“Playing the Midwife’s Part”: Shakespeare’s First Editors Starting from the early eighteenth century, Shakespeare scholars and editors gave disheartening accounts of how the texts of his plays were first committed to the press. The

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English language had undergone significant changes by then and the apparent lack of regularity in spelling and syntax, as well as the lack of stylistic decorum, were blamed on the carelessness of Shakespeare’s printers and the interpolation of spurious materials spoken by the actors in performance and then added to memorially-reconstructed versions of the texts used as printer’s copy in the printing house. Alexander Pope, who published his edition of Shakespeare’s works in 1725, condemned the “blunders and illiteracies of the first Publishers of his works”: In these editions their ignorance shines almost in every page; nothing is more common than Actus tertia. Exit Omnes. Enter three Witches solus. Their French is as bad as their Latin, both in construction and spelling: Their very Welsh is false. (Pope, 1725, I, xiv) The next editor of Shakespeare, Lewis Theobald, attacked Pope’s editorial methods but shared his views about the “maim’d and deform’d” quality of the early editions (Theobald, 1733, I, xxxiv). Like Pope, Theobald understood theatrical and textual transmission as contamination and was particularly harsh in his assessment of the impact of Shakespeare’s actors on the quality of the text preserved in the early editions. Writing specifically about the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s dramatic works published in 1623 (henceforth F1), Theobald complained that [w]hen the Players took upon them to publish his Works intire, every Theatre was ransack’d to supply the Copy; and Parts collected which had gone thro’ as many changes as Performers, either from Mutilations or Additions made to them. Hence we derive many Chasms and Incoherences in the Sense and Matter. Scenes were frequently transposed, and shuffled out of their true Place, to humour the Caprice or suppos’d Convenience of some particular Actor. (Theobald, 1733, I, xxxviii) Recent scholarship has reversed these views by demonstrating that dramatic copy was routinely if lightly annotated for the press (Massai, 2007) and that early modern stationers invested time, money and intellectual effort in the publication of plays originally written for the commercial stage (Lesser, 2004; McCullough, 2008). More generally, a more informed understanding of the conditions of theatrical production in early modern playhouses has led scholars and textual editors to argue that early modern dramatic authorship was inherently collaborative and that dramatists like Shakespeare relied on their actors and their stationers to realize and perfect their plays on the stage and on the page (Peters, 2000; Orgel, 2006). In keeping with this paradigmatic shift in our assessment of the impact of early modern theatrical and textual cultures on the fashioning of Shakespeare in print, Lukas Erne compares the act of committing his play to print under Shakespeare’s patronym to midwifery: If we consider the suddenness and the frequency with which Shakespeare’s name appears on title pages of printed playbooks from 1598 to 1600, it is no exaggeration to say that in one sense, “Shakespeare”, author of dramatic texts, was born in the space of two or three years at the end of the sixteenth century. (Erne, 2003, 63) Whether understood as formative or deforming, the influence of Shakespeare’s first printers and editors cannot be underestimated and is worth considering in more detail in order to get a better sense of how “textual Shakespeare” started to be constructed in the author’s own lifetime.

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The sample scene discussed throughout this essay was first published as part of “M. William Shak-speare: HIS True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three Daughters”, a slim pamphlet printed by Nicholas Okes for Nathaniel Butter in 1608 (STC 22292). This version of King Lear is also known as the First Quarto (Q1) because of its format – the text was printed on both sides of a sheet of paper, which was then folded twice, thus producing four leaves (hence the name “quarto”) and eight sides, or pages. Shakespeare’s name is the most prominent feature on the title page of Q1 King Lear (Fig. 1.1). The prominence accorded to Shakespeare’s name is significant because, while it certainly started to be included more systematically on the title-pages of the playbooks printed in and after 1598, it was still omitted from some plays, including, for example, and astonishingly enough, Romeo and Juliet, which was never attributed to Shakespeare in print during his lifetime. Nathaniel Butter, who had invested capital to purchase the manuscript copy of the play and to hire the printer who then set the “True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR” to type, must have regarded Shakespeare’s name as a good selling point, even more powerful than the royal favour accorded to the play when it was staged “before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall” on 26 December 1606, as recorded further down the title-page. Despite the prominence accorded to Shakespeare’s name on its titlepage, Q1 includes no further paratext to advertise Shakespeare’s authorship. Furthermore, the fact that none of the early editions of Shakespeare’s plays includes a dedication or an address to the reader signed by the author would seem to suggest that Shakespeare was never directly involved in the process of transmission of his theatrical manuscripts into print and that the early editions of his dramatic works are the product of his stationers’ craft and entrepreneurship. In making such a claim, I depart from Lukas Erne’s theory that Shakespeare and/or his company were the main drivers behind the publication of his dramatic works during his lifetime (Erne, 2003, 78–114; Massai, 2009, 1–11). The text of the sample scene itself is unmarked – Q1 is printed without act and scene divisions – and consists of ninety-three lines of dialogue, inconsistently set up as prose and verse over three pages (from signature G3v to signature G4v) (Fig. 1.2). This section of the play is also informally known as the trial scene, because forty-three lines of the dialogue as set in Q1 (from G3v line 29 to G4r line 35) are taken up by the imaginary trial set up by Lear to try his elder daughters, Goneril and Regan, who, having sworn their allegiance to Lear and inherited his kingdom as a result, have driven him mad by refusing to obey and honour him as a king and as a father. The stage directions are sparse, and the text of the dialogue includes some obscurities that would later attract the attention of several generations of editors and textual scholars, including the list of dogs named by Edgar as Poor Tom at G4r line 30 – “Mastife, gray hou[n]d, mungril, grim-hou[n]d, or spaniel, brach or him” (my emphasis) – or his puzzling appeal at G3v line 36 – “come ore the broome Bessy to mee”. Despite these minor cruxes, the text of this scene is otherwise coherent and was offered to Shakespeare’s early readers as a slim, unbound pamphlet for the modest amount of 6d [pence] (Blayney, 1997, 411). Another version of Q1 was reprinted in 1619 for Thomas Pavier (STC 22293), although the title-page of this later edition reproduces fairly accurately the original title-page, including its original date of publication. Pavier has been universally reviled by Shakespearean scholars and textual editors as an unscrupulous fraudster since W. W. Greg first established in a seminal essay published in 1908 that he had also published nine other Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays in 1619 and had attributed them all to Shakespeare, using fake imprints in six of them (Greg, 1908, 113–31). However, as I have

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Figure 1.1: Title page of the First Quarto edition of King Lear (1608, STC 22292)

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sonia massai Enter Gloster and Lear, Kent, Foole, and Tom.

Glost. Here is better then the open ayre, take it thankfully, I will peece out the comfort with what addition I can, I will not be long from you. Ken. All the power of his wits haue giuen way to impatience, the Gods deserue your kindnes. Edg. Fretereto cals me, and tels me Nero is an angler in the lake of darknes, pray innocent beware the foule fiend. Foole. Prithe Nunckle tell me, whether a mad man be a Gentleman or a Yeoman. Lear. A King a King, to haue a thousand with red burning spits come hiszing in vpon them. Edg. The foule fiend bites my backe, [29] Foole. He’s mad, that trusts in the tamenes of a Wolfe, a horses health, a boyes loue, or a whores oath. Lear. It shal be done, I wil arraigne them straight, Come sit thou here most learned Iustice Thou sapient sir sit here, no you shee Foxes--Edg. Looke where he stands and glars, wanst thou eyes, at tral madam come ore the broome Bessy to mee. Foole. Her boat hath a leake, and she must not speake, Why she dares not come, ouer to thee. [G3v] Edg. The foule fiend hau~ts poore Tom in the voyce of a nigh-tingale, Hoppedance cries in Toms belly for two white herring, Croke not blacke Angell, I haue no foode for thee. Kent. How doe you sir? stand you not so amazd, will you lie downe and rest vpon the cushings? Lear. Ile see their triall first, bring in their euidence, thou robbed man of Iustice take thy place, & thou his yokefellow of equity, bench by his side, you are ot'h commission, sit you too. Ed. Let vs deale iustly sleepest or wakest thou iolly shepheard, Thy sheepe bee in the corne, and for one blast of thy minik in mouth, thy sheepe shall take no harme, Pur the cat is gray. Lear. Arraigne her first tis Gonoril, I here take my oath before this honorable assembly kickt the poore king her father. Foole. Come hither mistrisse is your name Gonorill. Lear. She cannot deny it. Fool. Cry you mercy I tooke you for a ioyne stoole. Lear. And heres another whose warpt lookes proclaime, What store her hart is made an, stop her there, Armes, armes, sword fire, corruption in the place, False Iusticer why hast thou lether scape. Edg. Blesse thy fiue wits. Kent. O pity sir, where is the patience now, That you so oft haue boasted to retaine. Edg. My teares begin to take his part so much, Theile maire my counterfeiting. Lear. The little dogs and all Trey, Blanch, and Sweet hart, see they barke at me. Edg. Tom will throw his head at them, auant you curs, Be

thy mouth, or blacke, or white, tooth that poysons if it bite, Mastife, gray hou~d, mungril, grim-hou~d or spaniel, brach or him, Bobtaile tike, or tru~dletaile, Tom will make them weep & waile, For with throwing thus my head, dogs leape the hatch and all are fled, loudla doodla come march to wakes, and faires, and market townes, poore Tom thy horne is dry. [about (her [35] Lear. Then let them anotomize Regan, see what breeds Hart is there any cause in nature that makes this hardnes, You sir, I entertaine you for one of my hundred, Only I do not like the fashion of your garments youle say, [G4] They are Persian attire, but let them be chang'd. Kent. Now good my Lord lie here awhile. [so, so, so, Lear. Make no noise, make no noise, draw the curtains, Weele go to supper it'h morning, so, so, so, Enter Gloster. Glost. Come hither friend, where is the King my maister. Kent. Here sir, but trouble him not his wits are gon. Glost.Good friend I prithy take him in thy armes, I haue or'e heard a plot of death vpon him, Ther is a Litter ready lay him in't, & driue towards Douer frend, Where thou shalt meet both welcome & protection, take vp thy master, If thou should'st dally halfe an houre, his life with thine And all that offer to defend him stand in assured losse, Take vp the King and followe me, that will to some Giue thee quicke conduct. [prouision Kent. Oppressed nature sleepes, This rest might yet haue balmed thy broken sinewes, Which if conuenience will not alow stand in hard cure, Come helpe to beare thy maister, thou must not stay Glost. Come, come away. Exit. [behind. Edg. When we our betters see bearing our woes: we thinke, our miseries, our foes. [scarcely Who alone suffers suffers, most it'h mind, Leauing free things and happy showes behind, But then the mind much sufferance doth or'e scip, When griefe hath mates, and bearing fellowship: How light and portable my paine seemes now, When that which makes me bend, makes the King bow. He childed as I fathered, Tom away, Marke the high noyses and thy selfe bewray, When false opinion whose wrong thoughts defile thee, In thy iust proofe repeals and reconciles thee, What will hap more to night, safe scape the King, Lurke, lurke. [G4v]

Illustration 2: The text of the sample scene [3.6], as printed in the first quarto edition of 1608 (STC 22292; G3v-G4v).

Figure 1.2: The text of the sample scene [3.6], as printed in the First Quarto edition of 1608 (STC 22292; G3v-G4v)

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shown elsewhere (Massai, 2007, 106–35), the so called “Pavier Quartos” infringed neither the actors’ right over previously unpublished dramatic manuscripts in their repertory – all the quartos published by Pavier in 1619, including the “True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR” were reprints and had been first printed as early as 1600 – nor the rights of fellow stationers who owned the copy of some of the plays published by Pavier in 1619 – Pavier owned the rights to publish five of these plays and had longstanding working relations with the stationers who owned the copy of two, possibly three other plays, including Nathaniel Butter, while the copy of the remaining two plays was probably derelict by 1619 (Johnson, 1992, 12–50). Internal evidence indicates that Pavier had in fact planned to publish the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s dramatic works. Significant in this respect is the fact that the first three plays reprinted by Pavier – The Whole Contention (now normally referred to as 2 & 3 Henry VI) and Pericles – had continuous signatures. Also worth stressing is the sheer amount of effort invested in preparing all ten plays for the press. Pavier’s edition of the “True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR” displays a typical level of editorial intervention: it adds or clarifies stage directions and resets fourteen of them by centring them and allowing for extra space before and after them (Massai, 2007, 121–32). That both the “Pavier Quartos” and F1 were printed by William and Isaac Jaggard in turn suggests that Pavier may have changed his plan and used fake imprints in some of his quartos in order to sell them individually or as a nonce collection when the Jaggards realized that they could publish a larger and more upmarket collection of Shakespeare’s plays. When they eventually published the First Folio in 1623, the text of the sample scene discussed in this essay continued to change in ways that had already been anticipated by the Pavier edition of 1619, although the copy from which the Folio version was set clearly differed in several, significant ways from the one originally acquired and then published by Butter in 1608. The sample scene in F1 (1623, STC 22272) is marked as “[Actus Tertius] Scena Sexta” (Fig. 1.3). This scene, as reproduced in F1, is noticeably shorter than its counterpart in Q1: its sixty lines are typically arranged over two columns and take up half of page 299 (signature rr4). Lear’s mad trial is almost entirely omitted, though he is still determined to “Anatomize Regan” and “See what breeds about her heart” (TLN, 2033–4). Although considerably shorter, this scene in F1 includes lines that do not appear in Q1: in F1 the Fool is more prominent and is allowed to correct Lear and answer his own riddle (“whether a madman be a Gentleman, or a Yeoman”, TLN, 2007–8). As in Q1, Lear replies, “A King, a King” (TLN, 2009), but in F1 the Fool adds, “No, he’s a Yeoman, that ha’s a Gentleman to his Sonne: for hee’s a mad Yeoman that sees his Sonne a Gentleman before him” (TLN, 2010–12). Similarly, when Lear prepares to leave the stage announcing that he and his companions, Edgar as Poor Tom and the Fool, will “go to Supper i’th’morning”, the latter replies “And Ile go to bed at noone” (TLN, 2042–3). Other changes affect the stage directions: an exit direction, for example, indicates that Gloucester leaves the stage after delivering his opening lines and a slightly earlier entry direction at TLN 2039 gives Gloucester time to enter and join the other characters before he speaks his lines at TLN 2044–5. These changes reinforce the common assumption that at least some of the plays printed in F1 preserve features derived from the acting versions provided by Shakespeare’s fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, who sign the dedication and the address “To the great variety of readers” included in the prefatory materials. Even more visually arresting is a radical change in the running-title at the top of the page from “The Historie of King Lear” to “The Tragedie of King Lear” in F1. The new running title is consistent with

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sonia massai Scena Sexta. Enter Kent, and Gloucester.

Glou. Heere is better then the open ayre· take it thankfully: I will peece out the comfort with what addition I can: I will not be long from you. Exit Kent. All the powre of his wits, haue giuen way to his impatience: the Gods reward your kindnesse. Enter Lear, Edgar, and Foole. Edg. Fraterretto cals me, and tells me Nero is an Angler in the Lake of Darknesse: pray Innocent, and beware the foule Fiend. TLN 2006 Foole. Prythee Nunkle tell me, whether a madman be a Gentleman, or a Yeoman. Lear. A King, a King. Foole. No, he's a Yeoman, that ha's a Gentleman to his Sonne: for hee’s a mad Yeoman that sees his Sonne a Gentleman before him. Lear. To haue a thousand with red burning spits Come hizzing in vpon ’em.

Edg. Blesse thy fiue wits. Kent. O pitty: Sir, where is the patience now That you so oft haue boasted to retaine? Edg. My teares begin to take his part so much, They marre my counterfetting. Lear. The little dogges, and all; Trey, Blanch, and Sweet-heart: see, they barke at me. Edg. Tom, will throw his head at them: Auaunt you

Curres, be thy mouth or blacke or white: Tooth that poysons if it bite: Mastiffe, Grey-hound, Mongrill, Grim, Hound or Spaniell, Brache, or Hym: Or Bobtaile tight, or Troudle taile, Tom will make him weepe and waile, For with throwing thus my head; Dogs leapt the hatch, and all are fled. TLN 2030 Do, de, de, de: sese: Come, march to Wakes and Fayres, And Market Townes: poore Tom thy horne is dry, Lear. Then let them Anatomize Regan: See what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in Nature that make these hard-hearts. You sir, I entertaine for one of my hundred; only, I do not like the fashion of your garments. You will say they are Persian; but let them bee chang’d. Enter Gloster. Kent. Now good my Lord, lye heere, and rest awhile. Lear. Make no noise, make no noise, draw the Curtaines: so, so, wee'l go to Supper i' th' morning. TLN 2042 Foole. And Ile go to bed at noone. Glou. Come hither Friend: Where is the King my Master? Kent. Here Sir, but trouble him not, his wits are gon. Glou. Good friend, I prythee take him in thy armes; I haue ore-heard a plot of death vpon him: There is a Litter ready, lay him in't, And driue toward Douer friend, where thou shalt meete Both welcome, and protection. Take vp thy Master, If thou should'st dally halfe an houre, his life With thine, and all that offer to defend him, Stand in assured losse. Take vp, take vp, And follow me, that will to some prouision Giue thee quicke conduct. Come, come, away. Exeunt

Illustration 3: The text of the sample scene, marked as ‘Scena Sexta.’ in Act 3 in the First Folio edition of 1623(STC 22273; rr4); blank spaces signal the absence of quarto-only lines.

Figure 1.3: The text of the sample scene, marked as “Scena Sexta” in Act 3 in the First Folio edition of 1623 (STC 22273; rr4); blank spaces signal the absence of quarto-only lines

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the head-title on page 283 (signature qq2), and with the inclusion of King Lear with other plays described as “TRAGEDIES” in the “CATALOGVE” prefaced to F1. These changes are significant and will be discussed again in relation to the different theories advanced by later generations of scholars to account for their origins. However, far more consequential for Shakespeare’s early readers was the new bibliographical context within which the sample scene was placed in F1. King Lear was now available along with thirty-five other plays wholly attributed to Shakespeare in a large and expensive volume, prefaced by an imposing title-page mostly taken up by the Droeshout portrait, a dedication to two prominent courtiers and power-brokers, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, then Lord Chamberlain, and his brother Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, an address to the reader, several dedicatory poems, a list of “The names of the principal actors” who had acted in Shakespeare’s plays and a list of contents, or “Catalogue”. While the name of Shakespeare had been used only once on the title-page of Q1 to promote a cheap pamphlet, Shakespeare in F1 is literally monumentalized as the author and authorizing point of origin of a body of works, which could be purchased unbound for the considerable amount of 1l (£1). The omission of collaborative plays like Pericles and Two Noble Kinsmen and the failure to signal collaboration in plays such as The Life of King Henry the Eighth contributed to efface the material conditions within which Shakespeare lived and worked – as a company man, as a collaborative author, as an actor – and to construct the myth of Shakespeare as a literary genius. As Margreta de Grazia has helpfully explained, the textual and paratextual materials included in F1 presented Shakespeare’s plays as pure and uncontaminated, descending in a straight line from head to hand to papers to the printed copy of the Folio repository, a direct and undefiled line from the conceptions of Shakespeare’s mind to the printed issues of the Folio . . . “Shakespeare” was the name that guaranteed the consanguinity and therefore the coherence of what might otherwise have been no more than a miscellany . . . The diverse functions that led to the production of the Folio – the various stages of scripting, acting, printing, selling, patronage – collapsed into that one name. (de Grazia, 1991, 38–9) Interesting in this respect is the choice of patrons and the appeal to their power to transform and elevate the texts of plays originally written for the commercial stage – mere “trifles” (A2) – into literary works worthy of the appreciation (and custom) of discriminating (and wealthy) readers. “Country hands” may “reach forth milk, cream, fruits, or what they have”, but, as the text of the dedication continues, “the most, though meanest, of things are made more precious when they are dedicated to temples” (A2v). Unlike de Grazia, I believe that the name of Shakespeare alone was not as yet so prestigious as to warrant the publication of his works in such an expensive, and ostentatious format. By dedicating F1 to William and Philip Herbert, those responsible for its publication invoked the protection of and an affiliation to the most influential literary circle at the time, which had attracted dedication from over 250 contemporary authors (Stewart, 2000, 226). Also telling is the use of the verb “to prosecute”, meaning “to continue (with a course of action) with a view to its accomplishment or completion” (OED v. 1a), to express the hope that as the Herbert brothers “prosecuted both [the plays as staged] and their author, living”, they will now “use the like indulgence toward [the plays as printed in F1]” (A2). As I have explained elsewhere, “[b]oth ‘Shakespeare’ and his works are completed, become accomplished, through the transformative power of the two brothers as prosecutors, as parents, to both the plays and their author” (Massai, forthcoming).

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F1 was reprinted three times during the course of the seventeenth century and views differ as to whether subsequent editions elicited editorial preparation of copy for the press. Most textual scholars still regard the transmission of Shakespeare’s text in the seventeenth century as a process of incremental contamination, even when they are inclined to admit that the printer’s copy was prepared for the press by an intelligent, though anonymous, editor. M. W. Black and M. A. Shaaber, for example, value the intervention of seventeenth-century annotators only when their corrections happen to be supported by the earlier editors, as shown in their discussion of the second Folio (F2): it is remarkable that these seventeenth-century editors, in F2 nearly a hundred years before Pope began the restoration of quarto readings by process of collation, should, by a process of divination alone, so often have worked back to the readings of the quartos. (Black and Shaaber, 1937, 23) What Black and Shaaber overlook is a radical difference in the principles informing editorial practices among these early, anonymous annotators of Shakespeare’s text. While editors from the late eighteenth century onwards have refrained from refining or revising Shakespeare’s language, regarding the restoration of the text as originally intended by its author as the sole, legitimate purpose of their labour, their seventeenth-century predecessors clearly aimed at “perfecting” the text by replacing what they felt to be an obscure or unsatisfactory reading with a better one (Massai, 2007, 1–38). As well as “perfecting” Shakespeare’s text for the press, the agents responsible for the later folios expanded the preliminary materials by adding new dedicatory poems – most notably John Milton’s “An Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare” in F2 (A5). If the addition of seven new plays, including Pericles, to the second issue of the Third Folio (F3) reflects a desire to enlarge the corpus of Shakespeare’s textual remains, the attention paid to the preliminaries attests to the continuing efforts to elevate Shakespeare’s plays to the status of modern classics, a tendency which survived well into the eighteenth century.

“The Best of our Poets”: The Canonization of Shakespeare in Print Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s collected works is normally (and quite rightly) hailed as a milestone because it was edited by a well-known playwright, who explicitly stated the principles informing his editorial method. Rowe was the first editor to argue that, since none of Shakespeare’s manuscripts survives, he had endeavoured to compare “the several [extant] Editions, and [to] give the true Reading as well as [he] could from thence” (Rowe, 1709, I, A2v). However groundbreaking this statement of intent may seem, Rowe continued to work firmly within the editorial tradition established by his seventeenth-century predecessors and very rarely relied on early editions other than F4, which he used as the basis of his own (Mowat, 1988, 97–126; Brockbank, 1985, 717–32). He instead used his expertise as a professional playwright and added lists of dramatis personae, scene locators and necessary stage directions (Mowat, 1994, 314–22). The sample scene is certainly representative of Rowe’s editorial approach – Rowe was, for example, the first editor to signal to his readers that Edgar’s lines “My Tears begin to take his part so much / They mar my Counterfeiting” (Rowe, 1709, V, 2518) should be delivered as an aside. Rowe also continued the work started by the syndicate of stationers who produced F1 to foreground Shakespeare’s authorship by adding the very first “ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE, &c. OF Mr. William Shakespear”. Even more crucially, Rowe added woodcuts specifically

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Figure 1.4: Woodcut illustrating King Lear in Nicholas Rowe’s edition of The works of Mr. William Shakespear (1709), vol. 5, p. 2467

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commissioned to illustrate key moments in each play. Interestingly, his title-page privileges the description of this edition as “Adorn’d with Cuts” before it specifies that the texts of Shakespeare’s plays had been “Revis’d and Corrected”. Rowe the dramatist must have decided to provide his readers with some visual counterpart or substitute for the pleasure of performance, which is usually unavailable to readers of printed drama. Readers of the sample scene in his edition would have visualized the madness of King Lear and the violence of the elements in a naturalistic setting, against which the characters’ anachronistic wigs and clothing oppose a feeble, if decorous, resistance (Fig. 1.4). More generally, the impetus behind Rowe’s edition would seem to have been commercial, rather than stemming from the sudden need to change the principles informing the editing of Shakespeare. If the comments made by a later editor are anything to go by, “there was [then] a demand for [Shakespeare’s] works, and in a form[at] that was more convenient than the folio’s: in consequence of which, [Rowe] was set to work by the booksellers” (Capell, 1768, I, 15). Rowe may have claimed to present his readers with a more authoritative version of Shakespeare’s plays, but in fact what he offered was an attractive edition of the complete works in a smaller, more manageable format than the earlier folios, with the text of the plays unencumbered by textual notes or glosses and adorned instead with fetching woodcuts and more regular and standardized paratextual features, including act and scene divisions. The tendency to monumentalize rather than to edit Shakespeare systematically continued despite the increasing stress placed on justifying and supporting editorial intervention by means of a thorough collation of the early editions. Alexander Pope, for example, offered the following account of his editorial methods in the preface to his 1725 edition: I have discharg’d the dull duty of an Editor, to my best judgment, with more labour than I expect thanks, with a religious abhorrence of all Innovation, and without any indulgence to my private sense or conjecture. The method taken in this Edition will show it self. The various Readings are fairly put in the margin, so that every one may compare ’em; and those I have prefer’d into the Text are constantly ex fide Codicum, upon authority. The Alternations or Additions which Shakespear himself made, are taken notice of as they occur. (Pope, 1725, I, xxii) A glance at the sample scene shows that Pope did correct Rowe’s text by collating it with Q1 and that he was responsible for the groundbreaking introduction of critical and textual notes underneath Shakespeare’s text (Fig. 1.5). However, as some of his detractors pointed out, Pope, like Rowe before him, had not used the early editions consistently. What Lewis Theobald for example contested in 1726 was Pope’s half-hearted commitment to checking Q1 and to justifying editorial interventions that were not supported by any of the early editions, thus contradicting Pope’s own rationale as quoted above. The textual note at the bottom of the opening of 3.9 [3.6] is representative in informing Pope’s readers that, after Lear’s lines “To have a thousand with red burning spits / Come hizzing in upon ’em”, “[t]here follow in the old edition several speeches in the mad way, which probably were left out by the players, or by Shakespear himself. I shall however insert them here”. Groundbreaking as it is, this textual note did not allow Pope’s readers to establish that he had decided to include only a selection of lines from the mad trial and to exclude two speeches spoken by Kent and Edgar at the end of this scene. Besides criticizing Pope for failing to abide by his own editorial principles, Lewis Theobald described Pope’s edition as “pompous” (Theobald, 1733, I, xxxv), drawing

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Figure 1.5: Opening of Act 3, Scene 9 [3.6] and apparatus in Pope’s edition (1725), vol. 3, p. 66 attention to specific bibliographical and typographical features that often go unnoticed. While Rowe’s edition had been published in smaller and manageable octavo volumes, Pope’s edition was printed in a large quarto format and his volumes approximate small folios in size. The text of the plays is generously laid out above short and sparse notes at the bottom of the page. Most conspicuously, parts of the title-page in Pope’s edition are

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printed in red ink – a feature which required considerable ingenuity on the part of the printers in the age of the hand-press. Pope the poet seemed as concerned about monumentalizing Shakespeare as the syndicate of stationers who produced F1 and as his immediate predecessor, Nicholas Rowe. Like them, he described Shakespeare as a natural genius: “[t]he Poetry of Shakespear was inspiration indeed”, he writes in his preface; “he is not so much an Imitator, as an Instrument, of Nature; and ’tis not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks thro’ him” (Pope, 1725, I, 2). The grand setting of Pope’s edition is in keeping with his claim that “[e]very single character in Shakespear is as much as Individual, as those in Life itself” (Pope, 1725, I, 3) and with Pope’s understanding of “Nature” and “Life” mostly in nationalistic terms as the true essence of Englishness: “to enter upon a Criticism upon this Author”, he claims, “would be the best occasion that any just Writer could take, to form the judgement and taste of our nation” (Pope, 1725, I, 1). Pope’s edition also includes a list of subscribers, and it seems quite fitting that the king should feature as the first and foremost among Pope’s select readers. Everything about Pope’s edition suggests the elevation of Shakespeare to the status of national poet; the edition itself is presented to his select and discerning readers as the homage of a great poet to another. Theobald’s edition includes the same list of subscribers, because it was published, like all the other major editions of Shakespeare’s works in the eighteenth century, by the Tonson cartel. However, Theobald’s edition presented itself to its readers as a radically different enterprise. Theobald, like Pope, describes Shakespeare as “our British HOMER”, but he also adds that “Had Homer, or any other admir’d Author, first started into Publick so maim’d and deform’d, we cannot determine whether they had not sunk for ever under the Ignominy of such an ill Appearance” (Theobald, 1733, I, xxxiv). Instead of monumentalizing Shakespeare, Theobald argued vehemently for the need to restore his text by emending it: For the natural Veneration, which we have for him, makes us apt to swallow whatever is given us as his, and set off with Encomiums; and hence we quiet all Suspicions of Depravity. On the contrary, the Censure of so divine an Author sets us upon his Defence; and this produces an exact Scrutiny and Examination, which ends in finding out and discriminating the true from the spurious. (Theobald, 1733, I, xxxvi) The moral register of Theobald’s manifesto was an open attack against the work of his predecessors, and of Pope in particular, who had already been the target of Theobald’s criticism, when the latter published his Shakespeare Restor’d: or, A Specimen of the Many errors as well Committed, or Un-amended, by Mr. Pope in his Late Editions of this Poet in 1726. Theobald referred to editing as “the Science of Criticism” (Theobald, 1733, I, xl) and often used medical similes to advocate informed intervention as its most pressing imperative. In Shakespeare Restor’d, he compared Shakespeare’s text to the body of a patient and the editor to a conscientious physician: Certainly, that Physician would be reckon’d a very unserviceable Member of the Republick, as well as a bad Friend to himself, who would not venture to prescribe to a Patient, because not absolutely sure to cure his Distemper: As, on the other hand, he would be accounted a Man of very indifferent Morals, if he rashly tamper’d with the health and Constitution of his Fellow-Creature, and was bold to try Conclusions only for private Information. The same Thing may be said with regard to Attempts upon Books: We should shew very little Honesty, or Wisdom, to play the Tyrants

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with any Author’s Text; to raze, alter, innovate, and overturn, at all Adventures, and to the utter Detriment of his Sense and Meaning. (Theobald, 1733, I, lv) According to Theobald, Pope had acted as a careless and as an unscrupulous physician, because he had both refrained from emending corrupt passages – he had refused to cure his patient – and tampered unnecessarily with Shakespeare’s text in order to “perfect” it according to his own standards of aesthetic and poetic decorum. In the sample scene Theobald emends the Fool’s answer to his own riddle, by adding “mad” before “yeoman”: “No, he’s a yeoman that has a gentleman to his son: for he’s a mad yeoman, that sees his son a gentleman before him”. Pope had left these lines unaltered, probably because he had failed to check Rowe’s text, which was based on F4, from which “mad” had been accidentally dropped, against F1. Theobald therefore cured the text of the sample scene by careful scrutiny of the earlier copies. Theobald also reinserted all the quarto passages omitted in the folios, and only partially restored by Pope, who, in Theobald’s view, had played “the Tyrant” with Q1. The application of his rationale of informed and systematic engagement with Shakespeare’s text led Theobald to proclaim that his “Emendations [were] so far from being arbitrary or capricious, that They [were] establish’d with a very high Degree of moral Certainty” (Theobald, 1773, I, xlii). Despite Theobald’s recurrent reference to editing as the reformation of textual depravity and as a science, he did rely on conjectural emendation and silently changed the text preserved in the early editions. In the sample scene, he changed Q1’s “sinews” for no apparent reason to “Senses” and his emendation survived, unquestioned, until the Cambridge editors restored the quarto reading in the mid-nineteenth century. Theobald also fell back on the aesthetic principle when he justified his decision to restore the two final speeches spoken by Kent and Edgar in Q1 on the basis of their being “extreamly fine”. “[H]ow absurd”, he added, “would it look for a character of [Edgar’s] Importance to quit the Scene without one Word said.” Rather than justifying the insertion of these two speeches on the ground of a more general theory about the origins of the two different versions of the text from which Q1 and F1 were set, Theobald offered his reader a conflated edition, on the basis of his own sense of what constitutes a fine speech and whether or not a main character should speak last before leaving the stage. Theobald’s “moral” imperative to restore Shakespeare’s text, to emend it systematically by drawing on a comprehensive collation of all extant early editions, and to elucidate obscure passages “by Parallel Passages, and Authorities” (Theobald, 1726, viii) in other works by Shakespeare or by his contemporaries was going to prevail and has informed all major scholarly editions since the end of the eighteenth century. As Simon Jarvis explains: [t]he hostile responses to Pope’s edition were critically motivated by dissent from the idea that editors or writers should be disinterested or gentlemanly, and by an insistence, instead, that they should be informed or qualified specialists. This dissent was linked both to a newly historicist approach to the idea of linguist correctness . . . to an insistence on the importance of detailed bibliographical evaluation . . . [and to] changing attitudes towards the / division and professionalization of literary labour in the eighteenth century. (Jarvis, 1995, 13, 187–8) However, the aesthetic imperative to correct and revise Shakespeare’s language and to monumentalize his works in print was still dominant throughout the eighteenth century.

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In 1747, William Warburton was hired by the third member of the Tonson cartel to run the family business, who was also called Jacob and had succeeded Jacob the Elder and his nephew after both died in 1735 and 1736. Warburton had contributed to Theobald’s edition and quarrelled with him because he felt that his work had not been properly acknowledged. Ironically, when Warburton set out on preparing his own edition, he ostensibly corrected Pope’s edition, and both names appeared on its title-page, but he in fact relied heavily on Theobald in order to compensate for Pope’s reliance on no authority other than his own judgement in his effort to improve Shakespeare’s language. In Warburton’s version of the sample scene, he followed Theobald by accepting all the quarto passages the latter had drawn from Q1 and all his main emendations, including “Senses” for Q1’s “sinews”. Subsequent editors remarked on Warburton’s unacknowledged reliance on Theobald. The Cambridge editors, for example, remarked that [t]he excellence of the edition proved to be by no means proportionate to the arrogance of the editor. His text is, indeed, better than Pope’s, inasmuch as he introduced many of Theobald’s restorations and some probable emendations both of his own and of the two editors whom he so unsparingly denounced, but there is no trace whatsoever, so far as we have discovered, of his having collated for himself either the earlier Folios or any of the Quartos. (Clark, Glover and Wright, 1863–6, I, xxxiv) Warburton’s approach to editing Shakespeare’s text was in fact still closer to Pope’s than to Theobald’s, despite his reliance on the latter. Warburton, for example, changed the Fool’s speech in Q1 – “He’s made, that trusts in the tamenes of a Wolfe, a horses health, a boyes loue, or a whores oath” – to read “the heels of a horse”. In a new note added at the bottom of the page, Warburton explained that “[w]ithout a doubt we should read HEELS, i.e. to stand behind him”. When Johnson re-edited this scene for his 1765 edition, he rightly and sensibly noted that “Shakespeare is here speaking not of things maliciously treacherous, but of things uncertain and not durable. A horse is above all animals subject to diseases.” In the introduction to his 1790 edition, Edmund Malone is more generally critical of Warburton’s editorial methods: “[h]is unbounded licence in substituting his own chimerical conceits in the place of the authour’s genuine text, has been so fully shewn by his revisers, that I suppose no critical reader will ever again open his volumes” (Malone, 1790, I, 67). Johnson’s and Malone’s assessments of Warburton’s methods were fair, but they underestimated the influence and the purchasing power of the “aesthetic reader”, namely, of those readers interested in the reputation and status acquired by the received text, repeatedly emended, modernized and often unnecessarily and freely revised by his predecessors. In 1744, the Tonson cartel, who were trying to protect their copyright on Shakespeare’s works, were challenged by the publication of another lavish, monumental edition that included thirty-six newly commissioned illustrations. This edition was prepared by Thomas Hanmer and published under the auspices of the powerful and prestigious Clarendon Press at Oxford University. A far cry from Theobald’s definition of the editorial process as the “Science of Criticism”, the preface in Hanmer’s edition describes his engagement with Shakespeare’s text as “the amusement of his leisure hours” and his aim “to note the obscurities and absurdities introduced into the text, and according to the best of his judgment to restore the genuine sense and purity of it” (Hanmer, 1743–4, I, i, my emphasis). A testimony to Hanmer’s attempt to describe his editorial work not as professional labour but as a gentlemanly pursuit is the absence of any direct attribution of the

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text of the preface (which refers to its editor in the third person) or the editing of the texts of the plays to him. The preface instead refers to “other Gentlemen equally fond of the Author”, who gave Hanmer “their assistance by communicating their observations and conjectures upon difficult passages which had occurred to them” (Hanmer, 1743–4, I, i). This type of editing did not require systematic labour but judgement and was not carried out by a professional who would expect to be remunerated for his labour and for his labour to be protected from plagiarism. Predictably Hanmer used Pope’s, rather than Theobald’s, edition as his source text, overlooking all the quarto passages and the emendations introduced by the latter in 1733. Like Pope, Hanmer often resorted to conjectural emendation, and occasionally proposed readings, which, though not universally accepted, are still regarded by many editors as viable solutions to cruxes in the texts of the early editions. In the sample scene, for example, Hanmer changed the list of dogs named by Edgar/Poor Tom, emending the seemingly nonsensical “him” (Q1) / “Hym” (F1) in the early editions to read “lym”, short for lyme-hound or bloodhound. Edgar’s lines, as they first appeared in Hanmer, “Mastiff, grey-hound, mungril grim, / Hound or spaniel, brache, or lym”, have routinely been adopted by editors since then, though some modern editors prefer to retain “him” as a viable, if unusual, counterpart to “brach”, meaning bitch-hound. And like Pope, Hanmer produced an ostentatious edition, printed in large quarto volumes, adorned with new illustrations, with the text set in a large font and unencumbered by notes. Hanmer was even more explicit in stating that the main aim of his edition was not to “cure” Shakespeare’s text and to offer his readers a genuine, more authoritative version of it, but to celebrate Shakespeare as national poet: Since therefore other nations have taken care to dignify the works of their most celebrated Poets with the fairest impressions beautified with the ornaments of sculpture, well may our Shakespear be thought to deserve no less consideration: and as a fresh acknowledgment hath lately been paid to his merit, and a high regard to his name and memory, by erecting his Statue at a publick expence [Hanmer is alluding to the memorial statue erected in “Poets’ Corner” in Westminster Abbey in 1740]; so it is desired that this new Edition of his works, which hath cost some attention and care, may be looked upon as another small monument designed and dedicated to his honour. (Hanmer, 1743–4, I, v) The desire to revise Shakespeare and to present his works as a national treasure, as a monument, is matched by Hanmer’s efforts to make his text more palatable and immediately comprehensible to eighteenth-century readers. Interestingly, his edition included a glossary aimed at the “generality of Readers” and was therefore ornate and expensive, but not elitist. Hanmer’s edition proved very popular and was reissued with corrections in 1771. By then it had already sold well, even better than Pope’s edition. Even the Cambridge editors, who adopted a professional, systematic approach to the editing of Shakespeare in the mid-nineteenth century, had to admit that “[w]hether . . . from its typographical beauty, or from the plausibility of its new readings, this edition continued in favour, and even rose to the price of 10l. 10s. [10 pounds and 10 shillings] before it was reprinted in 1770–1, while Pope’s in quarto, at the same period sold off at Tong’s sale for 16s. [16 shillings] per copy” (Clark, Glover and Wright, 1863–6, I, xxxii). The popularity of Hanmer’s edition and the aesthetic and typographical priorities that informed it qualify recent teleological accounts of the evolution of Shakespeare in print in the eighteenth century. Marcus Walsh, like Simon Jarvis, detects a progressive inclination

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among eighteenth-century editors to professionalize their approach to Shakespeare and English literature more generally: What is most striking about Pope’s successors is not the lingering tendency to an aesthetic approach, but the extent of the movement towards explanation and emendation based, for the most part, on the assumption that there is an authorial text to be recovered and interpreted. (Walsh, 1997, 132) What Warburton’s reliance on conjectural emendation and the commercial success of Hanmer’s beautiful, monumental edition show is that the aesthetic approach was far from a lingering, residual influence, and that it in fact dogged the efforts of those editors who, like Theobald, had criticized it and were harshly ridiculed and accused of pedantry as a result. Probably conscious of the unresolved tension between these two approaches to Shakespeare’s text, Samuel Johnson was the only editor who successfully positioned himself in the middle: he distanced himself from Pope and Hanmer by claiming that he was not guilty of “refusing the trouble of research, for the ambition of alteration” (Johnson, 1765, I, lxiii), but he also criticized Theobald by explaining that he had been “more careful to protect than to attack” (Johnson, 1765, I, lxiv). Echoing Theobald, but choosing a military rather than a medical simile, he declared that “it is more honourable to save a citizen [an obscure reading], than to kill an enemy [to emend it]” (Johnson, 1765, I, lxiv). As a linguist and as the author of the first historical Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Johnson did gloss several obscure readings instead of emending them or leaving them unexplained. A good example occurs in the sample scene, where Johnson for the first time provided a commentary note for lines that had been highlighted by Warburton as defective and unintelligible. Edgar’s lines, “Mark the high Noises, and thyself bewray, / When false Opinion, whose wrong Thought defiles thee, / In thy just Proof repeals, and reconciles thee”, are re-presented by Johnson to his readers as perfectly intelligible through the following paraphrase: “Attend to the great events that are approaching, and make thyself known when that false opinion now prevailing against thee shall, in consequence of just proof of thy integrity, revoke its erroneous sentence, and recall thee to honour and reconciliation.” Johnson’s propensity to gloss rather than to emend Shakespeare’s text inflated the size of the critical apparatus and on some pages the notes took as much space as the text of the play. However, Johnson was clearly keen to attract both the “critical” and the “aesthetic” reader and urged those who read Shakespeare for the first time to “read every play from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators” (Johnson, 1765, I, lxix). A similar level of restraint can be detected even in one of the most innovative and systematically researched editions in the period. Edward Capell was the first editor to use the early editions, as opposed to the latest version of the received text, as a basis for his own edition. He carefully collated a greater number of extant copies of the early editions than any of his predecessors and he systematically noted “all discarded readings . . . all additions . . . and variations of every kind” specifying “the editions . . . to which they severally belong” (Capell, 1768, I, 22). His hope was that his most discerning readers, “the judicious part of the world” (Capell, 1768, I, 22), would have all the information available to consider and evaluate his editorial choices. But even Capell, who clearly had high expectations of his readers, decided to publish his notes in a separate volume and to present Shakespeare’s text with minimal and infrequent notes at the bottom of the page, because,

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as he candidly admitted, “a very great part of the world, amongst whom is the editor himself, profess much dislike to this paginary intermixture of text and comment” (Capell, 1768, I, 30). Also worth noting is Capell’s assessment of Hanmer’s edition. Predictably he wrote vehemently against the latter’s editorial approach, arguing that he “pursue[d] a track” that “excite[d] . . . indignation” because it “annihilate[d] . . . any authors whatsoever . . . by destroying all marks of peculiarity and notes of time” (Capell, 1768, I, 17). But he still described Hanmer’s edition as “splendidly printed”. The layout and presentation of Shakespeare’s text in Capell’s edition resembles Hanmer’s in allowing his readers to focus on the plays and the pleasure of reading them, as opposed to the critical questioning and the non-linear reading of the text elicited by a heavily annotated page. Unfortunately Capell’s plan to publish the textual apparatus in separate volumes backfired. As Andrew Murphy explains, his edition was published in 1767–8, but the first volume of notes appeared in 1774 and was then withdrawn from the market because the sales were disappointing. Capell’s second attempt to publish his notes in 1779 also failed and it was only after his death that his notes were published by Capell’s friend and literary scholar, John Collins (Murphy, 2003, 85). The lack of a critical apparatus in the 1767–8 edition prevented Capell’s contemporaries from appreciating its significance. As the text of the sample scene in Capell’s edition shows, he used Q1 as his base text, although he included Folio-only lines and relied on F1 quite often to emend and improve Q1. More crucially, he added several stage directions that clarify the action. Lear’s instructions as he sets up the imaginary trial in Q1 are, for example, supplied with directions to specify Lear’s addressees: “Thou robed man of justice, [to Edg.] take thy place; – / And thou, his yoke-fellow of equity, [to the Fool] / Bench by his side: – you are of the commission, [to Kent] / Sit you too.” Capell also emended spurious readings that had been left unaltered by his predecessors and which have been adopted by editors since. A good example is the first line of a song sung by Edgar, which in Capell, reads “Come o’er the boorne, Bessy, to me.” All previous editors had left Q1’s nonsensical “broome” unaltered. It was only a century later that Capell’s efforts were fully recognized. The Cambridge editors, for example, declared that [d]efects of style apart, this preface was by far the most valuable contribution to Shakespearian criticism that had yet appeared, and the text was based upon a most searching collation of all the Folios and of all the Quartos known to exist at the time. (Clark, Glover, and Wright, 1863–6, I, xxxvi) Though unacknowledged, his emendations and stage directions appeared in George Steevens’ revised version of Johnson’s edition in 1773. The first line of the song sung by Edgar quoted above is also emended in Steevens, where it reads “Come o’er the bourn, Bessy, to me.” Steevens includes Johnson’s note, where the latter conjectures that Q1’s “broome” should probably read “brook”, and then goes on to give several examples where “bourn” means “rivulet or brook”, but fails to mention that Capell had already emended this line. Unsurprisingly, Collins accused Steevens of plagiarism. Steevens’ failure to acknowledge Capell’s editorial efforts seems even more unexpected in light of the fact that his edition was the first to attempt to include all the notes of previous commentators and is now generally regarded as the first variorum edition of Shakespeare. Capell’s legacy can also be detected in Edmond Malone’s 1790 edition, the last major editorial venture before the end of the eighteenth century. Like Capell, Malone advocated a systematic collation of the early editions aimed at restoring Shakespeare’s text by “eject[ing] the arbitrary and

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capricious innovations made by our predecessors from ignorance of the phraseology and customs of the age in which Shakspeare lived” (Malone, 1790, I, xi). Malone went even further than Capell in his formulation of a professional and rational editorial approach by stressing the need to determine the relative authority of the early editions: “till it be established which of the ancient copies is entitled to preference”, he argued, “we have no criterion by which the text can be ascertained” (Malone, 1790, I, xi). Yet, oddly, Malone fell back on the traditional practice of using the early editions to check “the text”, i.e. the received text as reproduced by Steevens, his immediate predecessor. But in other important respects Malone was affected by Capell: having considered but ultimately dismissed the latter’s decision to publish his notes separately – “I am confident that if the notes were detached from the text, many readers would remain uninformed” (Malone, 1790, I, xliv) – he was nevertheless determined to contain the size of the apparatus – “I have in general given the true explication of a passage, by whomsoever made, without loading the page with the preceding unsuccessful attempts at elucidation” (Malone, 1790, I, liv). Despite Capell’s influence, Malone’s decision to use the Johnson–Steevens edition as a basis for his own and to include commentary notes at the bottom of the page meant that both the text and the apparatus looked very much like a development of the received text. Textual scholars have evaluated Malone’s edition differently: de Grazia is, for example, more inclined to regard Malone’s edition as a radical departure from established eighteenth-century editorial approaches and practices, whereas Jarvis and Walsh have argued that it was still significantly affected by them (de Grazia, 1991; Jarvis, 1995; Walsh, 1997). By contrast, Capell’s edition seems more directly linked to the Cambridge Shakespeare, the most prominent scholarly edition published in the nineteenth century. Instead of producing more editions of the complete works, publishers in the first half of the nineteenth century reprinted the texts in the Johnson–Steevens and Malone editions without their apparatus for the popular market (Murphy, 2003, 167–87). When the editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare published their multi-volume edition of the collected works in 1863–6, they did not only single out Capell’s edition as the “most valuable contribution to Shakespearian criticism that had yet appeared” (Clark, Glover and Wright, 1863–6, I, xxxvi), as mentioned above, but they also presented their work as a self-conscious departure from the dominant eighteenth-century editorial approach questioned by Capell nearly a hundred years earlier: [We] hope that our Edition will be found to supply a real want, while, at the same time, the novelty of its plan will exempt us from all suspicion of a design to supersede, or even compete with, the many able and learned Editors who have preceded us in the same field. (Clark, Glover and Wright, 1863–6, I, xi) The novelty of “Cambridge 1” stemmed not only from the fact that, like Capell, they chose the most authoritative among the early editions as a basis for their own text, but also from their decision to use the apparatus to focus exclusively on the textual history of each play, in order “to give the reader in a compact form a complete view of the existing materials out of which the text [was] constructed, or may be emended” (Clark, Glover and Wright, 1863–6, I, xi). As Paul Werstine has observed, the Cambridge editors “were almost exclusively [interested] in establishing a text; few of their notes concern anything but textual questions. Thus they may be credited with opening up a space for purely textual study” (Werstine, 1995, 264).

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The need to give their readers a full account of provenance and variation for each line led the Cambridge editors to use abbreviations to identify earlier editions along with line numbers that were for the first time keyed to the text of Shakespeare. As a result, the text of the plays in their edition rests on a thick layer of formulaically presented information, which textual scholar Alexander Dyce scornfully described as “hieroglyphical notes” (Murphy, 2003, 205) (Fig. 1.6). Unfamiliar as they may have seemed then, the main conventions used by the Cambridge editors have set the standard for textual annotation in scholarly editions of Shakespeare and early modern English drama since then. The notes in the sample scene finally allowed readers to reconstruct the evolution of Shakespeare’s text over time and how individual editors have contributed to it. Capell, for example, was finally accorded the prominence he deserved. His use of new directions to clarify the location of this scene, the timing of entrances and exits, and the addressees in two of Lear’s speeches is fully recorded in the notes and, more generally, in the introduction, where the Cambridge editors remarked that “he [had] described, much more minutely than Pope had done, the places of the scenes, and made many changes, generally for the better, in the stage directions” (Clark, Glover and Wright, 1863–6, I, xxxvii). The Cambridge Shakespeare was also linked to Capell in one other important respect. As the Cambridge editors explain in their preface, “[t]he Shakespearian collection given by Capell to the Library of Trinity College supplied a mass of material almost unrivalled in amount and value, and in some points unique” (Clark, Glover and Wright, 1863–6, I, x). The Cambridge editors worked with Capell’s excellent collection of quarto and folio editions of Shakespeare and were clearly inspired by his edition, which had been plundered for local emendations but whose principles had been marginalized by dominance of the received text in the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth century. By contrast, a very effective publishing strategy guaranteed the Cambridge Shakespeare a lasting influence well into the second half of the twentieth century. The simultaneous release of the groundbreaking Cambridge Shakespeare text both in a multi-volume, annotated complete works edition between 1863 and 1866 and in a series of cheaply-priced, single-text editions called the “Globe Shakespeare” ensured that “every Englishman of the tolerably educated classes, from the intelligent mechanic to the peer of the realm, might gladly possess [it]” (Murphy, 2003, 176). The Cambridge Shakespeare can still be regarded as a monument to Shakespeare, but quite different from the “fairest impressions beautified with the ornaments” produced by Rowe, Pope and Hanmer, or the annotated edition bulging with commentaries that culminated in the Johnson–Steevens variorum edition of 1773. The Cambridge Shakespeare was an attempt to restore and pay homage to Shakespeare’s original words. In the sample scene, the Cambridge editors were the first ones to restore Q1’s “sinews” in Kent’s line “This rest might yet have balm’d they broken sinews”, which had been changed to “Senses” ever since Theobald had first reintroduced this quarto line into the received text. However, even the Cambridge editors produced an eclectic, conflated text in this scene and in the rest of their edition of King Lear. Despite their reliance on Q1 and F1, by adopting the long-established practice of drawing the best readings from each of them the Cambridge editors produced a text which was preserved in neither Q1 nor F1, but which was presumably closer to an ideal state of the play as originally conceived by Shakespeare. Even the unprecedented impetus to study the material conditions of textual production in the early modern printing houses where Shakespeare’s editions were first manufactured, which was ushered in by twentieth-century supporters of New Bibliographical methods

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Figure 1.6: Opening of Act 3, Scene 6 in the Cambridge Shakespeare (1863–6), vol. 8, p. 350

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of textual analysis, was motivated by a desire to “strip the veil of print”, as opposed to an understanding of print as the medium that has fashioned what we understand as “textual Shakespeare” over the last 400 years. A new understanding of the medium of print as fashioning as opposed to merely representing Shakespeare’s text to readers over time marked the beginning of a new stage in the history of its reception.

Material Shakespeare: Rethinking Shakespeare in Print In his introduction to The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of ‘King Lear’, an influential collection of essays edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren in 1983, Stanley Wells helpfully summed up the history of the reception of King Lear in print up to the late 1970s and early 1980s: Until recently . . . the general opinion has been that Shakespeare wrote one play about King Lear; that this play is imperfectly represented in both the Quarto and the Folio texts; that each of these texts contains genuinely Shakespearian passages which are missing from and should have been present in the other; that comparison of the variant readings of the two texts must form the most important basis for the correction of errors of transmission; and that conflation of the two texts, along with such correction, will bring us as close as we can hope to get to the lost archetype which each is supposed imperfectly to represent. (Wells, 1983, 8–9) The essays included in this volume, as well as earlier, pioneering studies on the origin and the significance of textual variation in Q1 and F1, collectively proposed a different account of the textual history of these two early editions of King Lear, which were now understood to reflect different stages in its composition and its adaptation to the material conditions of theatrical production on Shakespeare’s stage. The notion that Shakespeare may have revised his plays was not new. Commenting on his decision to retain the two final quarto-only speeches in his version of the sample scene, Johnson had explained, as early as 1765, that “the folio [was] printed from Shakespeare’s last revision”. However, Johnson also believed that Shakespeare’s “last revision” had been “carelessly and hastily performed, with more thought of shortening the scenes, than of continuing the action”. According to Johnson, Shakespeare was obliged by the limitations imposed by the stage to modify the play imperfectly reproduced in Q1. Although Johnson adopted Folio lines, thus suggesting that he regarded them as authoritative and worth preserving, he ultimately regarded both the stage and the printed page as corrupting channels of textual transmission. Johnson therefore continued the practice of using both Q1 and F1 to emend and improve the received text. When Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor generally edited the 1986 Oxford edition of Shakespeare’s collected works, they decided to offer their readers edited versions of both Q1 and F1, because for the first time they had come to regard Shakespeare’s engagement with his company and the theatrical conditions within which he worked as formative, rather than de-formative. The Oxford editors, in other words, unlike the Cambridge editors in the nineteenth century, or their predecessors before them, understood Q1 and F1 to embody two significant moments in the evolution of King Lear on the early modern stage. Even the inclusion of Q1 in an edition of Shakespeare’s complete works was not new. The Cambridge editors, for example, decided “to print the text of the Quarto literatim in a smaller type after the received text . . . in all the plays of which there is a Quarto edition differing from the received text to such

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a degree that the variations cannot be shown in foot-notes” (Clark, Glover and Wright, 1863–6, I, ix). However the decision not to edit Q1, to use a smaller font to reprint it, and to place it after the received text clearly shows that the Cambridge editors regarded Q1 as a valuable document rather than as a self-standing and authoritative version of the play. What changed in 1986 and in all subsequent editions including parallel texts of King Lear was the editors’ understanding of the theatrical context within which Shakespeare operated as thoroughly informing Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination and of the early editions as effectively representing two moments in the state of flux in which the play existed on Shakespeare’s stage. The Oxford editors have since been accused of being influenced by lingering notions of ideal archetypes, though the archetypes they attempted to reproduce in their edition are not the ideal state of the plays as intended by the author but the plays as originally performed. Some textual scholars have since pointed out that print cannot reproduce performance and that we cannot hope to recover the original productions of Shakespeare’s plays from early modern printed playbooks (Dillon, 1994, 74–86). Other textual scholars have identified a residual prejudice against Q1, which is occasionally unnecessarily emended to agree with F1, which is closer to the received text and therefore more immediately familiar to the reader (Bate and Massai, 1997, 129–51). However, the Oxford Shakespeare and the work done by the textual scholars who endorsed the theory of revision in the late 1970s and early 1980s, contributed to refocus attention on Q1 and F1 as complex material artefacts and as textual spaces within which multiple meanings are created rather than simply transmitted (de Grazia and Stallybrass, 1993, 255–83; Kastan, 2001; Kidnie, 2009, 140–64). A renewed interest in the medium of print as fashioning rather than corrupting “textual Shakespeare” has led increasing numbers of scholars and research students to work with facsimiles or digital images of the early editions, now available online. High-resolution images of Q1 are, for example, available as part of the “Shakespeare in Quarto: Treasures in Full” British Library database (freely accessible via the British Library website) and digital images of several copies of the early folios can be viewed on the Internet Shakespeare Editions website. Ironically, the advent of digital media is allowing wider access to early modern printed artefacts, formerly accessible only to researchers able to travel to major research libraries across the world, and is encouraging Shakespeare editors to find new ways of re-presenting “textual Shakespeare” to modern readers.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Bate, Jonathan and Sonia Massai (1997). “Adaptation as Edition”. In The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 129–51. Black, M. W. and M. A. Shaaber (1937). Shakespeare’s Seventeenth-Century Editors, 1632–1685. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Blayney, Peter W. M. (1997). “The Publication of Playbooks”. In A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia University Press, 383–422. Brockbank, Philip J. (1985). “Shakespearean Scholarship: From Rowe to the Present”. In William Shakespeare: His World, his Work, his Influence, ed. John E. Andrews, 3 vols. New York: Scribner, III, 717–32. Capell, Edward, ed. (1768). Mr William Shakespeare his comedies, histories, and tragedies, set out by himself in quarto, or by the players his fellows in folio, and now faithfully republish’d from those editions

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in ten volumes octavo; with an introduction: Whereunto will be added, in some other volumes, notes, critical and explanatory, and a body of various readings entire. London: J. and R. Tonson, 1768, 10 vols. Clark, William George, John Glover and William Aldis Wright, eds (1863–6). The Works of William Shakespeare. Cambridge and London: Macmillan and Co., 9 vols. de Grazia, Margreta (1991). Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press. de Grazia, Margreta and Peter Stallybrass (1993). “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text”. Shakespeare Quarterly 44.3, 255–83. Erne, Lukas (2003). Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greg, W. W. (1908). “On Certain False Dates in Shakespearian Quartos”. The Library, n.s., 9, 113–31. Hanmer, Thomas, ed. (1743–4). The works of Shakespear. In six volumes. Carefully revised and corrected by the former editions, and adorned with sculptures designed and executed by the best hands. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 6 vols. Jarvis, Simon (1995). Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Johnson, Gerald D. (1992). “Thomas Pavier, Publisher: 1600–1625”. The Library 6th series, 14, 12–50. Johnson, Samuel, ed. (1765). The Plays of William Shakespeare, in eight volumes, with the corrections and illustrations of various commentators; to which are added notes by Sam. Johnson. London: J. and R. Tonson et al., 8 vols. Kastan, David Scott (2001). Shakespeare and the Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kidnie, Margaret Jane (2009). Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge. Lesser, Zachary (2004). Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCullough, Peter (2008). “Print, Publication, and Religious Politics in Caroline England”. The Historical Journal 51.2, 285–313. Malone, Edmond, ed. (1790). The plays and poems of William Shakespeare, in ten volumes; collated verbatim with the most authentic copies, and revised: with the corrections and illustrations of various commentators. London: J. Rivington et al., 10 vols. Massai, Sonia (2007). Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——(2009). “Shakespeare, Text, and Paratext”. Shakespeare Survey 62, 1–11. ——(forthcoming). “Shakespeare, Print, and Patronage”. In Shakespeare’s Stationers, ed. Marta Straznicky. Mowat, Barbara (1988). “The Form of Hamlet’s Fortunes”. Renaissance Drama 19, 97–126 ——(1994). “Nicholas Rowe and the Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Text”. In Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991, ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle and Stanley Wells. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 314–22. Murphy, Andrew (2003). Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orgel, Stephen (2006). “The Book of the Play”. In From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 13–54. ——(2009). “Editing: Art of Science?” Textus: English Studies in Italy 22, 517–24. Peters, Julie Stone (2000). Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pope, Alexander, ed. (1725). The works of Shakespear. In six volumes. Collated and corrected by the former editions, by Mr. Pope. London: Jacob Tonson, 6 vols.

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Rowe, Nicholas, ed. (1709). The works of Mr. William Shakespear; in six volumes. Adorn’d with cuts. Revis’d and corrected, with an account of the life and writings of the author. By N. Rowe, Esq. London: Jacob Tonson, 6 vols. Steevens, George, ed. (1773). The Plays of William Shakespeare. In ten volumes. With the corrections and illustrations of various commentators; to which are added notes by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens. With an appendix. London: C. Bathurst, 10 vols. Stewart, Alan (2000). Philip Sidney: A Double Life. London: Chatto and Windus. Theobald, Lewis (1726). Shakespeare Restor’d: or, A Specimen of the Many Errors as well Committed, or Un-amended, by Mr. Pope in his Late Edition of this Poet. London: R. Francklin et al. ——ed. (1733). The works of Shakespeare: in seven volumes. Collated with the oldest copies, and corrected; with notes, explanatory, and critical: By Mr. Theobald. London: Jacob Tonson et al., 7 vols. Walsh, Marcus (1997). Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wells, Stanley (1983). “The Once and Future King Lear”. In The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of ‘King Lear’, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1–22. Werstine, Paul (1995). “William Shakespeare”. In Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research, ed. D. C. Greetham. New York: MLA, 253–82.

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SHAKESPEARE AND POETRY Peter Holbrook

I had rather be a kitten and cry “mew” Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers. I had rather hear a brazen canstick turned, Or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree, And that would set my teeth nothing on edge, Nothing so much as mincing poetry. ’Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag. Hotspur in 1 Henry IV (3.1.125–31) Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses. Fourth Plebeian in Julius Caesar (3.3.29–30) Of course Hotspur is speaking in character, as a bluff soldier – in a non-trivial sense these are his not Shakespeare’s words. Nevertheless it is always something of a shock to come across, in the greatest poet of the English language, such a memorable expression of the hatred of poetry. Glendower has been wittering on about his supernatural and poetic endowments, and Hotspur has had enough. The bombastic Welshman assures Hotspur he has “framèd to the harp / Many an English ditty lovely well, / And gave the tongue a helpful ornament – / A virtue that was never seen in you” (3.1.120–3). Thank God for that, responds Hotspur. Yet contempt for poetry isn’t infrequent in Shakespeare. The Plebeians who kill Cinna the Poet in Julius Caesar are evidently not themselves fans of poetry, though the real object of their rage is conspirators not poets. But being a poet doesn’t recommend Cinna – and it’s not clear that any verses, good or “bad”, would delight them. Jaques begs Orlando to “mar no more trees with writing love songs in their barks” (As You Like It, 3.2.236–7). The obvious irony here, of course, is that “poetry” is precisely what Hotspur, and Jaques, do so well, not least in Hotspur’s speech disavowing poetry. This is an irony, but because it is inevitable it is also an uninteresting one. Hotspur and Jaques are characters in poetic drama; if they criticize poetry they must do so poetically. Nothing to wonder at about that. Nevertheless something is at work here that seems to take us beyond this blunt paradox, and this is what I aim to explore in this essay. Worcester’s undercutting of Hotspur’s eloquence is pertinent. Hotspur, he tells us, “apprehends a world of figures here, / But not the form of what he should attend” (1.3.207–8). Worcester’s target is what we might call “poeticizing” – a preoccupation with language and style and art that

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becomes a dead end, that entangles itself in a sticky web of words, that gets in the way of “what [one] should attend”. In this sense “poetry” in Shakespeare becomes the name for a desire to live in a fantasy world. “[T]he truest poetry is the most feigning” Touchstone tells Audrey; and “lovers are given to [it]”, either because they are susceptible to makebelieve or because of fickleness (As You Like It, 3.3.15–17). The “poetical” is not “a true thing”, not “honest” (3.3.13–14). This is, clearly, a literary pose and one should perhaps not be unduly solemn about words spoken in a romantic comedy. Yet the anti-poetical topos, which accuses poetry of not being “a true thing”, seems especially prominent and consistent in Shakespeare. It is as if Shakespeare has more in common with W. B. Yeats’ “Word bemockers” than he does with those who cling to the post-Romantic conviction that “words alone are certain good” (see Yeats’ “The Song of the Happy Shepherd”). It is difficult to imagine, for example, Shakespeare endorsing the sentiment of Wallace Stevens in “The Idea of Order at Key West”: It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made. (Stevens, 1985, 128–39) That last formulation – “there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made” – seems to me both self-evident to moderns and the type of statement Shakespeare could not make. What is un-Shakespearean about it is its whiff of literary grandiosity, the impression it makes of poetry congratulating itself on its own fine centrality to human experience. Stevens’ poem is, it must immediately be conceded, genuinely magnificent – important and thoughtful. Its ambition for the high status of art is humanely, exquisitely phrased. But it lies open to Worcester’s debunking. One can’t imagine Shakespeare writing such words, not at least without a shrug in the direction of: “Well, some, at least, have it seen it that way. On the other hand . . .” Certainly “poetical” types in Shakespeare often come across as ridiculous. Shakespeare is not as savagely contemptuous about them, perhaps, as Donne is in Satire 2 (1973), where poetry-writing is a grubby collective mania: “they who write, because all write, have still / That excuse for writing, and for writing ill” (ll. 23–4). But he draws attention to how the poetical can be like a derangement, a piece of “feigning” unmoored from reality. One thinks for instance of Bourbon in Henry V praising his horse: “When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk; he trots the air, the earth sings when he touches it, the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes” (3.7.14–17). The Constable’s retort is Worcester-like in its sobriety: “Indeed, my lord, it is a most absolute and excellent horse” (3.7.24–5 – actors should pause before “horse”). Bourbon tells us without embarrassment that he once “writ a sonnet” to this wondrous beast (3.7.36). Here “poetry” is merely the state of being puffed up, oblivious to the world, unable to see the thing itself (a horse is a horse). Towards the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost the word-bedazzled Biron is obliged to

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renounce the ornate and automatic language of wooing that has come all too easily to him. He vows never more to “woo in rhyme, like a blind harper’s song”: Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, Figures pedantical – these summer flies Have blown me full of maggot ostentation. I do forswear them, and I here protest, By this white glove – how white the hand, God knows! – Henceforth my wooing mind shall be expressed In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes. (5.2.405–13) Even then, of course, “a trick / Of the old rage” lingers, in the pretentious “sans” of his “My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw” – “sans ‘sans’” Rosaline gently chides him (5.2.416–17). It is by now a critical convention to take such moments as affirming a Stevensian awareness that there is nothing outside convention, that even as Biron renounces poetry and art he remains within it. But this response (which is, one might observe, just the sort of attitude those professionally concerned with literature might be expected to take) fails to register the pervasiveness and weight of this perspective in Shakespeare. There is a sense, I suggest, in which Shakespeare really does look beyond language and literature – advances a critique of these phenomena. And this critique, I think, is a main part of his legacy to English poetry. Earlier in the play Biron is described as a man whose eye begets occasions for his wit, For every object that the one doth catch The other turns to a mirth-moving jest, Which his fair tongue, conceit’s expositor, Delivers in such apt and gracious words That agèd ears play truant at his tales, And younger hearings are quite ravished, So sweet and voluble is his discourse. (2.1.69–76) That might well characterize Shakespeare. “Younger hearings are quite ravished” reminds us of the scholar Gabriel Harvey’s judgement that “The younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis” (Shakespeare Allusion-Book, I, 56; quotations from this work, indicated by volume and then page number, are modernized). And, as we shall see, the qualities of “sweetness” and “volubility” are often singled out in earlier notices of Shakespeare – for instance in Francis Meres’ well-known mention of “mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare” and his “sugared sonnets” (Allusion-Book, I, 46). Shakespeare often gives the impression of a kind of language-machine at work (the “voluble” part of the comment about Biron gets at that). He can keep on going – but he seems to have recognized the risks of this facility to common sense, even to sanity and good order. Samuel Johnson did not always approve the “volubility” of Shakespearean poetry. In the 1765 “Preface” to his edition of Shakespeare’s works, Johnson objected to Shakespeare’s “aptness” of language (to use the word applied to Biron). In “narration” Shakespeare too often “affects . . . a wearisome train of circumlocution, and tells the incident imperfectly in many words, which might have been delivered in few” (Johnson, 1989, 131). So often, Johnson notices, the language gets away from Shakespeare: he “apprehends

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a world of figures”, but “not the form of what he should attend”. Two words – or three – are better than one. And words can take you out of your path. Thus, famously for Johnson, the “quibble” was for Shakespeare “the fatal Cleopatra” that seduced him from the substance of his story. Wordplay in general has some malignant power over his mind and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him and he leaves his work unfinished. (Johnson, 1989, 132) “How every fool can play upon the word!” (The Merchant of Venice, 3.5.37) – or, as Viola puts it, “dally[ing] nice[ly] with words” can “quickly make them wanton” (Twelfth Night, 3.1.13–14). But Johnson’s criticism of the wantonness of Shakespeare’s style had been made indirectly by Shakespeare. The concern arises, for instance, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, in reference to Don Adriano de Armado, “a refinèd traveller of Spain” for whom Biron has the highest admiration: he is, says Biron, “A man of fire-new words, fashion’s own knight” (1.1.161, 176). Armado, the king observes, is “in all the world’s new fashion planted” and “hath a mint of phrases in his brain. / One who the music of his own vain tongue / Doth ravish like enchanting harmony” (1.1.162–5). What exquisite praise of the “voluble” and polished Armado – and what, though it is not intended by the king, striking condemnation. Armado’s wonderful inventiveness with language, his volubility, is not a virtue but, as with Bourbon, mixed up with vanity and insincerity. In Shakespeare the Thinker Tony Nuttall suggested that Shakespeare was early on aware of the possibility that “brilliant articulateness” might act as a barrier to true feeling (Nuttall, 2007, 104). What Biron, along with his fellow “bookmates” (4.1.96), is forced by the play’s end to do is get beyond poetry and use the language of “a man speaking to men”, as Wordsworth would urge poets to do centuries later. He is asked to renounce a superficial concern with verbal success in order to live successfully, in an adult, serious way. He is required to practise a fidelity to natural feeling and fact rather than make up brilliant word-pictures – to be true to nature. This fidelity to nature is, I suggest, the main characteristic of the Shakespearean tradition in English poetry. We see it emerge in the song that concludes Love’s Labour’s Lost, with its mimetically convincing vignettes of village life – pictures, one can’t help but feel, that draw upon Shakespeare’s own experience of such scenes in rural Warwickshire: When all aloud the wind doth blow, And coughing drowns the parson’s saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian’s nose looks red and raw . . . (5.2.895–8) It was this grasp of reality that later ages hailed in Shakespeare. For Johnson, “the praise of Shakespeare” was that “his drama is the mirror of life; that he who has mazed his imagination in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him may here be cured of his delirious ecstasies, by reading human sentiments in human language” (Johnson, 1989, 124). When Johnson defined Shakespeare’s art as essentially comic (Johnson, 1989, 128) he was making the same point: comedy punctures fantasies and pretensions, administers a dose of common sense to those who might be moved to describe their horse as Pegasus. But, as suggested, Johnson’s reading of Shakespeare is not far off from

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Shakespeare’s reading of himself. Hamlet defines drama as “hold[ing] . . . the mirror up to nature” (3.2.20); and throughout the oeuvre there is a repeated disowning of the merely “poetic”: Romeo, for example, needs to unlearn the Petrarchan love evident in his infatuation with Rosaline in order to learn true love. (The courtiers of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost need to do something similar.) The flip side of this is that the mimetic responsibility of poetry, as of art generally, is ardently celebrated. The most astonishing moment in The Winter’s Tale comes as the supposed statue of Hermione is seemingly brought back to life: the putative sculptor of this piece, Giulio Romano, is so “rare” an artist that, “had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, [he] would beguile nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape” (5.2.87–90). Again and again in Shakespeare we see a disavowal of the self-consciously literary. It is remarkable how worldly Shakespeare’s bookish types can be. Henry V combines “sweet and honeyed sentences” with physical courage and kingly resolution (1.1.51). Shakespeare’s real literary intellectuals, if one can put it that way, tend to be men of action as well as eloquence. We hear mention of “the book” Brutus has mislaid (Julius Caesar, 4.2.303) and Cassius “reads much” (1.2.202) – yet neither has “eat[en] paper” and “drunk ink” like the schoolmaster Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost (4.2.22). They are focused on the world, not words. Holofernes’ taste for purely verbal criticism, for “the dainties that are bred in a book” (4.2.21), is not to his credit: unlike the political actors Cassius and Brutus he is swept away by what he admits is “a foolish extravagant spirit” – lost in a cloud of words, “of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions” (4.2.61–3). This literary “gift” (4.2.61) has one special function: it sets Holofernes apart from the “undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather unlettered” (4.2.15–16). One can’t help but think here of the derision Shakespeare attracted from university-trained writers such as Robert Greene when he started writing poetic drama: the same words Holofernes uses of Dull (“unpolished, uneducated . . . unlettered”) were doubtless applied to him. “Words, words, words”, as Hamlet says to Polonius on being asked what he is reading (2.2.192): there is something in Shakespeare that finds absurd or disgusting the academic or humanist obsession with correct or sophisticated style for its own sake. It is significant Shakespeare makes the pompous, but also sinister, court counsellor Polonius a captious verbal critic. Polonius objects to the use of “beautified” in Hamlet’s love poem (“that’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase, ‘beautified’ is a vile phrase”, 2.2.110–12). Polonius’ heavy satisfaction in his own verbal art exasperates Gertrude: “More matter with less art”, she pleads (2.2.96). By contrast Hamlet, who is so frequently given the downright idiom of the common people, is enamoured of a style that is “as wholesome as [it is] sweet”, and “more handsome than [it is] fine”: an “honest” rather than an over-polished style, that is, and one not open to the charge of “affectation” (2.2.424–6) – i.e., of falseness, pretension, unreality. A good style, says Hamlet, is “honest”, or sincere. It may be “sweet”, or musically pleasing, but it must be “wholesome”, not overly and unhealthily preoccupied with artifice. Sweetness, refinement of style, is suspect. In the corrupt state of Denmark “the candied tongue” regularly “lick[s] absurd pomp” (3.2.53) – such a style, and the falseness it stands for, turns Hamlet’s stomach. Shakespeare, then, is suspicious of the way style alienates us from reality, encourages us to fake it. Cordelia’s inability to speak when demanded to do so by Lear is part of her ethical superiority to her sisters: she lacks “that glib and oily art / To speak and purpose not” (King Lear, 1.1.225–6). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Theseus prefers “tongue-tied simplicity” – heartfelt if inarticulate speech – to “the rattling tongue / Of saucy and audacious

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eloquence” (5.1.104, 102–3). What is objectionable about apt and gracious speech is its very smoothness, how it gets in the way of sincerity. “Poetry”, where it means the over-refined or excessively polished, is morally reprehensible. That is why “silence” (see Theseus at 5.1.100), or few words, are often so eloquent in Shakespeare: when Coriolanus holds his mother by the hand, “silent” (5.3.183), or when Cordelia responds to Lear’s declaration that she has reason to kill him with the utterly bare “No cause, no cause” (4.7.76), we know something real is happening. By contrast eloquence in Shakespeare is frequently represented as glib and hollow unnaturalness. The “honey-tongued Boyet” of Love’s Labour’s Lost is a strange grotesque of art: “the ape of form, Monsieur the Nice” (5.2.334, 325). It is not irrelevant here that Shakespeare’s villains are so often adroit speakers: Aaron the Moor, Richard III, Iago, Edmund. Readiness of speech is bound up with heartlessness. Shakespeare is often dubious about the vaulting claims of poetry. Isn’t Duke Theseus’ picture of the poet rather humorous? “The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.12–13). We often take this image as sublime, but its very extremity (that rolling eye . . .) makes it verge on the comical – it is not a world away from “the lover, / Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made to his mistress’ eyebrow” (As You Like It, 2.7.146–8). There is something suspect and ridiculous about the histrionics of poets. Hotspur is hardly the last word on poetry in Shakespeare, but his harangue against it is evidence of his creator’s ability to look at his own vocation with down-to-earth humour and sanity. Shakespeare’s significance for poetry, then, may amount to an intuition that there are more important things in life than the right words in the right order. The desire of English poetry in particular to connect with nature, experience, human reality – not to rest content with metropolitan stylistic polish or fineness – seems to me one of its most important features. The poetry of Ted Hughes – one of the most self-consciously Shakespearean poets of the twentieth century – is testament to this. In a startling essay of 1993, “The Burnt Fox”, Hughes describes his hopeless wrestling with an essay for his Cambridge English course. Having made hardly any progress he retreats to his bed, only to have a weirdly vivid dream. He imagines he is still at his desk. But then “a fox”, though one “the size of a wolf”, enters Hughes’ study “erect on its hind legs”: As it approached and came into the light I saw that its body and limbs had just now stepped out of a furnace. Every inch was roasted, smouldering, black-charred, split and bleeding. Its eyes, which were level with mine where I sat, dazzled with the intensity of the pain. It came up until it stood beside me. Then it spread its hand – a human hand as I now saw, but burned and bleeding like the rest of him – flat palm down on the blank space of my page. At the same time it said: “Stop this – you are destroying us.” Then as it lifted its hand away I saw the blood-print, like a psalmist’s specimen, with all the lines and creases, in wet, glistening blood on the page. (Hughes, 1994, 9) Hughes draws here a sharp distinction between culture and nature, between writing and literature on the one hand and life on the other. Writing kills – separates us from the truth. The fox – and, it is implied, all of nature – is being violated by words and thought. Hughes’ suspicion of culture is an extreme version of the suspiciousness of the schoolroom’s regard for Fine Writing we have noted in Shakespeare. Elsewhere Hughes asserts that “Words are tools, learned late and laboriously and easily forgotten, with which we try

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to give some part of our experience a more or less permanent shape outside ourselves. They are unnatural, in a way, and far from being ideal for their job.” Part of the reason for their inadequacy is that each word comes with “its own definite meanings” – and these may be quite different from “the meaning of our experience” (Hughes, 1994, 19). Here again for Hughes, language gets in the way of truth. His advice to poets reflects this notion. “The one thing”, he writes, is to imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic. If you do this you do not have to bother about commas or full-stops or that sort of thing. You do not look at the words either. You keep your eyes, your ears, your nose, your taste, your touch, your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them, then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. (13) The challenge is to get beyond words to “the thing”. Eloquence, fine style, laborious art or worrying about words – all these obstruct reality. In “Orghast: Talking without Words” (1971) Hughes writes that “A strange quality of truth is that it is reluctant to use words. Like Cordelia, in King Lear” (122). Collecting material for a long poem about the Gallipoli campaign, he noticed that, of the two veterans he interviewed, the more eloquent was the less useful in helping Hughes to connect to the reality of war; whereas “in the other . . . something about his . . . very dumbness released a world of shocking force and vividness”. The fact confirmed Hughes in his conviction that “a man’s deeper sufferings and experiences are almost impossible for him to express by deliberate means” (123). Consequently, the “incidental verbal poetry of true poetic drama is the least poetic thing about it” (125). For Hughes, then, the essence of poetry is the capturing of reality – “verbal poetry” is not be confused with actual poetry. The latter is neither “laborious” nor “deliberate”; it comes from turning oneself into the very thing one is attempting to capture in words and, in Keats’ phrase, it comes “as naturally as the Leaves to a tree” (Keats, 1975, 70). Behind such thinking lies a conception of Shakespeare as the poet who par excellence turned himself into other beings. And so too with the rejection of the labours of art. In Timon of Athens the Poet speaks of his own work in Keatsian terms, as “A thing slipped idly from me. / Our poesy is as a gum which oozes / From whence ’tis nourished. The fire i’ th’ flint / Shows not till it be struck: our gentle flame / Provokes itself, and like the current flies / Each bound it chafes” (1.1.20–5). In the Shakespearean tradition I am sketching genuine poetry is not connected with the university or even with what we think of as the “arts of language”. It is not cudgelled into existence but “provokes itself” – is linked not to deliberate labour and thought but to natural spontaneity. (Coleridge’s distinction (Coleridge, 1959, 68) between “organic” and “mechanic” form is relevant.) And, “like the current”, poetry “flies” boundaries. We can see this anti-poetic conception of poetry in Hughes’ well-known “The Horses”. Hughes’ attention is entirely on capturing the scene before him. Language is felt as a barrier to the experience of coming across horses “in the hour-before-dawn dark”. The awkward and unmusical character of Hughes’ phrasing – “Then the sun / Orange, red, red erupted / Silently” – is part of its claim to authenticity. The poem must get by without stanzas, regular line lengths, rhyme, regular metre – all that the Elizabethans understood

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by “sweetness”. It has a kind of staccato breathlessness about it: the urgency is to set down experience in whatever form, so that it may be recalled authentically “In din of the crowded streets”. Everywhere the poem declares its lack of concern with “poetry”. I suggest that Hughes’ warrant for this type of anti-writing lies in a conception of Shakespeare as a poet of experience. But I also suggest that Hughes captures only part of the Shakespearean inheritance, that concerned with empty “verbal poetry”. Another twentieth-century poet, John Berryman, also commented on the “spontaneity of articulation” in Shakespeare, quoting Coleridge to support his claim: Shakespeare’s intellectual action is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength. (Berryman, 1999, 65) Berryman locates the freedom and dereliction of his own style in Shakespeare. What matters is the “spontaneity” of Shakespeare, how his verse “like the current flies / Each bound it chafes”. Berryman wants to find a Shakespearean origin for the radical incoherence and decomposition of his work. Nevertheless, Hughes and Berryman capture only part of Shakespeare’s legacy. They connect with the suspicion of art in Shakespeare but not with the control and order of the Renaissance, which also shaped his achievement. There is, however, at least one twentieth-century poet who seems to me to engage equally with the artful and the natural sides of English Renaissance literature: the British-born poet Thom Gunn (1929–2004). If what I have been saying so far seems anachronistically to associate Shakespeare with a Romantic tradition in poetry, that is not necessarily illegitimate. Shakespeare’s enthusiastic reception by Romantics such as Keats and Coleridge really is the way he is transmitted to modern poets like Hughes, Berryman and Gunn. But actually the equation of Shakespeare with Nature significantly predates Romanticism. What I wish to do now is briefly review some of the ways in which Shakespeare is understood in the critical tradition in order to make it clear why I feel that Gunn, of all modern poets, has one of the strongest claims to Shakespeare’s inheritance. Where Hughes and Berryman tend to emphasize in a one-sided manner the “natural” dimension of Shakespearean poetry – its “spontaneity of articulation” and opposition to verbal artifice – in Gunn we find a strong tension between formality and ease of expression. And this same duality of Art and Nature is what is emphasized about Shakespeare in the couple of centuries or so after his death. (I rely here on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notices in The Shakespeare Allusion-Book.) The ease of Shakespeare’s style – its copiousness and spontaneity – is often praised in this early tradition of commentary. Shakespeare’s editors Heminge and Condell tell us that his “mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers” (I, 316). Jonson, less enthusiastically, said that Shakespeare “flowed with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped . . . His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too” (I, 348). Milton speaks of Shakespeare’s “easy numbers” and contrasts this unfavourably with “slow-endeavouring art” (I, 342), the latter observation being, probably, a thrust at Jonson. In The Return from Parnassus Will Kemp contrasts Shakespeare favourably with those writers “of the university” and prefers him to the more academic Jonson (I, 102). In

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the dedication to The White Devil Webster contrasts “the right happy and copious industry” of Shakespeare with Jonson’s “labour’d and understanding works” (I, 233). Suckling also compares the “easier strain” of Shakespeare with the “sweat” of Jonson’s “learned . . . brain” (I, 407), while Sir John Denham contrasts the products of the “oil” of Jonson’s lamp, and the “sweat” of his labours, with those of Shakespeare’s “more easy nature” (I, 504). Richard Flecknoe drives the comparison home: “Shakespeare excelled in a natural vein”, whereas Jonson’s “fault” was that “he was too elaborate”: “[c]omparing him with Shakespeare, you shall see the difference betwixt Nature and Art” (II, 85). Nahum Tate compares “Shakespeare’s flame with Jonson’s art” (II, 317): Shakespeare has the advantage of natural energy. Jonson himself is reported to have said that Shakespeare “wanted art” (I, 274). The inscription on Shakespeare’s monument says that with Shakespeare “quick nature died” (I, 267); Drayton likewise speaks of Shakespeare’s “natural brain” (I, 334). Thomas Fuller says of Shakespeare that “nature itself was all the art which was used upon him” and compares him to “Cornish diamonds” that “are not polished by any lapidary” (I, 482). For Dryden Shakespeare “was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inwards, and found her there” (II, 141). Edward Phillips concedes Shakespeare’s “unfiled expressions” and “rambling and indigested fancies” – yet, despite this lack of finish, he “must be confessed a poet above many that go beyond him in literature” (II, 221): he displays “a certain wild and native elegance” (II, 222–3). As for copiousness, Thomas Otway praises Shakespeare’s “luxuriant” pen (II, 263). For Sir Charles Sedley, Shakespeare is “the shame of schools, / Born to create, and not to learn from rules” (II, 392). Against these many identifications of Shakespeare with Nature we may set Francis Meres’ praise of “Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase” (I, 46) and, of course, Jonson’s own concession in the 1623 Folio: “Yet must I not give Nature all: thy Art, / My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part” (I, 309). And Richard Barnfield’s praise of the “honey-flowing vein” of Shakespeare (I, 51) captures, perhaps, what was seen as the natural and the artful side of Shakespeare: his manner is flowing but also sweet. What these quotations reveal are the co-ordinates within which Shakespeare’s work was understood in his own time and in the century of his death. And the fundamental distinction is, again, between nature and art, experience and form. I suggest that in Gunn we see this balance between nature and art made an explicit theme. Like Hughes and Berryman, Gunn was strongly conscious of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan example generally. Unlike them, however, he does not sacrifice “sweetness” – controlled and formal utterance – to “nature”. In Gunn overall we notice the tension between the finished and the unfinished, between form on the one hand and openness to the informalities of experience on the other (there is, for instance, the marked pressure of everyday speech in much of his poetry). Hughes’ privileging of image over word, his lack of interest in the musical or the “poetic”, is only a partial accessing of what Shakespeare bequeathed to English poetry. The drive to get beyond words to reality is a part of Shakespearean poetry, but so too is the tension between energy and pattern. Gunn’s conscious engagement with Shakespearean writing is evident in the pattern of allusions across his oeuvre. “A Mirror for Poets” recalls the Elizabethan age as “a violent time. Wheels, racks, and fires / In every writer’s mouth” and “Hacks in the Fleet and nobles in the Tower”; Jonson makes an appearance in the poem (Gunn, 1994, 24). “During an Absence” finds that the “obstacles to love” portrayed in Romeo and Juliet (“frowning Montague and Capulet”) take different forms now: our obstacles “Are air, not individuals”. In any case, “Even in sunlight what does freedom mean?” (73). External impediments

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to love are readily replaced in our age, Gunn suggests, by existential or psychological ones. The collection My Sad Captains begins with an epigraph from Troilus and Cressida: “The will is infinite and the execution confined, the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit” (91). A friend dying of AIDS is described as “Fantastical duke of dark corners” (alluding to Measure for Measure, 4.3.147); Gunn’s own homosexual adventures on Hampstead Heath are compared to “play[ing]” in “a Forest of Arden, in a summer night’s dream” (“Talbot Road”, 381, 383). Othello is alluded to in “Looks” (444); a friend is modelled on Falstaff in “Transients and Residents” (374). Gunn “most admire[s]” Coriolanus (“A Plan of Self-Subjection”, 46). Such reminiscences remind us of how self-consciously Gunn oriented himself towards the poetry of the English Renaissance, Shakespeare’s in particular. What is more important is Gunn’s repeated emphasis on the importance of art. The best way to understand this is to see Gunn as identifying both with the “laboriousness” of Jonson and the natural freedom of Shakespeare. Gunn’s word for “art” is “will” (much of his early poetry draws on a Sartrean language of the heroically self-determining agent). Repeatedly in Gunn we see this emphasis on the will as the quality that takes one away from or out of nature. In “Tamer and Hawk” there is evident pleasure in the tension between the freedom of the hawk and its submission to its master: I thought I was so tough, But gentled at your hands, Cannot be quick enough To fly for you and show That when I go I go At your commands. Even in flight above I am no longer free: You seeled me with your love . . . (29) The tight formal structure of the poem emblematizes the pleasure in control. Similarly, “On the Move”, about a group of bikers on the road, praises the capacity of human beings “To dare a future from the taken routes”. The bikers, as they roar past, frighten a flock of birds: but “Much that is natural, to the will must yield” (39). The human is defined – and defended – as the unnatural: “One is not necessarily discord / On earth; or damned because, half animal, / One lacks direct instinct, because one wakes / Afloat on movement that divides and breaks” (39–40). Human beings, says Gunn, are part of nature but also separate from it – awake on the unconscious flow of instinct. Like the unnatural artifice Perdita objects to in The Winter’s Tale, Gunn’s leather-jacketed, machine-mounted bikers constitute “an art / Which does mend nature – change it rather; but / The art itself is nature” (4.4.95–7). Again and again Gunn defends art and the human capacity freely to change itself: “My human will cannot submit / To nature, though brought out of it” (“The Unsettled Motorcyclist’s Vision of his Death”, 54). In his poem “To Yvor Winters, 1955”, Gunn praises the critic for “keep[ing] both Rule and Energy in view, / Much power in each, most in the balanced two” (70). In the critical tradition, as we have seen, Jonson is equated with “Rule” and Shakespeare with “Energy”: in this tribute to Winters Gunn sets out his own poetic doctrine, which is made up of loyalty to both these qualities. Watching surfers,

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Gunn pays tribute to the “learn’d skill” with which “they imitate” the “wave”: “Balance is triumph in this place” (“From the Wave”, 198). He celebrates the “cold hard light without break” that, as he flies over California, “reveals merely what is – no more / and no less” (“Flying Above California”, 116). The regard for “merely what is” is Gunn’s version of the feet-on-the-ground anti-poetical disposition I have discussed in Shakespeare, the impatience with that self-absorbed art that takes one away from reality, that offends against what Gunn memorably calls in this poem “That limiting candour”. Gunn’s very obvious formal composure, his attention to rhyme, rhythm and metre, is offset in his later work by an openness to the flow of experience, to effects of radical decomposition, many of which reflect experiences with drugs. “At the Centre”, for instance, recaptures a state of LSD-induced euphoria in which nothing remains separate from anything else: “The blue line bleeds and on the gold one draws . . . The sinewy flux pours without start or end.” Even here, however, order is reasserted, and not only in the poem’s use of rhyme and metre, but in its understanding of the way consciousness attempts to impose coherence on flux: “Though in the river, I abstract / Fence, word, and notion. On the stream at full / A flurry, where the mind rides separate!” But this reimposition of order, “this brief cresting” of thought, “sharpened and exact, / Is fluid too, is open to the pull / And on the underside twined deep with it” (220–1). The poem gives equal due to “word” or thought, on the one hand, and the flow of experience on the other. Gunn is attracted to soldiers partly because of the impression they give of order: “I watched them wheel on white parade grounds. / How could the flesh have such control?” (“The Corporal”, 233). In the very funny poem “Expression”, Gunn skewers some of the attitudinizing that I have suggested Shakespeare also targets: For several weeks I have been reading the poetry of my juniors. Mother doesn’t understand, and they hate Daddy, the noted alcoholic. They write with black irony of breakdown, mental institution, and suicide attempt, of which the experience does not always seem first-hand. It is very poetic poetry. As an antidote to this modish and “very poetic poetry”, Gunn takes himself off to the Art Museum. There he finds what he needs, “an early Italian altarpiece”. The Virgin “is massive and almost symmetrical” and the Christ-child “does not wriggle, nor is he solemn”: The sight quenches, like water after too much birthday cake. Solidly there, mother and child stare outward, two pairs of matching eyes, void of expression. (321) What Gunn cherishes in the painting is its lack of self-preoccupation, the absence of that “very poetic poetry” that always seems bound up with narcissism and unreality and which Shakespeare also satirized. The same balance between rule and energy is discussed in “Keats at Highgate”. Gunn dissents from Coleridge’s judgement, on meeting Keats, that there was something “Loose” or “slack” about this young man. As Keats walks home

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from the meeting with Coleridge, Gunn says, he is exquisitely “alert” to his surroundings: he “hardly passed the small grey ponds below / Or watched a sparrow pecking in the dirt / Without some insight swelling the mind’s flow / That banks made swift” (350). The “flow” of perception and thought, and its natural abundant energy, is made swift by the “banks” or limits of reason and mental discipline. Gunn’s poetry, then, derives its considerable wit and power from the combination of control and openness – “Rule” and “Energy” – that we find also in Shakespeare. He is an example of a modern writer who has learned the general lesson of Renaissance poetry, which is the equal importance of order and disorder in art. Like Robert Herrick in “Delight in Disorder”, he is more “bewitch[ed]” by “a wilde civility . . . than when Art / Is too precise in every part” (Herrick, 1961, 31), but that does not result in his relinquishing art altogether. To cite again the words Edward Phillips used of Shakespeare, Gunn’s poetry has “a certain wild and native elegance”. At the same time Gunn is quite unseduced – as, I think, Shakespeare was – by the attitude that poetry can be sufficient unto itself, that it can get by without reality. He is an instance, as again Shakespeare was, of a simultaneously erudite and unbookish poet. As he confesses in “Lines for a Book”: I think of all the toughs through history And thank heaven they lived, continually. I praise the overdogs from Alexander To those who would not play with Stephen Spender. For Gunn – and, as I hope I have demonstrated, for Shakespeare too – “though the mind has also got a place / It’s not in marvelling at its mirrored face / And evident sensibility” (“Lines for a Book”, 56). Poetry should hold the mirror up to nature, not itself. Gunn’s fusion of energy with order is the true Shakespearean inheritance.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Berryman, John (1999). Berryman’s Shakespeare: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings, ed. John Haffenden. Preface by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1959). Coleridge’s Writings on Shakespeare, ed. T. Hawkes. New York: Capricorn. Donne, John (1973). The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gunn, Thom (1994). Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Herrick, Robert (1961). Selected Poems, ed. John Hayward. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hughes, Ted (1994). Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell. London: Faber. ——(2003). Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan. London: Faber. Johnson, Samuel (1989). “Preface to the Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays”. In Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen. London: Penguin. Keats, John (1975). Letters of John Keats: A Selection, ed. Robert Gittings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nuttall, A. D. (2007). Shakespeare the Thinker. New Haven: Yale University Press. The Shakespeare Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakespeare from 1591 to 1700 (1932), compiled by C. M. Ingleby et al. London: Humphrey Milford/Oxford University Press, 2 vols. Stevens, Wallace (1985). Collected Poems. New York: Knopf. Yeats, W. B. (1950). Collected Poems. London: Macmillan.

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SHAKESPEARE AND THE NOVEL Marianne Novy

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n her essay “Shakespeare in Iceland”, Jane Smiley writes, “I wanted to communicate the ways I found the conventional readings of King Lear frustrating and wrong . . . My intention was to stick as closely to the plot as I could, given a few caveats” (Smiley, 1999, 160, 171). So she imagined parallels to the events of King Lear occurring on a farm in the American Midwest in the 1970s as she transformed the play into a novel narrated by Ginny, the oldest daughter. Ginny’s behaviour in some ways resembles Goneril’s, but since she explains it from her own point of view as part of a thoroughly imagined life story, it invites the reader to a very different response than Goneril’s does. Few novelists have so explicitly discussed their writing process as a response to Shakespeare and how the generic change facilitated this response, few have written about their opposition to the usual interpretation of the play, and few have been so critically and popularly successful. However, over the centuries since the hazy beginning of the novel, many novelists have used, alluded to and rewritten Shakespearean lines, characters, themes and plots, and the figure of Shakespeare himself. There are a number of affinities between Shakespeare’s plays and novels. Both developed as popular forms, but include richness and complexity that have led to recognition by the academy as spanning popular and high culture. Unlike the English neoclassical drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both often include a mix of voices, including multiple plots that sometimes mix classes. The multiple languages found often in Shakespeare’s contrasts between hyperbolists and ironists, idealists and realists, is close to the heteroglossia – interplay of different voices – that the theorist Bakhtin sees as characteristic of the novel as distinct from the genres of epic and poetry; novelists such as Eliot, Dickens, Joyce, Woolf, Carter and Rushdie may make Shakespearean echoes part of their own heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981, 324). Many novelists are also Shakespearean in their mix of humour and seriousness and, often, in their interest in going beyond tragedy as he does in his late romances. Shakespeare’s plays, like nineteenth-century novels, can please an audience interested in character (as was noticed first by Margaret Cavendish in the late seventeenth century), but they can also be interpreted as more similar to modernist and postmodernist novels (Cavendish, 1969, 245–6). Since the eighteenth century, Shakespeare has been well enough known among English-speaking readers that both novelists and their audiences can be presumed to know something of his work. Jane Austen has her Henry Crawford say, in Mansfield Park, “Shakespeare is part of an Englishman’s constitution. One gets acquainted with

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him who knows how” (Austen, 1965, 256). The critic G. H. Lewes saw Austen as similar to Shakespeare in dramatic presentation – what he called ventriloquy (Lewes, 1859, 102, 104, 105). Later in the nineteenth century other novelists, such as George Eliot, Dickens, Hardy, and Melville, were often praised as Shakespearean, especially with regard to their range, characterization and mingling of tragedy and comedy. Following in this tradition, Smiley writes in the essay quoted earlier that she considered Shakespeare: a model of what a writer should be – adept at comedy and tragedy and irony and characterization and poetry and prose, a person of wide-ranging interests and skillful at the illusion of expertise, lively and sober by terms, familiar with the full range of emotions, able to believably extrapolate from the quotidian life of a citizen to the epic life of a king or a queen. (Smiley, 1999, 165) Smiley’s use of Shakespeare in A Thousand Acres is oppositional; nevertheless she praises him highly. However, in this same essay she makes a point of saying that she does not find Shakespeare’s work universal. King Lear seemed to her unfair to Goneril and Regan and by implication to reflect a patriarchal and therefore limited view of family life. She also disagreed with what she saw as the play’s view of evil as sometimes innate and unmotivated (Smiley, 1999, 161, 172). The question of whether the use of Shakespeare in a novel presents his work as universal is sometimes raised by critics. Thomas Cartelli, for example, makes a distinction between works that claim that Shakespeare’s writings speak to new concerns, which he calls adaptations, and works that refer to Shakespeare’s writings in order to look at them critically, which he calls appropriations (Cartelli, 1999, 15). Before further discussion of this apparently basic and usually political distinction, it is useful to distinguish some of the elements in novelists’ uses of Shakespeare. These modes can also appear in poems and plays, but they can be developed much further in novels. Novelists may give a character a name echoing one in Shakespeare, or use a Shakespearean line in describing him or her as a shorthand suggesting the character’s temperament, as Sir Walter Scott sometimes does, or as a sign that they are revisiting a Shakespearean situation. They may build on a fascination they presume the audience will have in a Shakespearean character, as when Robert Nye writes a novel about Falstaff, or in Shakespeare himself, as in Anthony Burgess’ Nothing Like the Sun, Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W. H., or Leon Rooke’s mocking Shakespeare’s Dog. They may suggest that their character should be seen as having some of the stature of a Shakespearean tragic hero, or the charm of a comic heroine, as when Charlotte Brontë imagines Rochester comparing himself to Macbeth confronting the witches, and echoes Orlando’s praise of Rosalind in her description of Rosamond Oliver. Or they may foreshadow their own character’s role as a villain, as when Anthony Trollope, in The Prime Minister, has his character Ferdinand Lopez say, “I’m like Shylock, you know” – for Trollope, unlike some other novelists, did take Shylock as a villain (Trollope, 1987, 58). They may be trying to borrow an atmosphere of dread associated with Shakespearean ghosts and witches, as with Ann Radcliffe’s uses of epigraphs in The Italian and Mysteries of Udolpho, or in other ways use a quotation to mark a situation as either similar or contrasting. They may be placing their novel as one that appeals to an educated reader, in ways that range from an automatic comparison of suspected women to Lady Macbeth found in detective stories, to more varied attempts to add prestige to romance fiction, to the

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sophisticated in-jokes of Angela Carter’s Wise Children (Baker, 1995, 46; Osborne, 1999). They may mock Shakespeare’s language or plot as a burlesque, or they may satirize the pretensions of some of its actors or critics, as when Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn meets two down-on-their-luck performers who try to put on Hamlet but can’t remember their words. These uses, like those mentioned in the preceding paragraph, could be matters of one or more verbal echoes, or structuring principles making a larger pattern. More significantly, perhaps along with previous uses, they may meditate on key issues in a Shakespearean play, and perhaps define their characters by their varying reactions, as Charlotte Brontë does in Shirley when Caroline hopes that Coriolanus will persuade Robert to sympathize with his workers, and instead Robert identifies with Coriolanus’ pride. In many of the most interesting examples of rewriting, novels suggest a critique of a Shakespearean character, plot, or of the usual response to character and plot. They may give more attention to a minor character, and sometimes that shift drastically alters the balance of sympathies against the character based on Shakespeare’s hero, as when Smiley’s Ginny recalls her father as a tyrant who beat and molested his daughters. These novels are Cartelli’s “confrontational appropriations” (Cartelli, 1999, 17) and Peter Erickson’s “works that encourage us to direct our energies toward investigations of Shakespeare’s place in a reconstellated cultural situation in which his work, while still significant, is no longer the all-defining center of things” (Erickson, 1991, 145). In other ways, also, they may read a Shakespearean play in terms of preoccupations of their own time and society. For example, their allusions to Shakespeare may show longing for a literary hero from their own culture, as when Gloria Naylor’s characters in Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills fantasize about a black Shakespeare (Erickson, 1991, 124–45). Similarly, Melville and Joyce invoke and echo Shakespeare as part of their attempt to create classic literature for their own nation. Or they may be developing a dialogue about the relevance of Shakespeare to characters of their own time, as in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story, where Sonny at one time goes to Shakespeare for a definition of equality but later, as he loses both his wife and his lover, is “taunted by the tags of passion he didn’t understand” (Gordimer, 1991, 174). Is there always some critique in a novel’s use of Shakespeare, so that for novels Cartelli’s two categories are hard to separate? Possibly the fact that they are writing in another genre, not to mention several hundred years later, provides enough difference to mean that novelists’ use of Shakespeare must contrast with his work significantly. Shakespeare’s plays usually give centrality to aristocratic characters, even royal ones – though often showing their limitations – while novels usually focus on characters lower in class. In Mill on the Floss, George Eliot’s narrator contrasts her subjects with those of “that conspicuous, far-echoing tragedy, which sweeps the stage in regal robes . . . the pride and obstinacy of millers, and other insignificant people, have their tragedy too” (Eliot, 1980, 172). Furthermore, Bakhtin argues that authoritative discourse is always challenged by its juxtaposition with other kinds of discourse in a novel (Bakhtin, 1981, 344); Smiley finds critique resulting because narrative form differs from dramatic form: Narrative gives more direct access to the inner life, allows the writer to reveal the disjuncture between what is felt and what appears, and to suggest emotions so powerful that their complete expression must fail, resulting in silence . . . Narrative, in my opinion . . . always proposes a difference between the public perception of events and their actual meaning. (Smiley, 1999, 162, 172)

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Nevertheless, novels that explicitly critique Shakespeare still maintain the relevance of his writings as worth arguing with, which again complicates the question of dividing some novels into Cartelli’s two categories (Novy, 1994, 2, 7). Thus, analyses of novels that rewrite Shakespeare are inevitably involved with controversies about Shakespeare and his cultural place. For example, in The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar see some nineteenth-century women writers as rebelling against Shakespeare’s portrayal of women, exemplified by the inadequate alternatives of Lady Macbeth or Ophelia (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979). For some critics he inevitably represents inalienable colonial, patriarchal and canonical prerogatives; thus Elaine Showalter, discussing novelistic rewritings of Miranda, argues that “the use of Shakespeare by both Canadian and American writers has built-in contradictions that impede its revolutionary power” (Showalter, 1991, 41). However, a probably more adequate view, developed by Fischlin and Fortier, is that “Simplistic assumptions about the place of Shakespeare in relation to cultures of resistance or complicity are to be avoided” (Fischlin and Fortier, 2000, 12). Showalter’s view is too simple, but the split between adaptation and appropriation is not necessarily as clear as Cartelli says; often it is a question of degree. Revisions of the same Shakespearean play often deal with similar issues and seem in dialogue with each other (as well as with revisions in new plays and poetry, theatrical and film productions and criticism), but over time they may show a marked shift in cultural preoccupations. The rest of this essay will examine selected rewritings of six different plays, probably among the most often alluded to – The Merchant of Venice, Othello, As You Like It, Hamlet, The Tempest and King Lear – to show such dialogues and shifts. These rewritings include some novels that expand or redirect sympathy, framing, for example, Jews and women differently, and some that meditate for their own culture on issues in the original play, such as jealousy, crossing racial borders and the difficulty of action.

The Merchant of Venice Changing perspective to switch sympathy, one of the modes most closely related to Shakespearean criticism and stage history, has a long history, and The Merchant of Venice has often provoked it. Maria Edgeworth’s 1817 novel Harrington is one of the earliest for which there is external evidence that the author wrote to combat prejudice: a young Jewish-American reader, Rachel Mordecai, wrote to her to complain about the prejudice toward Jews in her writings, and Edgeworth recognized the justice of the complaint (Ragussis, 1995, 57–8). She decided to write a novel that would not only present Jews positively but also deal with the tradition of anti-Semitism in literature and its effects on both Jews and Gentiles. In a key scene, set in the 1780s, the narrator and title character goes to see a production of Merchant in which the famous actor Macklin plays Shylock with “an expression of latent malice and revenge, of everything detestable in human nature” (Edgeworth, 2004, 137). He is struck by the pain this gives Berenice, a young woman he has recently met: I almost wished Shakespeare had not written or Macklin had not acted the part so powerfully. My imagination formed such a strong conception of the pain the Jewess was feeling, and my inverted sympathy, if I may call it that, so overpowered my direct and natural feelings, that at every fresh development of the Jew’s villainy I shrunk as though I had myself been a Jew. (138)

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Edgeworth, writing a novel about Harrington’s recovery from the impact of a childhood fear of Jews promoted by a prejudiced servant, Foster, portrays many anti-Semitic characters, some of them involved with the historical riot against Jews at Gibraltar, and others casually calling a random male Jew Shylock. By the time Edgeworth was writing, Edmund Kean had played a Shylock whose own suffering was more obvious, but Harrington does not explicitly anticipate the possibility of this interpretation. However, he does feel “the force of some of [Shylock’s] appeals to justice” (138) such as his complaints about Antonio’s past treatment. Edgeworth’s novel also protects Shakespeare from a direct attack by its presentation of Berenice’s father, Mr. Montenero, who refers to the argument of eighteenth-century Shakespeare scholars George Steevens and Edmund Malone that Shakespeare’s source was a historical event in which a Christian merchant insisted on a pound of flesh when winning a bet against a Jewish usurer: as a dramatic poet, it was his business, I acknowledge, to take advantage of the popular prejudice as a power – as a means of dramatic pathos and effect. Yet you will acknowledge that we Jews must feel it peculiarly hard that the truth of the story on which the poet founded his plot should have been completely sacrificed to fiction, so that the characters were not only misrepresented, but reversed. (144) In spite of the occasional tributes to Shakespeare, the novel concludes by rewriting elements of his plot: here, for example, there is a ring deception which proves the truthfulness of the Jewish boy Jacob and the falsehood of the anti-Semitic Foster (instead of showing the promise-breaking of Portia’s Bassanio and her own truthfulness); the Jewish father argues for forgiving Foster as Portia argues for mercy in Merchant, while Harrington’s father is rigid and apparently unforgiving; the novel ends with marriage between Harrington and his half-Jewish Berenice (in a failure of nerve on Edgeworth’s part, she turns out to have been raised in her deceased mother’s Christian religion). A few years later, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe also rewrote The Merchant of Venice (Ragussis, 1995, 98–116). Scott may well have been influenced both by Harrington and by Kean’s interpretation. Though its Jewish money-lender, Isaac, is temperamentally less proud than Shylock, Scott underlines the connection by giving Chapter 5, where Isaac enters the novel, an epigraph beginning, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” (Scott, 1996, 63; Merchant, 3.1.49–50). Scott’s narrator writes critically of the prejudice most of the characters show with regard to Isaac. Frequently, as in Shakespeare, they refer to him as a dog, and one of them, Friar Tuck, claims to have converted him and forced him to donate half of his money, as in the end of Merchant, but Ivanhoe, the hero, does not share the prejudices of his time, and dismisses these claims. Isaac occasionally makes accusations like Shylock’s as he speaks of how badly he is treated, and Scott contextualizes his role as a money-lender with references to historical restrictions on the Jews. He shows Isaac as greedy, and recalls Shylock again with the epigraph to Chapter 22, which begins, “My daughter – O my ducats”, but makes it very clear that he is not as money-minded as Shylock since he is more willing to spend money to save his daughter than for anything else (230; Merchant, 2.8.15). The largest shift from Merchant to Ivanhoe is the portrayal of Isaac’s daughter Rebecca. Unlike Jessica, Rebecca has skill at healing, strength of character and a proud Jewish identity. She fascinates Ivanhoe, though she scorns to marry a Christian. Close to the end, she gives her jewels to his fiancée Rowena, repaying the help given to her. In this generosity,

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she is more like Portia or Antonio in Merchant than like Jessica, and like theirs, her generosity is also an emotional weapon of sorts, assuring that Ivanhoe will always think of her when he sees Rowena in her diamonds (Ragussis, 1995, 115). Though Harrington is more concerned with fighting bias than is Ivanhoe, neither of these novels directly challenges Shakespeare without qualification or presents a Jewish person’s viewpoint. More explicit critiques appear in Ludwig Lewisohn’s 1931 novel The Last Days of Shylock, in which Shylock contextualizes his attitude toward Christians by describing such historical events as the 1556 burning alive of twenty-five Jews who had converted to Christianity and then returned to Judaism, and in The Nature of Blood, discussed in the Othello section (Gross, 1992, 271–2). Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock meditates on Jewish identity, stereotypes, scapegoating, the persistence of anti-Semitism and its exploitation in relation to the situation of Israel in the late twentieth century. An Israeli fantasizes about starting the Anti-Semitic Theatre Company to play Merchant and others of what he calls “the great Jew-hating dramas of Europe” (Roth, 1994, 276). The fictional Philip Roth is assigned a line of Shylock’s as a password in his temporary role as a spy for Israel, but also feels his employer is asking for a pound of his flesh (395–6, 393). However, two earlier and better known novels steeped in Shakespeare implicitly challenge the idea of Shylock as a representative Jew by putting at their centre Jewish characters with no resemblance to him – George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, in which the central Jew, as will be discussed later, is more like Hamlet (as with Harrington, there is evidence in her letters of her desire to combat prejudice through the novel) and James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which Leopold Bloom is Everyman as the classical hero of the title.

Othello Unlike transformations of Shylock, novelistic transformations of Othello have generally not tried to make any Shakespearean character more sympathetic. Rather they build on Othello as a figure of jealousy or crossing racial boundaries or both, and expand on the implications of those issues for their own time. Sometimes they soften his guilt and/ or make him reform, but, especially in the twentieth century, they often use his story to explore the difficulties of racial and cultural identity, sometimes in the process making the Othello figure clearly less sympathetic or noble. Although Aphra Behn is not as didactic as Edgeworth, in the late seventeenth century she created, in Oroonoko, a narrator who combines some anti-racist language with a structure of allusions to Shakespeare’s Othello pointed out by Cartelli and Margaret Ferguson (Cartelli, 1999, 123–43; Ferguson, 1993, 15–49). Of her hero, an African prince sold into slavery, she writes: “Whoever had heard him speak would have been convinced of their errors that all fine wit is confined to the white men, especially to those of Christendom” (Behn, 2003, 15). Written after the development of the transatlantic slave trade, this novel shows racial prejudice at work more unequivocally than Othello as it portrays general suspicion of Oroonoko, and makes him less guilty than Shakespeare’s character because he kills his wife at her request, to save her from rape after his death. Ferguson shows how the speaker’s involvement enables criticism of racism (Ferguson, 1993, 40), but Cartelli argues that the grotesque ending identifies Oronooko as a savage, whatever Behn’s intent (Cartelli, 1999, 136–41). Later, the novel has been read to show Oroonoko as heroic because an anti-racist viewpoint gained wider acceptance. After Oroonoko, several novelists rewrote Othello focusing on the issue of male jealousy

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rather than on race. In Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796), characters’ reactions to a bad production of Othello show some uncritical of his jealousy, and later Edgar, whom Camilla loves, suspects her of deceiving him, but he reforms and marries her. In the nineteenth century, Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821), as Diana Henderson points out, portrays jealousy like Othello’s in Leicester but deals with the issue of Celtic race in the Cassio figure, Tressilian (Henderson, 2006, 73–4, 77–9). In the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro (1899), the Othello figure tells the story of how the physical resemblance between his son and his deceased best friend, first mentioned by his wife, convinces him that she has been unfaithful, and his inability to ignore this suspicion destroys his marriage. Although Machado de Assis was multiracial himself, race doesn’t seem to be a factor in the novel. There is cultural analysis, however: the novel puts a lot of emphasis on the conservative Catholic community and Casmurro’s idealization of his mother. Critics are divided over whether Casmurro has cause for jealousy or not. The late twentieth-century development of black and postcolonial liberation movements began more widespread interest by novelists in meditating on the racial meaning of Othello for the contemporary world. In Season of Migration to the North (1969), the Arab novelist Tayeb Salih takes Othello as the prototype of the Arab/African who acts out his exoticism to fascinate whites, seeking success in their world but ultimately finding disaster. His central character, Mustafa Sa’eed, a Sudanese man, goes to study in England, compares himself to Othello when meeting white women there, seduces and leaves three who then kill themselves, and finally kills one with his own dagger. However, Mustafa rejects the defence argument of his lawyer that “circumstances had driven [him] to killing in a moment of mad passion” and his “mind was able to absorb Western civilization but it broke his heart”. He thinks “I am no Othello. I am a lie” (Salih, 1997, 32–3), though at another point, he says, “I am no Othello. Othello was a lie” (95). Mustafa reverses the racist view that he exemplifies the persistence of African violence and maintains that his violence comes from the violence of European colonization, which he is deliberately turning back on Europeans. Salih frames Mustafa’s self-presentation by making the novel’s narrator another London-educated Sudanese who returns to his native village, as Mustafa has after seven years in prison. This narrator tries to understand Mustafa, and he must also do his own negotiation with Sudanese life. After Mustafa’s presumed suicide, he witnesses his community’s mistreatment of Mustafa’s widow, who is forced into a marriage that ends in the violent death of both husband and wife, thus showing, arguably, the destructiveness of his village’s defensive response to a woman influenced by modernity. (The complex portrayal of this Sudanese woman, by contrast to the portrayal of white women, anticipates a trend in recent Othello rewritings.) And he discovers that Mustafa’s locked study contains only books in English, and remembers, telling the reader for the first time, that Mustafa’s murder was literally demanded by his white lover (an uncanny echo of Oroonoko) as she begged, “Please, my sweet” (164). Thus Mustafa was less of an agent with regard to white culture than he claimed. His truest legacy may be in a silence, his refusal to write anything in a manuscript dedicated “To those who see with one eye, talk with one tongue, and see things as either black or white, either Eastern or Western” (150–1). Season of Migration may seem to present a postcolonial critique of Othello for his love of a white woman and his service to Venice, and a critique of Shakespeare both for making such a character a hero and for showing him as ultimately unable to deal with Western culture – but the oddly dedicated blank manuscript suggests that the novel’s ultimate

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judgement may be more complicated. If in order to see with two eyes in today’s world you must see things as both black and white, both Eastern and Western, Othello may be a profound image of modern existence, and Mustafa’s claim that “Othello is a lie” completely undercut. Yet ultimately the novel, like many discussed here, is less concerned with evaluation of Shakespeare and his work than with how to live in a complex, hybrid world. Season of Migration is one of the most many-layered novelistic rewritings of Shakespeare, but it has competition in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (1991) and Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood (1997). Written by a white South African who has repeatedly taken an anti-racist perspective in her novels and essays, My Son’s Story focuses on another socially mobile character, a mixed-race schoolteacher who loves Shakespeare and finds in his works authorization for his beliefs in racial equality. After he becomes an anti-apartheid activist, his extra-marital love affair with Hannah, a white activist, receives a Shakespearean frame not only from the implicit Othello comparison but also because her first words to him when she visits him in jail quote from the unjustly exiled Duke of As You Like It. Gordimer makes the “coloured” man and the white woman lovers rather than a married couple, shows their relationship as doomed even without murderous jealousy, and adds the story, missing from Othello, of women of colour. The novel does not tell that story from the women’s point of view, but shows how Sonny and his own son Will underestimate and alienate themselves from Aila (Sonny’s wife) and Baby (their daughter), as well as from each other, partly because of their fascination with white women. At the end the father–son relationship is reconstituted, but Sonny and Will are separated from Hannah, Aila and Baby, all living abroad because of political danger and commitment. Sonny’s love of Shakespeare is dramatized when he repeats Shakespearean lines of regret and bitterness as he becomes more isolated. When his wife is in prison, and he blames his love for Hannah for blinding him to Aila’s developing political commitment, he thinks of Othello’s words to Desdemona, “Oh thou weed, who are so lovely fair and smell’s so sweet that the sense aches at thee, Would thou had’st never been born” (Gordimer, 1991, 224; Othello, 4.2.69–71). Sonny had earlier realized that Shakespeare did not explain his political situation; now he finds that remembering Shakespeare does not help in personal situations like those in the plays. Yet this, unlike ignorance of the woman of colour, works more against Sonny’s previous safe reading of Shakespeare than against the plays themselves. The final twist of the Shakespearean themes of the novel comes at the end when Will (named after Shakespeare) reveals that he has been the narrator of the whole book as well as of the sections told from his point of view, in which he generally seems disgusted with his father. All the sympathetic exploration of Sonny’s consciousness has been Will’s work in spite of his own past hostility; Will even reveals as his own his father’s habit of remembering Shakespearean tags, as he thinks, quoting Hamlet, “I have that within that passeth show” (276; Hamlet, 1.2. 85–6). Will says he is going to be a writer of a different sort from Shakespeare, and show “what it was really like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free” (175), but this chapter reveals that politically committed writing can also have the sympathetic exploration of consciousness which one strong tradition associates with Shakespeare. Gordimer thus decentres Shakespeare in a novel that treats race with more complexity than his works ever do, but nevertheless she envisions an engagement with Shakespeare that need not be repudiated. She may have been influenced in this position by the anti-apartheid production of Othello filmed in South Africa in 1988, close to the time of this novel’s writing, by her fellow cultural activist Janet Suzman.

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The Nature of Blood (1997), by Caribbean-born, UK-raised Caryll Phillips, uses Othello to combine Salih’s critique of a figure who slights his African past with Gordimer’s critique of a figure who neglects his black wife and family because of fascination with a white woman. Unlike the criticism of the Shakespearean character in most novels, this attack comes from a second-person narrative voice, which might be the author’s viewpoint, might be the voice of Othello’s guilty conscience, might even be the voice of an imagined representative black nationalist: And so you shadow her [Desdemona’s] every move, attend to her every whim, like the black Uncle Tom that you are . . . yet you conveniently forget your own family, and thrust your wife and son to the back of your noble mind . . . You are lost, a sad black man, first in a long line of so-called achievers who are too weak to yoke their past with their present. (Phillips, 1997, 180–1) Phillips places the Othello section of his novel after other sections dealing with the Holocaust and the fifteenth-century Jewish ghetto. Following the Othello section, he tells stories of other failed cross-cultural relationships – one between Eva, a concentrationcamp survivor, and a British man who conceals his marriage from her, and one between Eva’s uncle, who helped in the military creation of the state of Israel, and an AfricanJewish woman he sees as too primitive for his country. As Peter Erickson shows, the novel’s various parts show a continuing story of both racial/ethnic prejudice and male irresponsibility (Erickson, 2007, 110). Here the struggles and errors of the Othello figure receive a larger context from the concern with anti-Semitism as well as with couples in which the woman, not the man, is the racial/ethnic other. Salman Rushdie’s fantastic picaresque The Satanic Verses, which plays with traditions from Hindu and Muslim cultures and many others, uses the Othello plot to examine the situation of the racial and cultural outsider from India as well as the psychology of evil, themes less central in the novels focusing on Africans. His Iago is an outsider of the same background as his Othello. The two central Indians both pursue white women; after losing his wife, Pamela, Saladin uses anonymous phone calls to makes Gibreel jealous over his own. There is reconciliation and forgiveness, but only Saladin survives of the four, to make a new beginning in India with an Indian woman. The characters who survive in these novels have usually gone through an experience comparable to tragedy even if, like those in Shakespeare’s romances, they move past it. Nevertheless, the limitations of Mustafa, Sonny and Phillips’ Othello raise questions of whether they should be considered as having tragic stature – something Rushdie’s narrator explicitly denies to his hero – and they de-idealize Shakespeare’s Othello as well (Rushdie, 1988, 424).

As You Like It In nineteenth-century England Rosalind became the representative figure for Shakespearean comedy and its possibilities for women (Poole, 2004, 89). Novelists often evoked her, but could present a critical treatment. In Jane Eyre (1847), Charlotte Brontë recalls As You Like It with both the first and the last name of Rosamond Oliver, who helps Jane set up a school while she lives with the Rivers family. Jane, the narrator, describes Rosamond’s gifts of beauty and fortune in terms that echo one of Orlando’s poems about Rosalind. Like Rosalind, she is aggressive in meeting an unsociable man. Unlike Orlando,

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St John Rivers doesn’t marry her – he can’t see her as a good missionary’s wife – and she quickly marries someone else. Rosamond’s flirtatiousness contrasts with Jane’s straightforwardness. Jane judges her as shallow, and so generally do readers. George Eliot may have had her in mind, as well as Shakespeare’s Rosalind, when she invented Rosamund Vincy in Middlemarch (1871–2), who also attracts the poetic clichés that have been applied to Rosalind, wins over a reluctant Lydgate and does destroy his vocation as a doctor. George Eliot’s most Shakespearean novel, Daniel Deronda (1874–6), repeatedly frames Gwendolen in relation to Rosalind (Novy, 1994, 120–4). Early in the novel on a festive day in the forest, Gwendolen is complimented on “having the part of Rosalind” (Eliot, 1984, 135). She has Rosalind’s charm, in most circumstances her commanding personality and her love of role-playing. She calls her cousin “dear little coz” (50), close to Rosalind’s addressing her cousin Celia as “pretty little coz” (As You Like It, 4.1.175). But she lacks Rosalind’s easy affection and compassion. When Rosalind hears that Orlando has been wounded by a lion and sees his blood on a napkin, she faints and pretends the faint was pretence. When Gwendolen hears that her wooer Rex has fallen from his horse and is injured, she pretends to be concerned, but can’t help showing that she is really amused. Evidently she thinks that her marriage to Grandcourt, compared to Orlando by another attendee at the party and willing to observe rituals of courtship, will give her a comic happy ending in which she can preserve Rosalind’s power – but she cannot. However, she survives her miserable marriage to Grandcourt, and Eliot deliberately breaks with novelistic and comic convention to leave her unmarried at the end. In the twentieth century As You Like It could be the starting point for more utopian comic adaptations. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in its title pays tribute to As You Like It, and plays further with Rosalind’s nest of gender disguises, but goes far beyond it. Orlando begins the novel male but becomes female, and the narrator says, “Her sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive” (Woolf, 1978, 146) and thus she enjoys her life much more. Orlando takes its story past marriage and in this case, as part of its continued allusion to the life of Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West, refuses an ending that gives up the heroine’s multiplicity or engages her in even a ritual of subordination. She was married, true, but if one’s husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? (165) Orlando takes Shakespeare as a model for her role as an author, but contrary to the usual Shakespeare myth, the novel pictures him as “a rather fat, rather shabby man” (14) and reworks the myth to empower rather than disempower non-canonical writers: “Shakespeare must have written like that [in obscurity], and the church builders built like that, anonymously, needing no thanking or naming” (65; see Froula, 1990, 131–3). In the late twentieth century, Angela Carter also evokes and goes beyond As You Like It as she imagines a world in which a woman can have both love and even more power and freedom than in Shakespeare. In Nights at the Circus, the heroine’s foster mother predicts that the novel will end like: “the customary endings of the old comedies of separated lovers. Orlando takes his Rosalind. She says: ‘To you I give myself, for I am yours.’ And that . . . goes for a girl’s bank account, too” (Carter, 1986, 280–1: As You Like It, 5.4.105). In response, Fevvers says: “But it is not possible that I should give myself . . . My being, my

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me-ness, is unique and indivisible . . . Surely he’ll have the decency to give himself to me, when we meet again, not expect the vice versa?” (281). Like Rosalind, Fevvers has more power than ordinary women, and she maintains at the end the insistence on women’s sexual autonomy that Rosalind articulates as an anti-feminist warning in her disguise as Ganymede. The novel ends not with a marriage ceremony but with Fevvers’ laugh at deceiving her lover about her virginity. While women novelists have been more interested in Rosalind than male novelists, one twentieth-century novel by a man to evoke her, Robert Stone’s Children of Light (1986), suggests her appeal to women as a fantasy in a way that might be compared to Eliot’s technique in Deronda. His failed, drug-addicted actress Lu Anne, on the verge of madness, constantly thinks back to the days when she starred in the live theatre as Rosalind. These memories can’t save her as mental illness and addiction take over. Each of these novelists takes for granted that Rosalind has some appeal. Brontë presents a parodic version of her as still inadequate by contrast to Jane’s depth, as we shall see in the King Lear section. Woolf’s reference obliquely emulates Shakespeare’s Rosalind in presenting a character who changes not just clothes and apparent gender but actual sex. Though Eliot’s letters show her own fascination with Rosalind, she and Stone imagine women led in the wrong direction by their identification with her, whether in following a marital plot or in living in fantasies of her theatrical past. More playfully, Carter, who alludes to Rosalind in creating characters who change or disguise sex in other novels, sees her as someone whose temporary freedom does not go far enough for the modern woman.

Hamlet The great interest in Hamlet among novelists begins with a similar interest among critics in the late eighteenth century. As pre-Romantic, Romantic and Victorian critics and novelists approach Hamlet, he becomes a representative figure for a man confronting the difficulty of action – whether because of the condition of the world – “the time is out of joint” (Hamlet, 1.5.189) – or because of his thoughtful, idealistic character, or both. He is often an emblem for the intellectual in search of a calling. This theme has an obvious interest for a writer, and it also fits the bildungsroman’s concern with how a young person finds a role in society. Usually Hamlet’s situation is treated with sympathy, but often there is also comic detachment and sometimes even scathing satire (as the focus turns to his character). There are Hamlet-like heroes, as Nancy Glazener has argued, in William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (US, 1789), William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (England, 1794) and Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (US, 1799–1800), with Hill Brown emphasizing Hamlet’s problematic psychology and Godwin and Brockden Brown his political situation. But the most famous novelistic discussion of Hamlet from the early part of this period is that of Goethe in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–6), where Wilhelm argues that the central situation is “the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it . . . An oak tree planted in a costly jar, which should have borne only pleasant flowers in its bosom” (Goethe, 1962, 236). However, as Alexander Welsh has pointed out, while Wilhelm himself may be like the hero in not knowing what to do, “he has never shouldered so heavy a burden as Shakespeare’s hero” (Welsh, 2001, 74). There is narcissism in his identification with Hamlet, and arguably this builds on Hamlet’s own narcissism. But his condition was something with which an increasing number of readers

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and writers in the nineteenth century could identify – as the influential critic Hazlitt wrote in 1817: It is we who are Hamlet . . . Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy . . . whoever has known “the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes” . . . who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose power of action have been eaten up by thought . . . this is the true Hamlet. (Hazlitt, 1967, IV, 232–3; Hamlet, 3.1.74–6) Three major novelists from the later nineteenth century all use Hamlet echoes in inventing idealistic male characters who want to save troubled young women – Melville, Dickens and George Eliot. All these writers frequently allude to Shakespeare in their novels and elsewhere and were compared to him in their own time. Melville’s Pierre (1852) is the most explicit and the most satirical in Hamlet allusions. After Pierre is contacted by his father’s daughter born out of wedlock, Hamlet is one of the two books he reads, and he seizes upon Wilhelm Meister’s – and perhaps eveyone’s – key couplet: “The Time is out of joint – O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right” (Melville, 1964, 199). He wants to acknowledge and help his disinherited half-sister Isabel, as well as to protect his mother and his father’s memory. The narrator comments that Pierre does not really understand the play; what he draws from it is idealism, selfcriticism, urgency and, it becomes clear, self-deception: “he began to see that after all he had been finely juggling with himself, and postponing with himself, and in meditative sentimentalities wasting the moments consecrated to instant action” (200). He decides to take responsibility for Isabel and at the same time save appearances by living with her (and later his cousin-fiancée Lucy) and pretending to be Isabel’s husband. But their relationship becomes sexual, he kills his male cousin who challenges him over his treatment of Lucy, as Laertes challenges Hamlet, and at the end of the novel he and Isabel both take poison in a jail cell. Thus Pierre’s identification with Hamlet leads to destroying the lives of everyone he claims to care about – “I leave corpses wherever I go” (239), he says, a line that Shakespeare’s Hamlet could also use. Dickens, more subtle about the Hamletism (Melville, 1964, 164) of Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit (1855–7), links the characters most explicitly by the message D. N. F., for “Do Not Forget”, words emphasized by Hamlet’s father’s ghost, on the paper of his deceased father’s watch (Dickens, 1965, 241–2; Hamlet, 3.4.100). Like Pierre, Clennam learns something about his parents’ past, but in his case, more like Hamlet’s, it is the guilt of the woman who he has learned to consider his mother – and the identity of the woman who really is. By contrast, he grows to admire her seamstress Little Dorrit, as she cares for her father and siblings in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison. He wants to help her, but is unsure of what to do. When Clennam first takes action, it involves investing money in a project that fails, so he too is responsible for hurting others, but he makes amends, partly by returning to prison, and unlike Pierre, he and his love are given a happy ending in marriage, unconventional, however, in that it involves the rejection of wealth. In both Shakespeare’s play and criticism since the late eighteenth century, Hamlet is often gendered metaphorically feminine. Indeed, since Sarah Siddons in 1775, more than 50 women have performed his role (Grebanier, 1975, 253–4). Perhaps partly for similar reasons, George Eliot, the British woman novelist whose masculine pseudonym has been the most lasting, alludes to him in letters and novels throughout her career. Along with Hamlet’s idealism and inaction, Eliot emphasizes his sympathy, the one quality

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particularly associated both with Shakespeare as an artist and also with the ideal woman. In her last novel, Daniel Deronda (1874–6), she never explicitly names Hamlet, but she describes Deronda as someone whose “sensibility and reflectiveness had developed into a many-sided sympathy, which threatened to hinder any persistent course of action” (Eliot, 1984, 335; Novy, 1994, 124–8). The same year she began the novel, she wrote “A College Breakfast-Party”, in which a character named Hamlet says that he needs to know how to find “That bias of the soul, that conquering die / Loaded with golden emphasis of Will” – the same problem Deronda has (Eliot, 1908, VIII, 416). She gives Daniel a Polonius-like guardian, Sir Hugo, and a vulnerable woman to protect who is linked with Ophelia at their first meeting when she is on the verge of drowning herself in the willows. Like both Clennam and Pierre, Daniel discovers a secret related to his parentage: he had thought himself Hugo’s illegitimate son, but it turns out that his birthparents were a Jewish married couple, his father now dead, his mother a former opera star that Hugo had once courted. Like Clennam, Deronda rejects many of the values of his society and finally marries his Ophelia, but at the end of the novel he has an overtly heroic quest since, having discovered his ancestry, he is going to the Middle East to help found a Jewish nation. Melville satirizes his Hamlet for taking Shakespeare’s play too seriously without understanding it; Dickens gives his the difficulty in action and the idealism attributed to Hamlet, and shows him making mistakes when he does act, but finally gives him a happy ending, though not a publicly heroic one. Eliot’s Hamlet is the most idealized; though somewhat like Clennam, he takes time to admit that his interest in Mirah is romantic, and he has to come to terms with his mother’s refusal to continue their relationship after they meet, he ends his novel as an epic figure. None of these characters speaks to women in his own generation with the anti-feminism of Hamlet’s words to Ophelia; saving and loving those women becomes part of their mission, and they are also rather restrained in speaking to the mothers who treat them so badly. The most significant literary use of Hamlet in the twentieth century is Joyce’s Ulysses. In the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode, Stephen Dedalus, author-to-be, presents his interpretation, which clearly shows his own literary preoccupations. Joyce frames Goethe’s reading as a cliché by having the librarian Eglinton quote it at the start before Stephen begins his analysis; unlike the Victorian Hamlets, Stephen, his Hamlet and his Shakespeare are preoccupied with female sexuality, which becomes important in Stephen’s discussion of the autobiographical bases for Shakespeare’s writing. If Shakespeare wrote Hamlet’s father’s ghost’s lines expecting to play this role, was he thinking about his own wife in the attack on the guilty queen? Stephen argues that the sexually assertive women in Shakespeare’s works, from Venus to Cleopatra, are based on the older Anne Hathaway, who seduced him and then seduced others later. But in the middle of this lecture we hear his unspoken thoughts, “And my turn? When?” (Joyce, 1961, 191). Stephen, in good modernist fashion, is aware of his own involvement in his biographical reading of Shakespeare. And by this point, it should also be clear that the assertively sexual woman, ultimately (unlike Gertrude) reconciled to her husband, in his portrayal of Shakespeare, is also, without Stephen’s knowledge, a picture of Molly Bloom. The possibility of reconciliation flickers. In the Nighttown phantasmagoria, when Shakespeare’s face appears in the mirror, crowned with cuckold’s horns from an antlered hatrack, one of his two speeches is a version of the condemnation of second marriages in the Mousetrap in Hamlet, “None wed the second but who killed the first” (3.2.163), garbled “With paralytic rage” into “Weda sec who killa farst” (568).

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The concern with father–son relationships in Hamlet is also a concern of Stephen, Bloom and Joyce in Ulysses. Stephen’s dissatisfaction with his father Simon is Hamlet’s early disgust with Claudius modified into the pedestrian terms of ordinary life; by implication he longs for a different father, just as throughout the novel Bloom mourns the death of his son Rudy at eleven days and longs for another son. In that scene in Nighttown Shakespeare’s face appears when they both gaze into the mirror after Bloom has excitedly looked through a keyhole at Molly having sex with Blazes Boylan. Shakespeare becomes an Oedipal image of voyeurism and jealousy as well as art, and a complex male bond is constructed. The rewriting of Hamlet continues with John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (2000). Switching sympathies, Updike imagines Old Hamlet as tiresomely moralistic and Gertrude’s liaison with Claudius as a movement for liberation allied with the development of courtly love. More recently, in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (2008), David Wroblewski keeps Shakespeare’s sympathies for the Hamlet figure but makes him a precocious mute adolescent in a family of dog breeders and trainers. Characters discuss whether dogs can be bred and trained to choose, or just to follow rules, in addition to, as in earlier Hamlet criticism, the difficulty humans have in knowing the right thing to do.

The Tempest The best-known novels to rewrite The Tempest deal with colonialism. Although this theme appeared earlier in Tempest criticism, Octave Mannoni’s long essay Prospero and Caliban (1950) set the stage for this interpretation for the postcolonial era as he identified the characters as psychological types of colonizer and colonized. In Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1968), John Thompson, a British colonial functionary, plans to give the title Prospero in Africa to a book about his work in Kenya. Thompson has an idealistic view of the assimilationist possibilities for Africans in the British Empire, but after the Mau Mau rebellion he is disillusioned and responds with brutal violence. In Water with Berries (1971), the Caribbean novelist George Lamming focuses on three West Indians living in London: Teeton, a painter; Roger, a musician; and Derek, an actor. By the title, Lamming frames them as versions of Caliban, given “water with berries” by Prospero and trying to break out of dependency (Paquet, 1982, 84; The Tempest, 1.2.337). All of their careers and personal lives are at a dead end (Derek once played Othello but now only plays corpses). After Teeton learns of his wife’s suicide, he speaks with longing of the Haitian Ceremony of the Souls, where the living and dead work through their complaints by talking all night through a priest, but no similar reconciliation is possible for him or any of the characters. Instead, Roger becomes an arsonist, Derek rapes the woman playing opposite him on stage and Teeton kills the Old Dowager, the elderly British landlady who has been protecting him but is becoming suspicious, and plans to join his revolutionary friends. More hopeful rewritings come from North American women. Canadian novelists have been rewriting Miranda since Charles G. D. Roberts’ The Heart of the Ancient Wood (1900) (Brydon, 1993, 166). Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974) combines an interest in Miranda and Caliban: the central figure, Morag, marries her controlling English professor and eventually realizes that she is still, as she titles her first novel, Prospero’s Child. Changing the story, she chooses to divorce him and to align herself with and have a child by (but not marry) the Métis Jules Tonnerre – more attractive than Caliban but too damaged by colonial history to survive (Greene, 1991, 148–65). At the end, she is a successful writer somewhat in Prospero’s position – dealing with the possible end of her career and

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the growing independence of her half-Métis daughter, for a long time the most important person in her life. While this novel revises The Tempest in its focus on female experience and its vision of alliance between outsiders by gender, race and class, its main character still celebrates the vision she finds in such passages as Prospero’s epilogue, “That incredibly moving statement, ‘What strength I have’s mine own, which is most faint’ – If only he can hang onto that knowledge, that would be true strength” (Laurence, 1974, 330; The Tempest, Epilogue, 2–3). A character literally named Miranda becomes a version of Prospero and also – since she has changed her name – the title character in the African-American Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988). Mama Day presides over the black-dominated, female-dominated island of Willow Springs. But the vision here is less utopian than in Carter and Woolf’s fantasies about transformations of Rosalind. Mama Day has magical powers analogous to Prospero’s, but unlike him she knows their limitations and works along with nature rather than in opposition to it. Unlike him, too, she cannot finally maintain a marriage against its elements of strain. There is love between her niece (Cocoa, formerly Ophelia) and her husband George, and also a love of Shakespeare (a sign of their upward mobility, but also, when they earlier read King Lear, an opportunity for them to explore feelings about absent fathers). This is not enough given the cultural differences between female and male, south and north, urban and rural, and the additional problem of George’s heart condition. But Cocoa survives, sees George as having sacrificed himself for her (contrary to the more usual fictional pattern in which women, such as Ophelia, are the sacrifices) and happily marries again. Novels set in the Caribbean with main characters torn between colonialist and indigenous values often suggest Tempest parallels. In Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981), for example, Malon Walther sees Miranda rewritten in black Jadine, educated in European art history under the patronage of Valerian, her relatives’ white employer (Walther, 1993, 137–49). In Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987), light-skinned Clare has grown up with her father, who tries to pass for white and encourages her to do the same. Thus Cartelli sees her as a Miranda figure (Cartelli, 1999, 112–13). But Clare includes Caliban in an inventory of her associations for her self-image (Cliff, 1996, 116) and rejects her father’s advice. Instead she allies herself with a male-to-female transgendered character, Harry/Harriet, whose name and gender ambiguity allude to Shakespeare’s Ariel. But Harry/Harriet, too, rebels more than Ariel by choosing to identify as black, homosexual, female and revolutionary (Goldberg, 2004, 111–12). In these recent novels about colonialism, male Prospero figures are destructive or at least wrong-headed, never heroic, and this could also be said of the male Caliban figures. Female figures may be heroic, and take on some of Shakespeare’s Prospero’s power, but only if they break their allegiance to racism and colonialism, and either form an alliance with a Caliban figure or become literally identified with him. Even among recent novels that focus on a Prospero figure without dramatizing anti-colonialist resistance, such as Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (1978), the dominant male – in this case the retired director Charles Arrowby – is clearly a monstrous and not heroic egotist.

King Lear Novels that rewrite King Lear are often particularly ambitious. In Jane Eyre (1847), the best-known Victorian novel on the need for more scope for women, Charlotte Brontë

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makes her case for her main characters partly through resonances of Lear, contrasting Jane with a figure evoking the Shakespearean comic heroine, as we have seen earlier. When Jane leaves Thornfield on discovering Rochester’s marriage, she is, like Lear, going to the heath to keep her integrity. Like Lear she must deal with the “torture of thought” as well as physical pain (Brontë, 1981, 328); she wishes to die but struggles on. When she finds a house on the heath with kind inhabitants, and says, “If I were a masterless and stray dog, I know that you would not turn me from your hearth tonight” (342), she recalls Cordelia’s speech about why Lear should have been taken into shelter: “Mine enemy’s dog, / Though he had bit me, should have stood that night / Against my fire” (King Lear, 4.7.36–8). She is a Lear, but she is also a Cordelia – a young woman, determined not to flatter, who after returns to Rochester when he is weakened and humbled. And Rochester is a Lear who wants affection from this determined young woman and cries, “Off, ye lendings!” (204; King Lear, 3.4.100) when he removes his gypsy disguise. He also, as close verbal echoes show, is Hamlet and, even more, Macbeth, communing with the supernatural, determined to break obstacles to his will. But the tragic man in Jane Eyre, as in Shirley, is ultimately converted so that the novel can end with the traditional comic conclusion of marriage. Herman Melville’s very different Moby Dick (1851) also self-consciously uses Lear allusions to break new ground and seek dignity for new kinds of characters. Melville wrote in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” about his own identification with Shakespeare and also his view that America would produce even better writers (Melville, 1987, 244–6). He praised Shakespeare’s ability to give his characters words that would be considered “all but madness” to utter: “Tormented into desperation, Lear, the frantic king, tears off the mask and speaks the sane madness of vital truth” (244). Around the same time, he drew on King Lear for Ahab’s tragic language and development. Ahab’s monomaniacal search for the White Whale is a tragic quest; in Chapter 37, which moves into dramatic form, he has a soliloquy in which he speaks to the gods much as Lear does on the heath: “No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags!” (Melville, 1956, 142). Late in the book, Ahab finds companionship with the ship’s boy Pip, who has been driven mad in a different way by traumatic experiences shipboard, and their companionship recalls that of scenes where Lear finds companionship with his fool or with the pretended madman Edgar. Julian Markels points out many echoes of Lear’s language in Ahab’s, as well as their similar age, weariness, passion, courage and suffering (Markels, 1993, 66). He compares Ahab’s quest to Lear’s attempt to look for “any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts” (2; King Lear, 3.6.71–2). But he also argues that Ahab’s values are closer to those of Edmund, contextualizing both novels to intellectual history. He summarizes: Through his friendship with Queequeg and his cetological reflections, Ishmael develops a Lockean conception of the state of nature that resists Ahab’s Manichean interpretation as Hobbes’s conception cannot, and with it a Lockean politics that reconstitutes Cordelia’s politics of responsibility in a fragile American alternative to Edmund’s and Ahab’s versions of the politics of competition. (84) While Melville’s perspective on Ahab is somewhat critical, he still gives Ahab tragic stature. In the last three rewritings of Lear I will discuss, all recent, there are no male heroes. Even Cordelia fails to be heroic in two of them. In Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, Elaine, a successful painter returning to her hometown for a retrospective, hopes to see her child-

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hood playmate Cordelia. Cordelia once dominated Elaine, but grew weaker, failing as a Shakespearean actress, as Elaine grew stronger and retaliated for the cruelty she had earlier received. “You made me believe I was nothing,” Elaine thinks to the absent presence, using a word important in Lear (Atwood, 1989, 211). The portrayal of Cordelia’s family suggests that she learned her own cruelty from a tyrannical father. The Shakespearean associations of the name Cordelia raise hopes for reconciliation, but the novel dashes the hopes that Elaine can renew the connection deep in her past this woman embodies. However, Elaine survives. In A Thousand Acres, the youngest daughter, Caroline, is reconciled to her father, but the novel’s focus is the two older daughters, who remember worse sins than she does. The novel connects Larry’s cruelty and sexual abuse to what the narrator sees as a pattern in American history – “taking what you want because you want it, then making something up that justifies what you did” as well as to chemical abuse of the land, which results in cancer for Rose and miscarriages for Ginny (Smiley, 1991, 342). Larry has no tragic grandeur or perceptions, but perhaps Ginny does as she thoughtfully acknowledges her own evil and finally thinks that she can imagine what it felt like to be her father with an “unthinkable urge, pricking him, pressing him, wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self” (370–1). Barbara Kingsolver’s 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible responds to The Tempest and King Lear in its presentation of colonialism and decolonization as well as family life (Novy, 2001). Told through the voices of an American mother and four daughters in Africa, it critiques their domineering missionary husband and father, who exaggerates the arrogance of Prospero and Lear. Like The Tempest, The Poisonwood Bible points to the colonists’ dependence on the natives for hard work and knowledge of the land. On the other hand, it contrasts in its respect for the natives’ language and its presentation of interracial sexual attraction as experienced by female colonists. Like Lear, the novel shows the impossibility of controlling nature and deals with parental response to the death of a youngest child, but the response developed most and presented as heroic, the tragic insight gained, is that of the mother, not the father. The Poisonwood Bible is similar to Shakespeare’s romances in that most of the characters move toward reconciliation and forgiveness, but it is unlike most of them in the focus on mother–daughter reconciliation, and unlike even The Winter’s Tale in the presentation and fulfilment of the mother’s desire for forgiveness from her dead daughter. Its concern about coming to terms with the past is most clearly connected with Shakespeare when one of the narrators, walking through the tombs of dead kings, quotes Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made Those are pearls that were his eyes Nothing of him that does fade But does suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange. (Kingsolver, 1998, 491; The Tempest, 1.2.400–5) As it drastically shifts sympathies, The Poisonwood Bible, like many of the late twentiethcentury novels discussed here, gives Shakespeare’s play a sea change. In the nineteenth century, Melville, Brontë and Eliot could still include Shakespearean echoes to give heroic stature to their characters. In the late twentieth century, novels displace and critique Lear, Prospero and Othello; Rosalind is a happy fantasy, but not enough. Cordelia

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is disappointing, except in Kingsolver’s version, where one version of her dies even younger, though others take on political and social commitment. The heroism of courage and insight is with three of Kingsolver’s women: Smiley’s Ginny/Goneril, Cliff’s Clare/ Caliban and Harry/Harriet and the two Mirandas who become also Prosperos, Laurence’s Morag and Naylor’s Mama Day. And perhaps with Gordimer’s Will. But their changed distribution of sympathy does not mean that these novelists are only confrontational in their relationship to Shakespeare. They often draw on him in part for plot, situation, characters, language and in many other ways, as he drew on earlier writers. It is worth considering, as an alternative to the dichotomy between appropriation and adaptation, Diana Henderson’s term for such works: collaborations with the past (Henderson, 2006).

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Atwood, Margaret (1989). Cat’s Eye. New York: Doubleday. Austen, Jane [1814] (1965). Mansfield Park. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Baker, Susan (1995). “Shakespearean Authority in the Classic Detective Story”. Shakespeare Quarterly 46.4, 424–48. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981). The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Behn, Aphra [1688] (2003). Oroonoko. New York: Penguin. Brontë, Charlotte [1847] (1981). Jane Eyre. Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press. Brydon, Diana (1993). “Sister Letters: Miranda’s Tempest in Canada”. In Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 164–84. Cartelli, Thomas (1999). Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. London and New York: Routledge. Carter, Angela (1986). Nights at the Circus. New York: Penguin. Cavendish, Margaret [1664] (1969). CCXI Social Letters. Menston: Scolar Press. Cliff, Michelle [1987] (1996). No Telephone to Heaven. New York: Plume. Dickens, Charles [1855–7] (1965). Little Dorrit. London: Dent. Edgeworth, Maria [1817] (2004). Harrington, ed. S. Manly. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview. Eliot, George (1908). Works. New York: Bigelow and Brown, 10 vols. ——[1860] (1980). The Mill on the Floss. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——[1874–6] (1984). Daniel Deronda. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Erickson, Peter (1991). Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——(2007). Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ferguson, Margaret (1993). “Transmuting Othello: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko”. In Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 15–49. Fischlin, Daniel and Mark Fortier (2000). “General Introduction”. In Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier. London and New York: Routledge, 1–22. Froula, Christine (1990). “Virginia Woolf as Shakespeare’s Sister: Chapters in a Woman Writer’s Autobiography”. In Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare: On Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, H. D., George Eliot, and others, ed. Marianne Novy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 123–42. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar (1979). The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Glazener, Nancy (n.d.). “Shakespeare and the Shape of Literary Controversy.” Unpublished manuscript. Goethe, J. W. van (1962). Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. T. Carlyle. New York: Collier. Goldberg, Jonathan (2004). Tempest in the Caribbean. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gordimer, Nadine (1991). My Son’s Story. New York: Penguin. Grebanier, Bernard (1975). Then Came Each Actor. New York: Davi McKay. Greene, Gayle (1991). Changing the Story. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gross, John (1992). Shylock: A Legend and its Legacy. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hazlitt, William [1817] (1967). Complete Works. New York: AMS Press, 21 vols. Henderson, Diana (2006). Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Joyce, James [1934] (1961). Ulysses. New York: Modern Library. Kingsolver, Barbara (1988). The Poisonwood Bible. New York: Harper Flamingo. Lamming, George (1971). Water with Berries. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Laurence, Margaret (1974). The Diviners. Toronto: Bantam. Lewes, G. H. (1859). “The Novels of Jane Austen”. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 86 (July), 99–113. Markels, Julian (1993). Melville and the Politics of Identity: From ‘King Lear’ to ‘Moby Dick’. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Melville, Herman [1851] (1956). Moby-Dick. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press. ——[1850] (1987). “Hawthorne and His Mosses”. In The Piazza Tales and other Prose Pieces 1839– 1860. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 239–53. ——[1852] (1964). Pierre. New York: New American Library. Novy, Marianne (1994). Engaging with Shakespeare: Responses of George Eliot and Other Women Novelists. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. ——(2001). “Barbara Kingsolver in Dialogue with Shakespeare”. Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 137, 66–74. Osborne, Laurie (1999). “Romancing the Bard”. In Shakespeare and Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer. New York: Routledge, 47–64. Poole, Adrian (2004). Shakespeare and the Victorians. London: Arden Shakespeare. Paquet, S. P. (1982). The Novels of George Lamming. London: Heineman. Phillips, Caryll (1997). The Nature of Blood. London: Faber. Ragussis, Michael (1995). Figures of Conversion: ‘The Jewish Question’ and English National Identity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Roth, Philip (1994). Operation Shylock. New York: Vintage. Rushdie, Salman (1988). The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking. Salih, Tayeb (1997). Season of Migration to the North, trans. D. Johnson-Davies. Boulder and London: Lynne Riemer Publishers. Scott, Sir Walter [1819] (1996). Ivanhoe. New York: Oxford University Press. Showalter, Elaine (1991). Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smiley, Jane (1991). A Thousand Acres. New York: Alfred Knopf. ——(1999). “Shakespeare in Iceland”. In Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re-visions in Literature and Performance, ed. Marianne Novy. New York: St Martin’s, 159–80. Trollope, Anthony [1876] (1987). The Prime Minister. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walther, Malon L. (1993). “Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby: Re-Figuring the Colonizer’s Aesthetics”. In Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 137–49. Welsh, Alexander (2001). Hamlet in his Modern Guises. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Woolf, Virginia [1928] (1978). Orlando. London: Triad Grafton.

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SHAKESPEARE AND TRANSLATION Alexander C. Y. Huang

CATHERINE I cannot tell vat is dat. KING HARRY . . . I will tell thee in French . . . Je quand sur le possession de France, et quand vous avez le possession de moi, – let me see, what then? . . . It is as easy for me, Kate, to conquer the kingdom as to speak so much more French . . . CATHERINE Sauf votre honneur, le Francois que vous parlez, il est meilleur que l’Anglois lequel je parle. KING HARRY No, faith, is’t not, Kate: but thy speaking of my tongue, and I thine, most truly-falsely, must needs be granted to be much at one. But, Kate, dost thou understand thus much English, canst thou love me? (Henry V, 5.2.169–83) Literary translation is a love affair. Depending on the context, it could be love at first sight or hot pursuit of a lover’s elusive nodding approval. In other instances it could be unrequited love, and still others a test of devotion and faith; or else an eclectic combination of any of these events. Translation involves artistic creativity, not a workshop of equivalences. As human civilizations developed and intersected, translation emerged as a necessary form of communication and a way of life. It highlighted and put to productive use the space between cultures, between individuals with different perspectives and within one’s psyche. Through translation we can learn a great deal about other cultures and discover ourselves, which is why in a fervour to endorse the humanistic spirit of his times, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the multilingual German thinker, proclaimed that those who do not know any foreign language or learn about another culture will remain ignorant of his own. As Lost in Translation (2003), directed by Sofia Coppola, aptly shows, translation can be an emancipating experience as it activates certain aspects of a text or cultural experience that would otherwise remain dormant or hidden from view. Philosophers and literary critics have attempted to define various activities named by translation. Walter Benjamin thinks of translation as a necessary condition for the afterlife, survival (Überleben) and continuous life (Fortleben) of a work of art (Benjamin, 2004, 76). An integral part of any text, translation can enrich the target language which must “let itself go” in order to give voice to the intentio of the original “not as reproduction but as harmony” (81). Therefore, while a work of literature may find itself at the centre of the “language forest”, translation is often located “on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give . . . the reverberation of the work in the alien one” (79–80). Taking this one step further,

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Jacques Derrida’s theory of translation makes all writing inherently multilingual (Derrida, 1985, 91–161). The acts of producing and decoding meanings make all texts translations of translations. Echoing some of these ideas, Paul Ricoeur, one of the most influential of twentieth-century philosophers, delineates two broad categories of translational behaviours: the linguistic hospitality that accommodates new words and meanings within language or between languages and the ontological mode that refers to the process of putting thoughts into words and communication between “one human self and another” (Ricoeur, 2006, xii–xiii, 11–29). Among the many theories of translation, the intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic models of translation proposed by Russian linguist and literary critic Roman Jakobson are most useful in our consideration of literary translation (Jakobson, 2004, 138–43). The intralingual translation refers to the process of paraphrasing, such as rendering an ancient text into a modern form of the same language, while the interlingual mode translates a text from one language into another. The intersemiotic translation pertains to a broader range of possibilities, including political interpretations and theatrical representations of a text (speech into image, verbal signs to non-verbal signs). Each of these paradigms offers rich materials for further exploration. To think of translation as a love affair does not eliminate hierarchies that are part of the historical reality. In terms of its symbolic and cultural capital, literary translations always reflect the global order of the centre and the peripheral. Shakespeare remains the most canonical of canonical authors in a language that is now the global lingua franca. Translating Shakespeare into Zulu produces a very different cultural prestige from translating Korean playwright Yi Kangbaek into English. Does translating Shakespeare empower those for whom English is a second language, or reinforce cultural hegemony? There is no simple answer. When his translation of Hamlet was published, King D. Luis was praised in 1877 for bringing honour to his country by “giving to the Portuguese Nation their first translation of Shakespeare” (Pestana, 1930, 248–63). In contrast, the Merchant-Ivory metatheatrical film Shakespeare Wallah of 1965 interrogates this sense of entitlement and prestige. Following in the footsteps of English director Geoffrey Kendal’s travelling company in India, we see the country’s ambiguous attitude towards Shakespeare and England. Translations, as they age, also serve as useful historical documents of past exigencies and cultural conditions (Hoenselaars, 2009, 278–9). In what follows, we shall consider literary translations in their own right and in relation to one another and other texts.

Shakespeare in Borrowed Robes One of the most thought-provoking cases of literary translation is Shakespeare, the most widely translated secular author in the past centuries, with several editions in many languages (for example, the Complete Works have been translated into German a number of times beginning with the German Romantics, and into Brazilian Portuguese by Carlos Alberto Nunes in 1955–67 and by Carloes de Almeida Cunha Medeiros and Oscar Mendes in 1969). Literary translation sometimes modernizes the source text (Eco, 2001, 22), which brings the text forcefully into the cultural register of a different era. As such, Shakespeare in translation acquired the capacity to appear as the contemporary (and ideal companion) of the German Romantics, a spokesperson for the proletarian heroes, required reading for the communists, and even a trans-historical icon of modernity in East Asia. New titles given to Shakespeare’s plays are suggestive of the preoccupation of the society that produced them, such as the 1710 German adaptation of Hamlet title Der besträfte

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Brudermord (The Condemned Fratricide) and Sulayman Al-Bassam’s The Al-Hamlet Summit (English version in 2002; Arabic version in 2004). While Western directors, translators and critics of The Merchant of Venice tend to focus on the ethics of conversion and religious tensions with Shylock at centre stage, the play has a completely different face in East Asia, with Portia as its central character and the women’s emancipation movement in nascent capitalist societies as its main concern, as evidenced by its common Chinese title A Pound of Flesh, a 1885 Japanese adaptation of The Merchant of Venice titled The Season of Cherry Blossoms, the World of Money, and a 1927 Chinese silent film, The Woman Lawyer. Had Shakespeare been alive today, he would have a well-thumbed passport. A great deal of Shakespeare’s extensive, transnational afterlife takes place in languages other than English, in particular translations in the modern forms of these languages. Shakespeare’s oeuvre is present on every populated continent, with sign-language renditions and recitations in Klingon in Star Trek to boot. Hamlet is one of the most frequently translated and staged plays in the Arab world (Mohamed Sobhi’s 1977 version in Egypt, Khaled Al-Tarifi’s version in Jordan and more). Since its first staging in Copenhagen in the early nineteenth century, Hamlet has been seen to have both visceral and historical connections with Denmark (Hansen, 2008, 153) – thanks in part to the famed “Hamlet Castle” in Kronborg. King Lear has a special place in Asian theatre history and Asian interpretations of filial piety. Romeo and Juliet enjoys a global renaissance in genres ranging from punk parody to Japanese manga. The Sonnets and The Merchant of Venice have been translated into the te reo/Maori language of New Zealand and hailed as a major cultural event. By 1934, Shakespeare had been translated into over 200 Indian languages using Indian names and settings. Shakespeare has come to be known as unser Shakespeare for the Germans, Sulapani in Telegu and Shashibiya in Chinese. This is not to say that translating Shakespeare is always an easy undertaking, or that Shakespeare has a universal appeal. Wars, censorship and political ideologies can suppress or encourage the translation of particular plays or genres for one reason or another, or outlaw Shakespeare altogether (as was the case during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–76). The 1930s was a period in which readers in the Soviet Union, Japan and China found in particular Shakespeare plays narratives with rich political applications. The regicide and assassinations in Hamlet raised the eyebrows of the Japanese censors in the decade when Japan was preparing to challenge European and American supremacy. Hamlet was banned, along with half a dozen other left-wing plays, at the International Theatre Day organized by the Japan League of Proletarian Theatres (led by Murayama Tomoyoshi) on 13 February 1932, on the grounds that the play might motivate rebellions against the rightist government. Ironically, Stalin expressed distaste for dark, tragic plays such as Hamlet, having famously declared that life had become more joyful for the communist state in 1935. Shakespeare’s comedies fitted the propagandistic goal and therefore had a firm place in the state-endorsed repertoire for the stage and reading materials in the USSR and its close ally, China, at the time. Shakespeare became, in the Soviet and Chinese ideological interpretations, the spokesperson for the proletariat, an optimist and a fighter against feudalism, through the “bright” comedies such as Much Ado About Nothing. Genres have a role to play in translation as well. The tragedies and some comedies are more frequently translated, staged and filmed around the world, because of their capacity to be more easily detached from their native cultural settings and the self-reinforcing cycle of familiarity. In India, for example, Hamlet and the Merchant of Venice have been translated more than fifty times and The Comedy of Errors has over thirty versions in different

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Indian languages, but the only history plays to have been translated into Hindi are Henry V and Richard II, and only one version each. While Shakespeare’s global reputation may seem to be driven by translations of his tragedies, comedies and the sonnets because of the sheer number of performances and translations since the seventeenth century, the history plays have their own histories of global reception, beginning with a 1591 Polish performance of Philip Waimer’s stage version of Edward III in Gdan´sk. Laurence Olivier’s wartime film version of Henry V in 1944 is far from being the only or the earliest translation – interlingual, intralingual, or intersemiotic – of the history plays, though each instance of translation focuses on different articulations of national histories. British performances, understandably, are more frequently geared toward constructing a coherent national identity in relation to Britain’s friends and foes on the European continent (Hoenselaars, 2004, 9–34). Non-anglophone translations of history plays, on the other hand, often use the plays to interrogate the notion of national history. One of the better-known examples in the West is Richard III: An Arab Tragedy by Sulayman Al-Bassam of Kuwait, a production that has toured widely around the world. Plays such as Henry V that polarize the English and the French have a contentious reception in France and Europe, serving as a forum for artistic experiment and political debate. Still farther ashore, plays from both the first and second tetralogies, excluding King John, found new homes in nationalist projects of modernization and school performances in Japan, Taiwan, China and elsewhere. While the Asian translators and adaptors’ interests did not always lie in medieval English history (or Shakespeare’s imagination thereof), they drew parallels to inspire analogous reflections on local histories. Kinoshita Junji’s translations of Henry VI and Richard III echo The Tale of the Heike, a thirteenth-century Japanese literary masterpiece chronicling the clashes between the Heike and the Genji clans. Henry IV appeared in prose as a serialized story in The Short Story Magazine in early twentieth-century Shanghai. It was soon published as a volume and prominently advertised. Its appeal was due in no small part to the Chinese discourse of modernity and unified national identity in a time of national crisis when the country was threatened by Japanese and European colonial powers. Chinese intellectuals of the time looked outward to other nations’ experiences. More recently, 1 & 2 Henry IV were adapted into a play for the Taiwanese glove puppet theatre (2002), a hybrid genre blending elements of Chinese opera, marionette theatre and street theatre. Translation is far from a one-way street from the English text to a foreign one. Rewritings of Shakespeare sometimes refer to and borrow from one another, resembling a process of cross-pollination. Examples include Chee Kong Cheah’s Chicken Rice War of 2000, a Singapore film that parodies Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet of 1996, and Wu Hsing-kuo’s reading of Macbeth in his The Kingdom of Desire, a Beijing opera play, that alludes to Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 film, Throne of Blood. These borrowings have enriched our understanding of Shakespeare and world cultures. It is noteworthy that Shakespeare was not always translated directly from English into foreign languages. Because of historical or political reasons, double or triple filtering was not uncommon. When composing the choral symphony Roméo et Juliette, Hector Berlioz worked from Pierre le Tourneur’s French translation of David Garrick’s English adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. French neoclassical versions were the foundation for early Russian translations of Shakespeare, while the first Shakespearean performance in colonial Korea was a Japanese version of Hamlet in 1909. Teodoro de la Calle’s 1802 Spanish translation of Othello was based on Ducis’ French version. As a result, Shakespeare in translation has been used as the proving ground of translation theory, and it is the core of the Shakespeare industry.

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Many of the translators of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets are major figures in the world of letters in and beyond their own cultures: August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Paul Celan in Germany, Boris Pasternak in Russia, Tsubouchi Shôjo in Japan, Liang Shiqiu in Taiwan, Julius K. Nyere in Tanzania, Aimé Césaire in Martinique, Rabindranath Tagore in India, Voltaire in France, Elyas Abu Shabakeh in Syria, Wole Soyinka in Nigeria, Charles and Mary Lamb in England, and countless others. Some cultures have canonical, received versions for readers and actors, such as Zhu Shenghao’s Chinese translation of The Complete Works, but the audiences in other cultures, notably France, cannot claim to have any set of standard translations (Morse, 2006, 79). There are numerous stage and film directors, painters, composers, choreographers and artists, who engage and transform Shakespeare, as discussed in other essays in this volume. The proliferation of Shakespeare in translation, especially in non-European languages, makes a nonsense of the notion of a homogenized, authenticated Shakespeare in British English. At the start of the twenty-first century, all of Shakespeare’s plays, followed by the Sonnets, have had long histories of translation. The year 2009 witnessed the publication of a 748-page critical anthology with a title that parallels and talks back to the 69-page quarto of 1609: William Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the First Time Globally Reprinted: A Quartercentenary Anthology with a DVD, containing samples of the sonnets translated, performed, or parodied in more than seventy languages and dialects. Since Shakespeare’s sonnets in translation have been discussed extensively in that anthology, this chapter will focus on the plays. The spread of Shakespeare’s work has accelerated due to the rapid localization of globally circulating ideas and with the globalization of local forms of expression, fuelled first by trade and slavery, and now by digital and internet culture. A new age of Shakespeare in translation is upon us.

Translation as a Theme in Shakespeare’s Plays What country, friends, is this? (Twelfth Night, 1.2.1) Estrangement and transnational cultural flows are not exclusively a modern affair. Cultural exchange was an unalienable part of the cultural life in Renaissance England. Translation, or translatio, signifying “the figure of transport” (Parker, 1987, 36–45), was a common rhetorical trope that referred to the conveyance of ideas from one geo-cultural location to another, from one historical period to another and from one artistic form to another. London witnessed a steady stream of merchants and foreign emissaries from Europe, the Barbary coast and the Mediterranean, and thousands of Dutch and Flemish Protestants fled to Kent in the late 1560s due to the Spanish persecution. In 1573, Queen Elizabeth I granted Canterbury the right to have French taught in school to “those who desire to learn the French tongue” (Cross, 1898, 15). The drama of the time reflected this interest in other cultures. Only one of Christopher Marlowe’s plays, Edward II, is set in England, and he translated Book One of Lucan’s Civil Wars, an epic canvassing the geographical imaginaries from Europe to Egypt and Africa. Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West explores the role of women and related cross-cultural issues. Most of Shakespeare’s plays are set outside England, in the Mediterranean, France, Vienna, Venice and elsewhere. Even the history plays that focus intently on the question of English identity and lineage feature foreign characters who play key roles, such as Katherine of Aragon in Henry VIII, and the diplomatic relations between England and

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France. Thomas Kyd flirted with the idea of multilingual theatre in The Spanish Tragedy through a short play-within-a-play scene, “Soliman and Perseda”, in “sundry languages” (4.4.74). Pidgin English is masqueraded as fake Dutch in Thomas Middleton’s No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s. Other examples abound. Within Shakespeare’s plays, the figure of translation looms large. Translational moments create comic relief and heighten the awareness that communication is not a given. Translation also served as a metaphor for physical transformation or transportation. Claudius speaks of Hamlet’s “transformation” (2.2.5) and asks Gertrude to “translate” Hamlet’s behaviour in the previous scene (the closet scene) so that the protagonist’s “profound heaves” (4.1.2) might be more readily understood. The queen not only relays what Hamlet has just done but also provides an interpretation, as a translator would, of her son’s actions. Henry V contains several instances of literal translation, including the wellknown wooing scene quoted above. Translation serves as a figure of transport, theft, transfer of property and change across linguistic and national boundaries, as the characters and audience are ferried back and forth across the Channel. The peace negotiations dictate that the English monarch marries the daughter of Charles VI of France, uniting the two kingdoms. The “broken English” (5.2.228) in the light-hearted scene symbolizes Henry V’s dominance over Catherine and France after the English victory at the battle of Agincourt. However, the Epilogue reminds us that the marriage is far from a closure (Epilogue, 12), for it produces a son who is “half-French, half-English” (5.2.208). The English conqueror pretends to be a wooer to Catherine of France who cannot reject him freely. One is unsure whether Catherine is speaking the truth that she does not understand English well enough (“I cannot tell”) or just being coy – playing Harry’s game, though Catherine eventually yields to Henry V’s request: “Dat is as it shall please de roi mon père” (5.2.229). Likewise, The Merry Wives of Windsor is saturated by translational scenes. Mistress Quickly receives a language lesson in Latin (4.1), and the French Doctor Caius makes “fritters of English (5.5.143). Shakespeare takes great delight in wordplay, and many comic puns rely on orthographic contrasts and resemblances of pronunciations of words in different languages and dialects. Love’s Labour’s Lost, a polyglot “feast of languages” (5.1.37), features a critique of Armado’s Spanish-inflected orthography by Holofernes (5.1.16–25). The idea of translation is given a spin in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where the verb to translate is expansive and elastic, signifying transformations most wondrous and strange. Upon seeing Bottom turned into an ass-headed figure, Peter Quince cries in horror: “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee. Thou art translated!” (3.1.105). Other characters use the verb in similar ways to refer to a broad range of transformations. Helena desires to be “translated” into Hermia (1.1.191), and a love potion transforms characters that come across its path. Indeed stage performances subject actors to various forms of “translation”. In the case of the first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in London, the stage transforms a Chamberlain’s Men actor to the character of an Athenian weaver named Nick Bottom to the role of a tragic lover, Pyramus, in a play-within-a-play, and to an ass-headed monster – an object of obsession in Titania’s fairy kingdom. Language barriers emerge as a moment of self-reflection for Portia in The Merchant of Venice even as she uses them to typecast some of her suitors from all over the world. In the first exchange between Nerissa and Portia, when asked for her opinion of “Falconbridge, the young baron of England”, Portia goes right to the heart of the problem. Since Falconbridge “hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian”, it is impossible to “converse with a dumb show”. Portia is aware of her own limitations, too. She admits “I have a poor

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pennyworth in the English”, which is why she can say nothing to him, “for he understands not [her], nor [she] him”. Falconbridge’s odd expression of cosmopolitanism does not fare any better, as Portia observes snidely: “I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behaviour everywhere” (1.2.55–64). As products of an age of exploration, Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate influences from a treasure trove of multilingual sources in Latin, Italian, Spanish and French. Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a Roman collection of mythological tales, provided a rich network of allusions for Shakespeare’s comedies (e.g., the story of Diana and Actaeon). In Titus Andronicus, the mutilated Lavinia is able to translate and communicate her thoughts via Ovid even though she is unable to speak or write. While other sources provided stories for Shakespeare to embellish, the Metamorphoses was an important stockpile of allusions for Shakespeare. Thomas North’s 1579 version of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans is a major source for Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and other Roman plays. Shakespeare rendered North’s prose in verse and made numerous changes. Shakespeare knew Latin and French, and was up to date on the translated literature during his times. He probably read Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi in Italian before penning Othello, and regularly looked beyond English-language sources for inspiration for stories to dramatize. It is no accident that Shakespeare put Julius Caesar’s famous last words in Latin, as “Et tu, Brute?” (3.1.77), rather than in the Greek of Plutarch, the play’s source. Perhaps, as Casca complains in another scene, “it was Greek to me” (1.2.278). Shakespeare was a great translator in the sense of transforming multiple sources, and he was a talented synthesizer of different threads of narratives. The important role of translated literature is indisputable in the development of Shakespeare’s art. Shakespeare became a global author – both in terms of his reading and the impact of his work – long before globalization was fashionable. In 1586 a group of English actors performed before the Elector of Saxony, marking the beginning of several centuries of intercultural performances of Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet was staged in Nördlingen in 1604, and Hamlet and Richard II were performed on board an English East India Company ship anchored near Sierra Leone in 1607. Four hundred years on, Shakespeare has come full circle. Given Shakespeare’s talents and interest in translational literature, it is fitting that his works have found new homes in such a wide range of languages and genres. T. S. Eliot’s quip in The Four Quartets about beginnings and endings aptly captures the journey that is translation. The end of the intercultural journey will take us to where we started and enable us to know the place for the first time. Both translation as a dramatic motif and drama in translation provide useful contexts for sustained reflections on the “fictions of national coherence” in Shakespeare’s times (Levin and Watkins, 2009, 14) and traits that differentiate and united different cultures in our times. While we will not be able to delve into these early modern cases within the constraints of this chapter, it is useful to bear in mind that there is a long and wide history of Shakespeare in translation and transformation.

Three Modes of Translating Shakespeare The lack of overt moralization in Shakespearean dramas, along with other features such as their “vernacular applicability” on screen (Burnett, 2005, 185) and flexibility to accommodate contrasting perspectives through dramatic dialogues, have contributed to their

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broad appeal around the world – in intralingual rewriting (Charles and Mary Lamb’s nineteenth-century prose narrative, Tales from Shakespeare), interlingual adaptation (Bengali translations of Macbeth) and intersemiotic transformations. The last category encompasses a wide range of transformations of Shakespeare’s work from page to stage, screen and other media. Adrian Noble’s English production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream “translated” the English text on the page to the language of the stage, while, as Adrian Streete explores in his chapter in this volume, Verdi transformed Othello into Otello, an Italian opera. John Everett Millais’ painting, Ophelia (Tate Britain, London), depicts the tragic death of Ophelia in so memorable a way that it has become iconic, supplementing, if not replacing, the passages about Ophelia’s demise in Hamlet in the popular imagination. Shakespearean dramas were in fact important sources for many Victorian painters. Each of these modes offers unique challenges and rich rewards. According to Jakobson, intralingual translation, or rewording, is “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language” which is akin to a process of meaning making. “An array of linguistic signs is needed to introduce an unfamiliar word,” reasoned Jakobson (139). But intralingual translation does not produce complete equivalences. Rewriting Shakespeare’s plays in nineteenth-century English prose narratives involves making choices about the characters’ motives, “morals” of the play, and even selecting a set of coherent meanings from a wide range of meanings afforded by puns and wordplay. One of the most widely-read and globally influential intralingual translations is Tales from Shakespeare by Victorian author and critic Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. The 1807 text was designed “for young ladies” because, as the Lambs reasoned, “boys being generally permitted the use of their fathers’ libraries . . . before their sisters are permitted to look into this manly book” (Lamb, 1963, vi). The moralistic, simplified, prose rendition of select Shakespearean tragedies (by Charles) and comedies (by Mary) was initially intended for women and children who would not otherwise have access to Shakespeare’s plays, but it has remained one of the most popular English-language rewritings to this day (Fig. 4.1). Charles Lamb was a respected essayist and critic in his times, considered by such figures as William Hazlitt to be a sounder authority on poetry than Johnson or Schlegel. The Tales from Shakespeare bear the mark of their times, but the collection of twenty stories was an enduring monument to Shakespeare in translation and Victorian literature. Though the Lambs openly acknowledged that their rewriting was gendered and classed, they retained as many phrases and passages from Shakespeare as possible. We find a Hamlet who is caring and grieving for clearer reasons: The young prince . . . loved and venerated the memory of his dead father almost to idolatry, and being of a nice sense of honour, and a most exquisite practiser of propriety himself, did sorely take to heart this unworthy conduct of his mother Gertrude: insomuch that, between grief for his father’s death and shame for his mother’s marriage, this young prince was overclouded with a deep melancholy, and lost all his mirth and all his good looks. (Lamb, 1963, 290) Like Henrietta Maria Bowdler’s The Family Shakespeare (1807), Tales tapped into the emerging market of books for middle-class children by censoring the “obscenity” in plays such as Othello and removing anything that may have been offensive to Victorian sensibilities. Between 1999 and 2007, several new editions of the Tales were brought out in English, Chinese and other languages. Mary Lamb wrote most of the prose stories (Charles wrote

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Figure 4.1: Covers of the 1807 and 1844 editions of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare only six). It has inspired similar ventures in England and abroad. Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch published a sequel of a sort before the nineteenth century wound down: Historical Tales from Shakespeare (1899). It supplemented the Lambs’ text by covering Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, King John, Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III, most of which the Lambs omitted. The Lambs’ Tales exerted a great influence in the early reception of Shakespeare in other countries, especially East Asia. The text was reframed in China for the male elite class that operated according to moralizing principles. In 1904, Wei Yi translated it orally, and his collaborator, Lin Shu, a prolific translator who could not read English, rendered it into classical Chinese with embellishment. Between 1877 and 1928, the Tales were translated and printed ninety-seven times in Japan, while over a dozen editions appeared in China between 1903 and 1915. Early Japanese productions were based on the Lambs’ Tales rather than complete translations of the plays themselves. The 1868 Kabuki production of Julius Caesar and Inoue Tsutomu’s retelling of The Merchant of Venice in 1883, titled “The Suit for a Pound of Human Flesh”, are two such examples (Quinn, forthcoming, n.p.). Translating Shakespeare into a foreign language is a different matter. It involves new semantic, semiotic and cultural contexts. Jakobson believes that “all cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language” (140), but when a grammatical category is absent in the target language, its meaning may be translated “by lexical means” (141). While European translators can draw on the shared Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions, the further a language is situated from the English culture the more creative strategies of displacement a translator will have to deploy. Translating Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech into Japanese, for example, will require substantial rewriting, because Japanese does not have the verb “to be” without semantic contexts. Jakobson gives a similar example of translating an Italian rhyming epigram (“Traduttore, traditore”) into English (“the translator is a betrayer”). For the English sentence to make

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sense, the aphorism will have to be elaborated to specify what message the translator conveys and what values he betrays, but the paronomastic value of the epigram will be lost (143). Working with Japanese, a language more complex than English from a sociolinguistic point of view, a translator would have to wrestle with more than twenty first- and second-person pronouns to maintain the ambiguity and subtlety of gender identities in a play such as Twelfth Night. In addition to making the right choice of employing the familiar or polite style based on the relation between the speaker and the addressee, the male and female speakers of Japanese are each confined to gender-specific personal pronouns at their disposal. Before a translation can be undertaken, decisions will have to be made on the register and gendered expressions to convey Orsino’s comments about love from a male perspective and Viola’s apology for a woman’s love when in disguise as Cesario in Twelfth Night, or the exchange between Rosalind in disguise as Ganymede and Oliver on her “lacking a man’s heart” when she swoons, nearly giving herself away (4.3.164–76). But limitations create new opportunities and bring translation closer to an act of performative interpretation. Differences in grammatical structure aside, bawdy language and puns also pose a challenge. The exchange between Samson and Gregory in Romeo and Juliet presents an opportunity for innovation and self-censorship: SAMSON I will show myself a tyrant: when I have fought with the men I will be civil with the maids – I will cut off their heads. GREGORY The heads of the maids? SAMSON Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads, take it in what sense thou wilt. GREGORY They must take it in sense that feel it. SAMSON Me they shall feel while I am able to stand, and ’tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh. (1.1.18–26) Christoph Martin Wieland’s 1766 German version excises this scene in its entirety and begins with the encounter between Gregory, Samson, Abraham and Benvolio and the ensuing fight (1.1). Along similar lines, Goethe’s 1812 adaptation of the play (based on Schlegel’s verse translation) presents a sanitized version, turning Romeo from a volatile youth to a more responsible man. References to the lovers’ bodies are replaced by purified language. Juliet’s comment to her nurse that she will die “maiden-widowèd” because “death, not Romeo, take [her] maidenhead” (3.2.135–7) is stripped of its reference to virginity. Goethe’s Juliet states that death, not Romeo, follows her to her bridal bed. Cao Yu (1910–1996), an accomplished modern Chinese playwright, felt equally uncomfortable about the passage but approached the issue differently. Diverting the attention from maidenhead to the action of cutting off the head, Cao used the verb gàn to activate the latent connection between cutting off the maids’ heads and Samson’s later comment about his sexual prowess. Gàn has a very wide range of meanings from innocent daily usage to profanity, including to do, to get rid of and to copulate. Schlegel translated the passage, but used “Jungfrau” (virgin) and “Jungfräulichkeit” (virginity) to translate the wordplay. In addition to translating the “pretty piece of flesh”, Schlegel has Samson say suggestively that the young women will feel the point of his sword (“die Spitze meines Degens”) until it becomes blunt (“stumpf”), which is not found in Shakespeare’s text. Other twentiethcentury Chinese translators have come up with various ways to translate this passage, but they share a common problem with the wordplay, because “head” and “maidenhead”

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in Chinese do not have orthographic and phonetic connections. Zhu Shenghao used “nipple” to translate this, as the second character of naitou (nipple) is the same as tou (head). In Fang Chong’s revision to Zhu’s translation, the reference to head is excised. Samson threatens to take the women’s lives and goes on to suggest that he might as well take their virginity which they cherish as much as their lives. Translating Shakespeare from page to stage or another medium in a different culture involves some of the same challenges outlined above, but it juxtaposes the power of Shakespeare’s words with that of non-verbal expressions and kinetic energy. Intersemiotic translation, or transmutation in Jakobson’s terms, involves the interpretation of “verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (139). It is hardly surprising that it is the intersemiotic transmutations that have buoyed the global Shakespeare industry. Critics are optimistic about Shakespeare without his language and even beyond his genres: “Not needing to record in English on the soundtrack, [filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa] enjoyed the luxury of reinventing the plays in purely cinematic terms” (Rothwell, 2004, 160). A recent example is a Chinese martial arts film adaptation of Hamlet by Feng Xiaogang (2006), entitled The Banquet and released in North America as the Legend of the Black Scorpion. The film stars Zhang Ziyi, Ge You, Zhou Xun and Daniel Wu. Set in tenthcentury China, the film reimagines the Hamlet narrative through stylized presentation and offers a fresh perspective on traditionally silenced characters such as Ophelia. The English critical and dramaturgical traditions treat Ophelia as a character whose significance lies mostly in information she conveys to the audience about Hamlet. The same is true of Anglophone cinematic representations of Gertrude. Many Western films and productions make Ophelia either childish or irritated, but Feng’s film combines both the qualities of innocence and a passionate lover in its representation of Ophelia. The Banquet gives Qing Nü (Fig. 4.2), the Ophelia figure and a symbol of purity, a palpable and vocal presence in a court inhabited by scheming courtiers, ministers, an empress and a usurper. Having gone mad for love of Prince Wu Luan, the Hamlet figure, Qing Nü enters uninvited in the last scene, the coronation of Empress Wan, the Gertrude figure. Seemingly oblivious to her intrusion to one of the most important court ceremonies, she announces that she and a troupe of dancers will perform a love song to honour the late prince who is assumed to be dead, a daring and bold move. The audience is left to ponder whether this act reflects her innocence or calculation, for, in several scenes, Qing Nü has shown her headstrong will to express her love for the Prince even at the cost of offending the empress. Qing Nü and her entourage don white, neutral masks reminiscent of those used in Noh performances. The song she sings about a boat girl is significant in its reference to Qing Nü’s extra-sensorial communication with the Prince: “Trees live on mountains, and branches live on trees / My heart lives for your heart, but you do not see me.” Coupled with the masked dance performed by a sane Ophelia figure, Qing Nü’s lyrics echo but also add new meanings to Ophelia’s song in Hamlet, sung when she is mad: “How should I our true love know / From another one?” (4.5.23–4). The Banquet is an exercise in considering the events from the perspective of an Ophelia who takes matters into her own hands (Figs 4.3 and 4.4). The stage also provides infinite possibilities for intersemiotic translation. Issues of translation and cross-cultural communication have been featured in three contemporary Asian productions that are themselves translations and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. To facilitate discussion, we will now turn to three adaptations of King Lear that present the play in monolingual, bilingual and multilingual formats. These works share the same

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Figure 4.2: Zhou Xun as Qing Nü (Ophelia) in The Banquet (dir. Feng Xiaogang, 2006)

Figure 4.3: Qing Nü (Ophelia) tells Emperor Li (Claudius) that the song-dance to commemorate Prince Wu Luan (Hamlet) is her own idea, and that her father Minister Yin (Polonius) should not be blamed

Figure 4.4: Qing Nü performs the masked dance and sings “The Song of Yue”

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conviction to link Lear to contemporary Asian cultures and political history. At the same time, they are set apart from one another by their distinctive approaches to the problem of self-identity in Lear and in contemporary culture. Lear is chosen as our case study because it occupies a special place in the history of Asian theatre since some scenes were first performed in English in Chowringhee Theatre, Calcutta, in 1832, and because the three adaptations provide usefully contrasting perspectives on intersemiotic translation. Videos of these three productions are also freely accessible on the Asian portal of the Global Shakespeares digital archive (http://web.mit.edu/shakespeare/asia). Filial piety, patriarchal authority and self-knowledge are among the themes that resonate with Asian directors and audiences’ concerns. Taiwan-based director and actor Wu Hsing-kuo’s solo Beijing opera adaptation in Mandarin Chinese, titled Lear Is Here (2001), is a postmodern pastiche of ten characters including Wu himself as a character. The Buddhist interpretation of Lear also informed Wu’s autobiographical narratives. As a Beijing opera actor in Taiwan where recent nativist campaigns have generated an essentialist discourse about bona fide Taiwan identity, Wu found himself at the mercy of the island government and residents’ anti-Chinese sentiments. Adding insult to injury, Wu has been seen as rebelling against the Beijing opera tradition because of his interest in intercultural theatre and Western drama. With his wife Lin Hsiu-wei, dancer and choreographer, he founded the Contemporary Legend Theatre in Taipei in 1986. Among the company’s best known Beijing opera plays are The Kingdom of Desire (Macbeth), The Revenge of the Prince (Hamlet), The Tempest, Oresteia and Medea. The tension between father and child in Lear provided a framework for Wu to explore his uneasy relationship with his Beijing opera master and with the establishment in general. In more ways than one, the play has become a ritual that redeems Wu through public performance of a private experience. Wu’s adaptation opens with the scene of the mad Lear in the storm (3.2), a solo tour-de-force during which he combines modern dance steps, Beijing opera gestures, strides, minced steps, somersaults and striking movement of his long Beijing opera beard and sleeves to “translate” Lear’s interrogation of the heavens. Toward the end of this scene, he asks “Who am I?” first as Lear and then as himself, an actor (Figs 4.5 and 4.6). The question is fundamental in Lear, and the first act of Lear Is Here retains a line-by-line translation of the following passage: LEAR Doth any here know me? This is not Lear. Doth Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, his discernings Are lethargied – Ha! Waking? ’Tis not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am? (1.4.226–30) Wu brings his life experience to bear on Lear, and eventually transforms himself out of the character on stage, a radical move in Beijing opera performance. He takes off his headdress and armour costume in full view of the audience, and uses the now eyeless head-dress and beard as a fictional interlocutor. As well, Wu’s resistance to the rigid system of performance passed down by his master takes other forms such as cross-dressing. Trained in the male combatant role type, Wu specializes in characters that are generals, patriarchs, or ministers. Beijing opera actors do not usually cross over to other role types. In the solo performance, Wu not only plays the wronged father, but also the unruly daughters, a wronged son (Edgar), and the blinded Gloucester. Lear Is Here taps into a rich reservoir of

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Figure 4.5: Wu Hsing-kuo takes off his Beijing opera head-dress in Lear Is Here

non-verbal signs, via Beijing opera and experimental theatre, to translate some of the most powerful emotions in Shakespeare’s play. The theme of generational gap in King Lear also lends itself to experiments with languages. Chinese-British director David Tse staged a Mandarin–English bilingual version of King Lear in 2006 with his London based Yellow Earth Theatre in collaboration with Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre. The Buddhist notion of redemption and reincarnation informs some of the design elements and presentational styles. The production opens and closes with video footage, projected onto the three interlaced floor-to-ceiling reflective panels, that hints at both the beginning of a new life and life as endless suffering. Images of the faces of suffering men and women dissolve to show a crying newborn being held upside down and smacked. The production toured China and the UK and was staged during the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works Festival. Set in 2020 against the backdrop of cosmopolitan Shanghai, this futuristic adaptation reframed the epistemological

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Figure 4.6: Mad Lear (Wu Hsing-kuo) in the storm

gap between Lear and Cordelia in terms of linguistic difference. The play is close to Tse’s heart, as he believes that Lear speaks strongly to diaspora artists and audiences who maintain links, but are unable fully to communicate, with their families residing in their home countries. As the poster makes abundantly clear, the production focuses on the questions of heritage and filial piety (Fig. 4.7). The tag line, in Mandarin and English, reads “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” Each of the characters has a primary language: English or Mandarin. On rare occasions, the characters may switch between the two languages. Bilingual supertitles are provided. Lear’s famous test of love in the division-of-the-kingdom scene is framed within the context of Confucianism. The Confucian family values implicate family roles into the social hierarchy, and the Shanghai Lear insists on respect from his children at home and in business settings. Lear, a business tycoon, solicits confessions of love from his three daughters. Residing in Shanghai, Regan and Goneril are fluent in Chinese and are highly articulate as they convince their father of their unconditional love for him. Cordelia, on the other hand, is both honest and linguistically challenged. She is unwilling to follow her sisters’ example, but she is unable to communicate in Chinese with her father, either. Her silence, therefore, takes on new meanings. A member of the Chinese diaspora in London, Cordelia participates in this important family and business meeting via video link. Ironically but perhaps fittingly, the only Chinese word at her disposal is meiyou (“nothing”). In the tense exchange between Cordelia and Lear, the word nothing looms large as Chinese fonts are projected onto the screen panels behind which Cordelia stands. Uninterested in the ontological or lexical significance of nothing, Lear urges Cordelia to

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Figure 4.7: Poster of David Tse’s King Lear

give him something. The production capitalizes on the presence of two cultures and the gap between them, and the bilingualism on stage is supplemented by bilingual supertitles. Whether in the UK or China, the majority of audiences for the production could follow only one part of the dialogue with ease and had to switch between the action on stage and the supertitles. The play thus embodies the realities of globalization through translation as a metaphor and a plot device. While Tse and Wu’s Lears have borne personal significance for their creators to varying extents, Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen’s pan-Asian multilingual production of Lear (1997a) brings national and regional identities to the fore. Akin to visual poetry, the production featured actors from several different Asian countries, performing in different Asian languages and performance styles representing their countries of origin. Wu

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Figure 4.8: Page 2 of the script of Ong Keng Sen’s pan-Asian Lear

superimposes autobiographical traces onto Lear. Tse sees the question of self-identity as one without fixed answers in an age of linguistic globalization. Ong brings the amalgamated performance styles from Noh, pencak silat, Bejing opera and other traditional theatres to personify a “new Asia” that is having an ongoing dialogue with “the old, with traditions, with history” (Ong, 1997b, 5). He stresses that a harmonious world unified by superimposed ideologies is not what he seeks, for “we can no longer hold onto simple

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Figure 4.9: Lear, a Japan Foundation Asia Center production, directed by Ong Keng Sen

visions of the outside world and the ‘other’” (5). The Old Man, the Lear figure, walks the stage in the solemn style of Noh theatre and speaks Japanese, while the Elder Daughter (embodying the shadows of Goneril and Regan) is performed cross-dressed in the style of Beijing opera in Mandarin. The younger sister (Cordelia) speaks Thai, though she remains silent most of the time. The Elder Daughter has this to say about the Cordelia figure: “She is always silent. Nobody knows what she is scheming in her mind” (Ong, 1997a). The assassins sent by the Elder Daughter speak Indonesian. The confrontation between the Japanese-speaking patriarch and Mandarin-speaking daughter brings to mind the SinoJapanese conflicts throughout the twentieth century. As with Tse’s version, the father– child relation is significant in Ong’s rendition. The production opens with the Old Man and the Elder Daughter engaged in a philosophical conversation, followed by a ritualized division-of-the-kingdom scene (Fig. 4.8). The Old Man’s questions – “Who am I?” and “What is a father?” – are, as it turns out, far from rhetorical ones, and the Elder Daughter’s initial answer is insufficient. The Elder Daughter defines the patriarchal role as one that exerts power, and aspires to such a position and does not refrain from making these desires known throughout the play. At the end of the play, she stabs the Old Man and declares herself “a powerful puppeteer”. She soon realizes, however, that “killing you, I become myself”; she becomes the patriarchal figure she wishes to eliminate, and now she has to live with it. The play concludes with an enormous silence and a sense of solitude (Fig. 4.9). At the core of all three productions lies the question: “Who am I?” At stake are the artists’ personal and cultural identities as the processes of globalization intensify.

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The question is as urgent for Lear as it is for contemporary translators, directors, and audiences.

Conclusion How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, In states unborn and accents yet unknown! (Julius Caesar, 3.1.112–14) Cassius’ remarks at the scene of Julius Caesar’s assassination are not without prophetic insight. Shakespeare transformed a great number of sources that enriched his works, and his plays have been translated into a wide range of languages and genres. It is useful to think of translation as a love affair involving two equal partners, because it allows us an unimpaired view of the event, and eschews such hierarchical constructs as a superior original and a necessarily lesser derivative. The production and reception of translated works – either literal translation of words into another language (e.g., the Hebrew Bible to the Geneva Bible) or the transformation of meanings into a new form of expression (stage play to film noir) – imply double perspectives and have a significance that goes beyond the simple transfer of semantic meanings. A translator is an interpreter of the literary text and its cultural contexts, and a reader of the translation is no less a mediator between many possible worlds and meanings. Contrary to the purists’ anxiety that the proliferation of Shakespeare in translation, whether in modern English or foreign languages, will spell the demise of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, the rise of a global industry of translation speaks to the power of Shakespeare’s words – not bound within the limit of one language and historical period but open to a wide spectrum of interpretive possibilities, a common feature shared by great works of art.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Benjamin, Walter (2004). “The Task of the Translator”. In The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 75–86. Burnett, Mark Thornton (2005). “Writing Shakespeare in the Global Economy”. Shakespeare Survey 58, 185–98. Cross, Francis W. (1898). History of the Walloon and Huguenot Church at Canterbury. London: Publications of the Huguenot Society of London. Derrida, Jacques (1985). “Roundtable on Translation”. In The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald. New York: Schocken Books, 91–161. Eco, Umberto (2001). Experiences in Translation, trans. Alastair McEwen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Feng, Xiaogang, dir. (2006). Ye yan/The Banquet. Hong Kong: Huayi Brothers and Media Asia. Hansen, Niels B. (2008). “‘Something is Rotten’”. In Shakespeare and War, ed. Ros King and Paul J. C. M. Franssen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 153–65. Hoenselaars, Ton (2004). “Introduction: Shakespeare’s History Plays in Britain and Abroad”. In Shakespeare’s History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad, ed. Ton Hoenselaars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 9–34. ——(2009). “Translation Futures: Shakespearians and the Foreign Text”. Shakespeare Survey 62, 273–82.

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Jakobson, Roman (2004). “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”. In The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 138–43. Kyd, Thomas (2005). The Spanish Tragedy. In Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, ed. Arthur F. Kinney, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, 143–91. Lamb, Charles and Mary Lamb (1963). Tales from Shakespeare. London: Dent. Levin, Carole and John Watkins (2009). Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Morse, Ruth (2006). “Reflections in Shakespeare Translation”. The Yearbook of English Studies 36.1, 79–89. Ong, Keng Sen, dir. (1997a). Lear. TheatreWorks, Singapore. Video and documentary with subtitles freely accessible on ——(1997b). “Lear: Linking Night and Day”. In Lear: Publicity Brochure. Tokyo: The Japan Foundation Asia Center, 5. Parker, Patricia (1987). Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. London: Methuen. ——(2001). “The Novelty of Different Tongues: Polyglot Punning in Shakespeare (and Others)”. In Esthétiques de la nouveauté à la Renaissance, ed. François Laroque and Franck Lessay. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 41–58. Pestana, Alice (1930). Alice Pestana 1860–1929: In Memoriam. Madrid: Julio Cosano. Pfister, Manfred and Jürgen Gutsch, eds (2009). William Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the First Time Globally Reprinted: A Quartercentenary Anthology with a DVD. Dozwill, Switzerland: Edition Signathur. Quinn, Aragorn (forthcoming). “Political Theatre: Two Translations of Julius Caesar in Meiji Japan”. In “Shakespeare and Asia”, ed. Alexander C. Y. Huang, a special issue of Asian Theatre Journal 28.1. Ricoeur, Paul (2006). On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan. London and New York: Routledge. Rothwell, Kenneth S. (2004). A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tse, David, dir. (2006). King Lear. Yellow Earth Theatre (London) and Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre. Video with subtitles freely accessible on Wu, Hsing-kuo, dir. and perf. (2001). Li’er zaici/Lear Is Here. The Contemporary Legend Theatre, Taipei. Video with subtitles freely accessible on

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SHAKESPEARE ANTHOLOGIZED Kate Rumbold

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n the twenty-first century, “Shakespeare” is not only an English cultural icon but shares some of the characteristics of a powerful global brand. This chapter shows the surprising but important role that the many books of quotations and extracts from Shakespeare’s works, published from within his own lifetime to the present day, have played in establishing that status. It argues that these anthologies have not simply reflected Shakespeare’s growing status, but actively helped to construct it. The seemingly inherent qualities for which Shakespeare is now admired – the beauty of his language, his wise understanding of human nature, his Englishness – are all qualities that the anthology has served to attach to Shakespeare over the years by the process of selection. In other words, by selecting what they consider to be beautiful or moral or valuable pieces from Shakespeare, anthologists have conferred value and significance not only on those chosen pieces, but, by implication, on the whole of Shakespeare’s work and on “Shakespeare” himself. Crucially, they do not simply provide “access” to Shakespeare for those who might not normally encounter his plays on stage and page, but give all of their readers a language with which to value him. The chapter traces Shakespeare’s changing place in anthologies and collections of quotations from his own lifetime to the present day. It moves from the early collections that bundled him together – sometimes unnamed – with other contemporary writers, in an attempt to place English poetry on a level with the classical texts from which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers were accustomed to extracting wisdom, to the eighteenth century, when he was transformed into an immortal genius with his own, dedicated quotation books. It shows how the moral authority that was ascribed to Shakespeare in those later books was then commodified in the nineteenth century, as new, lucrative markets for Shakespeare’s virtuous wisdom (school; home; women; the young) began to emerge. It explores the different ways that anthologies in the twentieth century responded to Shakespeare’s compulsory status in education, from capitalizing on it with selections designed to engage long-suffering students, to playing off it with humorously ironic or parodic collections; and it considers the future of the Shakespeare anthology in the twenty-first century, now that new technologies of communication have made “Shakespeare” an endlessly recyclable, and endlessly fragmentary, resource. In doing so, the chapter builds on and extends existing research in this field; scholars of anthology culture have tended to stop at the end of the eighteenth century, and none has focused squarely on the effect of anthologization on Shakespeare.

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The chapter draws much of its material from the catalogues of three key Shakespeare libraries in the UK: the Shakespeare Institute Library and the Shakespeare Centre Library (both in Stratford-upon-Avon) and the Birmingham Shakespeare Library (in Birmingham Central Library). Using a wide-ranging sample of familiar and less-familiar anthology collections (including both Shakespeare-devoted collections and larger anthologies of poetry or literature) it explores how “Shakespeare” is constructed within their pages. It examines their prefatory material, and considers the implications of their selection criteria, themes and target audience. It looks at the quotations themselves, their organization and labelling, whether they come from plays or poems, and whether they are attributed to characters, texts, or “Shakespeare”; and it gestures towards some of the patterns that start to emerge between the anthologies, and the effects they might have on the valuation (and seeming endurance) of certain parts of Shakespeare. The chapter also speculates on the acts of quotation they might have encouraged in their readers, and on the effects of their intersection with other art forms. In its course it takes in both anthologies – broadly referring to selective collections, often of longer pieces or even whole plays – and quotation books – taken to mean those gatherings of small fragments that might tend towards the aphoristic or the beautiful. Both forms, which have considerable overlap, are shown to have repeatedly linked Shakespeare’s aesthetic qualities to his ethical qualities, and established a dual sense of his intrinsic (beauty) and instrumental (usefulness) value that persists today.

“Our Moderne Poets”: The Seventeenth Century “Shakespeare” as we know him has long been constructed by other people. Even within his lifetime, his work was being shaped by others’ acts of selection. It has recently been argued that Quarto 1 of Hamlet, often dismissed as an actors’ version, or “bad quarto”, of the play, can be seen as a literary text intended for serious reading, because of the “marginal commas” that flag up the play’s sententiae – those lines of aphoristic truth that are “worthy of commonplacing” by readers (Lesser and Stallybrass, 2008, 372, 400, 420). The practice of pointing out particular lines can be seen in other 1590s’ printed drama, particularly in the work of Ben Jonson, who took a strong interest in this method of adding classical gravitas to his work. It recalls the sixteenth-century practice of organizing classical knowledge under rhetorical headings, for the aid of argument and memory (Moss, 1996; de Grazia, 1991). In Shakespeare’s early printed texts, marginal commas are relatively few (found by only a handful of lines in Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and in the folio versions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure and Cymbeline), and, in Hamlet, they cluster largely around the already well-worn advice of Corambis (who becomes Polonius in Q2). However, as Lesser and Stallybrass usefully observe, this sign of sententiousness comes most likely not from Shakespeare himself, but from the circle of publishers and printers that produced his works – including John Bodenham and Nicholas Ling. These mediating figures construct Shakespeare as a source of (some) sententious, valuable lines. Importantly, these figures were also responsible for a host of collections of extracts that promoted English verse at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare was one of a number of contemporary authors whose words were collected in books of extracts from English poetry. These collections (such as Bel-vedére and Englands Helicon) claimed for their modern

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contents the serious value of classical works. Robert Allot’s Englands Parnassus; Or, the choysest flowers of our moderne poets: with their poetical comparisons. Descriptions of Bewties, Personages, Castles, Pallaces, Mountaines, Groves, Seas, Springs, Rivers. &c. Whereunto are annexed other various discourses, both pleasant and profitable (London, 1600) extended the floral imagery of its subtitle in its dedication by describing the pieces within as “sacred Poesies” and “flowers of learning”, and assuring the Reader that “the nectar of good wits will sell itself”. This evoked both the root meaning of anthology as a garland of flowers, and the classical notion of education as gathering information from many sources in the way bees gather pollen (Benedict, 1996). Two thousand three hundred and fifty extracts are arranged under topics – from “Angels”, “Affection” and “Audacitie” to “Of Wrath”, “World” and “Youth” – that recalled the commonplace tradition of the previous century, and value is conferred on named authors by the attribution of the pieces (with some errors) to such figures as “Ed. Spencer”, “W. Shakespeare” and “S. Daniell”. Shakespeare appears ninety-five times, in such lines as “Affection is a coale that must be cooled” (under “Affection”) and “All Orators are dumbe where Bewtie pleadeth” (under “Bewtie”). However, contrary to what modern readers might expect, his presence is relatively small compared to other authors, in particular Spenser, who dominates the collection at 386 quotations, followed by Michael Drayton and William Warner. The quotations taken from Shakespeare come primarily from his poetry (Bentley, 1943, 187) – predominantly, as the two examples above suggest, from his narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. And despite Allot’s claims for the value of its contents, this kind of collection was not necessarily admired: Return from Parnassus (1606) referred to those “English Flores Poetarum” filled with pieces “which have been filched from the nests of crows and kestrels” (I.1). Allot’s collection declared “W. Shakespeare” one of a number of successful contemporary poets (at the very least, worth stealing from), but not dominant among them. That it would be reprinted across the centuries shows how far the value ascribed to anthologies, and to Shakespeare, would change. If Shakespeare appeared primarily as a poet in Allot’s collection, his presence in John Cotgrave’s 1655 The English Treasury of Wit and Language, collected out of the most, and best, of our English drammatick poems: methodically digested into common places for general use (London, 1655) was largely as a playwright. As the title suggests, Cotgrave, like Allot, organized pieces of English verse under headings, but unlike Allot, he extracted them exclusively from drama (Bentley, 1943). Published during the Interregnum when the theatres were closed, Cotgrave’s collection opens with battle imagery suitable for “these most distracted times”: “my Authors fear no colours, they have stood the world’s Gunshot, and passed the Pikes already, and that with no mean reputation, for sure they have given away more faire hits than they tooke” (“To the Courteous Reader”, 1). These valiant authors are seemingly rallied to a royalist cause (“kingship”, “tyranny” and “rebellion” are among the organising headings) and Cotgrave hopes the “usefulnesse of the method they are now in” outweighs any “loss of native vigour or beauty in the transplanting” (2); local details are removed to make them more abstractly applicable. While Cotgrave does not attribute his extracts, subsequent annotators suggest that Shakespeare is the most quoted author, with 154 out of the 1518 known references (1682 in total), followed by Beaumont and Fletcher (112), Jonson (111), Chapman (111), Greville (110) and Webster (104). However, it has been noted that references to the Shakespeare play most often quoted in the collection – Hamlet – pale into insignificance next to other individual

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plays (Alaham, Mustapha and the Duchess of Malfi), and that his dominance might rather reflect the sheer number of his plays, conveniently available in folio since 1623 (Bentley, 1943; though the annotations suggest the compiler looks beyond the folio for extracts from Pericles (Stallybrass and Chartier, 2007)). It is a salutary reminder that Shakespeare’s presence is partly dictated by opportunity; and here by the desire of Humphrey Moseley, the “leading publisher of drama between 1642 and the Restoration”, to capitalize shrewdly on the market for printed plays that could still be read, even if they could not be publicly performed (Astington, 2003, 607). Shakespeare has another kind of manifestation in the popular printed miscellanies of the mid-seventeenth century. These productions are more mixed than the abovementioned books, comprising “verse collections, models for etiquette, prompt-books for wit, exemplars of elite life” and “defiant shrieks of misrule” (Smyth, 2004, 3). In Smyth’s database of miscellany poetry (Smyth, 2008), it seems that Shakespeare made a handful of appearances in these lively texts: Jog on, jog on, the Foot path-way . . . (in An Antidote against Melancholy (1661)) Take oh take those lips away . . . ((also in Fletcher’s Bloody Brother) in Wits Recreations (1640) and The Wits Academy (1677)) Under the greenwood tree (in The Marrow of Complements (1655) and the New Academy of Complements (1669)) Where the bee sucks there suck I (in The Wits Academy, The New Academy of Complements and Windsor Drollery (1672)) Shakespeare emerges here as a source not of poetry or drama but of “Song” and “Catch”. These detachable lyrics are not the serious, moralising utterances of a named author that we might expect (the miscellanies are characterized by the “effacement of authorship” (Smyth, 2004, 6)), but part of a playful literary circulation of entertaining fragments from the burgeoning mass of printed material. These quotations from Shakespeare’s poetry, drama and song might seem to constitute a comprehensive celebration of his work. There is a danger, however, of reading our modern conception of Shakespeare – a national poet, now thoroughly enshrined in education and publicly-funded theatre – into these seventeenth-century collections. We can overestimate his prominence compared to other poets and dramatists, and underestimate the role of his availability. Above all, these early collections are the products of a different value system from our more familiar, post-Romantic notion of the anthology. We will see a major shift in the way Shakespeare is anthologized between the beginning of the seventeenth century – as one of a multitude of contemporary, living authors – and the end of the eighteenth, when he is celebrated in his own right as the national poet, an immortal genius and master of human nature. This shift is attributable not only to growing admiration for his work in England, but also to changing values surrounding quotation (the quotation mark itself going from signalling a sentiment that is the common property of everyone, to a sentiment that is the private property of the speaker (de Grazia, 1991)); and to the changing material circumstances of anthology production; restricted in production between 1600 and 1774 (St Clair, 2004), they will explode onto the market in 1774 when the relaxing of perpetual copyright makes it expedient to celebrate older, “classic” English authors.

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Beauties and Morals: The Eighteenth Century The eighteenth century, then, sees a major change in Shakespeare’s prominence as an author in England. The accepted story of Shakespeare’s reception is that he is transformed during this century from a provincial playwright, who needed much improvement before he could be enjoyed by a polite age, to a national poet and “secular scripture” whose words were widely revered and quoted (see Taylor, 1990; Dobson, 1992; Marsden, 1995; Bate, 1997). Quotation books and anthologies play a significant role in this process. They help to attach certain abstract notions to Shakespeare – namely beauty and morality – by selecting them from within his works. In a century in which, as Balz Engler demonstrates in his essay, Shakespeare himself was “embodied” as a middle-class man in various forms of statuary (Dobson, 1992, 134–84); and in which “A new longing for writing in Shakespeare’s own person emerged” (de Grazia, 1991, 57), anthologies and quotation books, it is argued, serve to make the abstract qualities of beauty and morality appear personal characteristics of Shakespeare the man. By the end of the century, this wise, authoritative figure will underwrite the value of the anthology; and in the subsequent century, be commodified into endless books of wisdom. At the beginning of the century, however, Shakespeare’s status was still under construction. Edward Bysshe told readers of his Art of English Poetry (London, 1702) that Shakespeare did not rank prominently in his collection of “the most Natural, Agreeable and Noble Thoughts” from the “best English Poets” because of the prevailing taste of the town: I have inferred not only Similes, Allusions, Caracters, and Descriptions, but also the most Natural and Noble Thoughts on all Subjects of our modern Poets; I say, of our Modern: For though the Ancient, as Chaucer, Spencer, and others, have not been excell’d, perhaps not equall’d by any that have succeeded them, either in Justness or Description, or in Propriety and Greatness of Thought, yet the Garb in which they are Cloath’d, ‘tho’ then Alamode, is now become so out of Fashion, that the Readers of our Age have no ear for them: And this is the Reason that the Good Shakespeare himself is not so frequently Cited in the following Pages, as he would otherwise deserve to be. (Bysshe, 1737, Preface, unpaginated) It is ironic that the association that Allot and others established between “moderne poets” like Spenser and Shakespeare and the classics now renders them remote and difficult next to Bysshe’s “modern poets”; once collected as “Alamode”, they are now severely dated. This early eighteenth-century preference for politely conversable “modern poets” would, however, give way to an “aesthetic of obscurity”, and a new valuation of these earlier productions as past classics of English antiquity (Kramnick, 1998). The later Thesaurus Dramaticus (London, 1724) includes plays “ANTIENT and MODERN” (title page), rallying all the “Beauties of the most Celebrated Writers of our Nation in the Dramatic Way” (i) to prove that “we have equall’d, if not surpass’d all other Nations in Dramatic Poetry” (iii); it draws heavily on Bysshe (Culler, 1948) but about a quarter of it is now made up of Shakespeare quotations. (Intriguingly, the book might help “young Gentlemen” avoid “running into that common error of making use of similies, which have been worn threadbare by a succession of authors” (ii); they may borrow its contents in order to be more original.) Bysshe’s poetic handbook went through numerous editions, but came to be disparaged

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in a changing value system that increasingly prized originality. More specifically, dependence upon Bysshe was disparaged. Culler called it “the sort of book one consults surreptitiously and keeps locked in a drawer when not in use” (Culler, 1948, 864), and the novelist Samuel Richardson has been critiqued until late in the last century for his seeming reliance on the handbook to furnish his quotations. However, Richardson’s use of Bysshe in Clarissa (London, 1748) is fully inflected by the keen awareness he and his characters display of the moral significance of skimming, skipping and trading in fragments: the libertine Robert Lovelace, one of those readers who “only skim the surface” (vi, 262), appears to furnish justification for most of his villainous intentions from within Bysshe’s pages. Richardson’s correspondent, the novelist Sarah Fielding, earnestly encouraged readers of her fiction, from an early age, to learn to extract and apply the “utility” of any piece of writing, including her own; that is, to exercise the skills of an anthologist, rather than simply to be a user of anthologies; and Richardson, Sarah Fielding and Henry Fielding were alive in their novels to those free-floating pieces of Shakespeare and other authors that were already becoming well-worn (Rumbold, 2007). The mid-century novel offers insights into the values, positive and negative, that were becoming attached to the anthology, and the gender, class and moral implications of owning and using such a book. Thanks in great part to the campaigning of the Shakespeare Ladies Club, the Shakespeare Revival of 1738 served to shift Shakespeare’s posthumous fortunes. He would come to dominate the London stage, to be enshrined in a statue in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, and to be canonized in the work of a long stream of serious editors. What Shakespeare was valued for would shift, too. Early editors such as Pope and Warburton associated Shakespeare with Isaac Newton for his insights into the underlying principles that governed human behaviour, and they applied pseudo-scientific methods to delve through the obfuscations of his language and gather his understanding; they did not value him primarily for his language (Bar-On, 2008). Over the course of the century, however, Shakespeare’s language acquired a greater sanctity and prominence (Marsden, 1995). Where language had once been the medium to get to Shakespeare’s value, it became the site of that value. Collections in the latter half of the century will become not just gatherings of similes and shining moments, but places where elegant language and ethical principles are entwined in Shakespeare’s words and phrases. William Dodd’s Beauties of Shakespear, regularly selected from each play (London, 1752) is the first collection devoted entirely to Shakespeare. The two-volume collection moves systematically through (most of) Shakespeare’s plays, flagging up the “finest passages of the finest poet” in the scenes within supplementary headings (“Advice”, “Too ambitious love”, “A parasitical vain coward”). Dodd’s approach is founded in the neoclassical practice of elevating beauties and demoting faults, as performed most visibly by Alexander Pope in his edition of Shakespeare when he signalled the former in the margin and pushed the latter to the bottom of the page. The beauties in Dodd’s collection are declared pieces of the sublime, products of an author who “like the Eagle, properest Emblem of his daring genius, soars beyond the common reach, and gazes undazled on the sun” (I, vi). This soaring beauty is not measured simply in the lines’ aesthetic qualities, but in the effect they have on people: “Longinus tells us, that the most infallible test of the true Sublime, is the impression a performance makes upon our minds, when read or recited.” As such, wide approbation is a stamp of value; an observation Dodd says is “most remarkably verified in Shakespear; for all humours, ages, and inclinations, jointly proclaim their approbation and esteem of him” (xvi–xvii). Dodd’s collection is not merely “cultivating the reader’s Taste,

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his and her aesthetic and moral judgement” (de Grazia, 1991, 63), but binding aesthetic and ethical qualities together in potent lines of Shakespeare. Critics suggest that Dodd’s collection opened a floodgate (see de Grazia, 1991; Taylor, 1990), but a significant gap exists between these Beauties and the collections that followed, not only in time (many were products of their new post-1774 freedom) but also in nature. Firstly, Dodd, unlike his succeeding compilers, saw his work as an intervention in the editorial tradition as well as a collection of beauties, seeking to overcome the “sooty emendation” of “brangling critics” and “elucidate” Shakespeare’s words with his extensive commentary (viii, xiii). Secondly, despite containing much “excellent and refined morality”, Dodd’s Beauties is not a declaredly moralistic text. As the few headings quoted above suggest, its extracts move between aphorism, observation and description; and from “lovetales” and “sober saws of morality” to “home-felt observations of experience” (xvii). But while Dodd resists categorization, the projects that followed had rather more explicitly moral intentions. For example, Elizabeth Griffith’s The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated (London, 1775) interweaves quotations with moral commentary. In her General Postscript, she implicitly distinguishes her labour from Dodd’s: There are many favourite passages in Shakespeare, which most of my Readers have got by heart, and missing here, may possibly object to my having neglected to quote or observe upon them. But my intention, in this Work, was not to propound the beauties of the Poet, but to expound the document of the Moralist, throughout his writings. So far from being insensible to the other excellencies of this Author, I have ever thought him by much the greatest poet of our nation, for sublimity of idea and beauty of expression. (515) If Dodd’s edition is the place where her readers will most likely have got their beloved passages “by heart”, Griffith acknowledges, but differentiates her project from, that collection. Though Shakespeare is full of “sublimity of idea and beauty of expression” – Dodd’s selection criteria – her work is “not to propound the beauties of the Poet, but to expound the document of the Moralist”. Her selections are not necessarily monologic aphorisms, but dramatic scenes whose moral operates on us by example rather than precept: “Richard the Third’s dream, Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy in her sleep, the Dagger Scene in the same Play, Cardinal Beaufort’s last moments, with many other passages in our Author, of the same admonitory kind, avail us more than whole volumes of Tully’s Offices, or Seneca’s Morals” (516–17). Morality is a new selective filter on Shakespeare (and not necessarily at odds with his dramatic nature). In a more explicit spin-off, George Kearsley printed a collection with the same title. The Beauties of Shakespeare (1783) collects quotations under alphabetical, abstract headings. What might be a rather opportunistic move (he later printed the Beauties of Johnson (1781) and Flowers of Literature (1782) which contained “the essence of the Beauties of Johnson, Swift, Fielding, Pope, Goldsmith, Hervey, Sterne, Watts, &c.” (Hazen, 1938)) is presented as a moral mission: As the title of this volume agrees with the work of a late unfortunate Author, it may be necessary to observe, that the present performance was begun with different views from its predecessor, and is conducted in a different manner. The end of the

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former appears to have been intended chiefly as a vehicle to display the compiler’s reading and critical talents. The present has no higher aims than a selection useful for reference to the learned, for instruction to the ignorant, and for information to all . . . whoever is concerned in the business of education, will find it very serviceable in impressing on the memory of Youth some of the sublimest and most important lessons of Morality and Religion . . . (ii–iii) The slighting acknowledgement of the “late unfortunate Author” recalls for the reader Dodd’s famous execution for forging a signature on a bond in 1777, casting aspersions on Dodd’s morality as well as on his showy “display” of “reading and critical talents”. This compiler modestly suggests that his goal is simply to make a selection “useful for reference to the learned” and for the improvement of “Youth”. Sublimity now becomes a tool for improvement: the “sublimest and most important lessons of Morality and Religion”. If Dodd did not set out to demonstrate the morality in Shakespeare, these later collections nonetheless articulated it. Morality still has to be extracted selectively from Shakespeare: Kearsley’s collection professedly follows Samuel Johnson’s hint that “From his writings a system of Social Duty may be collected” (ii) (but presumably ignores Johnson’s caution that this should not be illustrated by isolated quotations). It has been suggested that an extract in an anthology can function as a synecdoche for “the longer text from which it is excerpted” (Price, 2000, 68). However, these virtuous extracts function as synecdoche not for the “longer text”, but for a virtuous “Shakespeare”; with important long-term implications. Once Dodd’s editorial notes and commentary are removed from the collection early in the next century, readers will have a greater sense that these words are “Shakespeare’s own utterances: his self-expression” (de Grazia, 1991, 64). Combining this idea with Shakespeare’s gradual embodiment during the eighteenth century as a middle-class man, and with the host of virtuous fragments that now seem to emanate from him, the anthology will lastingly establish “Shakespeare” as not a heavily-mediated, edited text, but an embodied, moral figure upon whom people can call directly for wise counsel. As editors have cleared access to his voice, so their labours are now rejected as barriers to personal engagement; Dodd’s criticism that Shakespeare has been made a “kind of stage for bungling critics to shew their clumsy activity upon” (xv) has been turned back upon him. By the end of the century, this virtuous Shakespeare would already have a key role in the improvement of youth; his value refracted into a number of possible instrumental uses. In William Enfield’s The Speaker (London, 1774) he is one of the “best English writers” (title page) whose fragments can be used to practise good articulation, pronunciation, elegance, accent, emphasis, pauses and gestures in speech; while in Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Extracts: or Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, Selected for the Improvement of Youth in Speaking, Reading, Thinking, Composing; and in the Conduct of Life, published in its first edition in 1784, Shakespeare dominates the poetic excerpts that can be employed in schools for “recitation, transcription, the exercise of the memory, or in imitation” (Knox, 1789, iv); “Book III: Dramatic Chiefly from Shakespeare” reproduces Dodd’s headings. Charles Lamb would complain that lines such as “to be or not to be” were now “everywhere in the mouths of school-boys from their being found in Enfield Speakers”, “torn so inhumanly” from their plays of origin (qtd in Price, 2000, 78). The anthology is thus at odds with, and integral to, the Romantic conception of Shakespeare. He presides in chapter epigraphs in the Gothic novel, with the same typography and emotional potency as in an anthology;

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and anthologies might be seen as responsible for the fragmentary way in which Romantic poets such as Keats engaged with his “fine phrases” (Taylor, 1990, 107); but the Romantic concern for originality and organic structure, and anxiety about the mass public, would lead to an enduring disdain for the popular form (Price, 2000, 74–5).

“Shakespeare’s Household Words”: The Nineteenth Century The nineteenth century saw an explosion of anthologies and quotation books. Their expanding production can be mapped not only to the end of perpetual copyright in 1774, but also onto the widening access to education, dwindling illiteracy and growing market for cheap print that Andrew Murphy suggests would bring more people – including working-class readers – into contact with Shakespeare in the nineteenth century (Murphy, 2008); this chapter suggests that these readers were not only encountering full texts. Most studies of the anthology, however, tend to stop before this point. While charting the full extent of the century’s productions is beyond the scope of this chapter, a host of examples from familiar and less familiar texts will reveal how Shakespeare became both the property of everyone and of niche audiences, arrived in the schoolbook and stayed at home, in the nineteenth century. In this newly-flooded market, compilers took pains to distinguish their contributions from their competitors: Books of quotations and selections from Shakspere have, it may be urged, already appeared with more frequency than success or utility: some as reading-books for the school, others as appendages for the drawing-room table, while more have had for their object the mere purpose of supporting some fanciful theory entertained by their authors, in connexion with the history of our great poet. (The Shakspere Treasury, 1862, iv) In its disdain for other types of publication, this passage suggests the emergence of new niche markets for Shakespeare: in particular, the home (for perhaps conspicuous display on the “drawing-room table”) and the schoolroom (for instrumental “improvement”). Late eighteenth-century anthologies had generated the impression that Shakespeare is good for all people, but for some potential readers there remained obstacles to be overcome. Lamb targeted his Tales from Shakespeare (1807) – which recast Shakespeare’s stories in prose fable – at girls, who were unable, like their brothers, to access this “manly book” in their fathers’ libraries (or indeed at school); while Thomas Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare (1818) – which expurgated any lines that “cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family” – was designed to be read by fathers to wives and children. Different market niches thus emerged even within the domestic scene: the father “with his collected works, the sister with her Tales or her Girlhood, the brother with his Beauties or his Speaker” (Price, 2000, 90; see also Amy-Scott Douglass’ chapter in this volume). It is no longer a fault of Shakespeare’s that he needs mitigating for some members of his widening audience. William Dodd’s work is transformed for these new markets, a wide range of publishers producing new editions of the Beauties that take him far from his original critical aspirations: “It was my first intention to have considered each play critically and regularly thro’ all its parts; but as this would have swelled the work beyond proper bounds, I was obliged to confine myself solely to a collection of his poetical Beauties” (xv–xvi). Once his notes are dropped, the beauties become stand-alone pieces of excellence, with footnotes used

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only to explain the meaning of the occasional word. The pieces are now to be consumed, rather than debated; one elegant edition of 1878 includes twelve photographic plates from the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, and is one of a number of illustrated editions that invites the simultaneous consumption of Shakespearean beauties in two media. In addition, a number of collections by other titles – such as Pearls of Shakspeare (1860), Extracts from Shakspere for the use of Schools (1862) and Choice Thoughts from Shakespeare ([Bartlett],1862) – follow closely his structure and content; Choice Thoughts openly adding to or subtracting from “Dr Dodd’s well-known work” (vi) as appropriate. This book shares a publisher with Extracts from Shakespeare, and their prefaces are only differentiated by a small detail about their audience. Both are concerned with the lack of suitable collections for “youthful readers”, but while Choice Thoughts claims to have created a collection “specially adapted to the youth of both sexes, and for use in the family circle”, Extracts is “for use in the scholastic and family circle” (my emphasis). Extracts additionally boasts of having communicated with “principals of high-class educational establishments in various parts of the kingdom” and learned that acquaintance with Shakespeare is “a desideratum, if not a necessity” (vi). These parallel productions suggest an attempt to use the same material to convince not one but two lucrative niche markets of their usefulness. (Pearls from Shakespeare has no preface, but its careful targeting is revealed by back matter advertisements for Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible; The Ladies Treasury, Beautifully Illustrated; Cassell’s History of England; and Cassell’s Popular Natural History – “especially adapted for Family Reading, being free of all unnecessary technical terms”, unpaginated back matter.) By following Dodd, including reprinting his preface, nineteenth-century editions reproduced some of his eighteenth-century value judgements. Dodd asserted that those pieces that were too “closely connected with the plot and characters, and on which their beauties so wholly depend”, would be “absurd and idle” to reproduce. As a result, there is “not one line extracted from the Merry Wives of Windsor, one of Shakespear’s best, and most justly admired, comedies” (1752, xx). Subsequent editions and appropriations of the Beauties also omitted Merry Wives (though Extracts adds four short quotations from the play at the very end of the book), and, we might argue, affect the play’s future valuation. However, Dodd’s widely-varying headings mean that subsequent compilers can select from him the Shakespeare they want to depict – making it more sententious or emotional or even more theatrical as they so wish. Now a moral author, “Shakespeare” can more readily be applied to real-life situations. Wise words from Shakespeare are packaged for domestic or personal use in Aphorisms from Shakespeare (1812); Apothegms from Shakespeare (1850); and Sayings from Shakespeare (1864). Shakespeare’s Household Words (1862, 1875) reduces Shakespeare’s plays to their smallest units of wisdom: All hoods make not monks (Henry VIII, iii. 1) A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities (Julius Caesar, iv. 3) Affliction may subdue the cheek/But not take in the mind (Winter’s Tale, iv. 3) (2) Their small, ornate book setting suggests that these lines are to be cherished and consulted in the home. Their domestic destinations are implied by the female authors of many of these collections, who might be seen to perform on behalf of the customer or recipient the feminine activity of compiling a commonplace book (an ideal of genteel extraction that George Eliot satirizes in the character of Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch).

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They frame “Shakespeare” in the context of those expensively packaged “compendia of moral verse, usually addressed to women”, in which literature represented both “cultural enfranchisement and moral training” (Benedict, 1996, 219). The collections continue to contribute to Shakespeare’s status. By the same synecdochic process by which moral extracts evoke the wise, moral qualities of “Shakespeare”, what were once the salvageable “beauties” amidst his many faults have become representative “gems” from a glittering whole. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, reference to the “jewels” in Shakespeare was an act of special pleading, praising the good bits amidst the dross. Nahum Tate, who famously adapted King Lear in 1681, called Shakespeare’s work “a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolisht”, and Samuel Johnson later said that “Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in inexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals” (qtd in Marsden, 1995, 154). Marsden places their comments in the context of the growing reverence for Shakespeare’s language: by the end of the eighteenth century, “No longer perceived as unpolished or debased, Shakespeare’s language appears as a polished and refined gem, dazzling and exquisite as originally crafted” (Marsden, 1995, 154). In the nineteenth-century anthology, these “gems” come to stand for the complete Shakespeare: the “most brilliant” rather than “the brilliant” pieces (my emphasis). Furthermore, as a treasury of “jewels”, “pearls” and “gems”, Shakespeare becomes an aspirational object for ownership and display. When Palgrave called his collection The Golden Treasury (1861), he cashed in on these “currently popular metaphors” (Ferry, 2001, 18). Shakespeare is shaped by his inclusion in this collection of “all the best original Lyrical pieces and Songs in our language, by writers not living, – and none beside the best”. The thirty selections from his work are – in accordance with the criteria that “each Poem shall turn on some single thought, feeling, or situation”; and be “printed entire, except in very few instances” (Preface, unpaginated) – made up of sonnets and songs rather than drama, thanks in part to the influence of Tennyson on the collection and its sense of what constituted a poem (see Hopkins, 2008). Shakespeare the lyric poet speaks on abstract topics such as: TRUE LOVE (‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’) CARPE DIEM (‘O Mistress Mine, where are you roaming’) THE WORLD’S WAY (‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry’) Palgrave’s headings for each poem promote Shakespeare’s timeless applicability and “passionate reality”, or proximity to human experience. They also take part in a longer process, beyond the scope of this chapter, that turns the sonnets into a coherent (and giftable) set of love poems; John Benson’s disparaged edition labelled “Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds” as “The Picture of True Love” in 1640 (see also Roberts, 2003). Shakespeare gives the “First Book” (including Marlowe, Sidney, Drummond, Wyatt and Daniel) its “distinctive character” (as Milton, Gray and Wordsworth do the other books respectively). By framing the beginning of the collection in this way, Shakespeare is granted a foundational role in the “natural growth and evolution of our Poetry” (Preface, unpaginated). His Englishness – built in the eighteenth century on his native defiance of strict neoclassical rules of drama (see Bate, 1997) – is now linked to a lucid, polished expression, though Riding and Graves might more harshly describe it as the quality of a “composite author who shall be a mean struck between all the poets included” (Riding and Graves, 2002, 186).

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Compulsory Shakespeare: The Twentieth Century Shakespeare’s Englishness is reinvigorated at the beginning of the twentieth century in a poignant cluster of anthologies around the year 1916. As Francis Colmer, compiler of Shakespeare in Time of War: Excerpts from the Plays Arranged with Topical Allusions (1916) observed, “It is a dark hour that has fallen to us in which to celebrate the tercentenary of the death of William Shakespeare” (xv). Shakespeare anthologies such as this printed during World War One, and F. Askew’s Shakespeare Tercentenary Souvenir: England’s Thoughts in Shakespeare’s Words (1916), performed the dual function of celebrating the author and claiming him for England’s military cause. Colmer looks to Shakespeare for “one clear rallying cry and cheering note”, for “There is only one poet who has identified himself deeply with the nationality of our race and who has made himself the mouthpiece to interpret it in every mood and aspiration, who is himself, indeed, the typical Englishman” (xvii). That Shakespeare is an English poet is taken for granted; more important here is that Shakespeare is an “Englishman”, with fresh opinions on the battle at hand (and, in Askew’s case, “prophecies” for the future unfolding of events). Shakespeare’s “opinions” are constructed by the compilers. The excerpts in Colmer’s collection are not Shakespeare’s most celebrated beauties, nor aphoristic phrases, but incidental lines woven together to describe the specifics of the present war, “fragments as seemed most pertinent to the present time” (xxxv). “Of Zeppelin Raids”, Shakespeare says: “Some airy devil hovers in the sky / And pours down mischief” (King John, 73); “I heard a humming / And that a strange one too, which did awake me” (Tempest, 73). Apt lines describe the war’s key “players”, from Winston Churchill (“He speaks plain cannon-fire, and smoke and bounce; / He gives the bastinado with his tongue” (King John, 130)), to the Crown Prince of Prussia (“By Chesu, he is an ass, as in the world . . . He has no more directions in the true disciplines of the wars, look you, than is a puppydog” (Henry V, 149)); and President Woodrow Wilson (“My blood hath been too cold and temperate / Unapt to stir at these indignities” (1 Henry IV, 156)). That any line can now be extracted (with play and scene references in the footnotes) as an authoritative utterance of “Shakespeare” shows how far anthologization has conferred value on the whole. Colmer calls Shakespeare’s work “a wondrous treasury of wisdom” from which it is “possible to draw a commentary suitable to every human occasion” (xxxv). Shakespeare’s complete works, and by extension, “Shakespeare” himself, have become not the source of an anthology, but an anthology in themselves. Colmer laments that this wartime hero is not yet the recipient of the “spontaneous acclaim” of the people, “in spite of the fact” among other things “that certain of the Local Examinations necessitate the laborious study of one or more of his plays” (xvi). As not only school (with the 1870 Education Act), but also Shakespeare, becomes compulsory for all, numerous anthologies promise to convey this essential “Shakespeare” to a growing market of pupils and teachers. (Late eighteenth-century texts such as The Shakespeare Reader in Blackie’s School Series (1880) and Scenes from Shakespeare for Use in Schools (1898) are part of this rapidly-expanding genre.) Peat’s Presenting Shakespeare: How and When to Introduce the Plays of Shakespeare into the English School Syllabus (with Selections from Four of the Plays) (1947) reveals the pedagogical role that anthologies carved out for themselves: The number of people who say they were bored with Shakespeare at school, and who show no interest in his work after they have left school, is legion; it is impossible to

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avoid the conclusion that the presentment of the plays is not always satisfactory. I have tried here to put Shakespeare before the reader as a real figure . . . (5) Shakespeare is necessary and, if taught badly, potentially boring, risking not only a lifetime’s disengagement but unpreparedness for the School Certificate. Anthologies promise to foster engagement: rather than reading round the room (“the ass’s way”), teachers are encouraged to tell the story, encourage boys to engage with “the most important and most interesting scenes”, and skip the parts “likely to prove dull to young readers” (6). Peat prints selections from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and Macbeth, with prose interpolations borrowed explicitly from the Lambs’ Tales; he presents Shakespeare as appealing, informative and, above all, imperative. Quotation culture underpins early twentieth-century school Shakespeare. Mais’ An English Course for Schools (1920) includes long “Extracts from Shakespeare” to be “learnt by heart, and then used as exercises in analysis, paraphrase, scansion, etc.” (323), a dry technical exercise offset by his warm acknowledgement that Shakespeare is “the first to whom we turn when in trouble or joy”. Understanding is tested via quotation in the sample examination papers he provides: lines from Shakespeare are included among the “Passages for Explanation” of which candidates are required to “Give, with any necessary comments, the sense”; and they are also asked to: 6 a) Quote not fewer than ten consecutive lines from any play of Shakespeare with which you are familiar b) Describe the part taken in the play by the speaker of the lines you have quoted . . . (384) Exam Shakespeare demands knowledge of the characters and plot, as well as the grammatical and lexical meaning, of quotations learned by heart. A number of foreignlanguage collections from this period (such as M. Draber’s The Student’s Shakespeare: Tales and Scenes of English Plays of 1929–31 (English text with introduction and notes in German) and George Lambin’s The Candidate’s Shakespeare of 1957 (including scenes from Merchant, Julius Caesar, Macbeth and The Tempest, published in Paris as part of the “Collection Anglo-Americaine”)) suggest that students in other European countries would receive, and be tested on, their Shakespeare (and in the process, learn English) in the form of quotations or “beauties”. Shakespeare’s compulsory status is confirmed across England with the advent of the National Curriculum in 1988. Fragments of Shakespeare become the lowest common denominator in the anthology of poems and extracts introduced by the School Examinations and Assessment Council in 1993 for study by fourteen-year-olds: “Those of low ability, who are not required to study a Shakespeare play, will have to answer questions on the ‘all the world’s a stage’ speech from As You Like It and only the most able children will be tested on The Importance of Being Earnest” (Judd, 1993). To profit from this compulsoriness, and its frequent corollary of student (and teacher) disenfranchisement, educational anthologies have often presented themselves as navigating the boundaries between education and entertainment. The marketing blurb for Michael Flachmann’s Shakespeare, From Page to Stage: An Anthology of the Most Popular Plays and Sonnets (2006) declares that “this collection of eleven Shakespearean plays and sonnets brings Shakespeare alive through a combination of innovative, classroom-tested teaching approaches that show Shakespeare’s plays are not only radiant literary documents but also

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exciting dramatic scripts intended for performance before live audiences”; it “combines the exhilaration of live theatre with time-honoured elements of literary analysis to help bring the plays alive for a new generation of students” (pearsonschool.com). That fun, “exciting”, “live” Shakespeare can enrich pedagogy is a still-familiar trope that trades on his perceived association with stultifying desk work. Anthologies have also reached out to the expanding undergraduate (and graduate) English Literature market. Russ McDonald’s Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000 (2004) is one of a number of anthologies designed to help students navigate not Shakespeare’s texts, but the swathes of criticism that surround them; constructing the essential “Shakespeare” as a body of criticism that requires as much familiarity as the plays. In undergraduate-oriented surveys of English Literature, a field dominated since 1962 by M. H. Abrams’ Norton Anthology of English Literature, Shakespeare’s relative presence alongside less canonical texts is continually negotiated. The first edition included fourteen “songs from the plays”, nineteen “sonnets”, “The Phoenix and the Turtle” and 1 Henry IV; while its latest incarnation (the eighth edition of 2006) features forty-two sonnets and two plays, Twelfth Night and King Lear, with excerpts from the “Two Texts of King Lear”, encouraging engagement with recent editorial thinking. The relative role of Shakespeare in these collections speaks to an ongoing debate in higher education about whether Shakespeare should be considered in isolation or among his contemporaries; allowed to stand in for “the Renaissance”, or stand for himself. The Shakespeare industry continues to produce an array of collections of quotations for a popular audience. Often, themes that have become associated with Shakespeare by virtue of their appearing in, and being quoted from, his works – his affinity with nature, for example – become the organising topics for whole books: W. Foxton’s 1934 Shakespeare Garden and Wayside Flowers, with Appropriate Quotations for Every Flower is an early example of a book that commodifies Shakespeare’s association with the Warwickshire countryside. Shakespeare’s apparent expertise in romantic love has long been peddled in collections of quotations, from C. B. Jones’ cherub-adorned The Lover’s Shakespeare (1900) and Eleanor Easley’s Love, from Shakespeare. Quotations from Shakespeare’s Complete Works (1930) to Benjamin Darling’s Shakespeare on Love (2000); Elizabeth O’Mahoney and Katherine O’Mahoney’s Shakespeare on . . . Love and Sex (2002) and an audiobook entitled From Shakespeare with Love: The Best of the Sonnets (Naxos 2009), recorded by actors including David Tennant. Shakespeare turns love coach in the more instrumental Seduction by Shakespeare: Advice, Observations, and Quotes on Love, Lust, Beauty & Desire (2006). Their common operational manoeuvre is to blur the lines between a Shakespearean text that depicts romantic love, and an embodied “Shakespeare” whose personal experience of romantic love authorizes his insights; Joseph Fiennes, the actor who played the romantic part of William Shakespeare in the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden), fittingly adorns the front cover of The Little Book of Shakespeare (1999). From here it is a short imaginative leap to his presence in the genre of self-help poetry collections, a muchmaligned niche so lucrative that Arden Shakespeare have evoked their design in a series of recent collections of quotations on life, death and the seven ages of man. In addition, a number of popular anthologies market themselves as “easy”, “painless” and “fun” (Easy Reading Shakespeare: The Bard in Bite-Size (2007), The Friendly Shakespeare: A Thoroughly Painless Guide to the Best of the Bard (1994), Shakespeare without the Boring Bits (2004)) in more or less explicit opposition to (and thus confirming) Shakespeare’s reputation as difficult, torturous and dull. Others do not simply play off, but subvert,

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Shakespeare’s cultural capital for comic effect, exploiting the clash of registers of juxtaposing this dusty establishment figure with new, seemingly alien situations. The front cover of Syd Pritchard’s Shakespeare: The Golfer’s Companion (2005) is adorned with jauntilyangled Shakespearean lines including “Uneven is this course I like it not” and “Cursed be the hand that made these fatal holes”; the comically “tenuous” Shakespearean “golfing references” within include, under “Bunkered”, “What is this quintessence of dust?” (15). As in the wartime collections, any piece of Shakespeare can now have implicit authority – a fact evidently exploited by Shakespeare on Golf: Wit and Wisdom from the Great Elizabethan Golfer and Poet (1997) Shakespeare on Golf (2001) and Shakespeare was a Golfer: A Collection of Golfing Shorts (1996). What distinguishes these books from Shakespeare on golf, with special reference to St. Andrews links – published in Edinburgh in 1885 – is perhaps only the degree of postmodern irony they employ. The covers of these and other parodic publications often transpose the symbolic value of the Droeshout engraving – braininess, respectability, solemnity – into new visual settings: teeing up in Elizabethan dress and bidding “Friar John, go hence / Get me an iron”; grinning in gaudy jester’s garb; or covered in lipstick kisses.

Where Next: The Twenty-First Century In the twenty-first century, compilers of anthologies and quotation books can choose from an array of Shakespearean values: beauty, wisdom, morality, authority, Englishness, humour, irony. Barbs from the Bard (Viner and Rudnicki, 2000) proffers several more to its readers: nostalgia (swearing in Shakespeare transports us back from “new millennium” angst), eloquence (his insults revitalize our well-worn expletives) and “catharsis” (“Feel better? Of course you do!”). Like the Droeshout head perched on a modern, golfing body, this book trades on a perceived clash of discourses so remote that they require “translation”, and playfully offers the reader the cultural capital of fluency in Shakespeare’s language (“Your villainy goes against my weak stomach, and therefore I must cast it up. Henry V III 2. Translation: You make me sick” (9)). The “Bard” can now be selectively re-embodied, fit for purpose. Just as “Shakespeare and Love” collections blur the boundaries between the writing and the man, recent publications such as The Bard & Co: Shakespeare’s Role in Modern Business (2007) not only lift quotations from charismatic and eloquent characters, but cash in on an image of Shakespeare as savvy entrepreneur, a consultant who can offer creative insight to the twenty-first-century business person. But while “Shakespeare” can be re-embodied for new purposes, the ways in which we can encounter him are also becoming more fragmentary. Anyone with internet access can leap straight to an apt Shakespeare quotation on love, marriage or life through their search engine, or through an endless supply of quotation sites (coolquotes.com, motivationalquotes.com, quoteland.com). Facebook users can string together scathing units of Shakespearean vitriol and send them to appreciative friends via the “Shakespeare Insult Generator”; and YouTube videos, because limited in length, constitute an expanding collection of small fragments of Shakespearean performance and quotation, from the Beatles’ Shakespeare skit to pets “reciting” “To be or not to be”. The playful uses of “Shakespeare” in these new technologies of communication do not occlude the production of full plays on page and stage, but they might have longer-term implications for the printed anthology (see also Michael Best’s contribution to this volume). The effect of the internet on the anthology might resemble the explosion of publica-

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tions after the end of perpetual copyright in 1774. Publishers can struggle to retain their market share of “Shakespeare” when “Shakespeare” is freely available online. But the internet is not simply a place where (digitized) intellectual property becomes free content (see Desmet and Bailey, 2009). “Web 2.0”, a more participative, user-led version of the internet, can transform the way people read, share and communicate, and as such might alter the way people relate to fragments of literature. They might ostensibly trade Shakespearean lines in an early modern corner of “Second Life”; overlay sonnets onto film images or music on YouTube; and absorb the vital bits of a “Shakespeare play or a faddish business book” in a hurry in a “text cloud” of key ideas and words (an idea proposed at joelamantia.com). Above all, in encouraging people to combine bits of Shakespeare with other eclectic interests in their online self-presentation, Web 2.0 revives the “valorization” of “literary choices” (Benedict, 1996, 220) that have been observed in the marketing of earlier commodified collections. In a way that elides popular and critical Shakespeare (not least because academics and non-academics alike can take part in this often-ironic play with fragments), Web 2.0 reasserts the possibility for the expression of personal taste through the smallest units of literature; returning us to something like the private, manuscript culture of commonplacing on a global, public – and potentially endless – scale. This chapter has shown how the intrinsic (beauty, aesthetics) and instrumental (wisdom, improving your golf game) values of “Shakespeare” have been promoted, and mutually reinforced, by several centuries of printed anthologies. When “Shakespeare” is scattered across the globe (real and virtual) in innumerable fragments with innumerable new applications, will these continue to reinforce his perceived high status in the same way? Compilers have long expended prefatory ink on the effects of removing pieces of Shakespeare from their larger context: the cost to understanding of how his drama works balanced against the opportunity to appreciate localized poetic details (see, for example, Ted Hughes in A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, 1971); but the effect of their fragmentation has always, nonetheless, been to confer value on “Shakespeare”, however nebulous that larger notion; will the same be true of more free-floating pieces of “Shakespeare”? The challenge for scholars in the twenty-first century will be to reconcile our growing technological capacity to fulfil the desire to trace the endurance and popularity of certain lines of Shakespeare over time (Hopkins, 2008; see also Hyperhamlet) with the ever-growing impossibility of capturing all of his “timeless” utterances.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Astington, John H. (2003). “Dramatic Extracts in the Interregnum”. Review of English Studies 54.217, 601–14. Bar-On, Gefen (2008). “Looking for ‘Newtonian’ Laws in Shakespeare: The Mystifying Case of the Character of Hamlet”. In Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter Sabor and Paul Yachnin. Aldershot: Ashgate, 151–64. Bate, Jonathan (1997). The Genius of Shakespeare. London: Picador. Benedict, Barbara (1996). Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bentley, Gerald Eades (1943). “John Cotgrave’s ‘English Treasury of Wit and Language’ and the Elizabethan Drama”. Studies in Philology 40.2, 186–203. Culler, A. Dwight (1948). “Edward Bysshe and the Poet’s Handbook”. PMLA 63.3, 858–85. de Grazia, Margareta (1991). “Shakespeare in Quotation Marks”. In The Appropriation of

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Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. Jean I. Marsden. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 57–91. Desmet, Christy and Roger Bailey (2009). “The Shakespeare Dialogues: (Re)producing The Tempest in Secondary and University Education”. College Literature 36.1, 121–40. Dobson, Michael (1992). The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ferry, Anne (2001). Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hazen, A. T. (1938). “The ‘Beauties of Johnson’”. Modern Philology 35.3, 289–95. Hopkins, David (2008). “On Anthologies”. The Cambridge Quarterly 37.3, 285–304. Hyperhamlet. http://hyperhamlet.unibas.ch Judd, Judith (1993). “Anthology set for English tests gets hostile reception”. The Independent, 7 January. http://www.independent.co.uk Kramnick, Jonathan Brody (1998). Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lesser, Zachary and Peter Stallybrass (2008). “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays”. Shakespeare Quarterly 59.4, 371–420. Marsden, Jean (1995). The Reimagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Moss, Ann (1996). Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Murphy, Andrew (2008). Shakespeare for the People: Working-Class Readers, 1800–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Price, Leah (2000). The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel from Richardson to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riding, Laura and Robert Graves (2002). A Survey of Modernist Poetry and a Pamphlet against Anthologies, ed. Charles Mundye and Patrick McGuinness. Manchester: Carcanet Press. Roberts, Sasha (2003). Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Rumbold, Kate (2007). “‘So Common-Hackneyed in the Eyes of Men’: Banal Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel”. Literature Compass 4.3, 610–21. St Clair, William (2004). The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smyth, Adam (2004). Profit and Delight: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640–1682. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ——(2008). An Index of Poetry in Printed Miscellanies, 1640–1682. http://www.rdg.ac.uk/emrc/ printedmiscellanies.htm Stallybrass, Peter and Roger Chartier (2007). “Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590–1619”. In A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy. Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, Gary (1990). Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. London: The Hogarth Press.

Additional References: Anthologies Abrams, M. H., et al. (1962). Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: Norton. Allot, Robert (1600). Englands Parnassus; Or, the choysest flowers of our moderne poets: with their poetical comparisons. Descriptions of Bewties, Personages, Castles, Pallaces, Mountaines, Groves, Seas, Springs, Rivers. &c. Whereunto are annexed other various discourses, both pleasant and profitable. London: N. Ling, C. Burby.

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Askew, F. (1916). Shakespeare Tercentenary Souvenir: England’s Thoughts in Shakespeare’s Words. Lowestoft: Flood and Son Ltd. [Bartlett, J.] (1862). Choice Thoughts from Shakspere: By the author of ‘The Book of Familiar Quotations’. London: Whittaker and Co. The Beauties of Shakespeare; selected from his plays and poems (1783). London: G. Kearsley. Bysshe, Edward [1701] (1737). The Art of English Poetry. Containing, I. Rules for making verses. II. A collection of the most natural, agreeable and sublime thoughts, viz. allusions, similes descriptions and characters of persons and things, that are to be found in the best English poets. III. A dictionary of rhymes, 8th edn. London: F. Clay, 2 vols. Colmer, Francis (1916). Shakespeare in Time of War: Excerpts from the Plays Arranged with Topical Allusions. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Cotgrave, John (1655). The English Treasury of Wit and Language, collected out of the most, and best, of our English drammatick poems: methodically digested into common places for general use. London: Humphrey Moseley. Dodd, William (1752). The Beauties of Shakespear. London: T. Waller, 2 vols. Enfield, William [1774]. The Speaker: or, miscellaneous pieces, selected from the best English writers, and disposed under proper heads, with a view to facilitate the improvement of youth in reading and speaking. To which is prefixed an essay on elocution. London: Joseph Johnson. Extracts from Shakespere for the use of schools [1862]. London: Whittaker and Co. Flachmann, Michael (2006). Shakespeare, From Page to Stage: An Anthology of the Most Popular Plays and Sonnets. Harlow: Longman. Griffith, Elizabeth (1775). The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated. London: T. Cadell. Knox, Vicesimus (1789). Elegant Extracts: or Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, Selected for the Improvement of Youth in Speaking, Reading, Thinking, Composing; and in the Conduct of Life, 2nd edn. London: Charles Dilly. McDonald, Russ, ed. (2004). Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000. Oxford: Blackwell. Mais, S. P. B. (1920). An English Course for Schools. London: Grant Richards Ltd. Palgrave, Francis Turner (1861). The Golden Treasury of the best songs and lyrical poems in the English language. Cambridge: Macmillan. Pearls of Shakspeare: A Collection of the Most Brilliant Passages found in his Plays, illustrated by Kenny Meadows (1860). London: Cassell, Petter and Galpin. Peat, R. C. (1947). Presenting Shakespeare. London: George G. Harrap and Company Ltd. Pritchard, Syd (2005). Shakespeare: The Golfer’s Companion. Victoria, BC: Trafford Publishing. Shakespeare’s Household Words, A Selection from the wise saws of the Immortal Bard, illuminated by Saml Stanesby (1862). London: Griffith and Farran. Thesaurus Dramaticus. Containing all the celebrated passages, soliloquies, similies, descriptions, and other poetical beauties in the body of English plays (1724). London: Sam. Aris for Thomas Butler. The Shakspere Treasury of Subject Quotations, synonymously indexed (1862). London: Hodson and Son/George Unwin. Viner, Michael and Stefan Rudnicki (2000). Barbs from the Bard: Shakespearean Insults with Modern Translations and Notes. Beverley Hills: New Millennium Press.

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SHAKESPEARE AND BIOGRAPHY David Bevington

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an one learn or surmise anything significant about Shakespeare’s own life from his writings? The film Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998) has recently brought the question into focus, even though – or perhaps especially because – that film deliberately plays fast and loose with what we know about Shakespeare’s life. The film more or less accurately places him in London as a young man, eager to succeed in the theatre, keenly aware of the success of his great rival, Christopher Marlowe. This Shakespeare lives apart from his wife and children, having left them in Stratford. And thereby hangs a tale. This Shakespeare has a glorious affair with a young woman named Viola de Lesseps, after a succession of less romantic trysts with Rosaline and no doubt others. Is there any accuracy in this? We do not know, really, other than the possibly biographical circumstance of an unhappy love relationship with the Dark Lady of the sonnets, and a deeply passionate friendship for a well-born young man whom the sonnets address – a circumstance ignored by the film, interestingly; with so much happy hetero sex to explore in the relationship of Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow, the filmmakers were not about to show their Shakespeare falling in love with the Earl of Southampton. They did not need to, in any case, since the Fiennes–Paltrow relationship itself provides enough cross-dressing (Paltrow as Thomas Kent) and switching of sexual roles in the dialogue that the film is able to play with gender ambiguity without turning to the more disarming relationship portrayed in the sonnets. At any rate, it is not an outrageous guess that Shakespeare had love relationships in London that amounted to a betrayal of his marriage vows. There is even a contemporary story about this – a story that has no evidence to back it up and is inherently suspicious because it is a tale applicable to lots of situations, but nonetheless interesting to anyone curious to speculate if Shakespeare’s wonderful writings about falling in love had any basis in personal experience other than his presumed courtship of Anne Hathaway many years back in time. According to an anecdote related by one Edward Curle, a student at the Middle Temple, to his roommate Sir John Manningham, who jotted the item down in his diary of 1602, Shakespeare happened one day to overhear Richard Burbage making an assignation with a young lady in the theatre audience. Shakespeare took note of the time and place and, proceeding there in advance of the appointment, “was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came”. When a message was sent up to their room that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused a message to be returned that William the Conqueror preceded Richard the Third (Schoenbaum, 1975, 152). Shakespeare in

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Love alludes to this incident, in reverse, as it were, when Shakespeare finds Burbage in bed with Rosaline. The film’s most playful and outrageous suggestion connecting autobiography with Shakespeare’s literary output has to do with the creation of Romeo and Juliet. Here the film imagines, in wonderful detail, that the story of two star-crossed lovers comes to the writer’sblock-suffering Shakespeare in vivid instalments in the form of a series of actual experiences. He crashes a party at the elegant home of Viola’s parents, thinking that he is looking for “Thomas Kent”, and there beholds the lovely Viola in a dance; they touch hands; her kinsmen and the rival wooer are offended. Shakespeare climbs a trellis in an attempt to reach her from the garden behind her house. Filled with the rapture of this dangerous and exciting evening, he scurries back to his digs and writes it all down. One of the great jokes in the film, indeed, is that this Shakespeare gets all his ideas and his memorable phrases from his friends and from Viola, as Ramona Wray also argues in her chapter on Shakespeare and film elsewhere in this volume. “That’s a good title,” he’ll say, when Edward Alleyn suggests Romeo and Juliet instead of Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter. Viola gives him lines verbatim as they make love. Here again, of course, the film is playing adroitly with a common and not inaccurate perception of Shakespeare, that he did borrow unashamedly. He was a magpie, stealing not just plots but words and phrases. Well, then, why not suppose that the plot and characters of Romeo and Juliet came to him in the way the film imagines? The notion that Romeo and Juliet came to Shakespeare through the events of his life is more than just a marvellous joke (and one that is likely to mislead lots of people). It is plausible because that is how we think of fiction in the post-Romantic world. Writing as autobiography is very dominantly the mode of creation with which we are familiar. Yet anyone knowledgeable about the circumstances of Shakespeare’s career will know that the story of Romeo and Juliet came to him from a long narrative poem by Arthur Brooke called The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, written first in Italian by Bandell and now in English by Ar[thur] Br[ooke] (1562, two years before Shakespeare was born). “Bandell” is the Italian Matteo Bandello, whose Novelle of 1554 contained essentially the whole story that Brooke and then Shakespeare borrowed. Behind Bandello were earlier versions by Luigi da Porto (1530), Masuccio of Salerno (1476) and on back to Xenophon’s Ephesiaca of the fifth century ad. The story of Romeo and Juliet was handed to Shakespeare more or less intact. This is not to say that he did not have his own personal reasons for wanting to borrow and magnificently adapt the story, but it does pour cold water on any naive equation of autobiography with writing. The film is aware of its own outrageousness, to be sure, and is in my view a brilliant success. My point here is that it brings into renewed focus the question of what the connection might be between biography and literary oeuvre. The film is, on one level, a fantasy of our desire to know more about Shakespeare the man, and a distinctly modern fantasy that assumes writing to be a form of personal expression. Can one connect the life and the biography, as we are accustomed to do, say, with Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw or James Joyce, not just to satisfy prurient curiosity but to make connections, as Michael Holroyd or Richard Ellmann do, that enable us to understand how great works of literature are generated?1 Two great factors militate against our doing so. First, despite our knowing more about Shakespeare than we do about almost any other writer of the Renaissance, we know very little about his personal life. We have no letters, no record of his feelings about his wife or children or even friends, though it is possible to intuit some sense of his artistic rivalry with Ben Jonson. Second, Shakespeare

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did not transform biographical experiences into art in the way that Joyce or Tolstoy appear to have done. Generally he took stories that others had written and gave them dramatic form. Ever since Keats, the critical fashion has been to credit Shakespeare with an incredible “negative capability” – that is, a protean insight into the lives and emotions of other people.2 Shakespeare did not have to kill a king to write Macbeth or murder his wife to write Othello. He was not an autobiographical writer in the post-Romantic sense, just as Chaucer was not, either. The mode of artistic creation in the late medieval and early modern period was to subsume the self into a great subject rather than living off one’s individual experiences. This is true in the visual arts as well. Indeed, biographical interpretation of Shakespeare’s works earned a bad reputation in the early twentieth century, and for good reasons. Once German philological criticism had done much to straighten out the chronology of Shakespeare’s writing career, nineteenth-century scholars and critics proceeded to analyze that career according to their own Romantic conceptions of art and biography. As Marjorie Garber has shown (1987, 9), they needed to invent a Shakespeare who led a life illustrative of the transcendent status so abundantly manifested in his art.3 Coleridge, appalled at the prospect that the sonnets might reveal something untoward in Shakespeare’s biography and yet caught up in the notion that his writings must be deeply expressive of his own Sturm und Drang, went into contortions arguing that the sonnets celebrate the poet’s love for a young woman, not a young man.4 Elsewhere, scholars like Edward Dowden looked to Shakespeare’s life for clues about the periodization of his career. Why especially did Shakespeare turn to writing tragedies around the time of Julius Caesar (1599) and Hamlet (c. 1601), to be followed in relentless succession by Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, and why did he then turn in the late 1600s to the writing of bittersweet romances like Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest? Was the move toward tragedy triggered by the death of his son Hamnet in 1596 at the age of eleven, or of his father in 1601? Did the death of his brother in Edmund in 1607 have anything to do with this tragic “period” even if too late for most of the plays in that group? The naiveté of these questions is evident in the contradictions one can immediately perceive. The death of Hamnet in 1596 must have been a terrible blow, especially since Hamnet was Shakespeare’s only son, and since the sonnets among his other works suggest an absorption in the whole question of succession by a son; and yet some of Shakespeare’s most poignant depictions of the death of sons (young Talbot in 1 Henry VI, for example, or the father who has killed his son and a son who has killed his father in 3 Henry VI, or the murder of the young princes in Richard III) precede the death of Hamnet by several years. Conversely, the years 1596 and afterward saw Shakespeare writing some of his most successful comedies, like Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, along with the history plays about Prince Hal. These plays hardly seem the product of a man brooding about the death of his son. The presumed shift from tragedy to romance in the late 1600s is no less easy to explain in biographical terms – too easy, in fact. Some criticism in this vein has been excessive enough to give the whole enterprise a black eye.5 Dislike for such biographical interpretation was reinforced, in the 1920s and 1930s and afterward, by the formalist approaches of the so-called New Criticism and the Chicago School. Have we gone too far, however, in dismissing the idea simply because it was so grossly abused? More recently, psychological criticism has managed to broach this complex subject of autobiographical elements in Shakespeare’s writing by noting, first, that his creative

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life does lead through something like the “seven ages” of humankind that Jaques describes in As You Like It. To a significant extent, the plays of the first half of Shakespeare’s career are comedies and history plays – that is, celebrations of falling in love and of entering upon manhood. Shakespeare was in his middle to late twenties or even early thirties as he wrote plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice. His best history plays, which could have made other choices of theme and emphasis, focus on the coming of age of Prince Hal who was to be King Henry V. Moreover, these crucial rites of passage are seen from a decidedly male perspective. The young men in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies are seriously flawed in their inconstancy, in their macho need to prove their manhood (consider how Demetrius and Lysander try to kill each other in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), their debilitating jealousies, their self-destructive impulses to suspect the worst of the women they desire. Typically, they are saved from themselves by the forgiveness of the clever, teasing, yet loyal young women. Does this tell us anything about Shakespeare as a man? Who is to say? Yet it is perhaps significant that concurrently, in the late 1590s, he chose to dramatize the coming to maturity of Prince Hal in a way that stresses the uneasy relationship between a young man and his overbearing father. Hal becomes his father’s son and ultimately internalizes what he has learned from that father, but it is a lesson learned the hard way through rebellion and alienation. Such considerations resonate for us poignantly when we think of the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet in 1596. Moreover, this process of maturation, as Shakespeare tells it, sets aside the pursuit of women almost entirely. Prince Hal has no discernible sex life until, in Henry V, he conquers France and is handed the daughter of the French king on a plate, as it were, as the spoils of war. Male maturation in the romantic comedies of the 1590s often involves a strategy in which the young male protagonist, such as Orlando in As You Like It or Orsino in Twelfth Night, becomes deeply fond of a person he takes to be a young man but who is “in fact” a young woman – actually, a young male actor playing the part of a young woman disguised as a young man. The relationship quickly becomes frankly self-revealing, since young men can, it seems, unburden themselves more easily to one another than to women. The clear implication is that heterosexuality is hazardous to one’s emotional health, especially if one is a male. Women are deliciously desirable, but they are also scary. The romantic solution of Shakespeare’s comedies enables the male to make the trajectory across this hazardous terrain with the least possible pain. A seemingly male friendship, a very loving friendship, ripens into heterosexual love when the “friend” turns out to be biologically female, so that heterosexual union is now physically possible. Meantime, in the history plays, sexual maturation on the part of the male has been achieved by another “safe” route, that is to say, by postponing courtship until the young warrior has earned his spurs and has literally achieved the woman by conquest and mastery. There, if you like, is a composite psychological portrait of love and courtship and male maturation in the plays of Shakespeare’s first decade of writing, more or less. It answers no questions about Shakespeare as a person, but it does invite intriguing questions as to why he chose these topics at this time in his life and why he gave these distinctive “spins” to the purportedly objective narratives he chose to dramatize. What, then, about the later plays, from about 1600 until the time of his retirement in 1613 at the ripe old age of forty-nine? People generally aged more quickly in that era than now, owing in part to bad diet, and the fact that Shakespeare died three or so years later, reportedly in bad health, leaves open the prospect that his late plays might well reflect

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upon the phenomenon of aging. And indeed they do. His characters in the later plays are notably older. Male actors through the centuries have found themselves compelled to traverse the “seven ages of man” in their own careers as Shakespearean actors, portraying Romeo while they are young (David Garrick was an embarrassment when he held on to the role too long), Hamlet and Othello in early middle age, King Lear and Prospero in late years. One thinks of Laurence Olivier in his Shakespearean film career, almost feminine in his beauty as a young Orlando back in the 1930s, then a virile Henry V conquering France and wooing Katharine in 1944, and so on to Richard III and Hamlet and Othello, until, when he was fatally ill with cancer, he chose to be filmed as a very frail and white-headed old King Lear. What is more, the late plays are notably populated by aging males whose wives are unexplainedly absent and who are possessively attached to their daughters. We never learn why Brabantio in Othello, or King Lear, or Prospero, live without spouses, though the implication is that their wives have died. Cymbeline has remarried, but to a cruel and dangerous woman; his first wife, Imogen’s mother, is dead for unexplained reasons. (Women died often in childbirth in all periods of history down to the modern era.) Two other fathers, Pericles in the play named for him and Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, have seemingly lost or destroyed their wives, though the wives are rediscovered at last. In all these situations, the fathers turn for emotional sustenance to a daughter – sometimes in frustrated and jealous disappointment, but usually with ultimate reassurance that the daughter is the great sustaining force for the fathers in their last years of life. These intriguing circumstances invite speculation about the connection between this insistent father–daughter motif and Shakespeare’s own situation as he approached retirement in the late 1600s. Perhaps we can discern a coherent picture of the artist as aging man, living apart from his wife but also contemplating, with trepidation, a retirement that involved a reunion with that wife in Stratford and also with a daughter whom the writer held particularly dear. Some known circumstances of Shakespeare’s life do begin to emerge as relevant at this point. Almost without doubt, Shakespeare had found himself trapped in what we would call a “shotgun” marriage at the age of eighteen. The bishop’s register of Worcester, the central city of the diocese that includes Stratford-upon-Avon, shows for 27 November 1582 the issue of a bishop’s licence for the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. She was eight years his senior; we know this because her tomb, erected when she died in 1623 (seven years after her husband), lists her age at the time of death as sixtyseven. The issuing of this licence was irregular. The marrying couple needed to apply for the right to marry after only one reading of the banns, or announcement of a forthcoming marriage, rather than the normal three. The reading of banns was suspended at certain times of the church year, such as the period of Advent leading up to Christmas, and in this case the young couple were in a hurry. Their first child, Susanna, was born on 26 May of the following year, six months almost to the day after the wedding. We do not know if Shakespeare was the aggressor in the premarital sexual act that led to this hasty marriage and birth, or if he felt trapped by an older woman. We do know that he explores the fraught situation repeatedly in his plays, notably in Measure for Measure, one plot of which hinges on the circumstance of a young woman who has become pregnant before marriage. The mutual guilt of both parties, their uneasiness and resentment about the constraints imposed by law, the question of whether the man or the woman is more morally responsible for such a pregnancy – all is explored with wonderful sensitivity.

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Marriage is seen as the only solution, but marriage is nothing if not problematic in that play. We know too that Shakespeare, after begetting two more children in February of 1585, the twins Judith and Hamnet, then had no more children for the twenty-one remaining years of his nominally married life. Instead, he headed off for London, leaving his family in Stratford. He presumably came home to see them from time to time during breaks in his busy and successful career, and he took care of them handsomely, enabling Susanna and her husband John Hall to buy a fine house when they married in 1607. He seems not to have got on well with Thomas Quiney, who married Judith in 1616, shortly before Shakespeare died. By this time Shakespeare had no living son. Hamnet had died in 1596 at the age of eleven. The feelings of a father who, at about this same time, went to such extraordinary lengths to obtain a coat of arms for his own father can only be imagined. Shakespeare’s last will and testament names his wife Anne solely as the recipient of his “second best bed” – a circumstance that sounds churlish, and indeed may well have been so, according to recent examinations of comparable wills during the period (Honigmann, 1991). To be sure, Anne was comfortably provided for by common law assurances, but Shakespeare appears not to have gone out of his way to honour her as his wife. A number of dramatic situations in the late plays deserve our special consideration in view of what we know about the biographical facts. In Pericles, one of the late romances of somewhat uncertain date, the title figure flees from marriage with the daughter of the wicked King Antiochus once he surmises that king and daughter are incestuous lovers, and subsequently finds happiness in the court of King Simonides and his virtuous daughter, Thaisa. He is soon obliged to take a sea voyage, during which Thaisa dies in giving birth to a daughter and has to be jettisoned overboard to satisfy the sailors’ superstitious belief that the sea will not calm itself “till the ship be cleared of the dead” (ll. 48–9). The daughter, Marina, is then left (for insufficiently explained reasons) with Cleon, the governor of Tarsus, and his evil queen, an archetypal wicked stepmother. Only years later are father and daughter reunited, at which point, directed by the goddess Diana, they journey to Diana’s temple at Ephesus to find Thaisa living after all. The family is rejoined, thereby concluding a fantasy that seems strikingly relevant to the circumstances of Shakespeare’s own separation from his family and the prospect, in the late 1600s, of a more enduring reunion after his retirement. Pericles is based, like most of Shakespeare’s plays, on sources that provide the essential narrative (in this case John Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Laurence Twine’s The Pattern of Painful Adventures), but we still need to ask why the author chose to dramatize this particular story at this juncture in his life. The fantasy thus created is patently one that idealizes the circumstances of Shakespeare’s own life. The wife is not callously abandoned, since Pericles throws her overboard only in a crisis situation. Yet to many students of the play, Pericles is not a blameless hero, and he did throw overboard the body of his wife. The deep depression and near madness from which he is recovered (like King Lear) only by the ministrations of his precious daughter bespeak an ambivalence and guilt for which the story provides no objective correlative. One explanation of Pericles’ catatonic grieving may lurk in the play’s suggestive treatment of incest. Pericles has fled the incestuous court of Antiochus and has found marital happiness with a woman who is the very opposite of Antiochus’ daughter. Thaisa enjoys a warm and trusting relationship with her father, Simonides, who (like Prospero in The Tempest) seems entirely ready to see his daughter marry the right man of her choice.

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Simonides resolves the potentially incestuous bond of father and daughter. What about Pericles himself, though? Are we not invited to think of his deep depression as resulting from an incomplete and yet-to-be-worked-out relationship with his daughter, compounded by the anxiety of his having consented to the throwing overboard of his wife during the storm? Thaisa’s not being dead intensifies, at least for us, the puzzle of Pericles: why has he abandoned his wife, and what is his relationship with Marina going to be like? All is put back together by a happy ending, to be sure, in which the beloved daughter, reclaimed first, provides the pathway back to the recovery of a wife who was seemingly lost forever, and yet the journey toward that happiness has been fraught with difficulties that are both external and internal. And through it all, we sense a correspondence of some sort to the situation in Shakespeare’s own life. Does the agony through which Pericles must go suggest a kind of dream work in which the author uses fiction as a way of meditating on the guilt of a husband who feels that he may not deserve the happy second chance that the story has in waiting for him? In Cymbeline, the king is not wifeless, though Imogen’s own true mother is evidently dead. This apparent exception (a living wife) proves the rule as evidenced in the late romances, for Cymbeline’s queen is a stereotypical wicked stepmother out of fairy tale. She is worse than no mother at all to Imogen, and she is shown at the last to be planning to poison her husband. The fictional stratagem of providing the father with such a wife and the young heroine with such a mother is ultimately to intensify the father–daughter bond. At first, of course, the wicked stepmother queen succeeds in her sinister plotting. Her desire to marry her witless and brutal son Cloten to Imogen sets in motion the conflict that the play must resolve. Imogen’s husband, Posthumus Leonatus, is driven into exile because of royal disfavour, while the daughter is in disgrace. Yet these obstacles are there to be overcome and to intensify the happy resolution once it is reached. The tragicomic formula is Cymbeline’s version of the estrangement and separation between father and daughter that leads finally to reconciliation. The wife, in this version, is irrecoverably evil. She is scapegoated. Folklorists would say that she represents the hated wife and mother, transmuted into a stepmother through a process of psychological expurgation or displacement; the story attacks not the true mother but her debased and frightening counterpart. Folk tales usually see such a story from the point of view of the child; Cymbeline also sees it from the point of view of the father. The queen is the problem here, poisoning the relationship of father and daughter. Once she is belatedly exposed and removed from the story, father and daughter can understand each other once again. The son-in-law, Posthumus, can now be happily incorporated into a harmonious triad of father, daughter and a newly recovered son. This triad recalls that of Simonides, Thaisa and Pericles, and it manifestly anticipates the happy ending of The Tempest. We must be careful not to claim too much here by way of correlation with Shakespeare’s own biography, about which we know so little. To suppose that the portrait of the stepmother queen is a projection of Shakespeare’s feelings about Anne would be unwarranted. Nor can we feel confident in pointing to the possible resemblances between the play’s fictional triad of father, daughter and son-in-law with what we know of Shakespeare’s relationship to Susanna and John Hall. We simply do not know whether or not Shakespeare got along well with his son-in-law and felt good about that marriage. We can say, nonetheless, that after having explored in Pericles a narrative of recovering a wife whom the father has abandoned, and of a reunion with a daughter after long years of separation, Cymbeline

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experiments with a story in which the mother is more than superfluous; she is part of the problem. In her place, Cymbeline eventually finds comfort in his recovered daughter and her husband. We do not know if this narrative corresponds to the biographical facts in any direct way. We do see that Shakespeare is interested in the personal dimensions of the story. When Shakespeare turns to Robert Greene’s Pandosto for the story that becomes The Winter’s Tale, written in 1610 or 1611, he adds a new twist to basically the same story of the recovered wife, and does so in ways that suggest a strong artistic intent in refashioning his prose source. First of all, the guilt of the husband is more openly acknowledged than in Pericles. The wife, Hermione, is no wicked stepmother; on the contrary, she is radiantly beautiful and virtuous, another Desdemona or Thaisa. King Leontes comes to realize that he has wrongly accused her of adultery with his best friend, Polixenes. Haunted at first by jealousy and guilt, left with only a single daughter after the death of his only son (compare the death of Hamnet), whose sudden demise is a token of divine anger toward the king, Leontes threatens to kill his newborn daughter but instead orders her abandoned on a foreign shore, thus leaving open the possibility of her eventual restoration to him. Yet Hermione is dead, of grief and shame – or so it appears. The play strongly leads us to believe that she is dead, for her spirit appears in a dream to the hapless courtier (Antigonus) who is instructed to abandon the child to the elements (3.3.14ff.). Only at the very end, as though by miracle, a statue of Hermione that her lady-in-waiting Paulina has sequestered for some sixteen years is made to come to life again. Crucially, for the thesis of this chapter, Hermione has aged; she is the Hermione whom Leontes cruelly abandoned years earlier, older but still beautiful to him now that he finds her again. Like Pygmalion, who prayed to Aphrodite to give him a wife resembling the beautiful statue he has created, Leontes falls in love once again with his wife. This narrative follows its predecessors, in Pericles and Cymbeline, in imagining what it would be like to lose a wife and daughter and then recover them at last. The difference here is that the blame is more direct and terrible. Leontes believes that he has killed both wife and daughter, and that his son too has died as a consequence of his acts. His prolonged sixteen-year agony of remorse, presided over by his stern taskmistress Paulina with his urgent request that she never let him forget the gravity of his crimes, is implausible psychologically (no one can really be that sorry for that long) but is symbolically meaningful. The process is one of penance, and at length the contrition has its reward. The father is forgiven in good part because he has been so genuinely sorry. The daughter is now fullgrown and handsome, like the woman that Leontes once loved and married. Hermione has aged, and so has Leontes; after the nightmare of his attempt to destroy her (Othello with a happy ending), they are back together. He loves her as though the passage of time had made no difference in their affection, even if it has aged their bodies. The fantasy of the recovered wife and daughter in this version seems irresistibly close to what we can imagine to have been Shakespeare’s situation. This is not to say, of course, that he ever showed any violent antipathy against Anne, or threatened her, or anything of the sort. It is to wonder if the author is not using this narrative to meditate on a husband’s guilty feelings at living apart from his family. It is to wonder if that husband feels that the loss of his only son must somehow be his fault, a kind of punishment that the heavens wish to inflict on him. These are very like the emotions that another troubled father, Henry IV, feels when he confronts his wayward son Hal, in a play seemingly written right around the time of Hamnet’s death: is God punishing the father in his son for “some displeasing

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service I have done” (1 Henry IV, 3.2.5–7)? Hal is not dead, of course, but the idea of a “revengement and a scourge” is much the same. Leontes has a lot to answer for. Can we suppose that Shakespeare finds Leontes’ guilty broodings useful to him as a way of working through his own thoughts about retirement to Stratford? Most of all, is Shakespeare wondering if a person in his situation might find comfort in a reunion with his wife after so many years? If The Tempest can be read as a sequel and finale in this succession of plays about fathers, mothers, daughters and sons-in-law, then the disappearance of the mother must come as something of a disappointment, even a shock. Prospero’s wife is mentioned only once, as a “piece of virtue” who assured Prospero long ago that Miranda is indeed daughter to them both (1.2.56–7). Even this detail is troubling, for it suggests, if only jocosely, that fathers can never be entirely sure who sired the children bred in the wife’s womb. In any event, the fictional proposition of this play is that a father and daughter have lived together on an island for twelve years with no mother in the family. Prospero has been father and mother to Miranda. She is his creation and his companion. This tight-knit nuclear family, sans mother, has included another child of a sort for many of those years. Caliban is the native-born son of a witch. He is banished into servitude when he comes of age and attempts to rape Miranda. In terms of the paradigm we have been following, Caliban is the candidate for son-in-law who most definitely will not do. His approach to sexuality is, from the point of view of father and daughter, animalistic. Caliban is, then, a kind of alter ego and failed precursor for Ferdinand, who arrives when Miranda is of age, though barely so, it seems: she and Prospero have been on the island only twelve years, and she was an infant when they were set adrift in a boat. She is another Juliet, evidently, somewhere between fourteen and fifteen years old. Ferdinand is the ideal candidate to fill out the trio of father, daughter and son-in-law. He is Prospero’s choice, though Miranda does not know this; she falls in love with him, and he with her, as though it were entirely a matter of their own volition. The marriage is parentally arranged, and partly for political reasons; through the coupling of the happy pair, Milan and Naples will be at last united. At the same time the marriage is one of romantic happiness and fulfilment. Most of all, for our purposes here, the match provides Prospero with a young man to whom he can relinquish his daughter, thus resolving the riddle of incest that has hovered over the late romances. Prospero is another Simonides. Ferdinand, for his part, is enchanted at the prospect not only of marrying Miranda but of having Prospero for his father-in-law. “Let me live here forever!” he exclaims. “So rare a wondered father and a wife / Makes this place paradise” (4.1.122–4).6 What father could resist the warmth of that endorsement from his prospective son-inlaw? The comfort of this moment cannot have failed to mean something to Shakespeare. Again, we do not know what his relationship to John Hall was really like. Nor do we know if there is any reliable basis for the continued appearance in these late plays of a single beloved daughter rather than two. Judith did not marry until 1616, and Shakespeare seems to have quarrelled with her husband Thomas Quiney, but we cannot and need not assume that family difficulties of this presumed sort lie at the back of Shakespeare’s consistently admiring portrayal of a single daughter in Desdemona, Cordelia, Marina, Imogen, Hermione and Miranda. We can say that the configuration of father, daughter and son-in-law in The Tempest is the culmination of a process of a fictionalized search, in the late plays, for an ideal family. The play imagines a situation that should appeal to any father thinking about the marriage of a favourite daughter. And we can worry about the

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disappearance of the mother, the wife, in this last of the four late romances. Perhaps that second best bed is a bad sign after all.

Notes 1. For example, Holroyd, 1988–92; Ellmann, 1982 and 1988. Ellman has also written about Yeats. 2. In Keats’ own words, in a letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 December 1817, “negative capability” is a quality “which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean . . . when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats, 1935, 72). It is widely applied today in literary criticism to mean an ability to see things from other people’s points of view. 3. Garber is quoted by Wheeler (2000) in an article to which I am particularly indebted in this chapter. See also Wheeler, 1981. 4. Coleridge’s Table Talk is quoted in Stallybrass, 1993, 91–104. 5. Wheeler (2000) cites the instance of Bernhard Ten Brink, Five Lectures on Shakespeare (New York: Holt, 1895). 6. The textual debate as to whether the word in the First Folio printing is “wife” or “wise” with a tall “s” does not really change the implications for a biographical reading: in either case, Ferdinand seems enchanted with the prospect of joining this new family triad of father, daughter and son-in-law.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Dowden, Edward (1906). Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, 13th edn. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner. Ellmann, Richard (1982). James Joyce, rev. edn. New York: Oxford University Press. ——(1988). Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf. Garber, Marjorie (1987). Shakespeare’s Ghostwriters: Literature as Uncanny Causality. New York and London: Methuen. Holroyd, Michael (1988–92). Bernard Shaw. New York: Random House, 4 vols. Honigmann, E. A. J. (1991). “Shakespeare’s Second Best Bed”. New York Review of Books, 7 November, 30. Keats, John (1935). The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schoenbaum, Samuel (1975). William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare in Love (1998), dir. John Madden, with screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. Stallybrass, Peter (1993). “Editing as Cultural Formation: The Sexing of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”. Modern Language Quarterly 54.1, 91–104. Wheeler, Richard (1981). Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and CounterTurn. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——(2000). “Deaths in the Family: The Loss of a Son and the Rise of Shakespearean Comedy”. Shakespeare Quarterly 51.2, 127–53.

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7

SHAKESPEARE AND EARLY MODERN MUSIC Christopher R. Wilson

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his essay examines the relationship between the music and songs of Shakespeare’s plays and early modern music and musical practice. Music for Shakespeare meant performed songs and instrumental cues, and musical terms used as symbolic reference and metaphor. Very little music survives that can be identified with a first or early production but dramatic context and descriptors usually provide sufficient information on the type of music required. In Twelfth Night, for example, we know that a catch is performed by Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Feste when Sir Toby asks: “Shall we rouse the night-owl in a catch that will draw three souls out of one weaver?” (2.3.53–5). The stage direction “catch” (2.3.64) indicates that the catch was actually sung. Shakespeare even gives clues in the text as to what catches might be appropriate: he cites “Hold thy peace, thou knave” for which two early sources and one contemporary variant survive (Duffin, 2004, 200–2). It is not possible to determine which was used nor is it essential. Too literal performances in modern productions sound stilted in any case. What is important is to know how Elizabethan catches were rendered and why. Whilst the term is found applied more loosely to other kinds of songs including rounds and canons, in its strict sense it has specific application. It is a short song, normally for three or four voices, which follow each other in imitation at the unison or octave. The catch is not a sophisticated art song; it is intended to sound spontaneous, indulgent and fun for the performers, not necessarily the listeners. It was the preserve of male society of various social groups. Its rendition was often crude and its words tended towards bawdy innuendo, detested by Puritans. Clearly, this specific kind is the one Shakespeare intended rather than the “round” which generally eschewed bawdy and the “canon” with its more sophisticated musical technique. Presumably, Shakespeare intends the same specificity of performance and context when Caliban in The Tempest asks Stefano “Will you troll the catch / You taught me but while-ere?” (3.2.112–13). As David Lindley contends, “the musical nature of the ‘catch’ . . . is symbolically appropriate for a conspiratorial combination [Stefano, Trinculo, Caliban]. The unaccompanied, proletarian song stands for that which opposes Prospero’s harmonious purposes” (Lindley, 2002, 20). The most prominent forms of vocal art music in England in the 1590s and early 1600s were the madrigal and the ayre. There are no performed madrigals in Shakespeare’s plays and only one reference, in The Merry Wives of Windsor (3.1.14). The reason probably relates to the essential art music characteristic of the madrigal. The words are intended as a vehicle for musical representation and their collective sense, as a poem, is of secondary

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importance. Madrigals were composed for three to six voices, the norm being five voices involving soprano, alto, tenor and bass pitches. Such a performative prerequisite would not be practicable on the Elizabethan stage. Moreover, madrigals were intended as domestic music for adult singers of reasonable accomplishment. Shakespeare’s company contained at best one recognized adult singer and no females. The ayre became established in England following the publication of John Dowland’s The First Booke of Songes or Ayres . . . with Tablature for the Lute in 1597, although manuscript sources indicate that it was a separately identifiable genre in England from the 1560s. Ayres or lute songs were characterized by a melodic solo line for voice with instrumental (typically lute) accompaniment. Because of its texture, and because there is little repetition or melisma, the words of an ayre are more accessible to the listener than the performer-oriented madrigal, and therefore more suited to dramatic context. Consequently, a number of ayres are performed on-stage by various protagonists as part of the continuing action. In Much Ado About Nothing, a solo song or ayre, “Sigh no more, ladies” (2.3.56), prefigures the potential mix-up about to be enacted, as Benedick ironically observes immediately before the song: “Now, divine air! Now is his [Claudio’s] soul ravished. Is it not strange that sheep’s guts [i.e. lute or viol strings] should hale souls out of men’s bodies? Well, a horn for my money, when all’s done” (2.3.53–5). Balthasar’s song urges the ladies to take their love-making less solemnly. The stage direction in the 1600 Quarto has “Enter prince, Leonato, Claudio, Musicke” (2.3.31) and six lines later, “Enter Balthaser [sic] with musicke” (2.3.37). In the First Folio, the second stage direction is omitted and the name “Iacke Wilson” is substituted for “Musicke”, suggesting the identity of an actor-singer who played the role sometime before 1623, although he is not included in the list of “Principall Actors” in the prefatory material in the First Folio. Several commentators (such as Long, 1955, 132; Sternfeld, 1967, 107; Lindley, 2006, 176) link Balthasar’s song with a contemporary setting by Thomas Ford (c. 1580–1648) which survives only in manuscript (Oxford, Christ Church MSS 736–8). Whilst Ford published a collection of ayres and instrumental duets in 1607 (Musicke of Sundrie Kindes), his “Sigh no more, ladies” is in a post-1625 musical style and for three voices, not one as needed in the play. Moreover, Ford’s text is significantly divergent. Much closer to a pre-existent lute ayre is Sir Toby’s allusion to Robert Jones’ “Farewell dear love, since thou wilt needs be gone” in his The First Booke of Songes & Ayres (1600). Sir Toby and Feste between them render a version of Jones’ ayre in dialogue form – a type not uncommon in contemporaneous publications of ayres – alternating lines with interspersed dialogue from Maria and Malvolio, and conflating stanza one and two with necessarily altered words to fit. Both this ayre and “Sigh no more” point up one side of Shakespeare’s use of pre-existent song; his adaptation of suitable ayres from a variety of sources rather than writing new words himself. In several instances in Shakespeare, and many in Elizabethan plays, the texts of (preexistent) songs are missing, either because of printing problems, commercial restrictions or, as Sternfeld (1967, 22) surmises, “where the text of a song was not given . . . any song would do”. “Blank” or “lost” songs are not always clearly identifiable. In Shakespeare there are at least six that can be located. At the beginning of Act 3 of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Armado urges his boy servant, Mote, to “Warble, child; make passionate my sense of hearing” (3.1.1). Mote’s response, according to the text, is the seemingly meaningless “Concolinel” to which Armado remarks, “Sweet air”, that is “pleasing tune or song”. Clearly something (a song?) designated “Concolinel” has been sung. To date this has not

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been identified.1 In 1 Henry IV, the stage direction “Here the lady sings a Welsh song” (3.1.240) is unequivocal, yet no text is given. Lost songs are alluded to in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pericles and Macbeth. Were it not for the 1623 Folio, the famous “Willow Song” in Othello (4.3) would also have been “lost”. The 1622 Quarto has the stage direction, “Desdemona sings” (4.3.38), but no text is given for the song after she has lamented, several lines earlier, that “My mother had a maid called Barbary . . . She had a song of willow . . . she died singing it” (4.3.25–9). The use of song as interjected distraction or entertainment is rare in Shakespeare. In As You Like It, the ayre “It was a lover and his lass” (5.3.14) serves as a musical interlude. The dramatic flow pauses and the pages sing four stanzas of the ayre. A contemporary version survives in a unique copy of Thomas Morley’s The First Booke Of Ayres, Or Little Short Songs (1600), now housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Apart from a few minor textual variants in stanzas one and four, the versions are the same. It is not clear whether Morley used Shakespeare’s text or if Shakespeare conveniently incorporated Morley’s ayre.2 But given Shakespeare’s apparent practice elsewhere, it is likely that the latter was the case. The song is a typical strophic light ayre of the period. No indication is given on how the song was performed but with Morley’s music there is scope for an imaginative rendition by the two pages. Modern scholars contend that near contemporary settings of composed songs exist for two songs in The Tempest.3 A version for voice alone of “Full fathom five thy father lies” (1.2.400) in what seems a hybrid (lute) ayre and continuo song style (i.e. post 1620) survives in two later seventeenth-century sources (John Wilson, Cheerfull Ayres, 1659; Birmingham City Reference Library, MS 57316) ascribed to Robert Johnson (c. 1583– 1633). Robert Johnson was the son of the professional Elizabethan lutenist, John Johnson (d. 1594). From 1596 to 1603, he was a member of the household of George Carey, the Lord Chamberlain, and afterwards associated with the King’s Men. There are no significant textual variants between the music sources and the folio. It is likely, therefore, that Robert Johnson’s song is contemporaneous but not necessarily the one Shakespeare intended. Howell Chickering’s close analytical reading of Johnson’s music (1994, 158) therefore may not be appropriate. The other song is “Where the bee sucks, there suck I” (5.1.88) which survives in several sources. In Oxford, Bodleian MS Don.c.57, it is attributed to John Wilson, as it is in John Playford’s Select Ayres and Dialogues (1659) and also in his Catch that Catch can: Or the Musical Companion (1667). Folger Library MS V.a.411 is thought to be scribed by Playford where the song in a three-part version is ascribed to Dr Wilson. In the Birmingham Library MS 57316, Robert Johnson’s name is signed in, and in Wilson’s Cheerfull Ayres (1660), Johnson is also the named composer. Like “Full fathom five”, the music style with its phrasal regularity and (implied) harmonic simplicity suggest a post-1620 date of writing. “Full fathom five” includes directions for a burden (“exit”) in the text and extra “small” notes in the Birmingham manuscript. It is not certain how the song was performed but the musical intricacies in this song and others in The Tempest may reflect the increased musical resources available to the King’s Men at the indoor Blackfriars theatre that they used from 1608. One of the significant musical attributes of the Blackfriars, inherited from the children’s companies, was the availability of the mixed consort, a group of professional court musicians playing lute, bandora, bass viol, cittern, treble-viol and flute (either transverse flute or recorder). This was the combination for which Morley published his Consort Lessons (1599) and Rosseter, a theatre musician, his Lessons for Consort (1609). It was

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the mixed consort that played the inter-act music whilst the candles were renewed in the indoor theatre. Inter-act music spread to the outdoor theatre after 1610. The extra musical resources at the Blackfriars theatre may well account for the more ambitious theatricality of The Tempest, especially the inclusion of the masque scene (4.1). The masque genre developed, without any fixed form, in the first decade of the seventeenth century, after the accession of James I. It was essentially a multi-media genre, involving dance, music, visual spectacle and, to a lesser extent, poetry – although Ben Jonson vehemently defended the importance of the words in his “Expostulation with Inigo Jones” (1622). The Jacobean masque was an opportunity for ostentatious courtly display, as Norfolk observes in Henry VIII, commenting at first hand on the entertainments for Henry’s visit to France in which the masque on the first night was upstaged by that on the second: Now this masque Was cried incomparable, and th’ensuing night Made it a fool and beggar. The two kings Equal in lustre, were now best, now worst, As presence did present them. (1.1.26–30) The masque was an expensive, lavish, one-night-only courtly entertainment in which the most significant element was the entries of the masquers – noblemen and/or ladies in costume or disguises. In most courtly masques there were three main masquers’ entries articulated by music (entries, dances and songs). After the third entry, the formal masque was dissolved by the more extensive “revels” or social dancing when the masquers danced with members of the invited audience in a variety of less stylized dances, usually galliards, measures and corantos. The evening concluded with a song of farewell and a final dance. From 1609, courtly masques often began with an antimasque as a contrast in theme and presentation to the main masque. It was performed by professional actor-dancers and served to emphasize the entry of the main masque in its signification of “the resolution or dispersal of the ‘antic’ prelude” (Wilson and Calore, 2005, 265). The masque episode in The Tempest is, as Lindley purports, not “an example of the court masque, but a partial representation of it” (Lindley, 2002, 16). Its allegory is uncomplicated and its emblem apposite, as he points out: Its deities are chosen to celebrate elemental concord. Iris, the ‘watery’ goddess of the rainbow, brings down Ceres, goddess of the earth, and introduces Juno, goddess of the air and patroness of marriage, and the subsequent dance of the fiery reapers and watery naiads enacts the fusion of male heat and female coldness in the ideal temperate marriage. (13) In fact, the masque episode printed in the folio may well not be the one originally intended by Shakespeare but a substitute for a second court performance, possibly at the marriage festivities for Princess Elizabeth and Frederick, the Elector Palatine in 1613, as Irwin Smith argued (Smith, 1970, 213–22). Antimasque characteristics, Lindley contends, are to be found elsewhere in “the fabric and design of the play” (Lindley, 2002, 15). The entry of the “shapes” (3.3.19), accompanied by “marvellous sweet music” as they bring in the banquet, may function as a quasi-antimasque. The early seventeenth-century relevance and signification of the courtly masque are crucial for a contemporary account of The Tempest. Later generations have found the interpolation of the masque problematic and

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have substituted alternative, less emblematic, entertainment. The influence of the masque and masque episodes are also found in other late plays, including The Winter’s Tale, Pericles and Timon of Athens. The increased use of music cues, songs and other musical devices in the post-1600 plays may reflect changing tastes in theatre and court music, but instrumental cues and performed music were integral throughout Shakespeare’s theatre career. The physical sound of instruments in Shakespeare’s theatre had two functions: one to accompany entrances and exits, the second to add symbolic significance. The most common instrument in the outdoor theatre was the trumpet. Trumpets, placed in the hut above the stage cover – according to a drawing of the Swan theatre by the Dutchman Johannes de Witt – were sounded three times to announce the impending start of a play. This practice is confirmed by stage directions and dialogue in contemporary plays such as Ben Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humour (1600). Trumpets signalled the arrival on stage of a person of rank. This was standard practice in the histories and tragedies, but is found in the comedies as well. A “flourish” accompanies the entry of Duke Frederick, with his Lords, Orlando and Charles his wrestler in As You Like It (1.2.121.SD). Parodying this practice, “Flourish trumpets” marks Quince’s entry as the Prologue in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.107.SD). Sometimes hoboys were used with or replaced trumpets. At the opening of 2 Henry VI, the stage direction indicates a “flourish of trumpets, then hautboys. Enter, at one door, King Henry . . . Enter, at the other door, the Duke of York”. The differentiation in sound may have a hierarchical significance. In Hamlet (3.2.122.SD) the folio direction “Hoboyes play” replaces the quarto “The trumpets sound” as the dumb show enters before the Mousetrap. In the First Quarto of Titus Andronicus (1594), as Titus is about to serve Tamora a pie containing her dead sons, the stage direction indicates “Trumpets sounding, a table brought in. Enter Titus like a cook, placing the dishes” (K2r). In the folio (5.3.25.SD), hoboys replace trumpets, following the convention that hoboys usually accompany banquets, as in Timon of Athens (1.2.SD): “Hautboys playing loud music. A great banquet served in; and then enter Timon”. Indoor and private theatres preferred the smaller, mellower cornett to the brazen din of the trumpet. Increased occurrences of stage directions specifying cornetts in post-1600 plays attest to this. In Shakespeare’s plays, only the folio edition identifies cornetts. In The Merchant of Venice, for example, when the Prince of Morocco makes his first entry, the stage direction reads: “Enter Morochus a tawnie Moore all in white, and three or foure followers accordingly, with Portia, Nerissa, and their traine. Flourish Cornets” (2.1.SD). The earlier quartos (Q1, 1600; Q2, 1619) do not mention cornetts. It could well be that cornetts were not used in the first performances at the Globe and that the 1623 folio edition derives, as Frances Shirley argues, from a later revival or indoor theatre production (Shirley, 1963, 75). John S. Manifold’s theory, based on stage directions in Coriolanus (which indicate cornetts for senators), that cornetts were sounded “to distinguish minor dignitaries . . . the trumpets distinguish royalty and major dignitaries” (Manifold, 1956, 49) does not seem to have taken into account the differing performing conditions in early seventeenth-century theatres. The use of trumpets, hoboys, cornetts and other instruments as auditory cue signifiers is standard theatrical practice, which was as much understood in Elizabethan times as it is today. The use of trumpet signals as symbolic signifiers would not be meaningful today but would be immediately recognized in contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s plays. Royalty and high-ranking military persons could be identified by their own trumpet signals. When Othello arrives in Cyprus, trumpets sound. Iago immediately knows who it

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is, ends his conniving aside, and announces: “The Moor – I know his trumpet” (2.1.177). In Titus Andronicus, a special trumpet signal identifies Saturninus the emperor, as Lucius confirms: “[Flourish] The trumpets show the Emperor is at hand” (5.3.16). In Shakespeare’s day, the trumpet was not an art music instrument; it was a military and civic signalling instrument. As a military instrument it had specific signals. These had vital significance, as Gervase Markham (1568–1637) affirms in his The Souldiers Accidence, or an Introduction into Military Discipline: The first and last Lesson belonging unto the Horse-troope, is to teach the Souldier the Sounds and Commands of the Trumpet, and to make him both understand the Notes and Language of the Trumpet, as also in due time to performe all those duties and Commands, which are required by the Trumpet. (Markham, 1625, 100) It is evident that a contemporary audience would be able to identify the various signals; why else would Shakespeare specify them? The “Cavalry March” or tucket was one such signal. Shakespeare uses the term “tucket” more than any other early modern playwright. As Dessen and Thomson note in their Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642: “of the roughly twenty signals for a tucket many are in the Shakespeare canon” (Dessen and Thompson, 1999, 239). A correct military application is found in Henry V as the Constable urges the French cavalry to battle before Agincourt: Then let the trumpets sound The tucket sonance and the note to mount, For our approach shall so much dare the field That England shall couch down in fear and yield. (4.2.34–7) In fact, this is the only use of the term by Shakespeare in dialogue. It occurs elsewhere as a sound directive. Individual tuckets also help to identify certain characters. In the folio version of The Tragedy of King Lear, a tucket specifically announces the entry of the Duke of Cornwall (2.1.77.SD) and a little later, Goneril (2.2.347.SD): “Tucket within What trumpet’s that? / I know’t, my sister’s.” The tuckets are not specified in the 1607–8 First Quarto. Similarly, in the folio The Merchant of Venice, a tucket sounds the arrival of Bassanio, as Lorenzo reminds Portia: “Your husband is at hand. I hear his trumpet” (5.1.121). This musical sound effect is not specified in the earlier quartos. More exclusive than the tucket is the sennet. It was reserved for kings and emperors, and occasionally for princes and victorious generals. Except for one instance (Q1 King Lear), all cues for sennets appear in the folio. In that edition, the more generic term “trumpet” of the earlier quarto is replaced by “sennet”, as for example in Richard III: “Sound a sennet. Enter [King] Richard in pomp, Buckingham, Catesby, other nobles” (4.2.SD). Arguably, Shakespeare’s use of “sennet” shows an awareness of the arrival in England of new Italian trumpet music during the early seventeenth century which coincides with the increased employment of professional players in Shakespearean theatres. If the trumpet is associated with the cavalry in Elizabethan times, then according to contemporary accounts, the drum is connected with the infantry. Contrary to our modern perception, Paul Jorgensen argues that “the drum, rather curiously in view of modern standards, was a more precise as well as a more connotative military instrument than the trumpet” (Jorgensen, 1956, 24). Often, Shakespeare will indicate “drum and colours” (i.e. drummer and colours bearer) to accompany soldiers on stage to represent a march-

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ing army. The impending battle between the French and British armies in the folio of King Lear is prepared for in the stage direction, “Enter with drum and colours, Cordelia, Gentlemen, and soldiers” (4.3.SD). A messenger announces to Cordelia that “The British powers are marching hitherward” (4.3.21). After the entry of the mad Lear, the dialogue quickens; a “drum afar off” reminds the audience of the approaching battle. The reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia intervenes before the battle commences in Act 5: “Enter with drum and colours, Edmond, Regan, gentlemen and soldiers”, followed by the opposing French army led by Cordelia with her father. A drum announces the English victory: “Enter in conquest with drum and colours Edmond; Lear and Cordelia as prisoners” (5.3.SD). The drum has acted as aural prompt structurally through this episode in the play. Shakespeare uses this device elsewhere in his histories and tragedies. If various specific types of drum occur in military contexts, social and domestic situations are linked with the small tabor often played with a pipe by one person. The contrast between war and peace is neatly juxtaposed in Much Ado About Nothing when Benedick belittles Claudio’s propensity for falling in love, thereby observing his fickle moods: “I have known when there was no music with him but the drum and the fife, and now had he rather hear the tabor and pipe” (2.3.12–14). Love for Hero seems to have transformed the brave soldier in Claudio. There are around 2000 references to musical terms in the works of Shakespeare and a wide range of performed types of music, including art songs, popular songs, part songs, improvised songs and instrumental cues, ranging from simple flourishes to composed consort music. The small selection of examples of music in Shakespeare cited above aim to give a snapshot of how Shakespeare incorporated and exploited contemporary practice and kinds. Modern critical accounts of Shakespeare’s use of music have aimed either to locate Shakespeare’s music as reflecting musical theory and practice in Elizabeth society, or as a dramatic structural device, or sometimes both. Two examples, separated by forty years, will suffice. In his recent Arden Critical Companion, David Lindley opts for the first approach in his densely packed and lively discussion: This book is concerned primarily to explore the ways in which music in Shakespeare’s plays might have been comprehended by the audiences at the Globe and Blackfriars theatres . . . It focuses, therefore, on the particularity of musical events – instrumental and vocal – as they occur in the plays, attempting to place them within the period’s wider cultural understanding of music both as a symbol and as something experienced in the world beyond the theatre. (Lindley, 2006, vi) His book does not attempt to “engage with the fascinating musical afterlife that Shakespeare’s plays have engendered” (vi). This is the subject of Julie Sanders’ (2007) intensely wide-ranging study of musical responses to Shakespeare from seventeenthcentury adaptations to twentieth-century diverse media interpretations. Nor does Lindley include any musical examples. Instead we are referred to Ross Duffin (2004) and other sources. Nevertheless, Lindley’s account does include chapters on music education, music philosophy, symbolic music, instrumental cues and dance, mimetic songs and, drawing the argument to a climactic close, a case study of “musical thematics” in Twelfth Night and The Tempest. In contrast, F. W. Sternfeld’s pioneering book (1963) deals essentially with the role of music, derived partly from the author’s experience of providing “authentic” music for H. B. Williams’ post-war productions at Dartmouth College, USA. Following the example

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of Poel, Craig and Granville Barker, and partly also drawing upon Sternfeld’s own rigorous historical approach to musicology, Sternfield’s book proceeds according to what was thought to be Elizabethan practice. The study is divided into two main areas: the role of the songs in the plays and the role of instrumental music. Each chapter has an appendix of music examples of the earliest known settings. As if complementing Sternfeld’s work, Peter J. Seng’s 1967 critical history of the stage songs attempts “to make available to the modern student a chronological history of the textual and analytical criticism of the songs, information about the original or early musical settings when these exist, and a critical examination of the dramatic functions of the songs within the plays” (Seng, 1967, xiii). Since the 1960s, work has progressed on interpreting the role of songs in the plays and more recently the vast subject of musical imagery in both the plays and the poems. The changed emphasis among present-day scholars in regarding the plays as performative objects rather than as just literary texts has influenced musical criticism and has opened up new approaches, or at least the revision of older theories.

Musical References and Imagery In order to chart the full significance of the shift outlined above, it is necessary first to say something about early modern attitudes to music. The meaning and application of the word “music” has never been straightforward. Whilst for many the explanation of the term has seemed unnecessary, throughout the ages writers have been reluctant to define “music” and in their divergence have manifested uncertainty about its significance. The foremost theorist of early modern England, Thomas Morley (1557–1603), hesitatingly remarks that “amongst so many who have written of musicke, I knew not whom to follow in the definition” (Morley, 1597, Annotations to part 1). What he says shortly after indicates that he is aware of several, if not many, possible contemporaneous and historically derived meanings and invites the reader to choose which is preferable: The most auncient of which is by Plato set out in his Theages thus. Musicke (saith he) is a knowledge . . . whereby we may rule a company of singers . . . (or choir) . . . But in his Banquet he giveth this definition. Musick, saith he, is a science of love matters occupied in harmonie and rythmos. (Annotations to part 1) He refers obliquely to the principal medieval source, De Institutione Musica, compiled by the mathematician and philosopher, Severinus Boethius (c. 475–525), and his division of music into two activities relating back to ancient Greece: Boetius distinguisheth and theoricall or speculative musicke he defineth . . . As for the division, Musicke is either speculative or practicall. Speculative is that kinde of musicke which by Mathematical helpes, seeketh out the causes, properties, and natures of soundes by themselves, and compared with others proceeding no further, but content with the onlie contemplation of the Art. Practical is that which teacheth al that may be knowne in songs, eyther for the understanding of other mens, or making of ones owne. (Annotations to part 1) That division is effectively between musical philosophy and music theory, including composition, as expounded in music treatises of the period up to 1630.4 Performed music does not occupy a prominent position in Boethius’ hierarchy; it is referred to in one of the subdivisions of his “speculative” music.

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Whilst Boethius’ five books on “musica” (printed 1491–2) were not widely read in early modern England, his subdivision of speculative music into musica mundana, musica humana and musica instrumentalis continued to have resonance. The first, highest level depends on the concept of an earth-centric cosmos. “World music” was the aural identity of the cosmic order of the heavens, the allegorical harmony of the planets and fixed stars as they rotated and made a sound. This was the “music of the spheres”, as Pericles reminds us: O heavens, bless my girl! But hark, what music? [Celestial music] ················································ But what music? HELICANUS My lord, I hear none. PERICLES None? The music of the spheres. List, my Marina. ················································ Rar’st sounds. Do you not hear? LYSIMACHUS Music, my lord? PERICLES I hear most heav’nly music. It raps me unto list’ning, and thick slumber Hangs upon mine eyelids. Let me rest. (5.1.209–20) Such music has the power to affect, in this case sleep and rest as a preparation for Pericles’ vision of the goddess Diana. A contemporary explanation of how music was produced by the motion of the planets and stars was provided in Dowland’s translation of Andreas Ornithoparcus’ Musice active micrologus (1517), published in 1609: When God . . . had devised to make this world moveable, it was necessary, that he should governe it by some active and moving power, for no bodies but those which have a soul, can move themselves . . . Now that motion is not without sound: for it must needs be that a sound be made of the very wheeling of the Orbes . . . The like sayd Boëtius, how can this quick-moving frame of the world whirle about with a dumb and silent motion? (Ornithoparcus, 1609, 1) The most evocative, and best known, allusion to the music of the spheres metaphor is in Lorenzo’s soothing entreaty to Jessica in the last, romantic scene in The Merchant of Venice: And bring your music forth into the air. How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. (5.1.52–6) There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins. Such harmony is in immortal souls, But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. (5.1.59–64)

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Plato’s vocal sirens are replaced by singing angels, Christianized following the transmission of neo-Platonic theories of music by Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) in his De triplici vita and Epistola de musica, both of which appeared in the Opera omnia published in Basle in 1576. But Shakespeare does not adopt the detail of the myth. The angels do not each occupy one of the spheres (planets), nor together do they sing God’s praises, but rather act as a simile for heavenly music. The conventional reasons why mortals cannot hear the music of the spheres – either that it is too big, too loud or too familiar – are not given here. Instead, as John Hollander suggests, Shakespeare’s “unheard music is related to immortality, and by extension to a prelapsarian condition” (Hollander, 1961, 152). Shakespeare does not enlarge on the metaphor of the harmonizing power of heavenly music; he moves from the cosmos of the imagination to the aural world around us. In order to “awake” Portia, Lorenzo calls for actual music to be performed so that it may “with sweetest touches pierce your mistress ear” (5.1.65). The term “sweet” here links the two concepts. In sixteenth-century musical philosophy, “sweet” refers to consonance, concord and unity of sound. Thus the music of the spheres affects concord by the “touches [i.e. sounds] of sweet harmony”; musicians play a hymn “with sweetest touches”. Recourse to neo-Platonic philosophies of music, the symbolic associations and the power of music to affect idealized human emotion, though commonplace, were outmoded by the end of the sixteenth century. However, the concept and theory of “sweet” music links Boethius’ next subdivision of “speculative” music, musica humana, with the first. Music in humans produces “sweet harmony”, concord and the soul at one with the body: a state of well-being and contentedness both within the person and in relation to the outside world. Boethius called this “temperament” which “unites the incorporeal activity of the reason with the body . . . as it were tempering of high and low sounds into a single consonance”. This musical metaphor is found transmitted in Dowland’s translation of Ornithoparcus in his definition of “Humane Musick”: The Concordance of divers elements in one compound, by which the spirituall nature is ioyned with the body, and the reasonable part is coupled in concord with the unreasonable, which proceedes from the uniting of the body and the soule . . . we loath and abhorre discords, and are delighted when we heare harmonicall concords, because we know there is in our selves the like concord. (Ornithoparcus, 1609, 1) As Shakespeare describes it in The Merchant of Venice: The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. (5.1.82–4) This theory of harmonious music depends on contemporaneous practice of consonance/ dissonance treatment in contrapuntal composition as expounded by the great Gioseffo Zarlino (c. 1517–1590) in his Istitutioni armoniche (Venice, 1558, Lib III) and transmitted to England through Thomas Morley’s treatise A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London, 1597). Consonances were intervals or pitches, which, when sounded together, produced pleasantness; dissonances resulted in harshness and unpleasantness. Most English treatises of the period attempt to differentiate between concords and discords. In The Pathway to Musicke (Anon, 1596), the author states that concords are “sweetly sounding unto the eare” whereas discords are “naturally offending unto the eare” (Pathway, 1596, 39). Morley confirms that concord is “a mixt sound compact of divers

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voices, entring with delight in the eare, and is eyther perfect or unperfect” (Morley, 1597, 70). Discord, he says, is “a mixt sound compact of divers sounds naturallie offending the eare, and therefore commonlie excluded from musicke” (71). Shakespeare invokes the musical opposites, consonance and dissonance, extensively in a large variety of contexts. Shakespeare does not use the terms “consonance” and “dissonance”, even though they appear in contemporary literature. Instead he employs “accord”, “concord”, “concent”, “harmony”, “sweet” and their antonyms “discord”, “jarring”, “harsh”. Music that is “welltuned” or “in tune” as opposed to “out of tune” is similarly concordant not discordant. Sonnet 8 depends on these precepts for its rich musical imagery. The youth, the subject of the poem, shies away from his marital obligations when he contemplates what should be “harmonious music”: If the true concord of well-tuned sounds By unions married do offend thine ear, They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear. (5–8) He will be sad and “un-tuned” if he does not enter into marital bliss. Analogously, the perfect harmony between Desdemona and Othello is disordered by Iago as he “untunes their music”: “O, you are well tuned now, / But I’ll set down the pegs that make this music” (2.1.197–8). By loosening the tuning pegs (of a viol or lute), Iago causes the music to play out of tune. Iago turns the marital union of Desdemona and Othello into discord and destruction. When Othello realizes that Cassio has not been killed his act of murder is “out of tune” because he has managed to destroy only one half of the alleged adulterous relationship (King, 1986, 158): “Then murder’s out of tune. / And sweet revenge grows harsh” (5.2.124–5). Tuning and harmony are both central to the imagery and structure of Othello. The technical aspects of music, its composition and acoustic properties constitute Boethius’ third level, music instrumentalis. For Boethius, the musician not only creates music, s/he knows how it is created in the world order of things. The mathematical rationale of intervals (2:1 for the octave, 3:2 for the fifth, 4:3 for the fourth) deriving from Pythagorean theory demonstrates this principle. For the Elizabethan, the technical elements of music were the rules governing composition starting with the “gamut” or scale and proceeding to making music either through composition or performance. All Elizabethan music treatises introduce the gamut. For example, in The Pathway to Musicke (1596), the author stresses “first of all it is needful for him that will learn to sing truely, to understand his Scale, or (as they commonly call it) the Gamma-vt” (Pathway, 1596, A2r). In The Taming of the Shrew, Hortensio is conventional in urging Bianca to begin with learning her gamut: HORTENSIO Madam, before you touch the instrument To learn the order of my fingering, I must begin with rudiments of art, To teach you gamut in a briefer sort, More pleasant, pithy, and effectual Than hath been taught by any of my trade; And there it is in writing, fairly drawn. [He gives a paper] BIANCA Why, I am past my gamut long ago. HORTENSIO Yet read the gamut of Hortensio.

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BIANCA [reads] ‘Gam-ut I am, the ground of all accord, A – re – to plead Hortensio’s passion. B – mi – Bianca, take him for thy lord, C – fa, ut – that loves with all affection. D – sol, re – one clef, two notes have I, E – la, mi – show pity, or I die.’ Call you this gamut? Tut, I like it not. Old fashions please me best. I am not so nice To change true rules for odd inventions. (3.1.62–79) Bianca’s irritable response suggests she is not impressed by Hortensio’s theoretical approach to music making. In addition to neo-Platonic theories behind the affect of music transmitted primarily through Boethius, Shakespeare draws on other myths deriving from classical antiquity. One of the most current in Renaissance literature and music surrounded the figure of Orpheus, the “Thracian singer”. Sources, in their original or translation, come from Virgil’s Georgics IV and, most importantly for Shakespeare, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, books 10 and 11, as translated by Arthur Golding (1536–1606). In Ovid, the Orphic myth divides into three parts: the descent into Hades to retrieve Eurydice; the divine power of his music; and his violent death at the hands of the Maenads. These three sections are alluded to in turn by Shakespeare: obliquely in Titus Andronicus (2.4.50–1) and in The Rape of Lucrece (552–3) in connection with the desecration of women; in The Merchant of Venice (5.1.78–81), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (3.2.77–80) and Henry VIII (3.1.3) in relation to the power of Orpheus’ music; and evasively in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.48–9), where one of the interludes proposed by Philostrate is “The riot of the tipsy bacchanals, / Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage” only to be rejected by Theseus in his preference for another Ovidian tale from book 4 also found in Golding’s translation: “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisbe, very tragical mirth” (5.1.48–9, 56–7). Allusions and parallels to the Orphic myth are arguably also present in the late romances, notably Cymbeline, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. The soothing power of music in Renaissance philosophy does not depend on the Orpheus myth. It was a commonplace describing music’s ability to cure the troubled mind and assuage melancholy. It was used extensively by Shakespeare. In King Lear, for example, Cordelia pleads that her father will recover from his mental affliction: O you kind gods, Cure this great breach in his abused nature! The untuned and jarring senses, O, wind up Of this child-changed father! (4.7.14–17) The term “jar” or “jarring” is often used in this context, referring to the unpleasant sound made by the strings on an instrument such as a lute or viol when they are out of tune. Cordelia begs that the strings of the instrument be wound up to bring them into tune. One of the only cures for melancholy, usually induced by love sickness, was uplifting music, as Bright affirms: So not onely cheerfull musicke in a generalitie, but such of that kinde as most rejoyseth, is to be sounded in melancholicke eares . . . That contrarilie, which is

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solemne, and still . . . are hurtfull in this case, and serve rather for a disordered rage, and intemperate mirth. (Bright, 1586, 301) In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, merry music is called for to lift Julia’s sad disposition: “Come, we’ll have you merry. I’ll bring you where you / Shall hear music, and see the gentleman that you asked for” (4.2.29–30). Unfortunately, the music does not have the required effect. However, in Measure for Measure, music and the boy’s song lift Mariana’s spirits and dispel her melancholy: I cry you mercy, sir, and well could wish You had not found me here so musical. Let me excuse me, and believe me so: My mirth it much displeased, but pleased my woe. (4.1.10–13) As the (disguised) duke reminds us: “’Tis good; though music oft hath such a charm / To make bad good, and good provoke to harm” (4.1.14–15). So if Shakespeare’s inclusion of Renaissance musical philosophy is extensive, then his recourse to performed music is equally important, either as imagery and reference or as audible adjunct. As we have seen, Shakespeare refers to Renaissance and some medieval instruments of Western art music as well as military and hunting instruments such as trumpets and horns; he cites vocal and instrumental genres of contemporary music and dance; he employs performed music from both art and popular cultures as mimetic and non-mimetic kinds. It is to these last two examples that I now turn. The most significant art-music instruments cited are the lute and the viol. Shakespeare exploits their social and symbolic associations and their physical attributes as imagery and metaphor. The lute was the most popular instrument in Elizabethan England in both domestic amateur and public professional settings. It was used as a solo instrument either to accompany song or to play instrumental pieces; it was also ubiquitous in consorts and larger ensembles. Its characteristic pear shape, steeply angled pegbox or head, and bulbous vaulted back made it visually distinctive. Other features to which Shakespeare alludes are its fretted neck and the six courses of strings – pairs of strings that are plucked by the fingers of the right hand and “stopped” by the fingers of the left. The lute was a versatile instrument capable of playing a large variety of music including popular and courtly dances, vocal and consort music arrangements and a burgeoning idiomatic repertoire of preludes, fantasias and “passemezzi”. The method of low-tension stringing and the use of gut strings gave the lute a relatively soft, almost sensuous sound unmatched by cruder guitar cousins and successors. Players such as Francesco da Milano (1497–1543) and the English John Dowland (1563–1626) enjoyed huge reputations throughout Europe. Dowland is named alongside Spenser in Richard Barnfield’s poem “In Praise of Musique and Poetrie”: If Musique and sweet Poetrie agree, As they must needes (the Sister and the Brother) Then must the Love be great, twixt thee and mee, Because thou lov’st the one, and I the other. Dowland to thee is deare; whose heavenly tuch Upon the Lute, doeth ravish humaine sense: Spenser to mee; whose deepe Conceit is such, As passing all Conceit, needs no defence. (Barnfield, 1598, 1–8)

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Despite his prowess as a player and composer, Dowland was not offered a court post in England until late in his career and would not have performed for Shakespeare productions. Court and theatre lutenists who might have played include John Johnson, Robert Johnson, Francis Cutting, Philip Rosseter, Francis Pilkington, Daniel Bacheler, Robert Jones and Alfonso Ferrabosco (father and son). As Barnfield suggests, it is the ravishing sound of the lute that enraptured listeners and attracted poetical metaphor and imagery. On a philosophical level it could affect emotions, as Proteus tells Thurio in The Two Gentlemen of Verona: For Orpheus’ lute was strung with poets’ sinews, Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones, Make tigers tame, and huge leviathans Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands. (3.2.77–80) The power of music to soothe is also an element of the Orphic myth, especially Orpheus singing and playing the lute. This is confirmed in Henry VIII when Queen Katherine commands one of her lady attendants to sing a lute song in order to assuage her troubled mind: Orpheus with his lute made trees, And the mountain tops that freeze, Bow themselves when he did sing. To his music plants and flowers Ever sprung . . . . . . Everything that heard him play, Even the billows of the sea, Hung their heads, and then lay by. In sweet music is such art, Killing care and grief of heart Fall asleep, or hearing, die. (3.1.3–14) On a sensual level, the music of the lute could ravish the senses, giving delight and pleasure. In 1 Henry IV, Mortimer delights in the charming attributes of Glendower’s daughter: for thy tongue Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penned, Sung by a fair queen in a summer’s bower With ravishing division, to her lute. (3.1.203–6) If in its purest intent the lute symbolizes pleasure and the affect of love, paradoxically in the wrong context it can be associated with lasciviousness and lust. Among other similes, Hal compares Falstaff’s melancholy, his self-pity and love sickness, to “a lover’s lute” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.66). The lute’s representation of vice as opposed to virtue recurs in the opening soliloquy of Richard III, as Richard contemplates his potential to enjoy domestic pleasures following his military exploits: And now – instead of mounting barbèd steeds To fright the soul of fearful adversaries – He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. (1.1.10–13)

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The lute as an emblem of peace as opposed to war, the latter often signified by trumpets and drums, is also implicit here. Similarly, that opposition is invoked when the irascible Katherina smashes the lute over the head of her amorous music teacher, Hortensio: BAPTISTA What, will my daughter prove a good musician? HORTENSIO I think she’ll sooner prove a soldier. Iron may hold with her, but never lutes. BAPTISTA Why then, thou can’st not break her to the lute? HORTENSIO Why no, for she hath broke the lute to me. (2.1.142–6) A broken lute, or even a lute with a snapped string (e.g. in Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors) was a Renaissance symbol of discord and tension. The ability to play the lute and sing, in private, demonstrated grace and high etiquette among Elizabethan ladies. So the fact that Katherina refuses to learn to play the lute confirms her lack of refinement and conformism. In another juxtaposition of peace and war, Shakespeare sets up an intense atmospheric scene involving music. In Julius Caesar, on the eve of the battle of Philippi, Brutus asks his servant (boy) to sing and play “a sleepy tune” (4.2.318) to him in the quiet of the night. The stage direction “music and a song” and the context suggest the mimetic and symbolic appropriateness of a lute song (a text has not been found). The domestic association of the lute contrasts with the violent militariness of the battle about to commence. The distinctive sound and appearance of the viol made it apt for symbolic imagery, in particular social refinement, calm and healing, and sexual innuendo. In Twelfth Night Sir Andrew Aguecheek boasts he can play the “viol de gamboys” as well as speak “three or four languages word for word without book” (1.3.21–3) as a mark of his social standing and education. In 2 Henry IV, the king in his sickbed asks for quiet except that some soft and gentle music be played to sooth his distress: Let there be no noise made, my gentle friends, Unless some dull and favourable hand Will whisper music to my weary spirit. (4.3.133–5) The viol is not mentioned but would be the most suitable instrument or ensemble according to the stage direction “still music”, especially given the slower, smoother type of music it generally played. The curvaceous shape of the body of the viol and its slender neck made it apt for sexual allusion, especially in connection with the female. When Pericles uncovers the incestuous goings on between King Antiochus and his daughter, he disparagingly likens the princess to an immature viol: You’re a fair viol, and your sense the strings Who, fingered to make man his lawful music, Would draw heav’n down and all the gods to hearken, But, being played upon before your time, Hell only danceth at so harsh a chime. Good sooth, I care not for you. (1.1.124–9) Any modern viol maker will attest to the unpleasant sound an unseasoned viol makes. Among the large number of references to medieval and Renaissance instruments, the recorder in Shakespeare deserves some attention. It was a popular instrument among both amateur and professional players, being at one level a relatively simple instrument

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to learn, at another a versatile consort instrument as Jeronimo Bassano’s fantasias of the 1580s confirm. This paradox is described when Hippolyta comments on Quince’s performance of the prologue to the nuptial play, Pyramus and Thisbe, towards the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hippolyta compares Quince’s faltering delivery to a child playing a recorder: “Indeed, he hath played on this prologue like a child / On a recorder – a sound, but not in government” (5.1.122–3). The child can play the notes on the recorder but not with much control or fluency: “in government”. One of the most famous passages referencing the recorder is in Hamlet. After the performance of “The Mousetrap” by the itinerant players, the stage empties leaving Hamlet and Horatio alone to ponder on their world before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enter. At this point, Hamlet calls for some music: “come, the recorders” (3.2.268). Musicians with recorders enter. Hamlet asks Guildenstern if he will “play upon this pipe” (3.2.322) and he says he cannot. Hamlet chides his former school friend and proceeds with a brief and accurate instruction: ’Tis as easy as lying. Govern these ventages [holes] with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most excellent music. Look you, these are the stops. (3.2.329–31) Shakespeare exploits the notion that the recorder is the easiest instrument to learn when he reprimands Guildenstern for presuming to manipulate him: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me. (3.2.334–41) Shakespeare also alludes to the paradoxical qualities of the recorder. Whilst it is a simple instrument to learn it can also play complicated music. If Guildenstern does not know the basics how can he play a difficult piece? In addition to the mainstream Renaissance instruments cited above, Shakespeare alludes to a number of other contemporary and older instruments. Among the latter are the psaltery (a kind of zither) in Coriolanus: “Why, hark you, / The trumpets, sackbuts, psalteries, and fifes, / Tabors and cymbals” (5.4.43–5). Another is the rebec (a kind of bowed lute or fiddle) mentioned in Romeo and Juliet. When the Capulet serving man asked why music had “her silver sound”, the second musician, punningly called Hugh Rebec, replies “because musicians sound for silver” (4.4.155), a reference to professional music groups or minstrels. The rebec was known to be an instrument played by medieval and Renaissance minstrels. The list of contemporary instruments ranges from non-art horns and bagpipes to more sophisticated citterns, virginals and organs. The extent of Shakespeare’s involvement with and engagement of musical terms and instruments reflects the gamut of musical sounds of early modern England.

Music in Theatrical Production Music in Shakespearean production from the sixteenth century to the present has varied between newly composed songs, instrumental cues, pre-curtain and interlude music, to

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the use of pre-existent work. From the later seventeenth century to the early twentieth, Elizabethan music was not regarded as either essential or even relevant, just as the original text and staging conditions were neither commonly observed nor understood. In the early twentieth century, isolated attempts that sowed the seeds of change were made to recreate historically informed productions of Shakespeare, including music. This interest in Elizabethan music coincided with scholarly research and publication of “early music”. We might mention Breitkopf and Härtel’s publication in 1899 of Fuller Maitland and Barclay Squire’s edition of the vast collection of English virginal music preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for long enough erroneously catalogued as “Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal Book”. Significant too were Edward Naylor’s monograph, Shakespeare and Music (London, 1896), and his collection/selection, Shakespeare Music (London, 1913); Francis W. Galpin’s study, Old English Instruments of Music (London, 1910); and the pioneering study of historical performance practice, Arnold Dolmetsch’s The Interpretation of the Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, not published until 1915 but representing work going back to the 1890s. This emphasized the importance of playing music on original or replica instruments including viols, lutes, recorders and keyboard instruments. In 1894, William Poel founded the English Stage Society, a group of meagrely paid actors dedicated to performing Shakespeare plays “in an Elizabethan manner”, restoring original texts and fast-flowing delivery on bare stages. Victorian Shakespeare had suffered, or prospered (depending on historical interpretation), at the hands of self-indulgent actor-managers such as F. R. Benson at Stratford. Music in these pompous, slow productions catered for pre-curtain overtures, non-mimetic songs and instrumental diversions, interval music and other non-dramatic contributions. Such music was often symphonic and songs were turned into quasi-operatic arias. On 21 April 1908, Poel’s production of Measure for Measure was presented at Stratford with music by J. W. Wilson “done after the Elizabethan manner”, including a four-voice madrigal sung by “local Stratfordians”. Whilst hardly “authentic” music, this was the first attempt at replicating Elizabethan music in Elizabethan Shakespeare. It was a unique production. Other plays in the 1908 season were directed by Benson in the Victorian manner. The musical director for As You Like It (1 May 1908) was Mr Henry Caville featuring Miss Cissie Saumarez as Amiens “with song”. The 1913 season at Stratford included Poel’s Troilus and Cressida, a play not performed at Stratford or at any other theatre since its first performance by the King’s Men in 1603 at the Globe. The play was performed largely uncut and with only one interval. Details of the music have not survived but a neo-Elizabethan style would be in keeping with its production ethos, in which case, as Sternfeld (1963, xviii) possibly hints, Dolmetsch was involved. Whilst Poel’s following was not extensive and his audiences often very small, his influence was nevertheless important and lasting. The 1914 season at Stratford, directed by Patrick Kirwan, advertised “Elizabethan music” as part of the production. The emergence of the new style was confirmed by Nigel Playfair’s production of a Stratford perennial, As You Like It, for the short immediate post-war season in 1919. Playfair was a protégé of Benson; but he was also influenced by Granville Barker and Poel and presented a progressive approach to Shakespearean production that included “early” music. From these tentative beginnings in the early twentieth century, period music became part, albeit a small part, of Shakespearean production, commensurate with the development and understanding of early music in musicology and performance. It was not until the 1970s that the early music movement in Europe and the USA gained widespread recognition following enthusiastic pioneering efforts by the likes

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of David Munrow, Bruno Turner, Gustav Leonhardt, Raymond Leppard, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Christopher Hogwood, Thurston Dart, Robert Donington and others in the 1960s and earlier. Whilst early music was featured in a number of productions throughout the UK (Leppard, for example, acted as music adviser at Stratford in the 1960s for a variety of plays), it was not until the 1990s that “authentic” music consistently found its way into “authentic” Shakespeare at the newly opened Globe theatre. Each year since 1997 the Globe theatre on the Southbank in London has included an “Elizabethan” production amongst its various approaches. In the award-winning 2002 production of Twelfth Night, for example, with its all-male cast, the “masters of music” (Claire van Kampen and Keith McGowan) attempted to match the authenticity of the music with the specialness of the production marking the 400th anniversary of the first performance of the play at the Middle Temple Hall, London. Historical considerations included the use of period instruments and authentic ensembles. The original mixed consort of the Middle Temple was replicated. This comprised violin, flute/recorder, bass viol, lute, cittern and bandora. For the outdoor production at the Globe, the music was “fleshed out” (as the Globe programme puts it), made louder and more incisive by the use of the shawm consort and some percussion. The musical performance/concert that preceded the play was justified, according to McGowan, by the remark made by the Duke of Stettin-Pomerania (after he had attended a production at the Blackfriars in September 1602), noted by Frederic Gerschow, that he had “heard an hour-long consort recital before the play”.5 Songs and instrumental music were taken from Elizabethan sources, principally of Thomas Morley, John Dowland, Robert Jones and uniquely a pavane by James Lauder.6 The musicians were dressed in Elizabethan costume and occupied the central gallery above the stage. They were visible to both actors and audience and their entries and exits appeared as part of the production, even though these must have been determined as much by the demands of the music at any given moment. Feste, on stage, was generally recognisable by his pipe and tabor, which he carried and sometimes played. With the exception of three pivotal scenes (3.3, 3.4 and 4.1) instrumental music was played at appropriate places throughout the production. The song cues of the folio edition were observed, except for “Hey Robin” which was transposed from 4.2 to 3.1. Before the play began, there was a comparatively short concert of music (around ten minutes), performed by an ensemble in the stage gallery (at the Globe this was a shawm consort). Because the musicians were in costume, clearly visible to the audience, there was a sense in which the concert was integral to the production. Although the musicians were present in the auditorium and played to the assembled audience, their music did not serve as an instrumental overture, as in classical opera. Nor did it function like the substantial orchestral pieces that preceded the plays at the old Shakespeare Memorial Theatre productions in Stratford-on-Avon at the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. The concert was followed, after the Duke had spoken, by a quieter recorder, lute and viol ensemble playing the Dowland “lachrimae” theme.7 There is no evidence that this was the music meant to be played during performances of Twelfth Night in Shakespeare’s day, but McGowan contends that the Dowland was ideal for moments of melancholy. It also fits the text: “That strain again, it had a dying fall” (1.1.4). The music stopped abruptly at Orsino’s cue, “Enough, no more” (1.1.7). It provided a good acoustic contrast with the pre-act music and a suitable softening (diminuendo) lead-in to the play as the soundscape moved from loud music to soft talking. It set the mood of melancholy, appropriate for the

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theme of the play. It is also worth remarking at this juncture that the opening concert balanced the epilogue song and final jig music which followed the play. The first set-piece song, Feste’s “O mistress mine” (2.3.35), was done onstage, unaccompanied by instruments. The contemporary tune most often associated with this song was used.8 Since the song is integral to the dramatic action in that it contrasts with the mood of the scene and is not merely a pause for musical entertainment, its onstage performance must seem natural and spontaneous. A voice-alone rendition achieved this. The “period” music in Twelfth Night reinforced the aim of the production. Its purpose was to increase the experience of specialness rather than engage in an experiment in historicist recreation. In his review, Keir Elam argued that the characteristics that distinguished the earlier [Middle Temple] production were its chorality – i.e. the ensemble quality of the acting, despite the dominant presence of Mark Rylance as Olivia – and its musicality, both literal (the crucial importance given to song and, perhaps even more so, to dance) and metaphorical, namely the highly audible and pleasing nature of the verse and prose-speaking [sometimes underlined by soft background music as in 2.4 and 4.3]. These characteristics reemerged with perhaps greater clarity thanks to the discipline and harmony of the company, with a little help from the acoustics of the Globe. That specialness Elam terms “choral collaboration”. He points to two places in the production where Siân Williams’ choreography made a “decisive contribution, producing great stage-filling moments of group movement”. The first was at the beginning of the second half after the interval, with “full cast moving slowly towards the audience and intoning ‘Hey Robin’” (Elam, 2002, 7). The other was at the end of the production with the whole cast dancing the final jig. Whilst both of these were essentially a persuasive visual gesture, it was the music that served to unite the action in its encompassing aural presence. Thus the music had an extra unifying purpose. The unity of the production was further helped by the choice of the Elizabethan music, which suited the acoustic of the Globe. The music filled the space with sound without dominating the aural experience. The choice of music not only served to accompany the performance but also reinforced the “point” or aim of the production. The concordant period music coalesced with the harmony of the play. The choice of Elizabethan period instruments uniquely matched the soundscape of the all-male cast, ranging from the rich baritone of the Duke to the piping falsetto of Olivia.9 Moreover, the sadness that underlies the play – it “raineth every day” – is reflected in particular choices, namely the Dowland “lachrimae” at the beginning and the melancholic “Marche” pavane for “Come away death”. It could be argued that authentic music has a specific purpose in such a historicist location as the new Globe. In Twelfth Night, emphasis was placed on the aural dimension. Music played a significant, even enhanced role in keeping with the historical principle of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, in contrast with present-day production with its predominantly visual impact. Such emphasis was possible thanks to the acoustic environment of the new Globe, which allows for fruitful experimentation with different types of instrumental and vocal music. It is worth noting that judiciously chosen ensembles and solo instruments, either modern or period, make a precise acoustic impact and can once again fulfil the role they had in Shakespeare’s day of not only complementing the vocal soundscape but also in

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providing acoustic symbolism or signification. The term “incidental music”, so often signifying the purpose of music in Shakespearean production, no longer appears to have meaning or significance at the new Globe. Moreover, music choices are not about locating a play in a particular time or culture, but have more to do with pointing up the aims and meanings of the presentation. This production of Twelfth Night brought home to the audience the crucial phenomenon of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre-going, which is the importance of hearing a play as well as watching it. As Ben Jonson lamented in the Prologue to The Staple of News: Would you were come to hear, not see, a play. Though we his actors must provide for those Who are our guests here in the way of shows, The maker hath not so. He’d have you wise Much rather by your ears than by your eyes. (Jonson, 1988, 2–6) The recently published Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment contains two chapters on music and sound by music director Claire van Kampen, “Music and Aural Texture at Shakespeare’s Globe”; and David Lindley, “Music, Authenticity and Audience” which effectively summarize the historically informed approach taken by musicians at the Globe and the effect those decisions have had both on audiences and actors.10 Theatrical experimentation at the Globe has suggested among many revelations that Elizabethan music and period instruments can take on a signification beyond the immediacy of a play. “Authentic” music can both entertain and educate an audience in its experiential awareness by being introduced and getting accustomed to early modern instruments, practices and sounds not otherwise heard outside specialist venues. Whether it can ever recreate the experience Shakespeare intended by his use of music cannot be determined. It may be significant that for every “authentic” performance at the Globe there is a modern, often exotic production using new music. In other words, Shakespeare’s music cannot be constrained by the parameters of historical appropriateness. Just as in his time, Shakespeare exploited the old and the new, the familiar and the unfamiliar, so today historical productions are best experienced not as objects in themselves but in relation to contemporaneous interpretations. That so little original music survives that we can confidently assign to a particular play may cause music directors, editors and composers to be ingenious and somewhat creative in supplying “authentic” songs and instrumental cues. What is certain, however, is the extent to which Shakespeare employs both performed and imagined music. Whilst music is not as prominent as it was in the plays of the children’s companies, for example, it is the way Shakespeare incorporates music that marks him out as exceptional among Elizabethan playwrights. Music for Shakespeare was an essential part of his dramatic and thematic material. It was never simply an acoustic or esoteric adjunct.

Notes 1. For example, Ross Duffin (2004) does not include any suggestions. Van Kampen (2008) notes “Moth/Mote sings not a delicate love song but ‘Concolinel’ which would seem to have been a naughty French chanson” (84) which she reconstructed from an exemplar from Claude Sermisy (1490–1562) in turn derived from the Italian popolaresca lirica. 2. On Shakespeare and Morley see Seng, 1967, 89, 97–100.

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3. See Chickering, 1994, 131–72. 4. See further Herissone, 2000; Owens, 1998, 183–246. 5. Frederic Gerschow, in the train of the Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, attended a performance at the Blackfriars on 18 September 1602, about which he commented on the exquisite singing and the hour-long concert of music before the play. See Gurr, 1996, 201. 6. The music for the Middle Temple Hall and new Globe productions is available on two CDs: The 400th Anniversary Production of Twelfth Night, International Shakespeare Globe Centre Ltd (London, 2002) and The Food of Love: Music and Words from Twelfth Night, International Shakespeare Globe Centre Ltd (London, 2002). 7. The “lachrimae” (“tears”) theme is taken from Dowland’s famous pavane, found in many contemporary sources adapted for various instruments. It is best known as a solo lute piece. It occurs in two major Dowland publications, namely The Second Booke of Songs or Ayres (1600) as “Flow my teares” and as the opening piece in Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares Figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans (1604). See Holman, 1999. It is interesting to note that Smith suggests “a lute solo in the doleful style John Dowland had made popular” as suitable for the mood music at the start of Twelfth Night (1999, 233). 8. For sources and discussion see Seng, 1967, 94–100. In Thomas Morley’s First Booke of Consort Lessons (1599) there is the tune titled “O Mistris mine”. Shakespeare’s words do not fit this tune very comfortably. Moreover, the tune as it appears in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Rés. 1122 is called “O mistris myne I must”. Several commentators, including Tuttle (1955, 158) and Neighbour (1978, 145), have been at pains to note the difference. Both Tuttle and Neighbour claim that the addition of “I must” invalidates the association of Morley’s tune with Shakespeare’s song. 9. Smith contends that “Twelfth Night . . . like most of Shakespeare’s earlier comedies, offers a wider range of pitches than history plays and tragedies, with much more prominence given to higher-frequency sounds. From the beginning of the play to the end, treble-clef sounds move in counterpoint to bass-clef sounds in a manner that comes close to turning the play’s musical metaphors into acoustic fact” (1999, 232). 10. See Carson and Karim-Cooper, 2008.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Anon. (1596). The Pathway to Musicke contayning sundrie familiar and easie rules for the readie and true vnderstanding of the scale, or gamma-vt. London: J. Danter. Austern, Lynda Phyllis (1992). Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance. Philadelphia and Reading: Gordon and Breach. Barnfield, Richard (1598). “In Praise of Musique and Poetrie”. In Richard Barnfield: The Complete Poems, ed. George Klawitter. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. Baskervill, Charles Read (1929). The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Bright, Timothy (1586). A Treatise of Melancholie. London: Thomas Vautrollier. Carson, Christie and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds (2008). Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Charlton, Andrew (1991). Music in the Plays of Shakespeare: A Practicum. New York and London: Garland. Chickering, Howell (1994). “Hearing Ariel’s Songs”. Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24, 131–72. Dessen, Alan C. and Leslie Thomson (1999). A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doughtie, Edward (1986). English Renaissance Song. Boston: Twayne. Duffin, Ross (2004). Shakespeare’s Songbook. New York: Norton.

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Elam, Keir (2002). “Collective Affinities”. Around the Globe 22, Autumn, 7–9. Gillespie, Stuart and Neil Rhodes, eds (2006). Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture. London: Arden Shakespeare. Gurr, Andrew (1996). Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herissone, Rebecca (2000). Music Theory in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hollander, John (1961). The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500–1700. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Holman, Peter (1999). Dowland: ‘Lachrimae’ (1604). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jonson, Ben (1988). The Staple of News, ed. Anthony Parr. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jorgensen, Paul (1956). Shakespeare’s Military World. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. King, Rosalind (1986). “‘Then Murder’s Out of Tune’: The Music and Structure of Othello”. Shakespeare Survey 39, 149–58. Lindley, David, ed. (2002). The Tempest. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindley, David (2006). Shakespeare and Music. London: Arden Shakespeare. Long, John. H. (1955). Shakespeare’s Use of Music: A Study of Music and its Performance in the Original Production of Seven Comedies. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Manifold, John S. (1956). The Music in English Drama, from Shakespeare to Purcell. London: Rockcliff. Markham, Gervase (1625). The Souldiers Accidence, or an Introduction into Military Discipline. London: John Dawson. Maynard, Winifred (1986). Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and its Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Morley, Thomas (1597). A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke. London: Peter Short. Neighbour, Oliver (1978). The Consort and Keyboard Music of William Byrd. London: Faber and Faber. Noble, Richmond (1923). Shakespeare’s Use of Song: With the Text of the Principal Songs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orgel, Stephen and Sean Keilen, eds (1999). Shakespeare and the Arts. New York and London: Garland. Ornithoparcus, Andreas (1609). Musice active micrologus, trans. John Dowland. London: Thomas Snodham. Owens, Jessie Ann (1998). “Concepts of Pitch in English Music Theory, c. 1560–1640”. In Tonal Structures in Early Music, ed. Cristle Collins Judd. New York: Garland, 183–246. Sanders, Julie (2007). Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings. Cambridge: Polity. Seng, Peter J. (1967). The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shirley, Frances A. (1963). Shakespeare’s Use of Off-Stage Sounds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Smith, Bruce R. (1999). The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Irwin (1970). “Ariel and the Masque in The Tempest”. Shakespeare Quarterly 21.3, 213–22. Sternfeld, F. W. [1963] (1967). Music in Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Tuttle, Stephen, ed. (1955). Musica Britannica: Thomas Topkins. London: Stainer and Bell. van Kampen, Clare (2008). “Music and Aural Texture at Shakespeare’s Globe”. In Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, ed. Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 79–89.

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Walls, Peter (1996). Music in the English Courtly Masque 1604–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wilson, Christopher R. and Michela Calore (2005). Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary. New York and London: Continuum. Wulstan, David (1985). Tudor Music. London: Dent.

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SHAKESPEARE AND OPERA Adrian Streete

F

or the nineteenth-century French composer, Hector Berlioz, Shakespeare offered more than artistic inspiration. In fact, the playwright and his works acted as a prism through which the composer understood and rationalized his personal and professional successes and failures, indeed his very identity. Berlioz first discovered Shakespeare in 1827, an event he describes in his Memoires (1870) with typically Romantic effusion: “This sudden and unexpected revelation of Shakespeare overwhelmed me. The lightening flash of his genius revealed the whole heaven of art to me, illuminating its remotest depths in a single flash” (Berlioz, 1932, 66; see Schmidgall, 1990, 272–9; Cairns, 1989). Commonplace as this reaction may be for the period, the composer was no mere Bardolator, content to praise unthinkingly Shakespeare’s sublimity. From an early age, Berlioz had a healthy sense of his own genius, and his deification of Shakespeare offered him a means of validating his own talent, composition and music throughout his life.1 Indeed, his sense of identity as a composer was virtually indistinguishable from his veneration of the dramatist. He wrote a cantata for the Prix de Rome based on the death of Ophelia (1827), orchestral pieces based on The Tempest (1830) and King Lear (1831), a symphonic version (with voices) of Roméo et Juliette (1839), and his final opera, Béatrice et Bénedict (1862), is based on Much Ado About Nothing (Macdonald, 2001, 384–420; Holoman, 1992, 434–9). The magnificent love duet between Dido and Aeneas (“Nuit d’ivresse”) in Act 4 of his grand opera Les Troyens (1856–8) draws not, as might be expected, upon words from Virgil’s Aeneid but from Act 5, Scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice. Indeed this opera, never performed complete in Berlioz’s lifetime, and only achieving sustained critical and popular recognition during the latter half of the twentieth century, was self-consciously constructed on what the composer called “the Shakespearean model” (Berlioz, 1932, 494; see also Barzun, 2000, 11–19). It is possible to view these particular operatic and symphonic usages in terms of the broader European obsession during the nineteenth century for Shakespearean appropriation of varying kinds. As scholars like Adrian Poole, Gail Marshall and Jane Moody have shown, this period was one when what Moody calls the “transcontinental migration” of Shakespeare truly began (Moody, 2003, 99; see also Poole, 2004). Still, Berlioz’s complex and sometimes contradictory attitude to the cultural uses and abuses of Shakespeare is worth exploring in more detail. A case in point is his discussion of the practice of adapting or “improving” older operas to suit prevailing nineteenth-century aesthetic conventions. Writing of two popular works commonly subjected to such alterations, Mozart’s Die

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Zauberflöte and Weber’s Der Freischütz, Berlioz notes: “Theoretically it is recognized as an axiom that when any alteration in a great work is required it should be made by the very greatest artists only; that, in fact, correction should come from above, never from below” (Berlioz, 1932, 62). This claim expresses the central Romantic assertion of artistic selfdetermination (not to mention ego), and it also implies a parallel assertion, namely the transcendent value of music. Given that Berlioz in fact wrote new dialogue composed as recitative for Weber’s Der Freischütz in 1841 as well as adapting Gluck’s operas Orphée and Alceste in 1859 and 1861 respectively for the famous mezzo-soprano, Pauline Viardot, the charge of hypocrisy could certainly be levelled against the composer. However, it is significant that Berlioz goes on to augment his defence of proper artistic “correction” with a discussion of popular Shakespearean bowdlerization. He notes that “in England adaptations of Shakespeare by Cibber and others are still played”. Refusing to accept that the popularity of such adaptations might grant them some aesthetic validity, he writes that no one “has the right to meddle with Beethoven or Shakespeare, or to bestow their scientific or aesthetic alms on them”. He retains particular ire for the author of the “happy ending” of King Lear: “Detestable idiot! You have committed an atrocious crime, the most odious, the most enormous of crimes – an assault on that combination of man’s highest faculties that is called Genius! Curses on you! Despair and die!!” (Berlioz, 1932, 63).2 If appropriation of the Bard is to work, especially in musical terms, then it needs a similarly exalted figure, one who possesses the necessary authority to engender the metamorphosis of word into sound, or, in the case of opera, sound, word and action. This issue is one that has exercised operatic adapters of Shakespeare from the eighteenth century to the present day. For Berlioz, this Romantic ideal of “genius” enables him to categorize his own usages of Shakespeare as so much more than the embarrassing appropriations that he dismisses with such vehemence. It also offers him protection against professional dismissal or ridicule of his work. For example, in his account of the premiere of Roméo et Juliette, he recalls a particular critic: speaking of the love scene – the adagio, the part that three fourths of the European musicians who know it now rank it above all that I have written – asserted that I had not understood Shakespeare! Toad, swollen with imbecility! If you could prove that to me! No unlooked-for criticisms ever wounded me more cruelly. (Berlioz, 1932, 231) To dismiss the composition is one thing: but to attack Berlioz as lacking in appreciation of Shakespeare strikes at the heart of the syllogistic logic upon which his Romantic view of authorship is based: Shakespeare is a genius: only geniuses can fully understand and appreciate Shakespeare: therefore I, Berlioz, am a genius. Interestingly, that other great operatic appropriator of the Bard in the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Verdi, showed himself to be similarly sensitive on this matter. In 1865, Verdi had prepared a second version of his 1847 opera Macbeth for a performance in Paris. As with Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, the composer’s knowledge of Shakespeare was challenged by a critic as a means of dismissing the work. Verdi was outraged: “It may be that I have not done justice to Macbeth: but to say that I do not know, understand and feel Shackespeare [sic] – no, by God, no! He is one of my favourite poets. I have had him in my hands from my earliest youth, and I read and reread him continually” (Verdi, qtd in Budden, 1973, 269). From Paris to Parma, then, nineteenth-century operatic appropriations of Shakespeare were intertwined with broader issues concerning art, authorship and authority.

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I have begun this chapter with Berlioz and Verdi because, to a large extent, our understanding of Shakespearean opera is still, consciously or not, bound up with similar aesthetic and ideological issues that preoccupied these nineteenth-century composers. As Christopher Wilson notes, of the 270 or so operas based upon Shakespeare’s works, only a very small handful of these, “Verdi’s three masterpieces, Macbeth, Falstaff and Otello, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, on the Continent, Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor and Thomas’ Hamlet continue to receive performances” (Wilson, 1994, 338). Statements such as this invariably invite counterclaims. Looking at the repertory of the major opera houses and festivals over the past twenty years, it is possible to argue, for example, that Rossini’s Otello (1816) or Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette (1867) should be included here too.3 From a different perspective, the musicologist might claim that Bloch’s Macbeth (1904–6), Hahn’s Le Marchand de Venise (1935) or Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra (1966) deserve second hearings. It is also intriguing to speculate about some of the more obscure byways in the history of Shakespearean opera. For example, what might a work like Franco Faccio’s Amletto (1865) composed to a libretto by Arrigo Boito, sound like? The question is more than academic given that both men would later achieve much greater renown as, respectively, the first conductor and librettist of Verdi’s Otello. In terms of modern Shakespearean operas, Aribert Reimann’s Lear (1978; written for the great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) and Luciano Berio’s Un Re in Ascolto (1984; based on The Tempest) are occasionally revived. More recently, a number of critics have argued that Thomas Adès’ The Tempest (2004) will consolidate its current popularity at the time of writing as a repertory work (Adès, 2009).4 The premiere of Adès’ opera caused a degree of excitement and controversy in the operatic press. Discussions aired the issues surrounding the transposition of Shakespeare into the operatic genre, many of which would have been familiar to Berlioz and Verdi, not least the question of “fidelity” to the Bard. Of all the recent operatic adaptations of Shakespeare that I have heard, Adès’ opera certainly lingers in the memory. In particular, his extraordinary writing for Ariel encompasses something strange, magical and slightly crazy, especially the Act 1 aria “Five fathoms deep”. Ariel’s part, written for the high soprano Cyndia Sieden, has a truly stratospheric tessitura, like a cross between Mozart’s Queen of the Night and Strauss’ Zerbinetta on acid. Yet it is the element of fantasy that Adès’ opera invokes, indeed that all the great Shakespearean operas manage to conjure, which sets it apart: Ariel’s music is truly, as Ferdinand says, neither “I’ th’ air or th’ earth” (1.2.390). Still, with the notable exception of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, all the Shakespearean operas that have retained a significant place in the repertoire are nineteenth-century compositions. The vast majority of operas based on Shakespeare are not, nor are they likely to become, part of the repertoire of most opera houses. This is despite the fact that the twentieth century overwhelmingly holds the monopoly on operas written to Shakespearean texts (Wilson, 1994, 343–7). Critics have argued that this is because most Shakespearean operas are just not very good compositions and so do not deserve repeat performances. It would be wrong to dismiss this view out of hand. But to reduce the discussion only to distinctions based on musicological and aesthetic value would be to ignore an interesting argument that can be made about the broader cultural relationship between Shakespeare and opera. Significantly, the emergence across Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of Shakespeare as a literary and cultural icon whose value transcends mere nationhood or politics goes hand in hand with the establishment of opera as, predominantly, an elite cultural form. It also corresponds, as I will argue, to

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important developments in the role and function of theatre, performance styles and the establishment of an agreed canon of operatic works that would form the basis of the operatic repertoire that we are still familiar with today. The Shakespearean operas written by Rossini, Verdi, or Gounod are products of not just a Romantic aesthetics but also a Romantic politics, one based on a set of values that modernity would not only question but actively challenge (Arblaster, 1992). Paradoxically, though, this has done little to affect the popularity of these Shakespearean operas within modernity and post-modernity. This may well also reflect the on-going debate about the cultural sustainability of opera as a genre. Like the Shakespearean canon of texts, the operatic canon today comes pretty much pre-packaged and circumscribed. Without the operas of a fairly small group of composers, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Gounod, Bizet, Massenet, Wagner, Puccini, Strauss and Britten, the repertory system that we know today simply would not exist. And like the establishment of the Shakespearean canon, the ideologies that inform the construction of the operatic canon are complex and particular. As Christopher Norris has put it, music can seem to promise “the seductive ideal of a language purged of all merely temporal concerns, a language that could best live up to its own responsibilities by rejecting every claim upon the artist’s political conscience” (Norris, 1989, 7). I want to argue that the relationship between Shakespeare and opera invariably invokes the political consciences of its creators and audiences alike, and that what Gary Schmidgall calls “the synonymy of Shakespearean and operatic” is more than serendipitous (Schmidgall, 1990, 3). This chapter does not offer a chronology of Shakespearean operas then: these are easily available elsewhere. Nor do I offer a musicological critique of such works: again, distinguished examples of such analyses are easy to find. But as a Shakespearean who also has an interest in classical music, opera and its performance history, what I offer instead is an analysis of some complex confluences of Shakespearean history, politics and performance.

Opera, History and Shakespeare The roots of opera as the genre we might understand today can be traced back to late sixteenth-century Italy. It began as a form of aristocratic entertainment that drew upon liturgical performance, popular theatre and various forms of musical theatre such as the intermedio (Walker, 1989, 15–26). In late sixteenth-century Florence, an important group of artists and intellectuals led by the playwright, composer and writer Giovanni de’ Bardi gathered around the court of Ferdinando de’ Medici. This group produced philosophical writings on music and put on works of dramatic monody that were to prove extremely influential in the subsequent emergence of operas by Corsi, Peri, Caccini and Monteverdi in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Interestingly, Bardi’s group were active from around 1570 to the early 1590s, dates that also cover the emergence of the commercial theatre in England and the beginnings of Shakespeare’s career. We might draw another suggestive parallel here with elite court performances and masques in early modern England, many of which employ musical settings within a perspective stage, and the more demotic urban theatres whose use of music often serves rather different artistic and political ends and whose stagings were generally much less elaborate (Boetzkes and Savage, 1989, 53–4). The first productions in England that can be called “operatic” in any proper sense were mounted by a man steeped in the culture of the masque, William Davenant. His

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productions of The First Dayes Entertainment at Rutland House and The Siege of Rhodes, both probably in 1656, were highly significant, introducing as they did “recitative as well as vocal and instrumental music” and “the first public representation with stage scenery in the new Italian manner” (White, 1983, 74).5 Although the music itself was not composed by Davenant, the early performance histories of these works, first produced when regular drama was banned by the Puritan administration and put on in Davenant’s house, then later performed at Drury Lane, reflect the theatrically innovative potential of opera. They also point to the aristocratic origins of the genre, as well as its commercial appeal. This was a pattern (some might even call it a class tension) that was repeated as opera became increasingly popular across Europe. Opera could not have assumed the cultural significance that it did in Europe without cultivating a bourgeois class anxious to identify itself with this upper-class genre. Reflecting their intellectually rarefied provenance, the earliest Italian operas tended to be based upon classical myths such as Corsi and Peri’s Dafne (c. 1597) or Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607) (Lowenstein, 1978, 1–10). Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes was based upon the early sixteenth-century siege of the island by the Ottoman Turks, but it is worth noting that he had plans, unfulfilled at his death, for operatic adaptations of Macbeth and The Tempest. Operatic composers and librettists would continue to mine the classics for inspiration. Invariably, though, more recent history and popular literature such as Shakespeare would increasingly be drawn upon. During the baroque and the early classical periods, opera remained an entertainment primarily financed and consumed by the upper classes. Nevertheless, the period witnessed a gradual movement in the production of opera from the court, or more accurately its realm of patronage, into more socially diffuse and increasingly accessible settings. The first public opera house in Europe opened in Venice in 1637. But it was not really until the start of the eighteenth century that the great opera houses of London, Vienna, Berlin and Paris really established themselves as places central to the cultural life of the rapidly industrializing cities of Europe. Despite its elite cultural origins, opera was slowly becoming a form of entertainment accessible to a wider range of social classes (Sadie, 1989, 63–8). In Vienna, for example, common citizens had access to operatic entertainments from 1728 (Seifert, 1992, 990). An interesting case in point here is the work of Henry Purcell.6 Purcell took part in the first performance of The Siege at Rhodes, providing a direct connection to Davenant’s early experiments in the genre. In 1689, he wrote Dido and Aeneas for a girls’ school in Chelsea. Later works such as The Prophetess (1690), King Arthur (1691) and the first English opera, or rather semi-opera, based on Shakespeare, The Fairy-Queen (1693; based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream), were all first performed in the public theatres at Dorset Garden and Drury Lane. The former specialized in spectacular productions, often with a significant musical element, and the latter in “straight” drama (White, 1983, 109–36; Price, 1994, 1179–82). Edward Langhans notes that “Purcell became active in the theatre when it was undergoing a difficult and important transition” (Langhans, 1995, 301). Although Queen Mary attended performances of a number of Purcell’s operas, it seems probable that he was writing for a more socially stratified audience than Davenant could have been. It is unsurprising that Shakespeare should figure so prominently at the beginnings of opera in Britain. More surprising is that this did not lead to the sustained development of English opera, Shakespearean or otherwise. As Wilson points out, “shortly after Purcell’s death [in 1695] the type became extinct” (Wilson, 2001, 195). Scholars have speculated as to the reasons for this cultural falling off. Daniel Albright has written of the “monumen-

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tality of the achievement of English spoken drama” and noted the feeling in seventeenthand eighteenth-century England that “opera required one language and spoken language another” (Albright, 2007, 258–9). It may not be insignificant, too, that the arrest of opera in England corresponds with the concerted establishment of Shakespeare as national icon, as a number of scholars have shown. Perhaps British composers after Purcell felt it inappropriate to translate Shakespeare’s works into the “foreign” genre of opera. Perhaps there were just too few composers with the necessary talent. Indeed, with some notable exceptions, it is only with the advent of modernity that British operatic composers begin concertedly to adapt Shakespeare. Of course, it was not just the British who were busy laying claim to Shakespeare. The adoption of the Bard as a figure of pan-European importance is reflected in the number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century adaptations of his work by Italian, German, French composers and librettists, for example Domenico Scarlatti’s Ambletto (Rome, 1715), Johann Christian Bach’s Brutus (1774; based on Julius Caesar) and Rodolphe Kreutzer’s Imogène, ou La gageure indescrète (1796; based on Cymbeline). If operas based on Shakespeare were performed in eighteenth-century London, then they were much more likely to have been written by composers from across the Channel. Nonetheless, if we were to tally up all the Shakespearean operas written up until and including 1800, the number reaches a little over forty. Even accounting for lost works and so forth, this hardly represents a Shakespearean operatic glut. As mentioned, the real boom in operatic adaptations of Shakespeare comes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Still, none of these statistics helps us to answer, beyond relatively narrow judgements concerning musical worth, why these nineteenth-century compositions overwhelmingly continue to dominate our encounter with Shakespeare in the opera house. From its inception, the operatic industry had been fuelled primarily by the production of new works. Similarly to Shakespeare writing for Burbage or Armin, operas were very often written with the talents of particular singers in mind – we might think here of Handel’s London operas written for singers like Senesino and Farinelli, or Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti tailoring their works for singers such as Giulia Grisi, Maria Malibran, Luigi Lablache and Giovanni Rubini. Audiences went to the opera not only to hear the music, gossip, eat, drink, socialize and plot. They also wanted to judge how Handel or Bellini, for example, had adapted an aria for a particular singer, or written a new work to show off the coloratura technique of another. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the cult of the diva and divo, like the cult of the leading man or lady in the theatre, had much in common. For composer and performer alike, conventions could certainly be reformulated. If this could be done elegantly, then so much the better. If not, artistic ego did not preclude the insertion of preferred arias into existing operas or, for that matter, the insertion of newly written speeches into Shakespeare’s plays. But this was rarely done out of a desire for originality on the part of writer or performer: the Romantic artist may be singular but s/he is not autonomous in the modern sense of the term. In the second half of the nineteenth century, another important development in the cultural and political production and consumption of opera takes place. Although this shift is complicated and not absolute, scholars have pointed to the emergence of “repertory opera”, a system where the production of new works gradually takes second place to the repetition of an emerging canon of classic works. We can also see a similar development in the nineteenth-century “straight” theatre in the careers of actor-managers like

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Henry Irving, whose company at the Lyceum in London can be seen as offering a form of repertory theatre. As the scholar of opera Roger Parker writes, “repertory opera”: changed the manner in which composers and librettists thought of themselves as creators, and of the relative status of their works in the artistic pantheon; it changed their attitudes to the balance between convention and ‘originality’, with the latter increasingly seen as a necessary artistic goal; and it changed singing style, favoring as it did those performers most able to adapt to a broader, more cosmopolitan repertory. (Parker, 1997, 129–30) Almost all the assumptions that composers, performers and audiences alike had brought to bear on the production and consumption of opera were now potentially open to new scrutiny. It is not that composers no longer wrote with particular singers in mind or that they believed themselves now exempt from the messy exigencies of production: far from it. Yet in the second half of the nineteenth century, operatic composers started to assert a gradually more confident set of claims about the originality and autonomy of their compositions and the necessity of performers adapting to their artistic visions. The enormous impact of Wagner’s music and philosophy upon nineteenth-century European aesthetics and politics is crucial here. Composer himself of a Shakespearean opera, Das Liebesverbot (1836; based on Measure for Measure), his notion of the Gesamkunstwerk (total art work) is particularly important. Although his attitude to this issue changed over his lifetime, for Wagner, music was the most important of the arts. In the case of opera, he believed that drama should never be sacrificed for musical ends. It is the job of the composer to integrate music with the words, staging, costume and all the other myriad elements of an opera. The arias, duets, trios, cabalettas and choruses that are found in operas like Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821), Bellini’s I Capuletti ed i Montecchi (1830) or Verdi’s Macbeth (1847) were the conventional building blocks of Romantic opera, and they were accepted as such by composers and audiences alike. But according to Wagner, these musical divisions limited operatic composition. They reduced opera to a series of “numbers” with pauses for applause. In this way, they arrested the potential for opera to be taken seriously as drama. Wagner’s mature operas, Tristan und Isolde (1865), Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), Der Ring des Nibelungen (1869–76) and Parsifal (1882), are all through-composed works that do not invite audience applause/participation during the Acts. Instead, they demand complete audience attention and contemplation during the performance. The audience is present not to register its approval but, through its participation and reflection, to underwrite the unity and validity of the Gesamkunstwerk. The theatre that Wagner built at Bayreuth was constructed for festivals dedicated to performing his works only, a version of repertory theatre that the inaugural founders of the RSC would certainly have recognized. For Wagner, as Bryan Magee puts it, opera would be liberated completely from the tyranny of arbitrary patterns without becoming formless. It would derive its coherence from its relation to the staged drama, and for that reason would need, as music, to observe only such formal requirements as it evolved spontaneously from within itself. (Magee, 2000, 234) It is hard to overestimate the influence of such ideas. For example, when Verdi’s Otello was premiered in 1887, a fierce argument raged in the European press over whether the Italian composer had in fact written a “Wagnerian” opera. Although Otello contains

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arias, duets and choruses, the way in which they are utilized is startlingly different from his earlier operas such as Ernani (1844) or Luisa Miller (1849). James Hepokoski puts it as follows: “For the first time in a complete Verdi opera one may seriously question whether the large formulaic ottocento structures are consistently relevant: they not infrequently seem to exist more as memory – or as implied, but distant, referential points – than as current reality” (Hepokoski, 1987, 113; see also Kerman, 1989, 113). Otello emerges onto a cusp between two very different aesthetic and ideological views of operatic composition. The establishment of the operatic canon in nineteenth-century Europe corresponds to a more assertive, autonomous sense of compositional authority on the part of major operatic composers like Verdi and Wagner, a fact that can also be linked to the nationalistic ideology espoused by these composers and others such as Smetana, Tchaikovsky and Dvorˇák. The broadly “realist” operatic aesthetic of those composers who followed, exemplified in most of Puccini’s operas and in Strauss’ early works, Salome (1905), Elektra (1909) and Der Rosenkavalier (1911), is unthinkable without these advances. Modern operatic directors can and frequently do update and alter the settings of such operas. But in these cases, such updatings invariably have to contend with the very strongly realist sense of place and time as well as the political investments that are a constitutive part of these operas’ aesthetic composition and construction. Jonathan Miller’s 1982 “Mafia” updating of Verdi’s Rigoletto for English National Opera is widely considered a classic production, one that is still playing to full houses today. Whether this staging confronts, undermines or ignores the politically subversive elements of Verdi’s original conception remains a matter of debate. Or to take another example, Luc Bondy’s modern updating of Tosca for the Metropolitan Opera in 2009 was roundly booed at its premiere. The fact that this production was replacing an ultra-realist production by Franco Zeffirelli that had held sway at the Met for over thirty years seemed much more important to many critics than the fact that Bondy’s production at least attempted to interrogate the inherent misogyny of the opera and its extremely problematic portrayal of male violence against women. Certain operatic shrines, it seems, must remain unsullied. The question of how singers, directors and musicians relate these fascinating appropriations to the present day is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in Verdi’s Otello. From its premiere in 1887, Otello has rarely left the repertory of the major opera houses. Today it is arguably the most popular Shakespearean opera of all. In terms of the nineteenth-century cultural and aesthetic developments outlined above, Verdi, his librettist Arrigo Boito and his publisher Giulio Ricordi attempted to produce a discrete and free-standing work of art that would always be staged and performed in the same manner. The opera’s production book outlines in minute detail how the opera is to be performed. Unsurprisingly, the subsequent performance history of Otello shows it being appropriated in a range of disparate ways, many of which conflict radically with the intentions of the composers (Cartelli, 1999, 15). It is this conflict between authorial intention and cultural appropriation that is especially fascinating. Therefore, in the next section, I want to look in detail at the genesis and first performances of Otello. I then go on to examine some of the major recorded interpretations of the role of Otello during the twentieth century. Not only will this enable me to pursue further some of the issues and tensions that I have been outlining above. It will also demonstrate that, far from being a static, realist work of art that is endlessly replayed, the performance history of Otello is as contested and complex as the original play upon which Verdi and his team of collaborators drew.

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“Esultate!”: Composition, Controversy and Performance The idea of an opera based on Shakespeare’s Othello seems to have emerged in Verdi’s artistic circle during the late 1870s. Verdi wrote letters to Ricordi in July 1879 stating that their wives had been corresponding about the project: “As for the chocolate and the cocoa, consider them jokes, and keen anticipation!” (Verdi, 1988, I, 3). Verdi and his collaborators commonly used such racially loaded epithets when discussing Otello. For example, Verdi’s wife Giuseppina writes of “the African”, and the composer refers in a number of places to “this chocolate project” (Verdi, 1988, I, 4). Interesting in this regard too is the poster produced for the premiere of the opera at La Scala, Milan in 1887. This shows the solidly bourgeois Verdi and Boito above a depiction of Otello entering the bed-chamber in his “traditional” African garb (Fig. 8.1). These comments and image point up the degree to which, from the beginning, the opera’s genesis and composition is informed by a range of commonplace late nineteenthcentury racial stereotypes. This is not to say that Verdi and his collaborators consciously set out to write a racist opera. Verdi’s politics and political career mark him out as a liberal nationalist of a broadly humanistic stripe. And in his writing of the libretto, Boito took great care to stress the historical accuracy of the setting and period of the opera (see Della Seta, 2004). Neither man was consciously aiming for caricature or stereotype. Yet, similarly to recent critical discussions of The Merchant of Venice and the anti-Semitic ideology that underwrites much of the play’s discourse, our understanding of Otello as a work of art cannot be divorced from more problematic contexts that, consciously or not, contribute to its construction. It is only possible to understand the racial ideologies that constitute the aesthetic foundation of Otello by also examining the racial assumptions that shape late nineteenth-century attitudes to race. Doing so will also shed light, some of it not always flattering, on the work’s continuing popularity today. Whatever else it may say about the opera’s central figure, the work is premised upon the idea that the non-white, nonEuropean figure of Otello is morally and culturally inferior because of his racial origins. There are a number of important nineteenth-century philosophical and theatrical discourses that underpin this central premise. First, as both James Hepokoski and George Martin have shown, the Romantic Italian revival of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century was steeped in the thought of August Schlegel (Hepokoski, 1987, 163–72; Martin, 1988, 80–9). In Verdi’s preferred translation of Shakespeare by Rusconi, a number of the plays contained expository notes drawn from an Italian translation of Schlegel’s lectures on Shakespeare. For Schlegel, Otello possesses a “savage nature” and, in his fall, “the purely physical power of his passion demolishes his adopted virtues with one blow, and the savage supplants in him the civilized man” (Schlegel qtd in Hepokoski, 1987, 166). So when Verdi and Ricordi were debating in 1886 which tenor should play Otello, it is revealing that Ricordi should have rejected the more lyrically voiced Angelo Masini in favour of the more stentorian Francesco Tamagno since, as he claimed, “Otello must lean towards force and violence” (Verdi, 1988, I, 196). And although Verdi’s librettist Boito favoured a French translation of the play from the English that rejected Schlegel’s racially informed reading of Othello, Hepokoski notes that Boito was “unconvinced” by this account: “shortly after this point he wrote into the margin ‘And yet he is a black’ (eppure è un negro)” (Hepokoski, 1987, 170). In the “straight” theatre, the contemporaneous Italian Othellos of Ernesto Rossi, Tommaso Salvini and Giovanni Emanuel were extremely influential in popular receptions

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Figure 8.1: Poster for the premiere of Verdi’s Otello, La Scala, Milan, 5 February 1887

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of the play. These interpretations were not just famous in Italy but across the world. Scholars like Marvin Rosenberg, Virginia Mason Vaughan and Adrian Poole have traced the impact of such performances in the theatre and read them in terms of broader social and racial politics (Rosenberg, 1961; Vaughan, 1994; Poole, 2004). In terms of the opera, James Hepokoski has suggested that Rossi and Salvini’s interpretations delimit the “primitive/heroic” dialectic of Otello’s character as depicted by Verdi and Boito (Hepokoski, 1987, 160–9). Developing this suggestion, Scott Balthazar has argued that in fact Verdi and Boito’s preference “towards the ‘savage’ interpretation is evident in all four acts” (Balthazar, 2004, 238). Such categorizations are, of course, historically and culturally relative. Even if Rossi’s more “savage” interpretation represents an extreme expression of the Schlegelian view of Othello, nineteenth-century reactions suggest that both Rossi and Salvini’s conceptions of the Moor would seem crudely “primitivistic” and melodramatic to modern eyes (see Vaughan, 1994, 163–6). It is interesting here to consider the disagreement that Verdi, Boito and Ricordi had about a visit in December 1886 that the first cast of Otello, then in rehearsal, made to see Giovanni Emanuel’s Othello. Boito wrote to tell Verdi that he did not attend since Emanuel is “a very mediocre actor, cold, monotonous, unsympathetic . . . Rossi and Salvini, there are two giants! Tamagno could have learned something from them” (Verdi, 1988, I, 283). This comment, and others made in the correspondence, suggests that the composers of Otello did not perceive as much difference between the Othellos of Rossi and Salvini as modern scholars have. On the contrary, both actors’ interpretations would seem to correspond well enough to the dominant Schlegel-inspired view of Othello. Verdi reprimanded Ricordi for allowing this theatrical excursion. Ricordi stood his ground, maintaining that the visit was justified, especially for Tamagno, given his poor acting ability. This led Verdi to respond as follows: “The visual medium is all right if Emanuel was right; but if Emanuel made a weakling of Otello, and in some places almost a whimpering old man (as they reproached him), it would be a bad lesson for Tamagno” (Verdi, 1988, I, 286). Realism and its concomitant moral associations were to be repudiated. Othello’s human frailty limits the terms of audience identification: morally his weakness is related to his race. In this respect, while Hepokoski’s assertion that the character of Othello is constructed along a “primitive/ heroic” axis is correct, Balthazar’s argument that the opera tends to emphasize the “primitive” end of this axis is closer to the truth. As Hepokoski notes, Emanuel’s Othello did offer a genuine alternative to the Rossi/ Salvini model, being “more modern, lower-key, and much more naturalistic”, but also less popular with the public (Hepokoski, 1987, 169). To put it another way, Emanuel’s approach to Othello set itself against the predominantly melodramatic ethos of much nineteenth-century theatrical practice. Although realistic naturalism was making a strong theatrical claim at this time, especially in the nascent Italian verismo school, melodrama was, and remained, a dominant mode in popular theatrical aesthetics. Indeed, while the canonical late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works of composers such as Verdi and Puccini may share a realist sense of place and time, many of their themes, plots and action are deeply rooted in a melodramatic aesthetic. The ongoing popularity of works like Rigoletto or Tosca represents the survival of melodrama as a genre in the post-modern era. It is possible to get a sense of what nineteenth-century melodramatic acting style may have looked like from early silent film actors, many of whom trained in this theatrical tradition. Similarly, films of operatic stars from the first half of the twentieth century such as

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Enrico Caruso, Giovanni Martinelli, Beniamino Gigli and Magda Olivero are extremely instructive in this regard, and films of each of these singers are available on YouTube. They all share, as George Taylor puts it, a “highly formalised style of acting” where conventional and, to modern eyes at least, exaggerated facial, physical and vocal gestures are used to delineate a range of emotional states (Taylor, 1989, 121, 124).7 Verdi’s comments about Emanuel’s Othello as a “weakling” and a “whimpering old man” reveal not just a preference for the prevailing melodramatic and anti-naturalistic style: they also show how the “primitivistic” emotional state was ideologically underwritten by dominant theatrical practices, practices that are reflected in the poster for the premiere and that extend well into the twentieth century on the operatic stage. This point is reflected in the production book for the opera that Ricordi produced in collaboration with Verdi and Boito. This extraordinary and lengthy document details how an entire production of Otello is to be staged, from the sets, lighting, costumes, scenery, blocking, entrances and exits, the interpretations of the major parts, down to what decorations Desdemona’s handkerchief should have and what material it should be made from. In case there is any doubt, Ricordi warns that “It is absolutely necessary that the artists understand the production book completely and conform to it” (Verdi, 1988, II, 488). If Otello was to be sent out into the world, then it was to be as Verdi and his collaborators had envisioned it. In terms of the singer playing Otello, the suggestions have a defined ideological agenda. For example, at the end of the Act 3 aria “Dio! mio potevi scagliar” (“God, you could have afflicted me”) where Otello cries to “Clemenza” (“Clemency”), Ricordi writes that Otello’s “savage fury explodes terribly, inexorably, like lightening”.8 Or when Otello sees the handkerchief later in this Act, Ricordi notes that he should so “with a repressed howl”. During the scene with the Venetian Senators, Otello should “hurl . . . himself” at Desdemona, and at the end of the Act he should rush at the crowd “screaming like a madman” (Verdi, 1988, II, 574, 583, 591). We can certainly “contextualize” these pronouncements. But it is important that, in doing so, we do not forget that melodramatic primitivism is written into such instructions. This is not to say that alternative interpretations were not available. A good example is provided by Victor Maurel, the first Iago in Otello. A cultivated and intelligent artist, Maurel wrote his own production book for Otello, much of which is positioned as a corrective to Ricordi’s text. In fact Maurel’s book represents a version of what might be called the “Emanuel approach” to Othello. Realistic naturalism is stressed throughout. For instance, in the first duet between Otello and Iago in Act 2 (“Mio Signore? . . . Che brami?” (“My Lord? . . . What is your desire?”)), Ricordi instructs that Otello should “angrily [move] forwards to the footlights” to deliver his high B natural at “amore e gelosia vadan disperse insieme” (“love and jealousy will disappear together”) (Verdi, 1988, II, 533). For Maurel, this melodramatic posturing says more about the tenor’s high note than it does about “the dramatic intensity between these two men”. As he asks: “Does logic not suggest irrefutably that this line of reasoning [i.e. Otello’s] must be addressed directly to Iago, and not to the audience?” (Maurel, 1988, II, 652).9 In an implicit rebuke to the compositional team, Maurel contends that vocal display should be subjugated to the needs of dramatic naturalism. Another revealing example describes Tamagno’s acting during the premiere when he throws Desdemona to the ground in Act 3 before the Senators. Maurel says, in an interesting turn of phrase, that “This kind of acting is not only brutal and coarse, it is barbaric . . . it seems to us to go beyond the most exaggerated limits of realism” (Maurel, 1988, II, 663). For Maurel, the connection between melodrama and

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Figure 8.2: Francesco Tamagno, creator of the title role of Verdi’s Otello, c. 1888

“primitivism” inherent in Otello’s role compromised any serious effort towards “realism”, as this picture of Tamagno in Otello’s death scene amply demonstrates. The “orientalist” décor and costume nod towards the claims of realism; the clichéd pose and facial expression tend towards the melodramatic (Fig. 8.2). Verdi and Tamagno’s Otello failed to stress the Moor’s moral nobility: yet this nobility was implicit and, more importantly, recoverable. Like Maurel, Verdi had a number of doubts concerning Tamagno’s suitability for the role of Otello. In terms of the declamatory, marcato aspects of Otello’s music, and the projection and sheer volume required by the tenor for the more stentorian moments in the score, he thought that “Tamagno would do very well”. However, he also noted that there “are broad, long legato phrases to be sung mezza voce, something impossible for him”, the end of the Act 1 love duet being a case in point (Verdi, 1988, I, 196). Indeed, it is significant just how much of Otello’s music is marked in the score as either dolce, morendo or with various piano/pianissimo markings. For instance, the start of his Act 3 monologue “Dio! mi potevi scagliar” is marked pppp. Elsewhere, Verdi wrote that when Otello kills Desdemona, he must sing with “a half-muffled, veiled voice . . . but with a reliable one. This is a quality that Tamagno doesn’t have. He must always sing with full voice; without it his sound becomes ugly, uncertain, off-pitch” (Verdi, 1988, I, 201). He also decried Tamagno’s acting, his poor music reading skills and his inability to sing notes according to their proper values and in tempo to the conductor of the premiere, Franco Faccio (Verdi, 1988, II, 252). This is enough to make one seriously question why Verdi persisted with such a seemingly unsatisfactory singer?

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Fortunately, recordings exist of Tamagno singing parts of Otello’s music.10 These were made in 1903 and 1904 after Tamagno had retired from the stage and was suffering from ill health: he would die in 1905. Nevertheless they are still extraordinary documents. They reveal a robust, rather nasal tenor with a fast vibrato and clarion high notes: it is not difficult to imagine the power and ring (squillo) that the voice had, as numerous contemporary accounts attest, in its prime. But in these recordings, Tamagno’s dynamic range only really operates between mezzo forte and forte. His difficulty with sustained piano singing is clear, and melodramatic effects are evident, especially in his recording of the death scene (“Niun mi tema” (“No one fears me”)). The liberties he takes with note values and pitches, while common in pre-1930s’ recordings, show the kind of faults that exercised Verdi. Indeed, they are emblematic of a broader cultural conflict between the older, semi-improvisatory bel canto tradition and the increasing come scritto authority of the composer’s score and artistic conception. Throughout his career, Verdi demanded much from his singers and these sorts of complaints are not untypical (see Budden, 1992; Phillips-Matz, 1993). Yet the sheer number and seriousness of his problems with Tamagno are such that we might well ask, as already mentioned, why he persevered with such a problematic singer? The answer must surely be that Tamagno was the only contemporary tenore di forza who possessed the necessary declamatory squillo that the role of Otello calls for. Because this vocal tinta informed Verdi, Boito and Ricordi’s conception of Otello as a predominantly “primitive” figure, foregrounding the stentorian aspects of Otello’s part became, consciously or not, more important than any reservations about Tamagno’s ability and musicianship.

Otello and the Recorded Archive It is no coincidence that the most renowned Otellos of the twentieth century, for example, Jean de Reszke, Jacques Urlus, Leo Slezak, Giovanni Zenatello, Renato Zanelli, Aureliano Pertile, Lauritz Melchior, Max Lorenz, Torsten Ralf, Ramon Vinay, Mario Del Monaco, Jon Vickers and Plácido Domingo, can also be classified as heroic or even heldentenors. Most of these singers have also achieved fame in Richard Wagner’s highly demanding heroic (helden) tenor parts. It has often been suggested that Verdi’s writing for the tenor in Otello can be seen as a response to the heroic Wagnerian tenor scale, and an attempt to fashion an Italian version of the same. This is not to say that the Wagnerian and Verdian styles are fundamentally incompatible or that these singers of Otello do not, in their various ways, attend to the more lyrical aspects of the role. Thankfully, the critical division between singers of the “Italian” and “German” schools that used to prevail in critical discourse has been supplanted by a more flexible view of vocal interpretation. Of recorded Otellos, Vinay, Vickers and Domingo most convincingly manage to reconcile the stentorian and lyrical aspects of the Moor’s music. Nevertheless, Maurel’s warning that it is “dangerous to instil in the minds of future interpreters of Otello the idea that this kind of extraordinary vocal power [i.e. Tamagno’s] is a condition sine qua non of a good interpretation” is critical (Maurel, 1988, II, 632). This points up the tension between “primitivistic” melodrama, associated with Otello’s stentorian music, and his more lyrical, “naturalistic” side associated with the music in his part marked legato, dolce and con eleganza. I want to argue that this tension can be observed at work in a number of important twentieth-century performances of the opera. Crucially, this is a tension that often also reflects broader political considerations. Apart from the famous Mapleson cylinders recorded at live performances at the Metropolitan between 1901 and 1903, one of the

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earliest examples of an extended live operatic recording captures excerpts of Giovanni Zenatello’s Otello from Covent Garden in 1926. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, and given the great Enrico Caruso’s reluctance to take on the role live in the theatre, Zenatello was the most famous exponent of the part. As this image shows, he was also a striking figure and a not inconsiderable actor (Fig. 8.3). Zenatello’s recording demonstrates the singer’s admirable verbal colouring and he also pays close attention to a number of Verdi’s markings. For instance, the demands for a voce soffocata at the start, and the cantabile singing at the end of “Dio! mio potevi scagliar” are all well observed. The timbre of the voice is, like Tamagno’s, also rather nasal, and somewhat metallic. The high notes have the characteristically fast vibrato (some critics call it a “bleat”) common to a number of early twentieth-century tenors such as Miguel Fleta and Giacomo Lauri-Volpi. In terms of interpretation, the Act 2 aria (“Ora e per sempre addio” (“Now and forever farewell”)) and the Vengeance duet with Iago that ends the act (“Si pel ciel marmoreo giuro” (“Yes, I swear by the marble heaven”)), are punctuated by shouts, sobs and grunts not indicated in the score.11 In fact, Zenatello’s half-sung, half-shouted cries of “Sangue!” (“Blood!”) during the Vengeance duet sound to me like a self-conscious mimicking of the way Caruso sings “Sangue” in his famous 1914 recording of the duet with Titta Ruffo. It is perhaps too easy to dismiss these effects as examples of verisitic/ melodramatic bad taste of a previous age. More challenging is to acknowledge the ways in which Otello’s construction in ideology, and in music, is transmitted through the recorded performance history of the opera. Another fascinating example is a performance recorded on 12 February 1938 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York featuring Giovanni Martinelli’s Otello. He was Caruso’s successor at the Met in the tenore di forza roles such as Alvaro in Verdi’s La Forza del Destino and Canio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Martinelli had a career that extended from the first decade of the twentieth century until the 1940s. His commercial recordings, whilst never achieving the popularity of tenors such as Caruso, Gigli or Björling, have always been highly regarded by vocal aficionados. Martinelli’s famous breath control, legato shaping of long phrases and incisive, spinto attack on the high notes is evident throughout this recording of Otello (Fig. 8.4). His verbal colouring of the opening of the Act 1 love duet “Gia nella notte densa” (“The night is already full”) subtly delineates Otello as lover, almost the only place in the opera where this side of his character is developed, and Martinelli’s shaping of the legato line through the use of mezza voce (half voice) is very affecting. Less positively, the voice could not, at least by this stage of his career, be called beautiful, and the squillo of his tone, especially above the stave, often sounds unpleasantly metallic. Typically of these pre-World War Two performances, the interpretation is also marked in some places by other less scrupulous virtues. He crudely overemphasizes a number of phrases, especially in the dramatically charged Act 3 duet with Desdemona, such as “il piu nero delitto” and “Ah Desdemona indietro” (“the blackest crime”; “Ah Desdemona, leave me”). The most startling example comes after Desdemona’s cry in the Act 3 duet that she is not a whore (“Ah! Non son ciò che esprime quela parola orenda” (“Ah! I am not what you say, that horrible word”)). Here, Martinelli emits what can only be described as an extra vocal grunt followed by an extended, manic cackle, and then a further groan. Is this simply tasteless vocal acting? Or can we argue that Martinelli is, consciously or not, giving added voice to the “primitivism” of Otello’s construction as evinced by its creators and predominant in a pre-civil rights era? Martinelli is also pictured as Otello in “oriental” garb and setting like Tamagno; he wears

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Figure 8.3: Giovanni Zenatello in the title role of Verdi’s Otello, 1909

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Figure 8.4: Giovanni Martinelli in the title role of Verdi’s Otello, c. 1937

dark grease-paint, a black curly wig and large hooped earrings, all racially loaded signifiers during the 1930s. Interestingly, the tenor studied the part with both Boito and Maurel. But Martinelli’s performance takes place in the shadow of World War Two when issues of race could no longer be side-lined (he sang the role at the Met from 1937 to 1942).

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This performance took place seventeen years before a black singer first appeared on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera; yet in 1939, that singer, Marian Anderson, having been banned from appearing at the Constitution Hall, sang her famous concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Perhaps there were some in the audience that February afternoon in 1938 who reflected on the contrast between operatic and political realities. No less problematically, how might we approach performances of Otello like those given under the shadow of Nazi rule? I want to focus here on two performances, the first given by Torsten Ralf in Vienna in 1944, and the second by Franz Völker in Munich in 1946. Ralf’s Otello is taken from a radio broadcast, discovered as recently as 1989 in the East German Radio Archives, of a production given at the Vienna Staatsoper conducted by Karl Böhm. As Wilhelm Hartmann points out in his book Shakespeare on the German Stage, in 1941 the Nazis had placed restrictions on performances of a number of Shakespeare’s plays. These, including Othello, were unsurprisingly banned “on racial grounds” (Hartmann, 1998, 121).12 But, remarkably, this ban did not extend to operatic works based on problematic Shakespearean plays such as Verdi’s Otello. Indeed, as Erik Levi has pointed out, by 1939/40, Verdi had supplanted Wagner “as the most performed operatic composer in the Reich” (Levi, 1994, 192). Although Ralf was Swedish, he spent much of his career in Germany. His performance of Otello is largely free of extra melodramatic effects and, in purely vocal terms, his Moor treads a careful line between the stentorian and the lyrical and is a good foil for Paul Schöffler’s subtle and baleful Iago. But is it possible to listen to Ralf singing a German translation of racially inflected lines like “forse perchè ho sul viso quest’atro tenebror” (“perhaps because my face bears a darkness”) without considering how they might have been received by listeners under occupied Nazi rule in 1944? What Brian Currid has termed the “nationalizing aspect of art music in mass culture” under the Nazis was characterized by its abhorrence of any “foreign” or “degenerate” element that would undermine “pure” German art (Currid, 2006, 130). Would the story of a black man married to a white woman, both of whom are subsequently destroyed, have been read as an indictment of the racial policies of what was, by 1944, a Nazi regime in political freefall? Or would it have been understood as a cautionary tale against miscegenation? The fact that the answer is probably “both” shows how the unresolved political and ideological tensions at the heart of Verdi’s opera could easily be transmuted into other fraught political arenas. The case of Völker’s 1946 Munich performance of Otello (probably a radio broadcast) is no less problematic, but for different reasons.13 During the 1920s and 1930s, this singer became renowned for his Wagnerian roles, particularly his performances of Siegmund in Die Walküre and the title role in Lohengrin. Indeed, he famously sang Lohengrin in Bayreuth in 1936 under Wilhelm Furtwängler and before Hitler and the assembled Nazi hierarchy. The unforced lyricism, beauty of tone and excellent breath control that Völker brought to Wagnerian roles more often sung in a far less scrupulous fashion have led one expert to call him a “German bel canto singer” (Fischer, 1992, 531). The extracts of Völker’s Otello in 1946 certainly demonstrate most of these virtues in the Act 1 love duet (Fig. 8.5). However, by the time we reach the Act 3 confrontation with Desdemona, it is hard to believe that we are hearing a singer renowned for his smooth lyricism. In Völker’s commercial recordings of Otello’s music made in the early 1930s, the legato style is very much in evidence and is aligned to a noble, if interpretatively bland conception of the role.

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Figure 8.5: Franz Völker in the title role of Verdi’s Otello, c. 1938–40

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In this Munich performance, though, the interpretation is anything but bland: Völker’s singing can only be described as a grotesque parody of bel canto. Legato is foregone almost completely in favour of a kind of declamatory Sprechgesang (spoken song) complete with distorted vowels and all manner of strange, indeed almost hysterical tonal contortions: the style is like a bad cross between Mime in Wagner’s Siegfried and Macheath in Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. Interestingly, when we compare Völker’s interpretation with studio and live recordings of Otello made by the greatest German heldentenor of the period, Max Lorenz, a singer often criticized for the liberties he took with scores and for his overtly extrovert style, it is the latter tenor who emerges as a paragon of understatement when compared with Völker.14 I think that the only way to understand Völker’s Otello is to see it as representing a “heroic” interpretation of the role, that is, a “heroism” that is a product of the dominant political ideology within which it was conceived. Various historians have shown how Nazi ideals of heroism drew upon a politically inflected version of Wagnerian ideology. And a number of music critics have argued that the rhetorical style favoured under National Socialism, with its declamatory posturing and “heroic” ranting, is often echoed in similarly declamatory performances from this period by a number of musicians and singers. Given that Völker’s performance took place on 24 February 1946, only a month after denazification proceedings began, I had wanted to suggest that we could read his conception of Otello as a form of political parody, mocking the “heroic” style of the deposed regime. However, I subsequently discovered live excerpts of the same singer performing the opera at the Vienna Staatsoper during the war.15 Suffice to say, his singing of the role is broadly the same as in the post-war performance. Perhaps this “heroic” conception of Otello, understood in the odious National Socialist terms, had a certain kind of performative and political logic. We would probably find it easier to dismiss this kind of interpretation in 1946 after National Socialism’s demise. But the salutary realization of this, and other performances, is that the end of the Nazi regime did not necessarily imply the end of a performative aesthetic that had its roots in National Socialism (see Spotts, 2003). It may be objected that opera singers and operatic performances should not be subjected to this degree of political and ideological scrutiny, or else that the last two examples are not really representative of the ways in which Verdi’s Otello has been appropriated. Perhaps. But I maintain that, like operatic scores, or literary texts, operatic performances cannot be divorced from the broader political and ideological contexts from which they emerge. Nor can they be exempted from the hard questions that we would ask of the political investments and uses of any other work of art. In the case of Shakespearean operas, the ever-shifting parameters of Shakespeare’s global cultural appeal need to be considered too. This is as true now as it was in Verdi’s day. Two more recent examples will suffice here. The great Italian baritone Tito Gobbi, one of the finest Iagos of the 1950s and 1960s, was also an astute student of operatic history. His biography, published in English in 1980, contains fascinating accounts of how he approached roles such as Iago and Verdi’s Falstaff, for which he was also renowned. In the case of Otello, there is an interestingly elegiac connection with the first creator of Iago (Fig. 8.6). Gobbi recounts that he was contracted to perform the role at the Paris Opera in 1966 in a production utilizing the original scenery for the Paris premiere as well as Maurel’s costume. Unfortunately by this date the scenery was far too flimsy to use. Moreover, “the famous costume of Maurel . . . fell to pieces as I shook the moths out of it” (Gobbi, 1980, 213–14). As wistful as the

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Figure 8.6: Tito Gobbi as Iago in Verdi’s Otello

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Figure 8.7: Plácido Domingo in the title role of Verdi’s Otello at the Vienna State Opera

anecdote is, this is as far as Gobbi’s ideological connection with Maurel extends. In his reading of the opera’s titular character, the baritone shows himself to be much closer to Verdi, Boito and Ricordi’s view of the character. Otello, he notes, was “brought up in Venice with a smattering of ‘civilisation’ which easily rubs off under the stimulus of violent emotion” (Gobbi, 1980, 141). Gobbi’s Iago in the complete 1960 recording of Otello under Tullio Serafin (who played in the orchestra at the premiere of the opera in 1887) is rightly considered a classic performance. Yet it is clear that his conception of the opera’s titular character is rooted in the late nineteenth-century ideological framework outlined above. How might this inform our reading of his interpretation and others from this period of recorded history, which were informed by the civil rights movement? We might also consider here the example of the pre-eminent Otello of the last quarter of a century, Plácido Domingo. He has commented that his conception of the Moor was deeply influenced by Laurence Olivier’s “monumental yet controversial, ‘African’ rather than ‘Moorish’ interpretation of the role” (Fig. 8.7). For this reason, writes Domingo, he sees Otello “as a man deeply rooted in his African origins, despite his great military career and the universal respect he enjoyed in Venice. He is a Moor, he cannot change his blood. He comes with all the beliefs inherent in his religion” (Domingo and Matheopoulos, 2000, 181). It is no disrespect to Domingo’s compelling portrait of the Moor to point out that his conception of the role, like Olivier’s, is really another restatement of Verdi’s

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Schlegel-inspired view. From another perspective, we might consider the end of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1986 film version of the opera, also starring Domingo. As Iago runs from the bedroom in the last Act, Otello picks up a spear and hurls it through the fleeing Ancient. Is this a neat solution to Iago’s villainy? Is it a racialized ending that highlights the opera’s problematic ideological discourses? Or is it an example of the inherent and irreconcilable contradictions of performing this opera in the post-civil-rights era? Writing about invocations of Othello in popular culture, Thomas Cartelli has argued that the play has not only failed to unsettle or dislodge established racial stereotypes, but has played a formative role in shaping them into what might be termed the ‘Othello complex’. Understood in the starkest terms, this complex functions as an ‘anthropologized’ racial construction in which the ‘assimilated savage’ predictably ‘relapses into primitivism under stress’. (Cartelli, 1999, 123) Quite whether any production of Verdi’s Otello, or for that matter Shakespeare’s Othello, could provide a counter to Cartelli’s claim is an open question. More broadly, this quotation can be used to foreground some interesting tensions between the operatic and “straight” theatres. With regard to Shakespeare’s Othello, a number of theatrical actors and directors have concluded that the play is simply not viable today without a black actor in the title role. Though there are some exceptions, operatic Otellos still commonly darken their skin with make-up to play the role. This is a practice that the “straight” theatre has all but repudiated. Since Ira Aldridge’s assumption of Othello in the 1820s, many black actors in the “straight” theatre have taken on the role on the great stages of the world. Yet it is notable that, at the time of writing, no black tenor has sung the title role of Verdi’s Otello at the major opera houses of the Met, La Scala or Covent Garden.

Conclusion Compared to the fields of film, art and popular culture, opera and operatic performances are relatively underexplored as examples of Shakespearean appropriation in the arts. Today, the world’s opera houses offer only one of many outlets for operatic performances. I have not really considered here the fascinating role that technology, whether in the form of the gramophone, film, long playing record, video, CD, DVD or the internet has had on the reception and consumption of opera. Such an examination would undoubtedly shed interesting light on the connection between technological reproduction and changes in the cultural and political status of opera during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It may be the case, as Jeremy Tambling has argued, that “opera ended somewhere around the third decade of the twentieth century as a meaningful European art-form whose existence made some difference to social discourse” (Tambling, 1996, 8). Nevertheless, I have tried to show the various ways in which the composition and performances of operas such as Othello reveal absorbing social, ideological and political conflicts in the past, and in the present. These readings do throw new light on the place and function of the operatic Bard across a wide historical period. I have focused in detail and at length in the second half of this essay on one particular opera not simply because of the inherent interest of the material, but because I believe that similar in-depth contextual approaches could be taken in relation to other Shakespearean operas. Verdi’s Macbeth and Falstaff, or Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia and A Midsummer

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Night’s Dream are obvious cases in point here. In terms of recorded performances, my discussion of Otello’s performance history has only scratched the surface of what is a vast array of fascinating material. For example, I have not dealt with major twentieth-century interpreters of Otello such as Mario Del Monaco, Jon Vickers or James McCracken, nor have I touched on the new generation of tenors who have taken on Otello since Plácido Domingo retired the part from his active repertory. Among these, Ben Heppner, Johan Botha, Vladamir Galouzine, Aleksandrs Antonenko and Simon O’Neill are notable exponents of this complex role. And I have not explored in any detail the no less fascinating performance histories of Verdi’s Iago and Desdemona. More broadly, in terms of recorded sound and performers, there are any number of iconic singers whose interpretations of the canonical Shakespearean operas either on recordings or on film deserve wider exposure and further examination beyond the remit of classical music and opera scholars. For instance, the Roméo of that incomparable tenor Jussi Björling, the Falstaff of Mariano Stabile, the Medea-esque Lady Macbeth of Maria Callas and the King Lear of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau could all be explored at length. And much could be said about how various great conductors have approached these Shakespearean operas. To stay with Otello, a comparison of the recordings of Toscanini, Furtwängler, Serafin, Barbirolli, Karajan and Levine would reveal manifold facets of the opera’s construction, performance and reception.16 In addition to sound recordings like the ones examined here, large numbers of Shakespearean operas are now available on DVD. Internet sites such as YouTube and others have made available an extraordinary array of films of operatic performances and singers, many of whom are mentioned in this chapter. Such films represent a rich archive, documenting changing styles of operatic interpretation and singing from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition, there are vast historical collections of newspaper, journal and diary reviews of operatic Shakespeare that are waiting to be tapped. The materials are undoubtedly there: those interested in the operatic appropriation of Shakespeare could make fascinating use of them.

Notes 1. For example, when his wife Henrietta Smithson dies, he recalls how, as a “pale, worn, obscure youth, leaning against the pillars of the theatre”, he saw her play Ophelia, Juliet and Desdemona. Although he “devour[ed] her with wild glances”, the memory of his dead wife is inextricably connected to his first theatrical experiences of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Othello (Berlioz, 1932, 469). The Memoirs are also prefaced and concluded with Macbeth’s speech of despair in Act 5 of the play (“Life’s but a walking shadow”). 2. Berlioz is unaware of the author of the adapted Lear but is probably referring to Nahum Tate’s infamous late seventeenth-century reworking of the play. 3. The Rossini revival that has been in full swing since the late 1960s has been augmented by the emergence more recently of a number of specialist Rossini tenors such as Chris Merritt, Rockwell Blake and Juan Diego Florez who are able to sing Rossini’s extremely demanding music for tenor in operas such as Otello. And Gounod’s opera, although extremely demanding for the soprano and tenor, has never fully left the repertoire: famous singers such as Nellie Melba, Jean de Reszke, John McCormack, Georges Thill, Beniamino Gigli, Bidu Sayao, Jussi Björling, Nicolai Gedda, Franco Corelli, Mirella Freni, Alfredo Kraus, Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu have all successfully sung the titles roles. 4. Thomas Adès, The Tempest (EMI, B002GFIR3E, 2009). The Tempest is the Shakespearean play that operatic composers have turned to most often.

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5. White’s contention that Davenant’s work heralded the first female performer on the English stage has been challenged by critics such as McManus (2002). I do not consider here John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (c. 1683), the earliest surviving opera in English. 6. What follows draws upon White,1983, 109–36 and Price, 1994, 1179–82. 7. The melodramatic roots of so much canonical opera go some way to explaining the perennial criticism concerning opera singers’ lack of acting ability. Though there have always been opera singers who have also been praised as actors, for example Maria Callas, Jon Vickers or Plácido Domingo, a great many of the nineteenth-century canonical operas are, at base, melodramas, a fact reflected in the still much maligned “operatic acting style”. 8. Translations taken from Fisher, 2001. 9. A 1903 recording exists of Maurel singing “Era la note” from Act 2 of Otello. 10. Legendary Tenors (Nimbus, B000024NJY, 1994). 11. Extracts in Covent Garden Live: Zenatello and Chaliapin (Pearl CD, GEM 0203, 2003). 12. In 1944, public theatrical performances were prohibited across Germany, although opera houses and concert halls continued to give performances. 13. Franz Völker Live als Erik, Lohengrin und Othello (Preiser Records, 90364, 1998). 14. For Max Lorenz’s Otello, see the studio recordings on Giuseppe Verdi: Otello. Ralf, Konetzni, Schöffler, cond. Böhm (Myto, 922.60, 1992) as well as an extract from a live recording made at the Vienna Staatsoper in 1942, also under Böhm, on ‘Keiner wie er’: Max Lorenz Live (Preiser Records, 91167, 2009). Max Lorenz’s relationship with the Nazi regime was famously complex: he was married to a Jewish woman and offered active protection to a number of Jewish families, friends and colleagues. He was also bisexual and was threatened with prosecution by the Nazis for his sexuality. However, his importance as a singer at Bayreuth and elsewhere, plus his worldwide celebrity, meant that important allies within the Wagner family and the Nazi hierarchy were able to protect him and his family from exposure and prosecution. Völker’s political relationship to the regime is less clear. 15. Vienna State Opera Live, 16 (Koch Schwann, B000001SV3, 1994). 16. Both Toscanini and Serafin played in the orchestra at the premiere of Otello in 1887.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Adès, Thomas (2009). The Tempest. EMI, B002GFIR3E. Albright, Daniel (2007). Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Arblaster, Anthony (1992). Viva la Libertà! Politics in Opera. London and New York: Verso. Balthazar, Scott L. (2004). “Desdemona’s Alienation and Otello’s Fall”. In The Cambridge Companion to Verdi, ed. Scott Balthazar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 237–54. Barzun, Jacques (2000). “Berlioz as Man and Thinker”. In The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter Bloom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 11–19. Berlioz, Hector (1932). Memoirs of Hector Berlioz from 1803 to 1865 Comprising his Travels in Germany, Italy, Russia and England, trans. Rachel Holmes and Eleanor Holmes, rev. trans. Ernest Newman. New York: Tudor Publishing. Boetzkes, Manfred and Roger Savage (1989). “Staging”. In The New Grove Handbooks in Music: History of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 49–61. Budden, Julian (1973). The Operas of Verdi: 1. From Oberto to Rigoletto. London: Casell. ——(1992). The Operas of Verdi, rev. edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 3 vols. Cairns, David (1989). Berlioz: The Making of an Artist. London: Deutsch, 1989. Cartelli, Thomas (1999). Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. London and New York: Routledge.

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Currid, Brian (2006). A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press. Della Seta, Fabrizio (2004). “New Currents in the Libretto”. In The Cambridge Companion to Verdi, ed. Scott Balthazar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 69–87. Domingo, Plácido and Helen Matheopoulos (2000). Plácido Domingo: My Operatic Roles. London: Little Brown Books. Fischer, Jens Malte (1992). “Sprechgesang or Bel Canto: Towards a History of Singing Wagner”. In Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski and trans. John Deathridge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 524–46. Fisher, Burton D., trans. (2001). Verdi’s Otello: Opera Journeys Libretto Series. Florida: Opera Journeys Publishing. Gobbi, Tito (1980). My Life. London: Futura Publications. Hartmann, Wilhelm (1998). Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century. With a Section on Shakespeare on Stage in the German Democratic Republic by Maik Hamburger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hepokoski, James (1987). Giuseppe Verdi: Otello. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holoman, D. Kern (1992). “Hector Berlioz”. In The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, 4 vols. London and New York: Macmillan, I, 434–9. Kater, Michael H. (1997). The Twisted Muse: Musicians and their Music in the Third Reich. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kerman, Joseph (1989). Opera as Drama. London and Boston: Faber and Faber. Langhans, Edward A. (1995). “The Theatrical Background”. In The Purcell Companion, ed. Michael Burden. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 299–312. Levi, Erik (1994). Music in the Third Reich. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Lowenstein, Alfred (1978). Annals of Opera, 1597–1940, 3rd edn. London: John Calder. Macdonald, Hugh (2001). “Hector Berlioz”. In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 4 vols. London and New York: Macmillan, III, 384–420. McManus, Clare (2002). Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court (1590–1619). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Magee, Bryan (2000). Wagner and Philosophy. London: Penguin. Martin, George (1988). Aspects of Verdi. London: Robson Books. Maurel, Victor (1988). Production Book for Otello. In Verdi’s Otello and Simon Boccanegra (revised version) in Letters and Documents, ed. and trans. Hans Busch, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, II, 629–65. Monod, David (2005). Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945– 1953. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Moody, Jane (2003). “Shakespeare and the Immigrants: Nationhood, Psychology and Xenophobia on the Nineteenth-Century Stage”. In Victorian Shakespeare: Theatre, Drama and Performance, ed. Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 99–118. Norris, Christopher (1989). “Introduction”. In Music and the Politics of Culture, ed. Christopher Norris. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 7–19. Parker, Roger (1997). Leonora’s Last Act: Essays on Verdian Discourse. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Phillips-Matz, Mary Jane (1993). Verdi: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Poole, Adrian (2004). Shakespeare and the Victorians. London: Thompson Learning. Price, Curtis (1994). “Henry Purcell”. In The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, 4 vols. London and New York: Macmillan, III, 1179–82. Rosenberg, Marvin (1961). The Masks of Othello: The Search for the Identity of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona by Three Centuries of Actors and Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sadie, Stanley (1989). “Entr’act I”. In The New Grove Handbooks in Music: History of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 62–8.

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Schmidgall, Gary (1990). Shakespeare and Opera. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Seifert, Herbert (1992). “Vienna, 1”. In The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, 4 vols. London and New York: Macmillan, IV, 989–91. Spotts, Frederic (2003). Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. Woodstock: Overlook Press. Tambling, Jeremy (1996). Opera and the Culture of Fascism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Taylor, George (1989). Players and Performances in the Victorian Theatre. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Vaughan, Virginia Mason (1994). Othello: A Contextual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Verdi, Giuseppe (1988). “Otello Correspondence”. In Verdi’s Otello and Simon Boccanegra (revised version) in Letters and Documents, ed. and trans. Hans Busch, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, I, 3–419. Walker, Thomas (1989). “Italy”. In The New Grove Handbooks in Music: History of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 15–26. White, Eric Walter (1983). A History of English Opera. London: Faber and Faber. Wilson, Christopher R. (1994). “Shakespeare, William”. In The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, 4 vols. London and New York: Macmillan, IV, 338–47. ——(2001). “William Shakespeare”. In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 2nd edn, 29 vols. London and New York: Macmillan, III, 192–8.

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SHAKESPEARE AND CLASSICAL MUSIC Julie Sanders

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ans Werner Henze’s “First Sonata on Shakespearean Characters” (1975–6) opens with a very familiar speech: Richard of Gloucester’s “Now is the winter of our discontent” monologue, which is, of course, the opening of Shakespeare’s Richard III: Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this son of York; And all the clouds that loured upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. (1.1.1–4) But Henze’s version of this linguistically dextrous and challenging speech – for actor and audience alike – is utterly wordless. It is the opening movement in his paired sonatas on Shakespearean characters, a musical composition that has come to be known by the collective title of Royal Winter Music. Conventionally, a sonata is a composition for one or two instruments. Henze’s piece is written for the guitar and he has often acknowledged classical guitarist Julian Bream as an arch-collaborator in the work. The sonata form is, more precisely, a musical composition in three sections (exposition, development and recapitulation), usually in several movements and with one or more of these movements being themselves in the tripartite sonata form. In all respects, Henze’s work adheres to these basic compositional rules. The “Gloucester” movement that opens the work follows the movements and rhythms of the Shakespearean soliloquy which is itself a master-class in exposition, development and recapitulation, as Richard both spells out for audiences his dark intentions and makes them troublingly complicit in what follows: “I am determined to be a villain . . . Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous” (1.1.30–2). In this speech, Richard is able to set the historical and personal context, to establish the scene as it were, with great economy in his scabrous lines. The accession of a Yorkist line to the throne – “Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths” (1.1.5) – is accounted for, but also Richard’s dangerous ennui in the newly achieved peace: Why, I in this weak piping time of peace Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my own shadow in the sun And descant on mine own deformity. (1.1.24–7) The hugely variant and deliberately dissonant chordal sequences of this movement on guitar in Henze’s work both reflect and respond to these aspects of the source-speech.

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It helps that Richard himself deploys distinctly musical metaphors in describing the pacific, leisurely life of the court that he so roundly rejects in the course of this speech and its ambitious, upward thrusting dynamics. The “piping time of peace” quoted above, and also Richard’s self-aware description of his speech as a “descant on mine own deformity”, are cases in point. He metaphorizes the peacetime languor of the court he so despises in musical terms. “Grim-visaged war”, we are informed, “hath smoothed his wrinkled front” (1.1.9): And now – instead of mounting barbed steeds To fright the souls of fearful adversaries – He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. (1.1.10–13) To Richard’s jaded eyes (and ears), music is associated with femininity and a form of depreciated energy. In Henze’s sonata movement, as if to mark out Richard’s opposition to the harmonics of lute-music, the guitar is increasingly wrenched out of its more musical and ear-pleasing mode in the course of “Gloucester”. The musician is invited by Henze to move to the outside edges of the instrument, to use its wooden casing to turn it into an angrily percussive instrument. This redirection of the musician’s focus mirrors in interesting ways the marginal position in the court being asserted by Richard in this speech. He will spy on shadows and prove a villain and hates “the idle pleasures of these days” (1.1.31). By the close of Henze’s musical imagining of Richard’s speech, the percussive aspect has all but overwhelmed the musicality of the piece, suggestive perhaps of Richard’s heightening anger as the speech progresses. Shakespeare offers the alternative climax of a determined trochaic and alliterative response to the interruption of this monologue by the onstage arrival of Richard’s brother, George, Duke of Clarence, guarded. The stressed monosyllables are a musical dynamic in themselves: “Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes” (1.1.41). Henze’s “Gloucester” is a beautifully observed piece and one that raises a number of interesting questions about the relationship between Shakespeare and what is often termed “classical music”, but which might more accurately be described as orchestral or symphonic music. It is a relationship that began as early as the seventeenth century, when Henry Purcell and others involved in the practical commercial theatre and also music for the court composed music for spectacle and song-and-music heavy quasi-operatic Restoration adaptations of the plays, and has continued until the present day with the interventions of Michael Tippett, Thomas Adès and others into the Shakespearean classical canon. It is a relationship which this essay will try to tease out through a range of musical forms and examples and through the use of salient case-studies, beginning with Henze’s remarkable paired sonata sequence to which “Gloucester” forms the opening gambit.

Sonatas to Sonnets: Lines of Influence and Adaptation Henze’s Royal Winter Music announces its Shakespearean relationship both in the general titles of the two paired sonatas and in the titles attached to individual movements. “Gloucester” in the first sonata is followed by “Romeo and Juliet”, which is less a setting of a particular speech than a musical response to the iconic balcony scene. Then we have “Ariel”, invoking the character from The Tempest who is most explicitly linked to music as an art-form and whose songs, as we shall see later in this essay, have been the

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focus of innumerable classical settings, from Purcell to Adès. Next in the sequence comes “Ophelia” and here it is notable that, rather than offer a musical response to a specific moment in Hamlet, Henze opts to respond to an off-stage moment, a moment that exists only in the audience imaginary in strict dramatic terms. This movement, which comes in at just under four minutes in length, imagines Ophelia at the point of drowning, as she sings her musical lay and enters the water. In the play it is a moment present only to us in Gertrude’s poetic retrospective description: There is a willow grows aslant a brook That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream. Therewith fantastic garlands did she make Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples . . . There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke, When down the weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, And mermaid-like a while they bore her up . . . (4.7.137–40, 143–7) This same speech drew the attention of the early twentieth-century English composer Frank Bridge who composed a symphonic poem that took its title from Gertrude’s resonant first line.1 It is worth pausing at this point to reflect that this is a moment “not” in the play that has nevertheless been the focus of many artistic responses to Shakespeare, not least artistic. The perhaps best known example is John Everett Millais’ large Victorian painting (1852) of the “mermaid-like” Ophelia floating downstream, her dress temporarily buoying her up, though also inevitably suggesting a shroud, and surrounded by the flowers she was gathering before she is dragged to her “muddy death” (4.7.154). The painting was lovingly recreated on film in the first major cinematic interpretation of Hamlet in 1948, directed by and starring British actor Laurence Olivier. Jean Simmons as Ophelia seemingly metamorphoses into the Millais painting when the image appears onscreen and the resonance was quite deliberate on Olivier’s part (see Bate, 1997, 265–6). There are a number of points we could make in response to this – for example, that it captures in interesting ways the way in which Shakespeare himself chooses to aestheticize Ophelia’s death by means of Gertrude’s poetic narrative – but we also see that it is just one aspect of the play (“To be or not to be” would surely be another) that has achieved an afterlife of artistic and cultural resonance which has also, if not broken free of the play as such, certainly moved beyond its strict parameters. The Millais painting, in addition to the lines of Gertrude’s that inspired it, was clearly in Henze’s mind when he composed this movement; the point is acknowledged in the sleevenotes that accompanied the first published recording.2 We might also speculate that, subliminally, Olivier’s film was part of the adaptive process the play and the character had already travelled through by the time of Henze’s encounter with Ophelia’s death (see Sanders, 2006a, 120–4). His “Ophelia” movement is haunted by the structural movements of dance themes, specifically of gavottes. Another seminal film interpretation of both Hamlet and this character might also be bearing some influence here: in Grigori Kosintsev’s 1964 film version of the play, the score for which was composed by Dmitri Shostakovich who would collaborate on other Kosintsev Shakespearean cinematic

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interpretations (including King Lear in 1970), Ophelia is initially witnessed dancing in time to music. It is a movement, an aural and physical memory, to which she will painfully revert in her madness, echoing this first sighting of her as a woman constrained by the expectations of her family and the court. The spectral echo of dance themes in Henze’s piece suggests at the very least a shared notion of the character but possibly a direct line of inspiration. We begin to see in this way the relevance of current forays and debates in adaptation studies for thinking about musical responses to Shakespeare and literature more generally (see Sanders, 2006b). Until this point in his first sonata sequence, Henze has demonstrated considerable loyalty to the tragic and tragicomic form of Shakespeare’s oeuvre; The Tempest is the only non-formal tragic drama to feature in these character studies, but, following Ophelia’s death, there is a change of mood – as if the madness that her movement incorporated has strained the emotions to breaking point and there is now a need for music in a different key. Henze turns more overtly to comedy as a form and in particular to the idea of comic relief as a point of punctuation in the dramaturgic or musical structure. “Touchstone, Audrey and William” invokes three comic characters from As You Like It and then, to round off the sequence, Henze looks to Oberon the fairy king from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a play, incidentally, with one of the richest classical musical afterlives). The “Oberon” movement is a “rondo”, the conventional ending of a sonata or concerto (the “First Sonata” was written some years earlier than the “Second” and so was originally conceived as a contained sequence). The idea of circles and rounds and closures is not only a gesture towards the formal requirements of the sonata sequence, it is also an entirely apposite response to Oberon’s ending of that Shakespeare play in the form of gathering the fairies into a circle within the Athenian palace and the singing of a song as a blessing on the weddings that have just taken place. As Titania instructs the fairy charges: First rehearse your song by rote, To each word a warbling note. Hand in hand with fairy grace Will we sing and bless this place. (5.2.27–30) What is intriguing to the literary critic in response to these musical responses to and interpretations of Shakespeare is how they remain alert to the generic structures and conventions of both the disciplines to which they allude – in Henze’s case the sonata form, but also the five-act structure of an early modern comedy, with its heightened sense of the resonance of ending, as well as the early modern gesture towards music and dance at such moments: BENEDICK Come, come, we are friends, let’s have a dance ere we are married, that we may lighten our own hearts and our wives’ heels . . . Therefore, play music. (Much Ado About Nothing, 5.4.112–16) DUKE SENIOR Play, music, and you brides and bridegrooms all, With measure heaped in joy to th’ measures fall. (As You Like It, 5.4.167–8) But when he turned to “Second Sonata” in 1978–9, Henze imagined his musical closure afresh. This time he opted not for the more harmonious coming together and circularities of Shakespearean comedy and instead took his note of dissonance from the tenor of the opening “Gloucester” movement. If the percussive breakdown of the musical harmony in

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that sequence is intended to reflect the breakdown of Richard’s mind, and the “Ophelia” movement expresses an interest in moments of breakdown, of movement beyond the frame both of stage and of controlled social behaviour, Henze makes that embedded theme of insanity explicit in the decision to end his “Second Sonata” with another tragic image of collapse, that of the “Mad Lady Macbeth”. As if to highlight the contrast, he precedes it with two responses to Shakespearean comedy: the touching dance themes and cadenzas of “Sir Andrew Aguecheek”, who in Twelfth Night reflects on dancing days and measures: “I would I had bestowed that time in the tongues that I have in fencing, dancing, and bearbaiting . . . Faith, I can cut a caper” (1.3.78–80, 101). What Shakespeare invariably makes explicit in these references are the links, not least in early modern culture, between dance, musical forms and poetic meters, the shared vocabulary of “measures” on which he was so fond of punning.3 In turn, the embedded musical allusions find resonance with composers such as Henze several centuries on. From Sir Andrew’s dance-music, we turn to “Bottom’s Dream” a musical movement referring to a specific sequence of events in a Shakespeare play, this time again A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here there is the wonderful touch of the donkey braying at the end of this sequence that snaps both us, as listening audience, and the “translated” and retranslated Bottom back into the “real world”. What we are receiving, then, on listening to Henze’s sequence is a complex series of reading and interpretations of different plays, characters and theatrical moments. There is a question as to what this music would signify if the Shakespearean source-texts or “hypotexts” (to deploy the suggestive term coined by French narrative theorist Gerard Genette (Genette, 1997)) were either not signalled to us, by the titles accorded each moment in the sequence by the composer, or known to us in the kind of detail that enables and allows for the kind of simultaneous readings I am attempting to perform here. Adaptation studies becomes a pertinent set of methodologies to invoke since in that field the relationship between two “texts” (taking “text” here in its broadest sense to incorporate visual and aural cultural productions) is key both to the production of meaning and a large part of the pleasure involved in the reading or interpretative experience. The music/literature interdisciplinary encounter has been dogged by the same questions of fidelity and transcendence that have concerned many theorists of adaptation, but the point remains, I think, that Henze himself has signalled the relationship with Shakespeare to us and in doing so provides us with a rich set of interpretative frames and contexts (see Cartmell and Whelehan, 2007; Carroll, 2009). What is of most interest to me here in unpacking the cross-cultural and cross-historical contacts between Shakespeare and classical music is the intricate relationship, or rather delicate set of negotiations, between different forms, the kinships found between poetics and music, and what it constitutes to compose a piece of music that attempts to adhere to or even suggest a form of the “dramatic”. One of the key musical forms that explore exactly those questions is the symphonic poem, also known as the tone-poem, and that will be the focus of the next section of this essay. Before we move on to that specific musical genre, though, it is worthwhile ending this reflection on sonatas by thinking through possible resonances between this musical form and the poetic form for which Shakespeare is perhaps best known and which has, intriguingly, proved very popular with composers and musicians: the sonnet. The sonnet is a notoriously constrained form that nevertheless manages to embrace huge passions and big topics such as death, time, and love (Paterson, 2002). Frequently set to music and not averse to taking music as their own topic (see, for example, Sonnet 8: “Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?”), the taut shape of the

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sonnet compares well to the sonata as an architecture that gives the poet a defined space in which to operate and, in the most inventive and innovative ways, to push against. The music of Duke Ellington, working as it does in a jazz idiom, is in many respects beyond the remit of this essay, but I would argue that there is a direct relationship and resonance between the sonata form of Henze and the Ellington–Billy Strayhorn collaborations from 1957, which worked in particular with the fourteen line sonnet to provide a base skeleton or “ground” of rhythm.4 Shakespeare’s plays and the tripartite structure of the sonata form, similarly, provide Henze with the backbone, the musical and literary vertebrae, of his rich artistic response.

The Symphonic or Tone-Poem: Music and the Idea of the “Dramatic” It was suggested above that one of the musical sub-genres that most overtly grapples with the effort to inscribe the “dramatic” in a musical context (other than ballet and opera, which are themselves performance arts) is the symphonic or tone-poem. This particular sub-genre found its apogee in the nineteenth century, in the works of Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss and Antonìn Dvorˇák among others, and was deeply inflected by the European artistic movement that is known by the collective title of “Romanticism” and which embraced not only poetry and the visual arts but also music (see Bate, 1986; Clery, 2003). We have already noted that it was to the symphonic poem that Frank Bridge turned in the early twentieth century to produce his aural reflection on Ophelia’s death in 1927. In musical contexts that piece – There is a willow grows aslant a brook – is often cited since it demonstrates what has come to be known as the “Bridge chord”, a simultaneous use of C Minor and D Major. Since this essay is in many respects all about pairings, parallels and counterpoint, it is intriguing to see Bridge performing, perhaps “reperforming”, this idea at the level of musical key. Franz Liszt’s Hamlet is, however, a fine starting point for a discussion of the symphonic poem’s engagement with Shakespeare. Liszt had a sustained relationship with the symphonic poem as a form throughout his career, but the majority of his pieces are more epic or heroic in dimensions than this particular response to Shakespeare’s tragic interpretation of the revenge drama. At just under fifteen minutes in length, Liszt’s Hamlet is not an attempt to compress the events of the whole play into a single musical movement. Instead it is a character study of the Prince itself and it found its very direct inspiration in the practical theatre. Liszt saw a production of the play in 1856, starring renowned actor Bogumil Dawison as the princely protagonist. Dawison’s interpretation was actually somewhat against the grain of the more Romantic interpretations of the Prince that tended to dominate the public stages of Europe at this time, and which focused on the Prince’s philosophizing tendencies, and his capacity for melancholia and delay (Davies, 2008). Dawison’s was, by contemporary accounts, a highly active version of Hamlet and this sense of energy and agency in his performance and his interpretation of the role feeds directly into Liszt’s choices for his composition. The more melancholic or melodic sections of the piece, which are played on woodwind and strings, the instrumental range more commonly deployed in classical music to suggest femininity and/or female characters in an easily recognisable shorthand performance language, are suggestive of Ophelia rather than this highly masculinized active version of the Prince himself. The tonal movement in the piece is not, however, either solely thrusting or forward

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moving in its dynamic. There are moments of disruption and dissonance and it is possible to identify in this an attempt to translate the effect in performance of the Hamlet soliloquies into a musical context. The soliloquies, inherited by Shakespeare from the revenge play tradition and format, are dramatic punctuations of a sort; moments of reflection and of relationship with the audience in which Hamlet agonizes over his self-assigned task as a revenger of his dead father, the former king: O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! (1.2.129–32) O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else? (1.5.92) O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! (2.2.527) In making this kind of explicit connection between musical and dramatic text, I recognize the danger of trying to map the musical journey too directly onto the textual experience of seeing the play. Nevertheless, I would argue that there are essential qualities to the play (and we do here venture into the territory of using terms like “essence” and “quintessence” which perhaps tend more usually to give literary critics pause as they try to avoid too essentialist or deterministic readings), such as the soliloquies, that composers such as Liszt or Henze, in contradistinction to sensitive and expert readers, clearly aim to respond to in some way through their own referential structures and generic paradigms. If mapping music onto text is dangerous enough terrain, it will have become clear from the discussion above, both of Henze’s sonata and Liszt’s symphonic poem, that literary critics attempting to engage with and write about these classical musical responses find themselves relating a form of detailed character study that had until recently all but fallen out of fashion within the discipline. If New Historicism and Cultural Materialism asked us to relocate the text in a wider socio-cultural moment of production and materiality, so deconstruction and postmodernism invited us to think about the text in various component parts, instructive fragments that only from certain angles created the whole (see Belsey, 1985). By contrast, the form of criticism promulgated by A. C. Bradley and others in the early twentieth century, one which displayed a tendency towards imagining a rich personality and psyche for a character beyond the limits of either published text or witnessable stage events, has become a by-word for archaism, for an approach to literary studies that we have “grown out of” or “moved on from” (see Bradley, 1991). There is currently, however, an intriguing return to the subject of character studies from the posttheory position and an attendant effort to reinscribe those studies with a new energy and purpose. It is also worth noting in thinking about this kind of character-led criticism that it was the dominant mode of publishing and lectures on Shakespeare at the time when many composers of the symphonic poems under analysis here were working. Liszt and Strauss are direct inheritors of Romantic ideas and literary criticism; indeed, Liszt’s active, positively non-Romantic prince is a direct riposte to the influence of Goethe’s interpretation of the play and its protagonist, not least in his hugely influential novel, often described as the first bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–6).5 Early in the twentieth century, when Edward Elgar comes to write his “symphonic study” of Falstaff (1913), focusing on the fat knight of the Henry IV plays rather than his comic manifestation in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which has tended to be the

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preferential focus for operatic engagements with his character, the tragic inflection he gives to Falstaff – made manifest in the piece itself both in the decision to write in the key of C minor but also in the association of the melancholic and feminized oboe with his character, both of which lend the piece an elegiac air – is directly shaped by the lectures he had heard Bradley deliver on the subject (see Sanders, 2007a).6 Recent productions of Hamlet have agonized over the loss of energy at the close of the play when the Prince dies and yet the play continues on through Horatio’s efforts to eulogize his dead friend and the arrival of Fortinbras to assume power in Denmark. In a 2008 production at the Royal Shakespeare Company, director Gregory Doran took the decision to end the play with the dissipation of energy that comes with the Prince’s death and his final line: “The rest is silence” (5.2.310). For that particular production in Stratford-uponAvon, the line held true. But 150 years earlier, Franz Liszt, I would argue, offered a remarkably similar take on the play and the absolute centrality of the character of Hamlet to its intellectual and imaginative energy. When Liszt’s prince dies, the rest really is silence, as the piece fades out on quiet drumbeats, “half-uttered motives” in one commentator’s resonant description (Batta, 1985). The choice of specific Shakespeare plays as well as characters for what I am terming these self-consciously Romantic and post-Romantic symphonic poems of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is equally telling of the prevalent mindset and attitude towards Shakespearean drama at the time of composition. What we begin to unpack as a way of understanding the decisions behind these musical responses are the prevalent readings or understandings of the playwright and certain key texts. The seminal play-texts of the Shakespearean oeuvre for European Romantics were definitely the tragedies and, in particular, Hamlet and Macbeth with their carefully sketched, angst-ridden protagonists, whose moral and ethical dilemmas are so carefully displayed to an audience through the filter or prism of the soliloquy. These were also the plays with which Gothic literature and art developed the most pronounced relationship as well. The link to the kinds of heroes promulgated in the work of Goethe and Schiller is self-evident. This is, once again, the context for the work of Richard Strauss in his tone-poem on Macbeth (1887–8, Opus 23) which is not a single character study but rather an analysis of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. By stripping the play down to its essential components in this way Strauss was not dissimilar from his counterparts in the operatic domain such as Giuseppe Verdi, who famously described his Macbeth opera (1847, revised 1865) as a study of “three characters”, by which he meant the Macbeths themselves and the three witches conceived of as a single unit. The Strauss piece is a subject lesson in the symphonic poem and the use of repeating motifs to create its “dramatic effect”. There is no rigid adherence to plot here; that question of “fidelity” to an original that plagues so much of adaptation studies in other genres is almost immediately put out of mind here. And yet the piece does move towards a climax that suggests the movement of the final Act of the play in a number of respects. We hear the martial triumph of Macduff in the closing bars of the poem, albeit in a toned down version from Strauss’ original manuscript copy. The suggestion was that allowing Macduff to be the chief note at the close was at odds with the focus on the tragic (anti?)hero(es) more typical of the symphonic poem, hence Strauss revised the piece, muting the triumphalism of the ending. Whatever the truth of Strauss’ decision, we still register the novelty of the Macduff motif at the end because for the most part we have been focused in quite an intense listening experience on the Macbeths themselves. The only shift in that dynamic is a fanfare part of the way through which many commentators have seen as suggestive of kingship

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and therefore both of Macbeth’s general ambition for the crown and the literal arrival of Duncan at the castle in 1.6 of the play, the so-called “temple-haunting martlet” scene: This castle hath a pleasant seat. The air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses. (1.6.1–3) What is fascinating about the way in which the Strauss piece assigns recognizable and repeating musical motifs to the two main characters is that it also puts those identifying motifs under pressure as if to suggest the mental and emotional instabilities of our two protagonists. If, for the most part, Macbeth’s motif is martial and assertive, this is suggested in the strong drum-rolls suggestive of the battlefield world out of which he has emerged so decisively as a man of action and capacity at the start of the play: But all’s too weak, For brave Macbeth . . . Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel Which smoked with bloody execution . . . (1.2.15–18) This is then undercut by a more anxious series of chordal sequences. If, as I suggested with Liszt’s Hamlet, it is almost inevitable that close readers of the plays, as these composers undoubtedly are, would want to acknowledge the operation of the soliloquies in Shakespeare’s tragic drama in some way that remained true to the musical aesthetic, then this might be seen as Strauss’ means of bringing the dissonant quality that Macbeth’s anxious and paranoid soliloquies give the play into the heart of his symphonic poem. Certainly, he repeats the effect in the sections pertaining to Lady Macbeth. Once again easily recognizable musical languages are deployed in that, compared to Macbeth’s martial and brass and percussion led sections, Lady Macbeth’s motifs are dominated by the “female” sections of the orchestra; by woodwind and strings. This effect is further enhanced by her association with the key of A major. These two distinct “voices” are brought into play with each other within the piece as the two characters can be heard almost in dialogue. A knowledgeable listener who has the play partly inscribed in memory might recall the scenes where Lady Macbeth urges her husband on: “look like the most innocent flower, / But be the serpent under’t” (1.5.63–4); “But screw your courage to the sticking-place / And we’ll not fail” (1.7.60–1); or the post-murder moments in the castle when she seizes agency in the face of his wavering nerves: “Infirm of purpose! / Give me the daggers” (2.2.50–1). If Shakespeare’s plays often operate via a subtle counterpointing of dialogue, and often duologue and monologue, then something comparable is achieved here at the level of musical dynamics by Strauss. I have already suggested that the “symphonic poem” is an attempt to render the “dramatic” in musical terms and that may often be at the level of musical movements, the sweeps, arcs and climaxes of compositional narrative; but there are also moments when these poems strain towards the literally dramatic – the drumbeats that sounded the funeral march for Hamlet at the end of the Liszt are one example. Here, in Strauss’ Macbeth, we have the knocking on the door that disrupts Macbeth’s thoughts and which in the play ushers in the dissonant figure of the Porter. What becomes increasingly clear in these discussions, though, is the dependency of all these pieces of music for their fullest, or at least most nuanced, effect on the familiarity of the listener with the source-plays themselves. As with all adaptational texts, we are often being invited to read, or in this instance listen,

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“co-textually”, in a comparative mindset, not in order to test the composer on matters of “fidelity”, on what they have or have not included or “left out”, but in terms of understanding the subtle and often highly individuated interpretations of the plays that these musical pieces constitute and mobilize. These interpretations of Shakespeare take place at a variety of levels as well as in a variety of musical modes or forms: at the level of the line as in Henze’s “Gloucester”; at the level of character as in Strauss or Liszt’s symphonic poems; or at the level of the scene as in my last detailed example in this section. Antonìn Dvorˇák’s Othello (Opus 93) is not a fully realized symphonic poem but certainly it is a piece that has been seen as an important step towards that subgenre which would, along with opera, dominate the latter years of the composer’s career. The work is a response, a “free interpretation” according to one commentator, to the closing scenes of Othello (Dielitz, 2003). We are, quite literally, in the bedroom with Othello and Desdemona as the piece moves towards its tragic climax, which is her death. Intriguingly, for a play usually so associated with its articulate and manipulative villain, Dvorˇák demonstrates little interest in the figure of Iago. His focus is on the passionate but doomed love of the married couple and, as with Strauss’ interpretation of the Macbeths’ marriage, he achieves this via carefully honed motifs being accorded to each character and then repeated to clever effect throughout the piece. We open with Desdemona alone in the bedchamber, praying. This was a scene that also attracted the attention of operatic adaptors of the play, such as Verdi, who gave her the exquisite “Ave Maria” in a reimagining of the willow song from Shakespeare’s play in an operatic context (see the discussion of Verdi’s opera in Adrian Streete’s essay in this volume). Dvorˇák imbues the scene with tragic foreboding by means of the contrast he establishes between Desdemona’s gentle chordal motifs played on woodwind and strings (the pattern already established by the limited sample in this essay has hopefully helped to make clear what a recurring motif the “woman as woodwind” idea of symbolic instrumentation is in the classical corpus) and the bass notes with which Othello interrupts the literal and aural space of this scene. This is also a piece that plays on ideas of memory and recall, allowing some rather different tonalities to make an entrance and to establish a stark contrast with the tragic emphases that build and build towards a clashing climax where much of the orchestra is involved. Dvorˇák draws into the space of his musical “scene” speeches and moments of recall, which in the play took place in the opening sequences in the Venetian Senate when the newly married Othello recalls how he met Desdemona at her father’s palazzo and wooed her with his stories of exotic travel and adventure: Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly breach ··········································· Such was my process, And of the cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders. These things to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline. (1.3.133–5, 141–5) There is a shift in the instrumentation and key in the piece at this point, a musical equivalent of a flashback scene in cinematic terms, as the oboe (woodwind again suggesting

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gentler, happier contexts than the bass notes and drum-rolls that will be the tragic keynote as this movement progresses) and waltz motifs signify a couple falling in love, working in harmony, in ways that will only serve to emphasize the dissonant and permanent rupture between them that has been effected by Iago’s off-stage and out of hearing machinations (see Sanders, 2007b, 117, 172–3). If Strauss’ focus was almost deliberately claustrophobically on the Macbeths, Dvorˇák wants us to focus on the lovers and little else. The chordal sequences that signify Othello’s “revenge motif” – stabbing chordal sequences that in nineteenth-century melodrama would have connoted “evil” and which also feature in Verdi’s arias for Macbeth in his aforementioned operatic adaptation – keep invading these more harmonious passages, overlaying and side-lining the delicate sounds of the flute as Desdemona continues to assert her innocence in the face of his brutal accusations: “And have you mercy, too. I never did / Offend you in my life” (5.2.63–4). Like all of the pieces explored thus far there is a remarkable economy and containment at work in Dvorˇák’s Othello. The focusing in on a single moment in the play, on a limited range of characters, and the musical effort to give those characters voice, as well as to enable interaction between them that attains towards a quality of the “dramatic”, makes these very rich listening experiences. It can, and has, been argued that without the titles ascribed to them there is nothing intrinsic to them that makes these pieces “about” Hamlet, or the Macbeths, or Othello and Desdemona. Yet that is surely to be reductive to the point of absurdity. The experience of fine art is, as I have been emphasizing, frequently a co-textual or comparative one – the title of a painting gives shape and meaning to what our eyes see within the frame – and I would argue that the symphonic poem works in similar ways to reveal in music one individual reading of a play or a moment in a play, a reading that we, as audience, are able to take in and consider for ourselves and, indeed, compare to our own readings and responses. It is, like the best art, a wholly collaborative and communal experience and renders these symphonic poems in the best sense of the word “dramatic”.

Incidental Music for Stage and Screen Thus far this essay has concentrated on specific genres of classical musical composition, such as the sonata or the symphonic poem, that have enacted a relationship with Shakespeare and his playtexts and poetry. These works would normally be expected to receive their own performances and recitals in the concert hall or chamber. But there are other musical works, many of which have enjoyed performative outings in these contexts, which nevertheless have a more rooted and intimate relationship with Shakespeare’s plays in performance, since they are offshoots or adaptations of incidental music composed for the theatre. One of the best known examples of this is Felix Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1843). Despite the fact that its partly theatrical origins are spelt out in the title of the piece even as performed in concert hall spaces throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – it is now best known either as the score for the ballet based on the play (famous choreographies include those by Kenneth McMillan and Georges Balanchine), or as the score to the sub-balletic 1935 Warner Brothers’ film version directed by Max Reinhardt and Willem Dieterle.7 But Mendelssohn was himself working within a very recognizable tradition: as early as the 1660s Henry Purcell was composing incidental music for

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theatrical performances of Shakespeare plays (albeit in often heavily adapted or revised forms). In the eighteenth century composers such as Thomas Arne and Thomas Linley wrote incidental music for specific theatre productions and the tradition was continued in the nineteenth century across Europe, with examples extant from Edward German and Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) among others. Twentieth-century examples include the work of Jean Sibelius whose music for The Tempest stemmed from an avant-garde 1926 Copenhagen staging of the play. An even more intriguing genealogy can be traced in the work of Gerard Finzi, who composed a particularly striking set of pieces in association with Love’s Labour’s Lost. Finzi was a keen theatre-goer and initially wrote “snippets” of music linked to the play following the inspiration of a particular Royal Shakespeare Company performance of the play at Stratford-upon-Avon. There is an intriguing echo of Liszt’s inspirational experience in the audience for Hamlet. These Finzi “snippets” were then assembled as a short suite for performance at the Cheltenham Festival in 1952, a radio broadcast of which was heard by architect and theatre producer Michael Greenwood, who subsequently applied to use the music in an open-air performance of the play itself the following year. In an intriguing reversal of the usual process, Finzi now reimagined his concert hall suite as incidental music, of necessity having to take account of the pragmatics of an outdoor performance in the process (Burn and McVeagh, 2001). Open-air productions have elongated entrances and exits to offer an alternative effect where there is no opportunity to darken the stage as in indoor theatre practice and Finzi’s work altered and adapted accordingly. It was then reworked a further time into a classical suite that was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra in 1955. Like Shakespeare’s own plays, therefore, we must pay heed to the fact that several of the pieces of music that make up the canon of “Shakespearean classical music” actually exist in different versions and usually versions that are “site” or mediumspecific in some way. As ever, context proves all; both the critical context of Shakespeare’s work as it was understood at the time when certain composers were working (Benjamin Britten’s highly charged, sexually ambivalent opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1960, for example, was absolutely of its moment) and the context of textual production in its often most pragmatic and practical sense. Erich Wolfgang von Korngold’s Much Ado About Nothing (Opus 11) is best known through recordings as a suite for violin and piano. But like Mendelssohn’s Dream music or Finzi’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, its origins were wholly theatrical. Korngold composed the sequences that now make up the suite as part of the incidental music for a production of Much Ado that took place in May 1920 at Schönbrunn Castle. Some intriguing practicalities drove his decision to recast what was initially written for a full orchestra for the stripped back delivery of violin and piano in touching dialogue: the orchestra that had been hired for the production had been booked for other purposes before the run was due to end (Whitehouse, 2004). Korngold’s revisions allowed the production to retain its musical score with the most minimal of musical teams. The four pieces that make up the suite are a useful lesson in the different ways in which incidental music can perform its function in relation to a playtext. In Mädchen im Brautgemach (“Maiden in the Bridal Chamber”) the light and expressive music we now hear in a concert hall as suggestive of Hero’s excited preparations for her wedding to Claudio, on the stage would have offered a direct accompaniment to the movement of the bride to be and her women across the stage, blissfully unaware of the traumas to come. Music is a mood-enhancer in this respect but it also allows for and enables the practicalities of performance as in the

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Finzi – for exits and entrances, scene changes and flows from one moment to another in a production. As we saw with the Henze music with which this essay opened, music, in responding to Shakespeare from within its own conventions and medium-specific aesthetics, frequently offers motifs to signify or suggest particular characters. A charming example of this is Korngold’s Holzapfel und Schlewein movement (“Dogberry and Verges”). There is obvious humour here, signifying the entrance of comic characters and cueing the audience up for the apposite mode of response. Dogberry’s misplaced pomposity and self-satisfaction in his role as the local constable is beautifully realized in the deployment of mock-martial marching music here. Yet, even here, there are interesting subtexts, more melancholic suggestions that can in themselves be seen as a rich echo of the mixed mode of so many Shakespearean comedies, not least Much Ado with its “death” at a wedding, its sombre funeral and its plotlines of guilt and grief that sit alongside the more festive traditions of the genre. The date when Korngold is working is resonant. The year 1918 was the end of the conflict known as the “Great War”, though the ravages it had wrought on the European landscape and psyche would continue long after the formal Armistice. Was the choice of Much Ado, a play which opens in the excitement but also confusions and doubts of a post-war moment, quite deliberate in that respect and can the “comic relief” identified in the use of the musical codes of soldiery in the above sequence be read deeper and as potentially more effective (and affective) as a result? The third part of the suite is an example of “background music” for the purposes of scene-setting or enhancement: “Gartenscene” is music for that section of Much Ado at the heart of many performances of the play where Beatrice and Benedick finally acknowledge to themselves, if not yet fully to each other, their deep attraction to the other (2.3 and 3.1). The final movement is again functional music to accompany the masked dance at which Beatrice and Benedick trade arch wit and insults (Mummenschanz [“Masquerade”]; cf. 2.1). It will be noted that the suite as arranged for concert-hall performance does not follow the chronology of the play; the music has already made a considerable journey from its playhouse origins. One of the interesting things a “literary critical” reading of this kind of work might do, however, is to retrace those steps back towards the moment of performance, to offer a kind of compositional archaeology of the piece. Korngold is well known as a composer of film scores and the close relationship between incidental music for the stage and the film score in recent centuries is something we will turn to briefly in a moment at the close of this essay, but it would be wrong to leave the practical theatre without acknowledging another rich subfield of offshoots from performance scores for Shakespeare productions, which is individual song settings. In the brief discussions of Ophelia and Hamlet and Ariel and The Tempest above, we hinted at the presence of song within Shakespeare’s plays. The songs of Amiens in As You Like It (including the much anthologized “Under the greenwood tree” (2.5.1ff.)) and Feste’s melancholic “Come away, come away death” in Twelfth Night (2.3.50ff.) – in a play whose first line is all about the power of music to represent – or the boy’s beautiful “Take, O take those lips away”, which ushers the character of Mariana in her moated grange onto the stage of Measure for Measure (4.1.1), are merely further cases in point of the centrality of song to the dramaturgy of much Shakespearean drama throughout his career as a commercial playwright. There is not space here to rehearse the full complexity of this presence in the Shakespearean canon and the reader is directed to the fine work of scholar David Lindley in this regard (Lindley, 2006). But it is crucial to register in this context

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the large body of work that song settings of Shakespeare represent in the canon of classical musical responses to his poetry and playtexts (Lindley, 2006). Purcell’s Restoration settings of songs such as “Where the bee sucks” (5.1.88ff.), “Come unto these yellow sands” (1.2.377ff.) or “Full fathom five” (1.2.399ff.) from The Tempest remain regular presences in the classical repertoire today and individual settings for theatre performances (there are several from the eighteenth century for “Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun” from Cymbeline (4.2.259ff.), for example) both became concert pieces in themselves and fostered an interest in Shakespeare as a literary source within the lieder tradition. Pertinent examples of song settings of actual songs from Shakespeare’s plays in the twentieth century would include the work of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Roger Quilter and Gerard Finzi himself (who set several of the songs mentioned above, including “Come away, come away death” and “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun”), all of whom had connections with practical theatre and specific Shakespeare productions during their careers. Once more we find ourselves confronting the multiple, plural lives not only of our Shakespearean source-texts but the classical musical pieces that respond to those texts. The cinema has been another important context for the kinds of adaptations and negotiations, the artistic encounters, which this essay has striven to unpack in the history of classical music’s engagement with Shakespeare. As film became a dominant cultural force in Western culture in the twentieth century so the skills and talents of many of the finest classical composers were harnessed to the potential of this new art-medium: the use of Mendelssohn in the 1935 blockbuster A Midsummer Night’s Dream has already been mentioned as has one of the key director–composer collaborations, that of Grigori Kozintsev and Dmitri Shostakovich. Both of these film presences had their origin in theatre (Shostakovich had written incidental music for a controversial Kosintsev stage production of Hamlet prior to the film score work), but in their turn they signal another major format in which the intricate and ongoing relationship between Shakespeare and classical music can be felt and heard. Specific commissions for film scores were given to established classical composers, such as William Walton, whose creations for Laurence Olivier, both on his 1944 Henry V and his aforementioned 1948 Hamlet, have an important critical history within the subset of film music in their own right. Other significant director–composer collaborations to consider under this heading might include the Franco Zeffirelli–Nino Rota partnership, including Rota’s much performed score for the 1968 Romeo and Juliet with its instantly recognizable “love theme”. It is no coincidence that when Baz Luhrmann, towards the close of the twentieth century, made his seminal and music-soaked William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), he released two CDs (for these were pre-download days) of the film’s score. One concentrated on the pop and garage music commissions he had made for the film, thereby emphasizing its youth culture credentials, as Adam Hansen shows in his essay in this volume. The other collected together his long-time musical collaborator Craig Armstrong’s incidental music for the film, much of that written in a sub-classical idiom of orchestral strings, alongside the classical and operatic extracts which Lurhmann used as a central and cogent means of telling the story he envisioned on screen (see Loehlin, 2000; Sanders, 2007b, 171). Luhrmann and Armstrong invoked the classical musical canon in this knowing way because they were confident that it would in turn encourage within cinema audiences, however subliminally, centuries-old associations of Shakespeare with high art, with the tragic form, and with the emotional peaks associated with the experience and reception of opera or the full-blown classical symphony. As the twenty-first century dawned, clas-

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sical music had become a reliable shorthand signifier in the Shakespearean canon in its own right, testimony, were it needed, to the longevity and importance of the relationship between the two art-forms.

Coda This essay has deliberately not taken the road of attempting to be comprehensive where “Shakespeare and Classical Music” is concerned. That would be too large, too trying and in some sense too dissatisfactory, a task – tending towards the list rather than detailed analysis. Instead, I have opted for the model of selecting salient, and hopefully instructive, case studies to enable an entrance into the rich world of classical responses to Shakespeare. There are several guides and encyclopaedias that list more fully the range and nature of musical engagements with Shakespeare in the fields of the classical and operatic and the reader is directed towards those in the “Further Reading and List of Works Cited” suggested at the close. In musical terms, though, this is a coda; that is to say a concluding passage of a piece or movement, usually forming an addition to the basic structure. What the selective focus here on specific musical subgenres and their creative and often highly nuanced response to their Shakespearean inspirations and sources has made clear, I hope, is the value and interest of applying methodologies of reading familiar from literary criticism – narrative theory, adaptation studies and reception theory among them – to give us new and insightful route-ways into listening to and interpreting the music that Shakespeare has inspired.

Notes 1. There is, of course, an even wider body of music that makes reference to Ophelia as a character and at alternative moments in the play. Composers understandably seem drawn to the fact that she expresses her mental instability and distress through the medium of music and song. For example, Richard Strauss set three of her songs as lieder: Wie erkenn ich mein Treulieb (“How should I your true love know?”, 4.5.23ff.); Guten Morgen, ’s ist Sankt Valentinstag (“Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day”, 4.5.47ff.); and Sie trugen ihn auf der Bahre bloss (“They bore him barefaced on the bier”, 4.5.165ff.). 2. See sleevenotes to the Stradivarius recording of Royal Winter Music by David Tanenbaum (STR 33670, 2004). 3. For a more detailed explication of these ideas see Christopher Wilson’s essay in this volume. See also (on dance and early modern culture), Ravelhofer, 2006 and Lindley, 2006. 4. That work is usually collected under the heading Such Sweet Thunder and was in part inspired by Ellington and Strayhorn’s own involvement in a commission to provide incidental music for a production of Timon of Athens at Stratford, Ontario. 5. In that novel, Wilhelm’s life is profoundly altered by an exposure to Shakespeare and Hamlet in particular, a production of which lies at the heart of the novel. For a more detailed explication of the links between novel and play, see Bate, 1997, 259–61. 6. For a more detailed discussion of this connection, see Dan Grimley’s unpublished conference paper, “Falstaff (Tragedy): Narrative and Retrospection in Elgar’s Symphonic Study”. My thanks, as ever, go to Dan for sharing his important work with me. 7. This is the title that novelist Angela Carter gave her short story on the play, directly acknowledging Mendelssohn’s key participation in the cultural afterlife of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The story is included in her Black Venus collection.

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Further Reading and List of Works Cited Albright, Daniel (2007). Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres. New York: University of Rochester Press. Bate, Jonathan (1986). Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon. ——(1997). The Genius of Shakespeare. London: Picador. Batta, András (1985). Sleeve-notes to Franz Liszt, Symphonic Poems. Brilliant, CD 99938/3. Belsey, Catherine (1985). The Subject of Tragedy. London: Routledge. Bradley, A. C. [1904] (1991). Shakespearean Tragedy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Burn, Andrew and Diana McVeagh (2001). Notes to Finzi: A Centenary Collection. Nimbus Records, NI 5665. Carroll, Rachel, ed. (2009). Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities. London and New York: Continuum. Carter, Angela (1985). Black Venus. London: Picador. Cartmell, Deborah and Imelda Whelehan, eds (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clery, Emma (2003). Women’s Gothic. Plymouth: Northcote House. Davies, Michael (2008). Character Studies: Hamlet. London and New York: Continuum. Dielitz, Alexandra Maria (2003). Notes to the Münchner Rundfunkorchester’s Shakespeare, trans. Stewart Spencer. Orfeo, C6450614A. Genette, Gerard [1982] (1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Dobinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Gooch, Bryan N. S., David Thatcher and Odean Long, eds (1991). A Shakespeare Music Catalogue. Oxford: Clarendon. Lindley, David (2006). Shakespeare and Music. London: Arden/Thomson Learning. Loehlin, James (2000). “‘These Violent Delights have Violent Ends’: Baz Luhrmann’s Millennial Shakespeare”. In Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 121–36. Paterson, Don, ed. (2002). 101 Sonnets; From Shakespeare to Heaney. London: Faber. Ravelhofer, Barbara (2006). The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sanders, Julie (2006a). “Bubblegum and Revolution: Angela Carter’s Hybrid Shakespeare”. In Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts, ed. Rebecca Munford. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 110–35. ——(2006b). Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge. ——(2007a). “In Windsor Forest and At the Boar’s Head: The ‘Falstaff Plays’ and English Music in the Early Twentieth Century”. Shakespeare Survey 60, 184–95. ——(2007b). Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings. Cambridge: Polity. Whitehouse, Richard (2004). Notes to Erich Wolfgang Von Korngold, Much Ado About Nothing Suite. Naxos 8.557067. Wilson, Christopher and Michela Calore (2005). Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary. London and New York: Continuum.

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SHAKESPEARE AND MUSICAL THEATRE Fran Teague

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usical theatre is found world-wide, often with national inflections. Whether one considers a satyr play, opera, zarzuela, or Broadway show, that work is clearly an instance of musical theatre. Given the frequency with which songs occur, Shakespeare’s plays are themselves instances of musical theatre, but in this chapter I shall be focusing on one narrow branch of musical theatre, the sort of show that is sometimes called the Broadway musical (no Verdi or Elvis Costello here). A few such musicals have grown from Shakespeare’s plays, with the best-known instances being The Boys from Syracuse, West Side Story and Kiss Me, Kate. Why, one might ask, should anyone bother to consider such a phenomenon if only a small percentage of the shows in existence can be called “Shakespeare musicals”? My answer is that while the number of Shakespeare musicals is a tiny fraction of musicals as a whole, far more musicals are based on Shakespeare’s works than on those of any other literary or artistic figure. No other cultural icon even comes close. My first task will be to consider what a musical is and why musicals have an especial affinity for Shakespeare. Next I shall examine one show and its inheritors in particular before a final section that offers an overview of the Shakespeare musical and its history. The musical is a hybrid form. As Scott McMillan observes of the musical, “What kind of drama is this? It is popular and illegitimate, originating in vaudeville and revue as well as in operetta, and retaining links to the tradition of low culture despite its high prices” (McMillan, 2006, 179). The Black Crook (1866), said to be the first musical by most studies, combined two productions, one a melodrama and the other a dance production, that were in financial difficulty. It was a hugely successful show, as Leigh Odum has shown (Odum, 1982), thanks in no small part to the dancers’ costumes, which were considered daringly revealing. Thus McMillan’s adjectives, “popular and illegitimate”, have always been applicable. Initially modelled on operettas that told a slight tale with songs and music, the musical expanded to include topical jokes, dances and special effects. These added elements came from variety entertainment forms like burlesques, minstrel shows and music hall or vaudeville performances, the sort of entertainment that was the opposite of the legitimate theatre where Shakespeare’s works held sway. Such variety forms often attracted audiences by considering topics inappropriate for conventional plays: in particular, variety entertainers often joked about ethnicity, class, or sexuality, and those concerns recur in the book musical. Yet the musical differs from each of these variety forms in significant ways. The burlesque takes a serious work and mocks it by combining a well-known form with

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incongruous content: the burlesque of a Shakespeare play, for example, might borrow key characters and plot elements from Hamlet, but fashion the speeches from dialect humour. A musical that borrows from a Shakespearean play does not necessarily seek to mock it, so one shift is that while burlesques used Shakespeare’s more serious works, musicals, at least initially, drew on Shakespeare’s comedies. Even when musicals do use Shakespeare’s tragedies as a basis, the intent is not mockery, but rather a translation of an elite work into one that is popular and colloquial. For example, both West Side Story (1957) and the Cliff Jones’ Rockabye Hamlet (1976) take the Shakespearean model quite seriously, but try to revoice their originals in the music and language of a more contemporary idiom. The musical’s dancing comes from burlesque’s scantily-clad women performers, while its interest in the topical and in popular songs grows out of its precursors in the minstrel shows, music hall and vaudeville. But the idea of a book, a central plot that holds all together, comes from the operetta tradition. Unlike the operetta, however, musicals have always shared with variety entertainment an interest in the salacious and the forbidden, especially when it comes to race, class and gender. Precisely because variety entertainment was not elite, it included material that would have been vulgar on a legitimate stage, including off-colour jokes, jokes about immigrants or ethnicity and always humour about class. Whether in an Ayrshire music hall, a Japanese replica of the Globe Theatre, or a California mining camp, the audience laughed at people perceived as above or below themselves. (But such jokes are never simple. When one laughs at jokes about the Other, the laughter can mean that the audience considers itself better than the Other, different from the Other, inferior to the Other, or even identical to the Other. Meanwhile the person laughing in the next seat may mean something different by that laughter.) This hybridity, focused often on social boundaries, especially matters in Shakespeare musicals. One of the goals of such a work is to take what is perceived as an elite legitimate form and restore it to a popular audience. The musical’s origin as a hybrid form, drawing on many sources, has important consequences. From the outset the musical has been a liminal form, suspended between elite and popular culture, and it has been a transgressive form as well, moving from the stage into popular songs, mass media and especially into film. One could, however, argue that stage musicals differ radically from film musicals in what the audience experiences. One of the pleasures in watching a musical on stage is that the high kicks are performed by real legs, that the drops rolling down a performer’s face are real sweat and that the high notes are coming from a real throat. If a voice occasionally cracks or a kick line is uneven, one accepts that the human body has limits. When watching a film, however, one feels pleasure not from watching an actual body performing at the limit of possibility, but rather from the fantasy perfection that filmmaking allows. Every note sung will be perfectly on key, every dance step will be impeccably performed and no special effects will be spared to ensure that the film carries out the fantasy of the story. The filming of musicals alters the work fundamentally by erasing a stage musical’s corporeality, painting bodies with light instead of presenting them in the flesh. Many other differences exist, of course. Because a staged musical shows us the action as it occurs, it is generally non-diegetic, while a film has a narrative presence in the cameraeye point-of-view that allows it to use both diegetic and non-diegetic modes, to tell us a story, as well as to show it. Each enters the marketplace in a different way. The film is far more expensive to make, although film’s status as mass media means it is less expensive to

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watch. Moreover a film’s afterlife on DVD or video means that the cost of seeing it drops, so the audience who can gain access to it is non-elite. Yet a successful staged musical has a remarkably long afterlife in less and less expensive productions that occur under a variety of sponsorships: smaller productions that tour, summer stock and regional productions, amateur productions for school or community theatres. A further economic consequence is that the film is more likely to use celebrities than a stage production, but a celebrity on stage may make a more lasting impression. An audience member has an exciting experience in the movie theatre seeing a luminous Natalie Wood on screen singing Maria’s songs with the near-perfect voice of someone else, but seeing a young, scruffy and raspy-voiced Raul Julia on stage in Joseph Papp’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971) means years of “I saw him when” anecdotes. Finally, one can easily think of exceptions to what I say here: the film At Long Last Love (1975) comes to mind. Peter Bogdanovich attempted to create an original Cole Porter musical with the celebrity leads Cybill Shepherd and Burt Reynolds. Their celebrity was the perfect foil for their incompetence in a musical, making weak performances seem even worse than they were, and the film was savaged, although today it enjoys a cult status among some musical fans. (On the subject of inept Shakespeare musicals, the 2008 film Hamlet 2 (dir. Andrew Fleming), featuring Steve Coogan, is perceptive.) In the world of Shakespeare musicals, Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labours Lost (2000) is a vexed production. Although the ideas behind the film are charming, the execution of the song and dance is less than polished, as Ramona Wray also argues in her chapter in this volume. If I attend a stage musical for the real bodies and a film musical for the fantasy of perfection, I have no desire to see missteps or shakily sung lyrics. Critical response to Branagh’s musical film, however, was unfairly negative: its mise en scène was particularly effective and the laments over poor verse delivery largely misplaced. Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You (1996), made four years before Love’s Labour’s Lost, often draws attention as a musical film that uses amateurish performances effectively, but it is, ultimately, more successful as a Woody Allen film than as a musical. Given Branagh’s debt to Allen, amply demonstrated by In the Bleak Midwinter (1995, US title, A Midwinter’s Tale), Everyone Says I Love You may have influenced Branagh’s production choices in Love’s Labour’s Lost, although that source would not solve the problems. Love’s Labour’s Lost does not represent the end of the Shakespeare musical on film, but it may point out one avenue – the pursuit of celebrity – better left unexplored. For a different point of view on film and stage musicals, one might consider Graham Wood’s reasonable comment: Stage and screen musicals are indisputably and intimately connected in terms of their history, content and style and must be considered as such if a full picture of either genre is to emerge. Certainly, one advantage movie musicals have over stage shows is the benefit of a relatively permanent record that can be infinitely repeated and studied. Stage musicals, in contrast, truly exist only in live performance. (Wood, 2002, 213) My own preference is for stage musicals, but I find myself increasingly interested in ways other than film of recording what happens in a stage musical. The recent development of YouTube is a good instance of how a stage musical can live on; another familiar form is the cast album, whether on disc or DVD. The power of Broadway cast albums to evoke a stage musical is hauntingly described by D. A. Miller, while John Clum’s description of piano

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bars that specialize in show tunes suggests another entertainment form through which a show is evoked and arguably recreated (Miller, 1998; Clum, 1999). If the musical form is a hybrid of the legitimate and the variety stages, Shakespeare is a key figure for the musical to employ. Shakespeare is certainly at the heart of the legitimate stage, but he has been a key figure to be joked about and with; he is mocked, kidded and even occasionally embraced on variety stages. Shakespeare and his plays have offered an easy means to refer to elite culture since the nineteenth century, but Shakespearean references also allow the audience to enjoy the recognition of familiar material. In other words, when a vaudeville turn or a music-hall act uses Shakespeare, that use is not straightforward. Most such use depends on a single joke that gets reinvented continuously. One instance of the Shakespeare joke that enlivens his appearance in non-elite entertainment is “The Cove Vot Spouts”. This nineteenth-century popular song, available through the Library of Congress website “American Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets”, tells of the singer’s comical misadventures. Having gone to see Edwin Forrest play Richard III, an especially stirring role, the singer explains that “That night I got so drunk, in a tavern I let out, / ‘Give me another horse, bind’; like Richard I did spout.” His drunken spouting of Shakespeare tags as he assaults those around him eventually leads him to court where he is sentenced to thirty days in jail by a judge who fails to recognize the Shakespeare lines and thinks he is crazy. The spouting fellow is a drunken ne’er-dowell, while the respectable folks have no familiarity with Shakespeare, a nice turning of the audience’s expectations, but one that depends on the audience itself being familiar with Shakespeare. The joke here is that Shakespeare is aligned with the rowdy, not the respectable, but one can get the joke only by being at a non-elite show and recognizing the Shakespearean lines, thereby demonstrating the truth of the song’s point. My explanation is laboured, but it seems important to point out the doubleness of Shakespeare’s citation on the popular stage: used to mark a distinction between popular and elite entertainment, his presence instead underscores the way in which both share material and audience members. The laughter comes from surprise at the way the Shakespeare references overturn expectations, but that laughter is sweetened by its implicit flattery: the audience member is not dull and stuffy, as are the respectable folks like the humourless judge, but is more conversant with Shakespeare, an icon of elite culture. It is a good joke, repeated in one form or another throughout the decades. When Nextel peddles its text messaging through a joke version of Romeo and Juliet or Gap recapitulates the Capulet–Montague feud through waist-down shots of dancers wearing chinos and corduroy, these commercials illustrate that age has not withered nor custom staled the joke’s infinite variety. We laugh because of our surprise at recognizing a Shakespeare reference in such a setting, and we laugh at ourselves for being surprised. That joke is at the heart of Shakespearean musicals: the audience watches Shakespeare that is not Shakespeare; they participate in the show’s ostensible escape from the stuffiness of the legitimate, but simultaneously are reminded that they are sufficiently educated and cultured to follow the references to the original. While Shakespearean references abound in popular culture, and have done so since at least the nineteenth century, the first Shakespearean musical is generally agreed to be The Boys from Syracuse (1938), with songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart and a book by George Abbott. I shall discuss this show at length, both because it holds an important position historically and because its legacy is characteristic of what happens in Shakespeare musicals. In other words, I plan to use it and all of the other musicals based on The Comedy of Errors to make some general observations about where and

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why Shakespeare musicals are written and produced. While I am concentrating on The Comedy of Errors in this section, I could just as easily focus on The Taming of the Shrew, its musical Kiss Me, Kate (1948, with songs by Cole Porter making a magnificent comeback after several failures) and its progeny of other musical variants; or on Romeo and Juliet, its musical West Side Story (1957, with songs by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, book by Arthur Laurents and astonishing choreography by Jerome Robbins) and all the musicals that are based on that play. I mention these three – The Boys from Syracuse, Kiss Me, Kate and West Side Story – because these are indisputably the most important of the Shakespeare musicals. All three were innovative, altering the course of the Broadway musical, and all three are recognized as examples of Broadway classics. Yet these three do not stand alone: The Shakespeare Music Catalogue offers many other instances of generative Shakespeare texts and their musical theatre derivatives, and that catalogue is by no means complete. I estimate that while there are more than twenty Broadway Shakespeare musicals, several hundred more Shakespeare musicals have been produced in other venues around the world. Because it is the first, The Boys from Syracuse merits an extended consideration. The show opens as the Duke of Ephesus condemns an old man to death. The old Syracusan explains “I Had Twins”, telling the Ephesians that his children, both named Antipholus, were separated at birth, along with another pair of twins, the Dromio servants. He exits, and Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse come in, also seeking their lost brothers, but homesick for “Dear Old Syracuse”. Meanwhile the Ephesian pair have marriage problems: Dromio of Ephesus and his wife Luce sing of their discontent in “What Can You Do with a Man”, while Adriana, the wife of Antipholus of Ephesus, tells her regrets about “Falling in Love with Love”. Antipholus of Ephesus himself has been out on the town with a courtesan and sings about “The Shortest Day of the Year”. The boys from Syracuse are mistakenly brought to the Ephesian household and entertained by Luce and Adriana who think they are their husbands. It is Adriana’s sister Luciana who really attracts Antipholus of Syracuse, and they sing a duet, “Falling in Love with Love”. When Antipholus of Ephesus tries to return home, he finds himself locked out, so the entire town gathers to sing “Let Antipholus In”, as Act 1 ends. The next morning the Ephesians sing about “The Ladies of the Evening”, who have entertained Antipholus of Ephesus. Luce and Dromio of Syracuse sing a duet about “He and She”, a couple who would drive the angels out of heaven. Antipholus of Syracuse decides to flee Ephesus, but he tells Luciana that because he loves her, “You Have Cast Your Shadow on the Sea”. Complications develop when one Antipholus is asked to pay the other’s debts or to receive the other’s goods. The result is that Antipholus of Ephesus is arrested by the policeman who sings “Come with Me” to the jail. Dromio of Ephesus imagines his missing “Big Brother” and in a dream seems to see and dance with him. Fed up with their men, the women sing about the courtesans’ life in “Sing for Your Supper”. Finally Luce yearns for an honest man in “Oh, Diogenes”. The various brothers are finally brought face to face, the old Syracusan proves to be their missing father and their missing mother shows up as well. Once the Duke spares everyone’s life, all live happily ever after. Established songwriters who had turned out many hit musicals, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart had come up with the idea of basing a show on a Shakespeare comedy and took it to George Abbott. As it happened, Abbott knew Shakespeare thoroughly, and thanks to his training under George Pierce Baker at Harvard, he knew the source for Shakespeare’s comedy as well: Plautus’ Menaechmi. While he worked on the book, Abbott

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seems to have paid much attention to the Roman play, which is considerably bawdier than Shakespeare’s comedy. Abbott’s confidence in his own work was demonstrated when he undertook to produce and direct the show. The end result was a sparkling and racy book with songs that furthered the action by underscoring the naughty bits. Reviewers were ecstatic. The show’s success evidently owed something to its raciness since critic after critic comments on that feature. Characteristic of the general response is the review by Brooks Atkinson: Mr Abbott has a knack of giving everything he touches freshness, spontaneity, and spinning pace. Rodgers and Hart have written him a volatile score. Jimmy Savo [Dromio of Ephesus] who is usually lost when he strays away from his own routines, gives an immensely comic performance. And for the other parts, Mr Abbott has again found attractive and bustling young people whose styles are never hackneyed. Add to this some volatile dancing under George Balanchine’s direction, some of the most light-footed settings Jo Mielziner has recently designed and some gorgeous costumes by Irene Sharaff, and the local theatre wakes up to a beautiful feast of rollicking mummery this morning . . . mistaken identity results in ribald complications that suffuse this column in rosy blushes of shame. Someone will have to call out the fire department to dampen down the classical ardors of this hilarious tale. (New York Times, 24 November 1938) In The New Republic, Stark Young remarked that In general, the whole production seemed to have gusto and a certain freshness along the ancient classic line . . . [The] production is closer to the classic than the Elizabethan tradition could have been. (24 November 1938) In other words, Young notices that Abbott has on occasion returned to Plautus. In Plautus, men and women sleep together, for example, while in Shakespeare, they experience a number of near misses; Shakespeare’s courtesan does little to earn her keep other than accompany a man to dinner, while Plautus’ courtesan provides much fuller service. I have argued elsewhere that this show deliberately employs Shakespeare for respectability, while using his reputation to experiment with the limits of contemporary propriety. The doubleness of the Shakespeare joke adds a third level with The Boys from Syracuse: the audience enjoys the show both because it makes fun of the perceived stuffiness of high culture theatre, and because they recognize enough of the Shakespearean material to appreciate the wit of its adaptation. To credit the show’s success only to the Shakespeare connection would be foolish, of course, given the many other elements that make it work. The songs are terrific, examples of Rodgers and Hart at their best. Numbers like “This Can’t Be Love”, “Falling in Love with Love”, or “Sing for Your Supper” were hits that have become standards of popular music. The standards speak to the score’s strength, but a number of specialty numbers also catered to the particular strength of performers. The comedienne Wynn Murray (playing Luce), for example, had the chance to clown and to sing four numbers: the first was a duet by Luce and her husband, Dromio of Ephesus, “What Can You Do with a Man”, while the second was a duet by Luce and Dromio’s identical twin, “He and She”. Rodgers and Hart had picked The Comedy of Errors in the first place because Lorenz Hart’s brother Teddy Hart (Dromio of Ephesus) looked uncannily like another performer, the well-known comic Jimmy Savo (Dromio of Syracuse). Thus the two duets were very much featured

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numbers that allowed Wynn Murray to shine, performing first with Savo, a Broadway favourite, and then with Hart, the songwriters’ favourite. In addition, audiences loved the swing trio of “Sing for Your Supper”, a show-stopping number that featured Murray with the female leads, Muriel Angelus (Adriana) and Marcy Wescott (Luciana). Finally, late in the show, Wynn had a comic solo, “Oh, Diogenes!” Critics raved about her performance, and the songs that she had helped her shine. The dancing was also unusually strong. The producers had persuaded George Balanchine to do the choreography. Balanchine staged one dance number that involved a sorcerer and magic tricks, so the choreographer had to figure out a way to make a dancer appear and vanish during the routine. Most notably, however, Balanchine also came up with the idea of a number that featured a ballerina and two tap dancers performing together. An index to the success of The Boys from Syracuse is the number of follow-ups, shows that imitate it, reprise key elements, or show its influence. This category is the first to examine because it is in many ways the most important. Imitation being a form of flattery, it is worth noting that the 1939 season saw the second Shakespearean musical to reach Broadway. A swing version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream called Swingin’ the Dream failed in November 1939 despite much promise and strong performances by Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodwin, Dorothy Dandridge, Butterfly McQueen and Dorothy McGuire. Like The Boys from Syracuse, Swingin’ the Dream tried to wed popular songs, hot dancing and jokes in a book loosely based on Shakespeare’s plot line. While praising the music and dancing, the reviewers complained of a weak book with too much Shakespeare. Race was an issue, though not in the way that one might expect. Because many of the cast and musicians were African-American, the show was praised for the authenticity of its swing songs and dances, while reviewers found the Shakespearean material dull. This production was hardly the first attempt to link Shakespeare and race: the famous Orson Welles’ “voodoo” Macbeth had opened in 1937. Nor was it the first musical to use African-American performers, since Swingin’ the Dream owed something as well to The Swing Mikado of 1938, which became a Broadway success and spawned Mike Todd’s The Hot Mikado in 1939. Nevertheless, the idea of ethnicity, rooted in the musical’s source variety theatre, was now part of what makes Shakespeare musicals interesting: Shakespeare, that dead white European male, seemed to have written work that fitted a black celebrity like Louis Armstrong. In 1939, the Federal Theatre Negro Unit produced a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew, with music by Howard Biggs and libretto by Joseph Staton and Herman Moore, at Metropolitan Theatre, Seattle, Washington (SMC 14561), but whether this production owes something to The Boys from Syracuse, Swingin’ the Dream, or some other production remains unclear. Meanwhile a film version of The Boys from Syracuse was in preparation and released in 1940. The screenplay varied widely from the original book, and the movie dropped many of the songs from the Broadway production, replacing them with other numbers by Rodgers and Hart. While it broke no records, the movie was nominated for two Oscars (one for art direction and one for special effects). Further, the success of the original show is also indicated by the 1940 rumour that George Abbott, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart were planning a musical based on Much Ado About Nothing. They may have hoped to repeat their success using a different Shakespeare play, but Rodgers and Hart were having difficulty working together, largely because of Hart’s alcoholism, so this project came to nothing. In London, The Boys from Syracuse had a good run in 1963 and again in 1991. It has been twice revived in New York, off-Broadway in 1963 (with a revised book and interpolated Rodgers and Hart songs) and on Broadway in 2002 (another revision of the

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book and shifting of songs), as well as having a limited staging in the City Center Encores! series (with the original book and score) in 1997. Its success indicates the great strength of the hit musical. While theatre historians focus on major productions in New York and London, each of those successful productions gives rise to other productions, in regional theatres and summer stock, in community and school theatres. Little note is taken of these further productions, but each one means that the original musical becomes generative of productions that are not Broadway, but rather local musicals. One might draw an analogy to Shakespeare as a figure who is the national playwright of England, but who is also a global figure who speaks in a wide variety of settings. Similarly a musical may be a “Broadway” show, but simultaneously be a high school musical or a community musical almost anywhere. Moreover, the success of one Shakespeare musical may give rise to others. The Shakespeare Music Catalogue lists eight other musical versions of The Comedy of Errors. Since publication of the Shakespeare Music Catalogue, which stopped collecting information on 31 December 1987, at least two more musical versions have appeared. Chronologically, these are as follows: • William Ted Overton composer and adaptor. No known performance, c. 1972. • Frederick Koch, composer, with additional lyrics by Mary Fournier Bill. A children’s musical of Comedy of Errors, first performed at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, Lakewood Civic Auditorium, 29 August 1974. • Alex Kagan, composer, with libretto by Peter James and translation by Dan Almagor. This production of The Comedy of Errors first performed at the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, 8 March 1975. • Guy Woolfenden, composer, with libretto by Trevor Nunn. This production of The Comedy of Errors was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratfordupon-Avon, 21 September 1976. • Ray Leslee, composer, with a book by Leslee and Saul Elkin. Rock musical production of The Comedy of Errors first performed for Shakespeare in Delaware Park, Buffalo, NY, and produced by the Department of Theatre and Dance, State University of New York, Buffalo, 10 July 1979. • Iván Madarász, composer, with libretto by Dusán Sztevanovity. Tévedések Vígjátéka [Comedy of Errors] was first performed at Békéscsabai Jókai Színház, in Békéscsabai, Hungary, 23 October 1981. • Michael Valenti, composer, with libretto by Donald Driver. Oh Brother! was first performed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC, 25 September 1981. • Gary J. Sapp, composer. No known performance, c. 1983. • J.A.Q., composer, with lyrics and book by Jordan Allen-Dutton, Jason Catalano, G. Q. and Erik Weiner. The Bomb-itty of Errors, opened at 45 Bleecker (off-Broadway), NY, 12 December 1999. • Da Boyz was a hip-hop remix of the Rodgers and Hart songs from The Boys from Syracuse, directed by Philip Hedley, first performed at Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, 8 May 2003. Two of these musicals were registered for copyright with the Library of Congress, but have no record of production, so I shall not discuss them. (About fifty of the roughly 125

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musicals that the catalogue lists have no record of production.) I do want to consider the origins of the others, since that suggests something about the nature of Shakespeare musicals generally. The most common origin for a Shakespeare musical is the desire to imitate or recreate an earlier Shakespeare musical. The follow-up phenomenon is important. When someone decides to rewrite Shakespeare as a musical, the knowledge that it has been done and done well must be a factor. After seeing a successful Shakespeare musical, one has a model, as well as the knowledge that such a work is possible. Sometimes one can look at a chronology and speculate that having seen a particular production, someone else decided to try something similar. Examples might be the way that the success of The Boys from Syracuse encouraged the producers of Swingin’ the Dream or how its success led Rodgers, Hart and Abbott to consider another Shakespeare musical based on Much Ado About Nothing. One of these musical versions of The Comedy of Errors is clearly such a follow-up: the 1981 Oh, Brother! for which Donald Driver had done the book and directed the successful show, Your Own Thing, based on Twelfth Night, which ran off-Broadway in 1968. In this case, it is not The Boys from Syracuse that sparked his interest, but rather his own previous success. Nor is he alone, for Ray Leslee who wrote the 1979 musical for the SUNY-Buffalo Theatre and Dance Department would do a similar adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew in 1982, and one of Pericles titled Americles, in 1983. One might note the importance of pleasure in the creation of Shakespeare musicals, since it plays a role in another category of productions. In this list of Errors musicals, three shows were developed as educational works or cultural projects for Shakespeare Festivals. These are the 1974 children’s musical for a regional Shakespeare festival, the 1976 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the 1979 SUNY–Buffalo production for a Shakespeare in the Park Festival. If one sorts through all the musicals listed in The Shakespeare Music Catalogue, it is clear that such institutional Shakespeare musicals are fairly common. Indeed, the idea of encouraging students and audiences to become more engaged by adapting Shakespeare’s texts with popular music is ambitious, but attractive. The various listings for Shakespeare musicals in the Catalogue show that a large number of school performance groups, as well as a fair number of Shakespeare festivals have tried this strategy. Roughly a third of the produced Shakespeare musicals fit this description. My immediate response to such ventures is dismissive because the institutional Shakespeare musicals seem predicated on the assumption that Shakespeare is dull, but worthy, so throwing in some song and dances numbers will provide the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. Nor am I alone in that response, to judge from the recent film Hamlet 2 (dir. Andrew Fleming, 2008). In it a dreadful high school drama teacher, played by comedian Steve Coogan, saves his high school’s drama programme by producing a musical sequel to Hamlet that features a time machine, low-rider cars and a big production number called “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus”. Yet my immediate response is wrong: the film was enormous fun, and so are most of the institutional Shakespeare musicals that I have seen. The charge of energy that goes along with finding a contemporary musical idiom to help advance a Shakespeare text does often bring out better performances that engage and delight audiences. Ray Leslee went on to do two more Shakespeare musicals in Buffalo, and Trevor Nunn’s musical production, which he has called “a joyous experience”, won the 1977 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical. The final two entries in The Comedy of Errors list are also arguably institutional Shakespeare musicals in their origins, and they suggest the strength that such productions can have. Bomb-itty of Errors was an off-Broadway show in which four performers rapped

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The Comedy of Errors in hip-hop style, taking on all of the roles, playing both women (Betties) and men (MCs), delighting the audiences with bad wigs and good rhymes. Bombitty makes a value claim for a mass culture form, in this case hip-hop performance, by linking it to Shakespeare, a nice example of using Shakespeare as a beard, a convenient cover behind which the show pushes the limits of the form. Much as The Boys from Syracuse pushed the limits of permissible sexual reference, Bomb-itty uses Shakespeare to push the musical comedy form by employing hip-hop. The potential citation of race, so strongly associated with rap in America, is modified in this show since the original performers and creators were considered white, and indeed all of the New York reviewers commented on their identity. Perhaps in response to those reviewers’ comments, the two brothers, Jeffrey Allen and Gregory Qaiyum (JAQ and GQ), who were instrumental in creating the show, identify themselves as mixed race, since their father is Pakistani and their mother of German and English descent. Subsequent productions have used cast members of different races. The original production, however, used four young men who struck the reviewers as middle-class white kids partly because of the show’s institutional origin: while studying at New York University, GQ had created a senior project that would develop into Bomb-itty; his brother JAQ did the music and college friends helped him. Thus, the reviewers read the four performers as cheeky college students because that is who they were; that the reviewers then read college students as being white instead of possibly mixed race is more problematic. The show succeeded with a variety of audiences, off-Broadway, at the Edinburgh Festival, in the West End and at the HBO Comedy Arts Festival. The audience’s pleasure is not in the production’s vigour alone, but also in the unlikely juxtaposition of the old white Anglo-American text and the lively African-American rap coexisting and connecting. The Shakespeare musical, in this instance, potentially offers a political position (not unlike that of West Side Story or Joseph Papp’s Two Gentlemen of Verona) that we can defeat racial divisions, we can overcome, we can all get along, while the musical stage allows us to recognize different cultural traditions, which are embraced instead of erased. But Bomb-itty originates in a conventionally white institution: the show began as a school project, under the auspices of a university, perhaps suggesting not that Shakespeare belongs to all sectors of culture, but that members of the upper middle class can become missionaries to take Shakespeare to the masses. Such a reading troubles me: this analysis simply reinscribes the false dichotomies of high–low, elite–popular, white–black. I also think that reading is incorrect. One might just as easily argue that JAQ and GQ were missionaries bringing hip-hop to members of the upper middle class. The creators of Bomb-itty are comfortable with both hip-hop and Shakespeare, they gambled that other New Yorkers (and later, audiences across America and in London) would welcome the wit of their show. Nor are they isolated: African-American choreographer Rennie Harris has adapted Romeo and Juliet into the well-received hip-hop ballet, Rome and Jewels; while The Donkey Show, a celebration of disco and recreational chemicals by Diane Paulus and Randy Weiner, is very loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When playwright Cheryl West wants to write a fantasy about the Harlem Renaissance, she blends a revisioning of Twelfth Night and adds songs by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn in Play On! Such works are a definite change: they acknowledge that the creators and performers take great pleasure in the Shakespearean text, but regard that as just one resource among many in their own creative projects. Each of them does move past a

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cultural boundary, regarding race or gender, but they do so by simply concentrating on the project at hand as a piece of craft, not polemic or didacticism. Ironically, the same season that brought Bomb-itty of Errors to London also brought a hip-hop version of The Boys from Syracuse. DJ Excalibah developed the project for Stratford East, and after success at the Edinburgh Festival, Dah Boyz was brought to London’s Theatre Royal. According to Julie Sanders, [T]he Theatre Royal Stratford East in London [is] a theatre with a strong history of radical performance aimed at the local neighborhood and at an alternative audience to the elite patrons of West End theatre. The musical emerged from the workshopping practice that has long been a common tradition at Stratford East, which was formerly the home of Joan Littlewood’s experimental group Theatre Workshop. (Sanders, 2007, 80) In an interview, the company’s artistic director, Philip Hedley, who had been Littlewood’s assistant and who directed Da Boyz, said I’m proud of the culturally diverse work we do here and the culturally diverse audiences we attract but our audiences always get reviewed by critics. They always say that they are lively or something similar, which really means there were a lot of black people in. I’m glad that’s the case but it makes me sad that it is still so worthy of comment. (Ojumu, 2004) Hedley’s sensitivity to racial issues is part of his commitment to the community; Da Boyz grew out of a series of workshops he had done on musical comedies. Speaking with Ojumu, Hedley made the argument that the community’s desires were paramount: You can get young people into serious plays especially if some of the cast are familiar to that audience, but music has a universal appeal. Black music appeals to kids from all races and classes. I think there was a danger of us looking out of touch if we hadn’t gone in this direction. For the whole of the last century there was a trend for popular music to move into the theatre and rap is just part of that. (Ojumu, 2004) While reviews of Da Boyz were mixed, the effect was not. It sparked a follow-up a few years later, for the company turned to Love’s Labour’s Lost for a musical called The Big Life, which reimagined the King of France and his companions as Jamaican immigrants to post-war Britain. Moreover, if one turns to a search engine for mention of Da Boyz and Stratford East, one finds a remarkably high number of public reports that include the production as evidence of cultural outreach to a community: the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media, and Sport; the Arts Council of England; the board of directors for Pioneer Theatres, Ltd; the London Borough of Newnham Scrutiny Commission of Facility for the Young; the European Institute for Comparative Cultural Research; the Informal European Theatre Meeting all mention Da Boyz as an example of socially enlightened programming. As with Bomb-itty of Errors, however, I fear this social respectability misses the mark: what is far more crucial for the Shakespeare musical is that it be entertaining, and the brief online video clips of moments from the show suggest that it was just that, particularly in terms of choreography, although it also seems to have suppressed its Shakespearean antecedents. The institutional identity of these two shows is especially important, I would argue, in getting the entertaining works on stage where they can please an audience. If one reads

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many reviews of Shakespearean musicals, one quickly notices that for the past eighty years, positive reviewers have said that the musical (whatever the show may be) improves on the Shakespearean original, a claim made regularly about Shakespearean musicals since 1938. When The Boys from Syracuse opened, Richard Watts, Jr, remarked: If you have been wondering all these years just what was wrong with The Comedy of Errors, it is now possible to tell you. It has been waiting for a score by Rodgers and Hart and direction by George Abbott. (New York Post, 24 November 1938) When Bomb-itty of Errors opened, Drew Pisarra wrote: For everyone who’s tired of belabored Shakespeare revivals that remind us just how dead the playwright is, four recent NYU graduates have come up with a warmly invigorating adaptation of A Comedy of Errors. (Pisarra, 1999) In other words, the critics consider the shift to a musical comedy an improvement on the Shakespearean play, because the audience supposedly finds the musical more enjoyable, livelier. An additional category arises from the global nature of the Shakespearean musical. The idea that the musical, like Shakespeare, is simultaneously local as well as global receives confirmation from the list of Comedy of Errors musicals. Two of the musicals are for nonAnglophone audiences, one in Tel Aviv and one in Hungary. Moreover, it becomes clear from the Shakespeare Music Catalogue that these productions are part of an international movement. Of the roughly 125 musicals based on Shakespeare’s plays, almost twenty are for non-Anglophone audiences, and all are European. The editors of the catalogue make no promise to be exhaustive, of course, and may well have missed South American, African, or Asian productions, but it seems safe to say that until 1987 the majority of Shakespeare musicals were in Europe or in Anglophone nations like Australia, Canada, or the United States. Moreover, the non-Anglophone productions listed have a decided geo-political slant since these productions were principally done during the Cold War in Soviet-dominated nations. While productions did occur in Madrid, Nuremberg and Malmö, most were in the former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany, Poland. The use of Shakespeare productions in politics is hardly new, and deciphering how the political content (if, indeed, any existed) functioned is simply impossible if one is not privy to the production. Yet this group of foreign musicals is suggestive. First of all, it indicates an engagement with, though not an endorsement of, Anglophone culture, and British culture in particular. An example from another century and hemisphere will illustrate the point. In the earliest years of American theatre, the English settlers showed little interest in Shakespeare’s plays, preferring instead a fashionably “contemporary” dramatist like George Farquhar. Shakespeare became a mainstay of American theatre in the twenty-five years leading up to the American Revolution, as an increased concern with England sparked interest in his plays. From no recorded performances of Shakespeare’s plays during 1607–1750, the twenty-five years before the Revolution saw well over 400 performances (Teague, 2006, 17). One might consider that a similar development occurred during the Cold War, as theatre practitioners mirrored their national concerns with the Western nations by appropriating the British mainstay of legitimate theatre to local popular culture in the form of a musical. A second point, however, is worth considering. The Shakespeare musical is a great

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deal of fun. It allows the producing company to take a relatively familiar text, strip it to the bones and then add song and dance. Theatres do Shakespeare musicals for the same reason that they do Shakespeare operas: they have sturdy plot lines, familiar characters and a long tradition of added song and dance. Save for two non-Anglophone musicals based on Romeo and Juliet, all of these productions are based on the comedies. The conclusion that I would draw is that the non-Anglophone companies that staged these musicals were hoping to entertain themselves and please their audiences; if political considerations were in the air, they were secondary. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the increasing globalization of culture, however, non-Anglophone Shakespeare musicals have increasingly considered non-comedic plays. That development is probably attributable to a postmodern shift in musical theatre generally, as the success of such works as Phantom of the Opera or Rent initiated the resurgence of the operetta-form, which often uses more serious plots than does the conventional musical comedy. As early as 1957, West Side Story had established the non-comedic as a suitable basis for a Shakespeare musical, so the shift to more serious subjects from the 1980s on made a good fit with Shakespearean musicals, especially in European venues where opera and the operetta tradition had never faded (as they had in the United States). One particularly successful instance is a Czech production, Hamlet – the Musical (1999). Directed by Zdeneˇk Troška with music and lyrics by Janek Ledecký, Hamlet – the Musical was very successful in Prague, opening the Kalich Theatre. Originally expected to run for 300 performances, it more than doubled that, with a subsequent revival in Seoul. Although the attempt to take the production to Broadway has so far had no success, YouTube has a clip from the South Korean production in which the audience cheers and screams at Hamlet’s entrance. But Asia need not depend on Europe for Shakespeare musicals. Another instance of an original Shakespeare musical in a serious vein might be Hidenori Inoue’s excellent Metal Macbeth (2006) in Japan, while Taiwan has had two musicals in a lighter vein based on The Taming of the Shrew: Godot Theatre’s Kiss Me, Nana (1997) and a Hakka musical Fú chu ¯ n jiànü˘, or My Daughter’s Wedding at Taipei’s National Theatre. In each of these instances, however, what made the Asian musical popular was its reference to contemporary cultural taste or concerns: the Japanese taste for dramatic rock performances, for example, or Taiwanese concerns about career women. When these contemporary elements are linked to classical Western drama, particularly with the brand name of Shakespeare, the musical does well. Another Asian musical work, however, is far more original and deserves a longer look. Tenpou Juuninen no Shakespeare (Shakespeare in the 12th Year of Tempo) was written by Hisashi Inoue in 1974, but enjoyed limited success. The idea of the play is simple enough: episodes from a number of Shakespeare’s plays are presented as if they were Japanese tales. Unfortunately, when first produced, as it was then five hours long, its success was marred by many audience members having to leave before the end to catch last trains. In 2002, the noted Shakespeare director Yukio Ninagawa revived it to a mixed reception, and he did another, highly successful production in 2005. The revival has some tantalizing excerpts available on YouTube, as do a number of other international Shakespeare musicals. In the opening number, peasants storm the Globe-like stage and proceed to dismantle it while singing, “If William Shakespeare had never lived . . . so many people would never have received English Literature PhDs . . . theatre producers would have been denied full-house bonuses”: Shakespeare and his stage will not remain the same when they are done with him. Several selections from the Hamlet sequence are effectively played

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for laughs – Hamlet defies his uncle, speaks with the Ghost, and worries about the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy – as is Goneril’s declaration of love for her father. The closing number has the huge cast (forty-three according to one review) coming onstage wearing little headbands (hitaikakushi, a convention of Kabuki, as are their dangling hands) that indicate that all of them are ghosts now: as they cheerfully sing and dance, the audience claps along. The scope of the show must be like the size of the cast, very large indeed. That attribute is fitting given its author. In an interview, Inoue declared I don’t like bonsaiism – the idea that every literary work has to be exactly like a neatly shaped miniature tree. I think it is perfectly all right for some trees to grow big and wild. (Time, 1 August 1983) What is clear is that this production was a successful Shakespeare musical because it dismantled Shakespeare’s works. In this respect, it may recall The Boys from Syracuse or Kiss Me, Kate. Like them, it rests on the same old joke: that a Shakespeare musical is irresistibly funny when Shakespeare is enjoyed by people who are not respectable, or scorned by those who are. To be sure some musicals, like West Side Story or The Lion King, may take their debt to Shakespeare seriously, yet such works also include moments that embrace the vulgar (the serenade of Officer Krupke or almost any Timon and Pumba scene). Even in Shakespearean musicals, those roots in variety theatre continue to matter. A musical that attends to Shakespeare is likely to attend to gender, class and race as well, but not in any solemn or profound way. The jokes are suggestive or vulgar, the music and dancing energetic and the principal barrier to success is too much respect for the original work.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited I have taken the Shakespeare Music Catalogue as a primary source; it is a wonderful reference work that has been neglected. In addition, I have tracked production information in the Internet Broadway Database () or in the annual volumes, The Year’s Best Plays, which gives a good overview of the New York stage, and The National Theatre Critics’ Reviews, which includes reviews of most important American shows. Other useful sources are Gerald Bordman’s American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and my own Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Finally I am indebted to the discussions on Shakesper-L, moderated by Ken Steele and Hardy M. Cook (), for mentions of Shakespeare musicals and to YouTube, which occasionally offers video of these musicals. Clum, John M. (1999). Something for the Boys: Musical Theatre and Gay Culture. New York: St Martin’s Press. Hill, Errol (1984). Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Kennedy, Dennis, ed. (1993). Foreign Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joughin, John, ed. (1997). Shakespeare and National Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McMillan, Scott (2006). The Musical as Drama. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Massai, Sonia, ed. (2005). World-Wide Shakespeares. New York and London: Routledge. Miller, D. A. (1998). Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Odum, Leigh George (1982). “‘The Black Crook’ at Niblo’s Garden”. Drama Review 26, 21–40.

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Ojumu, Akin (2009). “Reach for the Ska”. The Guardian. 13 February, at Pisarra, Drew (1999). “Review of Bomb-itty of Errors”. February, at Sanders, Julie (2007). Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings. Cambridge: Polity. Teague, Frances (2004). “Mr Hamlet of Broadway”. Shakespeare Survey 57, 249–57. ——(2006). Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Graham (2002). “Distant Cousin or Fraternal Twin? Analytical Approaches to the Film Musical”. In The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, ed. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 212–30.

Websites and Reference Tools Bordman, Gerald (2001). American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gooch, Bryan et al., eds (1991). A Shakespeare Music Catalogue. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cited as SMC. The Internet Broadway Database (2009). The Broadway League. 16 June 2009, at The Library of Congress American Memory (2009). “America Singing: Nineteenth Century Song Sheets”. 16 June 2009, at Mantle, Burns et al., eds (1899–Present). The Year’s Best Plays. New York: Various Publishers. National Theatre Critics’ Reviews (1940–Present). New York: Various Publishers. Shaksper-L (2009). Ed. Hardy Cook. 16 June 2009, at

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SHAKESPEARE, BALLET AND DANCE Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

W

hen in Much Ado About Nothing Beatrice claims “there was a star danced, and under that [she] was born” (2.1.293–4), our immediate sense is of energy and mobile spontaneity. But for Shakespeare’s audience, of course, any illusions of free, wilful movement would have been contained and centred by the structural geometry of the Ptolemaic system. Much the same tension subsists within the art of ballet, which is nothing if not rigorous and enclosing, however much its protagonists seem to move without a care in the world. Frederick Ashton studied Euclid before he began choreographing his Scènes de Ballet, and perfect shapes, and the relations between them, are embedded in the very language of the art. The impulse can be traced back to Vitruvius who, in book 3 of De Architectura, tossed off an obiter dictum that lodged in the minds of Italian artists many centuries later, a source both of fascination and puzzlement: Namque si homo conlocatus fuerit supinus manibus et pedibus pansis circinique conlocatum centrum in umbilico eius, circum agendo rotundation emutrarumquemanuum et pedum digiti linea tangentur. Non minus quemadmodum schema rotundationis in corpore efficitur, item quadrata designatio in e invenietur. (Vitruvius, 1931, I, 160) [For if a man lies on his back with hands and feet outspread, and the centre of a circle is placed on his navel, his figure [sic; surely “fingers”?] and toes will be touched by the circumference. Also a square will be found described within the figure, in the same way as a round figure is produced.] (Vitruvius, 1931, I, 161) Kenneth Clark observes apropos of this passage that it is: impossible to exaggerate what this simple-looking proposition meant to the men of the Renaissance. To them it was far more than a convenient rule; it was the foundation of a whole philosophy. Taken together with the musical scale of Pythagoras, it seemed to offer exactly that link between sensation and order, between an organic and a geometric basis of beauty which was (and perhaps remains) the philosopher’s stone of aesthetics. (Clark, 1960, 13) The circle and the square are shapes associated with perfection and stability, and the various pictorial attempts – most of them unsuccessful – at reconciling their absolute geometry with the vagaries of the human form testify to the perennial “rage for order”, that yearning

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to reduce (and so to clarify) all that is inchoate in terms of its “ghostlier demarcations” (Stevens, 1965, 78). The search for a deep structure of abstraction also prompted the five positions by which Pierre Beauchamp first brought the art of ballet into existence, positions that (like the straddling efforts of Vitruvian “man”) are at once unnatural and enabling. The first position aligns the feet, heel to heel, at a 180 degree angle; the second, while retaining the 180 degree alignment, places them a distance apart; the fourth does the same, but along an axis that bisects the first at 90 degrees, and the fifth neatly hides one foot behind the other, heel to toe and toe to heel, effectively reducing the human form to a column. All these positions are supremely uncomfortable for the beginner, uniform postures based on the circular-squaring enterprise of Vitruvius. Ballet’s insistence on a rectilinear stability for the lower half of the body addresses the second part of that equation, and the first finds expression in a torso flexible enough to rotate on an imagined axis, and also in the rounding of the arms, which sometimes implies the embrace of orbicular shapes. These fixities and co-ordinates are points of repose secured at the cost of physical discomfort and even pain by codifying the otherwise variable and unpredictable possibilities of the human stance. In its purest form, which exists primarily in the classroom, ballet comprises a set of spatial theorems – or, to invoke the paraphrase of Richard Wilbur in “Grace” – the “graph of a theme that flings / The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings” (Wilbur, 1989, 384). This juncture of circles and square is also the “graph of the theme” of most Shakespearean comedies: as in ballet, their drive is toward balance (squaring) and reconciliation (closing the circle) after the messy asymmetries and mismatches of the action, book-ended as those are by the false calm of the beginning, and the achieved calm of the end. Even though the repose won at the end of a comedy is illusory, and bears no relation to the messy, asymmetrical and mismatched textures of the life it tries to stylize, we embrace it as a convention that guarantees us a momentary holiday from chaos. The Shakespearean work in which these geometric formulae obtain in their most naked form is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which, not for nothing, is also the most “balletic” of all the plays. It is this connection that I wish to pursue in the first part of this essay. It comes as no surprise that A Midsummer Night’s Dream should have been choreographed by the four greatest figures of the canon – Marius Petipa, Mikhail Fokine, George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton. There have, of course, been others, some of them simply names in reference books. For example, next to nothing is known about Giovanni Casati’s Dream ballet, staged at La Scala, Milan, in the nineteenth century (Reyna, 1965, 121). Even its title offers no guarantee of fidelity to its source, given the latitude of nineteenth-century adaptations. The extravagance and looseness of Adolph Nourrit’s paraphrase of La Tempête (1834) can be deduced from a single sentence: “Léa (Duvernay) is rescued by Oberon (Montjoie) after her parents (Legallois, Quériau) have been murdered by the Turks” (Guest, 1980, 134). But at least there is an island in this farrago, and a lover called Ferdinand, whereas not even these tenuous threads of connection can be found in Ambroise Thomas’ opera, Le Songe d’une nuit d’été, centred on Elizabeth I’s efforts “to reform a drunken Shakespeare” (Harding, 1994, 4) through the offices of Sir John Falstaff (of all people). Small wonder that the same composer had to rewrite the finale of his Nahum Tate-ish Hamlet – there the hero marries Ophelia and ascends the throne of Denmark – before it could be shown to the audience at Covent Garden! Getting back to ballet versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I must also mention that David Lichine’s

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Nocturne (1933) “had a libretto by Count Etienne de Beaumont based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream . . . Beaumont also contributed the designs and Roger Desormière orchestrated a score from Jean Philippe Rameau” (Walker, 1982, 27), and add that David Poole choreographed a masque-like capsulation of the play in 1970 for which he used music by Handel. Compared with Petipa, Casati, Lichine and Poole are mere minnows, but, even though their works have vanished from the repertoire, they demonstrate the enduring popularity of Shakespeare’s play on the ballet stage. Not that stature by itself guaranteed the survival of dance works in a time when the methods for recording movement were so clumsy as to be almost self-defeating: Petipa and Fokine’s Dream adaptations have both been lost to us. The former made his “fantastic ballet” in one Act for the Imperial Russian Ballet in 1876 to Mendelssohn’s incidental music (arranged by Minkus, a minor composer in the employ of the court). We can infer from its length that he dispensed with some of the plot strands as cavalierly as Mary Lamb had done in her “tale”, where the mechanicals dwindle to a single phrase (“Oberon seeing a clown near her, who had lost his way in the wood” (Lamb, 1893, 28)). That, and the fact that the ballerina Yevgenia Sokolova created the part of Titania (Roslavleva, 1966, 104), is about all we know in the West about Petipa’s effort, though some interesting material no doubt awaits discovery in a Russian archive. Mikhail Fokine, who, as Petipa’s adversary, took classical ballet in a new direction at the start of the twentieth century, presumably crafted a more comprehensive version of the play, amplifying Mendelssohn’s suite with “an adagio from the same composer’s Violin Concerto” (Beaumont, 1945, 27). It was mounted in 1906 for a Pupils’ Display at the Maryinsky School, and, according to Cyril Beaumont, featured “a number of elves (Nijinsky was the principal) who danced against a background of girls posed like garlands of flowers in opposition to the traditional arm-groupings in the style of the traditional ballet” (Beaumont, 1945, 27). This statement, which I find almost impenetrable, seems to imply that the linkages were made by finger contact rather than by encircling the waist, the method that Fokine’s predecessors had favoured for the coupling of his female dancers. But whatever the means of nexus, there can be no doubt that Fokine entertained a vision of the play similar to Petipa’s – one that foregrounded the fairies. The centrality of Fokine’s elves (barely mentioned by Shakespeare), which he set against a frieze of fairies, leaves no doubt of the ballet’s being a féerie or fairy-tale ballet in all but name. This is borne out by its apparent recycling in 1924 as a ballet called Elves, “arranged to Mendelssohn’s ‘Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and to the same composer’s Andante and Allegro from the ‘Violin Concerto (Op. 64)’” (Beaumont, 1945, 127), where the narrative appears to have been wholly replaced by tableaux like those in the choreographer’s Les Sylphides. But he renewed his acquaintance with the text when in the autumn of that year, he “went to London to produce the dances in Basil Dean’s production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, first performed on Boxing Night (December 26th), at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane” (Beaumont, 1945, 128). It must have been on this occasion that the redoubtable Ernest Newman saw his choreography of the Overture, which, more than a decade after the event, he compared unfavourably with Massine’s: “But when, in those long woodwind chords in the Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, he makes his elves do a jerk of now head, now body on each chord in turn, I feel that the limit has been reached of my tolerance of naiveté” (qtd in García-Márquez, 1996, 260). By this time, the idea of counterpointing movement to music had begun to gain ground, and Fokine’s essentially illustrative procedures were beginning to seem as old-fashioned

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as his predecessor’s. His two Dream adaptations have vanished from the repertory as irrecoverably as Petipa’s, and there is nothing more I can say about them, except to point out a significance in the progression from head to body that Newman might have missed. Mendelssohn adds new instruments at each stage of the opening tetrachord, starting with two flutes, and then superimposing clarinets, bassoons and horns in a kind of amplification. This pattern of steady amplification would have been answered by Fokine’s staged animation of the body. Balanchine also choreographed this tetrachord along these lines, but registered the pattern of layered supplementation with bodies rather than body parts: a new dancer joins the group with the advent of each kind of instrument. Far from being naive, it fulfils that primary aspiration of choreography, embodied by Auber in a dedication to the greatest practitioner of all: “À Monsieur Petipa, qui fait écouter ma musique avec les yeux” (Schneider, 2000, 6). I shall be returning to the two extant Dream ballets, that by George Balanchine (1962) and that by Frederick Ashton (1964) later, but for the time being I want to return those proto-balletic elements of Shakespeare’s play, elements that have made it irresistible to choreographers. For a start, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the only work in the canon in which the well-being of the cosmos, and of the society that subsists within it, is predicated on the dance. When first we meet the attendant fairy, her verse trips along in tetrameter couplets – Shakespeare’s signature for the supernatural, but also mimetic of the springy early modern volta in which the female dancer was lifted high by her partner, and favoured by Elizabeth I for putting her elegant calves on display. We should also note that one of the fairy’s functions anticipates that of the star pupil in nineteenth-century ballet classes who watered the floor to prevent the dancers from slipping: “And I serve the Fairy Queen, / To dew her orbs upon the green” (2.1.7–8). Those orbs, we duly discover, are linked by sympathetic magic to the sequence of the seasons, and even to the ordination of the cosmos – the great chain of being reconceived as an uroboric bracelet. Whether consciously or not, Shakespeare has been thinking in terms of the Vitruvian “man”, offering a pattern of circles and squares that recall “that link between sensation and order, between an organic and a geometric basis of beauty”: And never since the middle summer’s spring Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead, By paved fountain or by rushy brook, Or in the beached margent of the sea To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind, But with thy brawls thou has disturb’d our sport. Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, As in revenge have sucked up from the sea Contagious fogs which, falling in the land, Hath every pelting river made so proud That they have overborne their continents. (2.1.82–92) Just such a conception of the dance – the dance of Shiva – had also been entertained in the East centuries before Shakespeare, who, by an act of serendipity, realized it here in the systematic “sanctification” of the landscape – every conceivable cranny it contains – by the fairies’ “ringlets”. Compare the way, in a modern adaptation of the topos, Arthur Brown dances coherence into the quadrants of his disordered life in The Solid Mandala:

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‘I’m going to dance for you, Mrs Poulter,’ he said. ‘I’m going to dance a mandala.’ He knew she was preparing to laugh, but wouldn’t, because she had grown fond of him. ‘The mandala?’ she said, soberly enough. ‘I never heard of a dance called that. Not any of the modern ones.’ He did not attempt to explain, because he felt he would make her see. So Arthur Brown danced, beginning at the first corner, from which he would proceed by stages to the fourth, and beyond. (White, 1969, 265) We can deduce that these orbs and ringlets – and let’s not forget Titania’s recreational “roundel and a fairy song” in 2.2.1 – are emblems of continence as well as cyclic order. They not only limit the fury of the winds but also set an example of containment to everything else down to the “pelting” streams. This is because the winds, otherwise wayward and ungovernable, are kept in check by the dances they accompany, and they in turn ensure a perpetually calm sea and a prosperous voyage. For as long as the fairy dance persists, it holds back fogs of obfuscation and disease. In Shakespearean mythology, this rage for order can be served commutably by dance or music, since later in the scene, “the rude sea” grows “civil” at the song of the mermaid (2.1.152), while in The Tempest it is a roundel that calms the waves: Come unto these yellow sands, And then take hands; Curtsied when you have and kissed – The wild waves whist – Foot it featly here and there. (1.2.378–81) When dance is conceived on this providential scale, its stoppage will be catastrophic, a moment that Shakespeare paradoxically relates to the geometry of a square in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “And now they never meet in grove or green, / By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen, / But they do square’’ (2.1.28–30). Squaring the circle is ordinarily a stylized impossibility, but, in the pre-history of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it has come to pass. This particular square signifies aggression, whereas at other points of the play, the quadrangle more conventionally represents repletion and balance. Squares have as important a part as circles to play in choreographic floor patterns, and a good deal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is devoted to the proper alignment of the lovers’ quartet which keeps breaking down into fractious triangles. In effect, the epitasis or middle part of A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes form as a quadrille or square dance in advance of its time – a quadrille manquée that keeps going awry instead of matching partner with partner from corner to corner in a balanced pattern of election. This turns Oberon into a vexed dancing master trying repeatedly to untangle the crossed lines and collisions, or – the cosmology of the play makes one the function of the other – into a deity attempting to restore the cosmic dance from whose discontinuance all mishaps are seen to spring. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, moreover, is unique among the comedies in having the fairies usurp the matrimonial dance that elsewhere is reserved for the triumphal partnerings. Here Shakespeare lets the metaphoric displacement of the sexual act give way to the real thing, despatching the lovers directly to their marriage beds, where their “nightly revels” register as erotic as well as theatrical enjoyment: “Sweet friends, to bed. / A fortnight hold we this solemnity / In nightly revels and new jollity” (5.1.351–3).

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And at this point Puck steps forward with his broom to “sweep the dust behind the door”, an action for which the Arden edition note ponders various interpretations while ignoring the primary one: he sweeps the floor in readiness for the dance, just as, Acts earlier, the fairy had dewed the orbs. Oberon’s directives imply that this dance is a volta or a galliard, though the miniaturizing impulse of the play scales down its boisterousness. Unlike a volta, however, and more like a country round dance, it has a sung accompaniment, and proceeds in a quasi-ecclesiastical pattern (versicle and response) as fairy priest and priestess lead their congregation through a liturgy of dance: Every elf and fairy sprite Hop as light as bird from briar, And this ditty after me Sing, and dance it trippingly. (5.2.23–6) That briar seems to hint at the tortures associated with the mis-executed square dance in the intervening Acts – “The course of true love never did run smooth, / But either it was different in blood – / O cross!” (1.1.134–6) – inoculated, as it were, by the lightness of the fairy dancers that now coast over it. Also worth noting is the fact that the dance has been strictly choreographed, as rituals must be. The perception of its efficacy depends upon its being repeatable, and there’s no licence here for improvisation and bacchanalian impulsiveness, the usual features of the antimasque. Not for nothing does Titania insist on rehearsal and memorization: First rehearse your song by rote, To each word a warbling note. Hand in hand with fairy grace Will we sing and bless this place. (5.2.27–30) The grace of the dance here becomes indistinguishable from the quasi-theological grace of fairy favour, and the whole scene presents an analogue to, and even a conscious reworking of, the grand ballet or ballo grande that crowned court spectacles of the sixteenth century. Shakespeare would have been aware of them from the native English tradition of the masque. Such finales, as Ferdinando Reyna points out, were “the apotheosis of the aristocracy, which, as it were, set the seal on the work” (Reyna, 1965, 46), and they were modified in time into the climactic tableaux still present in the ballets of the nineteenth century (and beyond, since Mrs Dimple is apotheosized as Britannia at the end of Cranko’s Pineapple Poll). For the finale of The Sleeping Beauty Petipa envisaged “Apollon en costume de Louis XIV, éclairé par le soleil entouré des fées” [Apollo costumed as Louis XIV, illuminated by the sun and surrounded by fairies] (Wiley, 1985, 370). So much for the priorities of a ballet master: whereas Louis had impersonated the sun, here the sun impersonates Louis, and is surrounded by ten fairies of the choreographer’s own devising instead of the statutory nine muses. In the apotheosis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on the other hand, Shakespeare reverses Petipa’s values, for his fairies displace the earthly monarch and his entourage, and glorify him only indirectly by ensuring a faultless line: “And the issue there create / Ever shall be fortunate” (5.2.35–6). This contains a forward glimpse to the masque-like procession in Macbeth, where, with a canny eye cocked on James I, Shakespeare stages a succession of Stuarts stretching “out to th’ crack of doom” (4.1.133). According to Allardyce Nicoll, the telos of a masque was the glorification of the court:

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For this discovery the entire masque was conceived; all the rest – the changing prospects, the descents of deities, the eccentric measures of the antimasque – was merely a framework and a preparation for the true masquing display when the noble courtiers, suddenly revealed in their glory, doffed their vizards and descended in solemn state from their thrones or triumphal chariots. (Nicoll, 1937, 214) A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on the other hand, upends this convention, forcing an ascent into the fairy world, and leaving behind the human structures that the masque was ordinarily bent on entrenching. The glory engendered by the poet’s eye, glancing “from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven” (5.1.13) – observe the inverted parabola in that chiasmus – far excels the gross materialism of “paynted Cloth [and] Deal-boards”, to quote Ben Jonson’s “Expostulacion with Inigo Jones” (Jonson, 1954, 302), the playwright who was almost certainly inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he half etherealized his grand ballet at the end of Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly: Then, then, airy music sound, and teach our feet How to move in time and measure meet: Thus should the Muses’ Priests and graces go to rest Bowing to the sun thron’d in the west. (Jonson, 1967, 88) The “eccentric measures” to which Nicoll refers also play a major role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespearean comedy, in its effort to choreograph irregularities (or, in the words of the play in hand, to delete moles, harelips, scars and marks prodigious), had to take stock of their existence before it could inoculate against them. The antimasque provided such an acknowledgement, partly through the mechanicals’ country dance – an all-male affair and a by-word for clumsiness – partly through their play and partly through their very presence throughout. For the origin of this masque-negative lay in the ballet à entrée, the dominant form of courtly ballet, which sought to balance grace and formality with a simpler ballet-mascarade consisting mainly of burlesque scenes, or entrées as they were called, with generally little, if any, plot to connect them. Far from being pompous or tedious, these ballet-mascarades were vital and amusing. They were full of allusions to happenings and personalities of the time, introduced comic characters such as laundrywomen and innkeepers, and were enlivened by droll and grotesque effects. (Guest, 1962, 19) Liveliness and drollery have been the mechanicals’ hallmarks from Act 1 onward, and they manage even to draw the fangs of tragedy in Act 5. Tragedy almost always ends in a lateral sprawl of bodies (contrasting with comedy’s ordered erectness), and Shakespeare briefly glances at this corporal litter in Pyramus and Thisbe. Then, anticipating the imperishable elasticities of the animated cartoon where no hurt is permanent or disfiguring, he resurrects the “dead” to watch a dance. At the same time, the mechanicals remind us of all that resists the regulating force of art (cheerfully anticipating Caliban, the monster in The Tempest “on whose nature / Nurture can never stick’’, 4.1.188–9), and, in so doing, heighten the formality of the masque that debars them from participating. Ballet, masquelike in this respect, uses its aristocratic credentials to define the grotesque in terms of the uncourtly, and choreographers have dived into the gap that this country-clubbishness opens up.

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For example, when Fokine turns the feet of Petrushka inward in the ballet of that name, he flies in the face of Beauchamp, and claims for his creation the anti-aristocratic values of clumsiness and marginality that the five positions refuse to countenance. Aristotle defined the ludicrous (to geloion) as being “merely a subdivision of the ugly”, consisting “in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive” (Aristotle, 1961, 59). Translated into the classical ballet, to geloion dispenses with the rondure of the arms, the rectilinear closure and alignment of the feet and the pointed foot that puts the metatarsal arch on display. Balanchine and Ashton both make their mechanicals ludicrous in their ballets by denying them these resources. And they can deny them because they are there for the denying, a resource largely absent from the improvised vocabulary of modern and contemporary dance. If the antimasque in A Midsummer Night’s Dream had not been followed by the apotheistic fairy ball, its disruptive farce would have wanted the energy that comes from contrast and containment. But there are two sides to any coin, and persisted artifice and ritual court the danger of formularism. Shakespeare shows his consciousness of this by letting Puck mock the conventions of comedy – its forcings of pattern, the unreality of its poetic justice and its language of types and predictabilities: And the country proverb known, That ‘every man should take his own’, In your waking shall be shown. Jack shall have Jill, Nought shall go ill, The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well. (3.3.42–7) Spoken over the sleeping lovers, this sounds like the lullaby of a protective father, a father who knows the promises of his song are empty outside the confines of the bedroom – or the theatre. In any context other than that of the New Comedy, these lovers would wake to disenchantment, and their sleep be rounded by death, not by the eternal round of the dance. Shakespeare makes this point more forcefully in The Tempest, which interrogates the danced apotheosis as part of its apology, the retraction of its artifice. Not only are its constructs ephemeral but so too is the very life they attempt to regulate into pattern. In the words of Prospero, it will: . . . like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.155–8) The impotence of art to control and finalize becomes the subject of an enacted parable when the formless energy of the satyr play or antimasque (embodied by Caliban, Stefano and Trinculo) breaks into formal dance, showing that it is no solution at all, but rather an illusory parenthesis trying in vain to contain the unruliness of life: Enter certain reapers, properly habited. They join with the nymphs in a graceful dance; towards the end whereof PROSPERO starts suddenly and speaks PROSPERO [aside] I had forgot that foul conspiracy Of the beast Caliban and his confederates Against my life.

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·········································· To a strange, hollow, and confused noise, the [spirits in the pageant] heavily vanish. (4.1.138–42) Shakespeare knows deep down that dance is a divertissement, not an ordering principle, and that it offers no prophylactic against chaos and death. In this he looks ahead to Pope’s Clarissa: Oh! If to dance all Night, and dress all Day, Charm’d the Small-pox, or chas’d Old Age away; Who would not scorn what Huswife’s Cares produce, Or who would learn one earthly Thing of Use? (Pope, 1963, 238) Before we leave the apotheosis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we should remind ourselves that Elizabethan dance, executed in farthingales (hooped dresses), was rather more robust in effect than anything we are likely to see in the theatre today. Many readers will have Mendelssohn’s setting of the finale in their minds at this point, that gossamer scherzo idiom that he perfected through contact with the play. But if we exercise our historical imaginations, a rather different mental picture will emerge. The farthingales of Titania and her fairies were still in vogue in Spain when Velasquez painted the picture that Kurt Jooss, a choreographer outside the purview of ballet, joined to Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte. Commenting on the effect of his energetic enchaînements on this cumbersome dress, Arlene Croce gives us some idea of the figure that the fairies in the Globe would actually have cut: “You’d think, too, that anyone choreographing for a dancer who must wear enormous panniered hips and corkscrew curls that jut six inches from either side of her head would have limited her jumps to changements and low pas de chats. Jooss’s chipper choreography makes the infanta look like a gambolling sofa” (Croce, 1978, 212). The mention of Mendelssohn brings me to an additional reason for the play’s attractiveness to choreographers. For a start, we must recall that A Midsummer Night’s Dream forged the iconography of fairies that still obtains today. Harold Brooks points out that no mention of diminutive fairies before Shakespeare’s time was discovered by M. W. Latham, though in literature they subsequently became the norm and are found from time to time outside. Latham concluded that Shakespeare invented them, and that all their later appearances derive ultimately from him. (Shakespeare, 1979, lxxi) Although Brooks goes on to note that “neither conclusion commends itself to our foremost living authority on fairy lore, Dr Katharine M. Briggs”, he also acknowledges that there is “a literary tradition of such fairies which Shakespeare has inspired” (Brooks, 1979, lxxi). A corollary of this scaling down is insect wings as opposed to the feathered pinions associated with angels. With this adaptation comes a repertoire of movements (hovering and darting) not ordinarily associated with those Hebraic messengers. It was with insect wings (generally those of butterflies) that the Romantic ballet invested its otherworldly protagonists. La Sylphide (1832), the seminal ballet of the period, had its immediate source in a story by Charles Nodier (Trilby ou le lutin d’Argail), but its ultimate origin lay in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not least because the librettist translated Nodier’s goblin into a Titania-like figure. Contemporary lithographs of Taglioni in the role (Reyna, 1965, 104)

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depict her with wings like those of the eye-spotted peacock butterfly (Inachis io), an effect achieved by pasting the tips of peacock feathers onto a gauze frame. A similar image obtained in Giselle nine years later, except that two eyespots embellished Carlotta Grisi’s wings (Sitwell, 1948, Plate 6), and their more jagged outline evoked the contour of the Spanish moon moth (Graellsia isabellae) and even, perhaps, the scallops of a bat wing. She has almost turned into a species of vampire. Not for nothing, then, did Shakespeare make his fairies creatures of the night and name one of them “Moth” – for which reason the “Butterfly” in Balanchine’s ballet must join the long list of its solecisms. Mendelssohn fashioned his fairy music from rotary conjunct figures that evoke the milling of nocturnal insects around a light source, and from ledged patterns of notes that alternate within the compass of a third and a fourth, the last not unlike the zigzag hovering flight of a hawk moth. Such music was also highly suited to the major technical development of the Romantic ballet, especially the pointe work that allowed the dancer to take steps no larger than those described by the tips of her toes (pas de bourrée couru), and, accordingly, to take them at a pace that could realistically suggest the wing-beat of moth or butterfly. This innovation impacted in turn upon the ballet scenarios of this era, many of which centred on the hopeless love of a man for an unattainable being – a being whose ethereality was embodied by her movement en pointe. It is no coincidence that the kernel of the Romantic Ur-plot should also lie in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Out of this wood do not desire to go. Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no. I am a spirit of no common rate; The summer still doth tend upon my state; And I do love thee. Therefore go with me. I’ll give thee fairies to attend on thee, And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep, And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep; And I will purge thy mortal grossness so That thou shalt like an airy spirit go. (3.1.134–43) Thus does Shakespeare map out in advance the deep structure of La Sylphide and many of the ballets that followed – Giselle, La Fille du Danube, Eoline ou la Dryade and Ondine. The fact that these couplings of mortal grossness and airy spirits are in varying degrees sinister can also be traced back to Titania’s treatment of the poor mechanical, for she looks ahead in some respects to the figure of the Lorelei. “Out of this wood do not desire to go / Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no” anticipates Eichendorff’s “Waldegespräch”: “Es ist schon spät, es ist schon kalt, / kommst nimmer mehr aus diesem Wald [It is late, it is cold, / never will you get out of this forest]” (Schumann, 1973, n.p.). And just as Titania fails to honour her promise to Bottom, so the hero of the archetypal Romantic ballets can’t slough his “muddy vesture of decay” (The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.63) and unite with the aerial object of his desire – the coitus interruptus of most Romantic yearning. To sum up, then, given this essential plot – the base element for the tropes of the Romantic repertoire – and given its production of the miniature fairy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was readymade for balletic treatment. All the play needed was a sympathetic score, and this came with the composition of Mendelssohn’s incidental music. It created a watershed in the play’s performance history, for it is to the German composer above all that we must attribute its nineteenth-century

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balleticization, a metamorphosis that some twentieth-century directors (Peter Brook among them) worked hard to reverse. He wrote the miraculous Overture at the age of 17, and added the remaining numbers nine years later. The suite, which included pieces designed to subtend passages of text – literal melodramas – was first performed to Tieck’s translation in 1843. Although many in the Berlin audience found it “lamentable that music as lovely as Felix’s should have been wasted on so inferior a play” (Radcliffe, 1967, 50–1), England was unburdened by such qualms, and soon embraced it as the comedy’s aural complement. As Friedrich Niecks observes, “Mendelssohn opened a new world to the musician. Fairyland had not been part of his domain – Mendelssohn conquered it for him” (Niecks, 1991, 383). And the Victorian theatre, with its dancing girls in gauzy skirts (de rigueur in pantomime), its penchant for melodrama in both its literal and qualitative acceptations and its broad music-hall humour saw to the play’s gradual pantomimification, a process hastened by the fact that even in the legitimate Victorian theatre, “actors were liable on the least provocation – or none at all – to burst into song, brandish swords, or group for a dance” (Schlicke, 1985, 52). We must bear in mind, too, that Mendelssohn’s music had foregrounded the fairies to the detriment of the play as a whole, an imbalance at which Schumann cavilled in 1844: “Felix had overstated the ‘fairy parts’ (Feenparthien) and by recalling the overture had missed an opportunity to create something new” (Todd, 2003, 463). Before we turn Balanchine and Ashton’s use of the Mendelssohn score, we need to glance at one of its most important structural features, the woodwind tetrachord with which it begins and ends. Larry Todd has suggested that it evokes “a timeless quality” and assists “the audience in suspending disbelief and accepting the ensuing illusions” (Todd, 2003, 162), but I would argue that it is also the motif of prelapsarian order, one that declares “Whatever IS, is RIGHT” (Pope, 1963, 515). In this respect, it resembles the E flat major figure at the start of Wagner’s Das Rheingold – “the pure arpeggio symbolized the passionless flow of water” (Jacobs, 1965, 154) – and, just as Wagner framed the violence of Der Ring der Niebelungen with the waters of the Rhine, so does Mendelssohn the mishaps of the play with his tetrachord. The trope figures microcosmically in the very sequence of the chords – I (in potentia), V, IV, I – and in the macrocosm of the whole suite. And the roundedness of the tonic chord that returns to itself after two steps parallels the orbs and ringlets of the fairy dance upon which the order and integration of the Dream’s cosmos depends. For as long as they are intoned in their proper sequence and in their proper harmonies, Mendelssohn seems to be saying, “God’s in his heaven – / All’s right with the world” (Browning, 1954, 11). We can gather as much from its slightly smug “amen” contour, not only in the cadence (IV, I), but, if we follow the line of the uppermost notes, in its hint of the “Dresden amen” that also figures in the “Reformation” Symphony. No surprise, therefore, that when Titania falls in love with Bottom there should be a “distortion of the opening chords” (Radcliffe, 1967, 149), a skewing that ends the sequence with a diminished seventh, the most irresolute of all the chords in common practice harmony. So why would choreographers want to turn something so crucially abstract into concrete images? It’s a question to be asked both of Ashton (who associates it with Oberon’s power of intervention) and of Balanchine, who makes it the vector of inaudible fairy shouts or summonses (just who it is that they’re invoking is never made clear). The upshot is that a sequence that Mendelssohn had left open-ended has been limited and smudged by the impositions of each choreographer in turn. This is nothing new where Balanchine is concerned, for he raided the concert repertoire far more extensively than Ashton, and

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often overrode the logic of a musical design with the contradictory spatial logic of the steps he set to it. His sense of entitlement was overweening in this regard, and he almost had his ears boxed by Rachmaninov after urging him to present his Second Piano Concerto with a danced accompaniment by himself. Since his reputation was built on these conscriptions of absolute music, narrative works such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream are the exception rather than the rule in his oeuvre. His neo-classical idiom – abstract, theorematic and cerebral – isn’t really suited to narrative ballet, and it comes as no surprise to find that he has made his Midsummer Night’s Dream top-heavy with a divertissement (an extended, non-representative dance sequence) to celebrate the triple wedding. Since he is often compared with Ashton, his “neo-romantic” arch-rival (the jury is still out as to who has claim to being the greater artist), we here have a rare opportunity to see them go head to head on common ground, especially since Ashton’s abstract ballets (remarkable though they be) are far outnumbered by his narrative efforts. Balanchine’s biographer claims that in A Midsummer Night’s Dream “he was able to make clear, with no apparent strain, that whole complex of relationships, with all the humour, fantasy, romanticism and suspense one could wish – and to do it all through dance conceptions, not through mime” (Taper, 1984, 251), but this simply isn’t true. A good deal of the ballet’s action is inexplicable (the source of the quarrel, the relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta, the properties of the pansy juice, the mission of the mechanicals) and presupposes a knowledge of the play (as indeed does Ashton’s scenario). And, far from dispensing with mime, Balanchine has simply appliquéd it onto formal ballet steps. There are Munchian silent screams, tappings of the forehead (the awful balletic equivalent of the cartoon lightbulb), rotating hands to signify dance and many other gestic details besides. The whole “complex of relations”, moreover, has dwindled to a diagram – the “failed” quadrille implicit in the play – except that Balanchine tried to play it for pathos by introducing Mendelssohn’s overture to Die Schöne Melusine and pushing Helena and Demetrius in the direction of melodrama. Ashton has more success through treating the lovers as “Feydeauesque types” (Kavanagh, 1996, 480). Since the eye potion has mechanized the processes of love, he can bring a comic mechanicality à la Bergson to the rapid permutation of the lovers. Balanchine has filled in all the gaps of Mendelssohn’s coverage (gaps for which Schumann reproached him) by slipping in other works. The result is far from happy, especially where the immature string symphonies of the finale are concerned, for they jibe poorly both in texture and structure with the whole, and two self-contained overtures, replete in their sonata form, are forced to tell things they had no intention of telling (for example Balanchine commandeers the lovers’ motif in the Overture for the arrival of Titania). This choreographer’s claim to “musicality”, rote-repeated by ballet critics with limited musical knowledge, is seldom interrogated. The fact is that on some occasions – and this is one – it can prove deficient. But if Balanchine’s interpolations are infelicitous, at least he hasn’t brutalized the core music. The same can’t be said for Ashton’s score. It had been Ashton’s good fortune to have Constant Lambert as his mentor in his early career, but his later years were dominated by a musical butcher called John Lanchbery. On this occasion, at least, the latter held his habitually crude orchestration in check, but he does terrible things both to the Overture and the Scherzo, forcing them off their proper structural courses like a gramophone needle’s jumping over grooves, or like a warped record’s forcing familiar phrases into unfamiliar pitches. The score is made consecutive in a way that Balanchine’s isn’t, but hopelessly damaged by the process. Both ballets move

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toward a point of narrative stasis, and both nod at Petipa in the process. Balanchine’s delight in “pure” movement leads him to copy the divertissements (always over-long) with which Petipa capped his three-Acters; and Ashton’s love affair with the pas de deux (couple dance) leads him to write – nominally, at least – the sort of adage with which Petipa had capped his divertissements in turn. But this is actually quite a subversive duo, and seems to cast Titania vis-à-vis Oberon as a Hippolyta vis-à-vis Theseus. It is so packed with eccentric touches – standard arabesques suddenly melting their rigidity in a way that has more to do with Dali’s Persistence of Memory than with the rigid code of Beauchamp; the folding over of the ballerina’s body as though she were a pair of compasses at the point of closure; the vertical displacement of the shoulder line as opposed to the lateral axis sanctioned by ballet’s code of torso deportment or épaulement – that if it’s meant to represent the submission of Titania to her lord, it’s a very rebellious kind of submission, one that half acknowledges and half rejects that strict formality of classical movement known as the danse d’école. In the antimasque pas de deux of The Dream, which features Titania and Bottom, the dancers keep crossing tendus (foot-pointing steps) in what Kavanagh calls a balletic version of “footsie-footsie”, and it parodies a sequence from one of Balanchine’s greatest works, The Four Temperaments. Even in spite of these parallels, the two ballets are more dissimilar than they are like, not least with regard to their narrative methods. Balanchine could claim to be more comprehensive, though he does little for Hippolyta beyond giving her a sequence of multiple fouettés (whipping pirouettes much favoured – to the point of cliché – by the nineteenth-century virtuosa). He has lost sight of the play’s brilliant confusion of chanson de guerre and the epithalamion – “I woo’d thee by my sword” (1.1.16) – a confusion that Janine Charrat had explored in La Massacre des Amazones. All we have is empty flashiness. Worse still, Balanchine lets the exigencies of dance triumph over plot. What on earth is one to make of the ad hoc cavalier who steps into Oberon’s slippers after the quarrel beyond the fact that Balanchine hasn’t properly understood the play and needs a partner, come hell or high water, for his pas de deux? Ashton’s method in The Dream depends on compression rather than amplification, and owes something to the Hamlet of Robert Helpmann (who, with Balanchine, was one of his bêtes noires). The latter was mounted in 1942 to Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy-Overture, and dispensed with a consecutive plot, a Marowitz Hamlet avant la lettre that broke the action into fragments and associated each with the motifs in the score: “This sense of the disturbed outline of a dream is imaginatively sustained throughout: Hamlet seems, at times, outside the action, an invisible spectator” (Williamson, 1947, 93). In The Dream, however, the narrative isn’t tessellated so much as squeezed. Balanchine, as we’ve seen, included the figure of Hippolyta, but did nothing with her. Ashton dispenses with her altogether, and keeps the play entirely in the forest, as Tieck had done in his three-Act translation that premiered in 1843 (Mendelssohn had composed his Overture, in which the play’s four layers are clearly differentiated, to Schlegel’s five-Acter). And whereas Balanchine offers no recoverable point of view on the play other than to reconstitute it as a Maryinsky show-stopper (ballet à grand spectacle) with an inert divertissement-finale, Ashton does provide an off-beat take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In reaction to the portentousness of Helpmann’s Oedipal Hamlet (“disturbing comments on character were suggested by . . . the continued confusion in Hamlet’s mind of the images of his mother and Ophelia” (Clarke, 1955, 172)), he flies in the face of the socially committed sixties, and “confirms” the play’s avatar as a Victorian pantomime, validating a (currently) unfashionable take on the play:

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Ashton’s Dream is a conventional interpretation only in its appearance. Seen through a misty gauze, the set and costumes are early Victorian and re-create Lila de Nobili’s insect-wing textures and woodland colours (the designer’s David Walker and Henry Barden [Bardon] had been her pupils). Atmospherically it fuses an Old Vic-style production – Ashton had Tyrone Guthrie’s 1937 version in mind – with traditional Romantic ballet. (Kavanagh, 1996, 481) But “traditional Romantic ballet” took itself very seriously indeed, and Ashton’s Dream doesn’t. Decades elapsed before a self-parodying ballet would reach the stage (Tudor’s Gala Occasion is probably the earliest, though Fokine cryptically mocked Petipa’s Talisman at one point in Petrushka). The nostalgia of The Dream is leavened with mordant satire, for just as Saint-Saëns had mocked ballet’s fairy idiom in Le Carnaval des animaux, assigning Berlioz’s Danse des sylphes to the elephantine double bass, so Ashton puts Bottom’s dream onto point. This might seem to make good Titania’s promise that he shall “like an airy spirit go”, but in fact it makes him all the more clumsy. The male foot, unaccustomed to point-work, invariably executes it with a stiffness and caution that are the very antitype of the flighted quality it should evoke. Bottom’s pointes recall the inflexibility of a donkey’s hooves, as Pigling Bland’s evoke that animal’s trotters in The Tales of Beatrix Potter. The Dream also parodies the extravagance both of Victorian melodrama and Soviet plastique mime when Lysander flings the back of his palm to his forehead; this after Hermia insists that he sleep alone. Throughout his later career, Ashton would be reproached with “irrelevance” by critics affiliated to the school of Macmillan (Kavanagh comments that both he and Turgenev “were considered old-fashioned by their contemporaries, because their work was not weighted with world issues” (Kavanagh, 1996, 548)). The Dream, a riposte of sorts, all but says, “So what?” Since the focus of this chapter has fallen primarily on the balletic conversions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a synoptic coda about the other plays in the canon seems to be in order. The account that follows is by no means comprehensive, and simply reflects data that have been thrown up by my reading. So far as I can tell, none of the histories has been turned into dance, even in spite of the masque-like quality that their pageantry and stylized battles can sometimes impart to them. For just as Shakespeare used crypto-Vitruvian shapes to point up the chaos that the comedies pretend to conquer, so he reduced (and sharpened) the horror of civil war to a quadratic equation in 3 Henry VI when both a son enters with the body of his father and a father with the body of his son (2.5). The problem plays have levels of tonal complexity and satire that are not suited for ballet, and none, to my knowledge, has been made into one. Of the pastoral romances only The Tempest has been danced (once in Nourrit’s version – after a fashion – once in Nureyev’s, and once, possibly, in a ballet by Hansen at the Paris Opera, though his Tempête could be any number of things). As in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the extensive incidental music provided by Arthur Sullivan shows that The Tempest also underwent a sort of masquification on the Victorian stage. Other comedies that have been choreographed are The Merry Wives of Windsor (by Vladimir Burmeister in 1943 to a score by Oransky), Twelfth Night (by Antony Tudor in 1931, who called it Cross Garter’d and used music by Frescobaldi) and The Taming of the Shrew (by John Cranko to a Domenico Scarlatti patchwork in 1969). It’s significant that these last two rely on the self-replicating, motivic texture of baroque music, since it allowed Cranko (as it probably allowed Tudor and Lichine, who chose Rameau for his version of the Dream) to run the action and the dance

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sentences (enchaînements) independently of the musical phrases (something that the more expressive and programmatic music of the Romantic era disallows). That’s always a useful consideration if one is conscripting music for a purpose it was never meant to serve, though whether the results are satisfying is open to debate. The Comedy of Errors seems to have repelled adaptation by its too complex plot, and by an allegro pace that doesn’t provide for lyrical interludes, while Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing are both probably too verbal for ballet. Where the tragedies are concerned, Chaboukiani made an Othello for himself to music by Machavariani in 1957, and Peter Darrell crafted a pocket version of the play, wrenching the carefully woven signifiers of Liszt’s Faust Symphony to fit characters they were never meant to serve, as when he attached the Faust motif (rather than that for Mephistopheles) to Iago. It’s unclear to me if the Otello staged in 1813 by Viganò – an important choreographer who worked with Beethoven – owed more to Cinthio than it did to Shakespeare. I suspect that ballet’s necessary drive toward clear-cut narrative rather than abundance makes the Italian a more likely source of inspiration. By the same token, one can’t be sure whether Viganò’s Coriolanus, like Beethoven’s Overture, was based on Grillparzer’s play. Hamlet has been tackled twice over in South Africa, once by the Danish choreographer Kenneth Greve and once by Veronica Paeper in 1992 (Peter Klatzow supplied the score). South Africa has also seen a modern dance King Lear choreographed by Marie BrolinTani. In 1980, Macbeth enjoyed (or suffered) the attention of Vassiliev, who used music by Molchanov. I’ve not seen it, and wonder if it makes anything of that fine proto-balletic moment in the banquet scene where the procession of thanes yields to chaos: “Stand not upon the order of your going, / But go at once” (3.4.118–19). As in the chiastic tableau in 3 Henry VI, it shows Shakespeare’s use of stylized choreography as a way of heightening chaos. Even so, no attempt to convert Shakespeare’s “Ur” plays – Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear – into the traditional language of the ballet class is likely to succeed. For ballet, a product of Louis XIV’s court, is too obviously a language of sunny artifice to suit rough antique mores and the “fog and filthy air” of a cold climate. Bournonville’s ballets on Nordic themes were once hailed as masterpieces, but anyone today who scans the photographs of Valkyries with turn-out and tarlatan is liable to smile. Wagner’s Walküre, with its hojotoho-ing hoydens and the clumsy charge of its orchestral Ride, has driven these dainty maidens from the stage. By the same token, the bright-eyed diatonic melodies of Verdi’s early period don’t properly suit Macbeth. It’s an opera I enjoy and value, but, to paraphrase Maréchal Bosquet, “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la pièce” – magnificent, but not Macbeth. When Verdi came to compose Otello, he had reconstituted his melodic idiom into the smaller units of Sprechgesang – more melodic than Wagner’s, certainly, but infinitely less procrustean than the forms of his “galley years”, under compulsion of which he sends Lady Macbeth sleepwalking to the strains of a polonaise. A play so dark and murky can’t function satisfactorily in the straightjacket of the strophic tune. One imagines therefore that, tedious though it might seem, a Soviet Macbeth filled with hammy plastique (as Vasiliev’s ballet is likely to be) must be preferred above the version with pirouettes and arabesques mounted in London in 1785, when the audience cackled at the Italian accents of the chorus (a carry-over from the opera-ballets earlier in the century, where song was added to the dance). The critic of The Morning Herald, pining for words when the words went missing, lamented the fact that in “the sleeping scene, the comment of language was necessary to give effect to the action” (Guest, 1954, 19).

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Antony and Cleopatra received a multi-media dance treatment by the Cape Town City Ballet in 2002 (music by Charl-Johan Lingenfelder), but it isn’t clear to me if Noverre turned to Plutarch or to Shakespeare for his Stuttgart Antoine et Cleopâtre in the 1760s. Given the luxury of the Egyptian court, the imagination doesn’t recoil from the idea of a voluptuous pas de deux for the protagonists, nor, given the refinement and artifice of Venetian society, from the mental image of Desdemona swooning in an arabesque against her husband – whereas it does at the thought of a pas de quatre (dance for four) by King Lear and his daughters, complete with variations and coda, or of Lady Macbeth’s turning thirty-two whipped pirouettes in a tutu made of tartan if not of tarlatan. Romeo and Juliet probably qualifies as the Shakespeare play most frequently rendered into dance, the earliest effort being Galeotti’s, whose Whims of Cupid remains the oldest ballet in the repertoire. But, again, a choreographer’s literary sources aren’t easily recovered, and Auguste Bournonville tells us that Romeo and Giulietta, mounted in Copenhagen in 1811 to a score by Schall, “had Steibelt’s opera in mind more than Shakespeare” (Bournonville, 1979, 642). We can also guess that Steibelt might have drawn inspiration in turn from Matteo Bandello’s sixteenth-century version of the story. Determining plot influence is a venture fraught with difficulty, and authorities sometimes butt heads. For instance, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera confidently claims Shakespeare as the source for Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, but we have it on the authority of the librettist’s widow that “he had in mind a narrative by [a] Veronese writer of the time of Bartolomeo Scala as a foundation rather than Shakespeare, as being simpler in structure and more Italianate” (Orrey, 1969, 100). And the same dictionary asserts with equal confidence that Rossini’s Otello derived from Shakespeare’s play, whereas Stendhal suspected (as I do) that his librettist owed more to Cinthio: “Moreover, some petty consideration of backstairs patriotism (which earned him great favour in Venice) induced our worthy poet to revert to the original Italian legend which had provided Shakespeare with the basic plot” (Stendhal, 1956, 211). Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture engendered two short ballets by Serge Lifar and George Skibin in 1946 and 1955 respectively, and Antony Tudor used Delius for his redaction of the play in 1943. On this occasion, “Salvador Dali was approached to design the sets, and in time, submitted his ideas. These were unsuitable, particularly the balcony scene which featured a giant set of false teeth held up by crutches. Eugene Berman was next approached and his Botticelli-inspired designs were perfect” (Leonard, 1995, 228). Almost as bizarre was Nijinska’s metafictive version of the play, mounted to a score by Constant Lambert in 1926: Our new ballet, Roméo et Juliette, was by no means a literal adaptation of Shakespeare’s play: it was about a troupe of ballet dancers who were rehearsing episodes from the play. The first scene was a class; then the maître de ballet tried to arrange a pas de deux for the two principal dancers, who kept interrupting their work to make love to each other . . . and finally Romeo wearing a leather coat and airman’s headgear, eloped with Juliet in an aeroplane. (Sokolova, 1960, 243) But of course it is the Soviet Romeo of 1940, fashioned in accordance with the dictates of Zhdanov’s social realism – no false teeth or aviators allowed! – that has swept around the world. Its versions are too numerous to list, and its popularity must lie as much with the score as with the clarity and drive of Shakespeare’s play. Because Prokofiev’s writing is generally lush and melodious, the ballet lovers from the suburbs are contented (at a

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pinch), while the sometimes acrid harmonies reassure their urban counterparts that they haven’t been trammelled with Rachmaninov pastiche. The most influential versions of Romeo and Juliet are Cranko’s (Stuttgart), which was to some extent the progenitor of Macmillan’s ballet in London. Where the latter is concerned, never was a story of more woe, not least the unhappy pushing to one side of the dancer whom Macmillan had scheduled to create the role (Watson, 1994, 376). She eventually danced in the fifth cast after the ballet was forcibly reconceived by the Covent Garden management as a Fonteyn/Nureyev vehicle. Ashton’s version for Copenhagen (1955) is reputed to be something of a curate’s egg. It apparently falls down on perfunctory choral writing, or so says the dancer who created the role of Romeo: “He was not deeply interested in the corps de ballet. But the lyricism, the poetry, of Shakespeare’s words really came out in Ashton’s ballet” (Tomalonis, 2002, 148). And it’s in the release of such lyricism – corporal analogues to the incorporeal pattern and dance of the verse – that any conversion of Shakespearean play to ballet must seek its raison d’être. In a discussion of Macmillan’s Romeo and Juliet I have suggested that the choreographer has melodramatized [Mercutio’s “a plague on both your houses”] into the mimic language that the post-Fokine ballet d’action, having renounced the finger language of the nineteenth century, borrowed from the evolving silent cinema. Here, as when the Prince of Verona stamps about in silent displeasure, one has an aching sense of the absence of words. I go on to point out, however, that our responses are very different when Romeo and Juliet “dance their love in a language of leaps and bounds and postures as unreal and as exquisitely mannered as the conceits that vector their passion in the original text” (Edgecombe, 2006, 78). Ballet, of all the theatrical arts, comes closest to Pater’s claim that “art aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it” (Pater, 1910, 135). Its concern with platonic pattern and form runs counter to the narrative purpose – the task of embodiment – that it was later made to serve, and which it can’t properly realize without the assistance of the separate and older tradition of mime. That explains Shakespeare’s comparative popularity as a ballet source, for just as Greek mythology provided the Athenian dramatists with pre-formulated tales and permitted them to engage with more important issues than mere plot invention, so a fortiori the known contour of the Romeo and Juliet story has helped along the many choreographers who have turned it into ballet. It’s futile to reproach the form, as Gertrude reproaches Polonius, with decoration for its own sake (“More matter with less art” (Hamlet, 2.2.97)): its art is its matter and in plastic decoration it moves and has its being. That, ultimately, is why Balanchine expanded the divertissement at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the extent that he did. It might not make for very good drama, but it makes for very good dance.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Aristotle (1961). Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher and intro. Francis Fergusson. New York: Hill and Wang. Beaumont, Cyril W. (1945). Michel Fokine and His Ballets. London: C. W. Beaumont.

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Bournonville, Auguste (1979). My Theatre Life, trans. Patricia N. McAndrew and intro. Svend Kragh-Jacobsen. London: A. & C. Black. Browning, Robert (1954). Browning: A Selection, ed. W. E. Williams. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Clark, Kenneth (1960). The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Clarke, Mary (1955). The Sadler’s Wells Ballet: A History and Appreciation. London: A. & C. Black. Croce, Arlene (1978). Afterimages. London: A. & C. Black. García-Márquez, Vicente (1996). Massine: A Biography. London: Nick Hern Books. Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning (2006). “Trans-formal Translation: Plays into Ballets, with Special Reference to Kenneth Macmillan’s Romeo and Juliet”. The Yearbook of English Studies 36.1, 65–78. Guest, Ivor (1954). The Romantic Ballet in England. London: Phoenix House. ——(1962). The Dancer’s Heritage: A Short History of Ballet. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1980). The Romantic Ballet in Paris. London: Dance Books. Harding, James (1994). Booklet for Carnival: Sumi Jo: French Coloratura Arias. English Chamber Orchestra/Richard Bonynge. Decca 440 679–2. Jacobs, Robert L. (1965). Wagner. London: Dent. Jonson, Ben (1954). Poems of Ben Jonson, ed. and intro. George Burke Johnston. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1967). Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, ed. Norman Sanders. In A Book of Masques: In Honour of Allardyce Nicoll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 70–88. Kavanagh, Julie (1996). Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton. London: Faber. Lamb, Charles and Mary Lamb (1893). Tales from Shakespeare. London: Bickers. Leonard, Maurice (1995). Markova: The Legend. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Nicoll, Allardyce (1937). Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage. London: G. Harrap and Company Limited. Niecks, Friedrich (1991). “On Mendelssohn and Some of His Contemporaries”. In Mendelssohn and His World, ed. R. Larry Todd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 382–94. Orrey, Leslie (1969). Bellini. London: Dent. Pater, Walter (1910). The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. London: Macmillan. Pope, Alexander (1963). The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt. London: Methuen. Radcliffe, Philip (1967). Mendelssohn. London: Dent. Reyna, Ferdinando (1965). A Concise History of Ballet. London: Thames and Hudson. Rosenthal, Harold and John Warrack (1964). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera. London: Oxford University Press. Roslavleva, Natalia (1966). Era of the Russian Ballet. London: Victor Gollancz. Schlicke, Peter (1985). Dickens and Popular Entertainment. London: Allen and Unwin. Schneider, Herbert (2000). Booklet for François Auber: Ouvertures et ballets rares. Orchestra of the Gothenburg Opera/Tommy B. Anderson. Sterling CDS-1039–2. Schumann, Robert (1973). Booklet for Liederkreise Op. 39 and Op. 24. Robert Tear/Philip Ledger. Decca ZRG 718. Shakespeare, William (1979). A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks. London: Methuen. ——(1981). Much Ado About Nothing, ed. A. R. Humphreys. London: Methuen. ——(1982). Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins. London: Methuen. Sitwell, Sacheverell (1948). The Romantic Ballet from Contemporary Prints with an Introduction and Notes on the Plates. London: B. T. Batsford. Sokolova, Lydia (1960). Dancing for Diaghilev: The Memoirs of Lydia Sokolova, ed. Richard Buckle. London: John Murray. Stendhal (1956). Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe. London: John Calder. Stevens, Wallace (1965). Selected Poems. London: Faber.

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Taper, Bernard (1984). Balanchine: A Biography. New York: Times Books. Todd, R. Larry (2003). Mendelssohn: A Life in Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tomalonis, Alexandra (2002). Henning Kronstam: Portrait of a Danish Dancer. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Vitruvius (1931). On Architecture, trans. Frank Granger. London: William Heinemann, 2 vols. Walker, Kathrine Sorley (1982). De Basil’s Ballets Russes. London: Hutchinson. Watson, Peter (1994). Nureyev: A Biography. London: Coronet. White, Patrick (1969). The Solid Mandala. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wilbur, Richard (1989). New and Collected Poems. London: Faber. Williamson, Audrey (1947). Contemporary Ballet. London: Rockliff. Wiley, Roland John (1985). Tchaikovsky’s Ballets: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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SHAKESPEARE AND POPULAR MUSIC Adam Hansen

The music doesn’t wear. It cannot be repeated, whereas good music lasts, mellows and gains fresh beauties at every hearing. It stands, like Shakespeare, through the centuries. No passing craze can shake it. (Lewis, qtd in Frith, 1988, 30) Popular music is nothing if not dialogic, the product of an ongoing historical conversation in which no one has the first or last word. The traces of the past that pervade the popular music of the present amount to more than mere chance: they are not simply the juxtapositions of incompatible realities. They reflect a dialogic process, one embedded in collective history and nurtured by the ingenuity of artists interested in fashioning icons of opposition. (Lipsitz, 1990, 99)

Introduction This chapter addresses the following questions: how have Shakespearean characters, words, texts and iconography been represented and reworked through popular music; do all types of popular music represent Shakespeare in the same ways; if not, why not; and how do the links between Shakespeare and popular music develop what we think we know about Shakespeare, and what we think we know about popular music? Echoing the two epigraphs above, Shakespeare and popular music might seem fundamentally “incompatible”. The first, expressed in 1933 by C. A. Lewis, the BBC’s inaugural Programme Organizer, asserts that popular music is inferior to classical music, because it is ephemeral and insubstantial. Lewis marshals a manifestation of high culture’s durable power in order to derogate popular music: whatever Shakespeare is, he isn’t that. Such assumptions imply that reliably high cultural forms, like printed or staged Shakespeare, are distinct from popular, low or mass cultural products, like popular music. Antipathies between high culture and pop music might be considered mutual. Indeed, “though Romeo and Juliet are quite often named” in popular songs, “they are almost never quoted, for their youthful rebellion is directed against precisely what Shakespeare’s language represents: authority, age, propriety, respect for tradition” (Lanier, 2006, 72). Until recently the little criticism that did attend to the possible contiguity of Shakespeare and popular music hardly reinforced their relationship, by simply listing artists whose works alluded to Shakespeare, and presenting only perfunctory explanations for these allusions. In the past five to ten years, however, critical debate has decisively shifted,

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to focus more on the “dialogic” possibilities of Shakespeare’s relation to popular music, in the terms of the second epigraph, or to consider how Shakespeare has been “shaken”, or at least remixed, by the “passing crazes” of popular music, in ways declared impossible by Lewis. This criticism has emphasized the contentions and harmonies between Shakespeare and popular music. Any increasing critical sophistication is due in part to changes in the character of Shakespeare scholarship in general, notably a burgeoning interest in appropriations and remediatizations of his words and work in new technologies. As critics have focused on Shakespeare in film, for example, so the use of music in such films has become relevant, not least in terms of “cinem(edi)a”: “the circulation of all kinds of mass media in film . . . how film circulates from one big screen to another, how it is dispersed across media ranging from shooting scripts and screenplays to CD-ROMs and DVDs, and how sound (noise, music and so on), is deployed in those exchanges” (Burt, 2002, 201). Baz Luhrmann’s 1997 film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet offers a particularly reflexive take on the technologies of Shakespearean remediatization. This reflexivity also includes the film’s use of popular music, and its “MTV-inflected” editing and marketing (Burt, 1998, 5). These technologically facilitated interactions between Shakespeare and popular music climax and come undone at the Capulets’ party, with Kym Mazelle’s 1996 House version of Candi Staton’s 1976 disco classic “Young Hearts Run Free”, exuberantly performed by Mercutio in the film (played by Harold Perinneau). On one level, Mercutio’s performance, in drag, on stairs, flanked by dancers, reaffirms the music video aesthetic “in quickly paced zooms, zips and pans” (Burt, 1998, 159). This scene might seem like Mercutio’s – and House music’s – victory: both embody the liberty from the prescribed identities that Romeo and Juliet crave. The intra-and-inter-domestic violence of “households” identified in the play’s prologue momentarily dissipates into the loved-up, ecstatic empathies of dance. And yet the upbeat states evoked in this scene are haunted by shadows. Disco, its remixed musical progeny and the communities creating and enjoying these musics, have suffered through racism, homophobia and AIDS. Hence, in the film, ecstasy preludes tragedy: moments appearing to underscore desire and escapism actually present a “nonsynchronization of sound and narrative” (Burt, 1998, 160). The song’s lyrics themselves offer the perspective of someone whose love is long since lost. While identity may be negotiable and remixing may revive, technology consolidates such losses; as Burt notes “the transvestite voice is at best a DJ, a poseur whose claim to authorship is limited to remixing and sampling codes already enunciated by others” (Burt, 1998, 165). In music and elsewhere, to cease repeating “is to die”, but technological repetition itself – as the persistent 4/4 drive of disco and house, or as a remix – is “also a kind of death”; it facilitates “renewal”, yet obscures the original (Middleton, 2006, 137). This prefigures Romeo and Juliet’s “timeless end” (5.3.162) as signifiers of doomed love in suspended animation, living on and not, as powerfully as the still from the film’s close, freezing their underwater kiss. Yet repetition also betrays lack: “house is the music that can never satisfy or be satisfied . . . the music’s a repetition-complex, a symptom of some unstaunchable vacancy of being” (Reynolds, 1990, 178). If critical attention to these kinds of interactions has increased, this may also be in part due to changes in the demography of Shakespeareans, some of whom have become more sensitized to modern media: ‘‘Many moments in Shakespearean drama play themselves out in my mind to the accompaniment of popular music’’ (Marshall, 2000, 98). Indeed, scholars have resorted to describing the “interactive reception of a work by Shakespeare” as a form of jazz (Bristol, 1996, 23; see Hawkes 1986 and 2002). And as Shakespeare

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scholars explore the cultural politics of their subject and the contexts of his ongoing appropriation through popular music, this works both ways, with commentators on popular music deploying Shakespearean references to apprehend their subjects. Christopher Ricks, for one, records many instances of semantic and acoustic continuities between Shakespeare and Bob Dylan. Yet so intense are the semantic and acoustic relations they precipitate temporal disruption as much as a sense of literary “continuity and community”: Shakespeare becomes “Dylanesque”, not vice versa (Ricks, 2003, 60). Some Shakespearean pedagogy has contrived comparable continuities, with numerous projects seeking to “breathe life” into the Bard with popular music (Ko, 2006, 2). Yet in contrast to critics like Ricks, pedagogy has also employed popular music to more defamiliarizing ends. Cynthia Marshall reasoned her students required an “expanded sense of context” to understand ideological constructs of romance, gender and sexuality in Romeo and Juliet. To attain this she “turned to the conscious artifice of early rock and roll”. This music “mystifies heterosexual coupling” in the same way as, and offers “striking congruencies” with, the play. But rather than using such music to establish a tendentious homology between past and present, Shakespeare and pop, or insist upon the timeless “relevance” of the play-texts, Marshall problematized students’ experience of familiar drama, by encouraging them to deconstruct such “stylised” and now old-fashioned music: “an earlier era’s songs are revealed by time to be conventional period pieces that are anything but simple expressions of truth” (Marshall, 2000, 98–107). In other words, students became able to historicize culturally specific ideological and rhetorical values evident in Shakespeare, by hearing them in popular music. Evidently, such approaches have yielded and will yield a wealth of critical interventions on Shakespeare and popular music, interventions comprehending Shakespeare’s relationship not just to popular music, but also to the politics of popular music as it is consumed and produced in specific material, temporal, (inter)national, and social contexts.

Locating Shakespeare in/and/against Modern Popular Music Discussing modern popular music and Shakespeare’s relationship with it generates challenging questions, circulating around definitions. Given that this is the only chapter in this collection to include “popular” in its title, it is worth reinvoking the complexity of that term: Although ‘the popular’ can be made to carry a range of different meanings, what all these have in common is the idea of . . . belonging to the people. In particular, the idea of the popular is often a way of constructing, categorizing, and dismissing the cultural and social practices of ‘ordinary’ people. In other words, definitions of the popular are never neutral; they are always entangled with questions of culture and power. (Storey, 2005, 264) The complications increase when popular modifies music. Is popular music defined by its qualities (or lack of them), or the quantities of its production and consumption? Is modern popular music made by or made for the people, generated from mass populations or sold to them? Influentially, and controversially, Theodor Adorno set the tone for this debate. To him, popular music promoted cultural and ideological “standardization”, and “musical automatism” in its generic forms and its modes of production and reception. This suited industrialized, capitalist societies, founded on “conditioned” responses, where a musical

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motif within a popular song, and a consumer of such songs, functioned “as a cog in a machine”. Popular music staged a performance of spontaneity and individual freedom that only confirmed passivity and subjection: “Those who ask for a song of social significance ask for it through a medium which deprives it of social significance. The uses of inexorable popular musical media is [sic] repressive per se” (Adorno, 2007, 301–14). More generally, popular music has commodified creativity and desire, alienating producers and consumers from themselves and each other. Yet the politics of the production and consumption of popular music are not straightforward. Given these considerations, should we therefore speak of popular music or musics? Precisely because of the politics of production and consumption, popular music is internally discriminating and subdivided. In the simplest terms, this means that, for example, genre serves as a powerfully defining force. To deploy genre as a hermeneutic device in relation to popular music (and Shakespeare’s relation to it) is to acknowledge the complex conditions, identities, positions, locations, contexts in and by which that music is produced and consumed: period, nation, “race”, ethnicity, subculture, sexuality, musical forms. But deploying genre as a mode of analysis also reproduces commoditized, and very often gendered or racialized, discriminations. Genres are arbitrary designations in the most ambivalent sense: as constructs derived from socially and historically specific contexts, they convey both discrimination and constructedness. But this should not obscure the fact that some genres – and the cultures they signify – are more resistant to or accepting of Shakespeare than others. In turn, as we will see, some genres use Shakespeare in significant ways because of the cultural politics and identities they represent. If acknowledging this heterogeneity is necessitated by the diversity of popular music forms at present, then it is made all the more critical given the globalized character of modern music production and consumption. Having offered some sense of what popular music is, the question remains: how does Shakespeare relate to it? Lanier notes: “The ‘and’ in ‘Shakespeare and popular culture’ marks not just a link but a distinction” (Lanier, 2006, 3). The same is true of Shakespeare and popular music. If Shakespeare is “the sign of pop’s desire” for the “cultural authority, quality, legitimacy, and upward mobility” that he continues to “symbolise”, then his power “remains the sign of that culture which pop proclaims it isn’t” (Lanier, 2007, 99). Yet using Shakespeare as a “source or analogue for popular culture” consolidates its “worthiness” (Lanier, 2006, 95). By this, Shakespeare becomes a legitimator of particular popular music genres or ameliorates the status of one-time derogated forms. Such sourcings, analogies, or legitimations might simply consolidate the relative lowness of popular musical cultures. Even well-established and critically-acclaimed artists succumb to this sense of awed inferiority. “Go Ask Shakespeare”, a song sung by Rufus Wainwright on a 2005 Burt Bacharach album, ponders the big issues of life and love, and advises consulting the Bard. This situates Shakespeare as an existential as well as a cultural authority, to whom inarticulate popular musicians can only defer. Yet if Shakespeare emerges as someone or something to revere, he and his texts also generate a compulsion to resist, reject or surpass. Hence a range of popular music artists and works, and commentators on these, display perceived continuities and discontinuities with a diverse and contradictory range of figurings of Shakespeare: as popular or commercial artist, as patron of low culture, as icon of high culture, as blighting and blighted cipher of elitist White Europe sustained by institutions, or as universal communicator. Evidently, Shakespeare’s relation to popular culture – and popular music – is not simple, and never has been. Shakespeare drew on the materials of popular culture. Such

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materials included popular music of the broadest range. Yet as many commentators note, with regard to the “transmission and appropriation” of Shakespeare in and through profitseeking, mass-market popular culture, including popular music, issues of culture and power noted above only intensify (Shaughnessy, 2007, 2). Some of the complexity of these relations is captured in Lanier’s coinage “Shakespop”, designating not only instances of appropriation of Shakespearean forms in or by modern popular media but also examples of “negotiation, collaboration, exchange or other models” in diverse genres where issues of power or powerlessness are particularly pressing (Lanier, 2006, 5). As such, this chapter will seek to explore the politics of appropriation in these diverse forms. However we define our terms and address these issues, we would do well to remember the sale and singing of ballads in The Winter’s Tale: “Autolycus’s songs are specifically calculated to drum up business” (Lindley, 2006, 166). In other words, to begin to consider Shakespeare’s relations with popular music, we must consider his relations to the popular music of his own time.

Shakespeare and Early Modern Popular Music As Christopher R. Wilson shows in his chapter in this volume, early modern music, popular and otherwise, was consumed and produced in very dissimilar ways to modern popular music. The ideological, material and technological contexts of industrialization, urbanization, class stratifications, leisure economies and the creation of youth cultures as marketing demographics and subcultural categories, condition modern modes of consumption of popular music. To this extent, there are “fundamental differences” between modern and early modern soundscapes (Smith, 1999, 49). Thinking about Shakespeare’s relationship to popular music of his own time therefore requires recognizing the conditions in which people consumed or created such music. Early modern commentators, informed by Classical and Biblical discourses, often perceived hearing “as a sense characterised by passivity, community, obedience and tradition”. Ears were “uncontrolled orifices”, continuous with the world beyond the self, and made subjectivity and agency vulnerable to contamination. Yet while “aurality and obedience” were aligned in contemporary thought, this alignment was problematized by music (Folkerth, 2002a, 18, 73, 18). To the likes of Puritan reformers such as William Prynne, over-wrought music was “impudent” and “whorish”, immodest and emasculating (qtd in Lindley, 2006, 46). For Stephen Gosson, the only “right musicke” to which people should attend was that divine harmony underscoring orthodox political, gender, social and religious mores (qtd in Lindley, 2006, 49). But the fragility of such harmonies resonated. In Ulysses’ words: “Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows” (Troilus and Cressida (1.3.109–10)). Hence, in 1604, though informed by these discourses, Thomas Wright described the profoundly various effects of music on listeners: so in musicke, divers consorts stirre up in the heart, divers sorts of joyes, and divers sorts of sadness or paine: the which as men are affected, may be diversely applyed: Let a good and a godly man heare musicke, and he will lift up his heart to heaven: let a bad man heare the same, and hee will convert it to lust . . . these sounds diversificate passions. (Qtd in Lindley, 2006, 29) If responses to early modern popular music could be radically diverse, this was in part because such music was itself diverse. As well as well-known tunes, it included

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bell-ringing, street-sellers’ rhymes and harvest songs. Even a recognizable form like the “ballad” was a capacious genre, with huge publication rates, printed and oral circulation and plural functions. Yet whatever forms early modern popular music took in Shakespeare’s drama, its incorporation within the soundscape of the theatre proved to be “so popular” that the King’s Men “refitted the Globe to include a curtained music room in the balcony above the stage” (Smith, 1999, 221). And by the later plays, music is imbued with the power to bring people, if not the people, to life. In Paulina’s words: ‘‘Music; awake her; strike!’’ (The Winter’s Tale, 5.3.98). Shakespeare’s ear for a well-placed popular song was evident not least because he used them to diverse ends in a range of genres. Characters seize on “popular ballads in moments that require lyrical intensity” (Smith, 1999, 169). Ballads in Shakespeare’s plays also signify “pastness and passion” (Smith, 2006, 196). All such states coalesce in Desdemona’s “willow song” in Othello 4.3, with its melancholy memories of mothers, maids and mortality. Comparably, the songs sung by lowly or socially marginal figures like the Fool in King Lear act as a complex “subversive critique” of the “court-world”, a critique both “expressed and mitigated” by being in popular song (Lindley, 2006, 162–3). The “riotous snatches” of ballads sung by errant knights like Toby Belch in Twelfth Night and Falstaff in the Henry IV plays, powerfully signify the “Carnivalesque”, and “a sense of societal ambivalence”. Ballads similarly “destabilise gender roles”, as male actor-singers take female parts to lament patriarchal injustice and betrayal: “In Hamlet, Ophelia uses ballads not only to express grief but also to assert a prophetic judgement against male authority” (Buhler, 2007, 158–60). Her songs are more than simultaneously angry and mournful, then: they are “indecorous” for the way they perpetrate these destabilizations, and confuse “public and private worlds”, the “popular” and the political (Lindley, 2006, 157). Such indecorousness echoed not only the theatre’s subversive appeal, but also the development of ballads as a musical form during the period. Many popular songs “clearly derive” from the commissioned and professionalized music of earlier royal courts, in a process of cultural downshifting; conversely, many were ameliorated and “gentrified” for publication (Lindley, 2006, 73). If actors and musicians found themselves dislocated in the period’s social and legal re-entrenchments, then ballads were as deracinated as their subjects and singers. In part these unfixed but multi-functional forms would fulfil commentators’ worst fears about popular music’s errancy. Yet figures in the late romances complicate this sort of critique. As David Lindley notes, when Caliban sings his song of “Freedom, high-day!” (The Tempest, 2.2.177), he heralds a development in his subject status that resonates through the play: At this point popular music becomes oppositional rather than merely antithetical. This is continued in 3.2, where rebellious energy again finds expression in musical form. Because Caliban’s songs can be “firmly associated with the world of the tavern and ‘low life’”, they have a “strong potential” to implicate the audience in “conspiratorial combination”, as the liberations of popular song reach beyond the stage. Yet even as Stephano and Trinculo’s carousing catch ends with “And scout ’em and flout ’em, / Thought is free”, Caliban responds “That’s not the tune” (3.2.116–19). As Caliban’s words and their catch are followed by the watching Ariel taking up the melody on a “tabor and pipe”, the violently emancipatory ambitions of the “rebellious” song are muted (Lindley, 2006, 221–2). Popular songs could also be blatantly commercial artefacts, and this commoditization

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again complicates their purpose. At the Bohemian sheep-shearing feast in The Winter’s Tale 4.4, Autolycus sings and sells tunes that simultaneously mock – mimic and ridicule – the form and the taste for outlandish matter both on and off the stage. If popular music endured cultural shifts to perform multiple functions on the Shakespearean stage, it could be argued that in some cases Shakespeare survived through or because of early modern popular music. As Bruce R. Smith reminds us, Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) includes “Ballads that Illustrate Shakespeare”. Smith suggests that this betrays the residual presence in popular music of Shakespearean texts and responses to specific stagings: “Ballads did not record performances; they perpetuated them” (Smith, 2006, 194–5). Smith discusses one mid-seventeenth-century ballad entitled The Lamentable and Tragical History of Titus Andronicus. Here, Titus sings “all the events of the story – even his own death”. Only the “tongueless Lavinia” also speaks. So whether “singing the ballad alone” or “performing it for others”, notes Smith, “the singer perforce becomes the titular hero”, and “in possessing the ballad as a physical object, and in getting it by heart, one can perform the play in one’s own voice” (Smith, 1999, 203–5). This embodies popular music, offering the potential to anyone who could read, hear or simply learn a tune to reproduce Shakespeare, far beyond the contexts of a play’s initial staging. Yet despite the evident cultural and experiential differences between early modern and modern popular musics and the different material conditions they evoke, because of such deracinations modern musical forms may have early modern roots, implicating Shakespeare. What is significant is not necessarily the validity of these implications, but the urge of commentators to reference Shakespeare when making them, mitigating the often estranging impact of the technologies that made modern popular music possible. In Evan Eisenberg’s idiosyncratic analysis of phonography, for example, Shakespearean allusions proliferate the stranger the experience he describes: The record listener and the musician . . . like a man and his familiar ghost . . . do not inhabit the same world. This is the premise of their intimacy. And their intimacy is only closer when the Ghost is heard but not seen . . . But then the Ghost has power over the man – as Hamlet’s ghost has when, having gone underground, he cries ‘Swear!’ As Ariel has when, singing “full fathoms [sic] five thy father lies”, he leads Ferdinand by the nose. “This is no mortal business, nor no sound / That the earth owes. I hear it now above me,” says Ferdinand. Above, beneath, somewhere, but not in this world . . . “Is it not strange,” asks Benedick on hearing the fiddler, “that sheeps’ guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?” (Eisenberg, 1987, 57–8, 227) If Shakespeare prefigured the strangeness of experiencing modern popular music, he also helps make sense of it, because seemingly inherent to its idioms and mediums. But if this posits a continuity between Shakespeare and popular music, it is one in which Shakespeare’s words become as ghostly as the experiences those words describe. In their mutual “intimacy” and alienation from each other, their simultaneous continuity and discontinuity, Shakespeare proves the strangeness of pop, while pop makes Shakespeare strange too. This chapter will now explore how.

Shakespeare, Race, Gender and Popular Music Stephen M. Buhler has traced the contexts of popular music’s gendered engagements with Shakespeare, especially Romeo and Juliet. Peggy Lee’s 1958 version of Otis Blackwell and

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Eddie Cooley’s song “Fever” synthesized her own new lyrics, 1950s’ slang and an “entertaining approximation of Elizabethan language” to revivify the lovers’ passions: “While the focus remains on Romeo, his ardour is reciprocated by Juliet.” The song’s “sparse” arrangement only “underscores” the intensity of the lyrics and the emotions they evoke (Buhler, 2002, 248–9). As Buhler notes, however, though this revivification might have cast Shakespeare in contemporary terms, it was culturally and musically specific: Lee was inspired by the success of West Side Story, which opened in 1957, and, conscious of racially and generationally segregated consumers, she adapted, marketed, and subsequently “crossed-over” a pre-existing rhythm-and-blues song for white audiences, teenage and adult. Musicals such as West Side Story, and other youth-oriented adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, have also had an impact on many later male artists’ engagements with Shakespeare. All such artists offer nuanced engagements with Shakespeare, the commoditization of modern popular music and media, and modern constructs of romantic love, gender, and individual agency. Some, like Bob Dylan, have returned to Romeo and Juliet throughout their careers, imagining and giving voice to the “displaced and destructive” hero in early work but only according Juliet comparable significance and expressiveness in later songs (Buhler, 2002, 164). Dylan’s shift in emphasis reflects other changes. As gender and sexual identities have pluralized in the developing cultures of rock and pop, female performers and singer-songwriters have covered or created Shakespearean songs to realize different connotations. One such example comes with The Indigo Girls’ version of Dire Straits’ 1980 song “Romeo and Juliet” on their 1992 album Rites of Passage, which presents “feminist and same-sex recordings of one of the defining narratives of heterosexual romance” (Buhler, 2002, 157–8). The Indigo Girls have re-presented other Shakespearean characters, notably Ophelia: on “Touch Me Fall”, a track on their 1994 album Swamp Ophelia, the band relocate her geographically to America’s turbid and alluvial Deep South and consolidate this relocation musically. As the lead vocal “swims amid rich layerings of electric guitars”, any passivity ascribed to the play’s Ophelia, or “vulnerability” in the lyrics, is “offset by . . . sonic aggression” (Buhler, 2002, 167–8). Again, these re-presentations might in part be considered a response to the figure reconstructed by a male singer-songwriter like Dylan, in whose songs the drowned female appears as a “frustrated songstress . . . unable to give voice to her desires” (Buhler, 2002, 166). Yet the fact that, “after Romeo and Juliet”, Ophelia “has seemed to attract most songwriters”, simply reminds us that she is “obviously a fan of popular music” with a “penchant for singing snippets of her favorite songs” (Folkerth, 2006, 367). If some issues in Shakespeare’s relations with popular music have attracted critical attention, then so have some types of music. This is because some musicians are more insistent on celebrating continuities between Shakespeare and popular music, or acknowledging discontinuities, than others, especially where the production or consumption of the music are inflected by racial discriminations. No type of popular music is removed from these inflections. But in African-American popular musics, from jazz to rap, the tensions surrounding relations with Shakespeare have been noticeably acute. This is in part because of the politics of appropriation, as African-American musics have adapted, subverted and parodied dominant culture’s musical norms. As Douglas Lanier observes, these issues only intensify with regard to Shakespeare: “What gives the conjunction of Shakespeare and African American music its special frisson is that throughout much of the last century the two have been emblematic of what have been perceived as distinct cultural realms.” Hence while hybridizations of Shakespeare and African-American musics may have been

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confined to “marginal appearances”, they have had a “particular symbolic resonance”. These appearances first took their modern, mass-marketed and mass-consumed forms in racist nineteenth-century blackface minstrel shows that used crude stereotypes to parody Shakespearean texts. Even as these shows registered fears about black social mobility and political agency, they sought to diminish this mobility and agency, by mocking characters like Othello. Shakespeare thus becomes a “symbolically powerful means for denying African Americans the mantle of cultural authority” through a discriminatory and disenfranchising culture industry (Lanier, 2005, 1–14). However, as African-American musics rose to global popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, the terms of engagement with Shakespeare shifted. One of the most notable examples of this shift was the 1912 song “Shakespearean Rag”. While listing “various characters”, the lyrics by Gene Buck and Herman Ruby asserted that although “Bill Shakespeare never knew” ragtime, “his syncopated lines” “surely fit” “the ragtime hits” (Folkerth, 2006, 402). Shakespeare soon became a figure artists could use to legitimate and popularize jazz and its sources and offshoots, often in sophisticated ways. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s collaborations on their 1957 album Such Sweet Thunder “respond to selected Shakespeare characters in dramatic, formalistic, or thematic contexts”. As Buhler puts it: “[Ellington’s] ‘Sonnet to Hank Cinq’ is a portrait of King Henry V expressed in fourteen melodic lines, a musical analogue to the sonnet form” (Buhler, 2002, 151). As Buhler notes elsewhere, the piece’s mutability offers “aural reflections” of Henry V’s “capacity for chameleon-like change”. Another song on the same album, “Circle of Fourths”, “progresses through all twelve major keys in fourths . . . adding a flat to the scale, or subtracting a sharp”. This is hardly playing around, but a “canny exploration” of the “interconnections among the four genres in which Shakespeare composed” (Buhler, 2005, 3). Nor are these apolitical syntheses. Ellington’s suite of Shakespearean characters “begins and ends with blacks”, emphasizing their significance in the canon: these portraits are literally and metaphorically brassy, musically textured and tender, as they celebrate “black erotic power” (Lanier, 2005, 6). Similarly, Ellington’s 1963 score for Timon of Athens “hints” at “parallels” between his status as beneficent entertainer and the tragic protagonist’s abused generosity, and between Timon’s violent “bitter impulses” and the increasing militancy of the civil rights movement, “responses” that Ellington “consistently rejected” (Lanier, 2005, 7). Whatever their political imperatives, for some jazz artists and their listeners, such productive syntheses are possible because of the perceived continuities between jazz’s concerns and modes of creation, production and reception, and Shakespeare’s. Ellington himself consistently emphasized Shakespeare and jazz’s proximity, in terms of how art is made and how it is received: In the final analysis, whether it be Shakespeare or jazz, the only thing that counts is the emotional effect on the listener. Somehow, I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, he might be a jazz fan himself – he’d appreciate the combination of team spirit and informality, of academic knowledge and humor. (Qtd in Lanier, 2005, 6) And yet such syntheses, and the perceptions that underpin them, have not always been endorsed or well-received by aficionados of Shakespeare or jazz. Even the assimilation celebrated by Ellington was conspicuously incomplete: “the music is entirely instrumental, bypassing the issue of setting Shakespeare in an African American idiom” (Lanier, 2005, 6). Evidently, the shifts in African-American musics’ engagements with Shakespeare

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were not and could not be finalized, given continuing discriminations. Mid-century antiassimilationist US Be-Bop rejected Shakespeare in accordance with its “new racial politics” (Lanier, 2005, 5). Of course, even this rejection signals a relationship, as the titles of several Be-Bop songs played upon Hamlet’s notoriously vacillating question. This play had a serious purpose: would African-American cultures “be” autonomous and sustainable within or from other cultural domains, including those that sustained Shakespeare as cultural authority; or would they “not be” through repression by and assimilation to such domains? Such questions resound in later African-American genres. The first track on School’s In, a 2005 album by James Brown’s erstwhile saxophone maestro, Maceo Parker, is named “To Be Or Not To Be”. With call and response chants of the title punctuating a flowing melodic line and sharp backing, Maceo cites Hamlet’s famous line, wondering aloud whether the track will or will not be funky. Given the gesture to Shakespeare, the album’s title and its cover image of Maceo dressed in a suit, glasses in hand, in front of a blackboard with musical notation, this song could be taken as more than musing on whether the ensuing album will or will not be funky. By reminding listeners of the roots of contemporary hip-hop in jazz and funk, the song and album challenge the musical and political consciousness of black American youth: what will contemporary African-American music’s relationship with its heritage, with Shakespeare and the cultural domain he signifies, “be” or “not be” in the future? The form and function of Parker’s track suggest how these questions reverberate in the “evolving phenomenon” of “rap Shakespeare” (Lanier, 2006, 80). How can we conceive the (in)compatibility of contemporary African-American musics like rap and hip-hop with Shakespeare? Rap adaptations of Shakespeare can sometimes parody both Shakespeare and “reverence” for him, even while making rap itself “an object of parody” (Lanier, 2006, 74). If rap and Shakespeare are by no means always an easy fit, their engagement is thereby often necessarily facilitated as comedy, commerce or pedagogy, or complicated by the marginal status of rap performers in relation to popular music in general, and in relation to the genre itself. Something of the unease of this accord is caught in Burt’s tmetic coinage to describe Shakespeare in or as rap: “ad(r)aptation” (2002). Often comedy functions to mediate the relationship between Shakespeare and rap. Despite or perhaps because of comedy the distance between Shakespeare and rap is maintained (Lanier, 2006, 14–15). Notably, though, this distance can sometimes be overcome by musicians who operate on the margins of mainstream rap, and who find vocal agency in Shakespearean appropriation. Outkast are an innovative hip-hop outfit who nonetheless use costume and role-play to unsettle the stereotypes of nihilistic, materialist masculinity afflicting recent rap. The Shakespearean reference in the final verse of Outkast’s 1996 song “ATLiens” that echoes “All the world’s a stage” (2.7.138) from As You Like It, assists this deconstruction: “With Shakespeare’s help, ‘ATLiens’ send the message that everyone . . . can live their lives in a way that celebrates personal freedom and individuality” (Folkerth, 2006, 369). Other Shakespearean appropriations by hip-hoppers with an eccentric take on their medium are no less “striking”: Buhler explores just such an appropriation in a 1998 track by a female rapper, Sylk-E. Fyne’s “Romeo and Juliet” (Buhler, 2002, 260). With the Capulets’ ball now a club, Fyne relocates the play’s gender dynamics and factional strife to the contemporary hip-hop scene. Female rappers tend to concentrate on themes of “heterosexual courtship”, “the importance of the female voice” and “public displays of physical and sexual freedom” (Rose, 1994, 147). Consolidating Fyne’s status as female artist in a

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male-dominated genre, then, Buhler suggests she articulates herself as “a very assertive Juliet”, who is “confident of her ability to answer and even to overmatch her Romeo’s verbal skill, sexuality, and emotional ardour” (Buhler, 2002, 260). Given hip-hop’s global dissemination and its self-conscious, in-built modes of appropriation, it would be a mistake to ignore the ways in which a “black idiom . . . that articulates the problems of black urban life” also involves the “pleasure and participation of others” (Rose, 1994, 4). Rap now accommodates a wide range of non-black artists, with particular implications for relations between rap and Shakespeare: some of the earliest examples of their synthesis were produced by non-black artists. And precisely because one of the most notorious of these non-black others, Eminem, aka Marshall Mathers, aka Slim Shady, is so notably a white rapper has perhaps led commentators to ascribe Shakespearean associations to him in a way that might be less likely if he was African-American. Eminem has acknowledged such associations, by suggesting that to some of his listeners he can be compared to Shakespeare, on the 2001 track “Renegade”. This designation reveals more than a desire to legitimate rap in general; it also indicates a white rapper’s freedom to use a range of performative personae, and call on a figure of cultural authority like Shakespeare to do so. Significantly, this track features on an album by a pre-eminent black rapper, Jay-Z, who does not make or acknowledge the same claims. But as Eminem suggests, this is more than self-aggrandizement, as rap commentators have made the connection for him: In a hip-hop edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which rappers or their personas were the players, Puck, the comedy’s fairy instigator, could be no one but Slim Shady . . . Slim Shady is like Shakespeare’s Fool: the character who darts across the plot to tip the audience to truths unseen . . . He may annoy or illuminate, but he won’t be ignored. (Bozza, 2004, 67) Shakespeare and rap have been linked for other reasons, not least in terms of pedagogy. If rap Shakespeares sometimes maintain an air and tradition of travestying AfricanAmerican and Shakespearean idioms, they can nonetheless stimulate: Rap offers the performer a new form of ‘blackface’ that, first, trades on and thus attempts to legitimise the alternative discourse of urban youth, and second, makes the claim that an interactive cultural exchange across time with the classics can fend off the danger of their growing inert . . . In the context of a performance for youth, ‘blackface’ provides a revisionary idiom that acknowledges a student’s resistance to Shakespeare while enabling engagement. (Ko, 2006, 2) Despite these admirable pedagogic aims, the commercial contexts for rap Shakespeare are clear. Whether these contexts attest to Shakespeare’s power, or to rap’s, remains debatable.

Shakespeare and Country Music If race has been a significant factor in popular music and in such music’s engagement with Shakespeare, so too has class, albeit often in relation to race. In its early days US Country music “enabled poor Southern white people to hear the strains of the black working-man’s music while keeping their distance from poor working-class blacks”. As Country developed through the 1900s, it continued to be important to “farm people”, but became equally significant for those enduring “dislocation and rural nostalgia” with urban industrialization.

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Hence throughout its history, Country offered “a way to express frustration at . . . social exclusion . . . and . . . solidarity for people who felt marginalized by American society” (Dawidoff, 1997, 10, 18, 19). In other words, Country was and remains a genre sensitized to race, class and status, ascribed and self-identified as a popular but low cultural form. As with jazz and rap, however, Shakespeare is not just made to operate in opposition to this form (as a high cultural icon), or simply as a legitimator, elevating or aggrandizing. Indeed Country artists reference Romeo and Juliet as “a barometer of superior love, but also as a benchmark that the songwriter’s lovers can surpass” (Sawyer, 2005, 2–3). These status-inflected and stylized appropriations of Shakespeare have a long history in Country. The early Country star Hank Williams was known and marketed as “both the ‘Hillbilly Shakespeare’ and ‘the Shakespeare of the Common Man’”. These comparisons simultaneously “deconstruct the difference between high and low”, “serve as oxymoronic public relations tags” and betray a “comparison” between artists that “may actually have historical validity”, given both artists’ relationships with their markets and masculinity (Sawyer, 2005, 4–5). Continuities and also discontinuities between Shakespeare and Country have appeared most recently in Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s 2007 film Shakespeare was a Big George Jones Fan: Cowboy Jack Clement’s Home Movies. Cowboy Jack Clement is an engineer, record producer, singer, musician and songwriter involved in the Nashville Country Music scene. His career began at the legendary Sun Records studio in Memphis, as ownerproducer Sam Philips’ “right hand man”, in the words of one of the film’s contributors. Jack went on to work with a huge range of artists including Jerry Lee Lewis, Charley Pride and Johnny Cash, eventually founding his own studio, the “Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa”, to which repaired the luminaries of “Outlaw Country”, who were unwelcome in staid Nashville, for good times and to cut records. Perhaps the times were too good to cut good records: Cowboy Jack’s collaborations with Johnny Cash have been described as “cloying pop songs” (Dawidoff, 1997, 187). The film brings together present-day footage of Jack discussing his life and career, his incomplete earlier TV specials, “home movies” featuring stars he has worked with, concert performances and animated sequences. Throughout, Shakespearean allusions abound, generating rich material to explore Cowboy Jack’s and Country’s (and popular music’s) relationship with Shakespeare. The film maintains Cowboy Jack’s marginal status as a novelty pop-culture figure but also relocates him in the contexts he occupies, or aspires to occupy, thereby relocating Shakespeare too. The first animated Shakespearean sequence follows a scene where Cowboy Jack and friends are sitting round a table with the Country star George Jones, for whom Cowboy Jack wrote several hit songs. Cowboy Jack sings a jokey number, ending with the line “I’ve been flushed from the bathroom of your heart”. Jones responds “’sbetter than some of the stuff I’m hearin”. The scene then cuts to this conversation: COWBOY JACK CLEMENT [to George Jones] I had a dream one night, ’bout Shakespeare. An’ he was a big fan o’yours. GEORGE JONES ’Bout who? COWBOY JACK Y’know, William Shakespeare. An’ he was a big George Jones fan. GEORGE JONES You gotta joke comin’ up, I’ll bet. COWBOY JACK No, no, that’s it! What we need around here is some high class dreams, y’know.

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GEORGE JONES Yeah. COWBOY JACK Shakespearean dreams. At this, the screen wobbles into a dream sequence, or hallucination, with an animated Shakespeare and a photo of Cowboy Jack’s face, both in space suits orbiting the earth. The film’s end credits reveal Shakespeare is voiced by “Chance Martin (The Voice in Black)”, a play on Johnny Cash’s persona, befitting Martin’s Cash-like deep vocal tone. In the animated sequence, this space-cowboy Shakespeare grumbles in those deep tones, “Oh, OK, I’m just a dream,” to which Cowboy Jack responds: “No, no, but that’s what I tell people.” Despite being “high class” (or sky-high) Shakespeare seems to empathize with Jack’s all too earthly need for feints and obscurity: “That keep y’out of trouble doesn’t it, Cowboy?” Cowboy Jack concurs, even as he jokily diminishes his own credibility further: “Yeah, if I tell ’em I got a time machine, they’ll put me in the loony bin.” The matter resolved, Shakespeare and Cowboy Jack decide to go and drink some beer. From this (re-)animation of Shakespeare, suspended in time and space, the film then cuts to the present day, with Cowboy Jack discussing his own understanding of Shakespeare to the camera. He confesses he is “captivated by Shakespeare himself”, hence in thrall to a far greater artist, yet he adds he feels some equalizing connection exists between them across time and space. Shakespeare “seemed like he was a whole lot like me, sort of”, as a “music hustler, or something”: he “writes his stuff, casts it, ’n’ gets his friends to show up and sells tickets”. Cowboy Jack’s diffident use of “seemed”, “like”, “sort of” and “or something” indicate he is wary of stretching the comparison too far, but this doesn’t stop him doing so. Perhaps it is another joke, another feint, to mystify how and why he makes popular music while gently reducing Shakespeare’s awesome stature in the process. But even if this were true, the final comment stands as both a canny summation of the early modern stage’s hucksterism and the economics of contemporary Country production, as practised by Cowboy Jack, in his “lodge”-cum-studio. Moreover, the joking tone is muted as the film switches between Cowboy Jack’s explanation and a performance from a much earlier “Never-Finished TV Special”. Here he sings Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy with no little poignancy, acknowledging his own mortality and unrequited aspirations, to the gentle sound of a piano. Cowboy Jack’s nostalgia for the past – his own and Shakespeare’s – rubs against a sense of how old he has grown in the 2000s. “To be or not to be” hardly expresses the emotion: what was, and what has and will become, are contrasted and connected. Shakespeare and Cowboy Jack’s ambivalent relationship deepens as the film progresses. In a chapter on the DVD of the film entitled “Sigh No More Ladies”, Cowboy Jack sings to a guitar-toting cowboy-hat-wearing animated Bard-in-a-bar setting a song from As You Like It to a country strum, but rewriting the closing lines: “converting all your sounds of woe / Into songs that make some money”. Shakespeare is here an honorary Good Ol’ Boy, enjoying Cowboy Jack’s legendary hospitality. The pair are such good buddies that Cowboy Jack extends his informal revision of the canon, in a later chapter called “Lighten up Shake”. Still in the same bar, Cowboy Jack continues to muse on Hamlet’s soliloquy, but suggests to Shakespeare that it is “too morbid”. Shakespeare responds in the manner we might anticipate Jack thinks he would: “Well, Cowboy, that stuff really sells, y’know.” Cowboy Jack couches his (re)production advice in gentle terms: “Well, I wouldn’t want you to change it, but, er, write s’more happy stuff man, y’know, get outta the pits.” Shakespeare mumbles, but manages to admit “maybe nobody understands me”. Cowboy

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Jack offers a way out: “Maybe not, but you’ll have more fun.” Shakespeare decides that this is what he really desires and that Cowboy Jack’s approach is worth considering: SHAKESPEARE Well, that’s what I wanna do. T’have more fun. I never had that much fun. COWBOY JACK Remember man, we’re in the fun business. If we’re not havin’ fun, we’re not doin’ our jobs. SHAKESPEARE He knows it and I know it, now we gotta convince . . . COWBOY JACK . . . the world . . . SHAKESPEARE . . . that’s right, the world. Worn out by having designed a scheme for a new, pan-historical popular aesthetic, relevant both to The Globe and the global village they have floated above, or simply feeling the beer, Cowboy Jack promises to meet Shakespeare in a couple of weeks for another “good time” and nods off to sleep. Shakespeare sends him on his way with the inevitable refrain: “Good night, sweet prince.” Clearly Shakespeare as artist and as corpus figures in various and contradictory ways in this film, but these contradictions say much about his relation to both Country and popular music. He may appear as an object of whimsical fun, lost in space, just a guilty dream, or a playful hallucination. This might seem to undermine his cultural authority, but doesn’t seem to be Cowboy Jack’s or the film’s sole aim. If he can only be communicated with through altered states or dreams, is he nevertheless part of popular music’s subconscious? He may be out in space, but he’s also certainly deep inside the mind of this popular music maker. And, joking aside, to give Shakespeare “Johnny Cash’s” voice is to align the expressive powers of two artists Cowboy Jack evidently respects. Indeed, Cowboy Jack insists to George Jones that he’s gone beyond joking, and that first animated sequence actually works to offer a serious balancing out of the earlier jokey song. Like Hamlet, Cowboy Jack is self-consciously aware that confessing his fantasies makes him appear more foolish, even insane. These Shakespearean dreams express aspiration in two related senses. Firstly, when Cowboy Jack terms these the “high class” dreams we “need”, he implies Shakespeare’s cultural authority is something for popular musicians to aim at, in Country or otherwise. Secondly, and almost inversely, these are dreams about the sort of producer of popular culture, and even consumer of popular music, Shakespeare would have been. Cowboy Jack highlights Shakespeare’s status as a commercial entertainer – in these terms they equate. When Cowboy Jack assumes that Shakespeare would have been a “fan” and fixes his fandom on George Jones, Shakespeare’s cultural discernment and authority legitimize Jones, Cowboy Jack, and Country and popular music in general. But recognizing these aspirations need not mean that the film simply casts Country and popular music as “low class” cultural forms, irredeemably remote from high art such as Shakespeare’s and requiring his seal of approval. Instead, as seen, the film and Cowboy Jack create continuities between Shakespeare and popular music. Perhaps articulating these continuities represents Cowboy Jack’s wishful dreaming: the anachronism of Shakespeare as a big George Jones fan may seem daft or desperate. But articulating these continuities also attests to pop’s creative power, a power that, as we have seen before, can deform accepted progressions and hierarchies of time and culture. The film offers evidence for this reading. Early on, the singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson describes Cowboy Jack’s identity in terms that suggest these continui-

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ties are not simply a dreamy invention: “Cowboy Jack Clement, to me he was like a Shakespearean character, he was kinda a cross between Falstaff, y’know [laughs] and, er, God knows what.” Kristofferson goes on to imply this parallel is not simply comical, but fitting: “But to me he symbolizes what attracted me to Nashville at that time, which was just the love of creation.” Cowboy Jack’s Shakespearean stature derives both from his affability and his technical ingenuity, qualities as at home in the Nashville of a certain era as the film imagines they were in Shakespeare’s theatre. Voicing the film’s “Shakespeare” with a Johnny Cash sound-alike reinforces these continuities. It is significant then that the DVD commentary begins with Cowboy Jack and “Alamo Jones” (Chance Martin, in reality) trying to outdo each others’ Johnny Cash impersonations, staking a claim to his identity: CHANCE MARTIN Hello, I’m Johnny Cash. COWBOY JACK No, you’re not. Hello, I’m Johnny Cash. CHANCE MARTIN No, I’m Johnny Cash. But in the logic of the film, both men are also playing roles to stake a claim to Shakespeare’s voice. And if anyone can do a Johnny Cash and “Johnny Cash” is doing Shakespeare, then anyone can do, play, or perform with a Shakespeare. Though Shakespeare speaks in the distinctive accents of a popular musician, this doesn’t necessarily underwrite his universal articulacy, but could be seen to affirm both his continuing translatability and the efficacy of popular music as a medium in which to perform such translations. Again, the film seems to realize this affirmation. On the Shakespearean dream sequence, Cowboy Jack notes this inter-animation of Cashes and Bards is a “good combination”, allowing Alamo Jones aka Chance Martin aka Johnny Cash aka Shakespeare to concur, “Yeah, it sure is.”

Shakespeare and “World” Music So far, most critical attention on Shakespeare and popular music, including this chapter, has focused on Anglo-American forms. Some critics and artists have refined their attentions further, to realize popular music’s appropriations of Shakespeare in specific national contexts. The Beatles’ newness and distinction was partially signalled through their active reinterpretation of national icons like Shakespeare (see Bretzius, 1997). The band themselves engaged in a vivacious parody of the Pyramus and Thisbe scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.108–334), broadcast on UK television in 1964. However, the parody was not entirely iconoclastic. The date of the broadcast locates the performance around significantly Shakespearean and hence national anniversaries, even as it might be seen to supplant or re-envision the forms of culture and nationhood being commemorated (see Folkerth, 2002b). Yet beyond national contexts, Shakespeare is increasingly both subject and object of international production and consumption. In this regard, his status accords with the character of popular music, as a globalized commodity, as a creation of globally diverse local populations and as a synthesis of global and local musical forms. This reterritorialization of popular music is no innocent process, however: “As the transnational corporations plunder the musical assets of the Third World, ‘world music’ can hardly be a neutral term” (Middleton, 1990, 293). Some recordings and productions have evoked these newly accessible – or exploited – musical environments, suggesting Shakespeare has a place in them. A 2005 BBC Radio 3 adaptation of Pericles deployed global accents and

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international instrumentation to reinforce the play’s geographical shifts. Comparably, in 2002, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the ensemble specializing in the South African vocal genre isicathamiya, recorded a version of “Sonnet 8”. Embodying both the grievous sufferings and hopeful future of their nation, the group sought to answer the poem’s opening question: “Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?” Their harmonized, contrapuntal adaptation reflected both the sonnet’s words and their country’s aspirations, at once unified and particular, plural and singular (“all in one, one pleasing note do sing”). The adaptation also exemplified the universalist strains of some discourses of “World Music” and of some Shakespearean appropriations in a global context: “being many, seeming one”. Elsewhere, stagings like the Honolulu Theatre for Youth’s Othello (in 2002 and 2006) signal how globalized Shakespeares now interact with globally significant popular musics such as rap, far from such music’s (and literature’s) original sites of production. These interactions both revivify the drama and extend the music’s cultural reach (see Ko, 2006, 3, 6). In these global, remediatized terms, the meanings of Shakespeare multiply, as Michael D. Bristol influentially observed: Shakespeare is a term with extraordinary currency in a wide range of discursive practices as a complex symbol of cultural value . . . it refers equivocally to a particular man, an author, a body of works, a system of cultural institutions, and, by extension, a set of attitudes and dispositions. It is appropriate, then, that Shakespeare’s now “big-time” status is exemplified with reference to popular music stars: “No less than the Beatles or Liberace, Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger, Shakespeare is big-time in the idiomatic sense of cultural success, high visibility, and notoriety.” Shakespeare thus emerges as the biggest international pop star of all: “even more versatile as a cross-over artist than Madonna” (Bristol, 1996, ix, 3, 90).

Conclusion Shakespeare doesn’t exist in or relate to popular music simply by means of allusion, citation or appropriation. Popular music – and its consumers – creatively adapt, rewrite and recreate Shakespeare, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in admiration, sometimes in love. Popular music references Shakespeare not just because of some sense of cultural inferiority, or some lack of confidence in its own artistic authority, inferiorities and lacks that can be compensated only by Shakespearean legitimation. The reverse is true: many uses of Shakespeare reveal popular music’s cultural confidence. This is manifested in multiple ways, not least by popular musicians and critics describing the ways in which the modes of production and reception in their medium are commensurate with those in Shakespeare’s. In other cases, this confidence broadcasts itself in brash statements through which pop signals its power to both sustain and surpass Shakespeare’s impact.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Adorno, Theodor (2007). “On Popular Music”. In On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. London and New York: Routledge, 301–14. Around the Beatles (1964). UK television broadcast, 6 May. Bacharach, Burt (2005). “Go Ask Shakespeare”. At This Time. Sony, 82876742832. Bozza, Anthony (2004). Whatever You Say I Am: The Life and Times of Eminem. London: Corgi.

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Bretzius, Stephen (1997). Shakespeare in Theory: The Postmodern Academy and the Early Modern Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bristol, Michael D. (1996). Big-Time Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge. Buck, Gene and Herman Ruby (1912). “Shakespearean Rag”. New York: Joseph W. Sterne and Company. Buhler, Stephen M. (2002). “Reviving Juliet, Repackaging Romeo: Transformations of Character in Pop and Post-Pop Music”. In Shakespeare After Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 243–64. ——(2005). “Form and Character in Duke Ellington’s and Billy Strayhorn’s Such Sweet Thunder”. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1.1, 1–6, at http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/about ——(2007). “Musical Shakespeares: Attending to Ophelia, Juliet and Desdemona”. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 150–74. Burt, Richard (1998). Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture. New York: St Martin’s Press. ——(2002). “Slammin’ Shakespeare in Acc(id)ents Yet Unknown: Liveness, Cinem(edi)a and Racial Dis-integration”. Shakespeare Quarterly 53.2, 201–26. Dawidoff, Nicholas (1997). In the Country of Country. London: Faber. Dire Straits (1980). Making Movies. Mercury, 6359/7150 034. Eisenberg, Evan (1987). The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography. New York: McGraw-Hill. Ellington, Duke (1963). Incidental Music for Timon of Athens. Varese Sarabande, VSD-5466. ——and Billy Strayhorn (1957). Such Sweet Thunder. Columbia, CK 65568. Frith, Simon (1988). Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. Cambridge: Polity Press. Folkerth, Wes (2002a). The Sound of Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge. ——(2002b). “Roll Over Shakespeare: Bardolatry Meets Beatlemania in the Spring of 1964”. Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23.4, 75–80. ——(2006). “Pop Music”. In Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, ed. Richard Burt, 2 vols. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, I, 366–407. Fyne, Sylk-E. (1998). Raw Sylk. RCA, 07863 67551–2. Hawkes, Terence (1986). That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process. London and New York: Methuen. ——(2002). Shakespeare in the Present. London and New York: Routledge. Jay-Z and Eminem (2001). “Renegade”. The Blueprint. Roc-a-Fella, 314586397. Ko, Yu Jin (2006). “Honolulu Theatre for Youth’s Rap Othello”. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. 2.1, 1–7, at http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/ about Ladysmith Black Mambazo (2002). “Sonnet 8”. When Love Speaks. EMI, 7243 5 57321 2 5. Lanier, Douglas (2005). “Minstrelsy, Jazz, Rap: Shakespeare, African American Music, and Cultural Legitimation”. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1.1, 1–14, at http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/about ——(2006). Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——(2007). “ShakespeareTM: Myth and Biographical Fiction”. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 93–113. Lee, Peggy (1958). “Fever”. Capitol, CL14902. Lindley, David (2006). Shakespeare and Music. London: Arden. Lipsitz, George (1990). Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Marshall, Cynthia (2000). “‘Who Wrote the Book of Love?’ Teaching Romeo and Juliet with Early Rock Music”. In Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, ed. Maurice Hunt. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 98–107. Mazelle, Kym (1996). “Young Hearts Run Free”. William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: Music from the Motion Picture. Capitol, 7234 8 55643 0 7. Middleton, Richard (1990). Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. ——(2006). Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of Popular Music. London and New York: Routledge. Outkast (1996). “ATLiens”. La Face, 73008260322. Parker, Maceo (2005). School’s In. BHM, BHM 1007–2. Reynolds, Simon (1990). Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock. London: Serpent’s Tail. Ricks, Christopher (2003). Dylan’s Visions of Sin. London: Penguin. Rose, Tricia (1994). Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press. Sawyer, Robert (2005). “Country Matters: Shakespeare and Music in the American South”. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespearean Appropriation 1:1, 1–10, at http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/about Shakespeare was a Big George Jones Fan: Cowboy Jack Clement’s Home Movies (2007). Dir. Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville. Tremolo Productions. Shaughnessy, Robert (2007). “Introduction”. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–5. Smith, Bruce R. (1999). The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ——(2006). “Shakespeare’s Residuals: The Circulation of Ballads in Cultural Memory”. In Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, ed. Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes. London: Arden, 93–217. Staton, Candi (1976). “Young Hearts Run Free”. Warner Bros, SAM60. Storey, John (2005). “Popular”. In New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, ed. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris. Oxford: Blackwell, 262–4. The Indigo Girls (1992). Rites of Passage. Epic, 471363. ——(1994). Swamp Ophelia. Epic, 4759311. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1997). Dir. Baz Luhrmann. Twentieth-Century Fox.

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SHAKESPEARE AND DRAMA Lucy Munro

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t the end of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, a triumphant Petruccio declares, “Why, there’s a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate!” (5.2.184), underlining through his demand the domination over Katherine Minola that he has been asserting since their first meeting, when he told her, “We will have rings, and things, and fine array, / And kiss me, Kate, we will be married o’ Sunday” (2.1.315–16). Within twenty years, however, Petruccio’s dominance was to be undermined and Shakespeare’s narrative reshaped in a new play by John Fletcher, The Woman’s Prize or The Tamer Tamed. Fletcher’s play resurrects Petruccio to face a new challenge in the shape of Maria, his second wife, a woman who on her first appearance declares her intention to tame her famous shrew-taming husband. Fletcher strategically inverts much of Shakespeare’s action, as Maria adopts the strategy used by Petruccio in the earlier play, outdoing him in disruptive and shrewish behaviour and appropriating his use of physical gestures such as kissing. “And when I kiss him,” she exclaims on her first appearance, “till I have my will, / May I be barren of delights, and know / Only what pleasures are in dreams and guesses” (Fletcher, 2006, 1.2.120–2). At the end of the play, Petruccio is reduced to a spluttering, quivering wreck, driven to the end of his tether by Maria’s manoeuvrings and her ability to turn his own schemes to her advantage, and it is at this point that she offers him a compromise, saying: I have done my worst, and have my end. Forgive me. From this hour make me what you please. I have tamed ye, And now am vowed your servant. Look not strangely, Nor fear what I say to you. Dare you kiss me? Thus I begin my new love. [They kiss.] PETRUCCIO Once again[?] MARIA With all my heart, sir. [They kiss.] PETRUCCIO Once again, Maria. [They kiss.] (5.4.44–9)1

The kiss, which in The Taming of the Shrew underlined Petruccio’s control over his wife, becomes in The Tamer Tamed a symbol of both Maria’s victory and her willingness to surrender her advantage and embrace a new mutuality. Reworking a key physical gesture from Shakespeare’s play, Fletcher underlines his simultaneous debt to the older man’s narrative and his independence from it.

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The Tamer Tamed is an early example of the very direct influence that Shakespeare’s work has exerted on the plays of his contemporaries and successors though the practice of adaptation. His plays were, of course, often adaptations themselves, reworking dramatic and non-dramatic sources including older plays about King John and King Lear, prose romances by Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene, classical sources such as Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch and the chronicles compiled by historians such as Raphael Holinshed. The multiple surviving texts of plays such as Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and Othello suggest that Shakespeare’s plays were adapted and rewritten during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries – perhaps by Shakespeare himself – either during the process through which they reached the stage, or for revivals. Even plays surviving in only one extant version may include evidence of revision. For instance, Macbeth was first performed by the King’s Men around 1605–6, but the 1623 folio text indicates the interpolation of songs also found in Middleton’s The Witch, first performed around 1615; it is often thought that Middleton adapted Macbeth, and it has also been argued that the extant text of Measure for Measure is an early 1620s adaptation by the same dramatist.2 The product of an actively recycling theatrical culture, Shakespeare’s plays were quickly reabsorbed and reworked in their turn. In addition to The Tamer Tamed, other important examples include John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (c. 1629–32), in which the “starcrossed” lovers of Romeo and Juliet are transformed into the incestuous Annabella and Giovanni, and Richard Brome’s The Queen and Concubine (c. 1635), in which a king of Sicily persecutes his faithful wife and apparently causes the death of his heirs. In Brome’s version of the story, however, the repentant king is not allowed to resume his marriage; instead, he retires to a monastery, leaving the kingdom in the hands of his miraculously preserved son and charging him always to pay attention to his mother’s advice. In the next century and a half this process intensified, as the reworking of Shakespeare’s plays became entwined with debates about his own status as dramatist and cultural icon. Restoration and eighteenth-century dramatists saw no contradiction between revering and rewriting Shakespeare: as Michael Dobson suggests, “adaptation and canonization, so far from being contradictory processes, were often mutually reinforcing ones . . . the claiming of Shakespeare as an Enlightenment culture hero both profited from, and occasionally demanded, the substantial rewriting of his plays” (Dobson, 1992, 5). In addition, the adaptation of Shakespeare had already spread beyond the confines of the British Isles: seventeenth-century German and Dutch adaptations of plays such as Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet survive, and by the end of the eighteenth century the plays were being performed in local adaptations in countries including Canada, France, Germany, India, Poland, Russia and the USA. By the end of the twentieth century, substantial traditions of Shakespearean performance and adaptation had been established on a global scale. As Dennis Kennedy reminds us, “[A]lmost from the start of his importance as the idealized English dramatist there have been other Shakespeares, Shakespeares not dependent upon English and often at odds with it” (Kennedy, 1993, 2). It is, of course, impossible to summarize all of these developments, to do justice to the innumerable uses to which Shakespeare’s work has been put and to the artistic achievements of every adaptor and translator. Instead, this essay will survey some of the key techniques involved in Shakespearean adaptation, and some of the political, cultural and institutional contexts in which it has taken place. As Linda Hutcheon has pointed out in her important book A Theory of Adaptation, “[W]e use the word adaptation to refer to both a product and a process of creation and reception” (Hutcheon, 2006, xvi). The theatri-

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cal adaptation of Shakespeare is a particularly intriguing case. In many respects, it would appear to be the most straightforward kind of revision, as it does not involve a translation from one representational genre to another, as is necessary when plays or novels are adapted for cinema, when non-dramatic sources are reworked for stage and screen, or (more recently) when films are adapted as video games. However, there are complicating factors. Theatrical styles and genres do not remain static, and one of the most prominent forms of Shakespearean adaptation has been the generic or stylistic updating of the plays, examples of which include spectacular Restoration versions of Macbeth (1664) and The Tempest (1667) by William Davenant and John Dryden; neo-classical adaptations, including Alexander Sumarokov’s mid-eighteenth-century Russian version of Hamlet in which Ophelia survives and speaks the play’s final lines; the iconoclastic Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896); George Bernard Shaw’s combative Cymbeline Refinished: A Variation on Shakespear’s [sic] Ending (1936); Brecht’s politically charged Coriolanus (1951–3), with its increased role for the Roman plebeians; and the Shakespearean collages of Charles Marowitz. Precisely because they retain the plays’ original representational genre, these dramatists’ adapting strategies are laid bare. Moreover, many different techniques are gathered together under the broad description “adaptation”. The majority of adaptations rework narrative, many condensing the text and most altering at least some key sequences or stress points. In David Garrick’s adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, Catharine and Petruchio (1756), for example, the protagonists are humanized (or, perhaps, sentimentalized) through the addition of asides and soliloquies; the submission speech is cut down – although some of it reappears in Petruchio’s epilogue – and the wager between the men is omitted. As this might suggest, the plays’ endings are especially liable to alteration, for a variety of generic, cultural and, in some cases, political reasons. A well-known example is Nahum Tate’s 1681 adaptation of King Lear, which notoriously concludes with the retirement of Lear, Gloucester and Kent to a country retreat and the promise of marriage between Edgar and Cordelia. Some works cast themselves as sequels to Shakespeare’s plays but nonetheless rework the narratives of the adapted texts. In The Tamer Tamed, for example, this takes two forms. First, Fletcher reworks the narrative of The Taming of the Shrew as a back-story for his own play. Fletcher’s Petruccio boasts of his “mighty manage of my first wife” (2.5.11) and characters frequently refer to his reputation as a shrew-tamer. Elsewhere, however, it is suggested that despite her submission at the end of Shakespeare’s play Katherine refused to be subdued: Moroso comments on “her daily hues and cries upon him – / For, sure, she was a rebel” (1.1.18–19), while Tranio declares that the bare remembrance of his first wife . . . Will make him start in’s sleep, and very often Cry out for cudgels, cowl-staves, anything, Hiding his breeches, our of fear her ghost Should walk and wear ’em yet. (1.2.31–6) In Fletcher’s revisionist history of Katherine and Petruccio’s relationship, therefore, the “taming” was merely temporary. In addition, the narrative of The Tamer Tamed itself reworks that of The Taming of the Shrew, placing Petruccio in the position of Katherine, and casting the resourceful and determined Maria as both shrew and shrew-tamer. Reworking a narrative often involves the addition or removal of characters, and the redeployment of particular character traits – in Sumarokov’s version of Hamlet, for

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instance, the main villain is not Claudius, but an ambitious and unscrupulous Polonius, and Garrick’s 1772 adaptation omits the gravediggers. In Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969), an additional character, Eshu, an African devil-god, appears. Describing himself as “Dieu pour les amis, diable pour les ennemis! Et de la rigolade pour toute la compagnie” (Césaire, 1969, 68) (“God to my friends, Devil to my enemies! And lots of fun for all!” (Césaire, 2000, 45)), Eshu disrupts both Prospero’s masque – offending Ceres, Juno and Iris with his gleeful obscenity – and the colonizer’s attempts to impose “order” and to suppress non-European culture. As Césaire’s translator, Philip Crispin, comments, “Eshu is not part of the colonialist’s script. He reappropriates a vivid black identity by using negative stereotypes, in a manner analogous to the political use of such terms as ‘dreadlock’ or ‘queer’, and revelling in its otherness” (Césaire, 2000, 7). Another example of the political impact that an additional character might have is the clown added by Robert Sturua in his 1979 production of Richard III in Tbilisi, Georgia, who accompanied Ramaz Chkhikvadze’s grotesque Richard in the closing stages of his tyrannous rule, but then at the conclusion transferred his affections to the seemingly angelic Richmond: “Dancing lightly, he approached the audience with a mocking wink indicating that the snow-white hero Henry will not prove any better than the ‘bloody dog’ Richard” (Strˇíbrný, 2000, 121). Similarly, key verbal and physical tropes might be appropriated, reworked or parodied: just as Fletcher reworks the kisses of The Taming of the Shrew in The Tamer Tamed, Edward Bond’s Lear (1971) takes up King Lear’s comment “let them anatomise Regan; see what breeds about her heart” (3.6.33) and transforms figurative language into physical action in the sequence in which an autopsy is carried out on Fontanelle (the Regan equivalent). In Sulyman Al-Bassam’s Richard III: An Arab Tragedy (2007), the king’s famous line, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” appears, but, as Graham Holderness explains, the “ancient and suicidal heroism” that the words invoke “is undermined by the absurdity of the stage image, Richard flailing clumsily around on a mechanical horse that is going nowhere expect in circles” (Holderness, 2007, 138–9). In many adaptations, Shakespeare’s language is translated: from Early Modern English into present-day English; from British English into (for example) North American, Australasian or Indian Englishes; from English into other languages; from spoken language into music; and from verbal language into the physical “languages” of gesture or dance. Some productions have combined different languages. The earliest performances of Shakespeare in Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries appear to have been given in English, but with the accompaniment of a German-speaking clown who, as Simon Williams puts it, “summarised the action and entertained by recounting or enacting comically obscene incidents” (Williams, 1990, 32). More recently, multi-lingual performance has been used in a postcolonial context, as in Tim Supple’s 2006 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which an Indian and Sri Lankan cast spoke or sang in early modern English, Tamil, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Sanskrit. Shakespeare is rarely produced on the stage in a straight translation from early modern English to present-day English; in general, present-day English is reserved for Shakespearean spin-offs, such as Charlotte Jones’ Humble Boy (2001), which reworks narrative elements from Hamlet, or reworkings of King Lear including Howard Barker’s Seven Lears (1989), Lear’s Daughters, written by Elaine Feinstein with the Women’s Theatre Group (1991), and Ben Bennison’s Jack Lear (2008). However, when it occurs a translation from early modern to present-day English can encode or encapsulate cultural or political debates. For instance, Richard Curtis’ The Skinhead Hamlet (1981), “Shakespeare’s

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play translated into modern English” (Brett, 1984, 316), is a miracle of concise profanity, condensing Shakespeare’s play into just over 600 words, most of them obscene. The “To be or not to be” soliloquy and the “Get thee to a nunnery sequence” become: HAMLET (Alone) To fuck or be fucked. (Enter OPHELIA.) OPHELIA My Lord! HAMLET Fuck off to a nunnery! (They exit in different directions.)

(Brett, 1984, 318)

Similarly, the play ends: HAMLET Oi! Horatio! HORATIO Yer? HAMLET I’m fucked. The rest is fucking silence. (HAMLET dies.) HORATIO Fuck: that was no ordinary wanker, you know. (Enter FORTINBRAS.) FORTINBRAS What the fuck’s going on here? HORATIO A fucking mess, that’s for sure. FORTINBRAS No kidding. I see Hamlet’s fucked. HORATIO Yer. FORTINBRAS Fucking shame: fucking good bloke. HORATIO Too fucking right. FORTINBRAS Fuck this for a lark then. Let’s piss off. (Exeunt with alarums.)

(Brett, 1984, 320)

In a note before the text, it is stated that “Our hope was to achieve something like the effect of the New English Bible” (Brett, 1984, 316), the New English Bible being a widely criticized translation of the Bible intended to replace the 1611 “King James” translation. The Skinhead Hamlet thus engages with an ongoing controversy about the updating of key cultural texts and the extent to which they can, or should, reflect contemporary linguistic norms, or incorporate colloquial language. Simultaneously, though, the adaptation comments on the cultural position of Hamlet and other Shakespearean texts in its implicit assumption that there is something incongruous about the conjunction between Shakespeare and a sub-culture associated primarily with young, working-class men. In particular, it draws on a common association made between swearing and a lack of education, suggesting that Shakespeare is beyond the reach or cultural aspirations of real skinheads. However, The Skinhead Hamlet itself, with its gleeful appropriation of famous lines – “To fuck or be fucked”, “The rest is fucking silence” – complicates this reading, as it cheerfully colonizes the Shakespearean text. In some adaptations Shakespearean material is juxtaposed with present-day English. Often this involves a frame narrative, the Shakespearean text becoming a play-within-aplay. For instance, in Joe Calcarlo’s Shakespeare’s R&J (1997), four young men rehearse Romeo and Juliet in the dormitory of their Catholic boarding school, while in Mary Lou Rosato’s Henry V, premiered by The Acting Company in 1995, the play is performed by a group of veterans of different wars. Other plays integrate Shakespearean dialogue into a new plot. In Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), Hamlet exists on the fringes of the main narrative, constantly intruding on its bewildered protagonists.

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In addition to sequences where new dialogue follows on from that of Shakespeare, Stoppard also paraphrases some well-known speeches that have apparently been spoken off-stage. For instance, Rosencrantz summarizes what the pair have learned from their attempt to question Hamlet thus: He’s depressed! . . . Denmark’s a prison and he’d rather live in a nutshell; some shadow-play about the nature of ambition, which never got down to cases, and finally one direct question which might have led somewhere, and led in fact to his illuminating claim to tell a hawk from a handsaw. (Stoppard, 1967, 41–2) Other Shakespearean productions in present-day English include translations from adaptations originally performed in other languages. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732), which draws on Othello, was quickly reabsorbed by the London stage, where it was performed in Aaron Hill’s translation in 1736. Although Voltaire never acknowledged explicitly his debt to Shakespeare, Colley Cibber’s prologue for Hill’s version of Zaïre asserts an English claim to the play in a strenuously nationalist tone which its author – who was notoriously ambivalent about Shakespeare’s work – would have found laughable: From English Plays, Zara’s French author fir’d, Confess’d his Muse, beyond herself, inspir’d; From rack’d Othello’s rage, he rais’d his style, And snatch’d the brand, that lights this tragic pile. (Hill, 1736, [v]) Other adaptations have been presented to English audiences in a less jingoistic fashion. In 1924 William Poel produced a translation of a seventeenth-century German version of Hamlet, Der bestrafte Brudermord, under the title of Fratricide Punished, while adaptations such as Jarry’s Ubu Roi, Césaire’s Une Tempête and Ionesco’s Macbett (1972) have also been produced in English versions. As a range of contributors to this book point out, often linguistic translation is accompanied by the fusion of Shakespearean drama with alternative theatrical modes. For instance, European adaptations of Shakespeare have often drawn on commedia dell’arte or, more recently, on Brechtian modes of representation. Japanese productions have drawn heavily on indigenous forms such as Kabuki, Noh and Kyogen, Chinese productions have utilized traditional Kunjo theatre, which dominated the Chinese stage between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, and Korean adaptations have used pansori, or sung monologues. In India, the “adaptive, indigenized staging of Shakespeare”, as Poonam Trivedi terms it, can be traced back to the nineteenth century, including an 1860s’ As You Like It in the yakshagana mode, musical versions of The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a hugely popular 1889 Urdu version of Hamlet, Khoon-e-Nahak (Unjust Murder) (Trivedi and Batholomeusz, 2005, 172–3). Such linguistic and theatrical translations raise important questions about the intercultural relationships that they embody, relationships that vary hugely between countries. For instance, India, which was colonized by the British and subjected to aggressive propaganda about the value of the English language education and literature, interacts with Shakespeare in a different way from countries such as Germany, Japan or Russia, or even other former British colonies such as Australia, Canada and the USA. We often find what Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert term a “collaborative/negotiated” exchange in which both partners “undergo a series of transformations and challenges . . . a similar process of filtration and hybridisation, however differently experienced” (Lo and Gilbert,

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2002, 44–5), but the specifics of that exchange and the transformations experienced will necessarily differ. In the case of Shakespeare, there is an added complication in that these negotiations are not only geographic, cultural and political, but also temporal: even in Britain, the 400-year-old works of Shakespeare are “other”, incorporated into contemporary dramatic culture but never fully part of it. I have focused so far on alternations to the text, but it is important to remember that any performance of a play involves adaptation: there is no such thing as a wholly “authentic” production. As Alan Dessen asks, “At what point does the director take over the function of the playwright? Wherein lies the line between adjustment-improvement and adaptation-translation?” (Dessen, 2002, 93). Even in Anglophone countries, productions of Shakespeare usually adapt the “original” text. Most will work with critical editions, such as those in the Arden, Oxford or Penguin series, and these texts – with their modern spelling, consistent speech prefixes, thorough stage directions and often, in the case of Hamlet, King Lear and Pericles, the conflation of two or more sources – already stand at a remove from even the texts printed in Shakespeare’s day, let alone the lost playhouse or authorial manuscripts. The majority of productions will then make cuts to the text, cuts that might range from the minor (cuts within speeches, for instance) to the major, such as the omission of material concerning Fortinbras and the threat from Norway in many productions of Hamlet, which to some extent repositions the play as domestic tragedy. Henry Irving cut most of Acts 4 and 5 in his 1892 production of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, while in 1910 Herbert Beerbohm Tree omitted material relating to the Reformation, on the grounds that it was “practically devoid of dramatic interest and calculated . . . to weary an audience” and eventually removed around 47 per cent of the play’s 2810 lines (Shakespeare and Fletcher, 2000, 36). Even the placing of the interval can affect an audience’s interpretation. For instance, productions of Hamlet at Stratford Ontario (2000) and Stratford-upon-Avon (2008) both took the interval mid-way through Act 3, Scene 3, at the point at which it looked as if Hamlet might actually take his revenge and kill the apparently praying Claudius (on the Ontario production see Dessen, 2002, 104). Another example of what we might call theatrical adaptation involves casting. Poel used an all-male cast for his 1900 production of Hamlet, and his example has been followed by companies such as Cheek by Jowl, Propeller and Shakespeare’s Globe under former artistic director Mark Rylance. The practice has been particularly important in Japan, owing to the influence of classical Japanese forms such as Kabuki and Noh, which also employ all-male casts. This is in some respects “authentic” to the conditions in which Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed, although some individual examples – for instance, the middle-aged Rylance’s performances as Cleopatra and Olivia – are probably not in keeping with early modern practices. Less “authentic” are all-female casts, used in the Globe’s productions of The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III in 2003, which included Janet McTeer as Petruccio and Katherine Hunter as Katherine and Richard III. This strategy retains the single-sex dynamic – particularly important in plays such as As You Like It and Twelfth Night – but also serves to question or undermine some of the adapted text’s assumptions about male and female gender identity. Particularly intriguing are adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays by the Japanese all-female Takarazuka Revue, founded in 1913. Noting Western critics’ seeming disappointment with the company’s supposed sexlessness, Ohtani Tomoko suggests that they should be viewed in the context of Shôjo culture (usually associated with pre-pubertal or adolescent girls) and the cult of kawaii, or cute, embodied in products such as Hello Kitty, a

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culture which attempts to disengage from the demands of adult heterosexuality (Minami et al., 2001, 159–71). Female performers have also been deployed in an adaptive fashion in mixed-gender casts. In William Davenant and John Dryden’s adaptation of The Tempest (1667), one of the additional characters, a young man named Hippolito, “one that never saw Woman”, was originally played by a woman, probably Moll Davis, and this innovation led to a number of “breeches roles” in plays by Shakespeare and other authors, capitalizing on the erotic appeal of the professional actress. Since the nineteenth century, a number of female performers have played major Shakespearean roles such as King Lear and, especially, Hamlet, some in productions in which masculine pronouns or other aspects of the text are changed, and others in which they are left to stand. One might also consider as adaptation practices such as colour-blind casting, or even age-specific casting (given the evidence that early modern companies were not always naturalistic in their casting patterns). There have also been one-off experiments with other kinds of casting, such as Jude Kelly’s “photo-negative” production of Othello (Shakespeare Theatre, Washington DC), in which Patrick Stewart played Othello. Other productions may use doubling in a pointed fashion: for instance, many productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream have doubled Hippolyta with Titania and Theseus with Oberon; Perdita has been doubled with both Mamilius and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; and Petruccio has often been doubled with Christopher Sly when productions of The Taming of the Shrew retain the folio text’s Induction. More rarely, Katherine has also doubled as the Hostess in productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company (1978, directed by Michael Bogdanov) and Propeller (2007), and as the Lord in Carl Heap’s 1985 production for the Medieval Players. One might even argue that performances in which women play female roles – the most common casting practice since the Restoration – are in themselves to some extent adaptations. I am not suggesting that these are negative developments – quite the contrary – but all at least potentially call into question our attitudes towards certain aspects of the Shakespearean text. Another important aspect of theatrical adaptation is the use of design and setting. As Richard Foulkes points out in his chapter in this volume, in the nineteenth century, actor-managers such as Charles Kean, Irving and Tree strove for realism in their sets, props and costumes, aiming to reproduce the settings and contexts of the play’s narratives: Renaissance Padua; Athenian forest; medieval England; and so on. Following the campaign of late-nineteenth-century iconoclasts such as William Poel for a return to “Elizabethan” practices, the use of Elizabethan costume became more popular, before a turn during the twentieth century towards modern dress, alternative historical settings – for instance, the Weimar Republic for The Merchant of Venice, or the eighteenth century portrayed in the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau for Love’s Labour’s Lost – and eclectic, non-periodspecific, costume and sets. Some productions have introduced props in ways that have a direct effect on an audience’s interpretation of a play. In Complicite’s 2004 production of Measure for Measure, for example, Duke Vincentio’s proposal to Isabella was accompanied by the sudden appearance of a bed at the back of the stage; the same production had earlier introduced an image of George W. Bush on its video screens when Lucio mentions the “sanctimonious pirate” (1.2.7), and its prisoners wore Guantanamo-style orange overalls. As my discussion so far suggests, it is perhaps helpful to consider Shakespearean adaptation as a kind of continuum, ranging from the practices associated with nearly all performances of the plays, to full-scale adaptation of the text, or appropriation of particular

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aspects of a play. In terms of the effect on the “original” text, the range of contributing factors might be ranked thus: the design of costume and mise-en-scène; casting; minor and major cuts and alterations to the text, including transpositions, omission and addition of characters; linguistic translation; use of extracted narrative, textual and/or dramaturgical material in a new narrative or setting. In the remainder of this chapter, I will look in greater detail at three case studies, each of which dates from a different century and a different writing/performance context, and each of which brings together a different combination of the issues discussed above. The first is an example of translation, adaptation and contemporary reception: Jean François Ducis’ 1792 adaptation of Othello, named Othello, ou le Maure de Venise and a spin-off play, Arlequin Cruello. The second is an out-right parody of Hamlet, John Poole’s Hamlet Travestie (1810), which seems to have sparked off a long-running fashion in England and North America for burlesqued and travestied versions of Shakespeare’s plays. The third is Roy Williams’ Days of Significance (2007), a play inspired by Much Ado About Nothing, which was commissioned by the RSC as part of its Complete Works Festival, and which uses its Shakespearean material as part of its critique of British involvement in the Iraq war. In each case we can see the ways in which Shakespeare is brought into contact with contemporary theatrical, stylistic and linguistic conventions, ranging from French neo-classicism to nineteenth-century humour and twenty-first century colloquialism and political theatre. Performed in 1792 at the Théâtre de la République, with the celebrated actor FrançoisJoseph Talma as Othello, Othello, ou le Maure de Venise followed Ducis’ adaptations of Hamlet (1769), Romeo and Juliet (1772), King Lear (1783), Macbeth (1784) and King John (1791). Like English contemporaries such as Garrick, Ducis adapts Shakespeare’s plays to the aesthetic and political requirements of his own time; he was also heavily influenced by the two French translations available to him, those of Pierre Antoine de la Place (1745) and Pierre Letourneur (1776), since he could not read English himself. Othello posed a particular problem for Ducis, despite the attraction of the compressed time-span and limited location of the main part of the action, and the proven success that dramatists such as Racine had had with narratives centring on sexual jealousy; as John Golder summarizes, “it seriously offends against neo-Classical rule and convention: a double-dyed villain of central importance, a black-skinned hero, clowns and tipplers, drinking songs and Willow Songs, handkerchiefs and pillows, fits and headaches and a dreadful finale set in the heroine’s bedroom” (Golder, 1992, 262). In a preface to the printed text, Ducis explains that he rejected the conventions of the English stage with regard to Othello’s complexion in consideration of his audience’s sensibilities, but also the capabilities of his actors: J’ai pensé que le teint jaune et cuivré, pouvant d’ailleurs convenir aussi à un Africain, aurait l’avantage de ne point révolter l’œil du public, et surtout celui des femmes, et que cette couleur leur permettrait bien mieux de jouir de ce qu’il y a de plus délicieux au théâtre, c’est-à-dire, de tout le charme que la force, la variété et le jeu des passions répandent sur le visage mobile et animé d’un jeune acteur, bouillant, sensible et enivré de jalousie et d’amour. [I thought that the yellow and copper-coloured complexion, beside being suitable for an African, would have the advantage of not appalling the eye of the public and especially that of the women, and that this colour allowed them to enjoy much

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better all that is most delightful in the theatre, that is to say, all the charm that the force, variety and game of passions spread on the mobile and lively face of a young actor, passionate, sensitive and inebriated by jealousy and love.] (Ducis, 1991, v) It was, Ducis suggests, easier for Talma to make an impact in the role if his features were clearly visible to his audience. Nonetheless, it was not his intention to erase the racial tensions embodied in the play. Othello was part of a campaign by Talma and the Théâtre de la République to demonstrate their revolutionary credentials, and it followed performances of Dugazon’s L’Emigrant ou le père jacobin and Hyacinthe Dorvo’s Le Patriote du dix août. As Golder comments: The play’s contemporary application – set in a republic which owes its stability to a hero who is not only a sans-culotte but also an African, a man who strikes a blow against social and racial prejudice and demands equality on the grounds not of parentage or race, but worth – is anything but obscure. (Golder, 1992, 265) In general, Ducis adapts most thoroughly the scenes that receive most attention in la Place’s translation/redaction of Shakespeare’s text, which reduced some sequences to plot summary alone. The relationship between Hédelmône (Desdemona) and her father, Odalbert, is emphasized, and the role of Pézare (Iago) is radically reduced, Ducis commenting, “Je suis bien persuadé que si les Anglais peuvent observer tranquillement les manœuvres d’un pareil monstre sur la scène, les Français ne pourraient jamais un moment y souffrir sa présence” [“I am convinced that if the English could calmly watch the manoeuvres of such a monster on the stage, the French could never for a moment suffer his presence there”] (Ducis, 1991, iv). In general, the adaptation follows neo-classical convention, but Ducis retains some of the most resolutely “unclassical” elements of the Shakespearean text. These include, strikingly, the retention of Desdemona’s Willow Song, and the decision to have Othello kill Hédelmône on stage, and in her bed chamber, albeit with a dagger rather than a pillow. The death of Hédelmône was the subject of considerable controversy, even leading Ducis to compose an alternative version of the final scene with a happy ending, which seems to have been used in revivals of 1794, 1795 and 1796. The notoriety of Ducis’ Othello is also demonstrated by the production at the Théâtre de Vaudeville of a “parodie d’Othello”, Jean-Baptiste Radet, François George Fouques and Peirre Barre’s Arlequin Cruello, first performed shortly after the premiere of the tragedy in 1792 and frequently revived alongside it. In Arlequin Cruello the characters are members of a commedia dell’arte troupe, the burlesque substituting the stereotype of the sexually available actress for that of the Venetian lady. Cruello (Othello) is the Harlequin (who usually performed in a black mask), Doucelmone (Hédelmône) is the “Amoureuse”, or ingénue, and her father, Crialbert (Odalbert), plays the “père noble” parts; Bizarre (Pézare) is the “Crispin”, a character who started off as a version of the braggart soldier known as Scaramouche, but became during the eighteenth century a devious valet. In the third scene, Crialbert enters in outrage, declaring that his daughter has been seduced by Cruello; in a shared song, Crialbert asks Cruello, “Dis moi, par quel affreux pouvoir / Tu séduis une âme aussi blanche, / Avec un visage aussi noir?” [“Tell me, with what dreadful power / You entice a soul so white / With such a black face?”], and Cruello responds with a defence of his assumed colour, “Oui, noir, mais pas si diable” [“Black, yes, but not so devilish”] (Radet et al., [1792], 8). When she enters, Doucelmone sings her own defence of her actions: “Si vous connaissiez Cruello, / Ah! Qu’il est drôle! / Il est plus

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plaisant qu’Othello, / Sur ma parole” [“If you knew Cruello, / Oh! That he is funny! / He is more amusing than Othello, / On my word”] (10). Doucelmone and Cruello become engaged, but she later becomes involved with Laurent, the “Amoureux” or young lover, and son of the troupe’s director (the equivalent of Ducis’ Lorédan, the doge’s son, a conflation of Roderigo and Cassio). The writers of Arlequin Cruello were especially amused by the innovations of Ducis’ Act 5. Doucelmone sings a snatch from a bawdy ballad, and then a song about a hazel tree, of which, to the surprise of her maid, Démance, she sings only two verses (Ducis’ Willow Song notoriously went on for seven). She then goes to bed, whereupon Cruello enters, attacks her and, mirroring the stage-business of Ducis’ Othello, closes the curtains on her; unlike Hédelmône, however, Doucelmone peeps out from time to time, eventually announcing, “Je suis réveillée” [“I am awakened”] (49). The play ends with happy reconciliation and Cruello singing “Moins il rit dans Othello, / Plus Arlequin, dans Cruello, / A peur, a peur de n’être pas comique” [“The less he laughs in Othello, / The more Harlequin, in Cruello, / Is afraid, is afraid of not being comic”] (51). The close relationship between translation, adaptation and outright parody found in Ducis’ Othello and Arlequin Cruello recurs throughout the dramatist’s world-wide reception history. Also common elsewhere is the way in which Shakespeare’s plays are deployed as part of a metatheatrical commentary on contemporary dramatic mores. In relocating the Othello narrative to its new theatrical environment, Arlequin Cruello comments on the relationship between high and low dramatic forms, between the Théâtre de la République and the Théâtre de Vaudeville, and between the actors associated with each, undercutting the pretentions of the legitimate stage. A parodic response to the performance and adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays became an important element in British and North American theatrical culture in the nineteenth century, during which time burlesques were produced in huge numbers by dramatists including John Poole, Gilbert à Beckett, Francis Talfourd, F. C. Burnand, Robert and William Brough and W. S. Gilbert. To some extent, in London the fashion was propelled by licensing regulations: only the patent theatres were allowed to perform “legitimate” drama, but lesser venues such as the Adelphi, the Strand and the Olympique could adapt the works of canonical figures provided that they included a sufficient number of songs. More to the point, however, traditions of Shakespearean performance on the legitimate stages must have seemed ripe for ridicule; to quote Richard W. Schoch, “The burlesque backlash – the comic attack upon the pious pretentions of ‘legitimate’ Shakespeare culture – was not long in coming” (Schoch, 2002, 3). Poole’s treatment of the Shakespearean text in the early burlesque Hamlet Travestie – which was originally written as a reading piece but was quickly picked up for professional performance – is typical of nineteenth-century Shakespearean parody in many ways. Poole follows Shakespeare relatively closely, but undercuts the seriousness of his original, casting the dialogue into rhyming couplet throughout, setting Hamlet’s soliloquies to music, and inserting jokes wherever they can be fitted in. In the second scene, for instance, we find: HAMLET The air bites shrewdly – it is very cold. HORATIO (Aside) Why any fool, methinks, might that have told. HAMLET What is’t o’clock? HORATIO Half past eleven at most. –

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MARCELLUS My watch says twelve. HORATIO But see! here comes the Ghost. Enter Ghost. HAMLET Zounds! here’s a pretty rig! O Lord, defend us! Prythee no more such frightful spectres send us! Be thou a jovial sprite or goblin damn’d; Be thou or æther-puff’d or sulphur-cramm’d; Be thy intents indiff’rent, good, or bad, I’ll speak to thee, thou look’st so like my dad. In a trim grave so snugly wast thou lain, Say what the devil brought thee out again? I like a joke myself; but ’tis not right, To come and frighten us to death at night. Say, why is this? and straight the reason tell us, For fright’ning me, Horatio, and Marcellus. (Poole, 1810, 8–9) Poole lightens the tone through his use of rhyming couplets, double rhymes and shared lines; the contrast between poetic archaism and the high style, and colloquialism and cliché (“here’s a pretty rig”; “dad”; “what the devil”; “I like a joke myself”); the incorporation of familiar lines and phrases (“The air bites shrewdly – it is very cold”; “goblin damn’d”); and the insertion of sly asides, such as Horatio’s “Why any fool, methinks, might that have told”. It is entirely fitting in this context that the “To be or not to be” soliloquy should consist of garbled sections of the original speech, to be sung to the tune of “Here we go up, up, up” (23), and that Hamlet’s final lines should appear as If e’er you lov’d me – live – my tale to tell – And then – I care not if you go – to h–ll. – That last cross-buttock dish’d me – Oh! – I can’t get on – Here goes, Horatio, – going – going – gone. (69) Readers of the printed versions of Poole’s play were given additional entertainment through the annotations, which parodied the contributions of such figures as Pope, Johnson and Steevens to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions of Shakespeare’s works. In a note on the final line quoted above, for instance, we find these words, attributed to Johnson: To a literary friend of mine am I indebted for the following very acute observation: ‘Throughout this play,’ says he, ‘there is nothing more beautiful than these dashes: by the increase in their lengths, they distinctly mark the increasing difficulty of utterance observable in a dying man.’ To which let me add, that although dashes are in frequent use with our tragic poets, yet they are seldom introduced with so good an effect as in the present instance. (93–4) Burlesque Shakespeare had little patience with either theatrical or editorial excesses. My final case study is Roy Williams’ response to Much Ado About Nothing, Days of Significance, commissioned by the RSC as part of the Complete Works Festival season of 2006–7. The Complete Works Festival, launched on 23 April 2006, included performances of every play in the standard canon, including the Shakespeare/Fletcher collaborations Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, but omitted apocrypha such as Edward III and Sir Thomas More, to which Shakespeare may have contributed scenes. Some of

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the plays were performed by the RSC itself, while others were performed by an international cast of collaborating companies, including the Ninagawa company (a Japaneselanguage version of Titus Andronicus), the Baxter Theatre Center (Hamlet, directed by Janet Suzman and starring John Kani), the Chekhov International Theatre Festival in association with Cheek by Jowl (an all-male, Russian-language version of Twelfth Night), Propeller (The Taming of the Shrew), the Berliner Ensemble (Richard II), the Washington Shakespeare Theatre Company (Love’s Labour’s Lost) and New York’s Theatre for a New Audience (The Merchant of Venice, starring F. Murray Abraham). Less conventional productions included Supple’s multi-lingual A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Al-Bassam’s Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, a bilingual English and Mandarin King Lear (produced by Yellow Earth in association with the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre and featuring Zhou Yi Mang as Lear and David Yip as Gloucester), Cardboard Citizens’ adaptation of Timon of Athens (set in the context of a management training exercise), Compagnia Pippo Delboro’s Enrico V, a work-in-progress Macbeth by Poland’s Theatr Piesn Kozla and New York’s Tiny Ninja Theatre’s production of Hamlet (based on the First Quarto text, rather than the usual Second Quarto or Folio, and featuring tiny plastic figures in all roles). In a press release, RSC artistic director Michael Boyd described the festival as not only a chance for Shakespeare aficionados to chalk up every play in the canon, but “the most extensive celebration of Shakespeare’s genius – at once a national knees-up for the RSC’s house playwright and a survey of the different approaches to his work from around the world”. It was, he said, “a programme that meets our ambitions for an outward-looking RSC that’s truly engaged with the world. We want to do much more than pay lip service to Shakespeare’s internationalism as we prepare the ground for artistic collaborations that will continue beyond the life of the Festival”.3 Days of Significance was one of four new pieces commissioned by the RSC as part of the festival, the others being Rona Munro’s The Indian Boy, a response to A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed at the RSC’s temporary studio theatre, the Cube, between 7 and 11 November 2006, Leo Butler’s One of These Days, a response to The Tempest set in British-occupied Ireland in 1775, which was given a rehearsed reading in the Cube by the Indian Boy Acting Company on 10 November 2006 and Peter Straughan’s radio play Regime Change, written in response to Julius Caesar, which was given a single rehearsed reading at the Swan Theatre on 6 October 2006, before being broadcast on BBC Radio Three on 14 January 2007. Although One of These Days was given a full staging, under the new title I’ll be the Devil, at the Tricycle Theatre, London, between 21 February and 8 March 2008, Days of Significance has been by far the most high-profile of these new plays: originally performed at the Swan between 10 and 20 January 2007, it was then revived in a revised version at the Tricycle between 12 and 29 March 2008, and later toured six UK cities in October and November 2009.4 In commissioning these new plays the RSC demonstrated its on-going commitment to new writing at a time when its schedules were otherwise filled with the work of the “house dramatist”, Shakespeare. Although relatively marginal and uncommercial in the context of the Complete Works Festival – they were not intended to rival main theatre productions such as Greg Doran’s Antony and Cleopatra, starring Harriet Walter and Patrick Stewart, or Trevor Nunn’s King Lear, starring Ian McKellen – they are the product of both aesthetic and cultural-political dictates. The RSC’s main “business” may be the production of Shakespeare, but it is also keen to be seen as open to experimentation and, especially, to new writing. The declaration in the press release quoted above that Butler,

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Munro and Williams “were commissioned to create large scale plays with no restriction on cast size” also shows the RSC’s determination to intervene in on-going debates about the kinds of writing produced by contemporary playwrights and the economic dictates that often shape such work outside heavily subsidized venues such as the RSC and the National Theatre. Like many contemporary Shakespeare spin-offs – including the other plays commissioned by the RSC in 2007 – Days of Significance comments on contemporary politics, in this case the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US and its allies. It was thus part of a wave of theatrical works that examined the Iraq War and British involvement in it, which also encompassed David Hare’s Stuff Happens, premiered at the National Theatre in 2004 and Gregory Burke’s Black Watch, first performed by the National Theatre of Scotland during the 2006 Edinburgh Festival. Williams deliberately avoids replicating the public concerns of Stuff Happens; like Burke, he is concerned with the effects of warfare on ordinary soldiers, and with the socio-cultural conditions that have shaped them. He writes, I wanted to write something about the war in Iraq, but I wasn’t interested in exploring how it affects the people in power. I wanted to show the people who are not in power or rather those who feel powerless . . . On the one side Days of Significance is about a society that allows its young to drink themselves into oblivion at weekends, then expects them to defend its moral values in a war thousands of miles away. On the other it is a plea to those young people to know that, no matter who they are or where they come from, they must value themselves. (Williams, 2008, x) Persuaded “not to go for the obvious, like Othello”, in his choice of a Shakespearean source, Williams chose Much Ado About Nothing: “Its returning soldiers, battle of the sexes, girls and boys in packs resonated with me. They seemed just like the young people going out boozing in city centres all over the country” (x). The choice of a romantic comedy over a tragedy is an intriguing one, given that political appropriations of Shakespeare have tended to focus on tragedies such as Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth or Coriolanus, at least in part because the focus on the relationship between state and individual in these plays has almost limitless potential for topical application. Much Ado is, however, a notably uneasy romantic comedy, opening in the aftermath of a military victory in which “But few of any sort, and none of name” (1.1.6) have been lost by Don Pedro’s forces and focusing its narrative on sexual paranoia; it boasts a plot that could easily turn to real tragedy instead of false death and eventual reconciliation. The uncertain tone of Shakespeare’s comedy is reflected in Days of Significance, in which humour and violence are constantly juxtaposed. Williams plays with the narrative dynamic of Much Ado, so that Act 1 (“Much Noise”) takes place immediately before Ben (corresponding to Benedick) and Jamie (Claudio) leave to fight in Iraq, Act 2 (“On the Side of the Angels”) is set during the fighting and Act 3 (“A Parting of the Ways”) deals with the aftermath of Ben’s death in action and the consequences of Jamie’s apparent involvement in an Abu-Ghraib-like incident in which prisoners have been mistreated. In the rewritten version of Days of Significance performed at the Tricycle in 2008, the structural similarities between the play and Shakespearean romantic comedy are strengthened, as Act 3 is reshaped and tightened in a single, new location: Clare and Steve’s boozy wedding reception. Elsewhere, Jamie is added to the cast of Act 2, and it is made clear that Ben was also involved in the mistreatment of the captive Iraqis.

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Act 1 has the strongest narrative connection with Much Ado About Nothing, compacting the storylines concerning the relationships between Ben and Trish (Beatrice) and Jamie and Hannah (Hero) so that both take place during the course of a drunken night out in an unspecified town “city centre somewhere in the south-east of England” (Williams, 2007, 5). There is a fervid atmosphere of sexual and physical carnage throughout this long, continuous scene, which was performed at the Swan in a promenade format that brought the violence viscerally close to the audience. The Act opens with two police officers attempting to break up a fight, and physical violence is juxtaposed with sexual aggression in the young men’s treatment of the policewoman, Gail, and in the appearance of the penis-waving “Drunken Man”, whose actions are replicated by Tony and Steve, two of the younger men, later in the scene.5 As in Much Ado, the old romance between Ben and Trish is juxtaposed with the new attraction between Jamie and Hannah and, like Shakespeare, Williams contrasts the banter of the slightly older couple (in their early twenties, according to the dramatis personae) with the more naïve wonder of the younger pair, who are said to be in their late teens. This is underlined in the sequence in which Jamie and Hannah kiss for the first time: A memorable romantic love song is being played from inside Yates’s. JAMIE Oh yes! I love this one. Dance with me. HANNAH (laughs) Get the fuck . . . (She can see that JAMIE’s feelings are hurt.) Jamie, I gotta go in. JAMIE (holds her hand) Dance. HANNAH takes JAMIE by the hand as they dance together for the duration of the song. JAMIE clings to HANNAH like his life depended on it. HANNAH is a little embarrassed at first, but gradually seems to like the way JAMIE is holding her. They stare at each other, then kiss as the song comes to an end. (Williams, 2007, 24) Although in a very different style to Benedick and Beatrice’s sparring in Much Ado, the patterning of the banter between Ben and Trish, with its comic repetitions, effectively establishes their mutual attraction: Ben . . . (Sees Trish staring.) What? TRISH (mimics) What? BEN What? TRISH What! BEN Well . . . TRISH Well? BEN You know. TRISH Do I? BEN Yeah. TRISH Right. I know. BEN You know? TRISH I know. BEN You know. What do you know? TRISH I know how you feel. BEN You know how I feel? TRISH Yeah. BEN Good.

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TRISH Right. BEN I know how you feel. TRISH Good. BEN Right. TRISH I always knew. BEN Always knew too. Trish Oh for fuck . . . She lunges at him. They kiss like animals. BEN tries to put his hand up her skirt. (36–7) Like Shakespeare, Williams builds the erotic tension up to the moment when Trish demands that Ben “Fight Jamie” (39), prepared to utilize his sexual frustration and his attraction in order to get revenge on the man who has insulted her cousin. Ben and Jamie’s friend Dan, already alienated from the other men due to his participation in an anti-war march, and smarting from having been rejected by Hannah on another night out, takes the Don John role, informing Jamie not only that Hannah is “a slag”, but that she has been making fun of him to the other women: “Bitch bin flapping her mouth. Telling everyone how shit scared you are about going. Dancing together, out here. Bin telling Trish. Laughing their tits off in Yates’s, they were” (34). Although Jamie accuses Hannah of being sexually available – he claims that she is a “skank-faced bitch” (35) and later reiterates the charge: “She’s a slapper. Hannah, the slapper!” (43) – it is clear that the real threat here is the accusation of cowardice and its consequences for the fragile masculine egos on display. In the aftermath of Jamie’s accusation against Hannah, Tony asks Steve “How about Jamie, eh, losing it like that” and Steve replies, “Crying like a bitch, he was . . . Going on about me betraying her. I goes, ‘Shut up, give her a slap”’ (36). The accusation of cowardice has important consequences for the events of Acts 2 and 3. In the central scene of Act 2, Ben has apparently opened fire on a child, and he attempts to justify his actions with the claim that Those kids, they’re nothing but maggots. Their fucking dads are maggots. It was probably their same fucking maggot dads that jumped us. They are not people, they aren’t human, they are the enemy, alright? I bin here six months, I ain’t losing my life here, they can fuck off with that . . . That kid was signalling to them. I saw him, when he dropped that ball, that was their sign to open fire. (Williams, 2007, 58)6 It is made clear that Ben’s actions – which are condemned by his fellow soldiers – are the product of fear and trauma. In Act 3, Jamie is asked by Hannah why he committed the actions that he is about to be tried for, and he can only say “Dunno. I dunno, Hannah, I dunno. I dunno, I dunno why I did it. I didn’t think, right, wrong, I dunno. We juss lost it” (93). But this dumb and desperate machismo is not restricted to the men; elsewhere in Act 3, Trish tells Hannah about her two-year suspended sentence for glassing Gail, the policewoman; seeing Hannah’s shocked reaction, she merely says, “What? People lose it, shit happens” (78). As this suggests, although the narrative debt to Much Ado is most prominent in Act 1, the correspondences that are established between Shakespeare’s and Williams’ characters create an ironic subtext for the whole of Days of Significance. The correspondences between Ben and Shakespeare’s Benedick, who “hath done good service” (1.1.40) in Don Pedro’s war, and between Jamie and Claudio, who “hath borne himself beyond the promise of his age, doing in the figure of a lamb, the feats of a lion” (1.1.11–12), highlight both

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the elided militarism of Shakespeare’s play and the rose-tinted view of the soldier’s life that Ben and Jamie hold in Act 1. In revising the play, Williams sharpens these ironies further, as Jamie, the survivor, is condemned, while the dead Ben is repeatedly described as a “hero”. Jamie eventually explodes, telling Trish about Ben’s sexual abuse of an Iraqi prisoner in the wake of the death of one of their comrades: Poor cunt was praying overtime to Allah to get him out of there. All I did was a few kicks, a couple of slaps, some dickhead of a corporal gets his camera out, and now I’m the one that’s in the dock tomorrow. So don’t come to me about you loving poor heroic Ben! (Williams, 2008, 269) The fact that Dan, who takes on Don John’s function in betraying Hannah, is also the play’s most unequivocal anti-war voice means that the play is by no means univocal in its presentation of attitudes towards military action. Dan may be right in his assessment of the war, but that does not make him any more sympathetic. The use of Shakespeare in Days of Significance was mentioned in every review that I have been able to consult, and it seems likely that the stated link between Shakespeare’s and Williams’ work helped to intensify the Daily Mail critic Quentin Letts’ (atypical) negative reaction towards the play. Noting that Days of Significance was “apparently inspired by Shakespeare’s melding of love and war in Much Ado About Nothing” Letts condemns the RSC for “premiering an anti-war play which depicts our squaddies as cowardly, rapacious, socially incontinent, selfish, feral losers” at a time when “British soldiers are dying in Iraq almost every week”, and concludes that “Days of Significance is not great theatre. It also leaves the metallic, bitter taste of treason” (Letts, 2007, 29). From Letts’ perspective, the subsidized theatre is denigrating its duty both to the state and (by implication) its most canonical playwright. In A Theory of Adaptation, Hutcheon suggests that “an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative – a work that is second without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing” (Hutcheon, 2006, 9). The image of the palimpsest – in which an original text is overwritten without being erased – is extremely useful in considering the impact that Shakespeare’s plays have had and continue to have on global theatrical culture. At the same time, however, Shakespeare’s case is unique. No other writer has such an intensive history of adaptation, in part because Shakespeare’s artistic canonization in Western and, latterly, global culture means that adaptors can rely on their audience’s familiarity with at least the better-known plays. The cultural prestige associated with his works also makes them useful in other respects. Discussing his highly politicized adaptations of Hamlet, the Kuwait-based dramatist Sulayman Al-Bassam writes, “Shakespeare seemed a natural choice. In addition to being rich, malleable and volatile material, Shakespeare guaranteed me my ‘green card’ past the Cyclops of the state censor and the prejudices of a largely conservative society” (Holderness, 2007, 128). A fertile source, and a useful cloak, Shakespeare’s plays may be celebrated or critiqued, dissected or reassembled, embellished or stripped bare; their use in new works may provoke cosy familiarity or nostalgia, or it may create something closer to a Brechtian alienation effect. They have proved, however, difficult to ignore.

Notes 1. The Tamer Tamed survives in two texts, one manuscript and the other printed in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647. Daileader and Taylor follow the manuscript’s punctuation here, but I

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prefer the folio’s question mark at line 48, which underlines Petruccio’s utter desperation at this point in the play. Both plays are included in the 2007 Oxford edition of Middleton’s works, gen. ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. RSC press release: “RSC hosts first ever festival of Shakespeare’s complete works”, 11 July 2005 (http://www.rsc.org.uk/press/420_2145.aspx). For a complementary discussion of the festival, see Mark Thornton Burnett’s chapter in this volume. The Swan version is represented in the single-volume edition of the play (2007), the revised Tricycle version in the collection Plays: 3 (2008). In the revised version, the Drunken Man is replaced by Tony, and the second Act becomes a clearer echo of the first. This speech is retained in the revised version, but some of the words are given to Jamie, who attempts to support Ben in the face of condemnation from their Sergeant.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Brett, Simon, ed. (1984). The Faber Book of Parodies. London: Faber. Césaire, Aimé (1969). Une Tempête. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. ——(2000). A Tempest, trans. Philip Crispin. London: Oberon Books. Dessen, Alan (2002). Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Productions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dobson, Michael (1992). The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ducis, Jean-Francois (1991). Othello, ed. Christopher Smith. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Fletcher, John (2006). The Tamer Tamed, or The Woman’s Prize, ed. Celia Daileader and Gary Taylor. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Golder, John (1992). Shakespeare for the Age of Reason: The Earliest Stage Adaptations of JeanFrançois Ducis 1769–1792. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Hill, Aaron (1736). The Tragedy of Zara. London: For J. Watts. Holderness, Graham (2007). “From Summit to Tragedy: Sulyman Al-Bassam’s Richard III and Political Theatre”. Critical Survey 19.3, 124–43. Hutcheon, Linda (2006). A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge. Kennedy, Dennis, ed. (1993). Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Letts, Quentin (2007). Review of Days of Significance. Daily Mail, 17 January, 29. Lo, Jacqueline and Helen Gilbert (2002). “Towards a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis”. The Drama Review 46.3, 31–53. Minami, Ryuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies, eds (2001). Performing Shakespeare in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poole, John (1810). Hamlet Travestie: In Three Acts. With Annotations by Dr. Johnson and Geo. Steevens, Esq. and Other Commentators. London: Printed for J. M. Richardson. Radet, Jean-Baptiste, François George Fouques and Peirre Barre [1792]. Arlequin Cruello, Parodie D’Othello, en Deux Actes. Paris: Libraire au Théâtre du Vaudeville. Schoch, Richard W. (2002). Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William and John Fletcher (2000). King Henry VIII (All is True), ed. Gordon McMullan. London: Arden Shakespeare. Stoppard, Tom (1967). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. London: Faber. Strˇíbrný, Zdeneˇk (2000). Shakespeare and Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trivedi, Poonam and Dennis Bartholomeusz, eds (2005). India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance. Newark: University of Delaware Press.

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Williams, Roy (2007). Days of Significance. London: Methuen Drama. ——(2008). Plays: 3. London: Methuen Drama. Williams, Simon (1990). Shakespeare on the German Stage, 1586–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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SHAKESPEARE AND THE RENAISSANCE STAGE Edel Lamb

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he Renaissance stage, the artistic milieu in which Shakespeare’s dramatic works were originally produced, is fundamental to a consideration of the relationships between the playwright and the arts. Shakespeare’s plays were produced in the rapidly expanding institution of the theatre in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London and the shifting practices of this establishment had a significant influence on his plays, and are also examined in them. The Tempest, for instance, performed as part of the repertory of the King’s Men at the Blackfriars and Globe playhouses between 1611 and 1613 and at the Jacobean court in November 1611 and again, as part of the entertainments marking the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to Elector Palatine, in February 1613, self-consciously contemplates the performance arts, particularly their spectacular elements. Art is a major theme in this play, as Prospero’s abilities to control the action and to create illusions are represented as his “potent art” (5.1.50; see also 1.2.1; 1.2.28; 1.2.375; 4.1.41). This term, of course, refers directly to this character’s magic, which he notably surrenders in the image of breaking his staff and drowning his book in Act 5, Scene 1, but it has frequently been compared to the art of the playwright. The play has thus been read as Shakespeare’s celebration of and farewell to the arts of the Renaissance stage (on the play’s critical history, see McMullan, 2007). Such readings aligning the playwright and the fictional magician assume that the relationship between Shakespeare’s drama and his stage is one-dimensional. They consider the play in relation to the chronology of the playwright’s career and isolate this from the range of other factors that influenced dramatic production in the Renaissance theatres. Shakespeare wrote his drama in a distinctive yet continuously changing, multi-faceted artistic context. The playhouse as a fixed and purpose-built location for playing was still a relatively novel phenomenon; playwriting was a new profession; and the theatrical institution was experimenting with innovative material practices as it developed as a commercial and national entity. Dramatic production was not the sole responsibility of the playwright but a collaborative process between writers, sharers, players, patrons, playing companies and playgoers. Furthermore, it was embedded in the cultural, artistic and economic processes of a stage shaped simultaneously by commercial, political, literary and geographical factors. As Michael Bristol points out, while theatre is an art form, “it is also a social institution” (Bristol, 1985, 3). In order to analyze Shakespeare’s relationship with the arts of the Renaissance stage, therefore, it is necessary to consider them as part of an emerging and wide-ranging performance industry.

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This chapter will outline the multiple institutional influences on the original productions of Shakespeare’s plays by the company for which he wrote throughout most of his career, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men. It evaluates the impact of the evolution of the London theatre as a commercial and professional institution alongside the role of royal patronage, on the repertory of Shakespeare’s company, before analyzing the extent to which Shakespeare utilized performance practices and diverse staging locations in innovative ways. It concludes by returning to The Tempest to read this play as not only self-reflective about the role of the playwright, but also about the various distinctive artistic and material practices that impacted on its production. Using this play as a case study, it thus highlights the ways in which Shakespeare’s work is embedded in the manifold aspects of this theatrical institution and shaped by this complex medium. In addition, through this reading of his plays in relation to Renaissance theatrical culture, it demonstrates the ways in which Shakespeare, as a prolific writer, player and sharer of the company that dominated the theatrical scene from 1594 until the closure of the theatres in 1642, simultaneously contributed to the evolution of this culture.

Commerce, Patronage and the Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company An increase in the number of companies performing at purpose-built playing houses in London during the last decades of the sixteenth century marked the emergence of an original performance industry. Soon after Shakespeare began working in this environment, the Privy Council attempted to regulate it by ordering in 1594 that only two companies would be licensed to perform at fixed locations in the city. These were the Lord Admiral’s Men, based at the Rose playhouse under the patronage of Charles Howard, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, based at the Theatre under the patronage of Henry Carey, the management of James Burbage and with Shakespeare as a player and the main professional playwright. Although the industry was limited to this duopoly for a few years the act did not limit its longer-term growth. New playhouses, such as the Globe, Fortune and Boar’s Head were built; the Admiral’s and Chamberlain’s men changed locations; and, by the early seventeenth century, a number of older playing companies had been revived, including an amalgamated version of the Lord Oxford’s and Worcester’s Men and two children’s companies, the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Chapel. Company structures also developed in novel ways when six leading players of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men invested in their own playhouse, the Globe. Playing company members, therefore, now had a personal investment in the economic success of their company. For Shakespeare, it meant that he was a playwright, player and sharer in the company for which he would write exclusively during the rest of his career. The changing institutional structures of the Renaissance stage created new opportunities for the playwright, player and theatre entrepreneur. The expansion of the theatrical marketplace required that each company foster practices that would attract some of the 25,000 weekly playgoers to their playhouse (Gurr, 1987, 4). Adult playing companies responded by performing different plays on a daily basis for up to six days a week, from a repertory that included revivals of old plays and new ones, often written by a professional dramatist employed on a regular basis by the company. Philip Henslowe’s records for the Rose playhouse indicate that the Lord Admiral’s Men introduced a new play on average every three weeks, and it is likely that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men followed similar practices. Hence, there was continuous need for fresh plays and extra possibilities for playwrights.

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The plays, however, had to meet the demands of the playgoers. This was, Kate McLuskie argues, a “cultural moment in which literary arts began to be transformed into the commodities of a consumer economy” (McLuskie, 1994, 2) and Shakespeare’s plays, produced as part of his company’s competitive repertory, responded to the shifting tastes and requirements of the marketplace. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, like its contemporaries, capitalized on economically successful plays from within its own repertory and learned from the practices of other companies. For instance, the range of history plays in the repertories of the Lord Chamberlain and Lord Admiral’s Men in the 1590s, including Shakespeare’s tetralogies, points to the ways in which playwrights and companies responded to playgoers’ demands for particular genres. Other common commercial strategies included the use of the sequel play, which this genre also allowed for, and the spin-off (Knutson, 1991, 53). Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor is one of the most famous examples of the latter method as it built on the popularity of Sir John Falstaff, introduced in 1 Henry IV, and hence might be perceived to result, at least partially, from the commercial practices and economic pressures of Shakespeare’s artistic context. Moreover, the fact that this play was first performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1597–8 but was also revived in the company’s repertory of 1604–5 and between 1609 and 1613, illustrates the ways in which companies repeatedly used their successful plays. Motifs were also reworked across plays and across company repertories, and Hamlet, for example, can be seen as part of an on-going interest in the revenge tragedy plot, also evident in on-going performances of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, first performed in the 1580s, and new plays such as The Revenger’s Tragedy performed by Shakespeare’s company c. 1605–6. Yet, although revivals of old plays and duplication of genres and themes were crucial to the Renaissance playing companies’ commercial strategies, there was also, Lucy Munro points out, a need for freshness and innovation (Munro, 2005, 53). Shakespeare’s drama is exemplary in this respect as he arguably introduced the tragicomic mode to the Renaissance stage with Pericles, possibly co-authored with George Wilkins, in c. 1607. Shakespeare’s plays, therefore, were, to some extent, written as “merchandise in a commercial enterprise” (Knutson, 1991, 177) as playwrights and their companies worked together to create repertories that satisfied the tastes of playgoers who were presented with an increasing range of companies and plays from which to choose. Traditionally, criticism has suggested that this repertory system resulted in rivalry between the playwrights of competing companies. However, Roslyn Knutson has persuasively argued that instead the companies developed collaborative and co-operative commercial practices modelled on the guild systems (Knutson, 2001). Co-operation was essential to the structures of the Renaissance stage. In order to meet the demand for new plays, playwrights often collaborated on scripts. This includes Shakespeare who worked with his company’s other resident playwright, John Fletcher, in the later years of his career. In addition, playwrights, players and even playbooks moved between companies. Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix, for example, proclaims on its 1602 title page that it was performed by the Children of Paul’s and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and John Marston’s The Malcontent was originally performed by the Children of the Chapel in 1603 and then extended by John Webster for performance by the King’s Men in 1604. The relationships between the companies are, at times, the subject of the drama. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for instance, shifts from a discussion about the fictional players visiting the court to one about the theatrical marketplace of contemporary London and its increasing variety of playing companies when Rosencrantz tells Hamlet that the company has lost business to an “eyrie

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of children”, the children’s company based at the Blackfriars, that are “now the fashion” (2.2.326–8). In Nathan Field’s Amends for Ladies, written for the Children of the Queen’s Revels at the Whitefriars playhouse in 1611, Lord Feesimple expresses his desire to visit the Fortune theatre, the playhouse of Prince Henry’s Men, previously the Lord Admiral’s Men. Such moments function perhaps as advertising techniques for other companies and playhouses and as part of the companies’ co-operative strategies. The marketplace, therefore, was a crucial influence on the plays produced for the Renaissance stage; but it was not the only factor impacting on the strategies and repertories of the playing companies. On the one hand, repertories had to be commercially viable; on the other, they had to satisfy the demands of patrons and theatre censors. Accordingly, while playing companies operated as commercial entities they continued to depend on the protection and authority offered by their patrons in a carefully balanced relationship between economics and patronage (McLuskie and Dunsworth, 1997). This balance became increasingly important following the accession of James I, and VI of Scotland, to the English throne in 1603. Within two months the new king introduced a system of royal patronage that constituted a further restructuring of the playing company system. The Lord Admiral’s Men became Prince Henry’s Men; Queen Anna of Denmark became the patron of the children’s company at the Blackfriars; and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men acquired the patronage of the king himself, becoming the King’s Men and servants of the royal household. This status led to an increased income, as the new monarch invited companies to perform at court more regularly than his predecessor, Elizabeth I, and also paid his more for this activity. In addition, James actively demonstrated an interest in these performances. In the season of 1603–4, for example, he attended all twenty performances at court, including the five given by his own company (Gurr, 2004, 169). However, while the King’s Men may have produced plays that attended to the interests of their new patron in some ways, and the examination of monarchy and nation in Macbeth and King Lear in 1605–6 are evidence of this, this statistic actually reinforces the fact that the company’s principal audience continued to be the London theatre-goers. Indeed, all of Shakespeare’s plays were written primarily for performance in the professional playhouses of Renaissance London, and those commissioned for court entertainment would have come from the company’s existing repertory.

The Spaces of the Renaissance Stage(s) The playing spaces of Renaissance companies, therefore, were diverse. Although the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century witnessed the fixture of permanent purpose-built spaces for dramatic entertainment in London, the “Renaissance stage” was neither a singular concept nor in a fixed location. In addition to performances at court and in their professional playhouse, playing companies often toured to increase their income, especially in times of plague. Even within London companies moved between playhouses. While the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were resident at the Theatre, an open-air performance space built by James Burbage in 1576 in the north of the city, in the early 1590s, when their lease expired in 1597 they performed temporarily in the nearby Curtain. By 1599, however, following the investment of six of the company’s lead players and the movement of the physical structure of their original playhouse across the Thames to Southwark, the company built a new permanent playhouse, the Globe. The company’s first three playhouses were similar in many ways. As open-air theatres, they shared basic structural features including

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large stages with two main entry doors, a balcony for the players and an area for standing on the ground, and gallery areas with seats for the playgoers. In 1608, the company moved to an alternative type of playhouse, the indoor Blackfriars, and began performing there in 1609. Although Burbage had constructed a playhouse there in the late 1590s with the intention that it might become the company’s performance space, residents objected to the use of the building for this purpose (Gurr, 2004, 6). As a result, Burbage leased this theatre to the children’s playing company, the Children of the Chapel, who were permitted to perform there under the aegis of holding private rehearsals in advance of performances at court. A distinction between the two types of professional playhouse, the outdoor and the indoor, was thus established, and this has been widely perceived in modern theatre history as two rival traditions of “public”/adult performance with reasonable entry prices of one penny for standing versus “private”/children’s performance with the cheapest ticket costing sixpence, excluding the less well-off London playgoer (Harbage, 1952). As I suggested above, however, the companies based at these varied spaces developed co-operative commercial systems that depended on their similarities rather than their differences. Indeed the fact that Shakespeare’s company played at both the Globe and Blackfriars from 1609, possibly using the outdoor theatre as a summer venue and the indoor theatre as a winter one, indicates the parallels between these types of playing spaces. As many of Shakespeare’s plays written after this date, as well as revivals of his earlier drama, were likely performed in both locations, it is clear that the company did not significantly adjust their repertory to this alternative site. Yet some of the practical dimensions of the indoor playhouse did impact on Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. With the Blackfriars, the company acquired the resident consort of musicians and this new musical capability is reflected in new plays in the company’s repertory during this period, such as The Tempest, which makes extensive use of instrumental music. The Act divisions in this play also indicate the specific demands of the indoor setting. As Tiffany Stern notes, Shakespeare’s post-1608 plays follow a five-Act structure that would have permitted breaks for both the musical interludes, that had been common in the plays performed by the children’s company at this venue, and for trimming candles (Stern, 2004, 30). The fact that The Tempest allows for a break between Act 4 and Act 5 despite Prospero and Ariel being on stage at both moments is perhaps evidence of this need for regular intervals. However, beyond these minor functional adjustments, the indoor playhouse structure and the potentially wealthier audience had a limited impact on the repertory of the King’s Men, as the plays may have been performed simultaneously at the Blackfriars, the Globe and at the court. Nonetheless, the spaces of the Renaissance theatres were integral to the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The professional playhouses of the period were located in the margins of the city, or in the so-called “liberties”. Even the Blackfriars theatre, within the boundaries of the city, was in a liberty area. These areas, although subject to the control of the Privy Council, were not regulated by the Lord Mayor and, as a result, were perceived to be at once spaces of the city and outside its authoritative regulation (Dillon, 2000). They were sites of misrule, illicit activity, such as prostitution, and disease (Mullaney, 1988). Moreover, they were the spaces in which numerous entertainment institutions were already established. Playhouses were built alongside locations for sports such as cock fighting and bear baiting. In fact, the Hope theatre, built in 1613, replaced the bear garden in Bankside and was built as a dual-purpose entertainment venue: a theatre and bear baiting arena. From 1617, it was used mostly for the latter as well as for the exhibition of exotic animals.

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The Renaissance stage was aligned with these alternative forms of entertainment on a geographical, political and commercial level. Cock fights and bear baiting not only took place in the same “liberty” areas of the city as playing, they occurred at the same time in the afternoon and had similar entrance fees to the outdoor theatres. In one sense, therefore, playing was one of many forms of entertainment available to the Renaissance consumer and its greatest competition in this marketplace was these blood sports. The drama, however, responded to this competition as it did to the range of playing companies: it incorporated elements from the variety of entertainment institutions that may have tempted the playgoer and thus attempted to satisfy the diverse tastes of its audience. For instance, the bear that comes on stage in Act 3, Scene 3 of The Winter’s Tale perhaps attends to the desire to watch dangerous animals; the spectacular violence and gore of plays such as Macbeth may be the playing companies’ versions of blood sports; and metaphors of bear baiting run throughout Shakespeare’s drama, especially Twelfth Night (Ford, 2006). Hence, Shakespeare’s plays draw attention to their status as part of a wide range of games and pastimes in Renaissance culture. The spatial and ideological alignments of the plays of the Renaissance stage and these alternative entertainments are also implied in accounts of London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. In 1612, Thomas Heywood claimed that playing was an integral part of the city’s landscape, writing “playing is an ornament to the Citty, which strangers of all Nations, repairing hither, report of in their Countries, beholding them here with some admiration” (Heywood, 1612, F3r). Indeed international visitors, such as Fynes Moryson in his 1617 Itinerary, commented on the variety of plays on offer in London’s playhouses. During his tour of the city in 1599, Sir Thomas Platter attended a performance of Julius Caesar. Noting that at the end of the play the players “danced very marvellously and gracefully together as is their wont, two dressed as men and two as women” (Williams, 1937, 166), he then describes other entertainments in this area of the city, including cock fights and bear baiting. Grouping these entertainments together, he claims that “With these and many more amusements the English pass their time, learning at the play what is happening abroad” (Williams, 1937, 170). To consider Shakespeare writing for this stage, therefore, necessitates an understanding of this art form as one that merges playing, song and dance and aspects of alternative entertainment media, recognized not only by those working in the theatre but also to those observing the institution. Furthermore, the fact that this institution was the subject of international commentaries indicates its status not only as an establishment of the city and the English court but also of the nation: putting English practices on display for international visitors and, as Platter suggests, presenting affairs from abroad for its regular playgoers. Shakespeare’s stage, therefore, was also a national and international medium.

Staging Practices: Artistic and Material While the Renaissance stage developed as a commercial and professional institution influenced by an expanding marketplace, royal patronage and the alternative entertainments of early modern London, it simultaneously developed as a distinct performance form with systematic methods of representation, utilized by playwrights to convey setting, character and plot. Shakespeare’s plays frequently draw attention to the artistic and material staging practices of his theatre. The prologue of Henry V, for example, offers a potentially critical interrogation of the play’s original performance context. Possibly slighting the Curtain

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playhouse, where the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed temporarily between 1597 and 1599, it wryly questions the suitability of the stage, an “unworthy scaffold” (l. 10), “cockpit” (l. 11) and “wooden O” (l. 13), as a space for presenting the affairs of battles and monarchs. More generally, however, it alludes to the restrictions of the medium of playing. Apologizing for “The flat unraised spirits that hath dared / On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth / So great an object” (ll. 9–11), it continues: Can this cock-pit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O pardon: since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million, And let us ciphers to this great account, On your imaginary forces work. (ll. 11–18) Hinting that the stage is limited in its representational power, the prologue thus flatters the playgoer’s imaginative ability to conjure up the images that the playwright and his playing company aim to present. In a manner typical of Renaissance prologues it involves the playgoer in the theatrical event. It depicts dramatic production as a collaboration between the audience it addresses, the players, or “ciphers”, and the playwright who provides the words that work upon them, as well as the practical aspects of staging and the implications of the playing space, again aligned with alternative performance contexts from cock fighting to executions. Through a further insistence on the limitations of the stage, the prologue more specifically highlights the restricted use of scenic background in this theatre. However, by urging the playgoers to “think” (l. 26), “Suppose” (l. 19) and “make imaginary puissance” (l. 25), it compensates for this through a rhetorical technique that uses language to forge an image of the play’s setting and opening action. This method is repeated throughout the play as the chorus reappears at the opening of every Act to signal, among other things, a change in setting. At the beginning of Act 2, for example, it states that “the scene / Is now transported, gentles, to Southampton” (ll. 34–5). Drawing attention to the disparity between the playgoer’s fixed position in the playhouse and the movement between international locations on stage, it continues “There is the playhouse now, there you must sit, / And thence to France shall we convey you safe” (ll. 36–7). Via this manipulation of language and the dramatic convention of the chorus, it represents a range of locations to its audience. Henry V, therefore, self-consciously draws attention to the challenges and possibilities of the arts of the Renaissance stage. However, while plays such as Henry V advocate the use of the playwright’s language and audience imagination, Shakespeare’s stage was not a bare one (see Harris and Korda, 2006). The visual dimension of performance was important in this theatre and playing companies used material objects, costume and the dimensions of the stage to optimum effect. Trapdoors in purpose-built playhouses, for instance, may have been used as the space of the grave in plays such as Hamlet. Characters also entered and exited the stage from a variety of locations, including from above such figures as Juno who descends to the stage in Act 4, Scene 1 of The Tempest. However, given that any play may have been performed on a variety of stages in London, in the city and the court, as well as beyond when companies travelled to the provinces and abroad, the portable properties were of utmost importance to staging. Philip Henslowe’s inventory of properties owned by the Lord

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Admiral’s Men in 1598 indicates that playing companies had a range of items available for use, including crowns, sceptres, coffins, cages, bows, spears, wooden legs and a lion’s head (Rutter, 1999, 136–7). Contemporary playgoers noted the purposeful use of staging properties. For example, the centrality of a bed to the final Act of Othello is signalled in the play’s staging directions, “Enter Othello, and Desdemona in her bed” (Stallybrass, 1992, 65), and identified in Henry Jackson’s account of the King’s Men performance of this play in 1610 which notes that when Desdemona “fell back upon the bed she implored pity from the spectators by her very face” (qtd in Gibson, 2001, 194). Simon Forman, a regular playgoer in 1610 and 1611, also commented on the use of a chair in Macbeth, the bracelet and chest in Cymbeline and a “pedlers packe” in The Winter’s Tale (Harris and Korda, 2006, 3). These properties were used on one level to signal essential details such as setting and occupation; however, they frequently acquired symbolic significance in performance. Innogen’s bracelet noted by Forman in Cymbeline, for instance, like Desdemona’s handkerchief in Othello, comes to signify the character’s sexuality through its use on stage and description in the playtext and is manipulated as evidence to suggest infidelity. Shakespeare thus exploits the representative power of material properties on this stage. Costumes were the most expensive staging properties belonging to a playing company. Clothing was an important signifier of status beyond the playhouse and was regulated by law. Consequently it was a useful method for conveying a range of facts about a character on the stage. It was used to signal social status and, therefore, could also be drawn on to mark changing status in plays such as King Lear, where the king is reduced to nakedness as his authority declines. Costumes also designated the profession of a character, and the friar of Romeo and Juliet may have been marked by a friar’s gown similar to that included on Henslowe’s list of company costumes. Feste may have used a comparable gown in Act 4 of Twelfth Night when he dons a gown and a beard to disguise himself as Sir Topas, the curate. The colour of clothing was also used to signal character type, as black was commonly worn by melancholic characters and white to indicate old age. Henslowe’s inventory also includes a “yellow dublett for a clowne” and “green cottes for Robin Hood” (Rutter, 1999, 135). These items of clothing were frequently used in conjunction with beards and wigs, also often coloured. In his manuscript collection of plays, William Percy notes that the old servant, Livio, should be dressed in “Black velvet, And in Long-Thick-Short-WhiteGraye Hair” (Percy, c. 1601–2, 92). Coloured wigs are also used to represent age and gender in John Lyly’s Love’s Metamorphosis when Protea changes from “golden locks” to “silver hairs” when taking the form of an old man (Daniel, 1988, 306). In addition, beards were commonly used to represent characters of different social status, profession, age and gender. Shakespeare’s As You Like It associates diverse beards with different categories of men as the soldier is described “bearded like the pard” (2.7.149) in contrast to the justice with his “beard of formal cut” (2.7.154). Prosthetic beards are also used self-consciously by characters within plays, such as Follywit in Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters who puts on a beard to disguise himself as a courtier and Balurdo in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge who comes on stage “beard half on, half off” (Sturgess, 1997, 73) in a self-conscious moment typical of Marston’s interrogation of the representational techniques of the Renaissance stage. Shakespeare’s plays similarly foreground their medium via metatheatrical moments such as the representation of groups of players in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The latter comments on the practices of his stage via the detailed presentation of the preperformance preparations, including the handing over of parts, reflecting the way in which

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playtexts were physically written and distributed in this theatre, and rehearsal, and the performance of The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe. The play within a play demonstrates the combined use of costume, staging properties and language essential to the creation of character as Snout’s performance of the part of “Wall” necessitates not only “some plaster, or some loam, or some rough cast about him to signify “wall” (3.1.579) but also a speech beginning “That I, one Snout by name, present a wall” (5.1.155). While this clarification of the player’s intentions is deliberately excessive in this comic depiction of a playing troupe, such self-consciousness about the theatrical medium was often crucial in conveying plot on the Renaissance stage. Given the limited number of players in a troupe, doubling was a common practice and spectators would have accepted that a change in costume normally signalled that a player was taking on a second role. However, Feste’s doubled role as a curate in Twelfth Night is one example of a wider trope within Renaissance drama: disguise. In such instances, Renaissance plays often explicitly outline the character’s undertaking of disguise to avoid confusion with the stage practice of doubling, and in this case Maria brings Feste his costume and explains its purpose. This technique is used throughout the play to ensure that the spectators share the layers of character disguise within the plot. When Viola adopts the disguise of the pageboy, Cesario, at the beginning of the play she clearly articulates her intention to “Conceal . . . what I am” (1.2.49) and further draws attention to her disguise through asides and soliloquies. The play thus addresses the particular conditions of this theatre and compensates for them to ensure that the playgoer can participate in the comedy when other characters do not see through the disguise. Given the gender dynamics of the Renaissance stage, this is a particularly important technique in the case of cross-dressed disguise such as Viola’s. For the most part, this was an all-male stage. Adult companies, such as the King’s Men, consisted of approximately eight to ten adult male sharers or lead players and, on average, four apprenticed boy players; and the children’s companies were made up entirely of boys. Gender identity on this stage was therefore conveyed primarily through costume as boy players presented the parts of women by manipulating their voices and putting on women’s clothing, wigs and masks, such as that used in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to hide Flute’s beard when he plays the part of Thisbe. Renaissance drama, however, does not always utilize metatheatricality to aid the playgoer’s interpretation. Instead some plays manipulate staging practices to deceive the spectator. Plays such as George Chapman’s May Day and Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, for example, feature boy players performing the parts of men disguised as women, but they do not reveal the nature of this disguise until the plays’ final Acts. For the Renaissance playgoer, therefore, these performances at first appear simply to partake in the established practices of this stage in using boy players to perform the parts of women, until the layers of disguise are revealed. In Epicoene this deception of the other characters in the play and of the playgoer is revealed through the removal of the wig of Epicoene, Morose’s wife, and the accompanying statement “you have married a boy” (Campbell, 1998, 207). In shedding light on a crucial plot twist, the moment draws attention to the unique practices of this stage: of the use of boy players to play female roles and of wigs and costume both as elements of disguise and as the signifiers of character and gender. In performance in the Renaissance theatre these plays thus manipulate the playgoer’s knowledge and expectations of this medium, and disrupt them. They challenge the theatrical context for which they are originally written. Yet at the same time, they are to some extent dependent on it – although some

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modern performances have attempted to recreate the surprise effect of the revelation of Epicoene as a boy (Campbell, 1998, xvi). The self-conscious representation of staging methods and investigation of the relationship between player and fictional role in these plays demonstrates the ways in which playwrights and playing companies exploited the distinct conditions of the Renaissance stage for dramatic effect. However, this “discourse of theatricality” (Howard, 1994, 3) within the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries also constituted an engagement in wider political and cultural debates about the role of the institution of the Renaissance stage. Although the theatre was integrated into wider commercial, professional, courtly and artistic practices during Shakespeare’s career, it simultaneously held a vexed ideological position in this society. Detractors from Stephen Gosson to William Prynne circulated their fears that performance, particularly the women’s clothing used by boy actors, could alter the gender of the player, in printed tracts from the 1570s to the 1640s (Levine, 1994). Claiming that “for a boy to put one the attyre, the gesture, the passions of a woman; for a mean person to take upon him the title of a prince with counterfeit porte, and traine, is by outwarde signes to shewe themselves other wise then they are, and so with in the compasse of a lye” (Gosson, 1582, E5r), this anti-theatrical discourse allocated clothing a fundamental role in defining gender and class in the period and expressed the concern that in presenting, or showing, characters on this stage the player would misuse this signifier and break down the period’s hierarchies of gender and social status. It thus expresses an anxiety about the transformative power of the representational strategies of the Renaissance stage and about the dissolution of the boundaries between fiction and reality, for both players and playgoers. Playwrights responded to this debate about the effects of theatre in a variety of ways. While Jonson exploits signifiers such as clothing to surprise and destabilize the spectator’s acceptance of these signs in Epicoene, Shakespeare blurs the boundaries between player and role in alternative ways. The self-conscious interrogation of theatrical practice in A Midsummer Night’s Dream gently mocks the anxiety that an audience will be unable to distinguish between the fiction of the play and the reality of players presenting their parts. While the players provide a prologue to explain that “Pyramus is not killed indeed; and for the more better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver” (3.1.17–19) and ensure that half of Snug’s “face must be seen through the lion’s neck” (3.1.33) to avoid causing fear, the comments of their audience in Act 5, Scene 1 deride this over-compensation. However, in his use of the boy player to present his main female characters in other plays, Shakespeare playfully imagines the transformative power of the stage. Twelfth Night’s Viola, for example, a female character played by one of his company’s boy actors who is then disguised as a pageboy, is presented throughout the play as being transformed to some extent by this disguise. In Act 2, Scene 2, for example, she perceives herself as a “poor monster” (2.2.32), being both man and woman. Even after her disguise has been revealed in Act 5, Scene 1, she claims that only her “masculine usurped attire” (5.1.243) prevents her happiness and she refuses to embrace Orsino until she puts on her “maiden weeds” (5.1.248) again. She thus imagines herself as a boy while dressed as one. Of course, this moment promises that once Viola readopts her women’s clothing she will return to her feminine self, and gestures towards the end of the play when the boy player will also remove his theatrical costume and return to his existence as a player. As You Like It, however, goes one step further. In this play, the motif of the cross-dressed boy player is complicated by the multiple layers of disguise as Rosalind, played by a boy,

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takes on the disguise of the male Ganymede and then takes on the role of Rosalind herself, in order to teach Orlando how to woo her. More significantly, however, the play’s epilogue, spoken by “Rosalind”, is deliberately ambiguous, manipulating the playgoers’ understanding of who is speaking at this moment. Although the epilogue normally takes the format of the player addressing the playgoers, seeking their applause and often reminding them that what they have seen is the work of the playing company, the epilogue to As You Like It is innovative as it forces the audience to confront the layers of disguise that they have accepted during the performance. The speaker begins the epilogue in role, that is as Rosalind, claiming “It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue” (ll. 1–2), yet quickly forces the audience to acknowledge that this part is merely a fiction with the reminder “If I were a woman” (ll. 14–15), before ultimately returning to the woman’s part by concluding with a curtsey. In delivering the epilogue, therefore, the speaker switches at will from boy to woman, on the one hand continuing the complicated cross-gender disguises of the play, and on the other blurring the layers of performance to present a figure who is at once masculine and feminine and transgresses boundaries between the realms of the play and the playhouse by offering to “kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not” (ll. 15–16). Shakespeare, therefore, not only uses the environment of the Renaissance stage selfconsciously, but, as Tiffany Stern suggests, creates a new type of text suited to it (Stern, 2004, 11). Moreover, he achieves this by testing the limits of this medium. Of course, at the same time plays such as As You Like It respond to the practical elements of the playing company and playing spaces on a pragmatic level. Any Renaissance dramatist writing for a specific company produced a playtext with the distinct composition of this troupe in mind, writing directly for the talents, voices and appearances of specific actors. Yet Shakespeare was unusual among his contemporaries in that he wrote exclusively for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men/King’s Men for most of his career. He designed particular parts with his lead players in mind. Roles such as Hamlet, Othello and King Lear were originally performed by the leading actor of the company, Richard Burbage. Comic roles in the earlier plays were written for a celebrity comedian of the Renaissance stage, Will Kemp, who specialized in performing the ridiculous clown as well as in jovial dancing, especially the jigs that frequently followed the performance of a play in this theatre. His unique and famed style impacted upon the type of comic parts that Shakespeare wrote, and the parts of Falstaff, Bottom and Dogberry are just a few of the characters created through the collaboration between playwright and player. The central impact of the specific player on dramatic characters is demonstrated by the subtle change in the type of clown in Shakespeare’s drama written after Robert Armin replaced Kemp in the company c. 1600. A new type of singing court fool including Touchstone and Lear’s fool resulted from this change in company personnel (Bentley, 1984, 224). The relationship between play, playwright and company was thus heightened as a result of Shakespeare’s long-standing engagement with the one company. This is further indicated by the roles for boy players in his drama. Performing the role of Rosalind after all requires a boy player suitably trained to take on such a leading role. Critics have noted the two leading female roles in a number of Shakespeare’s plays in the late 1590s, including, in addition to As You Like It’s Rosalind and Celia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Helena and Hermia and Much Ado About Nothing’s Beatrice and Hero, and have suggested that the playwright was responding to the presence of two talented boy players in his company (Bentley, 1984, 225; Gurr, 2004, 135–6). Furthermore, the

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inclusion of other minor boys’ parts in these plays, for example, the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the boy in Act 5, Scene 3 of As You Like It who is brought on stage simply to sing a song, indicates an increased number of apprentices in the company at this time and hints at the role of the company’s performances in training novice players. As Catherine Belsey suggests, it is likely that the boys would be trained in the practices of this theatre through performing these minor roles and via this method the company would fashion their own leading boy players to take on advanced female roles (Belsey, 2005). Shakespeare’s plays and the conditions of his stage are therefore mutually reciprocal. The playwright responds to the talents of his playing company through his drama written for specific players, but he also attends to company needs in providing plays that permit the training of younger players.

The Tempest and the Renaissance Stage The Tempest is exemplary of Shakespeare’s engagement with the material conditions in which his company worked and innovative utilization of the staging practices of his theatre. On one level, it is self-conscious about the medium of performance as it examines the illusory and temporary dimensions of the arts of the theatre, represented by Prospero’s arts. This character commands his spirits to create spectacular events, such as a storm, a banquet and a masque, that ultimately are shown to be momentary illusions. The play thus interrogates the nature of what is seen. Characters believe what they witness, for example, “supposing that they saw the King’s ship wrecked” (1.2.237–8), only to discover that the events were simulations and not reality. In parallel with the characters, the playgoers also accept what is presented on stage, suspending their belief in the playhouse and interpreting the opening tempest as a reality within the play, to be informed in Act 1, Scene 2 that it was not real. Therefore, just as many characters throughout the play are unable to distinguish between illusions, dreams and realities, the play disrupts the expectations of its spectators and questions their ability to distinguish what is a fiction and what is a material reality in the theatre. Furthermore, by reminding them that the spectacle that they witness in the playhouse is also an illusion produced by the playing company, it draws attention to the ways in which convincing but momentary displays might be produced on the Renaissance stage. In highlighting the representational power of spectacle, The Tempest examines the practices of the stage in similar ways to earlier plays, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It. This examination climaxes, as in these plays, in an epilogue that selfconsciously alludes to the relationship between the fiction of the play and the role of the playing company. Prospero, or the player performing this role, begins the epilogue with the claim “Now my charms are all o’erthrown, / And what strength I have’s mine own” (ll. 1–2). This moment continues to blur the boundaries between performance and reality as it remains unclear whether the speaker is the character who has relinquished his charms of magic or the player who has moved beyond the fiction of the play to appeal for the approval of the audience in a conventional manner. However, as I noted at the beginning of this chapter, the farewell to the arts offered by Prospero in the play and particularly in this epilogue has also been interpreted as the playwright’s representation of the end of his career on the Renaissance stage. Such interpretations, however, do not account for Shakespeare’s later plays, All is True, or Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, written in collaboration with John Fletcher. Moreover, they do not consider his drama as products

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of the multi-faceted theatrical institution. The Tempest is self-conscious about its artistic medium, particularly its representational practices, but, I would suggest, it is produced in relation to the wider historical, cultural and institutional aspects of the stage. Indeed, the play self-consciously engages with a variety of the factors that impact on production. If it refracts its own medium, it not only attends to the spectacular nature of performance or the career of the playwright, but to the playing company, and their composition, playing spaces and material practices. Douglas Bruster suggests that The Tempest is a play about the theatrical experiences of Shakespeare and his company in his alternative reading of the play’s metatheatrical elements. He suggests that the play is not about theatre generally but about Shakespeare’s experience in the London’s playing culture as “a practical, not an abstract, matter” (Bruster, 2000, 117). Accordingly he reads the storm scene as an analogy for the crowded stages of the Globe and Blackfriars, Gonzalo as representative of the playwright and Prospero of the playwright and director, Miranda as the idealized spectator, Ariel as the boy actor and Caliban as derivative of Shakespeare’s experiences of working with comic players, particularly Will Kemp. He thus persuasively proposes that while this is a play about “art”, it is more importantly about the “work that Art requires” (Bruster, 2000, 117) and provides a careful examination of the ways in which the playhouses, company structures and players that impacted upon the playwright and shaped the play are represented in the text. He therefore interprets The Tempest as a product of the King’s Men in their professional playhouses, both indoor and outdoor. More often, however, this play has been situated in relation to its performances at court in 1611 and in 1613 and in the context of the King’s Men’s relationships with their patron, largely as a result of the play’s incorporation of the central dramatic art form of the Jacobean court: the masque. Masques had been performed throughout the sixteenth century in the Tudor courts, but rapidly developed in the Jacobean court of the early seventeenth century into a distinctive form resulting from the direct participation of the royal family, especially Queen Anna. As an art form, this dramatic genre was both entertaining and highly politicized, as it celebrated the court and its wealth through impressive scenery and costumes and was performed by hired players alongside the nobles of the court, including the queen and royal children. The professional playwrights of the Renaissance stage, including Ben Jonson, were often commissioned to write these pieces. The professional theatres and this form of court performance were therefore closely aligned, and although Shakespeare did not write a masque, as a player and playwright for the king’s company it is likely that he and his company were closely acquainted with the format. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Act 4, Scene 1 of The Tempest presents a masque of spirits, or a “majestic vision” (4.1.118), to celebrate the potential marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand. The Tempest, undoubtedly influenced by the distinctive performance forms of the Jacobean court, has been read in this context of elite performance as a celebration of the monarch and even as evidence of a “courtly Shakespeare” that exposes the distance between the theatre of the court and of the professional stages (Holderness, Potter and Turner, 1990, 139). However, given the practices of the playing company, it is unlikely that this play was written specifically for the entertainment of the court. Instead it was probably, like Shakespeare’s other plays, written for performance at the professional playhouses, in this case the Blackfriars and the Globe. It was therefore written primarily as a commercially viable entertainment and then chosen from the repertory of the King’s Men to be performed at the court. Yet to read the play either solely as a commodity in a

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professional playhouse or as direct imitation of the theatre of the court for performance before the company’s patron is to overlook the multiple material practices impacting on its original production. This play is embedded within the metropolitan Renaissance stage. Performed in both the liberties of the city and in the court, combining the politicized art form of the court with the commercial impetus of a professional playing company, it brings the theatrical forms of the court to paying playgoers. Perhaps, as David Bevington suggests, this representation of a wedding masque, at least in performances of the play in the professional theatres in 1613, capitalizes on public interest in the royal wedding and the court entertainments surrounding it (Bevington, 1990, 220). In this sense the professional theatre functions as a national institution bringing, as Platter suggests, news to the city playgoers (Williams, 1937, 170). However, the masque was likely a central component of the play from its original performances in c. 1611, when the inclusion of masques in plays was practised more widely, including in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy also first performed in c. 1610–11. The play’s incorporation of the courtly performance format perhaps therefore indicates a more general interest in the matters of the court as the play markets this elite genre to the playgoer. Moreover, the commercial benefits of spectacle and performance, both professional and courtly, underpin the play’s self-conscious meditation on the arts of theatre and display. The play draws attention to the marketability of unusual spectacles in this culture when Trinculo encounters Caliban in Act 2, Scene 2. Viewing him first as “A strange fish!” (2.2.26) and then “Legged like a man and his fins like arms! . . . an islander that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt” (2.2.31–4) he reflects: Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holidayfool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man. Any strange beast there makes a man. (2.2.26–9) Trinculo imagines Caliban as an exotic spectacle that he might exploit in a moneymaking venture that involves putting this strange creature on display for payment. Hence, the play evokes alternative entertainment and commercial contexts, namely the practice of displaying exotic animals that often occurred at the venues close to the city theatres used for cock fighting and bear baiting. Prospero’s speech dispelling the masque in Act 4, Scene 1 also potentially alludes to the moneymaking opportunities of the spectacles of the Renaissance stage. Prospero’s comparison of his spirits to “actors” (4.1.148) who have along with the scenery of this “insubstantial pageant faded” (4.1.155) and “melted into air” (4.1.150) ostensibly demonstrates the ephemerality of the magician’s conjured masque and, by extension, of the play in the theatre. Yet, as Alexandra Halasz points out, it simultaneously evokes, and may even draw on, Thomas Dekker’s famous representation of the theatre as a market, or the “Poets Royal Exchange” (Dekker, 1609, 27), and of muses turned to merchants in The Gull’s Hornbook (Halasz, 1997). Dekker’s 1609 account also highlights the temporality of theatrical performance but foregrounds the economic disadvantages of this momentary medium which limits opportunities for sale as “Plaudities and the Breath of the great Beast . . . vanish all into aire” and “Plaiers and their Factors, who put away the stuffe, and make the best of it they possibly can (as indeed tis their parts so to doe)” (Dekker, 1609, 27). Read alongside this account of the theatre as a marketplace, of muses as merchants and of players exploiting this medium for financial gain, Prospero’s seemingly abstract account of the illusions and the arts of dramatic representation instead functions as a further

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reminder of the economic forces impacting on the art of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Therefore, by considering spectacle and performance under the lens of material and economic benefits and by displaying the performance mode associated primarily with the court on the commercially driven Renaissance stage, The Tempest, I would suggest, indicates the narrowing cultural gaps between royal, aristocratic and citizen tastes as the theatre expanded as an institution. Locating The Tempest within the institution in which it was produced, therefore, illuminates the multiple factors influencing dramatic production in the Renaissance theatre. Although it has been widely recognized that the relationships between Shakespeare’s drama and the artistic, commercial, economic, royal and physical facets of the institution in which he worked are fundamental, many critical approaches continue to focus on one or two of these factors in isolation. Yet by considering the playwright, players, company practices, commerce, patronage and diverse playing spaces as simultaneous rather than as isolated influences, The Tempest may be read as resourcefully merging the theatrical genres of the court and the professional theatres and dissolving the boundaries between elite and commercially driven performance. It therefore highlights what Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin call the “nodal” character of this stage, occupying multiple places and “connected to a number of interesting circuits” (Dawson and Yachnin, 2001, 6). Readings of Shakespeare’s work in the context of the Renaissance stage must attend to these multiple influential connections. This not only enables fresh interpretations of the plays, but also demonstrates Shakespeare’s role, via his productive manipulation of the ranging material practices and of the social, political and cultural influences on the stage, in developing the institution in which he worked.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Belsey, Catherine (2005). “Shakespeare’s Little Boys: Theatrical Apprenticeship and the Construction of Childhood”. In Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage, ed. Bryan Reynolds and William West. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 53–72. Bentley, G. E. (1984). The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bevington, David (1990). “The Tempest and the Jacobean Court Masque”. In The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 218–43. Bristol, Michael (1985). Carnival and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England. London: Methuen. Bruster, Douglas (2000). Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Campbell, Gordon, ed. (1998). Ben Jonson, ‘The Alchemist’ and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Daniel, Carter. A., ed. (1988). The Plays of John Lyly. London: Associated University Presses. Dawson, Anthony and Paul Yachnin (2001). The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dekker, Thomas (1609). The Guls Horne-Booke. London: Nicholas Okes. Dillon, Janette (2000). Theatre, Court and City, 1595–1610: Drama and Social Space in London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ford, John (2006). “Changeable Taffeta: Redressing the Bears in Twelfth Night”. In Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage, ed. Paul Menzer. Selinsgrove: Susequehanna University Press, 174–91.

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Gibson, Joy L. (2001). Squeaking Cleopatras: The Elizabethan Boy Player. Sutton: Sutton Publishing Ltd. Gosson, Stephen (1582). Plays Confuted in Five Actions. London: Thomas Gosson. Gurr, Andrew (1987). Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——(2004). The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halasz, Alexandra (1997). The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harbage, Alfred (1952). Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harris, Jonathan Gil and Natasha Korda, eds (2006). Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heywood, Thomas (1612). An Apology for Actors. London: Nicholas Okes. Holderness, Graham, Nick Potter and John Turner (1990). Shakespeare Out of Court: Dramatization of Court Society. London: Macmillan. Howard, Jean (1994). The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England. London and New York: Routledge. Knutson, Rosalind (1991). The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press. ——(2001). Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levine, Laura (1994). Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McLuskie, Kathleen (1994). Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists. Basingstoke: Macmillan. McLuskie, Kathleen and Felicity Dunsworth (1997). “Patronage and the Economics of Theatre”. In A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia University Press, 423–40. McMullan, Gordon (2007). Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mullaney, Steven (1988). The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Munro, Lucy (2005). Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Percy, William (c. 1601–2). Comoedyes and Pastoralls with their Songs. Huntington Library, San Marino, Huntington Ms. HM4. Rutter, Carol Chillington, ed. (1999). Documents of the Rose Playhouse, rev. edn. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stallybrass, Peter (1992). “Transvestism and the ‘Body Beneath’: Speculating on the Boy Actor”. In Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman. London and New York: Routledge, 64–83. Stern, Tiffany (2004). Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page. London and New York: Routledge. Sturgess, Keith, ed. (1997). John Marston, ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Clare (1937). Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599. London: Jonathan Cape.

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SHAKESPEARE AND THE RESTORATION AND EIGHTEENTHCENTURY STAGE Fiona Ritchie Adaptations: Shakespeare as a “Heap of Rubbish”

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n 1679 John Dryden wrote of the challenges he found in adapting Shakespeare in terms that might surprise a modern reader. In remodelling Troilus and Cressida, Dryden said he “undertook to remove that heap of Rubbish, under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly bury’d”. Similarly, in 1681 Nahum Tate described Shakespeare’s King Lear as “a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht; yet . . . dazling in their Disorder” (Clark, 1997, 295). The Restoration theatre did not have the same reverence towards Shakespeare’s works that we do today; indeed, perhaps the most surprising aspect of the performance of Shakespeare on the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage is that what was staged often only vaguely resembled what Shakespeare actually wrote. Shakespeare had yet to achieve the canonical status of English national poet and in 1660 his works were not yet venerated, as they would come to be later in the eighteenth century. As the comments above suggest, Shakespeare’s plays were in fact seen as raw material that had to be remoulded to suit the taste of the times. As the eighteenth century progressed, bardolatry developed but despite protestations of his “natural genius”, Shakespeare was still altered in myriad ways to make him fit the aesthetic, cultural and political requirements of the age. The Restoration was an important era for Shakespeare adaptation. Aesthetic theory had changed since the Renaissance and the second half of the seventeenth century saw a neoclassical desire for symmetry permeate the theatre. Dryden and his fellow Restoration playwright William Davenant therefore altered The Tempest in 1667 in order to provide a balance that they considered lacking in the original.1 They created “the Counterpart to Shakespear’s Plot, namely that of a Man who had never seen a Woman”, introducing the character of Hippolito to provide a male equivalent to Miranda. Furthermore, Miranda is given a sister, Dorinda. Dryden and Davenant explained their aim as follows: “by this means those two Characters of Innocence and Love might the more illustrate and commend each other” (Clark, 1997, 84). Thus the play has not one but two pairs of young lovers and this doubling serves to emphasize the romantic aspect of the play. Even Ariel is given a partner, a spirit named Milcha. Despite the often somewhat dubious morality of Restoration drama, many of Shakespeare’s plays were altered to give them greater moral clarity. In Davenant’s Macbeth (1664), for example, the part of Lady Macduff is greatly expanded in order that she might provide a foil to the evil Lady Macbeth. In contrast to Lady Macbeth, who is “transported”

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by the witches’ prophecy and urges her husband to pursue the ambitions they spark in him, Davenant’s Lady Macduff cautions her husband about the dangers of believing their words: LADY MACDUFF Why are you alter’d, Sir? be not so thoughtful: The Messengers of Darkness never spake To men, but to deceive them. MACDUFF Their words seem to fore-tell some dire predictions. LADY MACDUFF He that believes ill news from such as these, Deserves to find it true. Their words are like Their shape; nothing but fiction. Let’s hasten to our journey. MACDUFF I’ll take your counsel; for to permit Such thoughts upon our memories to dwell, Will make our minds the Registers of Hell. (Spencer, 1965, 2.5.84–94) The female characters are directly contrasted in order to convey the moral message that Lady Macbeth’s encouragement of her husband’s regicidal ambition is wrong. Lady Macduff instead provides an example of how a virtuous woman should support her husband. Thus the play is given a clearer sense of morality and the principle of symmetry is observed. This emphasis on morality is also extended to Macbeth, who is allotted a dying line in which he repents his crimes: “Farewell vain World, and what’s most vain in it, Ambition” (5.8.42). The issue of morality is also at stake in Tate’s King Lear. This adaptation is famous for providing the tragedy with a happy ending which allows Cordelia and Lear to live, thus preserving the concept of poetic justice, in which the bad characters are punished and the good prosper. Cordelia’s goodness is rewarded and she reigns over the kingdom at the end of the play with her love interest, Edgar, who proclaims that “Truth and Vertue . . . at last succeed” (5.6.161). As well as being altered to take account of new trends in aesthetic theory and to provide a clearer moral direction, the plays were also adapted in order to exploit innovations in Restoration theatre practice. In particular, Davenant, as manager of the Duke’s Company, had pioneered the use of perspective scenery and special effects at his theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and so his Macbeth takes full advantage of these developments, featuring a chorus of singing and dancing witches who swoop around the stage on flying machinery and a dramatic exit for Hecate at the end of Act 3 in which, after a rousing song from the witches, she ascends “through the foggy Air” on a chariot. The popularity of such spectacular additions to the play is suggested by Joseph Addison’s account in the Spectator of a “Woman of Quality” who sat near to him at the theatre displaying extreme impatience for the witches’ entrance and proclaiming them “charming Creatures” (Addison, 1965, I, 194). The Tempest was also a stage spectacular and became even more extravagant in the operatic version by Thomas Shadwell (1674). Playgoers were treated to a Masque of Furies in Act 2, Scene 4 (which features singing devils and a chorus performed by Pride, Fraud, Rapine and Murder) and a spectacular finale at the end of the play: “Neptune, Amphitrite, Oceanus and Tethys appear in a Chariot drawn with Sea-horses; on each side of the Chariot, Sea-gods and Goddesses, Tritons, and Nereides” (Spencer, 1965, 5.2.245 SD).

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Connected with this new emphasis on the visual on stage was the advent of the actress, perhaps the single greatest change in the Restoration theatre. Indeed, John Dennis explicitly linked these two phenomena, describing the two most important theatrical innovations of the period as “scenes and women; which added probability to the Dramatick Actions and made evry thing look more naturally” (Dennis, 1939–43, 278). This development also had a great impact on the staging of Shakespeare. The addition of extra female characters and the expansion of female roles in the plays, as in the cases of The Tempest and Macbeth already discussed, were doubtless done in part to capitalize on this new theatrical trend (as well as for the other aesthetic reasons already outlined). Similarly, the incorporation of a romantic plot into Tate’s version of King Lear was probably motivated by the fact that it was now possible to depict love more “realistically” than in the days of the boy actors. The love between Cordelia and Edgar in Tate’s version also serves to clarify Cordelia’s motivation for her “cold” answer to her father at the opening of Shakespeare’s play. She is in love with Edgar and wishes to avoid the match with Burgundy proposed by her father: CORDELIA Now comes my Trial, how am I distrest, That must with cold speech tempt the chol’rick King Rather to leave me Dowerless, than condemn me To loath’d Embraces! (Clark, 1997, 1.1.92–5) Furthermore, Edgar assumes his disguise as Poor Tom not in order to save his own life but to be able to watch over Cordelia (who spends much of the play roaming the heath in search of her father) in the “charming Hope” that he “may do service” to her and ultimately win her love (2.2.130–1). The happy ending of the play, which concludes with “the prosperous Reign / Of this celestial Pair” (5.6.151–2), may seem bizarre to us now but it certainly was not considered so for much of the period in question. Samuel Johnson famously proclaimed his preference for Tate’s ending in the notes to the play in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare confessing that “I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor” (1958–90, VIII, 704). The presence of women on stage in the Restoration allowed for titillation as well as romance. In the Dryden and Davenant Tempest, much bawdy humour is extracted from Miranda and Dorinda’s burgeoning desire to see this strange beast, the man. Miranda claims she would “rather be in pain nine Months . . . than lose my longing” to see him and Dorinda asserts her desire to see the forbidden creature: “Though I dye for’t, I must have th’other peep” (2.4.140–1, 2.5.33). The two could even coexist in the same play. Tate’s Lear, in a move doubtless motivated by a desire for neoclassical symmetry, juxtaposes Edgar’s selfless love for Cordelia and wish to do her good with his bastard brother’s desire to violate her: Edmund sends ruffians to capture Cordelia in order that he might “enjoy” her (3.2.122). The advent of the actress of course influenced the original drama being written in the Restoration in a similar way, hence the development of the sex comedies of the period. In serious drama, a new genre developed which took advantage of the women on the stage in a different way: she-tragedy focused on the sufferings of virtuous female characters as a means of providing pleasure to the audience. Colley Cibber’s adaptation of Richard III (1700) is clearly influenced by this trend for suffering heroines in the expanded scene

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given to Elizabeth, the mother of Richard’s nephews, in which her children are torn from her and taken to the Tower of London, and she pathetically laments her separation from them: QUEEN ELIZABETH Support me Heaven! For life can never bear the pangs of such a parting. O my poor Children! O distracting thought! I dare not bid ’em (as I shou’d) farewel, And then to part in silence stabs my Soul. (4.1.101–5) Cibber’s play also caters to the early eighteenth-century audience by making the historical material it covers more accessible to them. By this time, the details of the Wars of the Roses no longer came easily to mind for most audience members and so Cibber interpolates material from the Henry VI plays into the first Act of his Richard III to explain the back story of the events depicted in the piece. Cibber also seeks to make the language of the play more accessible; he adds several new soliloquies for Richard which, while they emulate Shakespeare, are written in a more direct style. The obscurity of Shakespeare’s language was a concern for the Restoration and eighteenth-century audiences and many of the adapters sought to bring greater clarity to the plays by expressing Shakespeare’s ideas in a more contemporary fashion. As well as being influenced by aesthetic theory and practical stage considerations, many of the adaptations were highly attuned to the politics of the age. Even after the monarchy was restored in 1660 the political landscape was unstable and the execution of a king was still a recent memory. The spectres of regicide and restoration run through many of these plays (including The Tempest and Macbeth) and the adaptations became even more political in the early 1680s. This period is marked by the Exclusion Crisis, in which debates about monarchical succession raged. The Whigs sought to introduce a bill into parliament which would prevent Charles II’s Catholic brother, James, from succeeding to the throne, proposing instead Charles’s illegitimate, but Protestant, son, the Duke of Monmouth. In Tate’s King Lear, the part of the “Base-born” Edmund is greatly expanded in order to make the play’s parallels with contemporary politics clear and to denounce the illegitimate pretender to the English throne. Edmund seeks to inherit “spight of Law” (1.2.21) and imagines himself a future king (5.5.49–50). The happy ending of the play is thus also motivated by a need for the forces of illegitimacy to be defeated. Cordelia inherits the kingdom and the divine succession of the monarchy continues uninterrupted, with positive consequences for the nation: “Our drooping Country now erects her Head, / Peace spreads her balmy Wings, and Plenty Blooms” (5.6.155–6). Tate’s play also notably focuses on civil unrest in England (a peasant rebellion against the rule of Gonerill and Regan is exacerbated by the blinded Gloster, whose piteous state incites the sympathy of the people), not the threat of invasion from France. Other dramatists also used Shakespeare to reflect upon the recent experience of civil war. Thomas Otway’s version of the Romeo and Juliet story transposed to ancient Rome, The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1679), makes the fate of the young lovers more directly political. Young Marius and Lavinia are the victims of a quarrel between the rival senators Marius and Sylla (who roughly correspond to Montagu and Capulet). The play ends with Marius Senior’s lamentation of the tragedy brought about by civil war: “Be warn’d by me, ye Great ones, how y’ embroil / Your Country’s Peace, and dip your Hands in Slaughter / Ambition is a Lust that’s never quencht” (5.4.230–2). John Crowne reworked 2 and 3 Henry VI as

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The Misery of Civil-War (1680), bringing new topicality to the Wars of the Roses by associating them with the recent internal conflict. Crowne’s title makes the politicization of his adaptation clear but scholars have found topical allusions to Restoration politics in a number of other less obvious places in addition to Otway’s Caius Marius, including Edward Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus; or, The Rape of Lavinia and Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida; or, Truth Found Too Late (both 1678). The politics of some of the adaptations were considered too incendiary for performance. Crowne’s version of the first part of the Henry VI plays was banned after just one performance in 1680, probably because it depicted a successful rebellion against a legitimate monarch. Tate’s version of Richard II was denied a licence for performance in the same year, presumably because the idea of depicting the deposition and murder of a king caused as much anxiety to Charles II as it had to Elizabeth I. The play was subsequently acted as The Sicilian Usurper in order to set the characters and action at a remove from England, but the ruse failed and the Lord Chamberlain closed Drury Lane for ten days in order to punish the company for performing this provocative play. The eighteenth century too used the plays for political ends: Henry V was performed regularly during England’s wars with France and was often pointedly advertised as including “the Conquest of the French at Agincourt”. The Restoration adaptations are particularly significant since many of them constituted the versions in which Shakespeare was performed throughout the eighteenth century. Although the plays went through subsequent revisions and in some cases parts of the Shakespearean originals were restored, King Lear ended happily and Dorinda and Hippolito appeared as part of The Tempest well into the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Cibber’s Richard III, considered a more effective acting version than Shakespeare’s text, was the version of the play in which David Garrick made his official stage debut in 1741 and was still being performed at the beginning of the next century.2 In fact it is difficult to determine precisely how Restoration and eighteenth-century readers and playgoers encountered Shakespeare and whether or not they were aware that much of the work they saw did not appear precisely as Shakespeare wrote it.3 The early years of the eighteenth century saw a spate of adaptations of Shakespeare’s comedies which continued to mould his plays to contemporary dramatic taste and to the performers who would act in them. George Granville’s The Jew of Venice (1701) was written to showcase the skills of the comedian Thomas Doggett as Shylock, in this way emulating John Lacy’s Sauny the Scot (1667), a popular version of The Taming of the Shrew which shifted the focus of the play to its title character (who corresponds to Petruchio’s servant Grumio), providing a vehicle for Lacy’s comic acting talents. In both plays, contemporary racial stereotypes are exploited for comic effect. John Dennis’ Comical Gallant (1702) reworks The Merry Wives of Windsor in light of the shift in early eighteenth-century comedy in order to treat Falstaff more sympathetically. Similarly, William Burnaby’s Love Betray’d (1703), a version of Twelfth Night, alleviates the punitive treatment of Malvolio. David Garrick, manager of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane from 1747 to 1776, is often credited with “restoring” Shakespeare to the eighteenth-century stage, proclaiming it, in the prologue to Florizel and Perdita, “my chief wish, my joy, my only plan, / To lose no drop of that immortal man!”.4 However, despite his bardolatrous rhetoric, Garrick did exactly what his Restoration predecessors had done; as an astute actor and manager he carefully prepared his own versions of the plays, often making substantial changes in order to mould them to audience expectations. In an era when the sentimental novel was on the rise it is no surprise that sentimentality was also present in the drama: George Lillo’s The London

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Merchant (1731), with its moralistic and tear-jerking ending, was a perennial favourite on the eighteenth-century stage. Garrick’s Florizel and Perdita (1756), a version of The Winter’s Tale, perfectly fits the play to the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The first three Acts are cut and instead the play opens with a long expository scene of dialogue between Camillo and a Gentleman in which Leontes’ repentance for Hermione’s trial and her subsequent death are established. When Leontes appears soon afterwards, he expresses his own guilt repeatedly: LEONTES I can’t repent these things, for they are heavier Than all my woes can stir: I must betake me To nothing but despair – a thousand knees Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting, Upon a barren mountain, and still winter, In storms perpetual, could not move the gods To look this way upon me. (1.2.81–7) Even Paulina thinks he has already suffered sufficiently for his crimes. Thus the family reunion in the final scene is uncomplicated by issues of guilt (particularly since the character of Mamillius does not appear and therefore does not complicate the play’s resolution) and Hermione freely forgives her husband when she too becomes convinced of his extreme penitence, passionately exclaiming “My lord, my king, – there’s distance in those names, / My husband!” (3.4.215–16). Garrick’s Romeo and Juliet (first performed in 1748) similarly alters Shakespeare’s ending to provide a more cathartic experience for the audience: the two lovers are allowed an emotional exchange in the tomb before they both die. In the “Advertisement” to the 1753 edition of the play, Garrick justifies this moment by noting that it appears in Shakespeare’s source, the Italian novelist Bandello. Garrick also follows the dramatic tradition for this scene established by Otway’s Caius Marius and Theophilus Cibber’s version of the play (1744), both of which had included the lovers’ reunion to popular acclaim. The tomb scene, starring Garrick as Romeo and George Anne Bellamy as Juliet, was immortalized by the painter Benjamin Wilson and thus Garrick’s version of Shakespeare was commemorated in art as well as in print. Spectacle remained as popular on the eighteenth-century stage as it had been in the Restoration: when the famous “battle of the Romeos” took place in 1750, with Garrick at Drury Lane and Spranger Barry at Covent Garden going head to head as the male lead, part of the competition rested on which theatre could best stage the elaborate funeral procession for Juliet introduced by Garrick in Act 5, Scene 1. One of Garrick’s most successful adaptations was his Catharine and Petruchio (1756), a version of The Taming of the Shrew condensed into an afterpiece.5 Although Bianca appears as a character, the subplot involving her suitors is removed and the piece focuses on the taming plot. The play is notable for its attempt to clarify Catharine’s situation: Baptista has told her he will cast her out if she does not marry and she considers Petruchio her only chance of wedlock. Nevertheless, she refuses to go quietly. Once Catharine has submitted to her husband’s will, Petruchio reveals that his taming was all an act: PETRUCHIO Kiss me, my Kate; and since thou art become So prudent, kind, and dutiful a wife, Petruchio here shall doff the lordly husband; An honest mask, which I throw off with pleasure. (3.1.267–70)

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This softening of Petruchio at first might make the play seem less misogynistic but Catharine’s long final speech is greatly reduced and many of the lines are given to Petruchio (she speaks only nineteen of Shakespeare’s forty-three lines). The play ends with Petruchio leading her downstage as he recites the end of her famous speech, almost revelling before the audience in the silencing of his shrewish wife. This makes for a deeply uncomfortable ending; with Petruchio delivering the lines, the possibility for irony in the speech is reduced. Towards the end of his career Garrick became increasingly influenced by the theories of the French neoclassical critics and his adaptations began to resemble those of the Restoration in some ways. According to French rules, decorum had to be upheld at all times, which meant that tragedy and comedy could not be mixed. Therefore many comic elements were removed from Shakespeare’s tragedies: since the Restoration the Fool had been absent from Lear and the Porter excised from Macbeth; Garrick’s version of Hamlet (1772) omitted the gravediggers for the same reasons. Indeed, Garrick cut much of what he termed “the rubbish of the fifth act” and rewrote the final scene in order to minimize the number of bodies littering the stage at the play’s conclusion (Garrick, 1980–2, IV, 434). The high death toll of Hamlet’s final scene caused less concern to John Poole, whose Hamlet Travestie (1810) makes light of the play’s morbid conclusion. In this burlesque version Hamlet dies with the line “Here goes, Horatio, – going – going – gone” and Horatio’s final speech mocks the tragedy with indignation and puzzlement: HORATIO Well, here’s a noble fellow gone to pot! This altogether’s been a pretty plot! To see dead bodies strew’d about like cattle, Were better suited to the field of battle. Charon, in safety, o’er the Styx will ferry ’em: And all that we can do now – is to bury ’em. (Poole, 1977–8, 53) In the early nineteenth century the monopoly of the patent theatres (Drury Lane and Covent Garden, plus the Haymarket in the summer) was challenged and several minor theatres were granted licences, provided they did not perform the “legitimate” genres of tragedy, comedy and farce, or indeed the spoken word, but instead concentrated on pantomime, burlesque and melodrama, primarily to musical accompaniment. “Illegitimate” Shakespeare adaptations such as Poole’s Hamlet constituted a direct challenge to the patent theatres by taking the staple dramatist of their repertory and reinterpreting him for a new, popular audience. Poole’s travesty was so popular that it was performed all over London and notably at Covent Garden in 1813. The boundary between the “legitimate” and “illegitimate” theatres was by this time dissolving, although it was not officially overturned by law until 1843, and Shakespeare was being used to dismantle it.

Repertory: “Written by Shakespear” Clearly Shakespeare made up an important part of the theatrical repertory in the Restoration and eighteenth century, even if often in adapted form. When the theatres reopened in 1660 after their eighteen-year closure there was of course a shortage of drama to perform and for this reason the two companies turned to the works of pre-Restoration

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dramatists in order to supply material for performance until a new dramatic tradition could flourish. The texts that were employed tended to be the plays of important Renaissance dramatists whose works had been published in folio editions, thus ensuring their survival during the Interregnum. The plays of Shakespeare, Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher therefore constituted much of the theatre repertory in the early 1660s. When it reopened, the London stage was closely overseen by the crown: the theatre was restored by a royal proclamation from Charles II, who in a royal warrant dated 21 August 1660 granted patents to two courtiers, Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant, to set up two theatre companies, the King’s and the Duke’s.6 In line with this increasing royal control, the pre-Restoration canon was divided up between the two companies. Killigrew was favoured by Charles II and so the King’s Company received a larger number of Shakespeare plays: twenty-two compared with the nine allotted to Davenant’s troupe (The London Stage Part 1, 1960–8, 22, 152). Davenant’s company produced more Shakespeare adaptations than Killigrew’s, perhaps because the plays they were given were unsuited to the taste of the Restoration audience in their original form or perhaps because Davenant had more theatrical experience and was therefore more experimental. Both companies did, however, perform unadapted Shakespeare plays. The King’s Company held the rights to Othello, which proved popular throughout the period without revision. Davenant’s Company was also famous for their performances of a play that was not radically altered from the way in which Shakespeare wrote it: Hamlet. The actor Thomas Betterton was praised for his powerful performances of the lead role: the diarist Samuel Pepys said he acted the part “beyond imagination” and described the role as “the best part, I believe, that ever man acted” (Pepys, 1970–83, I, 161; IX, 296). It is important to note that while these plays were not subjected to the drastic changes undergone by some of the texts previously discussed, acting versions of them were prepared, which, like any theatre production, featured various cuts and changes. Nevertheless, Hamlet and Othello were rare exceptions to the adaptation-dominated Restoration Shakespeare repertory. However, as the prevalence of adaptations might suggest, many of Shakespeare’s plays did not prove popular with the Restoration audience, notably several of the comedies. Although performance records for the period 1660–1700 are scarce, there are very few known performances of unadapted Shakespearean comedies in comparison with the histories and tragedies: just five performances of The Merry Wives of Windsor, three performances of Twelfth Night and one of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Pepys writes disparagingly of seeing these plays, calling A Midsummer Night’s Dream “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life” (III, 208) and Twelfth Night “silly” and “weak” (IV, 6; IX, 421). In the early eighteenth century a change in the treatment of Shakespeare’s plays as literary texts influenced the ways in which they were performed. The year 1709 saw the first edition of Shakespeare, prepared by the popular dramatist and future Poet Laureate Nicholas Rowe. Editing Shakespeare became big business in the period, with many eminent men of letters undertaking the task.7 Rowe’s edition notably considered the plays’ performability by adding Act and Scene divisions, regularizing exits and entrances, specifying the location of the action and attaching a dramatis personae to each play. It is possible that the publication of Rowe’s work and its second edition in 1714 had an impact on the presentation of Shakespeare in the theatre: the proportion of Shakespeare in the repertory increased slightly (Scouten, 1956, 192). However, Rowe’s six-volume edition was priced at 30 shillings, which represented a sizeable investment for most consumers, and so the set was most likely targeted at only the “the wealthiest theatregoing play readers”

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(Dugas, 2006, 179). Shakespeare’s works were subsequently made accessible to less affluent consumers in 1734 when the publishers Jacob Tonson and Robert Walker engaged in a price war, selling individual copies of all of Shakespeare’s plays, in some cases for as little as a penny. This had a very real effect on the repertory since several plays that had not been performed since 1642 were now available to those who purchased playtexts in this way and readers naturally wanted to see these plays performed (Dugas, 2006, 232). Indeed, the revival of Shakespeare’s plays was often directly motivated by the audience. In the late 1730s, for example, a group of women known as the Shakespeare Ladies Club petitioned the managers of both Drury Lane and Covent Garden to stage more Shakespeare plays. The Club was successful: the proportion of Shakespeare in the repertory at both theatres increased demonstrably as a result of the Ladies’ requests (Ritchie, 2008, 61). A further consequence of the Club’s activity was the revival of several of Shakespeare’s English history plays, including 2 Henry VI, Henry V, 1 Henry VI and Richard II. The Club was also partly responsible for raising funds to erect a statue of Shakespeare by Peter Scheemakers in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey in 1741, a highpoint of eighteenth-century bardolatry. Another significant factor in entrenching Shakespeare in the eighteenth-century theatre repertory was the passing of the Stage Licensing Act in 1737, motivated by Prime Minister Robert Walpole’s desire to suppress the political satires being staged by Henry Fielding at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. Amongst other measures, the Act stipulated that all new dramatic scripts had to be pre-approved by the Examiner of Plays (who worked in the office of the Lord Chamberlain). In this climate that was hostile to new dramatic material, the managers of the two patent theatres increasingly turned to Shakespeare, whose plays were often tried and tested and thus represented less of a risk than staging new works. 8 In this way Shakespeare came to make up about one quarter of the plays performed on the London stage in the eighteenth century. The motivation for reviving Shakespeare could sometimes be surprising. In the 1740–1 season the actress Margaret (Peg) Woffington caused a sensation at Covent Garden in her performances of cross-dressed and breeches parts: she played the role of Sylvia in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (a part which involved her assuming a male disguise) and then took on the male role of Sir Harry Wildair in the same playwright’s The Constant Couple. In order to compete, the Drury Lane managers decided to resurrect some of Shakespeare’s plays which featured female cross-dressing in order to show off their actresses’ legs. As You Like It, Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice (none of which had yet been performed in the eighteenth century) all achieved phenomenal popularity in the 1740–1 season and remained in the repertory thereafter. Each of these plays was advertised as being “written by Shakespear”, suggesting that his name had now become an important advertising tool. The success of these revivals was due in no small measure to the talents of the actresses who performed in them, Hannah Pritchard and Catherine Clive, to whom I will return later. By the time that Garrick made his London stage debut in October 1741, Shakespeare had already been enshrined in England’s cultural imagination through the placement of a monument to celebrate him in Westminster Abbey and the various factors I have discussed had firmly established his works, whether adapted or unaltered, in the theatre repertory. The idea that Garrick was solely or predominantly responsible for popularizing Shakespeare on the eighteenth-century stage should therefore not go unchallenged. In fact, throughout his career as actor, manager and playwright, Garrick deliberately linked

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himself with Shakespeare in order to bolster his own fame.9 As I have already noted, although he claimed to be restoring Shakespeare’s text to the stage, Garrick in fact altered the plays as freely as the Restoration adapters. And as we shall see, Garrick was not the only actor heralded for the “naturalistic” acting style which became central to eighteenthcentury performance of Shakespeare. An examination of the Shakespeare repertory during the years of Garrick’s management of Drury Lane (1747–76) demonstrates that he did not in fact increase the number of Shakespeare plays performed. This was noted by Arthur H. Scouten in the 1950s: he counts twenty-two Shakespeare plays in the repertory at Drury Lane when Garrick became manager in 1747 compared with thirteen when he retired in 1776 and notes that Garrick himself revived only eight Shakespeare plays. Drury Lane seems to have had a reputation as the temple of Shakespeare, doubtless as a result of Garrick’s efforts to brand it as such: the prologue he delivered to open the 1750 theatre season proclaimed “Sacred to SHAKESPEARE was this spot design’d / To pierce the heart, and humanize the mind” (Garrick, III, xiii). But despite his association with pantomime rather than the Bard, John Rich, the manager of Covent Garden from 1715 to 1760, staged roughly the same amount of Shakespeare as could be seen at Drury Lane (Sawyer, 1972, 98). Nevertheless, the belief that Garrick was solely responsible for popularizing Shakespeare on the eighteenth-century stage persists. By the early nineteenth century, Drury Lane and Covent Garden had become cavernous spaces which could seat in excess of 3000 spectators. Many critics considered that this remodelling had a detrimental effect on acting style since gesture and vocal delivery had to be exaggerated in order to convey meaning to spectators seated far away from the stage. However, the dramatist Joanna Baillie in 1812 argued that Shakespeare remained popular since his plays were well known and thus readily intelligible: when a piece is familiar to the audience, the expression of actors’ faces is much better understood, though seen imperfectly; for the stronger marked traits of feeling which even in a large theatre may reach the eyes of a great part of the audience, from the recollection of finer and more delicate indications, formerly seen. (Baillie, 2003, 374) The actor-manager John Philip Kemble responded to the size of the playhouses by investing Shakespeare’s works with a new degree of spectacle, providing lavish costumes, stunning scenery and, wherever possible, pageantry. The biographer James Boaden cast this in terms of reform and improvement and makes clear that Kemble’s efforts were directed specifically at Shakespeare: he sought to give “a grand and permanent attraction to Drury Lane by encreasing the power of Shakspeare. This he proposed to effect by a more stately and perfect representation of his plays to attend to all the details as well as the grand features” (Boaden, 1825, I, 279). Kemble’s promptbook for his 1802 production of The Winter’s Tale contains an intricate sketch of the staging of the trial scene which shows a multi-levelled stage, numerous elaborate props (including papers, books, parchment, a sword of state, the Delphic altar and a casket containing the oracle) and a variety of supernumeraries in addition to the main characters, carefully placed on the stage for maximum visual effect. This scene was clearly a centrepiece of the Kemble’s presentation of the play. But as well as his detailed consideration of the visual aspects of his productions, Kemble also paid close attention to the texts of the plays. Twenty-six versions of Shakespeare were published in a collected edition of 1815 and Kemble’s texts of the play show “a progressive tendency toward

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crispness of action, clearness of plot-outline [and] in most cases care for the Shakespearian text” (Odell, 1966, II, 53). Kemble’s productions reinvigorated Shakespeare’s works for the Romantic theatre audience. They also served to define the “legitimate” drama that was the preserve of the patent houses in the face of the challenge from the minor theatres. In this way, Shakespeare was used as a symbol of cultural authority even while he was simultaneously employed by the illegitimate theatres to challenge the patent monopoly.

Actors and Acting: “Nature, Ease, Simplicity” Even when staged in a form close to the original, then, the performance of Shakespeare’s plays reflected the concerns of the era and evolved to fit the spaces and technology available for their presentation. Perhaps the most significant change to the way in which Shakespeare was staged was to the personnel involved in performing the plays. The advent of the professional actress altered English theatre irrevocably. Before the closure of the theatres in 1642 Shakespeare’s female roles had been performed by boy actors but with the reopening of the playhouses and the introduction to the London stage of a number of continental theatre customs that the court had experienced whilst in exile during the Interregnum, female performers became the norm. Early evidence of a professional actress in the London theatre is found in Thomas Jordan’s prologue to Othello, performed by the King’s Company on 8 December 1660. The speaker announces that a woman will play Desdemona today, excitedly claiming that he “saw the lady drest” and thus can be sure that the performer in question is female. The performance of female roles by women was subsequently made law in a royal patent issued by Charles II in 1662, which declared that in order to prevent the morally dubious practice of cross-dressed males performing female parts, from henceforward “all the woemen’s part . . . may be performed by woemen”. This reformation would be “esteemed not only harmless delight, but useful and instructive” (qtd in The London Stage Part 1, 1960–8, xxiv–xxv). The patent thus echoes the language of Jordan’s prologue, which claimed that the advent of the actress would “purge every thing that is unclean, / Lascivious, scurrilous, impious, or obscene”. However, Jordan’s introduction of the actress is not to be taken as a paean to the positive moral influence of the female performer. Although the speaker claims in the epilogue that “She’s the same thing in publick as in private; / As far from being what you call a Whore / As Desdemona injur’d by the Moor”, throughout the prologue and epilogue Jordan repeatedly emphasizes the actress’ sexuality: the lines “’Tis possible a virtuous woman may / Abhor all sorts of looseness, and yet play; / Play on the Stage, where all eyes are upon her” (Jordan, 1981–5, 1: 55, 56) suggest that the opposite thought would be uppermost in the audience’s mind and they would likely automatically consider the actress a whore, displaying herself to the public gaze in return for money as a prostitute would. The speaker’s protestations only serve to heighten the audience’s sense of the actress’ potential sexual availability to them; the new commodity of the actress apparently provided a great deal of titillation for Restoration playgoers, as became evident in the way that the female performer was used in subsequent adaptations of Shakespeare. The novelty of the Restoration actress therefore at first distanced her from her male peers. She was the subject of a great deal of attention but much of it was doubtless unwanted: for example, Jordan’s injunction to “have modest thoughts of her; pray do not run / To give her visits when the Play is done” (Jordan, 1981–5, 1: 55–6) was disregarded by many in the audience as playgoers often called on the actresses backstage, sometimes

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even watching them dress. Soon, however, the actress became an important element of the playing companies and began to receive the same professional recognition as her male counterparts. In the mid-1680s, Elizabeth Barry was the first performer of either sex to be accorded an annual benefit performance, a night on which she was able to select the play to be performed, sell tickets for the performance and keep the theatre’s profits, minus the house charges.10 Tradition prevented actresses from holding shares in the acting company, as actors did, and so Barry negotiated this professional perk in order to ensure she received fair remuneration for her work. These benefit nights, previously reserved largely for playwrights, subsequently became a staple of the agreements with theatre managers negotiated by both male and female performers but Barry led the way in ensuring that her professional skill was adequately compensated. This detail of Barry’s contract shows the professional respect that she was accorded. However, the Restoration actress still had to deal with the fact that her private persona was often conflated with the roles she played. Female performers in this period were largely considered whores and Barry was no exception, particularly given the public’s knowledge of her affair with the Earl of Rochester and rumours of subsequent liaisons with other members of the nobility. Thus, according to William Chetwood, the audience responded with “a Horse-laugh” when she spoke the line “Arm’d in my Virgin Innocence, I’ll fly” as the virtuous Cordelia in Tate’s King Lear. Anne Bracegirdle, much celebrated for her public reputation for chastity, was more successful in the part: Chetwood claims that on speaking this line Bracegirdle, in contrast, “received a Plaudit from the Audience, more as a Reward for her reputable Character, than, perhaps, her Acting claim’d” (Chetwood, 1749, 28). By the mid-eighteenth century, the situation had changed somewhat and the actress’ private and public personae were able to remain more distinct. Susannah Cibber, another notable Cordelia, was praised for her performance in the role, despite her somewhat scandalous private life.11 Thomas Davies writes in glowing terms of her performance: Mrs. Cibber, the most pathetic of all actresses, was the only Cordelia of excellence. The discovery of Lear, in prison, sleeping with his head on her lap, his hand closed in her’s [sic], whose expressive look spoke more than the most eloquent language, raised the most sympathising emotions. (Davies, 1783–4, II, 320) As previously noted, actresses had a profound impact on the presentation of Shakespeare in the Restoration and eighteenth century. His plays were rewritten in order to enhance or increase the female roles they contained and some of his works were revived in order to showcase the talents of the era’s most popular female performers. Nevertheless, contemporary accounts of performers in the Restoration and eighteenth century tend to focus on the actor at the expense of the actress. Thomas Betterton was considered the greatest Restoration performer and the period’s greatest interpreter of Shakespeare: Colley Cibber writes that “Betterton was an Actor, as Shakespear was an Author, both without Competitors! Form’d for the mutual Assistance, and Illustration of each others Genius!” (Cibber, 1968, 59–60). His interpretation of Hamlet influenced generations of subsequent actors and Cibber records a lengthy description of it, particularly praising Betterton’s performance in the scene in which Hamlet meets the Ghost of his father. Unfortunately, less critical commentary survives that describes Elizabeth Barry’s constructions of Shakespearean roles but, as I have already mentioned, much evidence exists of the professional respect that she was accorded. In addition to the care taken to reward her financially for her craft, critics praised her acting in the highest terms. Cibber wrote that she had “a power beyond all the actresses

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I have yet seen, or what your imagination can conceive” (Highfill, Burnim and Langhans, 1973–93, I, 324). She seems to have been most famous for the wide variety of roles that she played and the range of strong emotions she portrayed in each: Dennis describes her transitions “from Passion to Passion, from Extream to Extream, with piercing Force, and with easie Grace” (Highfill, Burnim and Langhans, 1973–93, I, 322). Like her male contemporary Betterton, Barry was more famous for her performances of Restoration drama than of Shakespeare and our modern desire to establish a genealogy of great Shakespearean actors can obscure the fact that Restoration audiences and critics praised performances of new plays more vociferously than old ones. In the mid-eighteenth century, the figure of Garrick dominates histories of Shakespearean acting. Garrick often altered Shakespeare’s plays in order to enlarge the part that he would play: his version of Macbeth expanded the dying line that Davenant gave the protagonist to a complete death speech which allowed him to demonstrate his talents in such scenes and his alteration of The Winter’s Tale shifts the focus of the play to the character of Leontes and the remorse he feels for his treatment of Hermione and Perdita. However, as a manager Garrick also developed a more systematic approach to rehearsal. Although the process did not necessarily become any more collaborative under his management (actors still received their parts independently of the whole text of the play and studied them individually), he did take great care to instruct his actors in their interpretations in order that their performances could shine. The other actors and actresses in Garrick’s company were thus of great importance in his presentation of Shakespeare, and of course the rival Covent Garden theatre also performed a great deal of Shakespeare. Although Garrick doubtless deserves the status of a great Shakespearean actor, he did not perform his plays in a vacuum. Garrick is credited with introducing a new, more “naturalistic” style of acting to the eighteenth-century stage: in a famous passage from Thomas Davies’ biography of Garrick he is described as “a theatrical Newton; he threw new light on elocution and action; he banished ranting, bombast, and grimace; and restored nature, ease, simplicity, and genuine humour” (Davies, 1780, I, 43). This style, it was claimed, helped to elucidate Shakespeare’s text more clearly: a poem that appeared in the London Chronicle in 1772 lauded the actor as “Best Commentator on Great SHAKESPEAR’s text! / When GARRICK acts, no passage seems perplext” (qtd in Price, 1973, 18). It certainly seems to be the case that there was a marked contrast between Garrick and his immediate predecessor James Quin. In his memoirs, Richard Cumberland describes this juxtaposition of the two actors in a performance of Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent: Quin delivered his lines “with very little variation of cadence, and in a deep full tone, accompanied by a sawing kind of action, which had more of the senate than of the stage in it”. Garrick, however, was young and light and alive in every muscle and in every feature . . . – heavens, what a transition! – it seemed as if a whole century had been stept over in the transition of a single scene; old things were done away, and a new order at once brought forward, bright and luminous, and clearly destined to dispel the barbarisms and bigotry of a tasteless age, too long attached to the prejudices of custom, and superstitiously devoted to the illusions of imposing declamation. (Cumberland, 2002, I, 48–9) Quin was static and declamatory, Garrick was lively and dynamic. Broadly speaking, the acting style of the eighteenth century shifted from one based on rhetoric to one based

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on action, from the vocal to the physical. Nevertheless, Quin was an extremely popular actor and, unlike his predecessors Betterton and Barry, did base his reputation on his Shakespearean roles. Proof of this lies in the fact that he was immortalized as Falstaff in porcelain figures by Bow, Derby and Staffordshire. Garrick cannot claim full credit for the innovations in acting technique often attributed to him since evidence exists that other performers were pioneering this approach before Garrick’s stage career took off. In the season before Garrick made his official London debut, Charles Macklin was pioneering a new, psychologically realistic style of acting. His performance as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in February 1741 was notable for what commentators described as its faithfulness to Shakespeare’s text: Macklin played “the Jew that Shakespeare drew” (which was admittedly easier to do with the original text, rather than George Granville’s comic adaptation, The Jew of Venice, popular since the beginning of the century). Macklin’s thorough preparation for the part, which involved visiting areas of London frequented by its Jewish population and reading Jewish history, probably influenced Garrick’s subsequent meticulous preparation for his roles through observing the details of daily life. Arthur Murphy describes how Garrick developed his portrayal of King Lear, basing his construction of the role on a tragic accident in which an acquaintance of Garrick’s dropped his baby daughter from an open window into the street below, killing her. The man subsequently went mad: Garrick frequently went to see his distracted friend, who passed the remainder of his life in going to the window, and there playing in fancy with his child. After some dalliance, he dropped it, and, bursting into a flood of tears, filled the house with shrieks of grief and bitter anguish. He then sat down, in a pensive mood, his eyes fixed on one object, at times looking slowly round him, as if to implore compassion. Garrick was often present at this scene of misery, and was ever after used to say, that it gave him the first idea of King Lear’s madness. (Murphy, 1801, I, 29–30) Later Spranger Barry excelled in the roles in which Garrick did not succeed. He had a more imposing stage presence and was a notable Othello, a role which Garrick played only a handful of times, apparently because he was not successful in it. Critics often noted the differing perspective that Barry brought to the roles that he shared with Garrick. His Lear was deemed “Every Inch a King” while Garrick was pronounced “Every Inch King Lear”, suggesting that Barry’s Lear was more regal and Garrick’s more domestic and affecting (Highfill, Burnim and Langhans, 1973–93, I, 331). And when the two actors went head to head as Romeo in the 1750 season, Barry was pronounced the better lover and Garrick the more fitting tragic hero, one female playgoer commenting “had I been Juliet to Garrick’s Romeo, – so ardent and impassioned was he, I should have expected he would have come up to me on the balcony; but had I been Juliet to Barry’s Romeo – so tender and so seductive was he, I should certainly have gone down to him!” (Highfill, Burnim and Langhans, 1973–93, I, 330). The actresses who performed in the Shakespeare revivals of the 1740–1 season were also credited for their “natural” acting style. Charles Churchill’s poem The Rosciad provides an interesting assessment of the acting abilities of the most important mideighteenth-century performers and praises a number of actresses. Catherine (Kitty) Clive is commended for her apparently effortless performances: “Original in spirit and in ease, / She pleas’d by hiding all attempts to please” (Churchill, 1761, 413–14). Here Churchill makes clear that part of acting “natural” was to conceal the art that went into

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a performance. Susannah Cibber was famous for her ability to provoke strong emotions in her audience: Churchill describes her ability “to melt the heart with sympathetic woe, / Awake the sigh, and teach the tear to flow” (Churchill, 1761, 457–8). For this actress, the realism of her performance lay in being able to enact the emotions proper to the character she was performing. Hannah Pritchard specialized in a different kind of role, the female virago rather than the comic ingénue or the pathetic heroine. That her acting also had a powerful effect on playgoers is clear from Churchill’s response to her performance of Lady Macbeth: When she to murther whets the tim’rous Thane, I feel Ambition rush through ev’ry vein; Persuasion hangs upon her daring tongue, My heart grows flint, and ev’ry nerve’s new strung. (Churchill, 1761, 491–4) Pritchard was in fact an extremely versatile performer and as such deserves wider recognition. Just as Garrick was praised for his special skill at excelling in both comedy and tragedy, a rare feat for eighteenth-century performers who usually stuck to one “walk”, Pritchard was also equally at home in both serious and comic drama. The two actors often partnered each other on stage and critics found it difficult to pronounce on who was the most accomplished. In his analysis of Much Ado About Nothing, which Garrick and Pritchard first performed in 1748, Thomas Davies claims that “the excellent action of Mrs. Pritchard in Beatrice, was not inferior to that of Benedick. Every scene between them was a continual struggle for superiority; nor could the audience determine which was the victor” (Davies, 1780, II, 164). Similarly, in his criticism of Macbeth Davies notes how well the two performers were matched: The representation of this terrible part of the play [the scenes surrounding the murder of Duncan], by Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard, can no more be described than I believe it can be equalled. I will not separate these performers, for the merits of both were transcendent. His distraction of mind and agonizing horrors were finely contrasted by her seeming apathy, tranquillity, and confidence. (Davies, 1783–4, II, 148) Pritchard left the stage in 1768 and Garrick retired in 1776. The next generation of performers could not escape their influence but their acting style was quite different. Garrick had tried out a young provincial actress, Sarah Siddons, in 1775 with little success. However, when she returned to the London stage in 1782 she caused a sensation; it seems that playgoers were ready for a new star performer. Siddons’ approach to the roles she played was to attempt to find some way of sympathizing with the character in order to develop a fully realized depiction of her. In contrast to Hannah Pritchard’s fearsome portrayal of Lady Macbeth, Siddons was convinced that the character was fair, feminine, nay, perhaps, even fragile . . . Such a combination only, respectable in energy and strength of mind, and captivating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless, a character so amiable, so honourable as Macbeth. (Siddons, 1834, 11) This femininity contrasted with Lady Macbeth’s “remorseless ambition” (Siddons, 1834, 20) to provide an innovative reading of the character. Her rendition of the sleepwalking scene was described as “the greatest act that has in our memory adorned the stage” when she first played in the role in February 1785 (Highfill, Burnim and Langhans, 1973–93,

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XVI, 15). Indeed, when she made her final stage appearance in this part twenty-eight years later, the play concluded after this scene at the audience’s behest. Siddons’ brother, John Philip Kemble, became the leading male actor of the late eighteenth century. However, his style was very different from that of his predecessor, Garrick. For a start, his physique was much more imposing: he was a great deal taller than Garrick’s five feet six inches. Whereas audiences had enjoyed the apparent intimacy of Garrick’s performances, Kemble was praised for his stateliness. The actor John Howard Payne wrote of his “inimitable dignity” as Coriolanus and commended “the Roman energy of his deportment, the seraphic grace of his gesture, and the movements of his perfect selfpossession” (Highfill, Burnim and Langhans, 1973–93, VIII, 366). Kemble’s majestic stage presence was very much to his advantage given the increasing size of the London theatre auditoria. To suit the new conditions of the stage, Kemble’s acting style was grander and more deliberate, in order to be better seen throughout the auditorium. It is doubtful whether Garrick’s intimate style and quick transitions between the passions would have been as effective in a theatre which seated over 3000 people as they were in his Drury Lane, which, at its largest, accommodated 1800 playgoers.

Conclusion When the theatres reopened in 1660, Shakespeare was treated freely and his works were adapted in whatever way was deemed necessary in order to cater to the changing desires of the audience. In the Restoration Shakespeare had yet to achieve the important cultural status he would be accorded in the eighteenth century, when the editing of his texts as literary works placed them on a par with the classical authors and even the Bible, and his plays became firmly entrenched in the theatre repertory. Despite the Enlightenment’s new reverence for the Bard, many of the Restoration adaptations held the stage and eighteenth-century theatre managers and playwrights continued to rework Shakespeare’s plays for their audiences or to introduce contemporary elements into their productions of his works, even as the rhetoric surrounding his irrevocable cultural position increased. As far as acting was concerned, whereas Shakespearean roles had been important for Restoration performers in proving their talent, they became indispensable to later eighteenth-century actors and actresses in developing their stage careers. The Restoration and eighteenth century firmly established Shakespeare’s place on the British stage, ensuring that his legacy continued in performance as well as in print. But Shakespeare could only be popularized once he had been made to fit the taste of the times.

Notes 1. Dates given are those of first performance. 2. Richard III was not restored in full until 1821 and parts of Cibber’s dialogue even made their way into Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film. King Lear and The Tempest reappeared as Shakespeare wrote them in 1838. For full performance histories of Shakespeare’s plays from the Restoration to the end of the nineteenth century, see Odell, 1966. 3. For a discussion of audience and reader awareness of Shakespeare in the early eighteenth century, see Hume, 1997. 4. All references to Garrick are taken from the Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann edition. 5. By the mid-eighteenth century it had become customary to stage a short play (usually a comedy

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or farce) after the main play and this double bill tradition continued throughout the century. The role of Shakespeare adaptation in the development of the afterpiece in the eighteenth century is discussed by Scheil, 2003, 153–87. The Theatre Royal Drury Lane and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden still derive their status from the patents granted in 1660. Rowe’s attempt was followed by editions from Pope (1725), Theobald (1733), Hanmer (1744), Warburton (1747), Johnson (1765), Capell (1768), Johnson and Steevens (1773), Reed (1785) and Malone (1790). Many essays, commentaries and selections also appeared in the period. Kinservik notes eight major revivals (i.e. plays not performed for the last twenty-five years) of plays by Shakespeare in the period 1737–47 (Kinservick, 2002, 111). Perhaps the most famous example of this is his orchestration of the Jubilee in honour of Shakespeare, held in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769. For a complementary discussion of the Jubilee, see Mark Thornton Burnett’s chapter in this volume. See Cibber’s Apology, 1968, 218 and Bush-Bailey, 2006, 62–4. She was the wife of the notorious Theophilus Cibber (son of Colley) who “sold” her to an admirer named William Sloper (with whom she subsequently fell in love) and then sued for damages.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Addison, Joseph (1965). The Spectator, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bond. Oxford: Clarendon, 5 vols. Baillie, Joanna [1812] (2003). “To the Reader”. In The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 370–8. Boaden, James (1825). Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Esq. London: Longman, 2 vols. Bush-Bailey, Gilli (2006). Treading the Bawds: Actresses and Playwrights on the Late-Stuart Stage. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chetwood, W. R. (1749). A General History of the Stage, from its Origin in Greece Down to the Present Time. London: Printed for W. Owen, near Temple-Bar. Churchill, Charles (1761). The Rosciad. Dublin: n.p. Cibber, Colley [1740] (1968). An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber. With an Historical View of the Stage during His Own Time. Written by Himself, ed. and intro. B. R. S. Fone. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Clark, Sandra, ed. (1997). Shakespeare Made Fit: Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare. London: Dent. Cumberland, Richard [1807] (2002). The Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, ed. Richard J. Dircks. New York: AMS, 2 vols as one. Davies, Thomas (1780). Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq. London: Printed for the Author, and sold at his Shop in Great Russell-Street, Covent-Garden, 2 vols. ——(1783–4) Dramatic Micellanies [sic]. London: Printed for the Author, and sold at his Shop in Great Russell-Street, Covent-Garden, 3 vols. Dennis, John [1725?] (1939–43). “The Causes of the Decay and Defects of Dramatic Poetry, and the Degeneracy of the Publick Tast”. In The Critical Works of John Dennis. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, II, 275–99. Dryden, John (1679). Troilus and Cressida, or, Truth Found Too Late. London: Printed for Abel Swan and Jacob Tonson. Dugas, Don-John (2006). Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660–1740. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Garrick, David (1980–2). The Plays of David Garrick, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 7 vols. Highfill, Philip H. Jr, Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, eds (1973–93). A Biographical

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Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 16 vols. Hume, Robert D. (1997). “Before the Bard: ‘Shakespeare’ in Early Eighteenth-Century London”. ELH 64.1, 41–75. Johnson, Samuel (1958–90). The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 16 vols. Jordan, Thomas [1660] (1981–5). “Prologue to Introduce the First Woman that came to Act on the Stage in the Tragedy, call’d The Moor of Venice” and “Epilogue to Othello”. In The Prologues and Epilogues of the Restoration 1660–1700, ed. Pierre Danchin. 4 parts. Nancy: Publications de l’Université de Nancy, 1: 55–6. Kinservik, Matthew J. (2002). Disciplining Satire: The Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the EighteenthCentury London Stage. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. The London Stage, 1660–1800 (1960–8). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 5 parts. Murphy, Arthur (1801). The Life of David Garrick, Esq. London: Wright, 2 vols. Odell, George C. D. (1966). Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving. New York: Dover, 2 vols. Pepys, Samuel (1970–83). The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews. London: Bell, 11 vols. Poole, John [1810] (1977–8). Hamlet Travestie. In Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesques, ed. and intro. Stanley Wells. 5 vols. London: Diploma, I, 1–69. Price, Cecil (1973). Theatre in the Age of Garrick. Oxford: Blackwell. Ritchie, Fiona (2008). “The Influence of the Female Audience on the Shakespeare Revival of 1736–38: The Case of the Shakespeare Ladies Club”. In Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter Sabor and Paul Yachnin. Aldershot: Ashgate, 57–69. Sawyer, Paul (1972). “John Rich’s Contribution to the Eighteenth-Century London Stage”. In Essays on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage, ed. Kenneth Richards and Peter Thomson. London: Methuen, 85–104. Scheil, Katherine West (2003). The Taste of the Town: Shakespearian Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Century Theater. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Scouten, Arthur H. (1956). “The Increase in Popularity of Shakespeare’s Plays in the Eighteenth Century: A Caveat for Interpretors of Stage History”. Shakespeare Quarterly 7.2, 189–202. Siddons, Sarah (1834). “Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth”. In Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons. 2 vols. London: Effingham Wilson, II, 10–39. Spencer, Christopher, ed. (1965). Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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SHAKESPEARE AND THE VICTORIAN STAGE Richard Foulkes

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n 27 June 1832 “Mr. William Charles Macready, [was] called in; and Examined by the Select Committee appointed to inquire in the LAWS affecting Dramatic Literature” (British Parliamentary Papers, 1968, 132–6). The Select Committee had been convened at the instigation of politician, novelist and playwright-to-be Mr Edward Lytton Bulwer as he then was, better known as Edward Bulwer Lytton. Earlier that month, on 7 June, the Reform Bill was passed and as his England and the English, published the next year, shows, Bulwer Lytton’s concern about the condition of England extended to the recreational opportunities for the population at large at a time when London and the industrial cities were expanding, as of course they continued to do (probably beyond his – or indeed anyone’s – expectations) during the remaining decades of the nineteenth century. The aspect of the theatre about which the committee particularly sought Macready’s views was the performance of Shakespeare’s plays in the capital, where the monopoly of the two patent theatres (Covent Garden and Drury Lane), instituted by King Charles II, still prevailed, with some dispensation for the Haymarket Theatre. In the interim Covent Garden and Drury Lane had been rebuilt several times (fire was a serious hazard) larger each time to the extent that the capacity of Drury Lane had increased to 3611 in 1794. The size of the patent theatres had a marked effect on the style of acting, the methods of staging and the composition of the audience. Thus the Select Committee was keen to know Macready’s views on the performance of Shakespeare’s plays in smaller theatres. He acknowledged that he felt “it to be much easier to act in a small theatre than in a large” and “could wish Covent Garden and Drury Lane somewhat reduced, but not very much”; he thought “very few of them [Shakespeare’s plays] can be found which can have due effect given to them in a small theatre”. By this he presumably meant the size of casts; by then Shakespeare’s characters were being supplemented by numerous extras for crowd scenes, and the scenery, which was increasingly elaborate and painstakingly researched for historical accuracy. Given the superior resources of the patent theatres and the public’s evident preference for their style of presenting Shakespeare’s plays, it was put to Macready “that they would not be injured by that competition” to which he replied that there would be “so many markets for talent” that actors would be lured away from the patent theatres, which would no longer be able to maintain the scale and standard of their work (British Parliamentary Papers, 1968, 132–6). The problem with Macready’s defence of the monopoly was that the patent houses were not honouring their role as custodians of Shakespeare. Thus when he was asked “how

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many times you have played Shakespeare’s characters [at Drury Lane] in those two years [of his current engagement]” he had no option but to reply rather lamely: “I think the play of Macbeth has been done six times in the last season, and Richard has been acted, I think, five times, and Hamlet once, and the Winter’s Tale once” and his answer to the question “Does it appear, then, that Drury Lane avails itself very often of Shakespeare’s plays?” could only be “it does not”. By way of justification Macready pointed out that “the losses have been very heavy” for the proprietors of the patent houses (British Parliamentary Papers, 1968, 132–6). The issues implicit in the Select Committee’s enquiry extended beyond theatre architecture and styles of staging Shakespeare to underlying questions about the ownership of the national Bard. Should this be restricted in the capital to two theatres which were so large as to be able to accommodate all sections of society at differential prices, or should free trade prevail, liberating theatres not just in the West End but also those in the expanding suburbs, where there was demand from the local inhabitants for entertainment, including Shakespeare, at a price they could afford? The ensuing account of Shakespeare on the Victorian stage shows how these questions were resolved in at least some theatres. The experience of running the patent theatres during the first three decades of the nineteenth century had been challenging to put it mildly. As Fiona Ritchie notes in her chapter in this volume, the family (dynasty even) that had most frequently taken up this challenge was the Kembles. The progeny of Roger and Sarah Kemble dominated the London stage from the 1780s, with their daughter Sarah Siddons enjoying instantaneous success with her Lady Macbeth on 10 October 1782 at Drury Lane where the next year she was joined by her brother John Philip Kemble. The brother and sister partnered each other as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth on 21 April 1794 with their younger brother Charles as Malcolm. During J. P. Kemble’s tenure the aforementioned expansion to 3611 took place, but in 1802, wearying of working with R. B. Sheridan (less successful as manager than as dramatist), the Kembles transferred to Covent Garden, where John Philip’s attempt to raise ticket prices (following expensive rebuilding after a fire) for Macbeth on 18 September 1809 sparked off the Old Price riots, which continued for sixty-one nights until he backed down. He remained at Covent Garden until his retirement in 1817, when his younger brother Charles took over, surviving somewhat precariously and being saved from bankruptcy in 1829 by his daughter Fanny’s sensational success as Juliet. Despite being siblings and often taking leading roles together, Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble were dissimilar actors, with Siddons, drawing on personal experience, investing her performances with powerful emotional force, in contrast to the studied technique of her brother. As a manager John Philip Kemble favoured pictorial Shakespeare, notably in his revival of Henry VIII (23 April 1806), as did his brother Charles who benefited from the (free) services of the antiquarian J. R. Planche for his staging of King John on 3 March 1823. By then the Kembles had been eclipsed by Edmund Kean, who had burst on the London theatrical scene with his electrifying interpretation of Shylock on 26 January 1814 at Drury Lane where he was to open Robert Elliston’s management with King Lear on 24 April 1820. Whereas the Kembles, especially John Philip, projected authority and conservatism, Kean brought a subversive romanticism to his roles. Although he was from a theatrical family William Charles Macready was a reluctant recruit to the profession. Having been obliged to leave Rugby School, following the decline in his father’s fortunes, he made his debut at the age of seventeen as Romeo in Birmingham on 7 June 1810. Performing with Mrs Siddons in Edward Moore’s The

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Gamester at Newcastle-upon-Tyne the next year was a formative experience and, though his father warned him against imitation, the young Macready closely observed the acting of John Philip Kemble as well as that of Edmund Kean, to whose Othello he played Iago at Drury Lane on 26 November 1832, just a few months after giving evidence to the Select Committee and only a few months before Kean’s death in May 1833. Macready’s biographer William Archer essayed the task of characterizing Macready’s acting style and its relationship to the Kembles and Kean: Let us now try to summarize the leading characteristics of Macready’s style. He was consciously and of set purpose an eclectic actor, trying to combine the dignity of the Kemble school with the vivacity of Kean. He is reported to have said that ‘his aim was to present an amalgam of Kean and Talma’. Natural grace, unfortunately, he did not possess . . . In make-up he seems never to have aimed at comeliness . . . His voice was by nature very fine and rich . . . he belonged, in the main, to what is called the ‘natural’ school of actors. (Archer, 1883, 193–7) Another close observer of Macready, G. H. Lewes, saw in him “only a man of talent, but of talent so marked and individual that it approaches very near to genius” whose particular strength was his intelligence: “yet his intelligence always made him follow the winding meanings through the involutions of the verse and never allowed you to feel . . . that he was speaking words which he did not thoroughly understand” (Lewes, 1875, 40). As an actor Macready’s range was limited. He was not suited to comedy, though early in his career his Benedick had its admirers. A more clear-cut early success was Richard III with which he established himself on the London stage on 25 October 1819, but it did not remain in his core repertoire. This essentially consisted of Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Iago and pre-eminently Macbeth. Of Macbeth playwright and critic Westland Marston remarked “Reasoning carried it over intuition; all had been too obviously reasoned out” (Rowell, 1971, 73). If this attention to detail was not conducive to success as an actor it was more of an asset to Macready as a manager and what would now be termed director. Although in 1832 the Select Committee had recommended the abolition of the patent theatres monopoly, this did not take place until 1843. In the interim Macready, who had defended the monopoly in his evidence to the Select Committee, successively undertook the management of both theatres: Covent Garden in 1837–9 and Drury Lane in 1841–3. In both cases, as his diaries reveal, Macready was assiduous in his attention to every detail: engaging actors, musicians and stage crew; determining the acting edition with Shakespeare’s plays; commissioning new work; settling scenery, costumes and lighting; sharing his ideas with his inner circle of friends notably Charles Dickens and John Forster; checking the table of forfeits (exacted for drunkenness, lack of punctuality and other lapses); rehearsing; improving the front-of-house facilities (banishing prostitutes from the saloon at Drury Lane); and even on 26 August 1837 “Spoke to Mr. Bottomley about coals” (Pollock, 1876, 429). Macready’s Covent Garden management commenced on 30 September 1837 with The Winter’s Tale in which he played Leontes and Helen Faucit was Hermione. The highlight of the first season was undoubtedly King Lear on 25 January 1838 in which the Fool appeared for the first time in over 200 years, albeit played by Priscilla Horton as “the sort of fragile, hectic, beautiful-faced boy that he should be” (Pollock, 1876, 438). John Forster hailed the restoration, pointing to the close association between the Fool and Cordelia, who in Helen Faucit’s performance accentuated the father–daughter relationship so

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beloved by the Victorians: “Mr. Macready’s representation of the father at the end, broken down to his last despairing struggle, his heart swelling gradually upwards till it bursts in its closing sigh, completed the only perfect picture that we have had of Lear since the age of Betterton” (Rowell, 1971, 66). Claims to textual authenticity often fail to stand up to scrutiny not least because of the cuts enforced by another claim to authenticity – namely the elaborate sets designed to recreate accurately the historical period in which a particular play was set. This was the case with Macready’s acclaimed production of Henry V on 10 June 1839 in which “the narrative and descriptive poetry spoken by the chorus is accompanied with PICTORIAL ILLUSTRATIONS from the pencil of MR. STANFIELD” in the form of the diorama (Odell, 1966, II, 219). Macready and Stansfield, like all exponents of the pictorial stage, felt they were remedying a deficiency of Shakespeare’s theatre that was unequal to presenting the “vasty fields of France”. Thus instead of rising to the Chorus’ injunction to “grapple your minds” and use their imagination, Victorian audiences were beguiled by the arts of the antiquarian and scene painter. Henry V would have exceeded its tally of twenty-one had Macready not restricted it to four performances a week rather than an open-ended long run. Although he had not extended his Covent Garden management into a third season Macready, encouraged by Dickens and other friends, returned to the fray this time at Drury Lane which apparently required even more refurbishment than Covent Garden had done. The Merchant of Venice on 27 December 1841 followed by – more unusually – The Two Gentlemen of Verona two days later with Macready, who had again assembled a strong company including Samuel Phelps, James Anderson, Mrs Warner and Mrs Keeley, as Valentine, got the management under way competently if not particularly excitingly. That came when the second season opened with As You Like It on 1 October 1842. Although Mrs Nisbett was mis-cast as Rosalind as was Macready as Jaques, overall the revival was a triumph. The same was true, though on rather different terms, with King John on 24 October 1842. Both of these productions have been painstakingly reconstructed by Charles H. Shattuck (Shattuck, 1962a and b), drawing on promptbooks, set and costume designs and other extant material. Mrs Nisbett ceded the role of Rosalind to Helen Faucit for whom it proved to be a long-standing success, numbering Queen Victoria amongst its admirers. She and the Prince Consort attended the performance in state on 12 June 1843. As a professed republican Macready had an ambivalent attitude towards royal patronage which he nevertheless regarded as due to his profession and himself as its leader. In their different ways Victoria and Albert were both enthusiasts for the stage; he, the more scholarly, asked “if this was not the original play. I told him: Yes, that we had restored the original text” (Pollock, 1876, 525). Later in the decade on 28 December 1848 royal patronage was greatly extended by the inauguration of the Windsor Castle Theatricals with a performance of The Merchant of Venice in the relative intimacy of the Rubens Room. The choice of Shakespeare for the occasion though hardly surprising was none the less significant. As for Macready, with his coffers depleted and the days of the patent theatres numbered, he set off to America on the second of three visits. The first had been in 1826–7, accompanied by his first wife and his sister Letitia. In 1843–4 he took John Ryder to play supporting roles in engagements ranging from New York to New Orleans and Macon to Montreal. On his return Macready performed with an English company in Paris, as he had done in 1827. New audiences far and wide responded enthusiastically to Shakespeare’s plays, which formed the core of these overseas ventures, thereby ensuring that the expansion of

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British influence and power had a cultural dimension to it, though without state support or intervention. Unhappily for Macready on his third visit to America (again with Ryder) he fell foul of the Philadelphia-born actor Edwin Forrest, who stalked him, replicating his roles and encouraging his supporters to disrupt performances, culminating in the Astor Place riots on 10 May 1849 which resulted in nearly 100 fatalities (Cliff, 2007). Macready, who had been considering emigrating to America, returned home for a series of farewell performances capped with a retirement dinner attended by 650 worthies, at which his achievements, particularly in Shakespeare, were lauded. Although, as the guest-list demonstrated, Macready loved to see himself as part of a social and cultural elite, he obviously accommodated humbler patrons during his managements of the patent theatres. He also appeared at minor theatres such as the Surrey and the Marylebone and in retirement he devoted himself to the Sherborne Night School for the education of the poor. Amongst the many toasts at the farewell dinner was one to “The Stage”, proposed by W. J. Fox MP: Mr. W. J. Fox, M.P., proposed ‘The Stage’, connecting with it the name of Mr. C. Kemble, as one of the representatives of the past, and Mr. Phelps, as one of the representatives of the future – the latter gentleman, he observed, having reclaimed Sadler’s Wells from clowns and waterworks (hear, hear), and made it a not unworthy shrine of Shakespeare, and a pledge of what the drama would be before the impulse which had been given to it by Mr. Macready was exhausted. (Pollock, 1876, 669–70) The distinction between heir apparent and rival was a fine one in the nineteenthcentury theatre and Phelps’ relationship with Macready had veered between the two. At both Covent Garden and Drury Lane Phelps had no doubt that he was being “bookshelved”, that is to say not being given the roles for which he was eminently suited because of Macready’s fear of him as a rival. Phelps had wisely declined Macready’s invitation to accompany him to America in 1843 when it was pointed out to him that with Macready away he had a golden opportunity at home. On 22 August 1843 the Theatres Regulation Bill was passed by both Houses of Parliament, removing after nearly 200 years the restriction on the performance of Shakespeare’s plays in London. Earlier in the month on 5 August Phelps and Mrs Warner appeared in a benefit performance of Othello at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in Islington and “were surprised by the size of the audience” (Allen, 1971, 70). Encouraged by this Phelps, Thomas Greenwood (the theatre’s lessee) and Mrs Warner announced that they would be opening the theatre under their joint management on 27 May 1844 with a performance of Macbeth. The handbills that were distributed in the locality clearly signalled their aspirations. They pointed out that with the abolition of the monopoly “the law has placed all theatres upon an equal footing” and that Sadler’s Wells would be “a place for justly representing the works of our greatest dramatic poets”. They avowed that “each separate division of an immense metropolis, with its 2,000,000 of inhabitants, may have its own well-conducted theatre within a reasonable distance of the homes of its patrons” and that admission should be “at a price fairly within the habitual means of all” (Allen, 1971, 82). The composition of the Sadler’s Wells audience has been much debated. Was it predominantly local? If so what were the demographics of the neighbourhood? In their chapter on Sadler’s Wells in Reflecting the Audience, Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow (2001, 108–36) sift through such evidence as omnibus routes, census returns and clues in the press. With the population of Islington rising from 55,720 in 1844 to 155,341 in 1861 the potential audience certainly increased. Naturally this expansion provided work

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for builders and allied trades constructing properties for “a large professional and skilled artisan class”. Women and students (medicine and law) were particularly well represented at Sadler’s Wells. Davis and Emeljanow conclude that “Generally Phelps’s audiences were drawn from the neighbourhood . . . Sadler’s Wells became identified as a venue whose patrons, if not from a narrowly-defined middle-class, nevertheless exhibited middle class behaviour” (Davis and Emeljanow, 2001, 117–18). By any measure Phelps’ achievements in his eighteen years at Sadler’s Wells were remarkable. He staged thirty-one of Shakespeare’s plays, including such rarities as Timon of Athens and Pericles, albeit in heavily edited acting versions (particularly so in Pericles with its many indelicacies). Phelps also revived Massinger and Beaumont and Fletcher, though he was less successful with new work. Shirley Allen’s inventory of Phelps’ repertoire at Sadler’s Wells reveals that the total of 3472 nights was split between Shakespeare (1632) and non-Shakespeare (1860). The hallmarks of Phelps’ regime were a strong ensemble acting company of which he was undeniably the leader, though avoiding the egotism of Macready and many another actor-manager; an extensive repertoire as already demonstrated; acting editions that though – inevitably – shortened were at least grounded in the original text; and tasteful costumes and scenery without allowing them to overshadow the play and performers. In tragedy Phelps’ style resembled Macready’s (a similar tendency to over-careful rather laboured performances), but, unlike the older actor, he was a very adept player of comedy, mining his character for its human failings without resorting to external excesses of business or overplaying to the audience. Thus Henry Morley wrote of him as Bottom after his assumption of the ass’ head (a skilful device which he could manipulate with wires concealed in his breast): “He accepts all that happens, quietly as dreamers do” and perhaps more significantly “Bottom was completely incorporated with the A Midsummer Night’s Dream, made an essential part of it, as insubstantial, as airy and refined as all the rest” (Rowell, 1971, 104). The harmonization of the acting and the scenery within a total concept of the play is apparent from Morley’s account of the woodland, “free from meretricious glitter”, in which “one scene is made to glide insensibly into another . . . over all the fairy portion of the play there is a haze thrown by a curtain of green gauze placed between the actors and the audience . . . it . . . incorporates more completely the actors with the scenes, throwing the same green fairy tinge, and the same mist over all” (Morley, 1891, 102–3). Phelps’ mastery of the resources of the Victorian stage combined the diorama with the use of gauze, subtle lighting and harmonious costumes in the service of the actors and the play as a whole. Phelps deployed similar techniques in Pericles, a rare offering in 1854, when it received the same number (fifty-five) of performances as A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the previous season, but in Morley’s view it “may be said to succeed only because it is a spectacle”, with Pericles’ ship tossing vigorously and: When he sails at last to the temple of Diana of the Ephesians, rowers take their places on their banks [of oars], the vessel seems to glide along the coast, an admirably-painted panorama slides before the eye, and the whole theatre seems to be in the course of actual transportation to the temple at Ephesus, which is the crowning scenic glory of the play. The dresses, which, like the sets, were based on recent discoveries at Nineveh by A. H. Layard, were “brilliant” (Morley, 1891, 83). Henry Morley was more likely to apply strictures about excessive spectacle to Charles

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Kean’s Princess’ Theatre in Oxford Street. Like Phelps, Eton-educated Charles Kean, who was appointed director of the Windsor Castle Theatricals in 1848, was benefiting from the abolition of the monopoly, but in his case at a West End location where he aimed to attract fashionable audiences. He commenced his management, initially with the Keeleys, on 28 September 1850 with the first season running until 17 October 1851, thereby coinciding with the Great Exhibition which after a slow start was good for theatrical business, helping to boost Kean’s profits to £7000. That season had begun and ended with Twelfth Night, but comedy was not the genre for which Kean was to become renowned. That was history plays. In his study of Charles Kean’s historical revivals Richard W. Schoch contrasts him with Macready whose goal had been to use history to represent Shakespeare, whereas Kean’s was “to use Shakespeare to represent history” (Schoch, 1998, 3). As Schoch argues, Kean’s antiquarianism was part of a widespread fascination with the medievalism (the Medieval Court was allegedly the most popular part of the Great Exhibition) which was “nothing if not an attempt to create a genealogy of national identity” (15). The duration of Kean’s Princess’ Theatre management, which ended in 1859, was about half as long as Phelps’ at Sadler’s Wells and with longer runs for his major revivals, to recoup their cost, his Shakespearian repertoire was much smaller, amounting to twelve. However amongst Kean’s greatest successes was one of the few Shakespeare plays that Phelps never staged: Richard II. As Kean’s biographer J. W. Cole observed, in 1817 Charles’ father Edmund Kean “did wonders with the part of the deposed king” in “an illassorted mixture put together by Wroughton, the Drury Lane stage manager”, but failed to restore “permanent life” to the piece (Cole, 1859, II, 204–5). Charles’ aspiration was to bring the historical period back to life. Appropriately therefore the first performance of Kean’s Richard II took place on 5 February 1857 at Windsor Castle in St George’s Hall, where he “specifically set his Act 5 Scene 4 (Shakespeare’s Scene 6), thereby achieving as complete authenticity as possible” and causing Queen Victoria to remark: “It was curious that a play in which all my ancestors figured, should just have been performed in St. George’s Hall” (Foulkes, 2002, 46). Her Majesty attended a further five performances at the Princess’ where the playbill proclaimed Kean’s endeavour “to produce a true portraiture of medieval history” with recreations of the Lists at Coventry, the Fleet at Milford Haven, Castles of Pembroke and Flint all based on the most impeccable historical sources (FSAs Anthony Salvin and Henry Shaw amongst them), as was the case with the interpolated HISTORICAL EPISODE (only described in Shakespeare) of the entry of Richard and Bolingbroke to London. The justification was “to surround the glowing imagery of the great Poet with accompaniments true to the time of which he writes – realizing the scenes and actions which he describes – exhibiting men as they once lived”. Such absorption in the detailed life of an earlier age was a feature of pre-Raphaelite painting which flowered in the 1850s. Minute accuracy could now be achieved by photography and thanks to the skill of Martin Laroche, whose studio was only a few doors away, Kean’s production of Richard II was immortalized by a series of over twenty fine photographs (Foulkes, 2002, 47, 49). One member of the Princess’ Theatre audience with the eyes of a photographer was Lewis Carroll (or Charles Dodgson as he was until the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865), mathematician, cleric and children’s author, who from his initiation at the Princess’ on 22 June 1855 with Henry VIII became an inveterate theatre-goer. His verdict on Richard II was “excellent as far as the scenes and grouping went, but it gave little scope for acting. The entry into London was marvellous” (Wakeling, 1993–2007, III, 52).

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With his unprepossessing figure, unexpressive face and nasal delivery Charles Kean was not very impressive as an actor, far less so than his formidable wife, the former Ellen Tree. As with the set he based his costumes on historical sources, in particular the so-called Jerusalem Chamber portrait of Richard II, which in the summer of 1857 was on public display at the Art Treasures of the United Kingdom exhibition in Manchester, on loan from Westminster Abbey. As one would expect the Keans aspired to the same degree of naturalism in acting as in stagecraft and in Richard II one scene at least was imbued with authentically powerful emotion: In the parting scene however Mrs Kean shows how a consummate artist can make a great deal out of scanty material . . . Mrs Kean, when Richard is torn from her arms displays such an agony of tearful grief, is so completely broken up with heartrending sorrow, that, although the pageantry of the play is over, this scene is one of the most effective in the whole performance. (The Times, 16 March 1857) Before long the Keans endured a lengthy parting, not from each other, but from their daughter Mary, as they undertook the apparently mandatory post-management, preretirement tour, in their case to Australia returning via America and lasting nearly three years. Whereas at the Princess’ the Keans had cultivated the well-to-do and at Windsor Castle Charles had presided over the royal theatricals, in Australia they ventured into the mining areas, performing Henry VIII, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet at Ballarat and taking excursions to “the diggings”. It was ironic that, with both Phelps’ and Kean’s managements at an end, the theatrical profession lacked a recognized leader at the time of the Shakespeare tercentenary of 1864. Furthermore the death of Prince Albert in 1861 and his widow’s withdrawal from public life left a vacuum in royal patronage. All sectors of society had rallied together to secure the purchase of Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-upon-Avon for the nation in 1847, but plans to mark the tercentenary were characterized by factiousness and rivalry. Perhaps this reflected the extension of the theatrical franchise for Shakespeare in 1843. There were no longer (two) designated theatres for the performance of his plays and by extension Shakespeare was now subject to claims by different social (political even) groupings, competing religious persuasions (Anglican, Roman Catholic, atheist) and educational organizations. The main contention was between his birthplace, the Warwickshire market town of Stratford-upon-Avon, and the capital where he had spent his working life and where his plays had first been performed. Stratford-upon-Avon could point to the precedent of Garrick’s bicentenary jubilee held (belatedly) in the town in September 1769, marred by appalling weather and (tales of) the rapaciousness of the locals. In 1824 the Shakespeare Club, still in existence, was founded and in 1830 the young Charles Kean led a procession proclaiming the patronage of the king. This identification of Shakespeare with the head of state was symptomatic of a trend that gathered pace throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, elevating the Warwickshire bard to the status of a national icon celebrating not only his country’s esteem for him but also its self-esteem. The vicissitudes of the 1864 tercentenary were chronicled by Robert Hunter (“Late Secretary of the Stratford-upon-Avon Committee”). In brief the London committee struggled to mount a programme, though a few theatres did stage plays, notably Drury Lane, harking back to its former status, with 1 Henry IV in which Phelps played Falstaff, and the Surrey, boldly seizing its freedom with 2 Henry VI. In fact the most dramatic event took place on Primrose Hill where a tree (oak) planting

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ceremony organized by the Working Men’s Shakespeare Committee was hijacked by protestors about the recent departure (allegedly enforced by the government) of Garibaldi (Foulkes, 1984, 42–4). That the situation in Stratford-upon-Avon was considerably better was largely thanks to the mayor, local brewer Edward Fordham Flower. Under his leadership and with the benefit of his financial support an ambitious programme was arranged, including the construction of a purpose-built, but temporary, Pavilion in which a luncheon, plays, concerts and a ball were held. Elsewhere there were exhibitions, excursions, services at Holy Trinity church with sermons by Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop of Dublin, and Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of St Andrews, and a firework display. With a deputation from the German Hochstift, which had purchased Goethe’s house, and a French actress Stella Colas appearing as Juliet (much to the indignation of chauvinist members of the acting profession), Stratford-upon-Avon achieved something of an international flavour. Within the town and its locality there was considerable resentment that so much had been provided for visitors and so little for the townsfolk. In response a second week of so-called popular entertainments was arranged with more modestly priced performances in the Pavilion, but the most popular event, the pageant, which, thanks to the advent of the railway, attracted over 30,000 onlookers on Monday 2 May, was not under the auspices of the official committee. As in London the Stratford celebrations exposed competing claims on Shakespeare with working men (and women, notably the poet Eliza Cook) challenging their social superiors’ ownership. Though by no means trouble-free the Stratford-upon-Avon tercentenary celebrations showed that the small Warwickshire town could rise to the occasion and formed the basis for future developments, notably the Memorial Theatre which opened in 1879, largely thanks to the efforts of another member of the Flower family, Edward’s son Charles. George C. D. Odell writing of “the twenty years between the retirement of Kean and the first definitive appearance of Irving, as the sole manager of the Lyceum” (i.e. 1859–78) refers only to “a series of scattered performances [of Shakespeare’s plays] at various theatres” (Odell, 1966, II, 358). In this assessment he was guilty of disregarding Charles Calvert who, initially at the Theatre Royal and then at the newly-built Prince’s Theatre, made Manchester “the centre of all that was noble and beautiful in the exposition of Shakespearean drama” (Foulkes, 1992, 55). As stage manager at the Theatre Royal, Calvert had made his mark despite the legendary parsimoniousness of manager John Knowles. His staging of two funeral scenes attracted particular praise: Ophelia’s in Hamlet in November 1859 and Juliet’s which, in the tradition of Charles Kean, he interpolated into Romeo and Juliet the following June. In both cases he co-ordinated costumes (ransacking the wardrobe for suitable old ones that could be altered), scenery (painting over old sets), music (dirges), lighting and the acting, both individual performances (he and his wife Adelaide played Romeo and Juliet) and the processions which were evidently such a striking feature. During the 1850s Manchester, of which Frederick Engels had painted such a bleak picture in the 1840s, had reinvented itself, with its “merchant princes” tapping the city’s wealth for social and cultural improvements. The construction of the Town Hall (Alfred Waterhouse), the Art Gallery (Charles Barry) and the Free Trade Hall (Edward Salomons), the foundation of Owen’s College and the success of the Art Treasures of the United Kingdom exhibition all served to establish Manchester’s credentials as one of Britain’s (indeed, especially in view of its cosmopolitan population) major European cities. Whereas in continental Europe civic playhouses were part of municipal provision this was not the case in Manchester, or anywhere else in the United Kingdom, so it fell to

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a group of leading citizens to set up the Manchester Public Entertainment Company and having raised £18,000 commissioned Salomons to design the Prince’s Theatre, so charmingly intimate that it was likened to a lady’s boudoir, which opened, on 15 October in the tercentenary year of 1864, with Calvert’s revival of The Tempest with himself as Prospero and his wife as Miranda, Arthur Sullivan’s music and an act drop by William Beverley. A further eleven revivals followed, ten at the Prince’s, the eleventh (Henry VIII) at the Theatre Royal (Foulkes, 1992, 89). A distinction has to be drawn between revivals, essentially large-scale new productions intended to achieve lengthy runs, and occasional performances of other Shakespeare plays more simply got up. Not surprisingly all of these revivals were of plays that Phelps had revived, but more significantly nine of them had also been done by Charles Kean. Calvert was undoubtedly indebted to both Phelps, who appeared at the Prince’s, and Charles Kean, rather more so to the latter, several of whose scenic artists (Grieve, Telbin) he employed in his conviction that “too much attention cannot be given to those arts and adjuncts that constitute the illusion of a theatre”. In this he was supported by Tom Taylor (dramatist, editor, civil servant, art critic), who described the theatre as “the very model-school of refinement and culture, in which all the Muses – of poesy, painting, music, history, oratory, the poetry of motion – are engaged as assistant masters” (Foulkes, 1992, 56). Taylor expressed these views in a speech at a banquet held early in January 1875 in honour of Calvert, prior to his departure for New York, where his revival of Henry V was to be presented by the impresarios Jarrett and Palmer. A previous transfer of a Manchester production, Richard III in 1871, had failed, but this time Calvert was to supervise the reconstruction of the sets, play Henry with Mrs Calvert as Chorus, and rehearse the American cast. Calvert’s Henry V had opened at the Prince’s Theatre, which by then had been expanded to create more balcony (i.e. cheap) seats, on 19 September 1872, a time at which several incidents (in particular the siege of Harfleur) in the play struck a contemporary note with the German invasion of France and the siege of Paris which lasted from 19 September 1870 to 28 January 1871. In February 1871 Calvert staged a series of tableaux, illustrative of “the horrors of war, the sufferings entailed and the blessings of peace” concluding with “The Dove and the Olive Branch” (Foulkes, 2002, 94). Clearly Calvert, who was profoundly religious (latterly espousing Swedenborg), was not going to approach Henry V jingoistically. Calvert was something of a scholar, determining his acting versions not simply on the basis of staging exigencies, but examining alternative readings, comparing the folio text with the quarto, where one exists. It does of course with Henry V producing a marked discrepancy in length between the quarto’s 1620 lines and the folio’s 3380. Shakespeare scholarship gathered pace during the nineteenth century through the efforts of individual scholars (Payne Collier, Halliwell-Phillipps, Dowden, Furnivall, Lee) and organizations (the Shakespeare Society of 1840–53; the New Shakespeare Society formed in 1873). Henry V featured very early in the New Shakespeare Society’s programme of publications with Brinsley Nicolson’s separate quarto and folio editions in 1875 and a parallel edition in 1877. These post-dated Calvert’s revival, which cut 1200 folio lines (compared with Charles Kean’s 1550), following the quarto in several instances. One very significant transposition was of Fluellen’s “Kill the poys and the luggage!” (4.7.1–2) to precede Henry’s command “Then every soldier kill his prisoners” (4.6.37) thereby providing justification for what otherwise appears to be a gratuitously ruthless act. This restraint was consistent with the overall interpretation as realized in the centre-piece tableau which encapsulated the whole of the battle of Agincourt:

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An elaborate tableau, which fitly represents the battle of Agincourt, where horsemen and footmen of the opposing hosts are inextricably mixed together in deadly conflict. There is no swaggering attempt to represent the dealing of actual blows, which often converts a bloody battle into an amusing burlesque: but a picture in still life presented on a crowded stage of the very death grapple of two hostile armies – a picture so telling and effective that the audience demanded its repetition thrice. (Examiner and Times, Manchester, 18 September 1879) Although the associations with the Franco-Prussian war inevitably became less immediate in time and place, Calvert’s Henry V enjoyed an extraordinarily prolonged success, with “handsome George” Rignold taking over the lead role from Calvert, touring the United States and Australia, and eventually returning to England for a season at Drury Lane from 1 November 1879. By then Calvert was dead (50,000 lined the streets of Manchester for his funeral in June 1879) and what Odell describes as “the accession of Henry Irving to sole management” (Odell, 1966, II, 371) of the Lyceum Theatre had taken place, ushering in a new era for Shakespearean production and, more especially, acting. Formative to this had been Irving’s apprenticeship in Manchester where he would sit up until the early hours discussing Shakespeare, dramatic art and poetry with the Calverts. At the Theatre Royal, Irving’s Shakespeare roles included Laertes, Mercutio and in 1864 Hamlet in a series of tableaux designed by Calvert and in the play proper supported by the Calverts. Metropolitan success still lay some years off and when it came it was in The Bells on 25 November 1871, but Irving did use the leverage that gave him to persuade the Lyceum manager Hezekiah Bateman to let him perform Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and Richard III. When Irving took over the management in Manchester he opened with Hamlet on 30 December 1878, having secured Ellen Terry as his Ophelia and leading lady. Undoubtedly Irving saw Shakespeare as central to his own ambitions. Jeffrey Richards rightly says that “Irving had a passion for Shakespeare”, going on to quote his remark to Squire Bancroft that “‘No actor can be remembered long who does not appear in the classical drama’, and at the head of the classical drama was Shakespeare” (Richards, 2005, 119–20). Accordingly Irving not only acted in Shakespeare, he gave his name to an eightvolume edition of the plays, lectured widely on him and cast himself as host to the succession of overseas actors (Booth, Modjeska, Bernhardt, the Saxe-Meiningen Company, Ristori, Salvini and Rossi) who came to London in pursuit of the ultimate imprimatur on their Shakespearian performances. When the role was reversed and Irving visited North America, as he did on no fewer than eight occasions, he was naturally expected to forefront his Shakespearean roles. However, on inspection of his first tour, which opened in New York on 29 October 1883, it is apparent that Irving managed his Shakespeare performances very carefully, confining himself to Shylock for the first four weeks in New York and keeping Hamlet for the rather less stern scrutiny of Philadelphia (Foulkes, 2002, 127). In the event, Irving won over (most of) his American audiences, but even in England there had been those who found his style fundamentally un-Shakespearean. In the vanguard were William Archer and Robert Lowe, who in 1877 published a slim (twenty-four page) pamphlet, entitled The Fashionable Tragedian. They attacked Irving for his generally awkward locomotion – “His figure, again, utterly precludes the possibility of dignity, grace, or even ease” – and his idiosyncratic speech, which transmuted “‘blood’ into ‘ber-a-lud”’ (Archer and Lowe, 1877, 8): “Can any actor be great who cannot pronounce his own

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language?” They were particularly disparaging about his Hamlet, which was illustrated with caricatures (by George Halkett) and dismissed as “the gloomy, sneering, and generally unpleasant Prince of Denmark” (16). The authors sneered at the features of Irving’s acting that appealed most strongly to his admirers: He is picturesque . . . He is the master of psychological subtlety . . . He elaborates his performance to an unprecedented extent – every motion of his fingers, every elevation of his eyebrows, every protrusion of the lower jaw, being carefully studied and contributing towards a defined end . . . and for the present lastly – He is possessed of a most delicate and exquisite taste, which presents Shakespeare precisely as he should be presented – without adherence to the text, and yet without Gothic mutilation of it. (Archer and Lowe, 1877, 4–5) Much later in Irving’s career Bernard Shaw castigated him on similar grounds: “The truth is that [Irving] has never in his life conceived or interpreted the characters of any author except himself.” Thus of Irving’s dignified and sympathetic Shylock: “There was no question then of a bad Shylock or a good Shylock: he was simply not Shylock at all”, and when it came to the Trial scene “he simply played in flat contradiction of the lines and positively acted Shakespeare off the stage” (Wilson, 1969, 75–6). The Spectator (8 November 1879) judged: his Shylock . . . Mr. Irving’s finest performance, and his final exit its best point. The quiet shrug, the glance of ineffable, unfathomable contempt at the exulting booby Gratiano . . . the expression of defeat in every limb and feature, the deep gasping sigh, as he slides slowly out, and the crowd rush from the court to hoot and howl at him outside . . . an effect which must be seen to be comprehended. (The Spectator, 8 November 1879) Edward Gordon Craig, Ellen Terry’s son, believed that Irving “did not set out to produce a play . . . but to act one” (Foulkes, 1976, 317), yet this brief description shows how every element in the scene (the set was designed diagonally to maximize the length of Shylock’s exit), including the delivery of other characters and the manipulation of the crowd, was designed to invoke sympathy for Shylock. This was also true of Portia, whom Ellen Terry was reprising from the Bancrofts’ ill-fated Prince of Wales’ production four years earlier on 17 April 1875, and for which E. W. Godwin (her children’s father) had advised on the sets. In comparison Irving’s production, which was inspired by a cruise of the Levant aboard the Baroness Burdett-Coutts’ yacht The Walrus, was “not so strictly archaeological . . . but it was very gravely beautiful and effective” (Foulkes, 1976, 313). The Merchant of Venice was the most enduring Shakespeare play in Irving’s repertoire; he was still playing Shylock on his final American tour in 1903–4 and right up until the Monday (9 October 1905), of the fateful week in Bradford in which he died following his performance of Mathias in The Bells on Tuesday 10 October. Irving’s tally of Shakespeare productions under his management (1878–1905) was twelve. His own performances were variable (Malvolio a disaster) as were the opportunities he afforded Ellen Terry as the Lyceum’s leading lady. The hallmark of his successful roles was the power of his intellect and the force of his personality, the ability to penetrate a character’s psyche and take his audiences into the mind of that character. Thus the Boston critic Henry Clapp, having criticized Irving for many of the faults identified in The Fashionable Tragedian: “his ungracefulness . . . his atrocious pronunciation” and so on, acknowledged that they

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belonged to “a most striking and impressive personality”, “the dramatic consequences of such a high intensity” being “obviously great, but the value of the quality in holding the attention of audiences is inestimable” (Foulkes, 2002, 128). At the Lyceum, the stalls and circle of which were occupied by the cream of society, it was the pit and gallery that Irving regarded as the “backbone” of the audience. As for Irving’s overall control of all aspects of theatrical art, Jim Davis and Doug Kirshen have argued that he came “close to realising Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk or total art work” (cited in Foulkes, 2008, 34) and “invites comparison with film directors and producers” (84). In addition to the creation of the patent theatres monopoly, the restoration of Charles II saw another major and far-reaching innovation: the actress and the end of the tradition of boy actors playing female roles. The increase in the number of actresses in successive censuses was indeed dramatic, rising from 310 in 1841 to 9171 in 1911. Of course from the Restoration onwards actresses had made their mark in Shakespeare, but as the nineteenth century drew to a close the stigma dating from their seventeenth-century forerunners was at last being banished. Ellen Terry’s own career had begun at the age of seven with the Keans at the Princess’ Theatre in the 1850s, when she attracted the attention and admiration of Queen Victoria and Lewis Carroll for her performances as Mamillius, Puck and Prince Arthur in King John. Child performers were a major attraction to Victorian audiences and in addition to named characters some plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream in particular, allowed scope for dancers in extended ballet sequences. Of course very few child performers went on to successful careers, though exceptions included Marie Wilton (Lady Bancroft) and Madge Robertson (Dame Madge Kendal), who appeared as a singing fairy alongside Kate (Oberon) and Ellen (Titania) Terry at Bristol in 1863. As their titles imply Lady Bancroft and Dame Madge Kendal achieved the respectability upon which the leaders of the Victorian stage set so much store. Helen Faucit, an actress of an earlier generation, had contributed to the process by her decorous performances of heroines such as Rosalind, her irreproachable private life (she married Theodore Martin, who was knighted for his services as Prince Albert’s first biographer) and her emphasis on the purity of the women about whom she wrote in On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters, “Respectfully Dedicated, By Permission, To Her Most Gracious Majesty The Queen” (1887). Ellen Terry did not of course provide such an exemplar with her marriage aged sixteen to artist G. F. Watts by then in his forties, her illegitimate children by architect E. W. Godwin and her undefined relationship with Henry Irving. And yet her short-lived first marriage provides a key to much of her later stage work since it resulted in such paintings as “Choosing” and “Ophelia”. Also the subject of the new art of photography (Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll) Ellen Terry has been characterized by Michael Booth as the embodiment of pictorialism, which was “most strongly marked in Shakespeare”, with her Ophelia creating “a pictorial as well as a theatrical stir” (Booth, 1988, 83). Terry’s “sheer pictorial strength and pictorial beauty” could lead detractors, of whom Theodore Martin and Henry James were two, to undervalue her acting ability as for instance with her rather exuberant Portia, but her Shakespeare range was considerable, encompassing the pathos of Ophelia, Desdemona and Cordelia, the comic delights of Beatrice (alas she never played Rosalind), the feminine force of Lady Macbeth, the boyish charm of Imogen and the more mature authority of Volumnia and Queen Katharine. Although Oscar Wilde dubbed her “Our Lady of the Lyceum”, Ellen Terry’s place there was always subservient to Irving. Her venture into management at the Imperial Theatre

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coupling Much Ado About Nothing, an established success for her as Beatrice, with Ibsen’s The Vikings in 1903, as a showcase for the innovative designs of her son Edward Gordon Craig, was not a success, but other actresses fared better. Though Max Beerbohm was not alone in finding it difficult to take Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet in 1899 seriously, other actresses whose mother tongue was not English achieved international distinction, notably Helena Modjeska from Poland who made her English (both language and place) debut as Juliet with Forbes-Robertson (later the Hamlet of his generation) as her Romeo. Italian Adelaide Ristori was an outstanding Lady Macbeth by any standards as apparently was Czech-born Fanny Janauschek, who, having performed in German (sometimes with the rest of the cast speaking English), learnt English to advance her career. American Mary Anderson, who retired to Broadway near Stratford-upon-Avon, set a precedent by playing both Hermione and Perdita and was much admired as Rosalind, as was her countrywoman Ada Rehan, also a feisty Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, who on both sides of the Atlantic appeared under the management of Augustus Daly. Of English actresses Lillie Langtry, encouraged by the Prince of Wales, sustained a theatrical career (largely under her own management), the appeal of which was not entirely separable from that connection and her physical allure costumed for Rosalind and Cleopatra especially. Another great beauty Mrs Patrick Campbell made her stage debut as Rosalind with Ben Greet’s Woodland Players in an open-air performance at Merton College, Oxford. Other actresses adhered to the husband and wife partnership that was such a bedrock of the Victorian stage. Foremost amongst these were the Bensons, Frank and Constance. Frank Benson represented an important new source of recruitment to theatre: the public schools and the universities of Oxford (principally) and Cambridge. Arriving at Oxford from Winchester College, Benson acted Clytemnestra in the student production of the Agamemnon (in the original Greek) sanctioned by Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol. This led to the foundation a few years later of the Oxford University Dramatic Society with its inaugural production of 1 Henry IV on 9 May 1885 with Hotspur played by Etoneducated Arthur Bourchier, who was to lead the way for OUDS members onto the professional stage. In the meantime Frank Benson had made his professional debut as Paris at the Lyceum Theatre alongside Henry Irving and Ellen Terry on 2 September 1882. Although he had sought voice training from old actors and the advice of Mrs Kendal, Benson’s lack of experience and technique was quickly exposed and he left for an engagement in the provinces with a touring Shakespeare company run by Walter Bentley. By the end of April 1883 Bentley personally and his company collectively were in a parlous state; Benson, thanks to a cheque from his father, stepped and took over. Benson and his companies (in his heyday there were four) never shook off the aura of amateurism; indeed there was probably no desire to do so, though Constance Benson (from a military background), whose claim on some of the roles she played owed more to her husband’s loyalty than to her talent, rather improbably ran a drama school. Sport featured large with the acting company taking on local teams as they toured the country, something that Max Beerbohm seized upon in his review of Henry V, which Benson staged as part of a London season at the Lyceum early in 1900: Alertness, agility, grace, physical strength – all these good attributes are obvious in the mimes who were last week playing Henry the Fifth at the Lyceum. Every member of the cast seemed in tip top condition – thoroughly ‘fit’. Subordinates and principals all worked well together. The fielding was excellent, and so was the batting. Speech

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after speech was sent spinning across the boundary, and one was constantly inclined to shout ‘Well played, sir! Well played indeed!’ As a branch of university cricket, the whole performance was, indeed, beyond praise. But, as a form of acting, it was not impressive. (Trewin, 1960, 111) Inevitably Benson companies travelled light, though some props (the stuffed stag for As You Like It) were regarded as indispensable. In so far as Benson had a home it was Stratford-upon-Avon, where he presented annual seasons at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. In 1910 he became only the second actor (after Garrick) to receive the freedom of the borough of Stratford-upon-Avon. As an actor Benson’s contemporary Herbert Beerbohm Tree also possessed ineradicable amateur traits, as did his wife Maud. Tree amused himself by inventing new pieces of business in performances that were notoriously uneven. Sometimes this worked well, as with Malvolio accompanied by four miniature Malvolios or Wolsey clutching an orange pomander as protection against the pestilent airs of lesser folk. “King Henry VIII” was the subject of an essay collected in Thoughts and After-Thoughts as was “The Living Shakespeare: A Defence of Modern Taste” in which Tree resolutely defended the pictorial style of presenting Shakespeare’s plays: “Illusion, then, is the first and last word of the stage; all that aids illusion is good, all that destroys illusion is bad” (Tree, 1913, 57). Tree’s revivals were the apogee of the pictorial/antiquarian style of presenting Shakespeare that had its origins with the Kembles and which had prevailed virtually unchallenged throughout the nineteenth century, practised by Macready, Phelps, Kean, Calvert and Irving. As part of the process of globalization that had taken place during the period this style had become adopted wherever the plays were performed with clear cross-fertilization of which the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen’s company was a particularly celebrated example. The company’s visit to London in May 1881 was a major theatrical and social event of which their renowned revival of Julius Caesar was the centrepiece, which the Athenaeum hailed resoundingly: It may, however, be maintained that no spectacular play of Shakespeare, such as ‘Julius Caesar’ may claim to be considered, has ever been put upon our stage in a fashion equally effective . . . the principal gain is in the manner in which those who are little or nothing more than supernumeraries wear the costumes of a bygone age, and take intelligent part in the action and movements . . . In the case of ‘Julius Caesar’ the most noteworthy features consisted of the arrangement of the tableaux and the disposition of the supernumeraries when, as is the case of the oration of Antony over the body of Caesar, strong and growing emotion has to be expressed. From the picturesque standpoint these things were perfect. That they were wholly natural is less clear. (Nagler, 1959, 500–1) When, towards the end of the next decade, Tree with Louis Calvert, Charles’ son, as his adjutant, revived Julius Caesar the Saxe-Meiningen example still loomed large, as it had for Frank Benson four years earlier. Of the Tree–Calvert production The Times (24 January 1898) wrote: “If the Saxe-Meiningen had something to teach us . . . they may now themselves come to London for a lesson.” There were those who thought that the German company had already learnt a lesson from London, one from Charles Kean. Tree’s Julius Caesar ran for 165 performances at Her Majesty’s Theatre where it was seen by 240,000 people reaping a profit of £11,000. Tree was just as resolute in his advocacy of

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the long run as he was about the virtues of stage illusion and the case for casting stars in leading roles. Of course they were all intertwined. Pictorial Shakespeare was expensive to mount and therefore required long runs in order to recoup the outlay. This formula served Tree well in most of his dozen Shakespeare productions at Her/His Majesty’s. Whatever the artistic merits of Tree’s staging may have been it ensured Shakespeare’s survival as a popular dramatist into the twentieth century. Like the patent theatres, Phelps’ Sadler’s Wells, even Kean’s Princess’, Irving’s Lyceum, Calvert’s Prince’s and Benson’s assorted venues, Her Majesty’s, built by Tree to designs by the prolific architect C. J. Phipps, was a theatre that accommodated all levels of society. Shaw saw its gallery as the preserve of the working man and the impecunious student. The 1843 Act may have enfranchised all theatres to perform Shakespeare, but, though there were variations in degree according to locality and other factors, the predominant style was pictorial, as of course was the new art of cinema which Tree was quick to espouse. On stage the forces of change could not be denied as Tree’s own annual Shakespeare Festivals, inaugurated in 1905, showed, for, stalwart of the picture stage though he was, he included in them exponents of different approaches to Shakespeare of which William Poel’s was at once both experimental and traditional. Poel’s Elizabethan-style productions, for which the only precedent in England was Ben Webster’s The Taming of the Shrew at the Haymarket in 1844, dated back to 1881 when he staged the “bad” quarto of Hamlet at the St George’s Hall in London with the actors costumed in the Elizabethan dress. As already noted this was a time of major advances in Shakespeare scholarship and other aspects of the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage to which the discovery in 1888 of the de Witt sketch of the Swan Theatre was an important addition. The Fortune Theatre contract was the basis for what was essentially a reconstruction that was erected on the Royalty Theatre stage for Measure for Measure in 1893. This was a play to which Poel returned for the opening of Annie Horniman’s repertory company at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester in spring 1908. In the meantime Poel’s cause had been furthered by the creation of the Elizabethan Stage Society in 1895, the same year in which Louis Calvert staged an Elizabethan style Richard II for the Manchester branch of another progressive organization, the Independent Theatre. Poel himself staged the play in 1899 with Granville-Barker, whose productions at the Savoy Theatre in 1912–14 revolutionized Shakespeare staging, in the title role. Though Poel’s productions ostensibly rejected the antiquarianism of Kean’s and Tree’s (1903) they were in fact substituting another form, the antiquarianism of the Elizabethan stage on which the plays had originally been performed instead of the antiquarianism of the period in which they were set. As in 1893 Poel’s 1908 production of Measure for Measure consisted essentially of the reconstruction of an Elizabethan stage behind a proscenium arch with the audience looking on rather than interacting with actors as they performed a heavily bowdlerized version of Shakespeare’s play. Miss Horniman had given the Gaiety a thorough make-over, reducing its capacity by 30 per cent and abolishing the “early door” system in favour of advanced booking for the pit. Though municipal patronage was as remote a prospect as it had been in Charles Calvert’s day, Miss Horniman’s subventions (courtesy of the family tea firm) alleviated the commercial imperative somewhat. But that had driven pictorial Shakespeare with its need for a mass audience to cover the costs. In Manchester that audience was still catered for by traditional actor-managers Richard Flanagan and Robert Courtneidge. Shakespeare’s own theatre had been genuinely popular. The irony was that the Victorian theatre, which differed from it in almost every respect (architecture, scenery,

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lighting, costumes, casting), had, nevertheless, also succeeded in creating a mass audience for his plays. The 1832 Select Committee and the 1843 Theatres Act had enfranchised significant sections of the population to see Shakespeare’s works performed. Suburban theatres, encouraged by Phelps’ success at Sadler’s Wells, mounted (literally at Astley’s) Shakespeare as befitted their resources and the tastes of their audiences. The West End continued to host Shakespeare including visiting actors from Europe and America whither and beyond English actors voyaged as part of the global traffic in the English bard. State funding was not a serious prospect, but royal patronage undoubtedly helped, though for the future Edward VII in the view of his biographer (as he was Shakespeare’s), Sir Sidney Lee, having a performance of Henry V as his twelfth birthday treat may have been counterproductive. Though his biography of Shakespeare ran to fourteen editions, Lee, who edited the Dictionary of National Biography, albeit an enthusiastic advocate in the academic and educational spheres which increasingly claimed the playwright, was hardly a populist. Throughout the nineteenth century actor-managers, from Kean with his antiquarian references to Irving with his eight-volume complete works, had seen advantages in associating themselves with scholarship and education. Whether studying Shakespeare’s plays is a valuable preparation for or a discouragement to the subsequent enjoyment of them on stage is debatable. The evidence of the Victorian period inclines to the latter. As Shakespeare became more entrenched in the curriculum the audience waned. Alongside this trend was that from actor-managers to directors with their more intellectual approach. The enfranchisement set in train in 1843, after decades of reasonably cohesive expansion, began to fracture or diversify, with adherents of particular practices appealing to their own followers. The process might be compared with that undergone by television when the four (BBC and ITV) channels faced the proliferation of numerous minority providers. Pictorial staging gave way to recreations of the Globe, to experimental approaches and to film. The dominance of actor-managers was usurped by directors and commercial drive was undercut by increasing public funding. The audience for Shakespeare’s plays fragmented and gone was the genuine popularity of the Victorian decades.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Allen, Shirley (1971). Samuel Phelps and Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Archer, William and Robert Lowe (1877). The Fashionable Tragedian. Edinburgh and Glasgow: Thomas Gray and Co. Archer, William (1883). Henry Irving, Actor and Manager: A Critical Study. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. ——(1890). William Charles Macready. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. British Parliamentary Papers, Stage and Theatre I (1968). Shannon: Irish Universities Press. Booth, Michael R., John Stokes and Susan Bassnett (1988). Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The Actress in her Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cliff, Nigel (2007). The Shakespeare Riots. New York: Random House. Cole, John William (1859). The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, F.S.A. London: Richard Bentley, 2 vols. Davis, Jim and Victor Emeljanow (2001). Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. Faucit, Helena, Lady Martin (1887). On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons.

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Foulkes, Richard (1976). “The Staging of the Trial Scene in Irving’s The Merchant of Venice.” Educational Theatre Journal 28.3, 312–17. ——(1984). The Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1864. London: Society for Theatre Research. ——(1992). The Calverts: Actors of Some Importance. London: Society for Theatre Research. ——(2002). Performing Shakespeare in the Age of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——ed. (2008). Henry Irving: A Re-Evaluation of the Pre-Eminent Actor-Manager. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lewes, George Henry (1875). On Actors and the Art of Acting. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Morley, Henry (1891). The Journal of a London Playgoer. London: George Routledge and Sons. Nagler, A. M., ed. (1959). A Source Book in Theatrical History. New York: Dover Publications. Odell, George C. D. (1966). Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving. New York: Dover Publications, 2 vols. Pollock, Sir Frederick, ed. (1876). Macready’s Reminiscences, and Selections from His Diaries and Letters. London: Macmillan and Co. Richards, Jeffrey (2005). Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and His World. London: Hambledon and London. Rowell, George, ed. (1971). Victorian Dramatic Criticism. London: Methuen and Co. Schoch, Richard (1998). Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shattuck, Charles, ed. (1962a). Mr. Macready Produces As You like It. A Facsimile Promptbook. Urbana: Beta Phi Mu. ——ed. (1962b). William Charles Macready’s King John. A Facsimile Promptbook. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tree, Herbert Beerbohm (1913). Thoughts and After-Thoughts. London: Cassell and Co. Trewin, J. C. (1960). Benson and the Bensonians. London: Barrie and Rockliff. Wakeling, Edward, ed. (1993–2007). Lewis Carroll’s Diaries. Luton: Lewis Carroll Society, 10 vols. Wilson, Edwin, ed. (1969). Shaw on Shakespeare. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

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SHAKESPEARE AND THE MODERN STAGE Christie Carson

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n addressing Shakespeare on stage in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries I face the two opposing dangers of providing too much coherence, on the one hand, and too little, on the other. It seems sensible therefore to try to trace three narrative strands that have largely determined our current vision of events, outlining the engagement with a Shakespeare who, in his theatrical manifestations, has become subject to a bewildering spectrum of new interpretive practices. Rather than an exhaustive account of Shakespeare on stage during these two centuries, this essay will try to connect, question and extend existing partial pictures of the period. The three strands I would like to pick up and weave together are the search for “authentic” Elizabethan staging through theatre architecture and acting practice (descending from Poel in several different directions); the move from the local to the development of the global (through the touring practices of the RSC); and finally the notion that, throughout this century, Shakespeare on stage has provided a source of cultural self-definition for local communities. The three world visions I will trace are linked to three different chronicling and critical traditions and the work respectively of theatre historians, theatre practitioners and performance critics. Through an exposition of current work in these three areas it is possible to illustrate how the form but also the function of Shakespearean performance has developed over one hundred years of interpretation and critical reception. In order to give this sprawling topic a central focus Stratford, London and the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, will feature at the heart of this debate, both to conform to critical expectations and assumptions about the centrality of these theatres, but also to examine the legitimacy of these claims. Two critical assumptions stand at the centre of this analysis. The first is that Shakespeare’s works translate internationally. Kathleen McLuskie notes that this idea assumes “that there is some kind of Shakespearean essence, a mix of ethical transformation and emotional affect, that is only metaphorically related to the words in the seventeenth-century copies of the plays” (McLuskie, 2006, 239). The second assumption is the value of a particularly British notion of Director’s Theatre which, as Stanley Wells points out, means that “a degree in English seems in danger of becoming a required qualification for directing a Shakespeare play, at any rate at Stratford” (qtd in Smallwood, 1996, 178). Contrastingly this vision of performance rests on the kind of textual analysis that comes from the training received in university English departments, particularly at Oxbridge. The success of British Director’s Theatre internationally could be seen to illus-

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trate the universal power of the Bard’s work and this interpretative tradition. Or rather, as McLuskie argues, it could be an indication of the increasing commercial viability of these plays internationally due to the implementation of “Compulsory Shakespeare” through education. What has emerged through this performance tradition is a forum for international theatrical debate and exchange which, while hampered by Shakespeare in some ways, has been equally facilitated by a common body of knowledge and practice. Sending British companies on tour and bringing exciting international directors to London and Stratford has created a cross-cultural conversation, but one that has been restricted to a few representatives world-wide and has been critically evaluated, until recently, largely from an Anglo/American perspective. In order both to chart and to confront this critical tradition, the reading of one-way traffic radiating out from Britain is here contrasted by an assessment of a selection of work internationally that can be seen either to interact with or to ignore the seeming influence and dominance of this central emanating force. Thus a process of transculturation is tracked, not by making proclamations about the international dialogue of Shakespearean production, but by mapping the conditions of that conversation in a way that challenges the assumptions of well-worn cultural debates and RSC promotional material. It seems essential to highlight the fact that no conversation can possibly be as unilateral as the RSC’s touring programme pretends to be. Nor, however, is this exchange as reciprocal and egalitarian as performance criticism would like to imagine. What can be usefully highlighted through an analysis of performative and critical trends is the fact that neither the exporting nor the importing of Shakespearean production can leave the practitioners and audiences without some new impressions that can and are taken on to the next exchange or cultural dialogue. This discussion, when followed across the century, shows a shifting focus for interpretation which I suggest is increasingly turning its attention away from the United States and towards the formerly less fashionable colonial experiences coming out of India, Africa and other parts of Asia. A shift from the search for “authentic” theatre practices through theatre architecture, to the search for textual innovation through Director’s Theatre, leads to universalized notions about the “essence of Shakespeare” world-wide which help to question, but also to illustrate, how Shakespeare has travelled and been translated across the century theatrically; being received by different audiences and critics at different times under very different social and economic conditions.

History 1: “Authenticity” in the Theatre The on-going attempts to recreate Shakespeare’s stage in this century must begin with the work of William Poel but must end with the reconstructed Globe Theatre at Bankside. In Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, Franklin J. Hildy traces the development of the idea of a reconstructed Globe theatre as it moves across the twentieth century on two continents. Hildy suggests a direct link between this theatrical activity and newly discovered, as well as existing, historical evidence: In 1893 he [Poel] introduced his ‘Fortune fit-up’, thereby staking claim to the authority of the Fortune contract, which, since its publication in 1790, has been the most highly regarded document relating to Elizabethan theatre architecture. In actuality his moveable stage was based on the more sceptically received Swan drawing, discovered five years earlier. (Hildy, 2008, 16)

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Tracing the history of reconstruction provides an initial insight into the evolution of theatre architecture over this period. However, Hildy also points out a link between scholarship of the period and the practices of theatre artists. Looking at a range of critics from both sides of the ocean helps to make clear how this history is consistently viewed through culturally specific lenses. For example Hildy’s exploration of the development of reconstructed theatres across North America provides a surprising vision of harmony amongst its participants. The steps of this process are carefully marked as shifting back and forth seamlessly between the theatre, the academy and the popular audience: Poel’s 1897 reconstruction drawing of the Globe playhouse was the first of its kind. This drawing became the basis for the first known model of the Globe which went on display in 1902. This model, in turn, became the basis for the first nearly fullscale reconstruction of the Globe which was built as part of ‘The Merry England’ (or ‘Shakespeare’s England’) Exhibition at Earl’s Court, London in 1912. (18) The 1912 Globe, Hildy continues, influenced the Globe Theatre that was built as part of the “Merry England” exhibition in Chicago in 1933–4 which then in turn, according to Hildy, directly influenced Sam Wanamaker. The model of passing down knowledge from father to son, master to apprentice, teacher to student is important to highlight. However, I wonder rather whether this is the way theatre practitioners actually work. It seems more likely that the radical tradition of the theatre would aim to reinvent, destroy or contest earlier work as much as it would lovingly reconstruct former models. This sequential narrative suggests a history that is tied to other significant cultural factors beyond the pure desire to experiment theatrically. Hildy goes on to trace the movement of the Globe Company to San Diego in 1935 for the California Pacific International Exhibition, the creation of a third Globe theatre for the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas and the creation of yet another theatre along these lines for the Great Lakes Exposition in Cleveland Ohio both in 1936. Hildy points out the scale of this movement: Over a three year period at the height of the Great Depression, then, these three companies staged eighteen plays by Shakespeare, plus Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, in 5,000 performances seen by over two million people either at the Globe reconstructions built in Chicago, San Diego, Dallas and Cleveland or on tours, several of which were sponsored by the Federal Theatre Project. (20) The franchise model that is developed here, as well as the use of Shakespeare within a popular cultural festival context, creates an influential model of the performance of “authenticity”. However, at this point it seems crucial to examine briefly the intervention of government subsidy in the promotion of the theatrical reconstruction movement. The Federal Theatre Project was a make-work initiative designed to stimulate the US economy during the Great Depression. Many actors, writers and directors got their start in these projects, which operated across the country. As Hildy points out, it “is often said to have been the closest the United States has ever been to having a national theatre” (25). The instrumental use of theatre in these reconstructed spaces for the performance of Shakespeare in a time of national financial and cultural crisis presents a significant model of linking theatre buildings with commercial development. Hildy points to another important partner in this process when he indicates how the

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reconstruction movement was given educational justification by the establishment of the Folger Shakespeare Library: These Globes of the Great Depression were inspired by the rhetoric of William Poel and his Elizabethan Revival but it seems fair to say that they were given legitimacy by the inclusion of an Elizabethan Theatre in the Folger Shakespeare Library when it opened in 1932. Their success inspired the creation of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (1935) and the San Diego Shakespeare Festival at the Old Globe Theatre (1949). (21) Thus the temporary festivals of the Depression, given financial viability and cultural importance through government funding, as well as educational justification by the Folger Shakespeare Library, inspired more permanent Theatre Festivals across the continent (eventually spawning 150 Shakespeare Festivals across the US and Canada). But this is just one perspective on these events. By addressing three theatrical moments that span the century, the richness but also the conflicting visions of the theatrical experiments of this period become clear. Returning to the originator of the ideas of “authentic” staging, Lucy Munro considers Poel’s later work in the early 1930s, pointing out how much it differs from his earlier approach to staging the plays. Through re-examining the developmental and experimental nature of Poel’s approach to “authenticity” Munro contradicts the usual critical view, which is to see his life’s work as a continuous and consistent approach to Elizabethan staging: [I]t is problematic to measure a production of 1931 against theories advanced half a century earlier. In addition, scholars have rarely examined Poel’s Shakespearean productions in the context of his frequent stagings of non-Shakespearean plays – an approach that provides an alternative perspective both on Poel’s Shakespearean productions and on his notions of authenticity. (Munro, 2010, 37–8) Looked at in this way Poel’s work can be seen to be much more like the later experiments I will examine of Tyrone Guthrie in Stratford Ontario in the middle of the twentieth century and Mark Rylance and Edward Hall at the end of it, supporting the notion that the work of theatre artists is not nearly as straightforward or consistent as theatre historians would like to imagine. Theatre practitioners of every period are inevitably bound by their social and political environment. Neil Carson looks at the way Tyrone Guthrie was able to experiment in Stratford Ontario in a much freer way than he was able to in London in the early 1950s. Carson also points out how the ideas around developing practical approaches to a more “authentic” Shakespeare stage space “cherished by scholars and theatre practitioners alike” became mired in a political battle in England about the viability and importance of a national theatre: [I]n England, the notion of a theatre for Shakespeare’s plays became fatally entangled with the idea of a memorial for the playwright himself. The latter, it was argued, should be devoted, not just to the works of the greatest English dramatist, but to the best drama of all countries and all periods: in other words, a true National Theatre. Once that happened, compromise was inevitable. (Carson, 2010, 57) The idealized aims of academics and the pragmatic concerns of theatre artists in this vision were enmeshed with the political wrangling of a country and a culture trying to grapple

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with an increasingly uncertain self-definition. It is ironic to note that what had worked so successfully in the American model (the idea of a government sponsored reconstructed Globe theatre) failed miserably in Shakespeare’s native land. The 1953 Canadian experiment, which established a new stage for the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford Ontario, took another culturally specific approach. The Festival employed a British director (Tyrone Guthrie), designer (Tanya Moiseiwitsch) and stars (Alec Guinness and Irene Worth) to work with Canadian supporting actors and technical crew, in what was designed as a theatrical apprenticeship for the practitioners who saw themselves as taking lessons from the “world’s greatest” theatre artists. This experiment took on the British theatrical tradition of practical innovation but through a colonial model of learning rather than the American movement across the continent of a proven product model. But, as Carson points out: “The unknown factor was the Canadian audience. Since Guthrie could count on neither an extensive familiarity with Shakespeare nor an understanding of medieval English history, he would have to appeal to the Stratford spectators as directly as possible” (64). Carson concludes that it was the theatre building itself that was perhaps more exciting than the production that it facilitated in that first season: What was genuinely new was the arresting immediacy of the theatrical experience made possible by the Guthrie-Moiseiwitsch stage and auditorium. These latter were a product of English practice and traditions, but it was the Canadian money, enthusiasm, and cultural environment that had made possible their final realization. (69) While Hildy makes some reference to Stratford Ontario as one of the many Festival Theatres that erupted, he does not acknowledge the importance of its hybrid approach or Guthrie’s subsequent influence in America and Britain in the staging of Shakespeare’s plays, most notably through the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and the Chichester Festival Theatre in Britain, both of which modelled their architecture on the original Guthrie–Moiseiwitsch design at Stratford Ontario. The juxtaposition of the view of a Canadian scholar with one from the US and one from the UK reflects an interesting development of our critical understanding of this tradition as well as its impact. Finally, then, Abigail Rokison combines the return to the UK of the ideas and practices developed in the Hildy tradition with the intellectual and practical approaches developed out of the very different British theatrical tradition and legacy of this century. Comparing the “authenticity” of Shakespeare’s Globe under Mark Rylance to the ideas about “authenticity” employed by Edward Hall’s (RSC director Peter Hall’s son) Propeller company, Rokison questions the significance and impact of these two contrasting companies both tackling Twelfth Night at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Rokison brings these conversations together by highlighting the way Edward Hall’s company returns to the ideas of Shakespearean essentialism but also to artistic rebellion and innovation in contrast to the Globe’s reverential traditionalism. The two theatre companies are described through reviews as the “traditional” Globe approach versus the “youthful” reinvention of Propeller. However, I suggest that Rokison’s assessment that Propeller is more “successful” in creating a productive kind of “authenticity” can be seen to be a product of her own cultural and critical position: [W]hilst the Globe productions have been concerned with adhering to an Elizabethan aesthetic and its practice, Propeller’s work has combined these ele-

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Figure 17.1: The attentive international audience at Shakespeare’s Globe, August 1997

ments with the use of modern dress, properties, and music, creating a different form of authenticity through a closer replication of audience experience rather than a greater accuracy of re-production. I would argue that this type of ‘authenticity’, which appeals to a shared cultural code between stage and audience, is more successful in engaging spectators and providing them with visual and aural signifiers as to the social and emotional status of the characters. (Rokison, 2010, 85) However, the “shared cultural code between stage and audience” she describes is specifically local; British, young and “radical”. The Globe stage, as I have argued elsewhere (Carson and Karim-Cooper, 2010), is a more egalitarian, international and collective space that redefines its “shared cultural code[s]” with each performance, although admittedly often drawing on well-worn and internationally recognized popular cultural and theatrical traditions. Rather than being more “successful” I would suggest that the Propeller company provides a more “local” Shakespeare for a new British audience while the Globe theatre provides “global” Shakespeare for an international popular audience (Fig. 17.1). The shift between a “local” and a “global” audience is an inevitable feature of the end of the millennium. Turning our attention to the RSC, it is interesting to see how this company is currently caught between these two positions, trying to attract both kinds of audiences. The issues of “authenticity” have not changed for theatre artists since Poel’s day. However, the new Globe theatre has been surprisingly successful, through its location and its architecture, in altering acting practices and audience expectations in the mainstream, to such an extent that the RSC has had to follow, not lead, in this particular

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theatrical “revolution”. Nevertheless, it would appear that the company is loath to admit that this is the case. Rokison says: The RSC, partly motivated by the success of productions in their thrust-stage Swan Theatre, is currently transforming the proscenium arch mainhouse into a space that is designed, according to Artistic Director Michael Boyd, to mirror ‘the intimacy of the courtyard theatres Shakespeare wrote for’ (RSC). (Rokison, 2010, 72) In a statement that is indicative of the essentialism of many theatre practitioners, but also the RSC’s unquestionable authority, Michael Boyd refers directly back to Shakespeare’s original conditions of performance without acknowledging any intervening theatrical history. “Authenticity”, then, in the early twenty-first century for a theatre historian, as Hildy suggests, a performance critic, as Rokison articulates, and for a theatre practitioner, as Boyd makes clear, seems to be tied to the relationship draw between the present and the past: “the success of Shakespeare’s Globe suggests that history can indeed be used to make important contributions to the present, even if it is only to help us see something about ourselves” (Hildy, 2008, 14). The critical presentation of this history demonstrates this to be true. “Authenticity” in its theatrical manifestations in this century has been tied to “history” on the one hand and to “innovation” on the other, but the “success” of authentic approaches has been largely based on the theatre’s ability to provide “accessible” or “resonant” Shakespeare. To turn back to the RSC’s own words of self-definition: “Our mission is to keep in touch with Shakespeare as our contemporary but also to keep contemporary audiences, artists and writers in touch with Shakespeare” (RSC, 2002, 1).

History 2: The RSC Travels the World Moving to the second view of the period, it is important to remember this definition of success. The “authenticity” debate involved a largely transatlantic conversation that was linked very closely to the academic critical dialogue and, in particular, to the conference culture of the last thirty years of the twentieth century. It involved the “cultural elite” in North America and in Britain. The move to a more international debate can be linked to wider economic trends in a global economy in the second half of the century and a global popular culture that was increasingly dominated by the US economy and media. Shakespeare in performance internationally in this century moves from being a symbol of colonial cultural connection, to becoming the purveyor of educational and cultural capital, to being transformed into the site of popular international culture interaction that has the potential to enhance global commerce and aid cultural self-definition. Looking to the end of the twentieth century and another RSC annual report, the justification for an ambitious international touring schedule for the company is articulated in interesting and complex ways: “New audiences have been introduced to classical theatre not only through our new pattern of work in the UK but also via our international stage. The RSC fulfils a costeffective ambassadorial role” (RSC, 1998). Tracing the Stratford company’s international touring schedule across the century supports this vision of calculated cultural influence. However, the idea of a “cost-effective ambassadorial role” is made instrumental at the end of this statement which suddenly links touring to the agenda of the British Council, and the offices of Foreign Affairs and Trade: “Coverage of the tours was excellent, creating a series of brilliant showcases for Britain abroad which, with increasingly close links with the British Council, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department of Trade

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and Industry, offer developing opportunities for British Trade” (RSC, 1998). The joining together of the forces of the arts, foreign policy and trade helps to indicate the intricate export model envisioned. While the first history linked the academic and theatre worlds, with some intervention by government and trade, this history focuses primarily on the pragmatic conditions that directly informed the RSC’s touring programme. It is my aim to look at the way the RSC’s touring itinerary helped to support and reinforce a sense that Shakespearean production could be exported productively to “educate” and “inform”, as well as entertain foreign audiences in the public service broadcast model, and also helped consolidate the international theatrical reputation of the visited city, potentially enlivening local traditions of theatre and Shakespearean interpretation. This history aims to weave together facts about the development of a touring programme, which inevitably was affected by international events, with a realistic understanding that not only did the audience and governments in question need to be deemed fit for a visitation but they also had to be willing to engage with the visiting company through providing an audience and the support required to facilitate these tours. The complexity of combining a cultural and a commercial agenda becomes obvious when the resulting tours are examined in any detail. The history of RSC touring is largely uncharted territory critically. Steven Adler sums up the touring activity of the company in the following way: The RSC produces two sorts of tours: small scale productions of works developed specifically for touring through the United Kingdom, which might also play a brief run at one of the Stratford or London theatres, and others that were originally produced as part of the regular season and are subsequently sent on tour. Both categories of tours may play dates at foreign venues. At times, the itineraries for the international tours are exemplars of a globe-trotting frenzy. (Adler, 2001, 109) Since the instigation of its Royal Charter in 1960, the RSC has struggled with its identity and purpose, and nowhere is this as clear as in the company’s vision of its role internationally. Colin Chambers points out: As a national institution the RSC reflected the wider historical confusions clustered around the loss of a secure national identity and the evident insecurity in finding new consensual definitions. Having achieved nationhood early, the unravelling was all the more complex and involved many interconnecting layers: end of empire, the Irish war, devolution, the tug between the US and Europe, the rise of identity politics, multiculturalism, the atrophy of democracy and globalisation. (Chambers, 2004, xiii) While early in the century a battle raged in Britain around the dividing of influence between the National Theatre based in London and the RSC based in Stratford, once placed in the international arena the RSC quite clearly saw its role as presenting the “best of British” to the world as part of a wider attempt to sustain British cultural influence following the “end of empire” and in the face of “the atrophy of democracy and globalisation”. Returning to the beginning of the century briefly, it is worth looking at what was happening alongside the reconstruction movement in North America. In 1913–14 ten plays led by Frank Benson and featuring the Stratford-upon-Avon Players toured fourteen Canadian and twenty-eight American cities. The list of plays performed included both largely predictable repertoire (Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet) and the wholly unex-

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pected (King John and The Merry Wives of Windsor). The cities visited were by and large urban centres with established touring houses and an audience accustomed to attending imported productions. In most of the cities visited there was not a strong enough local theatre tradition to rival the British imports. There was also a fairly uncontested sense in these parts of the country of British ownership of the Bard’s work at this early point in the century. The sense of cultural colonization, or at least the bringing together of former colonies through cultural affinity, can be supported by the fact that in this same two-year period a number of plays also toured to South Africa. The fact that this was the last time a tour of this kind visited South Africa for over eighty years shows perhaps the intersection between contemporary politics and foreign cultural policy. The events that took place in South Africa between 1913 and 1995, when the RSC finally returned to this country, can also help to highlight radically different ideas of cultural closeness.1 Turning to the next major tours undertaken by the Memorial Theatre in 1928–9/29–30, the company returned again to Canada and the US with eight plays in the first year and seven in the second. What proves interesting in these two tours is the shift in emphasis from fifteen Canadian cities and eleven American cities visited in 1928–9 to an inverted ten Canadian cities and thirteen US cities in 1929–30. The nature of the cities visited is striking. Dropped from the list after the first tour in Canada are Montreal, Hamilton, Brantford, Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat and Calgary. Added to the tour in 1929–30 are the Canadian cities of Prince Albert and Saskatoon. By contrast the only American cities not to be revisited from one tour to the next were Aberdeen, Detroit and Salt Lake City. The cities added for the second tour were St Louis, Cincinnati, Washington, Philadelphia and Boston. It may seem strange to a modern reader to see the last three cities appear on the British company’s theatrical tour so late in the day. However, what this shift in emphasis perhaps indicates is a strangely accurate picture of the financial stability of these cities during this volatile period of history. This possible development can be given further weight by the fact that when the company returned to North America in 1931–2 with nine plays, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington were the first stops on a tour that visited thirteen American cities and just three Canadian venues, concluding with stops in Vancouver, Winnipeg and Toronto. The length of the runs in this final of the three consecutive tours to cross both countries at the beginning of the Great Depression is also interesting to note. Philadelphia, San Francisco and Vancouver had the company for thirteen nights each (Philadelphia 19–31 October, San Francisco 11–23 January, Vancouver 15–27 February) and Los Angeles and Toronto had twelve-night runs (Los Angeles 21 December – 2 January and Toronto 8–19 March). Again the economic health of the country is importantly mapped by this activity, illustrating firmly that the West was as prosperous (if not more so) during this period than the East Coast cities, but also that the West perhaps demonstrated a more traditional interest in Shakespeare. It is revealing here to point out the development of locally based theatre festivals in the years that followed. It has already been established that the first Shakespeare Festivals grew up in Oregon and San Diego then spread across the country, just a few years after these initial tours. It could be argued that local performances of Shakespeare satisfied local audiences’ desire for a cultural connection in the war years. The example presented by the Stratford Festival in Ontario might, however, also be instructive. While the Stratford UK company returned to touring in 1949 it did not return to Canada until 1971 at which point Toronto was the only city visited. This example then signals a possible combination of economic viability, cultural interest, international influ-

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ence and the development of a local Shakespeare tradition more suited to the needs and tastes of local audiences which helped to determine an appetite for imported Shakespeare in the first half of the century. Given all of these potential factors it makes sense to follow these trends a bit more closely in the second half of the twentieth century when the touring schedule became much more complex. When the company returned to touring after the war in 1949–50 it turned its attention to another part of the colonial empire altogether with its first tour to Australia. In 1949– 50 two plays (Much Ado and Macbeth) visited four Australian cities for the first time. The first European tour of one play (Measure) to four cities in Germany also took place in 1950. This shift to the southern hemisphere and to the continent continued through this decade with a return visit to seven Australian cites and four cities in New Zealand with three plays (As You Like It, 1 Henry IV and Othello) in 1955, and one play (Antony and Cleopatra) to Holland, Belgium and France in 1953–4. A wider European tour followed in 1955 with two plays (King Lear and Much Ado) visiting Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway in addition to return visits to Belgium, Holland and Germany. In 1957 the company took its work into Eastern Europe for the first time with Titus Andronicus being performed in Yugoslavia and Poland as well as France, Austria and Italy. The following year (1958–9) saw the first visit by the company to Russia with performances of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night in Leningrad and Moscow. This can be seen as an extremely important development for the company, both in terms of its theatrical vision at the time and in terms of the influence of those visits on today’s self-image for the company. The 1950s, then, saw a very distinct shift in touring practices and priorities. This decade and the one that followed, when the company received its Royal Charter, saw a consolidation of its reputation and influence, as well, perhaps, as increasing links with foreign policy. The small scale production developed by the actors in the company entitled The Hollow Crown toured to three Western European countries (Switzerland, Holland and France) and to thirty-three cities in the US in tours in 1962 and 1963 respectively. This was contrasted by the tour of the large scale iconic production of King Lear directed by Peter Brook that toured to Paris in 1963 and to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, Finland and Russia in 1964. This production helped to construct the idea of a Director’s Theatre as defined through radical textual and conceptual reinterpretation, yet its touring was restricted to largely European destinations. While the tour of this ground-breaking theatrical triumph to Eastern Europe and Russia illustrates the theatrical lineage and cultural influence the company was then trying to establish, the small scale tour worked more on the principle of brand recognition and income generation across the United States. This split focus illustrates the financial rewards of touring as well as the importance of developing the RSC brand internationally. The residency of single non-Shakespearean plays in New York (Marat Sade) in 1965–6 and in Boston and New York in 1966–7 (The Homecoming) shows yet another model of theatrical exchange which has again been repeated more recently by the company. The RSC production in this model is seen as a kind of British theatrical franchise or cultural outpost, providing a satellite of British culture in the heart of America. All of these early attempts at developing an international sense of understanding and recognition might be seen to be fuelled both by a desire to facilitate international trade and as an attempt to define Britain’s cultural position in the Cold War, standing at the boundary between East and West. A third visit to Russia by the RSC in 1967 with two Shakespeare plays

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(Macbeth and All’s Well) and a return to five American theatrical centres in 1968–9 with three Shakespeare plays (Taming, As You Like it and Much Ado) and one contemporary to Shakespeare (Dr Faustus) shows the viability but also the challenge involved in pursuing these two strategies at the same time. In an attempt to counteract the loss of empire the RSC worked admirably well during this period to bolster a vision of British cultural importance and influence. The 1970s demonstrate another trend that again is linked to the international political and economic climate and Britain’s notion of its position in the world at this time. In 1970 a visit to Australia was combined with the first tour of the company to Japan. The enormous success of Brook’s Lear in Europe and Russia was expanded on with a series of tours in 1971, 1972 and 1973 that established the world-wide sensation that was Brook’s spectacular production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Four East Coast cities in the US (New York City, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia) and one Canadian city (Toronto) formed the first leg of this global journey. This was followed by a tour of Eastern and Western Europe in 1972 and West Coast America, Japan and Australia in 1973 (Fig. 17.2). This production and this set of three tours began the idea of an international theatrical product as well as an international theatre audience that could all be equally satisfied by a single production. It also created the notion of the “must see” international theatrical event that helped to instigate the development of the international theatre festival which came to dominate the theatrical landscape two decades later. However, the RSC was able to combine this huge international success with a consolidation of its position in North America with residencies in New York, Washington, Detroit and Toronto as well as new links with the University of Nebraska and Denver in 1974–5, performing non-Shakespearean plays as varied as Sylvia Plath, London Assurance, Sherlock Holmes, Summer Folk, Hedda Gabler and Travesties, in addition to productions of Richard II, Love’s Labour’s Lost and King Lear. Through this work the RSC’s reputation as the purveyor of the great classics of world theatre was consolidated both in the North American market and internationally. Touring declined in the second half of the decade and the company saw a return to Western European touring with just two Shakespeare plays, Henry V in 1976 and Coriolanus in 1979, in a retrenchment to safer ground after a period of over-extension. The shift in the political climate in Britain must be seen as the main factor in the touring practices of the company in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The importance of US financial support was made more crucial as the 1980s progressed and the pressure placed on the arts to become financially viable was made increasingly clear by the Conservative government. The RSC were called upon to provide a role in facilitating international trade much more directly as government funding was cut back and made more instrumental when granted. Chambers points out: “Despairing of Britain’s ability to protect one of its prime national institutions, [Kenneth] Cork [chair of governors 1975–85] also directed the RSC towards the USA, a course it would increasingly follow” (Chambers, 2004, 83). The close working relationship that developed between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan can be seen to have a parallel with the relationship that developed between the RSC and Broadway in this period. Productions of Piaf (1980), Nicholas Nickleby (1981–2 and 1986), Good (1982), Cyrano de Bergerac (1985), Les Miserables (1986) and Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1987 and 1990) in various New York theatres demonstrate the extent of this relationship as well as the taste and focus of the reigning artistic directors during this period (Trevor Nunn and Terry Hands). The popularity of the company and the marketability of its

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Figure 17.2: The 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Peter Brook, starring Sara Kestelman as Titania and David Waller as Bottom

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work on Broadway provided a new financial model for this subsidized British theatre and unimagined wealth for its leading participants. The ambassadorial role but also the financial example these productions set provided a challenge to any independent or commercial enterprise during this period. The dominance of American financial backing and the competitive commercial model of theatre represented by Broadway came to define the RSC’s approach in the 1980s. Chambers notes, “The RSC’s radical reputation had dissolved by the time it moved to the Barbican in the harsh political climate of the early 1980s and thereafter the RSC did little to offend” (Chambers, 2004, 167). During this decade apart from All’s Well that Ends Well which travelled to New York in 1983 and Much Ado About Nothing which appeared in Los Angeles, Washington and New York as part of an international tour in 1985 the only RSC touring productions that featured Shakespeare plays were those that travelled to Eastern Europe and Australia (Much Ado 1984–5 visited five European countries and the three US cities mentioned above, The Winter’s Tale visited Poland in 1985, Richard III visited Australia in 1986 and Titus Andronicus visited Spain, France and Denmark in 1989). It is worthy of note that during this decade a tour of Edward Bond’s Lear visited France, Germany and Austria in 1984. The divisions between the tastes of the American market and the European are quite clear through this selective touring schedule. The popularity of the RSC’s large and spectacular productions that featured excellence in theatrical craft in any playwright’s work might be contrasted with the expectation of a repertoire of new British voices echoing a radical theatrical ethos inspired by Shakespeare. Chambers points out: “The company’s sporadic diplomatic tangles underlined the contradictory nature of its urge to be a free spirit as well as a national body” (Chambers, 2004, 167). Competing visions of the company’s role internationally created tensions both inside and outside the theatrical world. Chambers also highlights that “The problematic role of Englishness was a central theme . . . indeed Peter Brook once described the aim of the RSC as the aim of liberal England – to do things well” (Chambers, 2004, xiii); again linking touring and the idea of showcasing how “to do things well” provides an interesting model of a one-way cultural exchange. Adrian Noble, artistic director from 1991, set out his vision in a 1993 information package delivered to the company members working at the Barbican which stated: “Wherever the insignia of the RSC appears . . . on the road, at home or abroad, we must all make a contribution, our work must bear the stamp of the highest quality” (qtd in Chambers, 2004, 120). But this paternalistic vision was met with increasing resistance internationally, instigating a period of re-evaluation for the company. The economic climate of the 1990s caused the RSC to revisit the earlier model of the 1970s and the incredible success of the visually spectacular production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with an international tour of Les Liaisons Dangereuses that covered three US cities, two French cities and one city in six additional countries (Canada, Holland, Spain, Germany, Japan and Hong Kong) in 1990–1. This tour, and several that followed it in this decade, demonstrate the clear existence of an international theatre circuit as well as the development of the international Theatre Festival, an interesting rearticulation of the American Shakespeare Festival craze of several decades earlier, which confirmed the link internationally between Shakespearean performance and cultural tourism. A production of The Comedy of Errors visited five cities in five countries in 1992–3, three of which featured the company as part of such a festival (Hong Kong, Australia and Taiwan). While Les Liaisons continued to tour to Ireland (1993), to Switzerland, Belgium and France

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(1994) and to South Africa (1995), the first half of the 1990s saw short tours to a small selection of widely dispersed theatrical centres. The Winter’s Tale visited Switzerland, France, Ireland, Hungary, New Zealand, Japan and the US largely in single city appearances in 1993–4. Julius Caesar travelled to four countries in 1994 and Henry IV visited the US and Italy to participate in the LA Festival and the Festival of L’Union in Milan respectively. This activity seems to embody Adler’s notion of “a globe-trotting frenzy” (Adler, 2001, 109). This scattered approach, responding presumably to invitations, shifted back to the longer tour of Shakespeare’s work that visited new audiences by the last half of the decade. In 1995 Henry VI travelled to nine countries including the Latin American nations of Brazil and Chile for the first time. A Midsummer Night’s Dream went to the US and four Australasian countries in 1996–7. The company reached seven countries with its production of The Comedy of Errors in 1996–7 including the first visits to India and Pakistan. A brief return to the vision of the company as a centre of European theatrical innovation can be seen in the tour of Beckett Shorts to Germany, Northern Ireland, Spain and Czechoslovakia in 1997. However, for most of the second half of this decade the combination of the earlier spectacular craft vision of the company was combined with an international market for the theatre and for Shakespeare that had opened new cultural territory. The RSC became a saleable brand of Shakespeare as much as it was an ambassador for Britishness (Englishness) and cultural quality. Shakespeare, not Britain or even the RSC, had become the cultural drawing card by this point in the century, returning perhaps to the origins of the touring practices of Benson’s first visits abroad. The last two years of the twentieth century show an exhausting attempt to address a festival audience while also maintaining established audiences in international centres, particularly in New York and Tokyo. This formalization of old partnerships with an attempt to open new markets demonstrates a clear move towards a consolidation of the company’s international profile but also its links with international commerce shifting its attention to the cities where the largest concentration of tourists and financial markets coincide. Therefore a pragmatic reading of the RSC’s “ambassadorial role” can attribute as much of its success to financial and political imperatives as it can to cultural influence.

History 3: International Responses to the British Model of Shakespeare To turn, therefore, from the company instigating this debate to its respondents, it is useful to focus on specific examples that illustrate the influence both of the RSC’s vision of textual interpretation and its ambassadorial intent. To end with a theatrical response but also a critical response to the RSC’s international touring programme, I will trace one play through two externally generated interpretative moments, one in Britain and one outside. This is an extremely focused approach that aims to question the viability of a vision of the RSC as providing “world leading” Shakespearean productions at the end of the twentieth century. This questioning of the central authority of the company is linked to a re-examination of the rhetoric surrounding the idea of a Director’s Theatre and the emergence of performance criticism and a vision of performance, as opposed to text, as the central object of interpretation and study. As attention has shifted towards other theatrical traditions, collective, devised and ensemble ways of working have all had an impact on the sustainability of the concept of a Director’s Theatre which supported

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the promotion of a small group of international companies on the global festival stage. By starting with Brook’s Dream of 1970, then analyzing Robert Lepage’s 1992 production of the play at the National Theatre which replaced Brook’s lightbox with mud and darkness, it is possible to highlight the idea of answering back to this central tradition. The third example, then, comes from Australia where A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the most popular Shakespeare play on stage for the last decade of the century. Looking at a local, indigenous, highly contextually specific production of this play makes it clear that the central influence of Brook’s production internationally has been its conceptual approach rather than textual interpretation. This history of the century is shorter but broader, speaking more widely to the work of international directors brought to Britain to invigorate the British theatrical tradition and to the work of countless small companies developing “local” Shakespeare in specific locations, often for the purpose of self-definition. These two separate traditions have been drawn together by performance criticism into an increasingly disparate interpretative debate. In order to tackle the problem of diffusion, performance criticism has itself focused on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Brook’s production in particular as touchstones, constantly returning to the reimagination of this play, and its focus on theatricality and representation, as an indication of the primacy of the performative text. To begin then, it is interesting to see where the influences for this production originated. The celebrated 1970 production, while famously directed by Peter Brook, was less famously designed by Sally Jacobs, who was at this time working in California. Therefore her hippie fairies can be seen to be coming as much out of Woodstock and the Summer of Love as out of the European radical tradition of student uprisings in Paris and elsewhere, with their strongly political and radical socialist agendas. Jacob’s white box, and Brook’s vision of circus entertainers within that, also embodied the openness of the 1970s, which brought a new era of consumerism, as well as a sense of cultural freedom. The international success of this production may be as easily linked to the spread of American ideas about globalization as to any real success in involving a world-wide audience in a new vision of British Shakespeare. The fact that this open and sunny production was a much bigger success internationally than Brook’s earlier dark, dangerous and particularly European production of King Lear is, I would suggest, telling. The shift of a society towards an interest in representation and personal expression for the individual in everyday life may well be the key to this production’s early success. In 1971 Peter Thompson writes of this production “More than anything I have ever seen, this production declared its confidence and delight in the art of performance” (qtd in Thompson, 1971, 172). Moving twenty years forward and back to London and the engagement by Richard Eyre as artistic director at the National Theatre of the French Canadian theatre director Robert Lepage, it is possible to see once again the coming together of a production with a particular cultural moment. Following on from the 1980s franchise of Les Miserables and tours of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, but also the development of the international Theatre Festivals, a tourist audience for theatre that was wealthy, mobile and culturally literate could increasingly be assumed by the early 1990s. A small group of international directors was brought to Britain (Robert Wilson, Yukio Ninagawa and Lepage to name a few) adding to the list that Peter Brook started, helping to support the somewhat lagging notion of a Director’s Theatre. Peter Thompson’s description of Peter Hall’s influence demonstrates the legacy of this idea:

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Moving with the times, Sir Peter turned in the 1990s to the private sector. But Hall has been a key figure in another respect, too: together with Peter Brook and John Barton, he so promoted the role of the director in British Shakespeare that we are now more likely to name a production after its director – the Deborah Warner Titus, for instance – than its leading player. (Thompson, 1996, 175) Importing new international directors into this model after the movement of UK directors to the private sector can be seen to define the next stage of Shakespeare production in the UK. The fact that all of these directors, but most particularly Lepage, worked collaboratively and out of very different theatrical traditions, was both celebrated, on the one hand, and ignored on the other. Lepage was known for spectacular visual effects that involved shifting perspectives of mood and light. His decision to locate the play in a muddy pool on the Olivier stage was not universally greeted with enthusiasm. Nor was his casting of Angela Laurier, a performer from Cirque de Soleil, as Puck. Lepage’s attempts to bring elements of his own theatrical tradition from Quebec to the production through this actor and through his physical approach to the play were seen as inappropriate both by London audiences but also by the actors in this production. Lepage says in rehearsals for his production: “The actors are not surprised by my approach [to Shakespeare] – they are much more surprised or shocked, or there is much more of a clash, when suddenly they have to do a lot of acrobatics” (Lepage, 1993, 35). Robert Smallwood (1996) includes a description of this production in his chapter on “Director’s Shakespeare” under the title “Experiments and Epics”. The production’s visual impact is celebrated by Smallwood but he sees it as woefully inadequate in terms of its presentation of the text vocally: The production provided an extraordinary theatrical experience, often visually astonishing, sometimes hauntingly beautiful as light was reflected off the stage’s shimmering surface, sometimes bizarre and absurd as actors struggled in the glutinous mess. Vocally it was almost unrelievedly disappointing, a situation crystallized by the Puck of Angela Laurier, a circus artist and contortionist operating in what was for her a foreign language. (Smallwood, 1996, 186) The central aspect of this director’s ingenious theatrical presentation, its preference for theatrical effect and visual illusion over textual reverence, is seen as inadequate within a cultural context that has been determined by the Oxbridge inspired tradition of Director’s Theatre. The clash of cultures both on stage and off made for a production that was less than wholly “successful” for the critics and local audiences (Fig. 17.3). Lepage himself points out the limitations of the vision of the director as the central creative practitioner but he also points out how a Director’s Theatre fundamentally contradicts Brook’s own radical impulses: “If you look at when Peter Brook did A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he reappropriated the text but he didn’t set it anywhere in particular. He just said ‘Play with it, make it yours’, and they made it theirs” (Lepage, 1993, 36). This freedom with the text is contrasted by Lepage with the working practices he experienced at the National Theatre: “There is a sense of respect for the director in British theatre that I am discovering, and well, it’s a nuisance. Everyone is so at your disposal . . . They’re disciplined, they are there on time, and they listen to what the director wants and they do it” (36). This director usefully signals his own dislocation from the Anglo/American English speaking theatrical tradition. With the last visit to Montreal by a Stratford company

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Figure 17.3: The 1992 National Theatre Production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Robert Lepage and starring Jeffrey Kissoon as Oberon, Angela Laurier as Puck, Indra Ové as Hermia and Rupert Graves as Lysander

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taking place in 1929 the theatrical influences that were working on Lepage were entirely different from those of the actors, audience and critics he encountered in London. This example can be contrasted with a “local” production of the play in Australia where the play was conceived to reflect its audience’s specific relationship with colonial culture and power. In a moment specifically designed to highlight Australia’s cultural presentation to an international audience, Noel Tovey directed an all-indigenous cast of the play in 1997 as part of the cultural programme leading up to the Sydney Olympics. In “Finding Local Habitation”, Penny Gay and Kate Flaherty note that the bringing together of the play’s comic characters with a local identification with a labour tradition resulted in a series of resonant moments that had very little to do with earlier stagings coming from the UK. The use of an indigenous cast added additional resonances, highlighting the gaps and incongruities resulting from the imposition of Elizabethan English on native characters. Gay and Flaherty look at the way this play spoke specifically to an Australian audience in this period suggesting that the production they address, while influenced by Brook’s Dream, was certainly not determined by it: The way that Dream engages with such features of the Australian cultural context seems almost to bring Brook’s project full circle. While in reaction to English nineteenth-century snobbery Brook pleads the innate dignity of the actor/artisan, Australian audiences are likely to side with the actor/artisans from the outset and to see the courtly set as the cultural ‘other’. (Flaherty and Gay, 2010, 232) In reception in Australia Brook’s Dream, then, spoke to a preconditioned bias towards these characters in this context, undermining the “radical” elements of the interpretation as it was seen in a British context. Tovey as director was interested in the relationship between Shakespeare’s Dream and the indigenous idea of Dreamtime: “In Aboriginal culture, all the ritual stories are about the Dreamtime, a time when humans and animals were the same thing. So it’s not really strange to our culture to have a man turned into an ass” (qtd in Flaherty and Gay, 2010, 236). This production helped to recreate the indigenous response to European norms: Deborah Mailman’s Helena at all points strongly signalled that the apparent enthralment to European cultural traditions would not be lasting. She undermined and exploited structures of cultural authority from within: from within sixteenthcentury English drama and even from within an Elizabethan bodice and farthingale. Mailman’s costume seemed not to inhibit, but rather to augment and impel her physical energy. It did not prevent her wrangling playfully with Demetrius or wrestling with Hermia. (238) The European influence, or lack thereof, then, became the subject of this theatrical reinterpretation of the text. Like the Lepage production, the visual intensity, but also the performing body of the actor, suppressed ideas of cultural or gendered submission inscribed in the text. However, this production “succeeded” in the one area that Lepage’s National Theatre production was seen to fail, in the vocal presentation of the text: Palpably in command of her attire, Mailman was even more the master of the language of the play. She utilised the stage space and the language with confidence, as part of her own stock of creative resources. In particular, her easy use of her own

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Australian accent permitted her to exploit the full expressive range of Helena’s speech. (239) The power relations in the performance contradicted a traditional reading of the hierarchies in the play: Her resourceful rhetoric of ‘self-abasement’, combined with her compelling physicality, amounted to a performance that overturned the ostensible power dynamics of the scene. A stiffly formal Demetrius, played by Tony Briggs, seemed feeble and put upon, oppressed by Helena’s superior vitality and conviction. His threats were delivered as desperate but ineffectual bids for power over her. (239) This was a production that clearly made this play Australian in its cultural resonances. The intercultural exchange here appears increasingly to be one of equals in this theatrical debate. However, it is important to stress the significance of a sympathetic reading of the production being articulated by a local critical viewpoint. The play in this case helped to address the strangeness of the gap between the native culture and the restrictions of the language and dress of the imposed culture. Struggling against the language, then, provided a positive tension that seemed resonant for local audiences but expressive and understandable for the visiting international guests in attendance. A local critical reading of this production makes its place in a wider culturally specific dialogue both possible and productive. Through these two examples what becomes increasingly evident is a two-way process of cultural influence but also the shift in importance away from Shakespeare’s text to the centrality of performance in order to create new meanings for the plays. The Dream, as an example of Shakespeare’s works more generally, shows how these plays have been reconceived and rewritten internationally to negotiate the positions of centre and margin but also the gaps between local and global theatrical and social conditions in quite sophisticated ways. An inverted form of influence was seen in Tim Supple’s Dream of 2006 (part of the Complete Works Festival) which reflected Lepage’s bold visual and multilingual style, as well as a vision of a forest that was culturally different, yet contextually specific, coming out of the Australian experiment. These interpretative influences, plus the inclusion of this production in a new form of festival, help to illustrate the circular journey of influence at the beginning of a new millennium for Shakespearean performance. As a microcosm of this work more widely, these Dreams prove instructive both practically and conceptually in mapping this third history; a history that engages with a central British tradition of performance but in forceful and influential ways.

Conclusion Thus, the story of this period begins in London but eventually, after circumnavigating the globe, re-emerges at the Globe theatre and in The Complete Works Festival of the RSC in 2006. This chapter has tried to trace this circular journey in a way that allows the grand narrative of individual achievement to give way to collaboration, between cultures but also between theatrical participants. International adaptations of Shakespeare, which once were seen as an attempt to enter into the dominant cultural debate, are now as often viewed as acts of self-definition, instigating local cultural debates and British responses. One view of the centuries in question is that they show a mirror image of what went before, with the decline of British cultural power matching an earlier development of

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colonial influence. Another view might draw parallels with the Renaissance period when emergent capitalism and increased trade and tourism in Britain created a need for cultural redefinition. Through both of these lenses Shakespeare continues to engage directors, theatre companies and audiences but also a range of academic commentators in complex and socially significant ways. Shakespeare’s position internationally is now well established as a commercial entity and as part of an international cultural debate. While some former colonies are increasingly disinterested in that debate, other countries formerly excluded from it still help to expand the RSC’s touring programme. A reverse trend is also possible to trace, through the work of South African expatriate theatre practitioners working in Britain. Both Janet Suzman and Antony Sher have recently worked with companies in their native land to bring interesting examples of new hybrid work to Britain. The multi-racial production of Hamlet directed by Suzman for the Grahamstown Festival in 2005, which later went on to the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town and the RSC Swan Theatre at Stratford-uponAvon as part of The Complete Works Festival in 2006, can be seen to have reignited a cross-cultural dialogue between these two countries. The 2009 RSC/Baxter Theatre coproduction of The Tempest, directed by Janice Honeyman, which starred Antony Sher as a clearly colonial Prospero and John Kani as the indignant native Caliban, altered the world view of the play to include an African aesthetic and value system. This reimagining of the colonial experience from the point of view of the local inhabitants encapsulates several decades of critical writing on the play from a postcolonial perspective, as well as the work of “local” productions such as the ones described above. What is new, however, is to see such productions performed under “the insignia of the RSC”. The question that arises is does the RSC now speak for these international perspectives as well as speaking to them? Regardless of the answer to this question, what is astonishing in this new development is the way that the plays continue to facilitate a dialogue that unites very different communities to construct a collective understanding of how we see the world. Shakespeare’s influence may be thinly spread, and the text may be subject to radical reinterpretation, but the influence of Shakespeare’s work in the twenty-first century will likely more fully encircle the global community, engaging with a wider range of world views as well as representational possibilities. If this is the case then Shakespeare on stage in the twentyfirst century will consolidate once and for all the world-wide influence of the unstoppable cultural and commercial entity that this playwright has become. Hopefully the new millennium will benefit from the intercultural dialogue that has been instigated by the at times colonial, at times collective and at times combative approach to these plays on stage as seen through these three complementary histories.

Notes 1. All of the dates and statistics used in this section rely on a list compiled by Emma Smith entitled “RSC International Touring 1913–2000” held in a file on the RSC’s international activities in the Shakespeare Centre Library, Stratford-upon-Avon. I was kindly given access to this file and advice on this chapter by SCL librarian Sylvia Morris.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Aebischer, Pascale, Edward J. Esche and Nigel Wheale, eds (2003). Remaking Shakespeare: Performance across Media, Genres and Cultures. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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Adler, Steven (2001). Rough Magic: Making Theatre at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Bennett, Susan (2008). “Universal Experience: The City as Tourist Stage”. In The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Tracey C. David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 76–90. ——(1997). Theatre Audiences. London and New York: Routledge. Carson, Christie and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds (2010). Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carson, Neil (2010). “A Fresh Advance in Shakespearean Production”. In Shakespeare in Stages: New Directions in Theatre History, ed. Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 57–70. Chambers, Colin (2004). Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company: Creativity and the Institution. London and New York: Routledge. Desmet, Christy and Robert Sawyer, eds (1999). Shakespeare and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge. Dionne, Craig and Parmita Kapadia, eds (2008). Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage. Aldershot: Ashgate. Flaherty, Kate and Penny Gay (2010). “Finding Local Habitation: Shakespeare’s Dream at play on the stage of contemporary Australia”. In Shakespeare in Stages: New Directions in Theatre History, ed. Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 229–47. Henderson, Diana E. (2006). Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hildy, Franklin J. (2008). “The ‘Essence of Globeness’: Authenticity and the Search for Shakespeare’s Stagecraft”. In Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds (2010). Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 13–26. Hodgdon, Barbara and W. B. Worthen, eds (2005). A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Oxford: Blackwell. Kennedy, Dennis (1993). Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lepage, Robert (1993). “Collaboration, Translation, Interpretation: The Director Interviewed Rehearsing his Controversial Dream”. New Theatre Quarterly 9.33, 31–6. McLuskie, Kathleen (2006). “Afterword: Unending Revels: Visual Pleasure and Compulsory Shakespeare”. In The Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, ed. Diana E. Henderson. Oxford: Blackwell, 238–50. Massai, Sonia, ed. (2005). Worldwide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Munro, Lucy (2010). “Coriolanus and the (In)Authenticities of William Poel’s Platform Stage”. In Shakespeare in Stages: New Directions in Theatre History, ed. Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 37–56. Novy, Marianne, ed. (1993). Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Rokison, Abigail (2010). “Authenticity in the 21st Century: Propeller and Shakespeare’s Globe”. In Shakespeare in Stages: New Directions in Theatre History, ed. Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 71–90. Royal Shakespeare Company (1998). Annual Report and Accounts 1997/98 (122nd Report of the Council). Stratford-upon-Avon: RSC Publications. Royal Shakespeare Company (2002). Review 2002. Stratford-upon-Avon: RSC Publications. Sinfield, Alan (1994). “Royal Shakespeare: Theatre and the Making of Ideology”. In Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 182–205.

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Smallwood, Robert (1996). “Director’s Shakespeare”. In The Oxford Illustrated History of Shakespeare on Stage, ed. Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 176–96. Thomson, Peter (1971). “A Necessary Theatre: The Royal Shakespeare Season 1970 Reviewed”. Shakespeare Survey 24, 117–26. ——(1996). “Shakespeare and the Public Purse”. In The Oxford Illustrated History of Shakespeare on Stage, ed. Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 160–75.

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SHAKESPEARE AND CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE SPACES Andrew James Hartley

U

ncool Shakespeare. Is there another kind? Not if you believe some of those who fancy themselves on the cutting edge of contemporary performance. Brendan Kiley’s article for the online magazine Slog was unambiguously titled “The Tony Awards 2008, or Enough with the Goddamned Shakespeare Already”. Kiley was responding particularly to Chicago Shakespeare Theatre being nominated for the Tony award for best regional theatre company, and he did so in suggestive terms: Really? A regional Shakespeare theater? How very, very lame. Shakespeare gets enough attention and reward in America, what with the NEA shoving piles of its theater money to Shakespeare-in-the-heartland projects because they’re too afraid of Congress to fund much else – like, say, even American classics like Tennessee fucking Williams. Which is bogus. It’s not like the NEA has to stuff cash directly into Karen Finley’s crotch to earn its name as America’s arts foundation, but can it dial the time machine forward at least 400 years, to maybe the early 20th century? I’m glad Chicago has a strong showing this year, with Steppenwolf’s August winning the Pulitzer and now, almost certainly, the Tony. And Barbara Gaines, artistic director of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, sounds like a champ . . . But giving a Tony to a regional Shakespeare house, especially now, seems like a capitulation to pernicious forces. (Kiley, 2008, emphasis original) Chicago Shakespeare Theatre did indeed win the regional company award, and Kiley was the subject of some vociferous attacks on his assumptions about the inherent “lameness” of staged Shakespeare, but versions of his stance are heard often from people committed to live theatre and they merit further consideration. Shakespeare is toothless and irrelevant, Kiley assumes, because it is archaic, arcane and culturally safe, providing no challenge to the present, particularly – as those dark references to pernicious forces suggest – in political terms. Of course, to many Shakespeareans accustomed to reading, teaching and producing politically inflected criticism such a position will seem surprising or just plain wrong, but there is no denying the fact that Shakespeare has an air of respectability which can easily morph into irrelevance, and Kiley’s invocation of the Bush era National Endowment for the Art’s sponsorship of a large scale Shakespeare initiative suggests that the powers that be see no threat in touring the dusty Bard.1 This version of Shakespeare is bound to traditional, text-bound education, to antique patriarchy and its values, to the establishment (both in terms of what the plays represent and the people who flock to them).

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Though such a reading is far from uncommon, it is deeply untheatrical, as some of Kiley’s critics were quick to suggest, citing productions at Chicago Shakespeare and elsewhere that they found aesthetically, politically and socially edgy, unsettling or radical. Shakespeare, they point out, can be any number of things, and the assumption that it must necessarily be conservative even when supported by a conservative administration is itself bizarrely conservative as an assessment of how theatre makes meaning. Whatever cultural and educational baggage Shakespeare has as a textual object or a cultural abstraction, theatre companies have to operate on the assumption that their productions will find something new and relevant in staging the plays, and it must be at least possible for audiences to experience something other than the known, the familiar, the inherently “lame”. My purpose here is not to insist that Shakespeare is somehow inherently radical but to insist on the locality of meaning in theatrical productions of Shakespeare, something I think both Kiley and the NEA have badly misjudged, which significantly inflects performed meanings, political and otherwise. Shakespeare means only within a specific cultural moment, and that implies both temporal and geographical fixity. A Shakespeare production necessarily generates multiple meanings, but its anchor is in time and space, and while criticism in the last thirty years has done an excellent job of recognizing the temporal dimension to Shakespearean meanings (particularly in the original period of production) it has paid less attention to its spatial element, especially in modern theatrical production. Shakespeare on stage is semiotically bound to space, to the form of the theatre itself, to the location that defines cultural ambience, audience demographics and therefore semantic specificity. Performance space is what gets us away from that conservative and essentialist notion of the magical, orthodox power of the text being generically broadcast throughout the world, inoculating the larger culture with the assumed value(s) of the monolithic “Shakespeare”. Focusing instead on space makes Shakespeare relative, not absolute; particular, not universal. Space renders Shakespeare in three dimensions, demanding the bodies of actors and audiences and making meaning less about what is written and more about what happens in the space between those bodies. Space implies time, demands an event, and at an event, anything can happen. I shall begin by considering briefly the way that the physical layout of a performance space affects staged Shakespeare in contemporary UK and US theatre before moving to a consideration of the kinds of plurality of approach and audience suggested by different kinds of theatres in US Shakespeare festivals, before concluding with a case study of a company which uses “found spaces”. In each case I hope to build an argument for the centrality of the material theatre and its location as a shaping factor in assessing how Shakespeare makes meaning in performance.

Playing Space Though Shakespeare on stage is too often discussed by academics simply in terms of language and text, the extent to which the form of a performance space shapes the production that is staged within it is a given for performers and something audiences recognize at least viscerally. Productions have to be tailored to the particular dynamics of a given space, taking into account the physical aspects of the facility. Basic concerns such as the size of the house immediately limit the kinds of production the company can mount, small houses (100 seats or so) being more suited to actor-driven performances than medium houses (say, 300–500 seats), while very large houses (say, 800 and above) generally lend

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themselves to more scenically driven productions. The building’s acoustic properties, similarly, affect the goals of the production, dictating a range of technical matters from the use of microphones to actor blocking and the style of vocal delivery by the actors. Such things affect not just what the company sets out to do, but how their work is received by the audience, and the issue is not simply a matter of getting the choice “right”: the acoustical problems of a large venue with a domed house, for instance, are not simply solved by miking the stage, since this tends to flatten the sound and, since all voices will be perceived to come from the sound system, make it hard for distant audience members to follow who is speaking. Most theatres, moreover, have houses whose acoustics vary considerably from area to area depending on the shape of the building and the way the sound bounces off structural materials.2 For productions of Shakespeare (in which the words factor crucially both because they define much of the author’s cultural value and because their very difficulty and antiquity demand absolute clarity from the performers), the way a space shapes sound is immensely important. Theatre is as much a visual medium as it is auditory, and every performance space has idiosyncrasies affecting productions as much as the physical quirks of a baseball stadium or a cricket ground affect the games played there.3 Sightlines necessarily shape productions and not simply because the company wants the whole audience to see the whole production. Actors have to perform differently according to where the audience is, and in a complex house (one with several different seating zones arranged by both width and height) playing to everyone means giving less of one’s face to any given audience member, something which is particularly true of in-the-round spaces where actors always have their backs to some part of the house and are thus encouraged to keep moving. Theatres with aisles often have stages where actors can safely turn their backs without significantly obscuring audience members, and this comes to stamp the production’s pictorial dimension in terms of actor blocking.4 Other physical elements of the theatre building have significant impact on the style as well as the scale of the production. Few things establish mood and focus in the theatre more than light, for instance, and there are a host of questions any lighting designer would ask of his or her space before the design can be produced. What particular demands does the space require in terms of scenic lighting and is the space equipped with the power and instrumentation to meet those requirements? Is the space confined to a repertory plot or are “specials” available, and if so, how many? What is the total number of lights available (dozens, or hundreds?), and how accessible are they for hanging and focusing? What are the theatre’s resources in terms of gels, gobos (templates placed in front of a source of lighting) and other lighting effects, and what sort of lighting board will be used to control them? Such things are dependent on the physical structure and technological infrastructure of the theatre building, so that lighting plots have to be altered to fit the space even in touring productions which move only between comparable venues. Versions of these issues occupy all companies, no matter how small, and even the most minimal productions have to engage with matters of simple spatial arrangement in the backstage as well as in the theatre’s public areas. How long it takes, for example, for actors to move backstage from one entrance to another may go beyond dictating exit choices, affecting more clearly conceptual issues such as actor doubling. Similar concerns tied to matters of physical space drive a production’s scenic elements. The placement of load-in doors, on site construction shops, the depth of wings and number of electrical lines, the

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availability or absence of fly and trap spaces: all of these aspects shape the production’s visual elements. The most major issue bound to performing space is probably that of the stage layout itself. Thrust stages, proscenium stages, those “modified” thrusts that are both and neither, and arena or in-the-round theatres all create radically different performer/audience dynamics which drive all the above concerns of light, sound and scenery. But they especially drive acting style and audience relationship. Even stages of the same basic type can have broadly different dimensions in ways that stamp the production, so a proscenium stage’s pictorial quality will be significantly shaped by the depth of its upstage in proportion to the width of its “arch”. The size and shape of a performance space are especially relevant to the staging of Shakespeare because most performers (and audiences) assume that Shakespeare is in some ways different from other kinds of drama, if only because of mainstream theatre it utilizes the oldest, most layered and mystified of languages. Patsy Rodenburg and other voice coaches assume that Shakespeare is different from other dramatists and requires a different set of skills and techniques keyed to issues of verse form (particularly metre), projection and character work. In finished productions, of course, these combine in the mind of the audience, shaping a larger sense of performative style and meaning, but such things cannot be considered without taking into account the physical dimensions of the playing space. No single approach to speaking Shakespeare can fit all venues, and what may seem unremarkable or even commendable projection on a 700-seat proscenium stage will look like shouting in a lab theatre. Character dynamics change in such conditions so that the scale of the space affects not just the way the audiences perceive character, but also affect character relationships, and thus may radically alter the kind of play the audience experiences. An audience that is close enough to see the minor raising of Hamlet’s eyebrow is going to have a very different perception of the play from one in which every line has to travel 100 yards to be heard. While some large theatres have both types of seating, the production will be aimed at one or the other, or pitched somewhere in between, and while it is understood that audience members will experience the show differently depending on their location, the implications for radically different playing spaces are clear: most companies develop a kind of “house style” where Shakespeare is concerned (often measured – albeit simplistically – in where they fall on a scale which has bombast at one end and naturalism at the other), but this style has as much to do with the kinds of facility in which they perform as it does with conscious intellectual or aesthetic preference. The configuration of a space has, for instance, significant implications for soliloquy and aside, early modern conventions that seem counterintuitive within the proscenium’s fourth wall. If the production is played in a broadly realist manner on such a stage, instances where characters speak without anyone else being on stage or in ways that assume they are unheard by other characters sharing the scene with them, might be vaguely Brechtian, shattering the realist illusion, or might attempt to subsume the device within a realist psychology as simply “thinking aloud”. Whatever the effect of such a choice, it is necessarily different from an actor who clearly addresses the audience directly, something that might be easier on a thrust stage which more obviously renders the playing area a conceptual space that is aware of its own theatricality. This is particularly true of a day-lit auditorium in which the audience is as visible to itself as are the actors who are performing. Space thus shapes more than playing style: it shapes character dynamics, the way an audience relates to the performers and the way it conceives of the theatrical event itself.

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While attending a 1999 production of Julius Caesar at the Globe in London, I was unsettled to see, standing beside me in the pit, a young man with a large beer can who, from the moment I walked in, looked likely to cause trouble. He was loud, obnoxious and apparently drunk, disturbing those around him immediately prior to the start of the play by calling for Gwyneth Paltrow and throwing out other references to the then recently released Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998). The Globe had not been open long, but had already acquired a reputation – partly earned – as attracting more tourists out for “Renaissance Festival” fun and games than “serious” theatre goers. In such an environment the lager lout beside me seemed plausible, however tiresome, and it was not until the show got under way and he revealed himself to be the cobbler of the first scene that the cleverness of the deception became clear. The device traded on the Globe’s populist audience dynamic, and while part of that is tied to the building’s nature as reconstruction, it was also tied to the nature of the space qua space: day-lit, interactive, pointedly opposite to the darkened, respectful auditorium of more “conventional” productions. This is a pointed case, but I would argue that some version of the manner in which space determines or facilitates certain kinds of theatrical effect is intrinsic to all performances of Shakespeare. Manchester’s Library Theatre proscenium (originally a lecture hall) could not be further from the neighbouring Royal Exchange’s space-age in-the-round arena that actors sometimes compare to the Thunderdome of Mad Max fame. The former is inevitably grand, distant and pictorial, the other intimate to the point of intrusion, its scenic elements generally confined to the floor of the acting space and a few carefully placed pieces of furniture. Actors using the invisible fourth wall of the Library Theatre need to be bigger, more presentational, though the space seats only about 300, while their counterparts at the Exchange have to stay alert to the space’s unique sightlines in ways making for more mobile performances, and deal with an audience which is never more than twenty or thirty feet away. Not surprisingly, the material conditions of such playing spaces have serious ramifications for touring companies and for the possibility of playing the same show at even a single venue for which it was not designed. In the case of the Library Theatre, for instance, it was found that their plans to move productions between the original theatre and their new venue, the Forum Theatre at Wythenshawe, were impractical because of “the incompatibility of the stages and a realization that what was appreciated at the one theatre did not necessarily go down so well with audiences at the other” (Library Theatre, n.d.). Differences between spaces, far from being matters of mere logistics, are integral to issues of conceptual approach and style of execution. All of which is, if too infrequently noted, self-evident. What emerges from such a sketch, however, is an important corrective to the centrality of the Shakespearean text where issues of staging are concerned and a sense of the uniqueness and specificity inherent in the spaces where such staging occurs. Shakespeare on stage is not something we can characterize with sweeps of a broad brush because it is an essentially local phenomenon, even in the case of touring productions or banner companies like the RSC, which draw audiences from far afield. The experience of theatre is always local because it is always bound to the space in which one experiences it.

(What’s so Funny ’bout) American Shakespeare Companies A casual researcher who confined his reading to Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Quarterly might be forgiven for thinking that there was little going on outside the RSC

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and the National. And while it might be argued, as Christie Carson does in her chapter in this volume, that for scholarly purposes these are the companies that best merit close attention, such an approach often fails to consider the way that many people actually experience Shakespeare in the theatre. Indeed, it might be said that the very iconic status of those companies, the global scrutiny to which they are subjected, the sense that their productions immediately become part of a conversation about the play’s performance history, strips them of some of the locally specific nature of theatre elsewhere. Nowhere is this more true than in the United States where the sheer scale of the geography tends to insist upon the localized nature of performed Shakespeare. The absence of monolithic companies like the RSC does not, however, mean that there is less Shakespeare to see. Quite the contrary. In the United States alone there are – according to Shakespeare Fellowship – 233 active companies who specialize in Shakespeare (all but sixty-two having “Shakespeare” or some similar moniker like “Bard” in their titles).5 There are forty-nine Shakespeare companies listed in California alone.6 These numbers are far from reliable, and while they certainly include some companies who work only sporadically or no longer exist, they fail to take into account some major companies who perform Shakespeare as part of a large repertory, and other minor companies staging Shakespeare in small venues. Those 233 US Shakespeare companies do not include many small organizations, let alone student or ad hoc companies formed for a single show or season. The list, for instance, has only two entries in my home state of North Carolina, namely the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival in High Point and the Carolinian Shakespeare festival in New Bern. It does not list Shakespeare on the Green (Wilmington), Montford Park Players (“North Carolina’s longest running Shakespeare festival”), Chickspeare (an all-female company in Charlotte), Collaborative Arts (who mount the Charlotte Shakespeare Festival), Epic Arts (who mounted a musical Midsummer Night’s Dream in one of the city’s shared spaces, Spirit Square, in 2008) or at least two other Charlotte-based companies whose Shakespeare productions I have seen. It also does not cover the state’s fifty-two four-year colleges and universities many of which stage Shakespeare regularly. In Charlotte alone, which has four major universities (UNC Charlotte, Davidson, Queens University, Belmont Abbey College) and a very strong community college (Central Piedmont Community College), all but the community college (which specializes in opera and musical theatre) have staged at least one main stage Shakespeare production in the last year. Factor similar omissions into the numbers representing the Shakespeare presence in other cities and states and the numbers start to get dizzying: close to 1000 separate professional companies staging multiple Shakespeare productions each year nationwide with (conservatively) twice that number of productions on college and university campuses. The proliferation of such companies might be considered an embarrassment of riches, but it raises serious questions about how we discuss the place of Shakespeare on stage in the twenty-first century. What we have in the United States – out of the shadow of a national and semi-authorized company like the RSC – is an extraordinary range of approaches, performance venues, company structures, levels and types of expertise, actors, directors, designers and, most importantly, audiences. How do we assess what Shakespeare on stage is, what it means, in the context of such extraordinary plurality? Before we address that larger question, however, we must first ask whether the apparent plurality is real in terms more than simple numbers? Can we take it to mean difference in approach, for instance, and can plurality in this case also imply diversity in the more

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specific sense of representing a cultural and ethnic spectrum? Answers, albeit tentative, to these questions can be found in a further consideration of space. Even confining ourselves to the US professional companies, the range of playing spaces is staggering, and many companies operate on more than one stage. A major LORT (League of Resident Theatres) theatre such as the Arizona Theatre Company (ATC) plays in two separate spaces, one in Tucson (623 seats) and one in Phoenix (800 seats), and while both are technologically sophisticated proscenium houses, the Tucson theatre is a comparably intimate space housed in a 1920s’ Spanish-style building, while the Herberger Theatre Centre in Phoenix is larger and more modern. The company mounts its shows for three weeks in each space. The Utah Shakespeare Festival (USF) also has two different theatres, and though they are comparable in scale they are radically different in design and feel, the Adams Shakespeare Theatre being a mock-Elizabethan amphitheatre with a deep thrust stage and the Randall L. Jones Theatre being a lavishly contemporary interior space with a modified proscenium stage. The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival (SFSF), by contrast, plays in 1000-seat public parks, constructing its own productionspecific stage in the venue. SFSF, ATC and USF represent the high end of American regional Shakespeare, all being LORT companies with multimillion dollar annual budgets, but a sense of the diversity of staged Shakespeare at the “street level” is perhaps easier to see through a consideration of smaller companies. In California alone the dozens of non-LORT theatres playing Shakespeare cover a range of organizations with budgets ranging from $50,000 a year or less (Long Beach Shakespeare Company, Crown City Theatre Company, Ragged Wing) to large companies operating on an excess of $1m per year with a letter of agreement from LORT (Pacific Repertory Theatre), with many midsized companies operating on between $100,000 and $750,000 per year (Shakespeare Orange County, Marin Shakespeare Company, Murphey’s Creek Theatre/Shakespeare in the Foothills, Woodward Shakespeare Festival, the African American Shakespeare Company).7 Levels of funding have a significant impact on the kinds of spaces companies can call home, and many do not own the buildings in which they perform, even when those spaces are their primary venue. This is particularly true of companies such as Shakespeare Orange County and the Woodward Shakespeare Festival who play primarily in outdoor public arenas – versions of Shakespeare in the Park – where the playing space is owned by the local community. Some (such as Long Beach Shakespeare) lease the space, while others (like Marin Shakespeare) share facilities owned by a local university, factors which, of course, limit the extent to which they can tailor the space to their needs or the needs of a particular production. Even within a single state, the stage and house designs of these non-LORT theatres run the full gamut of possibilities from the very small (Long Beach Shakespeare uses a 40-seat proscenium space) to large, indoor proscenium theatres such as the 540 and 300 seat theatres operated by Pacific Repertory Theatre. Pacific Rep also uses a 99-seat arena theatre, while the African American Shakespeare Company uses a three quarter thrust. Outdoor venues range from Mountain Shakespeare’s 150-seat “gazebo” theatre, Murphey’s Creek’s 250-seat scenic venue and Shady Shakespeare’s seasonally constructed 300–400 seat wooded auditorium, through Central Coast Shakespeare’s open plan lawn seating (holding about 500) and Shakespeare Orange County’s intimate 550 seats (none more than 40 feet from the stage). Marin Shakespeare has a 600-seat modified thrust and Woodward Shakespeare Festival a 900, while Redlands’ uses a 5000-seat amphitheatre (3800 fixed, 1200 lawn). The Crown City Theatre and Oakland’s Woman’s Will company play in both indoor and outdoor

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venues, the latter using dance studios, black boxes and dormant retail spaces as available. By contrast, San Diego’s Old Globe, a LORT theatre, has three spaces, two proscenium stages (seating 580 in the indoor Globe and 612 in the outdoor Festival theatre) and one in-the-round (seating 225). Any discussion of what staged Shakespeare is in California would have to be significantly modulated to account for the differences in house size and layout. But what does such diversity of venue mean? Does it, for instance, translate into diversity within the audience? Not surprisingly, the single largest factor affecting audience racial demographics seems to be not so much geographical location as company composition. Productions featuring people of colour predominantly in their casts tend to draw audiences which reflect that cast, and even predominantly white companies notice a shift towards greater diversity in their audiences when they mount productions with more diverse casts. Georgia Shakespeare is based on the predominantly white Oglethorpe University campus in a similarly largely white area of Atlanta. Their average audience is approximately 90 per cent white, with 5 per cent of the remainder being black, with other ethnicities making up the final 5 per cent. When the company stages its spring “Shake at the Lake” production – free admission to the general public – in the more ethnically diverse portion of Atlanta’s Midtown surrounding Piedmont Park, the audience demographics shift only three or four percentage points towards greater diversity. When they stage productions featuring largely African American casts at their Oglethorpe home, however, as in their 2005 Romeo and Juliet, audience diversity shifts closer to 20 per cent. Given the racial makeup of Atlanta, this number is still comparatively small, but it changes dramatically for the company’s education programmes and school matinees for which the audience may be 75 per cent black.8 Of Californian companies surveyed, most say that their audience tends to be predominantly white even when the immediate area is more ethnically diverse, the only exception to this being San Francisco’s African American Shakespeare Company whose audience is 60 per cent black, 35 per cent white and 5 per cent Latino. This pattern of company representing audience does not seem to hold true in terms of gender, all-male or all-female productions not having a significant effect on the gender of audiences, though some all-female companies report a more diverse racial audience than is typical for Shakespeare. Company make up clearly affects audience demographic, therefore, but it does not trump location as the principal determining factor of who watches any given American production. What is clear is that most US companies draw almost their entire audience from the immediate community, even in the case of large organizations based in major metropolitan centres. Visitors to New York city are more likely to seek out tickets to Broadway musicals than they are to the Gorilla Repertory Theatre, Judith Shakespeare or the New York Classical Theatre. While American Shakespeare tends to draw a predominantly white, educated and older theatre audience therefore, the local specifics can vary tremendously depending on the local community. The audience at Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska, reflects the particular demographics of its region (Caucasian, Filipino and Alaskan Native) and though the theatre plays almost exclusively to the 30,000 residents of Juneau (travel in and out being possible only by plane or boat) they mount two or three Shakespeare plays as part of a larger repertory and operate on an annual budget of over $1m. Perseverance, like most middle-sized to large companies, also has an extensive education and outreach wing which further roots the organization in the community. Even if Perseverence’s isolated location makes it a special case, US Shakespeare does

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generally tend to be home grown, the companies rooted in local communities in which most of the staff and actors live, so that even a theatre that attracts a particular audience demographic such as the African American Shakespeare Company draws 75 per cent of that audience from the immediate locale. In California, Shakespeare Orange County and San Diego’s Old Globe both draw 90 per cent of their audience from their immediate communities, the Pacific Repertory Theatre in Carmel 75 per cent, Central Coast Shakespeare in San Luis Obispo 85 per cent, while Marin Shakespeare Company attracts as much as 99 per cent of its audience from the Bay Area, and Shady Shakespeare gives the same number for Saratoga. All say that their audience demographics mirror those of their community to a large extent. The Crown City Theatre Company in Pasadena says that “mostly all” of its audience is local, the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival likewise, and Ragged Wing Ensemble in Berkeley says 100 per cent of its audience is local. Where companies think of their audience as less exclusively local, they usually do so because they interpret local in a very limited way. Woodward Shakespeare Festival draws 80 per cent of its audience from the local community (Fresno) but attracts the remaining 20 per cent from the adjoining Madera, Tulare, Kings and Merced counties. Long Beach Shakespeare Company says only 25 per cent of its audience is local, but that the rest come from the greater Long Beach area, from Orange County and Los Angeles, only 20–30 miles away and – more importantly – thirty to forty minutes away by car. Redlands Shakespeare Festival draws about half of its audience from Redlands but almost all the rest from elsewhere in Southern California. Similarly the Mountain Shakespeare Festival in Pine Mountain Club and Frazier Park gets 75 per cent of its house from the immediate locale while most of the rest are weekenders from LA. This is in contrast with the flagship UK Shakespeare houses, particularly the RSC where less than half of the audience is local (originating in the Midlands) and almost 10 per cent is international, 5 per cent coming from the Americas.9 In a single season, almost 5000 RSC tickets were purchased by residents of California alone, almost the same number as were bought in Scotland and six times as many as were purchased by residents of Northern Ireland. This is not to say that the RSC is any less democratic than US companies, but it does suggest that its standing as a national theatre of the highest reputation makes its audience more geographically disparate than US companies whose “brand” is less well known beyond the immediate region. Many would argue that the difference is also qualitative – and, broadly speaking, I would concur – but I am less interested here in how the plays are executed on stage than with their connection to and dependence on the immediate locale, a symbiosis that is, of course, financial as well as demographic. The RSC is not a public company but a charitable organization, and half of the RSC’s annual funding comes from government grants, only a third coming from box office revenue, the rest being made up in private gifts, grants, merchandising and interest on fiscal property.10 US companies, by contrast, tend to be dependent on locally raised income, both from their own box office and local public and private support, federal funding being available usually only for particular initiatives such as the NEA’s Shakespeare in American Communities which focuses on outreach and education rather than the day-to-day support of extant companies.11 This necessarily produces a greater reliance on the tastes, interests and demographics of the immediate community, sometimes in ways that actually alienate visitors. A production might resonate with a local audience because that audience discerns, for instance, echoes of local politics, or somehow invokes the company’s own past, its familiar actors a part of the community who may have been around for decades. Local

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companies draw on local resources to build their shows in ways that further anchor them. For its upcoming A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival will dress its mechanicals in leather, because High Point, where the company is based, is a furniture-making town and leather is plentiful and cheap. In an infinite number of tiny ways location shapes the production and, perhaps, invites audience association by echoing – consciously or otherwise – that location. This show, it says, this Shakespeare, is ours. Many US Shakespeare companies have embraced the importance of location through educational and community outreach programmes designed – among other things – to further root the company in the area. Some companies have taken this a step further, making such outreach their raison d’être, abandoning entirely the notion of a home theatre for an itinerant model utilizing school halls, public places and “found spaces” of various kinds to take their work into the community. This has the advantage of escaping the “theatre district” mentality of performance-rich cities and of taking the event to people who might not otherwise have the means or impetus to seek it out. Where Shakespeare is concerned, this has a marked effect on audience demographics in terms of age, ethnicity and levels of education. One such company is the Actors Shakespeare Project based in Boston.

Finding Shakespearean Spaces The Actors Shakespeare Project was established in 2004 during the run-up to the elections of that year, debuting with an overtly political production of Richard III staged in the Old South Meeting House, where Samuel Adams led the 1773 gathering that initiated the Boston Tea Party. The setting gave the play a specific political context in the local past but also – by extension – invited parallels with the present and immediate future, the play’s discourse of political machinations, tyranny and rebellion finding a physical corollary in the structure of the space itself. While the Actors Shakespeare Project has not always sought locations of such resonant specificity that they seem to invite allegorical association, the company does find special value in performing in places whose significance for the show is underwritten by something beyond the show itself, something in the material geometry of the space, its past and associations. The 2009 Coriolanus was set in the Sommerville armoury, while the venue for The Merchant of Venice was an old rope factory beside the water of Fort Point Channel, and their 2007 Titus Andronicus was set in the hard, windowless, concrete and oppressive world of the Basement at Harvard Square’s Garage. Working in so-called found spaces requires the company to engage directly and materially with the structure of the building just to make it practical as an auditorium, and this activity has palpable consequences for the resultant productions. A performance space with next to no power supply, for instance, was transformed by lighting designer Jeff Adelberg with numerous household lamps which had to be carried by the actors in ways that created startling effects. Adele Nadine Traub, who scouts for locations for the company, has to bear in mind the practical concerns of working with buildings that are not actually theatres: square footage for playing, affordability, bathroom and changing facilities, disabled accessibility and so on, but the payoff of using such venues is often remarkable. As designer David Gammons says: I very much enjoy working on site-specific projects, where the existing space tells a story, and where the interaction between the spectator, the spectacle, and the

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environment creates a powerful synergy. I love the idea that theatre takes place in a real space – this actual room, right here, right now – as well as in a mystical place in the imagination. We are TOGETHER simultaneously in this ACTUAL space (not an anonymous black void or a location designed to facilitate watching the play from an anonymous darkness). The play is happening both here and in an alternate reality. I love that site-specific productions frequently destabilize our expectations about our role as an audience, and thereby provide a unique encounter with the play – its story, its language, and its action. (Personal correspondence with author)12 Theorists may dispute Gammons’ use of “actual” but his point is clear: while conventional theatre insists on itself as a locus of the imaginary, the kinds of spaces utilized by ASP are overwritten by their previous incarnations, the people who used them before, the events and tasks for which they were used, and that immediate past is ghosted in the architecture. Instead of refashioning the space, trying to design it away as is the case with most productions, ASP seeks out such venues precisely because of what they might bring to a production if embraced, even when the space brings problems that might be considered counterproductive – even directly oppositional – to the execution of successful theatre. For their second season production of King Lear starring Alvin Epstein, veteran of the American Repertory Theatre, and directed by Patrick Swanson, Ben Evett, the artistic director of the company, had identified a studio space at Boston University. David Gammons was brought in to advise on use of this daunting and problematic venue, and ultimately to design for the production: The room at BU was extraordinary: a space that had lived many lives and therefore was a strange hodge-podge of architecture, textures, materials, and spatial relationships. It was impossible to determine the original function of the large space, but aspects of the room provided clues to its prior uses. Two enormous pillars were in the center of the space, with elaborate pilasters at the top. Closer inspection of these detailed decorations revealed that the exquisite figures were not traditional cherubim, but rather mischievous imps carrying jacks, wrenches, and tires! The strange décor was from one incarnation of the space as a car sales showroom in the fifties. A vast stone staircase swept into the space from a second level, with ornate gothic carved banisters. On one end of the room was a large fireplace with a carved stone mantle. An arched window was set into one wall, open to a small interior space beyond. The ceiling was a masterwork of ribs radiating out from the column tops, creating a cathedral-like vault. Working against these intriguing ornamental features were attempts to make the space “practical” over the years – linoleum tiles on the floor, fluorescent fixtures suspended from the ceiling, retrofitted panel-board cubicles around the exterior doorways, and the walls painted benign beige. It truly was a surreal experience to walk through the room and imagine a play unfolding there. I was absolutely thrilled by the prospect! (Personal correspondence with author) Of course, the interest value of a space does not necessarily make it theatrically feasible, and Gammons and his team then had to transform it into a viable performance venue, first determining the orientation of the audience. Given the location of the pillars and other features this was no easy matter, and was finally resolved by the construction of two L-shaped transverse risers, so that the audience sat on banks of tiered seating looking across the action at each other. This gave maximum access to the staircase, fireplace,

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archway and main entrances to the room, but also meant that the audience was always in the line of sight from each point in the house, albeit generally behind the action, thereby emphasizing both the theatricality of the event and its expressly communal dimension. ASP’s fiscal resources are limited, so simplicity in set-dressing is the rule rather than the exception, but the company wanted a design that would suit both the space and the scale of the play, an environment that would be both unique and, as Gammons puts it, somehow “inescapable”: The first thing I decided to do was create an organic, earthy landscape to work in counterpoint to the ornate architecture. We brought in several cubic yards of rubber mulch – an amazing product that looks very much like real bark mulch but is in fact made from shredded tires. We created texture by combining black, brown, tan, and green rubber mulch and covering the entire floor are in a three-inch deep layer. Now the room’s great columns and staircase seemed to rise up from the very earth, and the sense of Lear’s kingdom crumbling back into the soil became very powerful. The juxtaposition of strong architectural elements inherent to the room and this earthy, rolling landscape became very evocative. The next step was to re-claim the architecture of the space with paint. The massive central columns were completely gilded from top to bottom, and then distressed. The ribs and ceiling vaults were painted gold and red and blue, using the stunning ceiling of Paris’ Saint Chapelle as a model. All the work to bring the grandeur back to the space was countered with additional paint work to distress those surfaces – a paint treatment to suggest peeling paint (or unfinished work), worn chipped gilt, crumbling plaster. The sense was a once grand palace that had grown decrepit over time, as the forces of nature had their way. Water stains were painted onto every surface, as if a hundred years of Lear’s stormy tempests had sotted every beam and arch. On to walls we painted enormous murals, based on images from sources as diverse as the walls of Pompeii and the ceiling of Florence’s astonishing Duomo. These frescos were also distressed. So the overall effect was a vast, cavernous palace – once astonishing in its grandeur but now gone to seed and weakened by the inevitable forces of nature. Into this environment we brought simple pieces – a painted canvas map on the floor, a few chairs, a set of wooden stocks carved out of a tree trunk. Homemade chandeliers made from rusty buckets with holes punched into them and light bulbs inside were suspended from the ceiling. The elements were quite simple to tell the story – but the environment was magical. (Personal correspondence with author) The intrusive columns, which had so daunted the director when he first saw the space because they blocked sightlines, became an integral part of the production, forcing the action to circulate and evolve in fascinating ways, creating natural hiding places right on stage and a kind of strange anchor in the middle of the open space. Ironically, when the production transferred to La Mama in New York City, the company was disappointed not to have the pillars – the open dirt field in the centre of the round being less evocative without the columns rising out of it. For Gammons, the point was not just that the production changed in the new venue, an assumption at the heart of this essay, but that it “lost a little of its spatial intensity and urgency” because it had been constructed for a venue with more “architectural intrigue”. Such “intrigue” actually shapes the choice of play as well as production approach, spaces being selected for their useful associative resonances or particular energies, the two

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happening almost simultaneously. The process requires a commitment to the immediate neighbourhood, and ASP goes further than most companies in trying to connect with the local community. Open rehearsals are held in which members of the community are invited to come and hear a short director’s talk, watch a portion of rehearsal and then talk back with the actors. Community nights bring local partners to see the production, and the company does “conversation evenings” about the show, free workshops and work in the local schools. ASP has a special programme – Incarcerated Youth at Play – which works with juvenile detainees through staging Shakespeare. The company, like many others, is also committed to community outreach through youth work, both in terms of staging scenes with teenagers but also using them as a resource to connect the work of the company to the larger community, getting recommendations for advertising venues and the like from the kids themselves, and returning to schools where they have played before to maintain a sense of connection. For the coming year, ASP has established a committee of local people from different neighbourhoods (a high school student, a teacher, an artist, somebody who works in a town hall, etc.) to help them structure goals and expectations for the coming season grounded in a sense of what the community seems to want, need or relate to.13 Ben Evett, Founder and Artistic Director of ASP, encapsulates the project: We really do believe that Shakespeare exists in space and in the bodies of our actors, and the space where we do the play is incredibly important to how the play gets done . . . We try to let the space inform the play and the play inform the space, and we’re particularly interested in nonconventional spaces because it sends us out into different neighborhoods and different communities and we start meeting them on their own territory, and sharing the story together . . . It’s an ongoing dialogue with the community around the themes and characters that are raised by the play. (The Macbeth Project video) Whatever the value of playing in found spaces, companies like ASP are, of course, making a virtue of necessity, working outside the prohibitive costs of conventional theatre structures, particularly in cities where real estate commands staggering prices even as the economy stalls and collapses. In the months I have spent writing this piece, numerous theatre companies have folded, or closed their doors indefinitely, hoping that the much vaunted economic up-turn will come soon, bringing with it ticket buyers and philanthropists who have been hard to find of late. The kinds of work being done by companies like ASP may become more widely known as other companies default on mortgages and leases or simply struggle to reduce overheads. Space, as I have been arguing here, is not simply about the aesthetic dimensions of the stage, but is rooted in place in a broader political sense, that tripartite “location, location, location” which is the mantra of realtors/estate agents, and which is ultimately bound both to community and to money. As Todd Landon Barnes points out, the great error of the NEA’s Shakespeare in American Communities project – whatever its value – was its assumption that Shakespeare was a simple tool for (re)colonizing America, bolstering given patriotic values and unexamined educational standards. In fact, the meaning of Shakespeare in performance is shaped by what Barnes calls those “collaborative, bilateral affective relations” which are the heart of actual live performance (Barnes, 2008, 24). In place of the Bush administration’s condescending notion of a transhistorical Shakespeare which is static, mappable, a “sterile promontory unaffected by time”, Barnes urges a vision of Shakespeare which

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is dynamic, an “affective practice . . . a temporalized space on the plane of imminence” (25). He is insisting, rightly, on the importance of time, of the specific historical moment that frames a performance and the erratic, unmappable communicative energy that is the special urgency of theatrical temporality. To his “temporalized space” I would add another set of italics, because while the NEA is addressing geography, it is not addressing the immediacy and dynamism of space in a more specifically local sense. If what Shakespeare is finally has to be considered in temporal terms, so it has to be considered spatially, the where of large scale generic touring (“good evening Cleveland!”) giving place to the here of immediate communities. This is where Shakespeare makes meaning, and what that meaning is is deeply inflected by where we are in terms of structure and location. If we are to understand Shakespeare as dynamic, engaging and immediate we may want to look up from the grand tours, from the RSCs, from the tourist venue houses, excellent though they may be, to see what Shakespeare is – or might be – elsewhere, to explore the implications of a phrase I hear from my students when they praise something’s relevance: “It got me,” they say, “right where I live.”

Notes 1. The NEA’s “Shakespeare in American Communities” project is a national funding initiative which takes existing professional companies out into far-flung communities throughout the country, touring shows and presenting educational seminars and workshops. According to their website, the project has served (as of April 2008) 2000 communities, 3200 schools and over a million students with more than 4000 productions. Todd Landon Barnes has an excellent piece scrutinizing the assumptions behind project in Shakespeare Bulletin, to which I will return later. 2. In many theatres there are pronounced deadspots, particularly on the sides of proscenium theatres and under galleries and balconies, while in other areas of the same space the sound is unexpectedly live and clear. These better acoustic sites are often further from the stage than audiences expect and are shaped by the angle of acoustic bounce, particularly in upper balconies. Structural materials such as wood, glass, concrete and fabric drapes or seating upholstery have radically different acoustic qualities, some absorbing sound, others creating distinct bounce or echo. 3. Consider, for instance, how the particularities of play are affected by the varied dimensions of the yard, the amount of foul ground, the shape of materials lining the warning track, the location of the bullpen, and oddities like Fenway’s green monster. 4. The RSC’s courtyard theatre is a case in point where the downstage corners of the deep thrust stage give onto entrance/exit points used by the cast through the house. Recent productions (Noble’s 2006 Lear and Doran’s 2008 Hamlet, for instance) made use of the “safe” spaces in the downstage corners to place actors, particularly in large scenes when the focus was central. So long as the actors didn’t move too much, the company could be sure that the audience could still see the centre of the stage. The result is a specific kind of pictorial spacing that particularly shapes scenes in which more than a few actors are on stage. 5. The Fellowship also lists a further twenty-three Shakespeare companies in Canada, fourteen in the UK – again, omitting many companies who regularly perform Shakespeare – eight in Australia, and another nine world-wide. Their active status can be asserted from the list of websites all but two of which lead to displays of current or upcoming offerings. Frank Hildy, researching this subject independently, came up with the same number “derived by carefully merging the lists that are available on a number of websites, adding those I personally knew about from my Google alert on Shakespeare Theatres which were not listed there” (personal electronic correspondence). The Shakespeare Theatre Association of America lists 102 current US companies, but this is a professional organization with annual dues, and its membership

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7.

8. 9.

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(with some notable exceptions such as New York Shakespeare Festival (The Public Theatre) and the Old Globe in San Diego) tend to be the larger and more affluent companies. Of these forty-nine, two produce Shakespeare comparatively infrequently (only one or two productions every few years as part of a larger, non-Shakespearean repertory), and eight seem to be currently inactive or defunct. At thirty-nine the number of active California companies regularly staging Shakespeare remains, however, large and does not include major companies like LA’s A Noise Within which regularly stages Shakespeare. I obtained this and much of the information on specific companies that follows through direct correspondence with the staff of the various companies, using a general questionnaire and following up with other queries prompted by their initial responses. I’m grateful to Richard Garner, producing artistic director at Georgia Shakespeare, for providing me with these numbers. This information is based on Mary Butlin’s 2007 RSC marketing plan, shared with me by Penelope Woods. The figures were based on ticket buyers from the Complete Works Festival, a factor that may make some of the figures anomalous due to factors such as the number of foreign companies involved balanced by the somewhat nationalistic zeal that informed the project. I have calculated the cited percentages based on sales of almost 600,000 tickets, 93 per cent of which went to UK citizens, the largest group of which (after the Midlands) came from the south-east including London (22.5 per cent). Complicating these numbers is the fact that the Complete Works Festival took place in multiple venues and it is not clear how they break down in terms of individual theatre spaces. This information is based on the RSC’s annual report for 2007/8 accessed through their website. Georgia Shakespeare, for instance, depends roughly equally on ticket sales and local community giving. Unless specified, all quotations from ASP personnel are taken from my direct electronic correspondence with them. Most of the preceding paragraph is based on information supplied by Lori Taylor, the company’s community liaison.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Barnes, Todd Landon (2008). “Macbeth, MacBush and the Theater of War”. Shakespeare Bulletin 26.3, 1–29. Kiley, Brendon (2008). “The Tony Awards 2008, or Enough with the Goddamned Shakespeare Already”, at Library Theatre. The Macbeth Project video. Royal Shakespeare Company (2008). Annual Report 2008. Shakespeare in American Communities. Shakespeare Fellowship. Shakespeare Theatre Association of America.

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SHAKESPEARE FOR CHILDREN Amy Scott-Douglass

Children’s Shakespeare is far from being young. In fact, it is more than 200 years old. From the first editions, printed in 1807, to current day adaptations, authors and illustrators have found in Shakespeare’s work ample material for retellings geared to youngsters.1 This essay will look at the philosophies of children’s Shakespeare, and theories and practices of adaptation over the last two centuries. It will discuss several adaptations by the major figures of children’s Shakespeare: Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler, Mary and Charles Lamb, Edith Nesbit, Marchette Chutte, Leon Garfield, Lois Burdett, Marcia Williams and Tina Packer – along with other, non-canonical writers such as Caroline Maxwell and Elizabeth Wright MacAuley, whose fascinating versions of Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice help to provide a more complete picture of children’s Shakespeare. Although current scholarship on children’s Shakespeare attempts to trace an evolution of the genre, classifying early works as heavy-handedly moralistic and current works as playful and liberating, most early writers of children’s Shakespeare were not particularly moral nor would they fit into the current conservative definition of the nuclear family. Early children’s Shakespeare is traditionally characterized by a liberal humanism that often self-identifies as Christian; however, its early authors and editors include women and men (mostly women) who committed matricide, were incarcerated in asylums, had children outside of wedlock, participated in open marriages, risked paternal disownment by marrying outside of their faith and founded revolutionary political societies: murderers, mentally ill, adulterers and rebels. While on the one hand their adaptations are reverent of Shakespeare, on the other hand, they frequently use the Bard as a springboard for exploring social issues, in effect rewriting Shakespeare and his works as, presumably, they would like them to be.

Philosophies of Early Children’s Shakespeare In The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, nineteenth-century writer Mary Cowden Clarke imagines what life might have been like for Katharina Minola before the opening Act of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. In Clarke’s story, Katharina’s childish tempestuousness is exacerbated by adults who misunderstand her. Katharina is sent to a convent school where her vocal resistance to the prospect of becoming a nun results in the little girl being treated as a “prisoner” and put into solitary confinement. Clarke spends several pages envisaging the psychological horrors that young Katharina endures in her isolation and incarceration, a narrative that turns into Clarke’s polemic on the subject of discipline.

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Katharina emerges from her cell angrier than ever, but outwardly submissive to the convent school’s correctional system: [Katharina] learned to master the show, at least, of contumacy, lest she should offend one who had power to order her to the dark room. Her violence of temperament was smothered; but it was not extinct. Radical cure of a bad passion is not effected by such means. Subjection is not conviction. Fear may induce the show of submission; but through reasoning affection alone, is genuine compliance obtained. Tyranny but inculcates the meanness of hypocrisy the expediency of apparent yielding. Love only can truly subjugate a haughty spirit. (Clarke, 1850, 128) As an alternative to the sort of punishment that the nuns endorse, Clarke offers a glimpse of what she believes might be a more effective means to improve a child’s behaviour. Clarke constructs a scene in which Katharina encounters a beautiful painting of her patron saint, and this fine art is truly effective in calming Katharina: She felt the turbulent sensations that usually agitated her soul, lulled and soothed, and set at rest, by looking upon this picture. She felt better, as well as happier, while she gazed . . . and enjoy[ed] the delicious frame of mind into which the contemplation of this picture threw her. She would sit like one entranced, forgetful of time; the nuns, her schoolfellows, her daily vexations, her petulances, grievances, ill-humours, all and everything, faded from her view; she beheld nothing but the picture, felt nothing but the beatitude it inspired. (129) Ultimately, Katharina is chastised by the nuns for “studying” the painting rather than “praying” to it. They threaten to throw her back into solitary confinement for a week unless Katharina learns to worship the saint rather than contemplate the painting. This frightening prospect for young Katharina sends Clarke into another defence of the rehabilitative and transformative qualities of great art: Passionate temperaments are apt to be influenced by Art. Their very ardour and susceptibility render them peculiarly open to impressions for good or evil through the senses, the imagination, the intellectual faculties, all of which are appealed to, in high Art. A fine painting, a solemn strain of music, might produce powerful effects upon such a disposition as Katharina’s. (135) It seems quite appropriate that Clarke lays out her philosophy of the relationship between the arts and moral correction in an adaptation of Shakespeare meant for young readers, for almost all children’s Shakespeare, from the first editions produced by the Lambs and Bowdlers to current-day Shakespeare initiatives espoused by theatres’ outreach directors, governmental representatives and even juvenile court judges, evinces an underlying if not outspoken notion that Shakespeare is good for people, and that Shakespeare is particularly good for the young. In 1794, the anonymous author of the first printed adaptation of Shakespeare, The History of Shylock the Jew, prefaced the tale with an introduction pointing out the value of Shakespeare’s works “for their morality” and their appropriateness “for the youth of both sexes” given that Shakespeare’s “ideas are generally natural and sublime, abounding with instructions for our conduct in life, our duty to GOD and one another; our love of religion, justice, mercy, and every attribute which can render us good, virtuous, and happy” (History, 1784, 8). Similarly, the preface to the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare (1807) recommended

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the Bard’s works as “strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach you courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity” and concluded that, “for of examples, teaching these virtues, his pages are full” (Lamb, 1807, I, ix). A century later, Charles Alphonso Smith, in his 1902 treatise titled “Why Young Men Should Study Shakespeare”, ranked Shakespeare on par with the Scriptures for teaching ethics. Smith wrote: One has only to glance over a book of Shakespeare quotations, noting the number and familiarity of those that interpret or enforce conduct, to see that there is sound basis for the popular grouping of Shakespeare with so authoritative a book of conduct as the English Bible. As a guide in conduct Shakespeare is quoted consciously and unconsciously by learned and unlearned alike, for his dramas are essentially studies in conduct. In these dramas personal responsibility is never merged or abjured; a man remains the architect of his own fortunes. The ghosts, dreams, and witches occasionally employed by Shakespeare do not compel conduct; they only illustrate it . . . Shakespeare puts the emphasis not on fate or destiny but on character and conduct; not only crimes but venial sins, mere errors of judgment, carry within them the seeds of their own punishment. It is this fruitful and essentially ethical point of view that has stored Shakespeare’s pages with maxims of daily conduct. It is this that invests his characters with so vital a significance for all those who are reaching up into maturity and who, beginning to feel the possibilities of life, wish to probe deeper into its meaning and to know the principles of its right conduct. (Smith, 1902, 2–4) Supplying the preface to the 1936 edition of Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by Edith Nesbit, advertised on the title page as “Official Text for Members of The National Junior Shakespeare Club”, lawyer Edward Thomas Roe encouraged young readers to think of Shakespeare as: “the teacher of all good – pity, generosity, true courage, love” (Nesbit, 1936, 3). “In his creations we have no moral highwaymen, sentimental thieves, interesting villains, and amiable, elegant adventuresses – no delicate entanglements of situation, in which the grossest images are presented to the mind disguised under the superficial attraction of style and sentiment,” Roe asserted. “[Shakespeare] flattered no bad passion, disguised no vice in the garb of virtue, trifled with no just and generous principle” (3–4).

Theories and Practices of Adaptation So what happens when this myopic vision of Shakespeare’s inherent and infallible morality comes up against the reality of his works: villains like Iago, Aaron, Edmund, Claudius and Richard III, who are not only “interesting” but utterly fascinating; adventuresses like Regan and Goneril, who are neither “amiable” nor “elegant” and who aren’t punished any more or less than their ultimately compliant sibling; victims like Lavinia, who is subject to the circumstances of fate rather than “architect of [her] own fortune”? Shakespeare’s canon is full of plays that are frequently grimmer than Grimm: worlds in which crime is not always punished and virtue is not always its own reward. “Didactic” is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Shakespeare, and yet didacticism is a fundamental component of children’s literature, which is supposed to combine pleasure with profit. Faced with the reality that Shakespeare’s plays are not necessarily Sunday school fare,

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authors and editors of children’s Shakespeare simply rewrite them to align with their definition of “good” literature. Brother-and-sister team Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler were not the first to attempt to “render” Shakespeare “unexceptionable” with “a little alteration” (Bowdler, 1823, 1bv), as they put it in the preface to their first edition of The Family Shakespeare (1807), but they are probably the most infamous adaptors of the Bard. Although there have been plenty of readers opposed to the moralist expurgation of Shakespeare’s plays (the derisive term “bowdlerization” was named after the editorial practices of these two), there were certainly enough late Romantic and Victorian readers who subscribed to the siblings’ assessment that Shakespeare’s “plays contain much that is vulgar” and include words, phrases and scenes “which ought to be wholly omitted” (1bv): The Family Shakespeare went through no fewer than thirty-five editions in the nineteenth century (Wolfson, 2007, xx). Velma Bourgeois Richmond argues that “[d]ebates about the brute element – and Shakespeare contains much violence – always dominate the considerations of [what can be labelled] ‘suitable for children’” (Richmond, 2008, 12), but a closer look reveals that few early children’s adaptors have a problem with violence per se. Instead, they are opposed to violence that is not justified or punished, violence that does not fit into a larger moral framework. It is not violence but, rather, quite literally the body itself that is the problem for early editors of children’s Shakespeare. What the Bowdlers find “vulgar” is specifically the sexualized female body – as in Hamlet’s reference to “country matters” – and the monstrous, uncontained, carnivalesque, pleasure-seeking body – as in the Porter’s discussion of drunkenness or Falstaff’s many randy speeches. References to sex, then, and especially to infidelity, are deleted in The Family Shakespeare, as well as references to the body and bodily functions. Lambs’ Tales exhibit a similar decorum. In Mary’s retelling of Cymbeline, for instance, Imogen’s mole moves from her “breast” (where Shakespeare originally put it) to her “neck” (Lynch, 2007, 200), and in Measure for Measure, Mariana is the “wife of Angelo” rather than his ex-girlfriend when she slips into his bed in Isabella’s place (Lamb, 1807, II, 85). In the preface to the Henry IV plays, the Bowdlers cite the authority of Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu to rationalize their editorial decisions. Mistress Quickly is allowed because, as Montagu put it, “she helps to complete the character of Falstaff, and some of the dialogues in which she is engaged are diverting”. However, Montague found “[e]very scene in which Doll Tearsheet appears [to be] indecent; and therefore not only indefensible, but inexcusable” (Bowdler, 1823, IV, 100). Accordingly, the Bowdlers cut her out. Given the care that the Bowdlers took in cleaning up Shakespeare and the liberties that they took in deleting passages that might offend, alarm, or demoralize a family, it is even more interesting to look at what they left untouched. Rarely included in children’s or family’s Shakespeare collections, Titus Andronicus appears in the Bowdler edition with all of the rape, mutilation and cannibalism intact. And the Bowdlers were not the only editors to include the play in their collections. Adaptations of Titus Andronicus are an interesting case study, for this is a situation in which the concept of Shakespeare-as-moralist comes up against the actuality of his work. Written in 1828, Caroline Maxwell’s The Juvenile Edition of Shakspeare; Adapted to the Capacities of Youth contains nine Shakespeare plays, more than half of which do not appear in the Lambs’ Tales: Cymbeline, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, Henry VIII, King Lear, Richard II, Pericles and Titus Andronicus. For a children’s Shakespeare collection, it is a peculiar selection to say the least. In her introduction,

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Maxwell promises parents that she will only include the parts of the plays that little ones can handle: “any incident, passage, or even word which might be thought exceptionable by the strictest delicacy, is entirely omitted, and on no occasion has the fair purity of the youthful mind been for one moment forgot, in offering, and in selecting these pages for their perusal” (Maxwell, 1828, iv). Maxwell’s Titus Andronicus is remarkable in its abruptness. Most of her story focuses on the events that take place in Act 1 of Shakespeare’s play; everything that transpires after Lavinia’s mutilation is written very quickly, as if Maxwell is either doubtful about or overcome by the narrative. All of the violent acts in Shakespeare are retained by Maxwell, save one significant exception: in Maxwell’s story, although Lavinia’s hands and tongue are cut, to keep her from telling who killed Bassanius, Lavinia is not raped. The reader gets the impression that such abuse would have been too much for Maxwell to accept. At several points of the story, Maxwell steps back to announce her disbelief of Shakespeare’s plot. She finds that the dismembering of Lavinia lacks verisimilitude – surely no girl could survive such abuse: This circumstance so horrible in itself, and so repugnant to nature, we may well suppose introduced only to heighten the tragic effect of the piece: as it is not to be imagined that a delicate young female, such as here described, could possibly have outlived such a dreadful mutilation, left as we are led to think without assistance or attention, in such a wild and solitary wilderness: but to proceed with the story, we must admit it. (Maxwell, 1828, 204) As to the other woman in the play, Maxwell initially shows sympathy for Tamora, explaining that her hatred of Titus is only “natural” after he kills her sons (194). Just a few pages later, however, Maxwell characterizes the Queen as “a most wicked, artful, and malicious woman” (198) for accepting Saturninus’ proposal. There is no mention of the relationship between Aaron and Tamora (leaving the reader to wonder whether Maxwell found their relationship “indecent” because it was extra-marital or because it was interracial), of Tamora’s pregnancy and their child, or of Aaron’s punishment at the end of the play. Instead, Maxwell’s story ends like a fairy tale: with Lucius “ascend[ing] the throne in the midst of general rejoicing, and universal approbation” (209). Though not marketed deliberately to children, Marchette Chute’s Stories from Shakespeare served as many youngsters’ first introduction to the Bard since its first printing in 1956. While Chute’s collection is one of the few to include Titus Andronicus, it must be said that she attests to including the play reluctantly. Whereas most of Shakespeare’s works receive six to ten pages of summary, Chute devotes only a page and a half to Titus Andronicus, including a lengthy paragraph which functions as her discussion of the play’s shortcomings rather than a summation of the plot. She characterizes Titus Andronicus “as a melodrama of butchery”. Her problem, however, is not so much that there is violence in the play but, rather, that the violence is not punitive and does not function as justice against the “bad” characters: “the mutilations and tortures and beheadings are applied indiscriminately to all the members of the cast” (Chute, 1979, 111). As if in an effort to make Titus Andronicus subscribe to Chute’s criterion of good literature, she flattens the characters: Titus’ family is depicted as good; Tamora’s family as bad. The character of Saturninus is deleted so that the play becomes a battle between these two families and, consequently, a battle between good and evil. Unlike Maxwell who initially sympathizes with Tamora, Chute’s Tamora is “an evil queen” from the very beginning of the story,

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and Aaron is “an equally evil Moor”. There is no mention of Titus shirking his duties to the people in refusing the election, or of Titus killing his own son for defending his sister. Titus’ treatment of Tamora and her family is represented as “the old general[’s]” fair turn at revenge, and the story ends, like Maxwell’s, as in a fairy tale, “with Rome and her citizens once more at peace” (112). So why present young readers with narratives of such a, as Maxwell terms it, “horrid”, “complicated”, “distressing” play? “Shakespeare himself graduated very early from this kind of writing”, Chute asserts (111), acknowledging the “badness” of the play even at the same time that she includes it in her collection. One wants to believe that, although they would never admit it, Bowdler, Maxwell and Chute were motivated by a subconscious understanding that some of the most interesting children’s literature – and some of the most interesting children, not to mention some of the most interesting adaptors of children’s Shakespeare – actually take delight in the pleasures of fictive horror, violence and vulgarity. In any case, the inclusion of Titus Andronicus in these collections is definitely a result of the deification of Shakespeare, for these authors ultimately subscribe to the belief that all Shakespeare is inherently worthwhile and needs to be adapted no matter what. Maxwell explains: “as the play in question bears the name of the great Bard . . . the outline of the story must be presented, to our young readers” (Maxwell, 1828, 188). She even goes so far as the attempt to spin the play into a morality tale, citing its setting in pre-Christian Rome as evidence that Shakespeare was trying to represent non-Christians as negative exemplars: The deficiency in feelings of humanity, throughout, must ever render Titus Andronicus an unpleasant story: but given by so great a master of the human passions, both in their most amiable, or most degraded state, it must have its place in this selection; and the more so from its morally proving, that the most desirable gifts of nature, such as courage, beauty, sense or greatness, if not under the guidance of virtue and religion, humanity and justice, nothing avail to render the possessor himself happy. (188) Maxwell’s story, then, professes the same belief that Shakespeare – all Shakespeare – is beneficial to young minds. In at least one case, that of Mary Lamb, children’s Shakespeare was proposed as being good for the adaptor as well. After she killed her mother in a fit of exhaustion and insanity, avoiding a prison sentence only because of her mental affliction, Lamb, the story goes, took up her project of adapting Shakespeare for children as part of her rehabilitation. Whether this is true or not, in any case, it is impossible to read Lamb’s story without thinking of the author’s own experiences as a girl growing up. In the beginning of her version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, Lamb tells the story from the point of view of the daughters, opening with a witty explanation of Athenian marriage laws that privileged parental control (Lamb, 1807, I, 22). The treatment of girls and women in Mary’s story contrasts sharply with the representation of women that her brother Charles forwards in his version of Macbeth. Charles introduces Lady Macbeth to his young readers as “a bad ambitious woman” (I, 217), and the majority of his tale quotes Macbeth’s lines or narrates from Macbeth’s point of view, predisposing the reader’s sympathies from the start. The sympathies of the Lambs as authors are clearly divided along gender lines, with Mary being more compassionate in her portrayals of women characters, a quality that is characteristic of most women’s adaptations of children’s Shakespeare throughout history.

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The Politics of Children’s Shakespeare: Women and Children First By and large, children’s Shakespeare is the domain of women. Throughout history, most of the people involved with shaping children’s Shakespeare have been women, and from its inception, one of the primary objectives of children’s Shakespeare has been to provide girls with equal access to classical literature. The very first children’s Shakespeare collection – Jean Baptiste Perrin’s Contes moraux amusans et instructifs, à l’usage de la jeunesse, tirés des tragédies de Shakespeare [Amusing and Instructive Morality Tales for Youth, Drawn from Shakespeare’s Tragedies], printed in 1783 – was written for children of both sexes (“la jeunesse de l’un & de l’autre sexe”) (qtd in Ziegler, 2006, 145). Similarly, the first edition of The Family Shakespeare was overseen entirely by Henrietta Bowdler with a view to making Shakespeare more palatable to “ladies” (Bowdler, 1823, I, xvii). Although scholars assume the first edition was published anonymously for propriety’s sake, the collection in no way presents Shakespeare (either in the “original” or in the expurgated version) as out of bounds for women as thinkers, writers and critics. Indeed, the collection frequently cites women’s scholarship on the plays, quoting from, for instance, Elizabeth Inchbald’s and Elizabeth Montagu’s writings on Shakespeare. Tales from Shakespeare was a womancentred project as well. It was Mary Lamb and not her brother Charles who wrote the majority of the stories – fourteen comedies and romances – and most of the preface, the latter of which indicated girls as the target reading audience. “For young ladies . . . it has been my intention chiefly to write,” Mary explained, “because boys are generally permitted the use of their father’s libraries at a much earlier age than girls are, they frequently having the best scenes of Shakespeare by heart, before their sisters are permitted to look into this manly book” (Lamb, 1807, I, vi). With one eye to her books’ marketability and another to reading practices at home, Mary flattered her young male readers by depicting them as superior to the silly new Shakespeare stories, encouraging them to function as teachers of the Tales, by “explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand”, as well as teachers and editors of Shakespeare, by taking their sisters to the original passages in Shakespeare (vi–vii). By the turn of the century, following the Education Act of 1870, girls attended school as well as boys, causing one editor of Tales from Shakespeare to later remark, “Such a recommendation [that brothers read Shakespeare to their sisters] would be hardly appreciated in our schools, where the misses have equal advantages with their brothers and do not feel the need of such assistance” (Edwin Ginn, qtd in Richmond, 2008, 245), taking Mary Lamb’s recommendation at face value rather than recognizing it as a strategy to counteract nineteenth-century reading practices that privileged boys and men. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, children’s Shakespeare continued to be authored by women with a particular eye toward girl readers. Author Edith Nesbit’s preface to The Children’s Shakespeare said that her tales were inspired by her discussions with girls; Kathleen Knox’s educational treatise encouraged young girls, “[s]tudy Shakespeare’s women, and . . . [r]esolve, while yet in your teens to be a Shakespeare woman”; and Mary Cowden Clarke’s essay “Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend” represented Shakespeare to young readers of The Girl’s Own Paper as a “manly thinker and most virile writer” that nevertheless had “something essentially feminine in his nature, which enabled him to discern and sympathize with the innermost core of woman’s heart” (Nesbit, 1900, 5–6; qtd in Rozmovits, 1998, 40–1; Clarke, 1887, 563). Clarke waxed poetical on the joys of a girl’s intimate understanding of Shakespeare:

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Happy she who at eight or nine years old has a copy of ‘Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare’ given to her, opening a vista of even then understandable interest and enjoyment! Happy she who at twelve or thirteen has Shakespeare’s works themselves read to her by her mother, with loving selection of fittest plays and passages! Happy they who in maturer years have the good taste and good sense to read aright the pages of Shakespeare, and gather thence wholesomest lessons and choicest delights! (Clarke, 1887, 564) Clarke identified the girls as reading the Tales independently of familial assistance and having Shakespeare read to them by their mothers, in marked contrast to less than a century earlier when the Bowdlers and Lambs imagined that fathers and brothers would be the girls’ gatekeepers to Shakespeare. Following the publication of Clarke’s essay, The Girl’s Own Paper sponsored a contest inviting girls and young women to submit essays on their “favourite heroine from Shakespeare”. Several of the girls wrote essays that dealt with what the editors called “the vexed question of ‘women’s rights’” or a similar ideological issue, making Shakespeare’s characters such as Portia a “vehicle for expressing their ideas on some social problem” (qtd in Rozmovits, 1998, 32). Although the editors critiqued these essays as being out of the bounds of the assignment, their publication suggests that, far from being solely a vehicle for teaching female propriety, Shakespeare offered a space for challenging gender stereotypes and exploring larger social issues. A study of several representative adaptations shows that the extent to which a writer uses a children’s Shakespeare adaptation as an opportunity to “express their ideas on some social problem” depends not upon the writer’s era so much as it depends upon the individual writer.

Measure for Measure Measure for Measure is one of the plays in which we find children’s adaptors taking sides on the issues, as a comparison of adaptations by Mary Lamb and Edith Nesbit illustrates. Although Richmond maintains that Nesbit “adhered closely to Lambs’ Tales, including the same plays but simplifying their texts, in a journeyman work” (Richmond, 2008, 155), I would argue that there are actually significant differences between Lamb and Nesbit, and that these differences come out in the ways that each writer represents gender, narrates abandonment and sexual harassment, and deals with the ambiguity of Shakespeare’s ending. Mary Lamb’s Measure for Measure ends as, at once, a love story, a female bildungsroman and a morality tale. Not only does Isabel marry the Duke without reservation, effectively erasing any of the ambiguity in Shakespeare’s play, but she is then represented to both the women of Vienna and the little girls reading the story as the ideal wife – chaste, forgiving and longsuffering: [W]hen she became duchess of Vienna, the excellent example of the virtuous Isabel worked such a complete reformation among the young ladies of that city, that from that time none ever fell into the transgression of Juliet, the repentant wife of the reformed Claudio. And the mercy-loving duke long reigned with his beloved Isabel, the happiest of husbands and of princes. (Lamb, 1807, II, 96) Lamb’s treatment of Angelo and the Duke is even more forgiving than the Bowdlers, who selected Measure for Measure as one of only three extremely naughty plays to get its own separate preface. Thomas Bowdler wrote:

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The wickedness of Angelo is so atrocious . . . His crimes, indeed, are not completed, but he supposes them to be so; and his guilt is as great as it would have been, if the person of Isabella had been violated, and the head of Ragozine had been Claudio’s . . . Angelo abandoned his contracted wife for the most despicable of all reasons, the loss of her fortune. He added to his guilt not only insensibility to her affliction, but the detestable aggravation of injuring her reputation by an unfounded slander; ascribing his desertion of Mariana to levity in her conduct, of which she never was guilty. He afterwards betrayed the trust reposed in him by the Duke. He threatened Isabella that if she would not surrender her virtue, he would not merely put her brother to death, but make ‘His death draw out to lingering sufferance’. And finally, when he thought his object accomplished, he ordered Claudio to be murdered in violation of his most solemn engagement. (Bowdler, 1823, I, 329–30) Bowdler has harsh words for Vincentio as well, claiming, “The best characters act too much upon a system of duplicity and falsehood . . . the Duke, in the fifth act, trifles cruelly with the feelings of Isabella, allowing her to suppose her brother to be dead, much longer than the story of the play required” (I, 330). Writing more than a century after Lamb and Bowdler, the changes that Nesbit makes to Measure for Measure are remarkable. Sexually and socially liberal (she was pregnant before she wedded, participated in an open marriage and founded the Fabian Society, the precursor to the Labour Party in the UK), Nesbit’s adaptations of children’s Shakespeare are funnier at the same time that they are more politically aware than those by her predecessors. She pays especially careful attention to Shakespeare’s female characters, altering Shakespeare’s plots in ways that draw attention to the larger social tensions contributing to the plights of girls and women. In Nesbit’s Measure for Measure, Angelo wants to marry Isabella, not sleep with her. His proposition to Isabella, “Give me your love . . . and Claudio shall be freed” (Nesbit, 1936, 245), is interpreted by the novice as a marriage proposal, to which she responds, “Before I would marry you, [Claudio] should die if he had twenty heads to lay upon the block” (246). Though this textual alteration might be said to water down the issue of harassment, Nesbit’s revision – from sex to marriage – acts to put the Duke’s proposal, and the Duke himself, on the same level as Angelo: in Nesbit’s rendition both men endanger Isabella in that they threaten not her chastity but her chosen vocation to become a nun. Although the ending suggests that Isabella likes the Duke (the narrator tells us “she was his with a smile” (254)), no marriage is ever mentioned. And though the narrator may prefer the Duke over Angelo, she does not let him off the hook either, calling the Duke “roguish” for lying to Isabella about Claudio’s death (252). Nesbit’s treatment of Angelo is much more severe. She introduces her readers to Angelo as “a mean man” who only “appeared to be noble”, launching immediately into a discussion of Angelo’s abandonment of Mariana (242). At one point, as if to try to deal with the implausibilities of Shakespeare’s text – why in the world would any woman want to marry Angelo, let alone one who has been so mistreated as Mariana has? – Nesbit invents a scene in which the Duke tries justify his involvement in forwarding Mariana’s marriage to Angelo: [T]he Duke looked out the window and saw the broken sheds and flower-beds black with moss, which betrayed Mariana’s indifference to her country dwelling. Some women would have beautified their garden: not she. She was for the town; she

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neglected the joys of the country. He was sure that Angelo would not make her unhappier. (248) A “not unhappy” ending is not the same as a happy one, and like Mariana’s “milky stone[d]” wedding ring that “flashe[s] in the light with secret colors” (249), Nesbit’s Measure for Measure ends with even more ambiguity than Shakespeare’s play when it comes to the fates of the women. Nesbit’s adaptation of Measure for Measure is in marked contrast to that by Leon Garfield, published almost a century later. Far from critiquing Angelo, Garfield tells Measure for Measure almost entirely from his point of view. Angelo’s soliloquy is staged in his “bedchamber”, in which he experiences “hot dark fancies” for Isabella (Garfield, 1994, 109), and the entire trial scene is told from his perspective. Garfield even includes a description of Mariana and Angelo’s sexual congress together, describing Mariana’s experience as “[s]ilence and contentment” (114). Isabella’s youth and physicality is mentioned at every turn by every man – not only Angelo and the Duke but also the Provost and Lucio are struck by her “beauty”, and the narrator comments, “her looks would get her further than her words” (107). Yet in the conclusion of the story, Garfield says that it was Isabella who had the real lesson to learn in that she needed to value “the warmth of [a man’s] heart” over “the cool cloister” of the nunnery (130, 129). Garfield’s Isabella responds to the Duke’s proposal by “throw[ing] back her hood and unb[inding] her hair” so that it “[falls] about her shoulders in a storm of gold” (130) and the narrator comments, “Isabella, like the Duke, had made the long and arduous journey from justice to mercy, to forgiveness, and thence to love” (130). As in the example of the beginning of Charles Lamb’s Macbeth compared to the beginning of his sister Mary’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the differences between Garfield’s and Nesbit’s stories are clearly gendered, with Garfield privileging the male voice and perspective and offering the object lessons to the female characters and Nesbit privileging the female voice and perspective and offering the object lessons to the male characters, to the point where Nesbit even questions Shakespeare’s judgement in uniting Mariana and Angelo, and Isabella and the Duke. Nesbit has a similar moment in Taming of the Shrew in which she wonders, and allows her young readers to wonder, why Katharine would marry Petruchio in the first place: “whether she fell in love with Petruchio, or whether she was only glad to meet a man who was not afraid of her, or whether she was flattered that in spite of her rough words and spiteful usage, he still desired her for his wife” Nesbit isn’t sure (Nesbit, 1936, 38). As in Lamb, in which Petruchio is naturally easygoing and fun-loving and whose “boisterous airs” are only “in sport” in order to “overcome . . . the passionate ways of the furious Katherine” (II, 25), Nesbit’s Petruchio only pretends to be cross with his wife. Nesbit’s final scene is actually funny, with the focus not on Kate’s submission speech, but on Petruchio’s banter with the men (42), and the story ends with “nothing ever but love between those two”, and with the couple “liv[ing] happy ever afterwards” (43). But Nesbit makes it a point to let her little readers know that Katharine still keeps her wit and spirit. When Hortensio’s wife makes fun of Katherine in the final Act, “Katharine answer[s] with such spirit and such moderation, that she turned the laugh against the new bride” (40). While Nesbit might avoid the issue of domestic abuse in The Taming of the Shrew, she tackles it head on in her rendition of Othello. Mentioning Othello’s skin colour only twice and only very early in the story, a choice that is quite different from other Othello stories for children, Nesbit plunges into what to her is the heart of the story: men denying women

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their autonomy. She describes Othello’s feelings for Desdemona as “a terrible selfishness”, adding “[t]o love a woman meant with him to possess her as absolutely as [possessing] something that did not live and think” (212). Far from being the submissive wife, Nesbit’s Desdemona speaks to Othello “bitter[ly]” and “sarcastically” and “lose[s] her temper” (221–2). Her husband responds by hitting her. At this point in the narrative, Nesbit makes another remarkable choice: she tells the little girls and boys reading her story that Desdemona should have left Othello. “Othello slapped her face”, Nesbit narrates, “Now was the time for Desdemona to have saved her life by separation, but she knew not her peril” (222). Just as Desdemona is represented as a “blameless and sweet woman” (224), Emilia is entirely innocent of any knowledge of her husband’s treachery as well. In Nesbit’s hands, Othello becomes a lesson to little girls that, in choosing husbands, they should avoid controlling men.

Othello Like Measure for Measure, Othello is a problematic text for children’s Shakespeare from the onset, though the nature of the problem changes throughout history. The Bowdlers’ difficulty with Shakespeare’s Othello is the language used to describe conjugal relations. They find a “multitude of indecent expressions which abound in the speeches of the inferior characters” and Othello himself (Bowdler, 1823, VIII, 377). But their editorial choices suggest that a deeper, unspoken problem for the Bowdlers was the interracial relationship between Desdemona and Othello. The sex lives of a white woman and black man were not problematic for the Bowdlers when it came to Tamora and Aaron – the references to the couple’s sex life are included intact in The Family Shakespeare – because the Bowdlers considered them “bad” characters, the villains of the story, whose actions – all actions, both in and out of bed – were justly punished by Shakespeare in the end. But Desdemona and Othello posed another problem entirely – an adulterous, lustful interracial relationship is one thing, but a married, loving interracial relationship is quite another. And so, instead of “making the beast with two backs”, Desdemona and Othello are simply “together” (385). Othello’s bosom is still “sooty” (390), Desdemona is still a “whore” (445), but he is not the “black ram tupping [the] white ewe”. Unlike the Bowdlers, who edited Shakespeare’s plays without changing their generic form, the Lambs turned the plays into narrative, a genre that provided them the opportunities and challenges of interpretation. James Andreas finds in Charles Lamb’s narration of Othello a strikingly progressive strain, arguing that in his representation of Desdemona’s love for Othello, Lamb overcomes “the expected xenophobic tendency to convey the ethnic and racial stereotypes we have all come to recognize” (Andreas, 2003, 104). Commenting on the narrator’s assertion that “Desdemona loved the Moor, though he was black”, Andreas writes, “what a wonderful lesson there is for children here, one, indeed, that is far ahead of its time . . . Desdemona truly does see Othello as he is in his own mind’s eye rather than judging him” (102–3). I, however, would argue that by beginning the story with a description of Brabantio’s resistance to Desdemona’s marriage, rather than with a summary of the conflict between Iago and Othello as most children’s adaptations do, and by making the interracial quality of the marriage the focal point throughout his story (the skin colours of the two lovers are mentioned on practically every page of the story (see especially Lamb, 1807, II, 204–6, 221, 227)), Lamb actually marks the relationship between Desdemona and Othello, rather than the evil plot of Iago, as the chief cause of

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the problems in the play. When presented in the form of children’s literature, the interracial marriage of Desdemona and Othello becomes the negative exemplar of the story, over and above the actions of the naughty Iago. Certainly, though, Lamb’s treatment of Othello himself in 1807 – in which Othello is depicted as “noble”, “brave” and “valiant” (II, 206, 207, 209) – is considerably more respectful than Garfield’s treatment of the Venetian general in 1985. Othello is highly raced throughout Garfield’s story, written in adherence to the negative stereotypes of the African “savage”, which Garfield calls his Othello more than once. The narrator introduces Othello to young readers as “a Moor and as black as a stove” (Garfield, 1985, 223) with a “voice as dark and rich as his complexion” (226), and describes him as “the black thief of [Brabantio’s] fair daughter” (227). Garfield racializes moments in which skin colour is not even mentioned in Shakespeare. When Othello and Desdemona reunite in Cyprus, for instance, “their embrace, she fair, he black, was like the engulfing of day by all-conquering night” (232); and when Othello asks Desdemona the whereabouts of the napkin, he approaches her with a “countenance of frowning ebony” (240). Garfield’s Othello is “gigantic in his anger” (234), “a giant of a man who might, with one blow of his arm, have sent Iago headless to hell” (237). “[L]ike a furtive savage” Garfield’s Othello “hid[e]s among the trees” to watch Cassio and Bianca (241). He shuffles through the story “[i]n all his darkness,” his “soul [as] black as pitch” (243), and, ultimately, strangles Desdemona “with black hands like huge spiders” (249). Two modern Othello adaptations that offer alternatives to both the anxieties about miscegenation that occur in Bowdler and Lamb and the racism towards black people in Garfield are Marchette Chute’s Stories from Shakespeare (1956) and Tina Packer’s Tales from Shakespeare (2006). In Chute’s Othello, “everyone, including Othello, knows that his marriage is a risky one from the worldly point of view” (Chute, 1979, 160) because Othello is “black” and Desdemona is white, yes, but also because the groom is “much older than” the bride (156). Nevertheless, the pair have “a most perfect and loving marriage” (157). It is only because Iago is “an artist from hell” (155) that their marriage is destroyed. Othello is “a strong-hearted, innocent noble man who lets his mind be poisoned by jealousy” (155). Packer goes one better than Chute in terms of her Othellophilia. She begins by introducing him to her young readers as: “the hero of all Venice . . . Othello!” (Packer, 2004, 105). Othello is beloved not only by Desdemona but by all of Venice (105). Othello is called a Moor six times in thirteen pages – by Iago, by Emilia and by the narrator – and his dark skin is mentioned twice. However, Packer’s story includes none of the racial epithets from Shakespeare’s play and none of the racist narration as in Garfield’s adaptation.

The Merchant of Venice When looking at the history of children’s Shakespeare, we might expect to see a kind of evolution in terms of the representations of women and foreign characters, that is to say, over the past 200 years we might expect to see a growing sense of tolerance and sympathy for those characters who are treated with sexist, racist, or xenophobic behaviour by other characters in Shakespeare’s plays. In reality, though, that turns out not to be the case. Instead, both compassionate and critical portrayals of these characters coexist throughout all eras, as the history of children’s adaptations of The Merchant of Venice attests. Certainly there are a number of anti-Semitic depictions of Shylock in early versions of The Merchant of Venice for children. In both the first printed Shakespeare adaptation

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for children, a chapbook printed in 1794 and titled The History of Shylock the Jew . . . Adapted to the Minds of Young Children, and in Mary Lamb’s version of the story, Shylock is portrayed as ruthless and evil from the onset. The anonymous author(s) of the chapbook stacked the deck against Shylock from the beginning of the story. Antonio is introduced as full of “goodness and humanity” (History, 1794, 11), as opposed to Shylock, “a wealthy Jew, whose character is the most savage that can be imagined” (19–20). Following Shylock’s “Hath Not a Jew Eyes?” speech, for instance, the narrator comments, “Here was a picture of avarice and cruelty, and he soon put in practice his diabolical intentions” (77). In summarizing the trial scene, the narrator describes Shylock’s forced conversion as “the trial being thus happily ended” (108). Mary Lamb’s The Merchant of Venice is no more considerate. Her Shylock is “a hard-hearted man” whereas Antonio is “the kindest man that lived, the best conditioned, and had the most unwearied spirit in doing courtesies; indeed he was one in whom the ancient Roman honour more appeared than in any that drew breath in Italy” (Lamb, 1807, I, 140–1). But just fifteen years later, Elizabeth Wright Macauley would provide children with a very different take on Shylock in her collection Tales of the Drama, published in 1822. Macauley begins her story by casting blame where she thinks blame is due: on Bassanio, who has “incurred many debts indiscreetly” due to “errors which he had committed in his less than prime” (Macauley, 1822, 59). An actress and preacher in addition to being a writer, Macauley seizes upon her experiences in all three arenas to dramatize the story of Shylock as an object lesson for hard-hearted Christians, who are hypocritical in their lack of introspection and who are intolerant of other religions. She focuses most of her energies (and her enthusiastic predilection for exclamation points) on the trial scene and its outcome, describing Shylock’s forced conversion as “a dreadful proposal”, “an affliction beyond calculation – a punishment the most severe which could have been imposed” to “immediately turn Christian!!!”, “to become a Christian!!” (59–60). Macauley takes advantage of her narrative powers not only to comment upon the tragedy of Shylock’s mistreatment in the courtroom but also to invent a series of punishments that he suffers following the trial: He departed, and with an unsteady step slowly proceeded from court; but, when he reached the outer gates, his ears were assailed by the dismal yells, groans, hooting, hissing, and execrations of a numerous multitude . . . [S]everal of the mob rushed up the steps, and seizing the poor wretch, dragged him amongst them and buffeted him without mercy . . . Overwhelmed with grief and shame, and hurt by some of the severe blows he had received – after a few hours of the most exquisite suffering both mental and corporal, he expired, having pronounced a pardon for his child, and signed the stipulated deed of gift. After his death the rabble razed his house to the ground – and piling up the rubbish in the form of a mountain, fenced it round, put a rude stone at the top, to signify that these ruins were once the dwelling of a merciless Jew whose life was the forfeit of his own malignity. (60) Not only does Macauley stage the death of Shylock, calling into account the entire Christian community for torturing him and wrecking his house, she also brings the object lesson home, appropriating Shylock’s speech as her own moral: So perished this unfortunate man, one who amply possessed the bounteous gifts of heaven – and who, in seeking more, lost what he had. His name was execrated to

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posterity – and pity seldom designed to bestow a tear on his fate. Yet surely, though his cruelty was great, and his revenge dreadful; his provocations were also great: and Antonio, however merciful he might be to his fellow Christians, evinced no mercy or forbearance towards the Jew, on whom he showered every indignity. He was Shylock’s bitterest foe; hating his religion, he railed at him, and depreciated his value among his fellow merchants, he had disgraced him, spit on his bear on the Rialto, hindered him a half a million of money, called him dog, laughed at his losses, mocked at his gains, scorned his nation, thwarted his bargains, cooled his friends, heated his enemies: such were Shylock’s accusations. And much of this because he was a Jew!! This was not Christianity, this was not the forbearance taught by that great Master of the faith, which we profess to follow . . . If therefore the Jew was without mercy – little of mercy or favour had been shown to him, to teach him the bright example of . . . CHRISTIAN CHARITY!!! (60) As Linda Rozmovits points out, these two different approaches to the Merchant of Venice story, the one characterizing Shylock as a villain, the other contextualizing the story and calling Gentiles to account, are clearly identifiable in the “over sixty school editions of The Merchant of Venice [that] were published between 1870 and 1920” (Rozmovits, 1998, 100). Rozmovits cites two examples from late nineteenth-century children’s schoolbooks. The first tells youngsters that Shylock was always glad when he could screw money out of a poor Christian, who wanted a little help; for you know there was always a quarrel between the Jews and the Christians, because it was the Jews crucified our Saviour, whom the Christians know was the Son of God; and for many years they could not forgive the Jews, and would not treat them like fellow countrymen, but rather like slaves. (Qtd in Rozmovits, 1998, 98) The second advises children to be more tolerant: “Hate breeds hate, and the Christians showed as little of their Master’s spirit as did the Jews, who denied him” (qtd 99). Much like Macauley but considerably less fire-and-brimstone in her didacticism, Nesbit begins her The Merchant of Venice by scolding Bassanio for being “like many another gay and gallant gentleman . . . reckless and extravagant” (Nesbit, 1936, 183). Shylock is introduced to child readers as simply “a rich money-lender, named Shylock” (183), and Nesbit continues this sort of narrative objectivity throughout her depiction of the trial scene, describing Portia’s speeches with no markers of character’s psychology or narrator’s interpretive bias: “‘You, a foreigner,’ she added, ‘have sought to take the life of a Venetian citizen, and thus by the Venetian law, your life and goods are forfeited’” (192, italics mine). Nesbit does provide insight into Shylock’s mind, though, letting little readers know that during the trial “Shylock . . . grew very much frightened” (192). Chute’s version of Merchant of Venice is similarly sympathetic. At the point at which Bassanio invites Shylock to join the Gentiles for dinner, Chute stops to provide her readers with a history lesson. “Shylock refuses,” Chute explains, and for a very old and sad reason. Shylock is a Jew, and in Venice the Jews were treated as though they belonged to an outcast race. They were obliged to live in a special part of town and wear special garments to keep them separate from the Christians, and almost the only trade they were permitted to practice was that of lending money. Shakespeare had almost certainly never met a Jew, since all the Jews

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in England had been exiled long ago. But Shakespeare knew enough about human nature to realize how angry such treatment would make the members of a proud and ancient people . . . Shylock has always been treated with the most savage contempt by Antonio, and now he finds that the man wants to ask a favor of him. (Chute, 1979, 49) Written after the Holocaust, we might expect Chute’s text to demonstrate some signs of what Richmond calls the “[u]neasiness after World War II [which] altered the great popularity [previously] enjoyed by The Merchant of Venice” (Richmond, 2008, 180), and certainly it does. There is, for instance, no forced conversion in Chute – nor any mention of converting at all. Shylock “leaves the courtroom in utter defeat”, but without having to relinquish his faith (54). However, to suggest that there is a continuum of steady progression through history – that is to say, that The Merchant of Venice was unproblematic to pre-Holocaust writers who adapted Shakespeare for children whereas post-Holocaust writers are deeply invested in exposing the play’s anti-Semitism to children – is incorrect. Instead, almost from the inception of children’s Shakespeare, these two approaches to The Merchant of Venice occupy the same moments in time: some writers of children’s Shakespeare sympathizing with Shylock, and others demonizing him and revelling in his decline and disgrace. Surprisingly, Garfield’s The Merchant of Venice, although written as recently as 1985 by a Jewish man, takes the latter approach. Garfield describes Shylock, as he does Othello, as a “savage” more than once (Garfield, 1985, 80, 96). Antonio, on the other hand, is “as good and upright a man as ever merchant was” (75), a vague description which may well contain a double meaning but is nevertheless a description more attractive than that of “a lean, bearded man in black, who smiled and frowned and smiled and frowned, and rubbed his hands together as if he would get to the bone of them” (79). Though Garfield’s work shows a tendency to racialized and sexist depictions, Garfield’s unsympathetic description of Shylock only makes sense when put into the context of Garfield’s relationship with his own father, who disowned Garfield for divorcing his Jewish wife and eventually remarrying outside of his faith (Natov, 1994, 5). With this biographical information in mind, a closer look at Garfield’s The Merchant of Venice reveals that Garfield does indeed provide his young readers with attractive portrayals of Jewish characters, but they are of Shylock’s wife Leah and his daughter Jessica, with whom Garfield surely must have identified, rather than of Shylock. “Jessica was as lovely as the night in spring. Her mother must have been most wondrous for the daughter to have come by so much beauty, though mixed with Shylock’s blood”, Garfield claims, adding, “[s]he longed with all her heart to fly from the Jew’s dark house” (82). As Garfield might have written about himself, Jessica “[leaves] her father’s scowls for love’s smiles, and her father’s darkness for love’s light, taking with her his treasure and herself, who was the dearest treasure of all” (85).

Pictures Worth a Thousand Words In looking at children’s literature we see that as much as Shakespeare’s adaptors revere him and his works, they are also invested in rewriting him. Their deviations from and liberties they take with the texts are not blatant – there are no versions of Charles Marowitz in children’s Shakespeare (not yet, at least). Rather, resistance is found in details – an

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adjective here, an invented scene there. In particular, writers of children’s Shakespeare seize upon the opportunities the narrative form provides them, playing with point of view, for instance, or describing characters’ motivations in a way that Shakespeare never does. As Megan Lynn Isaac puts it: “The process of turning the dialogue of a play into the narrative of a story forces the editor to take interpretive positions. There are no stage directions in Hamlet to explain how King Claudius should deliver his lines, but if an adaptor of the play tells readers that Claudius spoke ‘slyly’, ‘with a sneer’, or ‘in an oily voice’, readers receive a very specific message about how to interpret the King” (Isaac, 2000, 7). But to consider only the words in Shakespeare stories for children is to ignore another extremely important component of children’s Shakespeare: the illustrations. The anecdote that Charles Lamb “disliked the pictures in the first edition” of Tales from Shakespeare “because they related to the plays rather than the tales” (Richmond, 2008, 17) reveals two things about children’s Shakespeare: first, that the adaptors thought of their texts as new creations, purposely separate from Shakespeare and decidedly different from the plays’ original interpretations; second, that the adaptors were aware that the illustrators of their books had the power to turn their interpretative focus of these new creations on their head. The frontispiece to the 1909 edition of Charles Lamb’s Macbeth, illustrated by Helen Stratton, is an excellent example of how an illustration can undo a writer’s interpretation. If Lamb was resistant to those illustrations that accompanied Tales during his lifetime, then surely Stratton’s portrayal of Lady Macbeth has Lamb turning in his grave, for in the face of Lamb’s characterization of Lady Macbeth as a “bad ambitious woman”, a character without a conscience, the instigator and chief culprit of Macbeth’s murder spree, Stratton depicts a scene only alluded to in Shakespeare’s play: she shows Lady Macbeth unable to kill Duncan because the sleeping king reminds her of her father . Young readers who encounter Stratton’s benevolent portrait of Lady Macbeth might not even register Charles’ disdain for her once they enter the text (Fig. 19.1). On the other hand, illustrations can just as easily counteract a more progressive reading of a Shakespeare play. In Nesbit’s Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare Frances Hodgson Burnett’s colour illustrations feature pudgy toddlers dressed up and behaving themselves like adults, silly and harmless illustrations which complement Nesbit’s humorous rendition of the Taming of the Shrew. However, the pen drawings by Max Bihn that accompany Nesbit’s Othello actually work against Nesbit’s reading of the story as a tale about the domestic abuse Desdemona suffers and refocus the reader’s attention on the compelling image of a young Othello as a slave, in wrist and ankle chains (Figs 19.2 and 19.3). Indeed, illustrations have such sway over readers’ interpretations and experiences that Janet Field-Pickering goes so far as to suggest that illustrations should be left out of modern children’s Shakespeare so as not to discourage any young readers. Writing of her work teaching Shakespeare to students in Washington, DC, Field-Pickering cites an instance in which African-American students were “annoyed” by pictures of a white family in The Children’s Macbeth by Beverley Birch. In response to this event, Field-Pickering argues that “Shakespeare’s words alone can avoid alienating students in allowing them to read them and supply their own pictures” (Field-Pickering, 2003, 209), seemingly ignoring the racist, sexist and otherwise alienating language that students encounter in Shakespeare’s plays themselves.

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she had not the courage to proceed

Figure 19.1: Helen Stratton, frontispiece to The Lamb Shakespeare for the Young: Macbeth (New York: Duffield and Co., 1909)

Modern-Day Children’s Shakespeare: The Aesthetics of Delight and the Persistence of Morality Certainly one change in printed children’s Shakespeare adaptations is the increasing number of graphics in books throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Sometimes the children themselves function as the illustrators, as in the case of schoolteacher Lois Burdett’s book series, Shakespeare Can Be Fun, in which the pictures are supplied by her students, who do not always agree on the characters’ appearances. In Burdett’s The Tempest, for instance, Caliban appears in seven illustrations, and is a different colour in each image – sometimes green, sometimes orange, and sometimes red – depending on how the child imagines him. Burdett’s books also privilege the voices of her students, who supply inner monologues for the stories’ characters and whose narratives are often more sympathetic than those by their adult contemporaries. Indeed, adults rarely give Caliban a fair shake in children’s Shakespeare adaptations. Probably the most decent depiction of Caliban in children’s Shakespeare is found in Burdett’s book, but it is not by Burdett herself; she characterizes Caliban as a “monster . . . grotesque and bent” (Burdett, 1999, 23). In doing so, Burdett is following a long tradition of representing Caliban as non-human. Mary Lamb describes him as “a strange mis-shapen thing, far less human in form than an

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Figure 19.2: Frances Hodgson Burnett, Katherine and Petruchio. Reproduced in Edith Nesbit’s Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (Chicago: D. E. Cunningham, 1936)

ape” (Lamb, 1807, I, 2); Nesbit characterizes him as “the son of the wicked old witch, a hideous, deformed monster, horrible to look on, and vicious and brutal in all his habits” (Nesbit, 1936, 35); Garfield calls him “[a] slow, heavy, lumbering creature, all scowls and bristles, with his ugly nakedness scarcely covered by skins as rough and hairy as his own; a creature of darkness, like the foul witch who had bourne him, and of curses, like the devil who had fathered him” (Garfield, 1985, 56) and Packer portrays him as “the son of the witch Sycorax . . . of monstrous size . . . with a mass of hair [that] looked like tangled seaweed” (Packer, 2004, 90). The most sympathetic representation of Caliban comes from Burdett’s student “Rebecca Courtney (age 8)” who, rather than providing a physical description of Caliban, focuses on his internal monologue, written as a letter by Caliban to Prospero: You villainous master! I used to care for you and in return this is what I get . . . work work work! I was lord of this island until you showed up. I know you have great powers but that gives you no right to pick on me. (Burdett, 1999, 23) Similarly to Burdett’s books, which present Shakespeare’s plays to young readers with several layers of interpretation available to them, Marcia Williams’ books Tales from Shakespeare and More Tales from Shakespeare feature two sets of characters: the actors and the audience. Williams illustrated and provided text for the stories, which imagine how theatregoers at the Globe might react to abbreviated scenes from Shakespeare’s plays represented in comic book format. The action of the play itself is represented in several cartoon-strip style tableaux, and the audience members and their comments are drawn into

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Figure 19.3: Max Bihn, Othello. Reproduced in Edith Nesbit’s Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (Chicago: D. E. Cunningham, 1936)

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the literal margins in the book. In Clark’s The Tempest, the theatregoers are considerably less benevolent than “Rebecca Courtney (age 8)”. Williams’ theatregoers comment that Caliban probably “picks his nose” and describe his behaviour as monstrous, and during the murder plot, a theatregoer teases another: “If you wriggle, Caliban will get you” (Williams, 1998, n.p.). The pages of Williams’ Shakespeare books are a frenetic explosion of activity, of colours and of life – these books are “busy”, to say the least. In that sense, they align with the current practice in children’s Shakespeare, in which Shakespeare is thought of as decidedly playful, that is to say, full of play. In addition to Williams, who sets all of her stories literally as plays, both Burdett and Packer (herself a theatre administrator) begin their Shakespeare adaptations with a list of dramatis personae, as though they are beginning a play rather than a story. This explosion of visual, dynamic, interactive children’s Shakespeare in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has led adaptors and scholars alike to characterize modern children’s Shakespeare as delightful and charming – geared toward a child’s pleasure – as opposed to the old fuddy-duddy children’s Shakespeare of early days. According to Naomi J. Miller, the two eras are easily distinguished. Miller argues that “early nineteenth- and twentieth-century adaptations commonly focused on bringing children to Shakespeare through frames of significance that reproduced adult concerns with the ‘meanings’ or ‘messages’ of the play.” In contrast, Many late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century adaptations . . . endeavour to bring Shakespeare to children through ‘play’ and the concept of playing, involving a sea-change in notions of the agency of the literate child, where ‘literary’ is associated not so much with literal ‘knowledge’ of quotable lines from ‘high literature’ as with comfort and active familiarity with the ‘sounds and sweet airs’ of the source. (Miller, 2007, 139) Williams herself weighs in on the subject by describing her experiences with Lambs’ Tales (“I yawned and fidgeted through every page . . . truly boring” (Williams, 2003, 29)) as the catalyst for creating her more visually engaging Shakespeare comics and by describing Nesbit as “patronizing”, citing The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature as evidence that Nesbit’s Shakespeare stories were composed during her “more or less hack-writing” phase (31). “As any author knows,” Williams says, “your own enthusiasm is the best starting point, your own moral fervor, the worst” (31). But this distinction between early children’s Shakespeare as being laborious and disciplinary, and current children’s Shakespeare as being fun and liberating, is too decidedly drawn to be accurate, nor does it not hold up to historical evidence. Both Richmond and Ziegler identify a similar playful approach to children’s Shakespeare in the nineteenth century, particularly in the form of play-sheets, toy theatres and paper dolls which “encourage[d] recreational approaches to Shakespeare” (Richmond, 2008, 9). And in the prefaces and treatises to early children’s Shakespeare, we find the adaptors and educators themselves focusing on the pleasure of their children readers as well. Mary Lamb writes that she hopes children will find the tales “delightful” (Lamb, 1807, I, viii). Writing in 1902, educator Hamilton Wright Mabie advises students to approach Shakespeare just for fun: “the lover of Shakespeare begins by reading the plays for pure pleasure and ends by reading them for greater pleasure . . . The best approach to a great book is by the way of simple enjoyment” (Mabie, 1902, 1–2). Both Knox’s 1880 treatise and the preface to Blackie’s Stories Old and New (1917), a collection that included six Shakespeare stories,

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recommend that children read Shakespeare en plein air, characterizing the experience as the ultimate sensory experience: Some sunshiny spring or summer Saturday, go out into . . . the woods, ask your best . . . friend to go with you, and take a volume of Shakespeare. Do not take the school edition, but the daintiest and prettiest volume you can find . . . and lay in it a sprig of scented geranium . . . to mark the place and be a pleasure to the senses. (Qtd in Rozmovits, 1998, 40) The editors of Blackie’s use similar imagery, representing a youngster’s book collection as being “like a walled garden where a child may safely play” (qtd in Richmond, 2008, 235). And in Journeys through Bookland (1909) Charles H. Sylvester explains that he expects children to read Shakespeare for fun, arguing that Shakespeare “gives a pleasure that cannot be equaled. Young people are liable to think that study is laborious and uninteresting, a nuisance and a bore. Nothing of the sort is true of the study of Shakespeare” (qtd in Richmond, 2008, 286). Even the Bowdlers hope that readers of The Family Shakespeare will receive “pleasure” from their texts (Bowdler, 1823, I, xix). Rather than thinking of early children’s Shakespeare as devoid of a sense of playfulness and children’s agency, we might do better to acknowledge that children play in different ways today than they did in the eighteenth century (Figs 19.4 and 19.5). Similarly, when Miller argues that Burdett’s books provide “a multivocal experience that leaves space for [children’s] agency and voices as individual audience members” (Miller, 2007, 147), she ignores that moral tone in current children’s Shakespeare adaptations. Rozmovits does the same thing, identifying the late nineteenth century as the time when heavy-handed moralism “gave way to a growing sense of the legitimacy of the idea of literary pleasures for children”, and quoting F. J. Harvey Darton’s characterization of the late nineteenth century as ushering in “a shift away from evangelical and conservative values toward increasingly liberal and secular ones” in which children were taught to resist vice “with vigour, but without loud chords of moral triumph” (qtd in Rozmovits, 1998, 103). More accurate is Ziegler’s notion of the two theories of adaptation – the one preoccupied with the reader’s morals and the other highlighting the reader’s pleasure – operating at the same point in time (Ziegler, 2006, 134). She points to the anonymous chapbook The History of King Lear, and his Three Daughters as an example of the former in that it “announces its moral intent in the subtitle: ‘shewing, the fate which will attend those who are undutiful, and the reward which providence will bestow on the virtuous and good’” (138) and the Lambs as an example of the latter. The truth is that current children’s Shakespeare is still incredibly interested in instilling good values and morals into its readers. Burdett’s Macbeth, for instance, concludes by asking students: What can we learn from this tale of strife, As we make decisions in our life? Don’t lose your honour, as you reach for your dream, Don’t lose your virtue, your self-esteem. Remember Macbeth; he wanted it all, It brought a quick rise, but a swifter fall. And worst of all, when he met his end, Macbeth died without a single friend. (Burdett, 2007, 63)

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Figure 19.4: J. R. Skelton, Shakespeare. Reproduced in Henry Gilbert’s Stories of Great Writers (London, NY: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1914)

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Figure 19.5: Shakespeare’s Birthday Bash, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, April 2008 Similarly, Field-Pickering’s experiences suggest that even children participate in the practice of moralizing children’s Shakespeare, as in the case in which the students self-edited the copy of Oscar Zarate’s comic book Othello they were shown, telling Field-Pickering that the illustrations “were inappropriate for their age group, with naked characters and ‘dirty pictures’” (Field-Pickering, 2003, 210). And the moral component of children’s Shakespeare is particularly pronounced in a document like that produced by Cornerstone Christian School in Tuscon, Arizona, in which twenty-first-century parents and educators present Shakespeare as a moralist in terms even more shocking than those employed in

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the nineteenth century: “Because Shakespeare wrote from a Christian worldview, there is little difficulty in helping students see God’s truth in these plays . . . The faces at the end of a show well done are priceless to behold. Shakespeare’s faithful depiction of the superiority of good over evil is clearly imprinted on their little hearts and minds” (Cooney et al., 2009, 1). Those elements of Shakespeare’s plays that do not align with the school’s credo are literally bowdlerized: “In the recent production of Much Ado About Nothing,” the document tells us, “the adultery episode was tastefully minimized without damaging the thematic illustration of the consequences of deceitfulness” (1).

Shakespeare for Every Kid So if early children’s Shakespeare exhibits a similar sense of play that is found in current children’s Shakespeare, and if current children’s Shakespeare shares early children’s Shakespeare’s underlying sense of morality, what has changed about children’s Shakespeare over the past 200 years? For one thing, children’s Shakespeare has undergone a change of venue. No longer is the family home, as Ziegler puts it, “the major location where most people first experience Shakespeare’s plays and poetry” (Ziegler, 2006, 133). Instead, beginning with the Education Act of 1870, which effected the standardization of Shakespeare in British schools, children’s Shakespeare has been thoroughly institutionalized, with classrooms, theatres and outreach programmes functioning as the sites of children’s Shakespeare. In the United States, even the federal government has got into the act, sponsoring the National Endowment for the Arts’ Shakespeare in American Communities initiative, conceived of as a national effort to bring a professionally produced Shakespeare play to schoolchildren living in “small and mid-sized communities in all fifty states”. Publicized with the NEA’s tagline “[a] great nation deserves great art”, the Shakespeare programme, now in its seventh year, is both the most expensive NEA offering ever and the only initiative to date that Congress has considered making a permanent NEA fixture. In the press release announcing the project, honorary chairman First Lady Laura Bush said, “I am particularly interested in the educational aspect of Shakespeare in American Communities. Thanks to the Arts Endowment, thousands of children and their families across America will be introduced to the literary and artistic world of Shakespeare” (National Endowment, 2003). In the same document, honorary co-chairman Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, mused, “Unless you know, read, and hear his magic stories there is a vacancy in your life.” In their statements, both Bush and Valenti subscribe to what Susanne Greenhalgh calls the “formulation of Shakespeare as the ‘best’ that English culture has to offer, a heritage to which all children have a democratic ‘right’” (Greenhalgh, 2007, 120) – or, as Maxwell put it in 1828, “polite education cannot be complete without [Shakespeare]” (Maxwell, 1828, iv). Occasionally, administrators of these outreach programmes attempt to elicit social activism in their readers and participants, such as in Packer’s introduction to Tales from Shakespeare in which she calls for children to “act” socially – “It’s possible to think of the greater good while still taking care of yourself and those who are close to you. This is the true legacy of Shakespeare’s play – to see ourselves, to see the world, and to act” (Packer, 2004, 13) – or as in the mission of London’s Shakespeare Globe Trust – “[a]s Shakespeare dramatised social, political and emotional issues and asked questions about his community, so we encourage students to consider the same issues and questions about their own

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community” (Globe Education, 2009), adhering to a philosophy at least as old as 1902 when Charles Alphonso Smith argued that “The most fruitful lesson to be learned from Shakespeare is culture as social service” (Smith, 1902, 8). Coming in somewhere between “morality” and “social service” on the children’s Shakespeare philosophy continuum are those outreach programmes that are geared toward at-risk youth. One such programme, titled “Shakespeare in the Courts”, offers juvenile offenders the option of cutting their probation time in half if they participate in the programme. “Shakespeare in the Courts” was founded in 2001 by Paul Perachi, presiding justice of the Massachusetts Juvenile Court Department Berkshire Division, and the educational staff at Shakespeare and Company in Lennox, Massachusetts. Most of the participants are violent offenders who have been convicted of serious crimes like assault, arson and theft. Many of them are neglected foster children, suicidal teens and pathological runaways. Though psychological therapy and moral rehabilitation are not the explicit objectives of the Shakespeare in the Courts programme, Perachi believes that studying Shakespeare’s plays can help the children make better ethical decisions. According to Perachi, Some of the characters in Shakespeare’s plays have questionable morals and ethics, and the children can identify with those characters. It’s good for the children to express themselves and learn communication. Macduff says, ‘I have no words; my voice is in my sword.’ And the kids are like that, too, in that they’ve been communicating through violence. Well, now they’ve got the words. The arts in general are important and effective, but Shakespeare seems to have a special magic when it comes to Corrections. (Perachi, 2006) Barby Cardillo, who, in addition to directing the Shakespeare in the Courts plays, conducts Shakespeare workshops at a residential centre for teenage girls who are trauma victims and who are also adjudicated, believes that Shakespeare works because it is so emotionally charged and it has everything these kids might have experienced: family problems, alcoholism, lust, love, war, peace, fear, jealousy – all the stuff is just heightened. In any given Shakespeare play, you can find all those themes. And when they express those emotions through the text, it’s a huge difference than actually expressing them through offensive acts. And especially when [juvenile offenders] perform the violence, I think they understand the consequences of their actions a little better. (Cardillo, 2006) “That,” says Cardillo, “is the magic of Shakespeare,” using the same term as the judge to describe disciplinary Shakespeare.

Conclusion A discussion of Shakespeare programmes for at-risk youth brings us back to the beginning of this chapter, for the philosophy inherent in modern-day programmes like “Shakespeare in the Courts” and so many other outreach initiatives in the twenty-first century is the same one at work in Mary Cowden Clark’s story of Katharine Minola: it is the philosophy that the Arts are a more effective disciplinary tool than punitive correctional measures such as incarceration and isolation. In the words of Perachi and Cardillo we hear evidence that administrators and officials believe that Shakespeare is particularly good for children who are hard to discipline – or that, as Susanne Greenhalgh puts it, Shakespeare has “a

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primary gentling and civilizing influence for children” (Greenhalgh, 2007, 124). But it could be said that this philosophy – that Shakespeare is good for you, and that his plays have a positive effect on his readers – underlies almost all children’s Shakespeare. This is an argument that surely makes many Shakespeare scholars, including this one, uneasy. We are trained to recognize coercion in texts and institutions outside of our own rather than to acknowledge our participation in it. One difference between current children’s Shakespeareans and early ones is that the early shapers of children’s Shakespeare recognized that they were doing just that: shaping children. But today, although some authors and administrators of children’s Shakespeare seem to have an awareness of themselves as wanting children to change and “improve” from their experiences with Shakespeare, several authors and administrators, and certainly most children’s Shakespeare scholars, seem deeply invested in disavowing the part that they might play in using Shakespeare to inculcate good morals or to “correct” behaviour. They cite the “democratization” of children’s Shakespeare (Greenhalgh, 2007, 118), and the increased “agency” which they believe current children’s Shakespeare provides (Miller, 2007, 139). Greenhalgh asserts that children’s Shakespeare “need not be a vehicle for conservative ideologies of literary tradition and canonical authority, but can also form a vibrant space in which the complexities that children encounter in relation to gender, sexuality and social, family and racial roles . . . can be entertainingly – and often powerfully – explored” (130). Certainly this is true. However, the examples of Macauley and Nesbit show us that such resistance to conservative interpretations and explorations of gender and racial roles was just as possible in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century as it is now, while the examples of Garfield and Burdett suggest that children’s Shakespeare can be just as conservative and didactic in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. To suggest that children’s Shakespeare which is invested in encouraging explorations of gender, sexuality, social, family and racial roles is preferable to children’s Shakespeare which does not – for Greenhalgh to do so in her scholarship and for me to do so in this chapter – is to forward a culturally-relative philosophy of children’s Shakespeare. In doing so, we are in practice no different from the Bowdlers or the Lambs. There is definitely a sense in scholarship on children’s Shakespeare that the current generation has it right whereas earlier adaptations of Shakespeare were restrictive, boring and wrong. Whether this is actually the case is doubtful. Certainly there are many early children’s Shakespeare stories that were meant to be liberating, to be entertaining and to get it right. More to the point, twenty-first-century authors do still censor children’s Shakespeare – by avoiding socially problematic plays like The Taming of the Shrew and Measure for Measure, which neither Burdett, Williams, nor Packer include in their collections; they do still attempt to use Shakespeare to inculcate values (though moral correctness might have been replaced by political correctness as the current standard); and they do still promote Shakespeare as being “good” for children. Surely there are more similarities than differences when it comes to philosophies and practices of children’s Shakespeare across the centuries.

Notes 1. Most of the research for this essay was completed at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. I am deeply indebted to Georgianna Ziegler and the Folger staff for their assistance while I was in residence.

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Further Reading and List of Works Cited Andreas, James (2003). “Canning the Classic: Race and Ethnicity in the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare”. In Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi J. Miller. London and New York: Routledge, 98–106. Bowdler, Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler (1823). The Family Shakespeare, 3rd edn. London: Longman, 8 vols. Burdett, Lois (1999). The Tempest. Richmond Hill, ON and Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books. ——(2007). Macbeth. Richmond Hill, ON and Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books. Cardillo, Barby (2006). Personal interview. 11 April 2006. Chute, Marchette Gaylord (1979). Stories from Shakespeare. New York: Meridian. Clarke, Mary Cowden (1850). The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. New York: Putnam, 3 vols. ——(1887). “Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend”. The Girl’s Own Paper 5, 562–4. Cooney, Huntley et al. (2009). “Shakespeare at Cornerstone Christian School”. Cornsterstone Christian School, Tuscon, AZ, at Field-Pickering, Janet (2003). “Shakespeare Steps Out: The Primacy of Language in Inner-City Classrooms”. In Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi J. Miller. London and New York: Routledge, 207–16. Garfield, Leon (1985). Shakespeare Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ——(1994). Shakespeare Stories II. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Globe Education Assistant (2009). Shakespeare’s Globe, London, UK, at Greenhalgh, Susanne (2007). “Introduction: Reinventing Shakespearean Childhoods”. In Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 117–36. The History of Shylock the Jew . . . Adapted to the Minds of Young Children (1794). London: Printed for the Bookseller. Hulbert, Jennifer et al. (2006). Shakespeare and Youth Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Isaac, Megan Lynn (2000). Heirs to Shakespeare: Reinventing the Bard in Young Adult Literature. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers. Lamb, Charles and Mary Lamb (1807). Tales from Shakespeare. London: Printed for Thomas Hodgkins, 2 vols. ——(1909). The Lamb Shakespeare for the Young: Macbeth. Illustrated by Helen Stratton. New York: Duffield. Lynch, Jack (2007). Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife that Turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard. New York: Walker. Mabie, Hamilton Wright (1902). “How to Study Shakespeare”. New York: University Society. Macauley, Elizabeth Wright (1822). “The Merchant of Venice”. In Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 59–61. Marchitello, Howard (2003). “Descending Shakespeare: Toward a Theory of Adaptation for Children”. In Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi J. Miller. London and New York: Routledge, 180–90. Maxwell, Caroline (1828). The Juvenile Edition of Shakspeare; Adapted to the Capacities of Youth. London: C. Chapple. Miller, Naomi J. (2007). “The Play’s the Thing: Agency in Children’s Shakespeares”. In Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 137–52. National Endowment for the Arts Launches Largest Tour of Shakespeare in American History (2003).

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Press Release. National Endowment for the Arts. 23 April 2003, at Natov, Roni (1994). Leon Garfield. New York: Twayne. Nesbit, Elizabeth (1900). The Children’s Shakespeare. Philadelphia: Henry Altemus. ——(1936). Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare: Official Text for Members of the National Junior Shakespeare Club. Chicago: D.E. Cunningham. (This item also reprints text from Nesbit’s Beautiful Stories first printed 1907). Packer, Tina (2004). Tales from Shakespeare. New York: Scholastic. Perachi, Paul (2006). Personal Interview. 11 April 2006. Richmond, Velma Bourgeois (2008). Shakespeare as Children’s Literature: Edwardian Retellings in Words and Pictures. Jefferson and London: McFarland. Rozmovits, Linda (1998). Shakespeare and the Politics of Culture in Late Victorian England. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Smith, Charles Alphonso (1902). “Why Young Men Should Study Shakespeare”. New York: University Society. Williams, Marcia (1998). Tales from Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick. ——(2003). “Bravo, Mr. William Shakespeare!” In Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi J. Miller. London and New York: Routledge, 29–38. Wolfson, Susan. J. (2007). “Introduction”. In Tales from Shakespeare. New York: Signet, 1–10. Ziegler, Georgianna (2006). “Introducing Shakespeare: The Earliest Versions for Children”. Shakespeare 2.2, 132–50.

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SHAKESPEARE AND TEENAGERS Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr

JOHNNY Ana, do you know the story of Romeo and Juliet? ANA Of course, I saw the movie. JOHNNY Well, Juliet was only fourteen, and she had a relative who hated Romeo. Yet their amor survived for all time. ANA But they both died, cabrón! No thanks! (Carlos Morton, 1992)

T

here are no teenagers in the seven ages of man. Jaques, in describing the development of a human being in As You Like It, moves from “the whining schoolboy, with his satchel / And shining morning face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school” to “the lover, / Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made to his mistress’ eyebrow” (2.7.146–8). Although to a modern reader or audience member, this description may sound like a lovesick teenager, to Shakespeare’s audience it describes someone older. The teenager is not in the seven ages, not least because the teenager, at least as understood today, is a twentieth-century invention. As Carol Chillington Rutter has argued, childhood was an “elastic concept” in Shakespeare’s England (Rutter, 2007, xiv). Shakespeare does not use the words “teen” or “teenager” in the modern sense. “Youth” is the closest Shakespeare comes to the stage in between infancy/childhood and adult maturity. Paul Griffiths notes that “boy”, a frequent appellation in Shakespeare’s plays to the younger male characters, refers to a male between the ages of ten and eighteen (Griffiths, 1996, 24). Yet, given the elasticity of the concepts of both childhood and adulthood, the boundary between the two was blurred at best. In some senses, the age of adulthood in Shakespeare’s period came much sooner than in the modern era. Fourteen was the legal age of marriage (indeed, Juliet is between thirteen and fourteen when she is engaged to Paris) and the minimum age for apprenticeship. Rutter observes that “By Elizabethan statute, apprentices were bound until they were twenty-four, and were not permitted to marry until then, the end of apprenticeship marking the move into adulthood” (Rutter, 2007, xiv), although twenty-one was otherwise regarded as the age of majority. Yet for the upper classes (and a growing number of the middle class) who did not participate in apprenticeships, fourteen marks the beginning of adulthood. Thus, it is possible that Beatrice, Hero, Hermia, Helena, Viola, Rosalind, Julia, Silvia, Kate, Rosaline, Maria, Katherine, Marina, Miranda and Imogen are all teenaged, as they are all of marriageable

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age and, indeed, they are all married or engaged to be married by the conclusion of their respective plays. Anne Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor is teenaged, but younger than seventeen, as she stands to inherit a fortune “when she is able to overtake seventeen years old” (1.1.45–6). Like Juliet, that other favourite teenaged bride, she tricks her parents and elopes with the husband of her choice, in this case, Fenton, who is most likely not a teenager any more. Martius, the son of Coriolanus, is probably a teenager, as is Fleance and Young Siward, although we cannot be certain as Shakespeare rarely specifies the ages of his young characters, with the notable exception, discussed below, of Juliet. In The Winter’s Tale, a sixteen-year gap from the births of Perdita and Florizel to the beginning of Act 4 when we meet them as youths indicates that they are teenagers. Falstaff’s Page in 2 Henry IV who becomes the Boy who goes to war with the other Boar’s Head denizens in Henry V is most likely in his early teens, as may be Francis the Drawer in 1 Henry IV. Francis Flute the bellows mender in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who has “a beard coming” (1.1.39–40) but can still play Thisbe (and thus suggestive of the young apprentices of Shakespeare’s own company who were also adolescents) may also be a teenager. In short, the plays of Shakespeare are full of teenaged or possibly teenaged characters. The comedies more than the tragedies tend to focus on the younger characters as well, which may also explain the proliferation of Shakespeare appropriations by Hollywood to make what Thomas M. Leitch terms “teenpix” (Leitch, 1992, 43). In Shakespeare’s plays, however, there is no distinction between the teenaged characters and the adult characters. As mentioned, the teenager is a modern invention. Michael Barson and Steven Heller trace the development of the modern notion of the teenager to World War Two and the immediate postwar period (Barson and Heller, 1998, 22). Jon Lewis states that in the postwar period there arose “a distinct, moneyed, seemingly homogenous subculture with its own set of rituals and practices” (Lewis, 1992, 3). For the first time, teenagers were separated from both childhood and adults and were seen as having a distinct identity. Their economic power made them the key consumer group of modern media (television, music, cinema and, subsequently, video and DVD, game and internet) and the items they consumed also created an identity for them, collectively (as teens and youth) or individually (as “Beatles fan” versus “Elvis fan”). Through the fifties and sixties this group of individuals in between childhood and adulthood developed into generations that rejected tradition and adult authority. Youth culture (Elvis, drag racing, malt shops and rock music) gave way to numerous countercultures (drugs, psychedelic music, political activism). First and foremost, however, youth culture (and especially teen culture) was and is a mediated, market-driven culture in which identity is ascribed by products purchased and culture consumed. Thus, Shakespeare for teenagers is a convergence of three key markets: youth culture, the Shakespeare industry and the education industry. Youth culture was also profoundly shaped by the concomitant rise of technology in the 1950s, with “teenpix”, in particular, being aided by the development of the drive-in. In the 1980s, home VHS systems helped further the spread of the youth-oriented films of John Hughes. Similarly, the development of CD, DVD, MP3 and digital technology all represent leaps in youth culture as well as technology. Contemporary teenagers are a media-savvy, media-saturated, mediated generation whose educational and personal experiences are fragmented and rooted in multitasking: texting friends while updating one’s Facebook status, listening to pop songs in MP3 format while simultaneously checking email, tweeting and taking notes in class. And the Shakespeare that is aimed at them reflects this reality.1

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Even amidst the discontinuities and instabilities of postmodernity, Shakespeare (both the man and his works, to say nothing of the epiphenomena surrounding both) continues to be read according to a template of difficulty, unintelligibility and remoteness. Hence, it is perhaps unsurprising that, in reinventions of “Shakespeare” aimed at teenage consumption, a streamlining and democratizing of his work is immediately apparent. The two main areas in which Shakespeare is aimed at teenagers are in secondary education and in youth culture. In both areas, the techniques of bringing Shakespeare to teenagers and teenagers to Shakespeare are primarily through relatability and accessibility. In other words, both the classroom and the teen movie/young adult novel/pop song transform Shakespeare into something relevant to the teenager. This relevancy is achieved by focusing on the teenage elements present within Shakespeare’s work, or translating Shakespeare’s work into something recognizably “teen”, something recognizably “cool”. As Jennifer Hulbert, Robert York and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr conclude, Shakespeare is brought to teenagers utilizing one of three strategies: translation (changing the text into contemporary English or slang), reducing (making smaller or lessening the text) and referencing (suggesting or alluding to Shakespeare, the man and/or the work, without necessarily citing the source), all of which are done to make the plays accessible for teenagers (Hulbert, York and Wetmore, 2006, 17–34). The two greatest worries, at least if one peruses the literature, is that teenagers either “fear” Shakespeare, or find him and his works boring. Shakespeare for teenagers, whether in education or popular culture, or often a combination of the two, aims to combat these two demons. Thomas M. Leitch links movies about teenagers with Shakespeare, Molière and Roman comedy, noting, “In each of these stories, social standards of maturity are renewed through generational development, as children grow up to be the legitimate avatars of the social order” (Leitch, 1992, 44). But, as Leitch observes, Rebel without a Cause was unusual in its focus on the teenagers as not developing into the social order but failing “to grow into the adult community” (44). Whereas traditionally most romantic comedies and dramas that feature teenaged characters see those characters enter the community and join in the restoration of order at play’s end, the modern teenage narrative does not always follow that trope. Later teenpix from the eighties are critical of adults and adulthood and, according to Leitch, valorize adolescence as an unchanging, self-justifying system of values which does not reaffirm or renew standards of maturity but simply marginalizes the adult world by ignoring any possible continuities it might have with the world of adolescence and setting goals which can be reached without growth or change. (45) In other words, the teenpic keeps the adolescent central, marginalizes the adult world and insists not only on the values of the teenage generation but in the value of not leaving that generation. What Leitch argues of the teenpic, I argue is true for “TeenShake”: that all Shakespeare aimed at teenagers, whether in the classroom, the multiplex or the young adult section of the bookstore, is about teenagers and valorizes the teenage experience within Shakespeare. This strategy is the chief way to combat the aforementioned fear and boredom. Many of the adaptations and offshoots I shall explore in this chapter rewrite or reframe Shakespeare for the purpose of empowering the teenager who encounters the work. For the purposes of this chapter, I shall first consider the education system as a site where Shakespeare is aimed at teenagers with strategies of making the plays relevant to teenagers. Then I shall

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consider the primacy of Romeo and Juliet as the emblematic teen Shakespeare work. Finally I shall consider Shakespeare for teenagers in two key appropriative markets: cinema and young adult novels. Teenagers encounter Shakespeare in the classroom as part of their secondary education. Although they may have had some exposure before (see Amy Scott-Douglass’ chapter in this volume), Shakespeare is mandated and studied in much greater depth in both the United States and the United Kingdom in secondary school. For both the General Certificate of Secondary Education and A-Level/Sixth Form education as well as in American high schools, students are required to engage with the work of William Shakespeare. Thus, as part of compulsory education, the teenager is literally compelled to read at least one of Shakespeare’s plays. Alan Sinfield has claimed that in the education system, Shakespeare “has been made to speak for the right” (Sinfield, 1985, 134–5). Yet, as Susanne Greenhalgh counters, educational Shakespeare is not just a vehicle for conservative ideologies of literary tradition and canonical authority, but can also form a vibrant space in which the complexities that children encounter in relation to gender, sexuality and social, family and racial roles, as well as first experiences of loss and love, can be entertainingly – and often powerfully – explored. (Greenhalgh, 2007, 129–30) The use of Shakespeare in the classroom in the twenty-first century has taken on a new approach. Instead of engaging Shakespeare on his own terms, students are also encouraged to encounter the plays on theirs and to engage the plays with agency. Assignments include rewriting the plays in contemporary settings, or using hip-hop music, or comparing the plays to other texts from contemporary popular culture (see Sedgewick, 1999). Shakespeare is not merely something to be studied on his own but also a form of “empowerment” in which students can develop and create their own ideas based on his texts. Likewise, many assignments within the classroom at the secondary level are also designed to remove the fear that students are supposed to have of Shakespeare as the embodiment of high culture. Shakespeare is very much an establishment figure, and is often used in popular culture as a symbol of the academic establishment and even the academy itself. Yet, paradoxically, Shakespeare can also be “cool”. Richard Burt has argued that Shakespeare is a contradictory figure: “both cool and uncool, both a signifier of elite and popular culture, in part because of the way he is now positioned inside and outside of academia” (Burt, 1998, 6). One of the key strategies in the academy to combat the fear of elitism and “uncoolness” is to focus within the classroom on Shakespeare as “cool” and popular by filtering the plays through a variety of media: adaptations and film versions on DVD, translations into contemporary language and a spate of recent texts aimed at teachers and students whose very titles indicate their agenda. Such educational tools are designed to remove fear and promote accessibility. Whether the obviously titled No Fear Shakespeare series, which has side by side original text and translation into contemporary English, Folger Library’s Shakespeare Set Free series, designed to aid teachers in finding activities to overcome students’ aversions to Shakespeare, or Alison Schumacher’s Shaking Hands with Shakespeare: A Teenager’s Guide to Reading and Performing the Bard, subtitled “Everything You Need to Get Over Your Fear of Shakespeare”, the very titles of the educational volumes focus on Shakespeare as something to be feared, presumably because of his assumed irrelevance to students’ lives and inaccessibility.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, the favourite Shakespeare text in secondary education was often Julius Caesar, primarily because of its rhetorical speeches and its absence of any sexual content. Since the sixties, Romeo and Juliet has achieved primacy in secondary education, presumably because of its teenaged heroine (and often-presented as teenaged hero, though Romeo is most likely in his early twenties and would have been played in the Lord Chamberlain’s men by an adult actor).2 As noted above, Shakespeare rarely specifies the ages of his characters, especially his younger ones. Juliet, however, is thirteen, going on fourteen. In fact, before we even meet her in the play, her age is twice a matter of discussion. First, between Capulet and Paris, in which Capulet begs: My child is yet a stranger in the world; She hath not seen the change of fourteen years. Let two more summers wither in their pride Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride. (1.2.8–11) In the subsequent scene, her age is again a significant part of the opening conversation between Lady Capulet and the Nurse: CAPULET’S WIFE Thou knowest my daughter’s of a pretty age. NURSE Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour. CAPULET’S WIFE She’s not fourteen. NURSE I’ll lay fourteen of my teeth – and yet, to my teen be it spoken, I have but four – she’s not fourteen. How long is it now to Lammastide? CAPULET’S WIFE A fortnight and odd days. NURSE Even or odd, of all days in the year Come Lammas Eve at night she shall be fourteen. (1.3.11–19) Not only is it well established in this scene that Juliet is thirteen, a few weeks shy of her fourteenth birthday, but also that her mother had given birth to her around the same age (1.3.74–5). Romeo’s age is never stated. Interestingly, however, Romeo and Juliet only became a “teen play” in the twentieth century. The tradition in the previous centuries was to have the title characters played by older actors, despite the specificity of Juliet’s age in the text. In the postwar period, just as youth culture was beginning to emerge, Juliet and Romeo both became high school aged. As “teenagers” in the modern sense are a postwar invention, Shakespeare for teenagers was an almost immediate result. In 1957, for example, the musical West Side Story translated Romeo and Juliet into a contemporary pop culture milieu of juvenile delinquency, gang fighting and teen love. That Shakespearean offshoot is now frequently performed in secondary schools, representing yet another conflation of youth culture and education, and inhabiting its own canonical status as a “classic musical”. Students in the United States read the play in secondary education. Although other high school favourites include A Midsummer Night’s Dream (whose young couples may also be teenagers) and Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet remains the most read and performed play by teenagers. As part of the valorization of all things teenaged in Shakespeare in order to make Shakespeare accessible and “not boring” to students, it is not surprising that this is so. What is remarkable is how a play already about teenagers is further drawn into the youth culture realm through the use of popular culture in the classroom. Just as popular culture has appropriated Shakespeare, the education system has also appropriated youth culture to teach Shakespeare.

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When the present author was in high school, it was the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet that we watched in English class on videotape. Now, high school students watch Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film version of the play on DVD. Luhrmann’s film was aimed at the duel and overlapping markets of popular culture and educational culture. In the weeks before its release, MTV ran a series of specials on the film, hosted by star Claire Danes, best known at that point for the high school drama (also then running on MTV) My So-Called Life. And yet, so much was Luhrmann’s film expected to connect with the high school classroom that Dell Publishing rereleased its version of Romeo and Juliet in a single volume with the screenplay by Craig Pearce and Baz Luhrmann under the title William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet: The Contemporary Film, The Classic Play with the film first both in the title and the volume demonstrating its prevalence and place of importance. In his note at the beginning of the text, Luhrmann argues for Leitch’s model of understanding Shakespeare teenpix: “Juliet is written as a very smart, active character. She decides to get married, she resolves to take the sleeping potion, she really drives the piece. The extraordinary, unmissable characteristic about Claire [Danes] is that here is a sixteen-year-old girl with the poise and maturity of a thirty-year-old” (Shakespeare, Pearce and Luhrmann, 1996, v–vi, emphasis in original). As with the classroom assignments mentioned above, Luhrmann’s statement empowers the teenager and makes Romeo and Juliet about Juliet’s self-empowerment to make life decisions. As Leitch also notes about teenpix, although Claire Danes is sixteen, she is as smart, mature and poised as a “thirty year old”. As in the films of John Hughes, Luhrmann’s Juliet is firmly ensconced in Leitch’s “self-justifying system of values which does not reaffirm or renew standards of maturity but simply marginalizes the adult world by ignoring any possible continuities it might have with the world of adolescence and setting goals which can be reached without growth or change” (Leitch, 1992, 145). Juliet does not need to grow up – she needs the adults in her life to leave her alone so that she may pursue a relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio. While this is not Shakespeare’s play necessarily, it is an accessible, understandable world view that will lessen one’s fear of Shakespeare. The link between Shakespeare and education also is made manifest in teenpix and television programmes about Shakespeare, taking the form of scenes of high school English or drama classes that display teens encountering Shakespeare. In teen films such as Dead Poets Society (dir. Peter Weir, 1989), Stand and Deliver (dir. Ramón Menéndez, 1988) and Porky’s II: The Next Day (dir. Bob Clark, 1983) as well as youth-oriented television programmes such as Malcolm in the Middle, The Brady Bunch and 3rd Rock from the Sun, Shakespeare production is shown as a major part of the secondary education experience, and the possibility that a classroom experience of Shakespeare can be life changing is often explored. So much is the Shakespeare-in-the-classroom a cliché of teen films that it shows up in almost every genre of teen film, from romances such as Clueless (dir. Amy Heckerling, 1995) to “slasher” films such as Halloween (which features an extended discussion of the idea of fate in Hamlet). In films adapted from Shakespeare’s plays, such scenes have now become obligatory: the source material must be acknowledged. Films such as 10 Things I Hate about You (dir. Gil Junger, 1999) are both based on Shakespeare and demonstrative of the Shakespeare classroom (see also Ramona Wray’s chapter in this volume on recent Shakespeare on film). Teenpix appropriations of Shakespeare almost without exception set the play in an academic setting and then riff on and reference Shakespeare within the film as well. In these films, such as She’s the Man (dir. Andy Fickman, 2006) (a high school Twelfth Night), ‘O’

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(dir. Tim Blake Nelson, 2001) (a high school Othello), 10 Things I Hate about You (a high school Taming of the Shrew) and Get Over It (dir. Tommy O’Haver, 2001) (a high school Midsummer Night’s Dream), the plot is derived from Shakespeare, a recognizable line or two remains, but the narrative is then entirely set within the world of the contemporary teen. Whether it is a preparatory academy, inner-city school, or (most often) suburban public high school, the school is the site where Shakespeare is engaged and where the protagonist(s) have a life-changing experience rooted in this encounter with Shakespeare. Ariane M. Balizet notes that “The recognition of Shakespeare’s play and its position relative to the film is essential to each film’s effort to comment on adolescence” (Balizet, 2004, 124). In other words, teenpix based on Shakespeare or incorporating Shakespeare use Shakespeare to analyze, construct and valorize the adolescent experience first, and then, maybe, Shakespeare’s works. However, Balizet also identifies these films as demonstrating teenagers realizing “Shakespeare as a shaping influence in their lives” (131). Ironically, teen films depict the importance of Shakespeare in the education system, even as the education system uses teen films to depict the importance of Shakespeare in culture. We here see the confluence of the education and youth culture industries: schools show movies, movies depict schools. The purpose? To make Shakespeare accessible by demonstrating his value to teenagers. If Julia Styles can learn about herself by rewriting sonnets in 10 Things, or if Robert Sean Leonard only finally feels alive by playing Puck in Dead Poets Society, then the average teenager might also welcome Shakespeare as a “shaping influence”. Richard Burt identifies the “archetypal figure of the Shakespeare teacher” in teenpix as traditionally a “loser”, although the notable exception of 10 Things I Hate about You features a “cool” Shakespeare teacher (Burt, 1998, 214). Mr Morgan, the young, AfricanAmerican English teacher, tells his students, “I know Shakespeare’s a dead white guy, but he knows his shit so we can overlook that.” With the acknowledgement that Shakespeare stands for the institution and high culture (“dead white male”), combined with the assumed street cred of a young, African-American teacher vouching that “he knows his shit” (the obscenity spoken in a classroom shows us both speaker and subject are “cool”), 10 Things asserts that Shakespeare is not only relevant to the lives of teenagers, but that teens should want to encounter his works, not fear them. Shakespeare has teenage street cred in a way that no other author, living or dead, does. Such uses of Shakespeare as emblematic of the classroom and as life-changing, empowering cultural material also occur within so-called “Young Adult Literature”, whose very name asserts to the teenage market it is aimed at that they are already adults, and therefore have their own section of the library and bookstore. As with teenpix, young adult literature rewrites Shakespeare’s plays from a teenage perspective, commenting on Shakespeare’s originality while centralizing the teen experience and empowering the young reader in a manner that Shakespeare’s original does not necessarily do. Alternatively the novel is placed in an academic setting where the characters riff on and reference Shakespeare. Most often adapted for young adult literature are Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and The Tempest. As Amy Scott-Douglass notes in her chapter in this volume, the plays of Shakespeare are frequently transformed into novels and are refocused to reflect the concerns of adolescents, often rewritten to empower teenage girls. Ophelia is of particular importance, both in young adult fiction and, as we shall see below, in pop psychology. An example of this last type is Lisa Fiedler’s Dating Hamlet: Ophelia’s Story (2002). The

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novel, a feminist retelling of Hamlet from Ophelia’s point of view is fascinating if one knows the original, but clearly written so that the reader need not have read the play. Ophelia in this case is a teen heroine, one who is devoted to her boyfriend Hamlet, who is “as brilliant as he is handsome” (Fiedler, 2002, 2). He is “sweet” (2). He kisses her fingertips; he is devoted to her and hopes to marry her someday. But he is also “melancholy” ever since the death of his father (3). From the beginning of the first chapter, it is clear this Ophelia is not Shakespeare’s. She has an ideal boyfriend in Hamlet. There is no “Get thee to a nunnery” in their relationship. Instead, she learns that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” and works with her sweet boyfriend to fix the problems. She tells Hamlet about the Ghost, fakes her own death and then helps him get revenge. At the climactic duel, it is Ophelia who has the antidote to Claudius’ poison, and so revives a duly penitent Laertes, Hamlet and Gertrude, but since Claudius was the problem that made her boyfriend’s life so difficult, he doesn’t get any.3 Fiedler rewrites the story of Hamlet so that it reflects the concerns of adolescent girls. Ophelia is a girl of privilege who will marry a prince someday – it is her boyfriend’s stepfather who is causing the problems. Ophelia, an empowered teen girl, works with her near-perfect boyfriend to fix the problems. Like the teenpix, this novel uses Shakespeare to privilege adolescents, marginalize adults and reflect the contemporary teen value system. Ophelia’s top priority is helping and maintaining a relationship with her ideal boyfriend. Another novel that empowers teens through Shakespeare, albeit through the different route of a contemporary academic setting is Lois Duncan’s Killing Mr Griffin (1978). The novel references Hamlet and Macbeth, but is much more interesting for its inversion of Balizet’s “shaping influence” of Shakespeare on teen lives, by presenting it as something insidious that they have come to resent. Similarly, Duncan offers the epitome of Burt’s “loser Shakespeare teacher”. Brian Griffin, the titular victim, is a demanding and obnoxious high school English teacher. He carries out many of the activities noted above in attempting to get students to engage with Shakespeare and find his works meaningful. The students read the plays; he expects them to get the references; he has them write a final song for Ophelia. He tries to empower them through creativity and he tries to make them see the power of Shakespeare’s work. Three students who resent the teacher decide to teach him a lesson. One of the key reasons they resent him is how much he values and pushes Shakespeare. As they attempt to kidnap him, one student thinks, ‘“Who would have thought the old man had so much strength in him’ – No – that wasn’t it – it was blood: ‘had so much blood in him.’ That guy Griffin had them brainwashed! Shakespeare was coming out of their ears!” (Duncan, 1978, 70). Unlike in the teenpix, here the students realize that against their own wishes they have incorporated Shakespeare into their thought patterns and it makes them lash out against the teacher who did so. But in this case, even the negative influence still demonstrates the power of Shakespeare, and Duncan interestingly weaves the story of the accidental killing of the Shakespeare teacher with the creeping influence of Macbeth on the students who did it. Even the teens who resent Shakespeare find their lives influenced by him, and he is present at the wish fulfilment fantasy of kidnapping and killing an unpopular teacher. In a combination of rewriting a play and dealing with the plays in a contemporary academic setting, David Bergantino’s Hamlet II: Ophelia’s Revenge (2003) is a young adult novel that empowers both Shakespeare’s teen character (Ophelia) and the contemporary teens who must fight her. Cameron, an American university student inherits Elsinore Castle and he and his friends go to visit it, awakening the Ghost of Ophelia who is

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determined to kill the young men by possessing the bodies of the young women. Finally, Sofia, Cameron’s girlfriend, stops Ophelia by telling her to “get over herself” and “move on” (Bergantino, 2003, 236). Hulbert, York and Wetmore argue that this solution is “the typical youth response to Shakespeare: transcend your time and context and situation and make yourself relevant to now or don’t waste our time” (Hulbert, York and Wetmore, 2006, 226). In other words, if Shakespeare’s Ophelia cannot fit in the contemporary teen world and reflect contemporary teen values, then she must be made to leave. Shakespeare’s characters must connect to teenagers on the teenagers’ terms or not at all. “Shakespeare” is not merely the plays, however. There is also the man and his cultural context, which is part and parcel of the experience of learning about Shakespeare in the educational system. Young adult literature also deals with the issues of learning about Shakespeare the man and his context. In Norma Howe’s Blue Avenger Cracks the Code (2000), David Schumacher, who has assumed the identity of “Blue Avenger” at the age of sixteen, investigates and discovers Shakespeare’s plays were really written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. The narrative exemplifies this approach to the teenage-ization of Shakespeare studies in several ways. The teenage hero is able to discover what four centuries of adults have not: the actual author of Shakespeare’s plays. For 400 years Shakespeare has been presented as the author, and this myth is perpetuated in the high school classroom. The Blue Avenger proves what teens have suspected all along: that teachers are lying to them and teaching them things that are false. Again, the teenage hero is centralized, valorized and his values are celebrated; it is Shakespeare the man (and adults who claim he wrote the plays) who are marginalized and insignificant. Perhaps one of the most interesting literary developments concerning Shakespeare and teenagers is what Jennifer Hulbert calls “the Ophilia-ization of the contemporary teenage girl” in which pop psychology has constructed Ophelia as “the representative of the silent sufferings of adolescent girls” (Hulbert, York and Wetmore, 2006, 199, 202). In 1994, Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia, subtitled Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, used Shakespeare’s character as a model for understanding teenage girls. Pipher was concerned that a generation of young women was being forced to conform to images in the media and to attempt to form and maintain a sense of self in the face of conflicting pressures from home, school and friends. What followed was a small flood of pop psychology volumes that continued the idea of the contemporary teen girl as Ophelia: Sara Shandler’s Ophelia Speaks (1999), Nina Shandler’s Ophelia’s Mom (2001) and Cheryl Dellsaga’s Surviving Ophelia (2001). Yet, “the Ophelia that has become vernacular for adolescent woman is the Ophelia of Pipher’s book, not the Ophelia of Shakespeare’s play” (Hulbert, York and Wetmore, 2006, 217). Hulbert argues that Pipher’s Ophelia removes not only the historical context of Shakespeare’s play but the actual character as presented in Shakespeare’s play and instead offers an Ophelia rooted solely in contemporary teen culture. Ophelia’s misery is not “due to the onset of adolescence” but in “particular to her circumstances” (Hulbert, York and Wetmore, 2006, 215). Furthermore, as evidenced by the statistics with which I began this essay, Ophelia was not a teenager in the modern sense but a woman of marriageable age. It is only in the late twentieth century that Ophelia has been made over as a teenager, so to speak. What Fiedler constructs as positive and empowering (Ophelia as active teenage girl), Pipher and company present as tragic (Ophelia as damaged and self-damaging teenage girl). In both cases, however, Ophelia is no longer the Ophelia of Shakespeare’s play: rather, she is a contemporary teenager. Following Leitch’s model, we might note that Shakespeare for teenagers is literally

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Shakespeare about teenagers. Whether in the classroom, the multiplex or the young adult section of the bookstore, Shakespeare when aimed at a teenage audience is himself a young adult author writing about teenagers dealing with typical teenage concerns. The adolescent’s fear of Shakespeare and the concern that the plays might be boring or inaccessible are both removed by ensuring that Shakespeare only engages issues of concern to them. Shakespeare himself becomes an expert on teenagers, himself, in Burt’s terms, a “cool loser”. But the one thing he is not is a teenager himself. Of Shakespeare’s own teenage years we know little. He left school around thirteen with “little Latin and less Greek” and at eighteen he impregnated and married Anne Hathaway, herself no teenager. But neither of these facts will be celebrated in the industries that provide Shakespeare for teenagers. He remains an adult, albeit one who “gets it”. The only part of Shakespeare that cannot be teenagified is the man himself. To cite one of Feste’s songs in Twelfth Night, “Youth’s a stuff will not endure” (2.3.48.)

Notes 1. An example of this is Sarah Schmelling’s Hamlet (Facebook Newsfeed Edition), which reduces the plot of Shakespeare’s play to a series of single line updates for each of the characters. See, for example, such entries as “Horatio thinks he saw a ghost”, “Hamlet and the Queen are no longer friends”, “Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent”, “Polonius is no longer online”, “Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don’t Float”, “The queen, the king, Laertes and Hamlet are now zombies”. To any member of the social networking site, this reductio ad absurdum of the play mimics exactly the narrative feed of Facebook. To appreciate Schmelling’s parody, however, one must be familiar with not only Hamlet but with the various tools and functions on Facebook. It is this type of Shakespeare appropriation that is aimed at a mediated, media-savvy, mediatized generation. 2. I have always found it curious that we give teenagers a play in which young people disobey their parents and civil authorities, engage in gang violence and a thirteen-year-old girl gets married, has a night of intimacy with her husband and the two of them then commit suicide, and then tell those students that this is one of the greatest things ever written, particularly since the play romanticizes everything that they are being taught to not do elsewhere. This aspect is an example of how the valorization of all things teen in Shakespeare is ultimately subversive within the classroom. Yet, as the epigram that opened this essay indicates, Romeo and Juliet has become romanticized as the epitome of teen love. Teens know the story because they have “seen the movie”, yet Ana’s statement that concludes the exchange also demonstrates a more contemporary, ironic teenage take on the story of Romeo and Juliet: “they both died” (Schmelling, 2008, 39). 3. This same idea appears in the pseudo-inspirational teacher film Hamlet 2 (dir. Andrew Fleming, 2008), which is set in a high school where the drama programme has been cancelled and the truly inept drama teacher has written a sequel to Hamlet in which Jesus uses a time machine to help Hamlet stop the deaths of his mother, Laertes and Ophelia, all played by high school students. Though ridiculous in its narrative and effect, the idea is the same as Fiedler’s: empowered teenagers can change the world, forgive the adults who have screwed up the world and their lives, and live happily ever after.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Balizet, Ariane M. (2004). “Teen Scenes: Recognizing Shakespeare in Teen Film”. In Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television, ed. James R. Keller and Leslie Stratyner. Jefferson and London: McFarland, 122–36.

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Barson, Michael and Steven Heller (1998). Teenage Confidential: An Illustrated History of the American Teen. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Bergantino, David (2003). Hamlet II: Ophelia’s Revenge. New York: Pocket Books. Burt, Richard (1998). Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture. New York: St Martin’s Press. Duncan, Lois (1978). Killing Mr Griffin. New York: Bantam. Fiedler, Lisa (2002). Dating Hamlet: Ophelia’s Story. New York: Henry Holt. Greenhalgh, Susanne (2007). “Introduction: Reinventing Shakespearean Childhoods”. In Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 117–36. Griffiths, Paul (1996). Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England 1560–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Howe, Norma (2000). Blue Avenger Cracks the Code. New York: Henry Holt. Hulbert, Jennifer, Robert York and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr (2006). Shakespeare and Youth Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Isaac, Megan Lynn (2000). Heirs to Shakespeare: Reinventing the Bard in Young Adult Literature. Portsmouth, NH: Boytowcook Publishers. Klett, Elizabeth (2008). “Reviving Viola: Comic and Tragic Teen Film Adaptations of Twelfth Night”. Shakespeare Bulletin 26.2, 69–87. Leitch, Thomas M. (1992). “The World According to Teenpix”. Literature/Film Quarterly 20.1, 43–7. Lewis, Jon (1992). The Road to Romance and Ruins: Teen Films and Youth Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Miller, Naomi J., ed. (2003). Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults. London and New York: Routledge. Morton, Carlos (1992). Johnny Tenorio and Other Plays. Houston: Arte Publico. Pipher, Mary (1994). Reviving Ophelia. New York: Putnam. Rutter, Carol Chillington (2007). Shakespeare and Child’s Play. London and New York: Routledge. Schmelling, Sarah (2008). Hamlet (Facebook Newsfeed Edition). McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, at Schumacher, Alison (2004). Shaking Hands with Shakespeare: A Teenager’s Guide to Reading and Performing the Bard. New York: Kaplan. Sedgewick, Fred (1999). Shakespeare and the Young Writer. London and New York: Routledge. Shakespeare, William, Craig Pearce and Baz Luhrmann (1996). William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet: The Contemporary Film, The Classical Play. New York: Dell. Sinfield, Alan (1985). “Give an Account of Shakespeare and Education, Showing Why you Think they are Effective and What you have Appreciated about them. Support your Comments with Precise References”. In Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 134–57. Thew, Neill (2006). Teaching Shakespeare: A Survey of the Undergraduate Level in Higher Education. London: The Higher Education Academy.

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SHAKESPEARE AND THE COMIC BOOK Michael P. Jensen

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he Oregon Shakespeare Festival occupies parts of two blocks in downtown Ashland, Oregon.1 Directly across the street from one of their buildings is More Fun, a comic book store selling new and old comics, graphic novels and books reprinting comic books and strips. The store reverses the usual trend in which retail shops make enough money in November and December to turn a profit for the year. At More Fun, it is some of the 125,000 tourists visiting the Shakespeare Festival that keep the lights on as many kill time between breakfast and the matinée. Shakespeare is independent from both theatre and comic books, but among the ways in which his works are delivered is performance on the stage and on the comic page. Since comics construct how their readers understand Shakespeare’s works, it is worth exploring further the kind of Shakespeare that comic books deliver. We shall look at what comic book adaptors have changed, added or spun in their versions of the Bard, and try to understand how Shakespeare’s plays work (or not) as comics. Evaluations will concern why a comic works or else fails to work, as a comic, because this tells us how comics work as versions of “Shakespeare”. An exception is the problem of updating Shakespeare’s language, which we shall consider particularly in relation to graphic novels that often seek to update the language. My concern is with the major comic series familiar to readers of this genre across the world; minor series and non-series comics are omitted for reasons of space. It seems best to proceed systematically, since each comic book publisher is unique. I shall look first at Shakespeare comic book adaptations, next at some of the ways in which non-adapted stories use Shakespeare, then at a few creators who quote, paraphrase and allude to the plays, and then finally I will examine how Shakespeare has been used as a character in comic books. Some reference will be made to international Shakespeare comics, especially those created in Japan. Throughout I use the word adaptation instead of appropriation because it is commonly as an adaptation of Shakespeare that Shakespearean comics envisage their engagement with the Bard.

Comic Book Adaptations Educators in the United States were quick to see comic books as a possible educational tool. By 1944, over 100 studies indicated that comic books assisted in education, including those in the Journal of Educational Sociology, which devoted an entire issue to the matter. Educational comic books predated the first Shakespeare comic books by several years. The

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first created for classroom use was True Comics (1941–50), featuring “factual matter and true adventure stories” (Fuchs, 1971, 139). In the late forties, the Superman Work Book was used in 2500 primary classes to teach children to read. By 1950, the publishers of Classics Illustrated claimed that 25,000 schools assigned their magazines to students (Jones, 2002, 89). Comics were also used to teach other subjects such as history and the sciences. Classic Comics, later retitled Classics Illustrated (CI), was published by Gilberton. CI was initially designed to teach literature, though history and science comics were later added to their list. Their first publication, The Three Musketeers, was issued in October 1941. CI comics were marketed as books, meaning they stayed in print past the month of publication. Single copies were available on news stands in the publication month, and then warehoused for bulk sales to schools. Back issues could be ordered with coupons in the current issue and titles were reprinted when out of stock. The magazine and marketing plan was so successful that Gilberton opened editorial offices in “over two dozen countries”, published in “nine different languages” (Benton, 1989, 124) and was imitated by Amex in the UK and Seaboard Publishing in the US. Amex produced its first Shakespeare comic book, their Macbeth beating CI’s Julius Caesar into print by a couple of months. Amex and Seaboard both created entertaining comic books by being unfaithful to Shakespeare. Amex published twelve literary adaptations in their comic A Classic in Pictures (a somewhat wordy way to refer to Classics Illustrated) from 1949 to 1951, presenting three of Shakespeare’s plays: Macbeth (1949), Henry V (1950) and Julius Caesar (1951). The series was reprinted under the Barins Books imprint in 1955 in a slightly larger format and retitled Famous Stories in Pictures. The three comic narratives are quite different from each other, with Macbeth being a fairly faithful rendering of the play. Henry V contains so little of Shakespeare that the first page excuses the story as “freely adapted”. The next nine pages constitute a prologue that tells the back-story of Prince Hal and England in his time, including the scene from 2 Henry IV at 4.5 where Henry rebuffs Hal for taking the crown (8). The first half of the comic does not follow the play closely, and scenes that are included often have a different slant. The story is fairly straightforward in the second half, though heavily abridged. All the comedy is cut and so are scenes that undermine Henry’s character, among them, the order to kill the French prisoners (4.6.37). A blurb on the cover reads, “The world’s greatest stories illustrated”. That remained the selling point, even when the stories were altered. The first fifth of Julius Caesar is invented, portraying Caesar as a reformer in opposition to corruption in Rome. The plebeians love Caesar for this, but the nobility wish him silenced. This is dramatically enacted through a brawl between the factions in a tavern (2–10), which replaces the scene with the cobbler that opens the play. Shakespeare’s story begins with the arrival of Caesar and the conspiracy against him, unfolding mostly as expected. Brutus is portrayed as the innocent dupe of the conspirators, not as a man who accepts his manipulation. The dialogue in all the books is rewritten into child-friendly language. Seaboard did not take these liberties with the stories. Printed in some issues was the statement, “No longer is it necessary to wade through hundreds of pages to enjoy these great stories . . . you . . . will know the greatest characters of literature. You, too, can quote the famous lines and impress your friends.” Seaboard published eighteen literary adaptations under three titles, including three of Shakespeare’s plays with the titles Stories by Famous Authors Illustrated and the simpler Famous Authors Illustrated. Seaboard hired CI’s main artist, Carl Henry Kiefer, to draw this work.

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Writer Dana E. Dutch paraphrased Shakespeare’s language, making it readable for children. The dialogue in Macbeth (August 1950) flows like a comic story, even with Kiefer’s stiff art. Dutch can include every major plot point because Macbeth is a short play and he does a considerable amount with a few words. Though all the Famous Authors issues paraphrase dialogue, Dutch experimented with using more of Shakespeare’s language with each title. Hamlet (October 1950) uses several of the original words and phrases. Romeo and Juliet (January 1951) has even more of them, with the paraphrase sometimes following Shakespeare’s syntax. Since both of these plays are longer than Macbeth, some of the subplots and business are cut, but the increased wordiness slows down the pace. At Amex, artist Alan Philpott made the action flow, and the story was clear. Whoever adapted the scripts invented new plot elements that functioned well in a comic story form and produced easy to read dialogue. Seaboard’s comics are more faithful to Shakespeare, but are not as much fun to read due to their more formal language and art. Indeed, Seaboard is the bridge to the CI Shakespeare titles. CI faced the social opposition to all comics that started in the US from about 1950 onwards, and the staff believed that their best chance to flourish was to identify their product as literature, not as comics. At some point they even came to believe, apparently, that they no longer published comic books but illustrated books formatted like comics. These were aimed at children aged twelve and above, the age at which most readers gave up traditional comic reading. Gilberton’s remaking policy was proclaimed in a 9 March 1950 New York Times article that boasted of a staff of twenty researchers to ensure the “adaptations would adhere rigorously to the author’s language and plot” (Crawford, 1978, 212). It was even claimed that the adaptation of Julius Caesar (February 1950) was prepared with the consultation of New York University at a cost of $11,000. Such PR was important. Gilberton needed to be seen to be publishing literature, yet by keeping their comics so close to their sources, the company sacrificed what comics did best given the storytelling techniques developed up to that time, namely telling a simple story directly, Shakespeare famously being neither simple nor direct. In an effort to please educators, CI used Shakespeare’s dialogue instead of paraphrasing it. This choice fails to use the medium as well as Amex or even Seaboard. Shakespeare often used four words to say what Amex writers said in one and Dutch said in two. This requires a wordiness that uses more panels to show the same incident, and word balloons often cover a third to half of those panels. CI productions did not read like comics or plays, but a bizarre hybrid. Since the dialogue was above the reading level of most students, CI added glosses to help, but how many children would take the extra time demanded is an unanswerable question, even if Gilberton felt this rigour was necessary. The art also makes it difficult to learn the stories. Kiefer and Alan A. Blum were the artists on the first four Shakespeare titles. Neither artist knew how to tell a story sequentially, and only how to illustrate a moment without much finesse and little sense of pace. Images often look like dioramas. Even dialogue is presented in long and medium shots. Close-ups are rare, but helpful when dialogue drives a story. Without the art supplying story momentum, the abridged dialogue has to labour to move the story along. The comics are lifeless, but were the kind of compromise that teachers who did not understand the medium wanted. And most of the Shakespeare titles were strategically released in September, the start of the school year. After Kiefer’s Julius Caesar, Blum was responsible for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (September 1951), Hamlet (September 1952) and Macbeth (September 1955). Since

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superior art makes for better comic reading, readers were better served by Romeo and Juliet (September 1956) and the revised edition of Julius Caesar (Summer 1962). These were drawn by George Evans, the latter in collaboration with Reed Crandall. Kiefer and Blum were the illustrators; Evans and Crandall were the storytellers. One panel flows to the next, moving the plot, with the space between the panels indicating the timing. Many compositions are striking for the ways in which characters interact with each other and their environment. No one strikes a pose to give a speech. Both are too word heavy to read like comics, but they succeed visually. Nevertheless, the long run of CI and the short runs of Amex and Seaboard suggest that making fun Shakespeare comics is a losing proposition when teachers impose dull comics for educative motives. This confirms Joseph Witek’s observation (Witek, 1989, 14) that Gilberton’s non-fiction comics were popular with parents for the very didacticism that put off their children. There have been several CI revivals. The most notable for our purposes is the March 1990 Hamlet by First Comics. Certainly, the art by Tom Mandrake is striking, possibly influenced by Laurence Olivier’s film (1948) in its grey tones and swirling fascination with the castle. Here, the problem is not the art, but the script. Steven Grant uses Shakespeare’s lines, but deletes information needed for later scenes, such as when Polonius asks Ophelia what Laertes “hath said to you” (1.3.88); but the dialogue where he learns about this conversation is gone (10). There is no cry for help behind the arras, but Hamlet still stabs Polonius (29). Claudius and Laertes do not plot to poison Hamlet, yet the poison is where it should be (41). Because most comic book adaptations served the education market, the choice of play was determined by school curricula. The plays turned into comics by Amex, Seaboard and Gilberton were Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, most multiple times. It was not until the 1980s that other comedies were made into comic books, and with the single exception of the Amex Henry V and serializations in children’s weeklies, history plays were neglected until 1998 (when the Acclaim Books revival of CI published 1 Henry IV). To this day, none of the late plays, problem plays or tragicomedies has been published as a comic book except The Tempest. We shall consider the problem of cartooning the comedies as we look at the children’s weeklies published in the UK and the books published by Pendulum in the 1980s. The Children’s Newspaper, Diana, Look and Learn and Ranger were not comic books, but weekly periodicals for children. Text articles covered most of their pages. At different times, each serialized Shakespeare’s stories in one or two comic book type pages per week. These have a different feel from the comics already discussed, partly because they were created in the 1960s, partly because they were serialized and partly because some took a different narrative approach. The stories in The Children’s Newspaper and Look and Learn are illustrated texts. The pictures do not always show a sequence of action, but illustrate different moments in the story with captions instead of word balloons. This is quite different from the illustrative approach of Kiefer and Blum, who tried to tell a story and failed. These are proper illustrations, illustrating a text that moves the story forward. Several of the comedies were illustrated, so artists had to solve the problem described by John Marston in his prologue to The Fawn (1606) when he noted that his play was not amusing in print because actors in the theatre were required to stimulate laughter (Marston, 1965, 3). The only actor in a comic book is the artist, whose skill can bury or enhance comedic scenes. Good artists use a humorous illustration style. Andy Capp, created by Reg Smythe, and Beryl the Peril, created by David Law, are drawn in humorous

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styles that suit the material in ways that the art in adaptations of Shakespeare’s comedies seldom do. While the British weeklies generated few laughs, the illustrations for The Taming of the Shrew (21 September 1963) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (23 November 1963) in The Children’s Newspaper are far more successful. More charming than funny, the humorous touch is provided by the exaggerated posture of the characters. Less successful are the Shakespeare comics published by Pendulum Classics in the US, which produced seventy-two new literary adaptations as small paperback books, the first titles released in 1973. Twelve of these books adapted Shakespeare. The art is always elegant, and that is part of the problem. Though some comedies finally became comic books, and about half of Pendulum’s titles present the most popular of these, the stories are not at all humorous. The art style is essentially the same in King Lear as it is in As You Like It, with the effect that the comedies also look elegant, but elegant is not always funny. All Pendulum books are fifty-five pages, so cuts are made. This is often managed through censorship. Similarly to a number of the Shakespearean adaptations for children mentioned by Amy Scott-Douglas in her chapter in this volume, most of the sexually charged material in Romeo and Juliet is removed. Likewise, much of the cruelty is abridged from Twelfth Night, and no mention is made of Othello’s race. The dialogue is updated for young readers. Pendulum produced some of its titles for educators, and that is how Saddleback Educational Publishing, the current publisher, sells all the books today. Aggressive marketing in the 1980s allowed Pendulum to create titles that had not previously been adapted to sell through bookstores. Thus it was that many of Shakespeare’s plays, such as The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew, were made into comic books for the first time. The series has changed imprints and publishers over the years, and the formatting has changed with them: some publishers change the trim size and some add colour. CDs of the dialogue have been added to a study guide so students can read along with the voices. The comic books we have looked at so far were created to teach Shakespeare’s stories in the average classroom. The next three publishers create books for special needs children. Each one helps students by reinventing the way the dialogue is presented. Livewire is published by Houghton Education in the UK, with two additional titles published in the US by Barron’s Educational where the series is entitled Picture This! Shakespeare. The Picture This! Hamlet and Julius Caesar (both 2006) were produced by different creators from those employed on the UK series. All the books alternate pages of text and comics. This allows fairly complete plots – despite fifty-three to fifty-eight page counts. When a story is long, the number of text pages rises, with soliloquies usually given in the text. Romeo and Juliet (1999) and Julius Caesar have more text than comic pages. The series is aimed at special needs secondary school students, and are loaded pedagogically with headers that summarize the story, a list of “Literary Terms”, boxes showcasing those terms, more boxes encouraging students to interpret the plays and glosses. Some of the “Think About It” questions are trite in the US editions, as when students are asked how they feel about mob-rule in Julius Caesar. The UK produced books are sloppy, with exits and entrances making some characters miraculously appear where they should be, but without actually entering. Philip Page is the creator of the UK books. His strength as an artist resides more in those small moments when characters reveal themselves rather than in telling the story. He also draws characters in the comedies well, though the books are not especially

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diverting from an aesthetic point of view. Livewire books are less censored than most comic books. It would be easy to hide violent scenes in the text pages, and this happens sometimes in Romeo and Juliet, but the other tragedies play to one of comic’s strengths by showing action scenes. Livewire glosses the original language, but the Shakespeare Comic Book Company (SCBC) goes even further. SCBC doubles the text: each of Shakespeare’s lines is followed by a close translation in modern English so that students can use the paraphrase to understand the original. With a limit of sixty pages, the plays are abridged, but adaptor/artist Simon Greaves packs in a lot of words because the basic design element is the text with space left for the pictures to be added later. With so much text, SCBC breaks what seemed to be a rule for successful Shakespeare comics, that the pictures should have more space than the words, and strategically gets away with it. CI’s adaptations had more inches of art per page, which made them seem like traditional comics until they were read. By contrast, SCBC gives readers less art, and makes this work because the company’s books do not look like traditional comics. It is clear at a glance that those users of SCBC books will be spending most of their time reading the texts, with the art illustrating what the text leaves out. The art, especially in the latter books, has a life that escaped Kiefer and Blum. Some productions, such as The Tempest (2006), can charm even adult readers. Greaves is still active, most recently producing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2009. The six books are created for British school children from eleven to fourteen years of age and aim at helping slow learners with little motivation to pass the Shakespeare requirement. Testimonials in publicity materials indicate that SCBC’s approach is pedagogically effective (Fig. 21.1). SCBC doubles the text and Classical Comics (CC) triples it, publishing three separately bound versions of their Shakespeare books, each with different dialogue. The Original Text editions use unabridged dialogue. The Plain Text is a modern translation of the unabridged version. The Quick Text is modern and highly abridged, aimed at children aged from ten upwards. Because the art is the same in each book, the Quick Text stories do not abridge incidents, only the number of lines and much of the nuance. These are often used in Special Education classes. The idea is that students begin with this easy version and work their way up. The Plain Text is the most popular version for adults who want to know the story without being challenged to read Shakespeare’s language. It is worth pausing here to reflect on the critical issues surrounding translating Shakespeare’s language into modern English so as the better to understand the issues raised by CC’s three-text plan. Eventually our language will change so much that Shakespeare will be as difficult to read as Beowulf. Translations will be necessary sometime before then. At issue today are a number of questions. Do we need translations now? How will we know it is the time for them? This may become a useful debate, though it has been underdeveloped so far. Too often questions are rather simplistic and concern only how current translations might be controlled. The issue is treated as right or wrong, and mostly wrong, without crediting what translations have achieved or taking account of their legitimate uses. On the other hand, translations are poor substitutes for Shakespeare’s language and dramatic poetry, and they do not delve as deeply into character as do Shakespeare’s lines. Teachers who want to teach these aspects of Shakespeare generally do not want their students using translations. Yet the proliferation of translations in the marketplace, if not in the classroom, suggests they are here to stay at least as a cheat for those who do not want to work through Shakespeare’s language.2

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Figure 21.1: Dominated by both Shakespeare’s text and modern translation, this page from The Tempest nonetheless finds an imaginative way to illustrate the storm. Art and translation are by Simon Greaves

CC’s modern translations are problematic, especially in the Plain Text editions. In the Amex, Seaboard and Pendulum books, there is no assumption that Shakespeare’s lines are accurately translated into contemporary language. Yet SCBC and CC Plain Text books invite comparison because the translations are their selling-points. SCBC translations stay close to the structure of Shakespeare’s language. Very few translation choices are questionable compared to the many in CC’s books. Perhaps this is because Greaves stays as close to Shakespeare’s syntax as he can, while CC is idiomatic and easier to absorb. One might expect that some ambiguity, puns and bawdy lines would disappear from CC’s titles, and this is certainly the case. There is loss, and there are no glosses. There are other problems as well. These arrive early in Romeo and Juliet (2009). Sampson’s “I strike quickly, being moved”

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(1.1.5) indicates his potential for violence. The corresponding Plain Text “I’m fast when I’m angry” could mean many things. The “fair Montague” and “Sweet Montague” of 2.2 are rendered as “Romeo Montague”, which misses sense and loses the echo of “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” (2.1.75). On the other hand, the 99 per cent of the lines without such problems are wonderfully clear, sometimes even insightful, as adapted by John MacDonald. If one reads CC Plain Text editions to appreciate all that Shakespeare wrote in modern language then the books fail. However, if one reads the stories as enjoyable and clearly presented comic books, they succeed. The production on the books is beautiful. They are well printed on coated paper, with dazzling colour and computer effects, and usually have an easy to read font. The care that goes into production, and the sheer length of the books (121 pages for Macbeth (2008) and up to 158 for Romeo and Juliet), necessitate a long preparation time – eighteen months to three years. Publisher Clive Bryant began with books that were part of the UK schools programme, but required texts had changed by the time his titles were ready. Bryant now adapts books that please him, including works by classic novelists. In one case, that of the forthcoming Julius Caesar, the book was chosen because Bryant thought the play to be a good match for artist Sean O’Connor’s talent. In terms of pedagogical practice, some teachers use CC as introductions to the original Shakespearean play-text. The art is also a challenge. There are occasional lapses, as when Juliet tells the Nurse to “Go ask his name” (2.1.131), and the Nurse answers her in the same panel without going (51). The books occasionally make the CI mistake of packing too much dialogue into a panel, which stalls the story. The Salic law discourse in Henry V at 1.2 is as tedious as it often is in the theatre. The scene is also balloon heavy since the artist does not have visual fun with the scene so as to give it life. Something film and comics do well is to show two narrative lines at once. CC does very little of this, but a good example to the contrary is when Juliet wonders about Romeo at 3.2 while other panels simultaneously show Tybalt being brought to the family crypt (91). The adventure comic styling is mostly effective, if derivative. The artists do not employ a unique approach suited to each story as we shall see in the books published by Oval. Yet, with some exceptions, most of the CC artists are as good as anyone who has ever drawn a Shakespeare comic. The Shakespeare Comic Book Series has an odd history. The artist Von came up with the concept for his Macbeth (1982), which he sold to Oval Books. Oval Director Anne Tauté took the concept and hired Oscar Zarate to produce Othello (1983), Ralph Stedman for King Lear (1984) and John Howard for Twelfth Night (1985). Von took his concept to Michael Joseph for two more books, Romeo and Juliet (1983) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1985). For simplicity, I refer to all six books as Oval. The contrast between Oval and CC is striking. Like CC’s Original Text editions, the plays are unabridged. Page counts vary to accommodate the different lengths of the plays, allowing artists to find the best way to tell the story. While the standard realistic art of CC makes good reading, there is little imaginative interpretation of the texts. Oval artists use a non-realist, cartoon-like style to interpret the plays visually. While some do this better than others, the two best books are stunning. These artists visualize the core of the characters and their conflicts. Gloucester topples a pillar in his own house in King Lear as he becomes enraged at the false letter that Edmund shows him. In doing so, he rejects Edgar, the real pillar holding up the House of Gloucester (17). Soon, Edgar is hiding on top of one of the still-standing pillars and must come down when Edmund orders, “Descend, brother, I say” (39). Lear’s throne is located on top of a rickety pillar

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that is buttressed by temporary repairs as he looks down on his court (2). These pillars visualize the relationships and dilemmas of these characters in a powerfully striking comic vocabulary. The choice to use uncut texts creates problems for both Oval and CC. Since Shakespeare’s stage had no sets, characters describe scenery. Using unabridged texts in a comic requires that scenes be redundantly depicted and described. This cannot be avoided, but should it be minimized? Romeo describes the Apothecary’s shop at 5.1.37–55 in the play. CC puts the description in a panel showing the inside of the shop, so both are in the same space (138). Bryant feels the two reinforce each other in a way that helps students learning the play. Oval has a smart, non-redundant approach. The lines in Von’s version for Michael Joseph are given as Romeo approaches the shop. This does not eliminate the problem, but it does mitigate it, especially because Von draws the scene in such a way that he does not need to depict the alligator and tortoise that Romeo describes (103–4) (Fig. 21.2). The comedies fail: the texts demonstrate no particularly humorous illustrations. Von’s art is weak in all of his books. The artists are not able to communicate jokes as an actor might. Still, some readers and critics will prefer Oval to CC because of the creative way in which the artists interpret the stories. There is nothing of the order of the pillars in King Lear and, as far as modern equivalents are concerned, in Twelfth Night, only the Fool and Malvolio dress in early modern garb. Oval artists filter the play, guiding readers to think about a particular work in often productive ways. CC artists are less likely to influence how readers think about what they read, and some will prefer this more straightforward approach. The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet were announced by Oval, but not published. The series was not successful, but the books are remarkable achievements, as has been recognized by Can of Worms Press in the UK, which has brought the four Oval Books titles back into print and, in 2009, added The Tempest by animator Oscar Grillo. While this production possesses a few felicitous moments, and the art is sufficiently cartoon-like to fit snugly in the Oval line, there are page design problems, and the artist clearly did not pay sufficient attention to the text when deciding what to draw. More books in this series are in preparation.

Mostly Manga Adaptations “Manga” is the popular term for Japanese comic books, which, perfectly bound, are about the trim size of trade paperbacks in the West. Manga is not on the fringes of society as comics traditionally are in the West, but, rather, is central to Japanese life and culture. The manga approach embraces fiction, non-fiction and “how to” books. The traditions of manga Shakespeare have been touched on by critics such as Minami Ryuta (Ryuta, 2007, 813–17) and Emma Hayley (Hayley, 2010, 267–80), with a key example being Ikeda Riyoko’s Ai wa Eien ni: Shugyoku Kessakushu (1976), which retells Othello from Desdemona’s point of view. Niji no Pureryudo (1951) is a loose version of The Merchant of Venice, designed to help students learn the play, by manga master Tezuka Osamu. It is so loose, indeed, that Bassanio is represented as a student and Shylock’s religion is not mentioned. A new version by Satonaka Machiko was published in 2001. A Twelfth Night by Morikawa Kumi entitled Juniya: Morikawa Kumi Tanpenshu (1978) explores the gender confusion of the Viola/Sebastian characters with zest. This was a common theme

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Figure 21.2: Romeo at the Apothecary’s shop in Classical Comics’ “Romeo and Juliet”: Original Text Edition (2009). The art is by Will Voley

in manga from the 1970s onwards, and can be seen in Ranma ½. The story concerns a boy who turns into a girl and back again when splashed with hot or cold water. The protagonists’ school stages Romeo and Juliet in one 1987 manifestation of the narrative, with the Romeo character and the Juliet character he likes playing the lead roles. Abundant quantities of water create confusion. An adaptation of Romeo and Juliet was published in 1995 entitled Romio to Jurietto: Manga Sekai no Bungaku. Creator Igarashi Yumiko’s retelling was for a series similar to CI, though the action unfolds from Jurietto’s perspective. Japanese animation is the source of much manga, as it is for Romeo X Juliet, a further reimagining of the story. This take on the play is set in a repressive future state, with Juliet as a Zorro-like figure leading a rebellion. A quite different story from the play is thereby generated, but the main plot elements remain: the lovers meet, fall in love and separate and, while the conclusion is not tragic as such, in that Juliet is transformed into a tree that will forever

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support the city of Verona, the lovers do not remain together. There is also Tenamon’ya Shakespeare by Shimamura Yoko, a compilation published in 2000. Six of Shakespeare’s tales are set in Osaka and are reimagined in terms of local linguistic and cultural details. With manga, a number of visual motifs differentiate the genre from Western comics, which are usually drawn in a realistic style. Artists exaggerate the emotions shown in faces, add lines around a figure to focus the eye or indicate the intensity of feeling, and draw grown-ups to look like children when they behave childishly. Lastly, words may be placed in the background to reveal what a character feels: these are just a few of the manga techniques. Manga has become popular around the world, and so have graphic novels (as opposed to comic magazines) generally. Graphic sales nearly doubled in the UK from 2004 to 2005, with sales for manga earning the largest share of that increase (Hayley, 2010, 267–80). The West now creates its own manga-style books, and three series are dedicated to mangalike Shakespeares. The first series does not bill itself as manga, and two of its three books were not created in the manga style, but the third uses manga with great skill. No Fear Shakespeare Graphic Novels (2008) are based on John Crowther’s No Fear Shakespeare translations published by Spark Notes. The translations readably approximate the meanings of the originals while removing everything notable, nuanced or aesthetically striking. A two-page spread positions the original on one side and Crowther’s translation on the other. The translated scripts, with small modifications, then became the basis for the graphic novel scripts. The books are about the same length, 192 pages (Macbeth) to 205 (Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet), so there is some crowding in the case of the longer plays. This is solved by adding panels: Macbeth usually has three panels a page, with five in Romeo and Juliet and six in Hamlet. Macbeth is as dull as an issue of CI. The fault lies with artist Ken Hoshine, whose stolid line makes the climactic battle somewhat tedious. His style is stately, so the pace of this dynamic story becomes stately, flattening such diverse scenes as the witches’ prophecies, the aftermath of Duncan’s murder, the banquet and the slaughter of the Macduff family: each episode resembles a long dialogue scene. Even the lettering lacks life. Manga techniques are not used, and they might have helped. Romeo and Juliet is a much better effort. Matt Wiegle does not use manga techniques, but he uses hands expressively. He perhaps does not draw them especially well, but they are the key to what happens in many panels. The text has some annoying moments. A gloss is supplied during the prolonged joke about a goose in 2.4, as is shown in the line, “You’ll just have to trust them that this is hilarious” (81), a non-solution to explaining the humour. Such moments aside, the book is fun to read, and would probably be finished by students who might not finish the play. Neil Babra’s Hamlet takes a manga approach. Panels curve and slash their way across the page, backgrounds change to indicate the spiritual space occupied by a character and the drawing often shows something remembered or discussed that is not actually present in the scene. The characters are drawn with an almost Oval-like cartoon quality that is as expressive as it is interpretive. These manga stylings give the book genuine verve. When Laertes informs Ophelia that Hamlet “belongs to the royal family, which means that his will is not his own. He is a slave to his family’s obligations” (24), Hamlet appears in prison, until the reader realizes that the bars he peeks through are actually the bar-like spikes of gigantic crown. When Laertes adds, “Keep your emotions under control, and don’t become the target for his lust” (24), Ophelia appears doll-sized as Hamlet’s giant

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hands reach up to grasp her. The second hit in the duel is handled in one panel. Multiple figures of Hamlet and Laertes fight in gray in the background, but the foreground figures experiencing the hit are in black. It is an ingenious decision. There is one obvious mistake in the translation. Claudius announces, “My son will win”, when it should be “our son” (195), but most translation quibbles are not so obvious. Of course, Matteo A. Pangallo is correct to suggest that too much is lost in the non-graphic No Fear translations (Pangallo, 2009, 34), but at least in this graphic Hamlet the artist adds fascinating and sometimes wonderful interpretive flourishes that are worth the linguistic inconvenience and will not bother readers who enjoy this book as a graphic novel. Adaptor Adam Sexton and a team of artists produced four books published simultaneously in 2008 with the titles Shakespeare’s ___: The Manga Edition, the title of a play filling the space after Shakespeare’s name. All of these comic books set the story in safe periods, so Julius Caesar is in ancient Rome and Macbeth is in the medieval period, while Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet are placed in Shakespeare’s time. The language is Shakespeare’s, but is trimmed to fit 185 pages or, in the case of Julius Caesar, 176 pages. The introduction by Adam Sexton to his Hamlet is rather embarrassingly self-serving, yet he is right in stating that “The play is manga-friendly because it is unarguably actionpacked, complete with a terrifying ghost, a tussle in an open grave, and a climactic swordfight during which four central characters die violent deaths” (4). Action is indeed a strength of the manga genre, but all comics do this well because action is visual. Manga itself is hardly needed for that and, despite the series title, distinctive manga techniques are used sparingly. The Macbeth characters occasionally grimace, and several panels in Romeo and Juliet have lines to focus attention, but most pages are styled like Western comics. Illogical cuts hamper each comic book. An example is the Player King’s Hecuba speech in Hamlet, which triggers the Prince’s bout of self-loathing and the “rogue and peasant slave” (2.2.527) soliloquy. Hecuba is cut from the book, but Hamlet gives his speech anyway. The best productions, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, are unchallenging because they are not obviously interpretive yet offer likeable and safe readings of the plays. Readers who appreciate Shakespeare in early modern costume and without a director’s concept will be approving. By far the most arresting of the genre is the manga Shakespeare series published by SelfMadeHero (SMH) in the UK, conceived by editor Emma Hayley with original language dialogue abridged by Richard Appignanesi. With fourteen titles in print, SMH have given the manga treatment to over a third of the Shakespeare canon. SMH books are used in schools, but the primary readership is teenage manga readers. While most of the plays adapted have been such canonical choices as As You Like It and Othello (both 2009), SMH has published the Fletcher collaboration Henry VIII (2009), though Fletcher is nowhere mentioned. SMH books are 205 pages, so the amount of cutting depends on the length of the play. Some entries, such as Hamlet (2007) and Much Ado About Nothing (2009), feel incomplete. Others, Julius Caesar (2008) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2007), for example, are more impressive. Manga semiotics are used to good effect. The baby Elizabeth has an almost halo-like glow when she is blessed in Henry VIII (199) and when, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania kisses Bottom on the snout, her hair curls into the shape of a heart (108). Not all the books are as successful. Richard III (2007) uses few manga techniques, has too many cuts, and is marred by murky printing. This is a shame since it is the only graphic rendering

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of this play outside of the children’s weeklies. Most books are drawn by different artists, so some unevenness is expected, though the artists and Appignanesi collaborate on the particular approach, with Hayley giving final approval. Most plays in the series are thoughtfully set beyond Shakespeare’s time. Experiencing Romeo and Juliet (2007) resembles seeing a play with subtitles. It is set in modern Japan and finds smart equivalents for old structures that truly illuminate the play today, rather in the manner of some modern film directors. Romeo spots a Hari-Kari dagger in the Friar’s cell and holds it to his stomach as he asks, “In what vile part of this anatomy doth my name lodge? Tell me that I may sack this hateful mansion” (100). This is an inspired reading. Hamlet, by contrast, is not so successful. The science fiction world does little to illuminate the story or ground it in an absorbing version of reality (Fig. 21.3). Manga Shakespeare has been embraced by Japan. The books are used to teach Shakespeare to Japanese students, and Hayley and the creators have been brought over for university seminars and to the Museum of Manga in Kyoto, which stores the original art (Hayley, 2010, 267–80). SMH has produced more Shakespeare comics than any other publisher, has published the most engaging Shakespeare manga and, with Oval, has provided us with the most stimulating of the Shakespeare comic genre.

Recycling Characters, Stories, Allusions, Paraphrases and Quotations Writers and editors in the earliest days of US comic books believed their magazines were read by children, aged from eight to twelve, who abandoned comics upon becoming teenagers. There is little point putting in allusions to Shakespeare if young readers will not understand them, so writers seldom did. Comics become more allusive in the mid1960s and 1970s when a teenage and college-aged audience continued reading comics. A parallel factor is that many of the creators from the 1930s through to the 1950s were emigrants or the children of emigrants for whom Shakespeare was not culturally rooted. This changed as new writers in the 1970s and 1980s received college educations. There are notable references to Shakespeare in early comic books, but the frequency increased over the decades. Using Shakespeare’s characters outside of an adaptation is rare in any era. Falstaff made a brief appearance in a Kid Eternity story of March 1949 published by Comic Magazines. Kid, who can briefly call on the dead to help him, needs to seal robbers in a bank until the police arrive. He summons Falstaff, who is so fat that he blocks the door, preventing the crooks’ escape. A sequel to Romeo and Juliet is told in two issues of Teen Titans, published by National Periodical Publications between October and December in 1971. The Titans visit Verona in a story that parallels Shakespeare’s in most ways. A young man named Romeo meets the superhero, Lilith, at a ball. They fall instantly in love because they are reincarnations of Shakespeare’s lovers. From August 1981 onwards, The Uncanny X-Men (Marvel Comics) has a continuing character named Caliban. While there are some similarities, it is clear that this character does not specifically resemble Shakespeare’s creation. From time to time, characters in a comic book will perform one of Shakespeare plays, usually in a humour-based comic with a high school setting. Performing Romeo and Juliet in Ranma ½ has already been mentioned, and this takes place again in the manga W Juliet, published in 2004 by Viz in the US. Here, a girl disguised as a boy is cast as Romeo. A boy posing as a girl plays Juliet. They confess their love for each other using Shakespearean-

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Figure 21.3: Japanese cultural motifs are a good fit for the manga Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The art is by Sonia Leong

like lines. Almost certainly, the translator did not realize the lines were from a Japanese translation of the play, and simply translated the Japanese into modern English. The lines are close enough to Shakespeare’s to seem erroneous. Archie and his pals rehearse Hamlet in Archie Comics (MLJ Comics, May 1947) and perform Romeo and Juliet in Archie’s Pal Jughead (Archie Comics Group, January 1994). In both cases, the characters behave more like frivolous teenagers than real actors, and the shows are ruined. Similarly, the comic book version of the television series Welcome Back, Kotter (DC Comics, July 1977) has the class attempt Julius Caesar. Another example of a performance is when Donald Duck plays Gimlet, Prince of Denmark, so as to impress Daisy Duck in a Danish comic. Donald is so successful that he is sent on tour, leaving Daisy in the arms, or perhaps wings, of his rival. Shakespeare stage productions in humour-based comics are usually always disastrous, and need to be for that is the source of the comedy. Shakespeare turns up in other genres as well. In Western Publishing Company’s

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Grimm’s Ghost Stories (August 1975), a group of incompetent actors breaks into Shakespeare’s grave to steal his bones and sell them as relics. The curse on the Shakespeare Memorial dooms them to ironic deaths that mimic those of Desdemona, Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. Writer Arnold Drake deserves the credit for a well-constructed story. No less relevant is an issue of X-Men Unlimited (Marvel Comics, December 2004). After claiming he has not read Shakespeare’s play, the superhero Wolverine finally decides to become the leader of an X-Men team after playing Henry V’s part in a holographic recreation of the Battle at Agincourt and realizing that the team needs his inspiring leadership. Literary allusions are supplied by dozens of writers, especially since the 1980s, but few allude to, paraphrase or quote Shakespeare systematically. By far the most prolific trick is calling any would-be male lover “Romeo” no matter what the character’s name is, though female characters are rarely called Juliet. This cliché is even more prevalent in comic strips than comic books. Al Capp, in his Li’l Abner strip (1934–77), went so far as to name two of his failed lovers Romeo. One of these, Romeo Scragg, was a recurring character for many years (Jensen, 2006, 15–16). Any writer might allude to, paraphrase or quote Shakespeare once or thrice, but with admittedly limited exposure I see no pattern on either side of the Atlantic except for three series published in the US. The first pattern might be detected in issues of The Incredible Hulk written by Peter David from 1987 to 1998. David quoted or paraphrased Shakespeare perhaps a dozen times, and usually without acknowledgement. I have not made a systematic study of David’s work to learn if he used Shakespeare in other series. One magazine stands out not so much for the Shakespeare references but for its general allusions. Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones produced an extraordinary comic called The Trouble with Girls, published off and on by various publishers between 1987 and 1993. The story concerns a reluctant adventurer named Lester Girls and his family and friends. Jacobs and Jones seem to have read thousands of novels and short stories, and put references to most of them into their comic book. They fit literally dozens of allusions into some issues. From street names, city names and the names of neighbours to quotations and jokes both good and bad, the magazine is about literature, especially American literature, almost as much as it is about the adventure stories it satirizes. The writers do not use Shakespeare often, but do it very well on those rare occasions. For example, The Trouble with Girls Christmas Special (Malibu Graphics, December 1991) has about a dozen literary allusions, including two to Shakespeare. A clue to a treasure hunt is the paraphrase from Romeo and Juliet (2.1.86), “By another name, I still smell as sweet”, and it is revealed that Mrs Macbeth “invented a detergent that made her a million bucks”. Jones was particularly prone to quote Shakespeare from 1991 to 1993 in his solo superhero work, though with less finesse than when he worked with Jacobs. The Trouble with Girls is a smartly self-conscious comic. Taking another approach is Neil Gaiman. Girls is a parody of adventure stories that uses allusion to establish a humorous tone. Gaiman’s Sandman tells horror stories in which allusion reinforces a darker atmosphere. Critics who have commented on Sandman miss the point, as do Josh Heuman and Richard Burt when they write, “How does a comic book become one for intellectuals? In brief, occasional traffic with Shakespeare, a (meta) mythology congruent with the mature critical attitude” (Heuman and Burt, 2002, 163). Would Sandman be as intellectually satisfying without references to Shakespeare? The answer is almost certainly in the negative. Is it intellectually satisfying with these allusions, and does it truly transcend genre fiction to become “literature” (Heuman and Burt, 2002, 165)? “Satisfying” and “literature” would need to be defined, but the answer

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probably lies in the eye of the beholder. When we study literature in Sandman, especially when we only study the Shakespearean elements (as I do), we miss most of what Sandman is about: the world of the endless, the gods that personify human fears and drives, and the gods’ attempts to seek power over one another and interact with the material earth, not to mention the many lurid comic book dimensions that lend Sandman its voice and texture. Sandman revels in its status as genre fiction. Allusion and quotation allow the comic to peek over the intellectual horizon, but it is ultimately genre-bound and wishes to remain so. Like Jacobs and Jones, Gaiman is pan-referential, including Milton, Coleridge, Dickens and Carroll, amongst many others, in his referential remit. Shakespeare is quoted in the very first issue of Sandman (January 1989), again in the fifth (May 1989) and in several issues after that. There is also inspiration that probably derives from Shakespeare, such as the appearance of three sisters who are reminiscent of the weird sisters in Macbeth in form and function, yet not close enough to be clearly identified (December 1990). Only three issues of the seventy-five centre on Shakespeare, but the Shakespeare sequence is still remarkable. Sandman and Shakespeare have a Faustian pact. Sandman will make Shakespeare a great writer if Shakespeare will write two plays involving dreams (February 1990). The first is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare, his son Hamnet and his company travel to a magic location in the countryside to give the first performance before Oberon, Titania, Puck and dozens of other magic creatures, some of whom would rather eat the cast than watch the play. We are told it is Shakespeare’s best play to date, and Sandman is well pleased (September 1990). After only occasionally alluding to Shakespeare for fifty-six issues, Gaiman’s farewell to the series cunningly exploits The Tempest and the myth that it was Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre. The story takes place in Stratford-upon-Avon and shows Shakespeare’s reluctance to embrace the inevitability of life being rounded by a sleep. It is a leisurely and melancholy tale that allows Gaiman to show off his Shakespeare trivia, but the story is mostly dedicated to using the end of Shakespeare’s career to parallel Gaiman ending his tenure on Sandman. Gaiman does not let the facts get in the way of a good story. The Tempest is not really the dream play it appears to be here, and only readers who find Gaiman’s footnotes will discover that Shakespeare’s career continued after The Tempest. The sentiment is problematic, but Gaiman’s spell is hard to resist.

Shakespeare as Comic Character Gaiman’s Sandman involves two categories of representation. He alludes to Shakespeare several times, but also uses Shakespeare as a character. Gaiman was hardly the first author-artist to do this, though fictionalized stories remain rare. Romeo X Juliet, published as a Japan-based comic from 2007 onwards, makes Shakespeare a character belonging to Juliet’s camp, but the fleeting panels in which he appears seem to have little point or impact. National Periodical Publications in the 1940s through to the 1960s often had their characters visit literary and other historical figures. Superman’s visits to the past were the result of editor Whitney Ellsworth’s calculated programme to impress on young readers just how important their hero was. Superman becomes more important than the Bard in the January 1947 issue of Superman when Sir Harry Stafford and his gang injure Shakespeare for mocking Sir Harry,

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and the Man of Steel rescues him (3–5). Shakespeare figures out Superman’s dual identity and wants to write a play about it, but Superman suggests Macbeth instead, and even writes it letter-perfect using his gift of total recall (8–10). Rain falls during the first performance, but Superman moves the clouds away, ensuring the play’s success (10–11). The point is summed up on the splash page. The Man of Steel writes with a quill at super speed as an admiring Shakespeare says, “Marvelous, Superman. I couldn’t write better myself.” Less traditional is Wes Kublick’s The Cheque, Mate, published in the US by Fantagraphics Books in July 1992, which reprinted various publications from the UK. Kublick dedicates these strips “to anyone who ever tried to make a living from a creative endeavour and spent 50% of their creative energies in finding ways to make past due cheques arrive in the mail”. Kublick wants readers to identify Shakespeare’s frustrations with his own. Nine strips show Shakespeare writing letters for money owed him. In the tenth strip, Shakespeare meets his friend, Ben (enigmatically with no last name), who observes that Shakespeare looks pleased with himself. Shakespeare replies, “Smartest thing I ever did . . . [I] got Francis Bacon to write my collection notices.” Gregory Rogers’ The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard is a comic book story published as a children’s picture book by Allen and Unwin (Australia) in 2004. A boy loses his football when it sails into a proscenium arch theatre. He enters looking for the ball, bursts through the curtain and somehow ends up on the Globe stage mid-performance. Shakespeare literally propels the story forward when, enraged by the intrusion, he chases the boy through early modern London. Most pages show the boy’s adventures whilst eluding Shakespeare as he frees a bear prepared for baiting and a baron prepared for the block. Shakespeare nearly catches the boy as he bursts back into the Globe and across the stage, and it is at this point that the boy returns to the proscenium arch theatre in his own time. Shakespeare is hardly needed for this exercise. A butcher or a baker would do just as well. Perhaps the most bizarre use of Shakespeare, and apparently the most pointless, is in Bob Burden’s October 1994 issue of Flaming Carrot Comics, published in the US by Dark Horse. In the subplot, Shakespeare is an intellectual simpleton and a handyman by profession. He will do anything for money, including write plays. He gets help from timetravelling twentieth-century comedian Buddy Hackett, since Shakespeare cannot really write. The main plot involves an English professor fired for suggesting that Shakespeare was not a writer. He gets his job back after travelling in time and producing the proof that this story provides. Marginally less bizarre is Kill Shakespeare, a series from IDW Publishing in the US that started in April 2010. The five issues out at the time of writing cast Hamlet as the slayer in a sword and sorcery story. He escapes from pirates only to meet Richard III, who promptly sends him to kill the wizard Shakespeare and bring back his quill. One of the clichés of the genre is that the purpose of the individual who sends the slayer is far worse than that of the wizard he wants slain. It is too early to know if the story will complete this obvious trajectory, but we do expect the hero to meet many challenges on the road to the wizard, and that is the substance of the issues published so far. Characters encountered along the way include off-kilter versions of the Weird Sisters, Tamora, Falstaff, Lady Capulet, Othello, Iago and Juliet, again cast as the leader of a rebellion, with a stop at “The Merry Wives of Windsor Pub”. Though we do not actually see Shakespeare in the first five issues, he is a constant presence in the background. It seems appropriate to close with these different Shakespeares, who resemble neither the playwright nor each another. This disunity is just as true of the many kinds of

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Shakespeare comics produced over the decades. Even those created for the education market solve adaptation problems in different ways, and so do those published for the trade market. Comic book writers have used Shakespeare’s cultural familiarity to plot teenage romance stories, funny animal stories, ghost stories and superhero stories. Some writers have quoted, paraphrased or alluded to Shakespeare to craft the structure and tone of their comic books, but use these quotations, paraphrases and allusions in very different ways. Shakespeare comic books escape every box we think might contains them, because all creators represent Shakespeare according to their own needs and goals, just as Shakespeare represented his sources according to his needs and goals. It is ever so, and will be the next time a comic book represents Shakespeare.

Notes 1. For recommending comics, lending them or emailing descriptions of stories and credits, I especially want to thank Bernice L. Kliman, Douglas Lanier, Roy A. Lineer and André Verner. Thanks to Francis A. Shirley, who wisely observed that comic strips (and, I will add, books) nearly always reference the tragedies, sometimes the comedies, but rarely the histories. Special thanks to William B. Jones for many emails helping me to understand the mindset at Classics Illustrated and how fans understand CI comics. For answering questions or pointing to examples in their work, my thanks to Clive Bryant of Classical Comics, John Crowther of No Fear Shakespeare, Simon Greaves of the Shakespeare Comic Book Company, Emma Hayley of SelfMadeHero, Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones of The Trouble With Girls and Gerard Jones alone for Ranma ½, Tobias Steed of Can of Worms Press and Anne Tauté of Oval Books. 2. Matteo A. Pangallo (Pangallo, 2009, 31–6) provides useful background to this question.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Benton, Mike (1989). The Comic Book in America. Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company. Crawford, Hubert T. (1978). Crawford’s Encyclopedia of Comic Books: A Review of the Good Old Days of Adventure for a Dime! Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Publishers. Fuchs, Wolfgang (1971). Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium. London: Studio Vista. Hayley, Emma (2010). “Manga Shakespeare”. In Manga: An Anthology of Global & Cultural Perspectives, ed. Toni Johnson-Woods. London: Continuum, 267–80. Heuman, Josh and Richard Burt (2002). “Suggested for Mature Readers?: Deconstructing Shakespearean Value in Comic Books”. In Shakespeare after Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt. New York: Palgrave, 151–71. Jensen, Michael P. (2006). “What’s in a Name?: A Real Romeo”. The Shakespeare Newsletter 56.1, 15–16. Jones, William B., Jr (2002). Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History, with Illustrations. Jefferson and London: McFarland. Journal of Educational Sociology (1944), 18.4. Marston, John (1965). The Fawn. Ed. Gerald A. Smith. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Pangallo, Matteo A. (2009). “‘Hamlet Cannot Finish the Sentence’: Translating Shakespeare into ‘Modern English’”. The Shakespeare Newsletter 59.1, 31–6. Ryuta, Minami (2007). “Appendix A: Shakespeare in Japanese Comics”. In Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, ed. Richard Burt, 2 vols. Westport and London: Greenwood, II, 813–17. Witek, Joseph (1989). Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi.

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SHAKESPEARE, PORTRAITURE, PAINTING AND PRINTS Erin C. Blake

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his chapter explores Shakespeare in paintings and prints by looking at pictures of Shakespeare himself and at pictures that illustrate the words he wrote. In essence, both types of image are portraits. They attempt to represent a pre-existing entity, whether a real person like Shakespeare, or the people and places he brought to life in his plays. Portraiture is supposedly about verisimilitude, but a successful portrait is less about replicating someone or something in another medium than about meeting expectations. Portraits depict what we want to see or what we expect to see, otherwise they prove unsatisfying. Shakespeare has meant different things to different people over the years. Similarly, aesthetic tastes vary between people and across time. As a result, Shakespeare in paintings and prints is an ever-changing story.

Shakespeare’s Picture Shakespeare’s image has been in circulation since 1623, when the First Folio edition of his plays appeared with a portrait engraving on the title page (Fig. 22.1). That it is an authentic likeness of Shakespeare is confirmed by the fact that it was placed frontand-centre in a book compiled by members of his acting company, John Heminge and Henry Condell, and by the poem “To the Reader” that faces it on the frontispiece. The well-known lines, signed “B. I.” and generally believed to be by fellow writer Ben Jonson, read: This Figure that thou here seest put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut; Wherein the Graver had a strife with Nature, to out-doo the life: O, could he but have drawne his wit As well in brasse, as he hath hit His face, the Print would then surpasse All, that was ever write in brasse. But, since he cannot, Reader, look Not on his Picture, but his Booke. In other words, the picture represents only Shakespeare’s outward appearance. His true nature is represented by the words inside the book. For Ben Jonson, immersed in a culture

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Figure 22.1: Martin Droeshout, title page portrait from the First Folio. Engraving, 1623

where the truth-value of words over pictures was almost a cliché, no portrait could be up to the task of representing the man. The First Folio portrait, signed “Martin Droeshout sculpsit London”, shows a balding man with a long face, dark wavy hair and a prominent forehead. He has a slight beard

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and moustache and a chubby jaw line. The sitter also resembles the stylized sculpted halflength likeness of Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. As Balz Engler notes in his chapter in this volume, this sculpture was placed in a memorial there sometime between 1616, when Shakespeare died, and 1623, when it is alluded to in one of the laudatory poems published in the First Folio. Countless other portraits have been championed over the centuries, some more credible than others, but only these two have experts’ unreserved approval as likenesses. Both date to within a few years of Shakespeare’s death, and both were approved by people who knew him. The Droeshout portrait itself, as has often been remarked, is not a particularly skilled one. Most noticeably, the head is proportionally too large for the body, which seems to belong to a different composition. The odd effect was even more pronounced in the earliest state of the portrait, which survives in only four copies. In that version, the head seems to float above the body because the shadow across the triangular white pleats on the collar had not yet been added. Droeshout recognized the incongruity and reworked the plate, adding cross-hatching to make the shadow, plus some additional lines in the facial hair. He did not, however, rework the costume to add the missing half of the underpropper, visible through the transparent collar on the right-hand side but not the left, or to reshape the braid on the left side (the sitter’s right) where it runs perfectly straight to the edge of the image instead of disappearing into the curve of the underarm. This portrait is all about the face, which, as Ben Jonson judged in the poem opposite it in the First Folio, the engraver “hit” well. If it seems strange that a book now considered the most important secular work in English has an ill-proportioned portrait on the title page, keep in mind that the rest of the production is also not up to the highest standards, and was not a top priority for its printer (Blayney, 1991). Publishing a folio-sized edition of collected plays was a risky venture, and the compilers presumably did the best they could with the resources they had. This is not to say that Martin Droeshout also did the best he could. His surviving works show that he could do better, but given the status of engravers in London, there was little incentive to do more than necessary for a given commission (Griffiths, 1998, 16–17). Ironically, the awkwardness of the Droeshout engraving is one of the keys to its resurgence in the later twentieth century, as will be seen. Before moving on, something must be said about Martin Droeshout himself. There has been some uncertainty about whether the engraver of the First Folio portrait was Martin the Elder, born in Brussels in 1573/4 but living in London by the mid-1580s, or Martin the Younger, his nephew, born in London in 1601. Recent archival discoveries, coupled with evidence that Martin moved to Spain in the 1630s, where he signed engravings with the Anglicized surname Droeswood, argue strongly for the nephew (Schlueter, 2007). Although the younger Martin was only twenty-two in 1623, this was not unusually young in an era when apprenticeships began in the early teens, and there is no reason to doubt the traditional attribution to Martin the Younger. The Droeshout portrait was reprinted in 1632, on the title page of the second folio, which closely replicates the First Folio’s design. In 1640, however, another version of Shakespeare’s portrait appeared, one that more conventionally fitted expectations of an author portrait. William Marshall’s engraving accompanying the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected poems takes the Droeshout portrait as its starting point, but reverses it and moves it to the frontispiece (Fig. 22.2). The reversal is not surprising. Unless the printmaker specifically wants to reproduce a model in facsimile, the easiest

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Figure 22.2: William Marshall, This shadow is renowned Shakespear’s. Engraving, 1640

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thing is to draw directly from the model, transfer that image to the plate and engrave. The printed image will necessarily be the reverse of what is on the plate. The reversal also means that Shakespeare faces to the right, a pleasing effect for the frontispiece, since it means he now faces the words on the title page. William Marshall’s engraving keeps the iconic high domed head and starched transparent collar, but corrects the costume to provide the missing half of the underpropper and allow the braid around the shoulder (now just a decorative hint) to wrap under the arm. The awkwardness of the other shoulder is solved with a draped cloak. More significantly for expectations of a seventeenth-century author portrait, Marshall removes Shakespeare from Droeshout’s plain rectangle and resituates him in a trompe-l’oeil oval niche, behind a plinth. Although the oval does not have a Latin form of the sitter’s name inscribed around it, as might be expected, it does have conventional laudatory verses engraved directly below. Marshall also provides Shakespeare with his first piece of classical iconography, a laurel branch as symbol of literary distinction. The elevation of Shakespeare’s image had begun. By the end of the seventeenth century, another portrait emerged to challenge the Droeshout model as a likeness of Shakespeare: the Chandos portrait, now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. The Chandos takes its name from a late-eighteenth-century owner, the 3rd Duke of Chandos, but was known since the late seventeenth century, when it began to be copied in oils. Recent studies confirm that it dates to around 1600–10, when Shakespeare was in his mid-thirties to mid-forties (Cooper, 2006, 57–9). But is it an authentic likeness of Shakespeare? That cannot be proven. In 1719 George Vertue recorded being told that its provenance went back to the playwright and theatre manager Sir William Davenant, who knew Shakespeare as a child. There is no independent evidence to confirm the link to Davenant, however, and there is evidence that George Vertue’s stories about paintings require corroboration. The Chandos portrait first became widely known thanks to being incorporated in the frontispiece to Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 octavo edition of Shakespeare’s collected works, an edition conceived by publisher Jacob Tonson (Fig. 22.3). This frontispiece, engraved by Michael van der Gucht, goes far beyond William Marshall’s adaptation of the Droeshout portrait in elevating Shakespeare above the realm of the ordinary. Here, classically-draped figures of Comedy and Tragedy crown the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare with laurels while Fame trumpets his glory above. The composition comes directly from a French frontispiece used in the 1650s and 1660s except that there a sculpted bust of Pierre Corneille rests on the plinth. The incongruity of embedding Shakespeare, whose works famously did not follow the supposedly classical unities of French theatre, into a neoclassical structure has not gone unnoticed (Sillars, 2008, 35–6). It is tempting to wonder if van der Gucht or Tonson deliberately chose Corneille’s works over Racine’s when looking for frontispiece models, knowing that the former had faced the same criticism in his early work and continued to chafe under the unities’ strictures. Replacing a three-dimensional sculpted bust of one playwright with a two-dimensional painting of another draws attention to the artificiality of the conceit. Although van der Gucht extracted the feigned oval from the Chandos portrait’s rectangular canvas, it is still clearly a flat image. Shakespeare might deserve laurels, but this simulacrum is incapable of bearing the wreaths on offer. The frontispiece could have shown the sculpted monument of Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church instead, but its static, archaic, look would not have suited the Augustan age even if an accurate representation of it had been available.

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Figure 22.3: Michael van der Gucht, Mr. William Shakespeare ob A.D. 1616, aet, 53. Engraving, 1709

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The architecturally and artistically inaccurate representation that was in circulation at the time, published in William Dugdale’s 1656 Antiquities of Warwickshire, was of even less use, though van der Gucht did reproduce it, painfully awkward arms and all, elsewhere in the edition (Price, 1997). By using the Chandos portrait rather than other known representations of Shakespeare, the 1709 frontispiece demonstrated a preference for a relaxed, softer-looking Shakespeare that continued through the eighteenth century. The relative informality of the portrait, with its loosely-painted facial hair and a sitter wearing an untied collar, nicely fitted the dominant portrait aesthetic of the time. That this aesthetic was exemplified by Sir Godfrey Kneller’s Kit-Cat Club portraits, commissioned by Jacob Tonson, points to the publisher’s influence on the design. Tonson called for an even more relaxed and informal version of the Chandos portrait when a new, smaller plate was required for the frontispiece to his 1714 duodecimo edition of Rowe’s Shakespeare. Engraver Louis du Guernier replicated van der Gucht’s version of the Corneille surround, but now the two-dimensional portrait on the plinth shows Shakespeare with his doublet half-unbuttoned, in addition to the open collar. The unbuttoned Shakespeare comes directly from the adaptation of the Chandos portrait designed by Benoît Arlaud and engraved by Gaspard Duchange. Tonson first used the Arlaud–Duchange plate in large-paper copies of the 1709 Rowe edition, though it became best-known from its appearance in Lewis Theobald’s popular 1733 edition, also published by Tonson (Fig. 22.4). The Arlaud–Duchange portrait made no claim to be a portrait from the life. Rather, Benoît Arlaud visually edited the historic Shakespeare, just as textual editors modernized the archaic spellings and obsolete letter forms of the early seventeenth century. This updated Shakespeare, cloaked in the conventions of eighteenth-century portraiture, sat easily alongside the developing rhetoric of Shakespeare as a timeless and natural writer. As portraiture styles changed, so too did this always-up-to-date type of Shakespeare portrait. The countless variations on “Shakespeare in his Study” from the nineteenth century are thus equivalent to Picasso’s famously abbreviated line drawings of Shakespeare from the 1960s. The visual idiom changes over time, but remains contemporary with other art of that period. Meanwhile, another strand of Shakespeare portraiture developed parallel to the relaxed, informal Shakespeare born from the Chandos portrait. This Shakespeare is dressed like a courtier, sometimes with a thick ruff, sometimes with a flat lace collar, but always with a refined air. The earliest published version of this portrait type appeared in 1725, as the frontispiece to Alexander Pope’s edition of Shakespeare, although the plate itself had been finished since 1721 (Fig. 22.5). The words “William Shakespeare” in a banner floating above the sitter identify him as the author; an inscription below reads “Ad Originalem Tabulam penes Edwardum Dominum Harley [From the original picture possessed by Edward, Lord Harley]”. This original picture is the Harleian miniature, also known as the Welbeck Abbey miniature. The Harleian miniature shows the head and shoulders of a man with a gold earring, full moustache, small pointed beard and fluffy hair, including a prominent tuft on top of his head where the Droeshout portrait and Stratford memorial are bald. George Vertue enlarged and adapted the miniature to the proportions of a panel painting by placing the head and ruff into the larger compositional structure he had already designed for his 1719 engraving of the Chandos portrait (Fig. 22.6). Although he reversed the image and de-emphasized the hair somewhat, showing it in a straight

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Figure 22.4: Gaspard Duchange after Benoît Arlaud, Mr. Wm. Shakespeare. Engraving, 1733 (first published 1709)

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Figure 22.5: George Vertue, William Shakespeare. Engraving, 1721

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Figure 22.6: George Vertue, William Shakespeare . . . done from the original now in the possession of Robert Keck. Engraving, 1719

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line across the forehead rather than dipping down in the centre, it is otherwise a close representation. Lord Harley, the miniature’s owner, happened to be both a patron of Pope, the publication’s editor, and Vertue, its engraver. Critics supposed that they promoted an image that did not closely resemble other likenesses of Shakespeare simply to please Harley. Some even thought it was based on a portrait of James I (Spielmann, 1913). The publisher – again Jacob Tonson, who still held the printing rights – must have had second thoughts because when the second edition of Pope’s Shakespeare came out in a smaller format three years later, he did not adapt the frontispiece to the smaller size as he had done with Rowe’s second edition. Rather, he re-used the Rowe 1714 frontispiece, Louis du Guernier’s merging of the Arlaud–Duchange portrait with the classical figures originally found in the frontispiece to Corneille. Even so, the Harleian image lived on: Vertue’s original copperplate survived and was printed from again in 1775 and 1784. Copies appeared in prints and paintings. Even though its authenticity was doubted from the start, the image came to look like Shakespeare through the power of repetition and by meeting an expectation that Shakespeare should be a fine-looking, well-dressed courtier. The most influential of the courtly Shakespeares, however, was not published until 1770, when it appeared as the frontispiece to Charles Jennens’ edition of King Lear (Fig. 22.7). As the caption explains, this is “William Shakespear. From an Original Picture by Cornelius Jansen in the Collection of C. Jennens Esqr”. The original painting is no longer attributed to Cornelius Janssen, who is now known to have been too young at the time, but it remains known as the Janssen portrait by tradition. An inscription in the upper left indicates that the Janssen portrait was painted in 1610, of a man aged forty-six, which corresponds to Shakespeare’s age that year. It shows a fine-featured man with a slender face, thin upper lip, wispy hair and the expected high forehead. The banner above him in the print reads “ut magus [like a magician]” but does not appear on the original painting. It does appear in a number of painted versions, though, providing a handy clue to their post-1770 origin. “Ut magus” comes from Horace’s Epistles (2.1.213), at the end of a passage criticizing the theatre of his day as showy nonsense for a vulgar crowd. He contrasts this with the great poets (implicitly, classical Athenian dramatists) who could “like a magician” transport him to other places. The phrase’s appearance on a mezzotint engraving of Shakespeare could simply be dismissed as another example of its clichéd use, but why take the trouble to include it? Jennens planned the edition very carefully, and would have known that his learned readers could place the line in its full context, making it a fitting introduction to his critical edition of King Lear. For almost a century, the standard Lear seen on stage had been Nahum Tate’s 1681 adaptation, revised to suit popular taste through the removal of the Fool and the addition of a happy ending, with Cordelia married to Edgar and Lear restored to the throne. The line from Horace, who has just lamented the modern appeal to popular taste, allows Jennens to reference the contemporary stage indirectly, without having to stoop to mention it. More subtly, the passage from the Epistles points to Jennens’ stated goal in compiling the edition: being a “fair dealer” to intelligent readers by presenting them with footnotes detailing different wordings from a total of eleven editions (the two quartos and four folios of the previous century, plus six “modern” editions). “No editor that I know of,” he states in the preface, “has a right to impose upon every body his own favourite reading” (Jennens, 1770, ix). He admits that including footnotes on each page interferes with the flow of the text, but his goal is not vulgar entertainment,

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Figure 22.7: Richard Earlom, William Shakespear, from an original picture by Cornelius Jansen in the collection of C. Jennens. Mezzotint, 1770

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it is allowing the reader to see “what might be Shakespeare’s, and what not”. Shakespeare could transport people “like a magician”, but exactly how he performed those feats had become obscured. Thanks to its frequent appearance in engravings, the Janssen type became firmly established in the visual lexicon of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century, by which time a new type of Shakespeare portrait was emerging: genre scenes featuring William Shakespeare’s romanticized life. In Edouard Hamman’s Shakespeare with his family, at Stratford, reciting the tragedy of Hamlet, the Jacobean sitter of the Janssen portrait has been transformed into a Victorian paterfamilias, complete with a dog at his feet (Fig. 22.8). Pictures such as this circulated widely in illustrated magazines, but were also available as expensive framing prints. Indeed, Paul Allais exhibited a monumental engraving of the same Hamman painting at the Paris Salon of 1864. Other mid-century images in the same vein portray Shakespeare penning a manuscript while balancing it on his lap in a well-furnished room, Shakespeare courting Anne Hathaway in her cottage and a group portrait of “Shakespeare and his Friends at the Mermaid Tavern”. This last, painted by John Faed in 1850, is almost always published with a key identifying each of the fifteen men in the room. John Fletcher and Ben Jonson lean on the table, which is covered with an incongruous white cloth. Sir Walter Raleigh stands next to Shakespeare, his arm on the Earl of Southampton’s shoulder. John Donne gazes into the middle distance, looking serious. It is easy to imagine how pictures of an imaginary, idealized past with erudite connotations proved compelling for an audience anxiously living in an era of rapid industrialization, mechanized warfare and Dickensian poverty. Rejecting the prettified Shakespeare of the nineteenth century, twentieth-century portraits of Shakespeare tended to strip his image to the essentials revealed in the Stratford memorial and the Droeshout engraving. The portrait is distilled into an icon, with a stress on identifiability rather than real-life behaviour, social position, or photographic realism. This stripped down, essential image could then be used for striking graphic effects, like the Kittridge Shakespeare, where each volume has the same uncoloured line drawing from the Droeshout engraving paired with a solid-colour drawing of characters from that play, or the early Penguin edition, where the Droeshout engraving’s lines are thickened into solid areas of black that playfully echo the penguin logo below. Other playful images of Shakespeare are not as subtle. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first century portraits have fun with the stereotype of Shakespeare as the epitome of high culture, whether he is rendered in origami, as a plastic action figure, or as a celebrity rubber duck in the “Celebriducks” line-up. These tongue-in-cheek likenesses almost invariably derive from the Droeshout portrait or the Stratford Monument, both of which naturally have the inelegance and instant recognizability necessary to the task. Having become accustomed to seeing versions of the Stratford Monument and Droeshout engraving used as graphic design elements and portrait parodies, it is difficult to imagine them representing a real person at all. They represent the idea of Shakespeare, which itself has come to represent such things as the theatre, Englishness, culture and scholarship. When imagining a real flesh-and-blood Shakespeare, modern viewers are drawn to a different look. He is young. He is lively. He has a full head of hair. The Sanders portrait, in a private collection in Canada, made headline news around the world when it was rediscovered in 2002, but did not make much of a splash when it was first publicized in 1909 (Fig. 22.9). At that time, a vaguely saucy young Shakespeare with an intriguing little smile did not fit expectations for Shakespeare. Decades later, however, he matches

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Figure 22.8: George Edward Perine and Charles T. Giles after Edouard Hamman, Shakespeare with his family, at Stratford, reciting the tragedy of Hamlet. Mezzotint, 1866

the young, devil-may-care man portrayed by Tim Curry in the 1978 mini-series Life of Shakespeare and by Joseph Fiennes in the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden) discussed elsewhere in this volume. Similar popular interest greeted the Cobbe Portrait, the presumed original model for the Janssen portrait, in 2009. Tellingly, it was revealed through a well-choreographed series of press releases and events rather than through traditional scholarly channels. The academic community was less enthused, greeting the news with a mix of indifference, annoyance and polite disdain. Painstaking pursuit of a life portrait seemed to be a step backwards. Scholars and theatre folk are generally more interested in the words and the production histories than in what Shakespeare really looked like. Or at least, they must pretend to be. To express too much interest in portraits smacks of the bardolatry of ages past. It would be unseemly. Shakespeare scholarship has not taken a sustained interest in life portraits of Shakespeare for several generations. Investigations like James Boaden’s 1824 Inquiry into the Authenticity of Various Pictures and Prints . . . of Shakspeare appeared regularly throughout the nineteenth century, with arguments and counter-arguments back and forth, but the exchanges more or less ended with M. H. Spielmann’s several articles in The Connoisseur between 1908 and 1916. For twentieth-century academics, the topic of Shakespeare’s face simply ceased to be relevant to an understanding of his works except in as much as they reflected reception. The stakes had changed. The idea that facial structure transparently indicates innate character or strength of mind is now dismissed as a misuse of physiognomy. However, it remains true that people are judged based on outward appear-

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Figure 22.9: The Sanders Portrait. Oil on panel, 1603

ance. Roy Peterson uses this tension to comic effect in his editorial cartoon “Some experts think even earlier versions of Shakespeare’s portrait exist” (Fig. 22.10). Objectively, buck teeth and a heavy unibrow would not change the beauty of the words that Shakespeare left behind, but the contrast between that face and those words opens up an uncomfortable gap.

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Figure 22.10: Roy Peterson, Some experts think even earlier versions of Shakespeare’s portrait exist. Original drawing, 2009

Shakespearean Pictures On the flip side of portraits of Shakespeare come pictures of Shakespearean scenes, portraits of his writings, as it were. While pictures representing Shakespeare the man had been circulating during the seventeenth century thanks largely to the Droeshout engraving, pictures representing Shakespeare’s works were almost non-existent until the eighteenth century. As Sonia Massai points out in her chapter in this volume, things changed in 1709 with the appearance of Nicholas Rowe’s edition of the Works, published by Jacob Tonson and already discussed for its use of the Chandos portrait on the frontispiece. The full title reads The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare, in Six Volumes, Adorn’d with Cuts, Revis’d and Corrected, with an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author. The layout of the title page privileges “Adorn’d with Cuts” as a selling point, setting the phrase off in small capitals between two rules. The “cuts” are engraved frontispieces, one for each of the forty-three plays in the edition, which included several plays no longer thought to be by Shakespeare.

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The stiff “staged” look that predominates in these frontispiece illustrations, attributed to designer François Boitard and engraver Elisha Kirkhall, has encouraged commentators to see them as transparent examples of contemporary theatrical practice. Recent work by Stuart Sillars and others challenges this assumption (Sillars, 2008, 31–72). One of the strongest arguments against seeing the illustrations as portraits of productions is the simple fact that most of the plays had not appeared on stage during the previous ten years, even when adaptations are taken into account. Sillars makes the case that Boitard’s illustrations for Rowe come largely from his reading of the folio text (some scenes directly contradict settings specified by Rowe, whose edition was still in preparation while the engravings were being made). Contemporary theatre costume and gesture did play a role in many of the plates, but always as interpreted through Boitard’s artistic training, Sillars argues. The images function as visual introductions to the texts they precede, setting the tone and directing the reader’s attention to key themes and characters. None of this is to say that Boitard was a skilled artist; simply that he was working within existing conventions for image making. Jonathan Bate provides an instructive reading of the 1709 Hamlet frontispiece (Bate, 2000, 31–4) (Fig. 22.11). The foreground comes directly from Thomas Betterton’s stage business, where his Hamlet is so startled by the Ghost’s appearance that he loudly knocks over a chair. The sound element is, of course, absent from the illustration, as is the action itself. The chair is already on the floor. What is action on stage becomes pictorial structure: the chair provides a base for the Hamlet–Gertrude–Ghost triangle that points to Old Hamlet’s picture on the wall, directly above the overturned chair. Looking between the portrait and the chair, the size of the open space beside Gertrude becomes apparent and the chair implies an overturned throne. The swag of fabric in this and many other plates to the Rowe 1709 editions has sometimes been mistaken for a theatrical reference. It is not an evocation of the stage, since English theatres at the time placed the action on the apron, not behind a proscenium arch, a point made by Sillars who believes the fabric serves to “remind the spectator that she or he is looking at an engraving, not a performance” (Sillars, 2008, 44). But Sillars moves rather too quickly past the fact that such swags of drapery were common in seventeenth-century portraits, but not engravings, except reproductive engravings. Swags of drapery connote portraiture and the fabric in the upper left of the Hamlet scene is perfectly matched by a corresponding swag in the portrait on the wall. This is not a representation of Hamlet in performance. It is a representation of real people brought to life by Shakespeare (or, in the case of the Ghost, who does not cast a shadow, a real person brought back from the dead). Just as he had updated the relatively stiff Chandos Shakespeare of the 1709 general frontispiece by using the more relaxed Arlaud–Duchange version of it in the 1714 edition, Louis du Guernier updated many of the individual play’s frontispieces, sometimes changing the scene entirely. At first glance, his 1714 Hamlet plate looks quite similar to the 1709 equivalent (Fig. 22.12). Again, there are two portraits on the wall, one fully visible the other partly hidden; Hamlet raises his arms in fright on the left; Gertrude sits below the portraits in the centre; and the Ghost, holding a baton in his outstretched hand, stands on the right. Look more closely, though, and key differences appear. The swag of fabric is gone both from the engraving itself and from the portrait of Hamlet’s father reproduced in it. Instead of the strong portrait-like light illuminating the entire scene, shadows close in at top and bottom. Compositionally, the large shadow on the floor takes the role of

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Figure 22.11: Elisha Kirkhall after François Boitard, Hamlet, act III, sc. 4. Engraving, 1709

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Figure 22.12: Louis du Guernier, Hamlet, act III, sc. 4. Engraving, 1714

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the overturned chair, anchoring the Hamlet–Gertrude–Ghost triangle. Most significantly for the interpretation of the text that follows, readers’ attention is drawn to the sexual elements. A large canopied bed fills the space beside Gertrude and the Ghost points his baton between her legs, where the knotted ties added to her costume already emphasize the genital area. The picture is still highly structured, but we are no longer distanced from it as we are with a conventional portrait. Now the viewer is imaginatively hidden in the foreground shadow. Compositionally and stylistically, Shakespearean book illustration continued in much the same vein as du Guernier’s Hamlet for the next sixty years. Artists created verticallyoriented frontispiece illustrations that could just as easily have been illustrations to contemporary novels. Carefully-arranged figures generally occupied the lower half, providing ample background space to set the scene with appropriately intimate architecture, foliage, or interior design. By the 1740s, paintings of Shakespearean scenes began to provide an alternative visual discourse to such book illustration. The most famous of these early paintings, William Hogarth’s Mr. Garrick as Richard III, now hangs in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Hogarth quickly made the life-size painting available as a high-quality engraving, ensuring that it became widely-known thanks not only to his own prestige as an artist, but to the white-hot fame of David Garrick (Fig. 22.13). Unlike Shakespearean book illustrations of the time, Hogarth’s painting unquestionably showed an actor playing a role, not an imaginatively-recreated historical King Richard. Nevertheless, it is a carefully-constructed history painting, not a representation of what could be seen on stage. Stuart Sillars describes this work as an example of “the artist as critic”, one of a number of eighteenth-century paintings he identifies as critical interpretations of the text, where the artist’s choices of content, style, or both provide glosses on Shakespeare rather than simply depicting a single moment in isolation (Sillars, 2006, 46–52). In the ostensible moment shown, Richard III wakes from a dream on the eve of battle thinking the fight is already on. “Give me another horse. Bind up my wounds,” he shouts, and many later versions of the print include those lines in the caption. But the picture shows more than that one instant, providing additional meaning. The solemn group of soldiers gathered around a campfire in the background contrasts poignantly with Richard’s turmoil, evoking an earlier moment on stage where Richard observes his troops sitting patiently “like sacrifices” as they “inly ruminate the morning’s danger” (Shakespeare gave those lines to the Chorus in Henry V (4.0.23–5), but Colley Cibber transferred them to Richard in the acting edition that ruled the stage through the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth). In the foreground, the note reading “Jockey of Norfolk be not too bold, / For Dickon thy Master is bought and sold” reveals itself to the viewers, even though it has yet to be discovered on Norfolk’s tent. The more obvious pictorial comments include Richard turning his back on Christ, represented in a painted crucifix behind him, and the careful centring of the word “mal” [evil] on the Order of the Garter’s garter below his knee. The rich pictorial commentary Hogarth provided did not always make it into other versions of the much-copied picture. The frontispiece for the 1756 Dublin edition of The Tragical History of King Richard III, for example, omits the crucifix and crops the scene at the bottom and both sides. It becomes a celebrity portrait of David Garrick in character more than a Shakespeare illustration, presaging the celebrity portraits used in the 1770s in John Bell’s Shakespeare editions. Marketing Shakespeare through illustrations of famous actors continued through the centuries. Only the technology changed. In the

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Figure 22.13: William Hogarth and Charles Grignion after William Hogarth, Mr. Garrick in the Character of Richard the 3d. Engraving, 1746

1850s, John Tallis and Company provided readers with Charles Kean as Hamlet “from a Daguerreotype by Paine of Islington”. In 2000, the New Longman Shakespeare provided readers with Kenneth Branagh as Henry V, from a film still. Many paintings besides Hogarth’s Richard III happen to have been used as book illustrations, but painting and illustration came together intentionally – and most famously – through the efforts of John Boydell and the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery. In 1786, Alderman John Boydell and his nephew, Josiah Boydell, announced a plan to produce both an illustrated edition of Shakespeare and a series of much larger engraved plates, all based on new paintings by the best artists in Britain. The paintings would be exhibited in a purpose-built gallery in London, and the project as a whole would “improve the Arts of Painting and Engraving in this Kingdom”. Between the gallery’s opening in 1789 and its bankruptcy closing in 1805, the original scheme of seventy-two paintings grew to 167, with engravings coming out at regular intervals (though not as frequently as the proprietors had hoped). The sheer number of images and artists involved makes it difficult to generalize about the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery and impossible to summarize here. The gallery’s catalogue encouraged viewers to experience the paintings as illustrations to a text. Rather

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than paraphrasing the story, referring to performances, or drawing attention to the aesthetics of the work, the catalogue simply provided a lengthy excerpt from the relevant scene for each painting, leaving it up to the reader to make the connection between words and image. Among the more successful compositions is James Northcote’s Romeo and Juliet (Fig. 22.14). Paradoxically, its narrative strength comes not from depicting a key action, but from depicting an emotionally intense moment that knowledgeable viewers could place within the action. Illustrations of Romeo and Juliet 5.3 typically show the culmination of the scene, where Juliet plunges Romeo’s dagger into her heart. In Northcote’s life-size painting, though, Juliet has not yet noticed that Romeo is dead. Instead, the artist captures the last instant before that discovery: Juliet has just awoken and reaches out to Friar Laurence in anticipation of being reunited with her beloved, but she is puzzled by the look of horror on the Friar’s face. Viewers know that his horror comes from looking past Juliet to the dead bodies of Romeo and Paris, and that only a split second remains before she follows his gaze and understands that everything has gone wrong. It is a powerful image, but the viewer must bring additional information in order to realize the full extent of its power. The Boydells published Northcote’s Romeo and Juliet in both large- and smallformat engravings; numerous other engraved versions of it appeared in the nineteenth century. It clearly struck a chord. It has become a commonplace that the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery stands as yet another failed campaign to admit British art to the canon of history painting, the intellectually elevated genre at the top of the academic hierarchy. Despite John and Josiah Boydell’s hopes, not enough artists were up to the task, and the patronage base that sustained history painters on the Continent did not materialize. Yet the gallery did prove influential, just not on Western painting. Rather, the widespread circulation of engravings after the paintings significantly influenced the way people imagined Shakespeare scenes. Direct and indirect versions of the Boydell engravings appeared regularly in the nineteenth century. Stage productions drew on them as source material. Framed versions hung in parlours. They can still be found easily on the antique market. Notwithstanding the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery’s failure in the endeavour, British painting soon did come into its own, but as a new kind of landscape art exemplified by the works of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, not as an English version of history painting. The strength of this aesthetic movement can be seen in the increasing number of Shakespeare illustrations emphasizing landscape. Turner himself painted several Shakespeare-related scenes, though characteristically, he seems to have cited Shakespeare as his source in order to confound conventional expectations rather than to interact with literature. Juliet and her Nurse from 1836, for example, clearly sets the scene in Turner’s beloved Venice, not Shakespeare’s Verona. Despite the title, the composition is primarily a view of the Piazza San Marco, with the basilica and campanile illuminated by fireworks. Juliet and her nurse are present, but confined to a balcony in the extreme lower right. A more mainstream treatment of Shakespeare through scenic views can be found in G. F. Sargent’s Shakespeare Illustrated, in a Series of Landscape & Architectural Designs, with Notices of the Several Localities by Various Authors (London: How and Parsons, 1841–2). Sargent’s volume of forty-five steel engravings plus accompanying text combines Shakespeare with contemporary interest in picturesque travel and antiquarianism. Each steel engraving depicts a place mentioned in Shakespeare. A caption in the lower margin prominently names the place and then provides a line or two from the appropriate play in smaller letters, along with the play title, act and scene. Instead of following up imme-

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Figure 22.14: James Northcote, Romeo and Juliet, act V, scene 3. Oil on canvas, 1790

diately with fuller Shakespeare text, though, the letterpress pages that accompany each engraving first provide one or more non-Shakespearean passages that describe the place, a pattern familiar from travel books of the period. Only then does a fuller Shakespeare passage follow. In most cases, the Shakespeare connection would be impossible to determine without this added passage. The sole Romeo and Juliet illustration is a distant view entitled Mantua, with the city picturesquely framed by Italianate trees on either side (Fig. 22.15). Two miniscule figures on horseback in the lower centre easily escape notice. As indicated by the quotation below the title, “I will hence to night”, and the reference “Romeo & Juliet, Act 5, Scene 1”, these tiny specks are Romeo and Balthasar returning to Verona. In other words, we see a flash-forward to something Romeo says he will do, but which itself is omitted from the text, not the usual picture-worthy moment in the same scene, Romeo buying poison from the Apothecary. Likewise, Dunsinane and Birnam Wood could have come directly from a book of Scottish views, dominated as it is by a dramatically-lit sky, craggy peaks and blasted trees. What could at first be mistaken for a stretch of river or silvery undergrowth is revealed on closer examination to be a fierce battle, the bodies strewn around being delineated only by a few sketchy strokes from the engraver’s burin. Interior of Westminster Abbey, with small letters below reading “Funeral of Henry Vth”, is

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Figure 22.15: J. Hinchcliff after G. F. Sargent, Mantua. Engraving, 1841

an architectural study of soaring vaults and carved screens. Apartment in Philario’s House in Rome is more about the view of the garden, the highly-decorated floor, walls and ceiling, and the still-life of glassware and jugs on the lion-footed table than it is about Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Four years after their first publication, G. F. Sargent’s views reappeared as The Book of Shakespeare gems, in a series of landscape illustrations of the most interesting localities of Shakespeare’s dramas (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846). The same kind of packaging and repackaging occurred with the various series of Shakespeare’s heroines published in the nineteenth century (Fig. 22.16). Instead of idealized landscapes with a more or less superficial Shakespeare connection, these were idealized portraits of women with a more or less superficial Shakespeare connection. Much could be made of the generic equivalent of landscapes and women, but the important thing here is that Shakespeare could be, and was, matched to the full variety of illustration supported by the nineteenth-century market, an era with a matchless appetite for illustration. This was the heyday of the illustrated Shakespeare (Holland, 2003, 56–71; Murphy, 2003, 174–5; Sillars, 2008, 252–323).

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Figure 22.16: E. Blair Leighton, “Olivia” from The Graphic gallery of Shakespeare’s heroines. Colour gravure, 1896 Popular editions routinely filled their pages with wood engravings, creating a reading experience where, depending on your perspective, the words and pictures constantly interrupted or mutually re-enforced each other. After two centuries of involvement in the pictorial mainstream, Shakespeare almost disappeared from twentieth-century paintings and prints. Even Shakespeare book illustration shifted from illustrating the narrative of the plays to illustrating Shakespeare’s era and performance history. This is no reflection on Shakespeare as such, merely the effect of a reaction against narrative and naturalism in the traditional visual arts.

Many Shakespeares On the surface, Ben Jonson had it right when he advised readers in 1623 to look “Not on his Picture, but his Booke”. Shakespeare’s words are the best representative of the man. That being said, those words inevitably conjure up images, and successful images, in turn, can powerfully evoke the words. To be successful, an image of Shakespeare the man or of “Shakespeare” the body of literature must satisfy certain expectations, but as this chapter has shown, those expectations are not universal. The Droeshout portrait, the Harleian

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miniature and Shakespeare with his family, at Stratford, reciting the tragedy of Hamlet all look very different, but all are “Shakespeare” in the larger sense, just as James Northcote’s enormous oil painting and G. F. Sargent’s small steel engraving are both Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Bate, Jonathan (2000). “Pictorial Shakespeare: Text, Stage, Illustration”. In Book Illustrated: Text, Image, and Culture, 1770–1930, ed. Catherine J. Golden. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 31–59. Blayney, Peter W. M. (1991). The First Folio of Shakespeare. Washington, DC: Folger Library. Cooper, Tarnya (2006). Searching for Shakespeare. London: National Portrait Gallery. Griffiths, Antony (1998). The Print in Stuart Britain, 1603–1689. London: British Museum. Holland, Peter (2003). “Performing Shakespeare in Print: Narrative in Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Shakespeares”. In Victorian Shakespeare, ed. Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, I, 47–72. Jennens, Charles, ed. (1770). King Lear: A Tragedy by William Shakespeare. London: W. and J. Richardson. Martineau, Jane et al. (2003). Shakespeare in Art. London: Merrell. Merchant, W. Moelwyn (1959), Shakespeare and the Artist. London: Oxford University Press. Murphy, Andrew (2003). Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pape, Walter and Frederick Burwick, eds (1996). The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery. Bottrop: Peter Pomp. Pressly, William L. (1993). A Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library. New Haven: Yale University Press. ——(2007). The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare’s ‘Fine Frenzy’ in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Art. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Price, Diana (1997). “Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Monument”. Review of English Studies 48.190, 168–82. Schlueter, June (2007). “Martin Droeshout Redivivus: Reassessing the Folio Engraving of Shakespeare”. Shakespeare Survey 60, 237–51. Sillars, Stuart (2006). Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——(2008). The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spielmann, M. H. (1913). “The ‘Welbeck Abbey’ or ‘Harleian’ Miniature of Shakespeare: The ‘James I Type’”. The Connoisseur 35, 3–13.

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SHAKESPEARE, SCULPTURE AND THE MATERIAL ARTS Balz Engler

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culptures, traditionally three-dimensional representations of human beings, have been popular in the history of Shakespeare reception. They usually show the writer himself, occasionally certain figures from his plays, and they do so in different sizes, from larger-than life to miniature knick-knacks, and in different materials, from marble and bronze to china and even Welsh coal. The knick-knack has been popular since the eighteenth century, in the shape of small statues, thimbles, wine-stoppers, teapots, and so on as they can be found today in Stratford souvenir shops; Batman, of course, used a switch hidden in a Shakespeare bust to open the Batcave (copies continue to be available online). The following survey, however, will have to focus on public monuments, and it can only discuss some of them in an exemplary fashion. These monuments, which often served as models for smaller representations, can tell us a great deal about the cultural status of the person depicted by them. They do so if we do not simply consider them as aesthetic objects, but take into account their history and the place where they were erected. In most respects a sculpture and a theatrical performance are opposites. In the theatre the presentation of a figure is transient, part of the flow of an action; with the sculpture it is fixed in place and quasi permanent, though not as permanent, according to the debatable claim in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as poetry: “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme” (55, 1–2). Sculptures arrest the flow of time and freeze a person in a significant image; they call it back to life, as it were, at the same time as fixing it in rigor mortis, those who put up the sculpture publicly associate themselves with the person or the event commemorated. They are therefore important elements in a culture of memory. In Shakespeare’s time sculptures appeared mainly on funerary moments, as the many examples in English churches testify; and where monuments occur in Shakespeare’s plays, on the scene or in the dialogue, they are always associated with the grave (for example in Romeo and Juliet, 5.3.298–301, Much Ado About Nothing, 4.1.205, Twelfth Night, 2.4.113, Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2 and The Winter’s Tale, 5.3). The public stage of Shakespeare’s age did not use elaborate scenery of the kind that became common after the Restoration; Henslowe’s inventory of his company’s equipment in 1598 lists, among other sculpted objects, a rock, a hell-mouth and – we may now feel, significantly – three tombs. This was different with the elaborate Italianate entertainments written for the court, the so-called masques, where statues were often part of the scenery, for example in The Masque of Queenes (1609):

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for the lower Columnes, [Inigo Jones] chose the statues of the most excellent Poëts, as Homer, Virgil, Lucan, &c. as being the substantial supporters of Fame. For the upper, Achilles, Æneas, Cæsar, and those great Heroës, which those Poets had celebrated. All which stood, as in massy gold. (Jonson, 1925–53, VII, 313) In his later plays Shakespeare often drew inspiration from the masques (strikingly in The Tempest, 4.1). Their dramaturgy often depends on sudden reversals and transformations, among them the strong effect of statues coming to life. In the final scene of The Winter’s Tale, Paulina reveals to Leontes a statue of Hermione, his rejected wife, standing on some kind of pedestal. It is still painted in the manner traditional up to the early seventeenth century (“The ruddiness upon her lip is wet”, 5.3.81) and it has been announced as having been made “by that rare Italian master Giulio Romano” (5.2.87–92). In one of the most moving moments in Shakespeare’s works the statue comes to life and forgiveness and reconciliation between Leontes and Hermione becomes possible: PAULINA Music; awake her; strike! [Music] [To Hermione] ’Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more. Approach. Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come, I’ll fill your grave up. Stir. Nay, come away, Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him Dear Life redeems you. (5.3.98–103) The scene beautifully illustrates the position of statues between death and life, and between past and present. Turning to sculptures of Shakespeare and figures from his plays, we are confronted with historical developments that gradually free statues from their close association with funerary monuments and churches. Increasingly, they became public monuments, public in several senses: in their function, in their location, and in being commissioned by public subscription. In the second half of the nineteenth century this led to a veritable monument-craze. Public spaces were adorned with the statues of historical personalities, statesmen, generals, poets, but also allegorical figures, meant to represent the cultural and political values of the community (see Michalski, 1998). An account of Shakespeare monuments has to begin in Stratford-upon-Avon. There is Shakespeare’s grave in Holy Trinity Church (between 1616 and 1623, of which more later). There is Thomas Banks’ relief The Apotheosis of Shakespeare, originally at the entrance of Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery in London, commissioned in 1788 and moved to the garden of New Place in 1871, showing Shakespeare reclining on a rock between the admiring Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting. There is the American Fountain on the Market Square (1887), a strange neo-Gothic drinking fountain for cattle cum clocktower, with inscriptions celebrating, as so often in Stratford, the brotherhood between the English and the Americans, offered by the Philadelphia newspaper tycoon George W. Childs. There is Lord Ronald Gower’s Monument, now at Bridgefoot (1888), which shows Shakespeare sitting on a chair, holding a manuscript and a quill (since lost); the pedestal is surrounded by four figures from the plays, which also serve an allegorical purpose: Falstaff, standing for Comedy; Prince Hal, standing for History; and two figures representing Tragedy, Lady Macbeth and Hamlet (Kimberley, 1989). And among the many additional sculptures, the somewhat generic statue of a jester by James Butler (1994) at the end of

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Henley Street may be mentioned, which bears inscriptions from As You Like It, Twelfth Night and Hamlet. Together with the buildings associated with Shakespeare, they mark off a precinct within which, even today, homage is done to Shakespeare by theatre-goers and tourists (Engler, 1997, 344–56). The oldest and most important sculpture is the Shakespeare monument on the wall of the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried in front of the altar beside other members of his family. The arched niche contains the half-length limestone bust of Shakespeare, mouth slightly open, looking into the distance. His hands rest with pen and paper on a cushion before him. The bust is painted in bright colours in the fashion of the period (in 1792 it was painted off-white, giving it a classical touch, then supposed to be the original colour, only to be painted again in 1861), Shakespeare’s hair and beard are auburn, his eyes hazel and he is wearing a scarlet doublet under a loose black gown. The bust by the London sculptor Gheerart Janssen is flanked by two black marble pillars supporting a cornice, on the edges of which two nude figures are seated on mounds, the one on the left carrying a spade, the one on the right with a skull and an inverted torch; they may represent labour and rest. Between them there is a square structure fronted by Shakespeare’s coat of arms and topped by another skull. As the monument was erected not long after Shakespeare’s death in 1616, we may assume that the bust shows Shakespeare as his contemporaries knew him. His somewhat rigid features (which led to the speculation that a death-mask served for a model) certainly do not agree with the image people came to associate with a natural genius; rather, it shows the wealthy citizen that Shakespeare was after his return to Stratford. The iconographical type of the bust is that of a scholar or divine, according to Nikolaus Pevsner, and its expression has been variously described as that of a “self-satisfied pork-butcher” (John Dover Wilson) or a “self-satisfied school-master” (Nikolaus Pevsner). It is not surprising, therefore that the likeness on the monument was replaced by other iconic images and that the statues made in the eighteenth century only vaguely allude to it. Below the figure of Shakespeare, on a tablet, there are two inscriptions, one in Latin, the other in English; both celebrate Shakespeare as a dramatist and the fact that his first name is not mentioned may itself be a sign of how well-known he had already become by then. The need to commemorate Shakespeare publicly, in a fashion befitting his status, began to preoccupy Londoners soon after his death in 1616. This has resulted in several, usually undistinguished, monuments, stained glass windows and memorial plaques. Here the focus will be on the monuments in Westminster Abbey (1741) and on Leicester Square (1874). One recent structure that would deserve discussion as a monument has to be dealt with elsewhere: the Globe theatre, which, when being reconstructed, was raised above its surroundings like a monument, put on a pedestal, as it were. At the time of Shakespeare’s death, Chaucer, Spenser and Beaumont had their monuments in Westminster Abbey already, because they were also buried there. The thought, however, that Shakespeare’s grave should be moved there, or even more unusually, that a monument should be erected to him although he was not buried there, was new. But nothing came of such plans. Instead the folio edition of his works (1623) presented itself as an alternative monument; as Ben Jonson writes in his prefatory verses: My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye A little further, to make thee a room:

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Thou art a Moniment without a tombe, And art alive still, while thy Booke doth liue, And we haue wits to read and praise to giue. (Norton Shakespeare, 3351) The monuments of Chaucer, Spenser and Beaumont were gradually joined by others, usually sponsored by wealthy admirers, among them those to Michael Drayton, John Dryden, Samuel Butler, Matthew Prior, John Gay, John Milton and Nicholas Rowe. Not all of these writers were also buried in Westminster Abbey. Apparently beginning with Samuel Butler (1721) monuments were also erected to writers buried elsewhere, to mark their status in English literature. In 1734 it was suggested that the acting profession and theatre audiences should collect money for a Shakespeare monument and the plan came to fruition in 1739. Its erection also had political implications. It was promoted by opponents of Walpole’s corrupt regime; Shakespeare was claimed “as both a foe to tyranny and a genuinely national hero, above the reach of bribery or invidious patronage” (Dobson, 1992, 138); it was, therefore, erected on public subscription and received the Latin inscription “Amor publicus posuit [the love of the public erected it]”. While the design by William Kent and the sculpture by Peter Scheemakers is Palladian, the marble statue shows rococo features in the relaxed, somewhat theatrical manner Shakespeare stands there cross-legged, leaning on a pedestal. He supports his head on his left hand, on three folio volumes, and points with his right hand to an open scroll. This scroll was at first left blank; the dean of Westminster then had a conventional memento mori put there, a version of Prospero’s speech in The Tempest (4.1.152–6): “The Cloud cupt Tow’rs / The Gorgeous Palaces / The Solemn Temples / The Great Globe itself / Yea all which it Inherit / Shall Dissolve; / And like the baseless fabrick of a Vision / Leave not a wreck behind”. By replacing Shakespeare’s “this insubstantial pageant faded” in the penultimate line by words from an earlier line (151), the words, now emphasizing transience, have been isolated from their context as a statement of general truth. The statue presents Shakespeare not in a heroic pose, but as somebody very human turning towards the onlookers and drawing their attention to the words on the scroll. The head of the figure draws on all three likenesses then known, the bust at Holy Trinity in Stratford, the Droeshout and Chandos portraits. But, as Erin C. Blake also notes in her chapter in this volume, it was the Chandos portrait, with its open collar, that best suited the tastes of those who were constructing him as a natural genius. At the foot of the pedestal the three visible corners are decorated with the heads of Elizabeth I, Henry V and Richard III. It is difficult to see what these figures have in common in relation to Shakespeare; it cannot be his biography or his achievement as a dramatist. Elizabeth, the queen of Shakespeare’s youth, and Henry V, the successful warrior, may have been apposite at a moment when England was again going to war against France, but Richard III’s presence is difficult to account for. Soon the statue appeared on the stage in an entertainment at Goodman’s Field, Harlequin Student, or the Fall of Pantomime by David Garrick, and it became a popular icon for later representations, including china figurines. As Sidney Lee complained in 1906, this “set a bad pattern for statues of Shakespeare. Posterity came to invest the design with some measure of sanctity” (Lee, 1906, 216). As such it could serve those who wanted to enhance their status by associating themselves with Shakespeare. This is borne out by the copy used in Leicester Square, and by the revised version Scheemaker made for Lord Pembroke at Wilton, a lead copy of which Garrick gave to

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the Stratford Corporation, and which now stands in a niche at the Town Hall. Garrick also had himself painted by Robert Edge Pine in front of it, reciting his own ode to Shakespeare. The one public open-air statue of Shakespeare in London today is in a small park on Leicester Square (1874), now aptly located in the centre of the entertainment district. Where the wide paths connecting the corners would intersect, there is a fountain, with Shakespeare on a high pedestal towering above it. The pedestal of the statue is decorated with four dolphins which, on occasion, may spout water into the basin of the fountain. Around it there is a round space where small plaques have been inserted indicating the distances to all the former colonies and dominions, suggesting the universal role that Shakespeare has acquired. Facing Shakespeare, and benevolently viewed from above by him, there is a bronze statue of Charlie Chaplin. An adaptation of the statue in the abbey, made of marble, it was chosen because it was recognizable to everyone at a glance. The prestige of Shakespeare was used to add dignity to the square. Here the figure points at the words “There is no darkness but ignorance”, Feste’s words to Malvolio in his dungeon (Twelfth Night, 4.2.37–8). Again the words have been isolated from their context and reproduced as a statement of general truth, now expressing a Victorian belief in improvement (Fig. 23.1). Features of the Kent/Scheemakers sculpture are also to be found in another influential statue of 1758, by Louis-François Roubiliac (1702/5–62): Shakespeare’s contemporary dress, his open cloak, his leaning against a pedestal, the hand supporting his chin. But Roubiliac’s Shakespeare is holding a pen, like the figure in Stratford, and is shown in an altogether more pensive mood, the poet in the act of creation. The familiarity so characteristic of the Scheemakers statue is also there, in the open buttons of his doublet which seems to be unable to contain his paunch. Garrick had this statue made for the Temple to Shakespeare in his own garden; he bequeathed it to the British Museum in 1779, where it can still be seen. Roubiliac was also the artist who created an influential bust of Shakespeare, which along with one by the French artist Emile Guillemin (1841–1907), is still reproduced and may be found on bookshelves in educated middle-class households all over the world. Whereas the monuments in Holy Trinity church in Stratford and in Westminster Abbey may be understood as reminding people of Shakespeare and his achievement, the later monuments tend to work the other way round: they remind viewers of the association between a community and the famous dramatist. Monuments were erected all over the English-speaking world, emphasizing a shared culture. There were original monuments, for example, in Central Park, New York, by John Quincy Adams (1870), in Tower Grove Park, St Louis, Missouri, by Ferdinand von Mueller (1878), in Lincoln Park, Chicago, by William Ordway Partridge (1894), at the Library of Congress in Washington by Frederick William MacMonnies (1896), in front of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh by John Massey Rhind (1907) and in Sydney, Australia, by Betram MacKennal (1926). Outside the English-speaking world, a statue by Paul Fournier was erected in Paris (1888, commissioned by an Englishman and melted down in World War Two). Here two monuments will be discussed in more detail, the one in Weimar, by Otto Lessing (1904), which specifically reflects what Shakespeare has meant to the Germans, and, perhaps surprisingly, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, a monument that combines all the functions so far mentioned. It is no coincidence that the most important German Shakespeare monument is in Weimar (Engler, 2002, 146–60), the city of Goethe and Schiller, the spiritual capital of

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Figure 23.1: The statue of William Shakespeare, Leicester Square, London, 1874

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the German nation, as it were. Weimar is full of monuments; the most prominent among them is the monumental one to Goethe and Schiller (1857) on the square in front of the Nationaltheater, to the authors who, as cultural heroes, played a crucial role in the unification of Germany; money for its erection was collected all over Germany. They are shown larger than life, confidently stepping forward like heroes. In 1901 the Shakespeare-Gesellschaft acted on its plan to erect a Shakespeare monument. As with the Goethe–Schiller monument, the project was to be based on public subscription. It was to make evident “the veneration of the triumvirate Goethe–Schiller– Shakespeare by the German people”, in other words, to establish Shakespeare as an equal beside the German classics. The monument was to be erected opposite the one to Goethe and Schiller. But after lengthy debates, the view of the sculptor, Otto Lessing, won the day, who was of the opinion that large squares needed large monuments; “the monuments of princes and statesmen obviously fitted such squares; those of poets and artists a park”, classifying Shakespeare as a poet in the romantic tradition, and placing Goethe and Schiller among the princes and statesmen (Engler, 2002, 146–60). The contrast between them was made so stark as to contradict the original intentions of the project completely. Lessing’s Shakespeare, unlike Goethe and Schiller, sits, lost in thought, holding a scroll, the attribute of the poet, in one hand, a rose in the other, the right arm supported, almost defiantly, on his hip. At his feet there are symbolic objects: a skull with a fool’s cap, a fool’s bauble, a dagger and a laurel wreath. The figure shows Lessing’s own idea of the poet and his works rather than serving the purpose of reverence; his model was Prince Hal in Eastcheap as he had seen him in a production of 1 Henry IV. As the monument was to be placed in a park, it was to show the poet as the writer of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The location of the monument in a park made sure that the problem of Shakespeare’s place in the symbolic geography of Weimar did not come to rest; vandalism and the damage done to the marble by the fog rising from the nearby river may also have played a role. In 1950, finally, with Weimar in the socialist GDR, the Shakespeare monument was moved to a new place, beside the library in which Goethe had worked, with a view towards the Platz der Demokratie, closer to the market square and in a symmetrical position to the newly erected Pushkin monument on the opposite side of the building. Now the monument was no longer to be understood as a sign of Germany’s adoption of Shakespeare, but as an admonition that there should be a return to that openness toward things foreign that had once been characteristic of the Germans. The relation between the monument and the city was considered crucial rather than that to the other classics, and the closeness to the only other monument to a foreign poet at the time, the Russian Pushkin, was emphasized. But in 1963, in time for the Shakespeare centenary in the following year, the monument was put back to its old place in the park, for which it had originally been conceived. The anniversary was celebrated in grand style in view of the important role that Shakespeare played in the cultural policies of the GDR: the head of state laid down a wreath. It was there again in 1990, after the collapse of the GDR, that Maik Hamburger, a man of the theatre and member of the board of the Gesellschaft, reinterpreted the figure, reminding his audience of the official pomp of 1964 and of the way Shakespeare was instrumentalized during the GDR period: “William would have greeted the claim that his visions were being realised in this country with that sceptical glance the sculptor Otto Lessing gave him in effigie.”

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The most splendid monument to Shakespeare outside England is certainly the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC (Engler, 1999), a huge white marble treasure chest in exquisite art déco style, raised above street-level on a pedestal, marked off by shrubbery, by a lawn in front of its main façade to the north, a small Elizabethan garden to the East and a fountain in the West, facing the Capitol, showing Puck and his words “Lord, what fools these mortals be” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.2.115). Between the two entrances of the building nine high rectangular windows are cut into its shiny surface, separated by flat pilasters, without either base or capital. Above this middle section of the façade, where the classical arrangement would demand a sculptural frieze, there are inscriptions instead. The central one is from the First Folio: “HIS WIT CAN NO MORE LIE HID THEN IT COVLD BE LOST. READE HIM THEREFORE: AND AGAINE AND AGAINE. John Heminge. Henrie Condell”. Strikingly, these inscriptions combine historical English spelling, Roman lettering, and, as a democratic gesture, an indication of their sources. Large, strongly sculpted reliefs instead appear below the windows, at eye level for the onlooker, depicting climactic scenes from nine Shakespeare plays, with the death of Julius Caesar in a central position. To the left there are scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (3.1), Romeo and Juliet (3.5), The Merchant of Venice (4.1), Macbeth (4.1), to the right King Lear (3.2), Richard III (3.1), Hamlet (3.4) and 1 Henry IV (2.4). The Folger was not originally conceived as the research library that it is now. Its founders, Henry Clay Folger and his wife Emily, first wanted it to be called the “Folger Shakespeare Memorial”, but then they felt that this name had inspired Philippe Cret, the architect, to propose too sombre a façade, and they eventually decided to call it “FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY”. The inclusion of their surname was never in doubt. The memorial was to be both to them and to Shakespeare. And indeed, at the eastern end of the reading room, their portraits are placed; and above them, in central position, there is a copy of the Shakespeare monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, and a plaque with the inscription, “To the Glory of William Shakespeare and the Greater Glory of God”, with the names and dates of the founders. Behind this plaque their ashes are immured. The location of the memorial made it easy to give it a place in Washington’s symbolic geography. In his address at Henry Clay Folger’s funeral in 1930, William Slade, the first director of the library, observed: [A] line drawn from the site of the Folger Shakespeare Memorial through the Capitol building and extended onward, will all but touch the monument to Washington and the memorial to Lincoln – the two Americans whose light also spreads across the world. (Slade, 1931, 41–2) All three stand for union: Lincoln in the West “for the Union of the States as an enduring fact”, Washington for the foundation of the Federal Union, Shakespeare in the East for the transcendent unity that made it all possible, for “the age which produced a poetry that is capable of speaking to each successive age because its living content is itself the material of life” (Slade, 1931, 42). Unusually for a building of its kind, the Folger has two main entrances. Their symbolism is the same as the one Slade saw in the location of the Folger. The entry to the East is marked by the mask of tragedy, the one to the West by the mask of comedy. The east entrance leads to the Elizabethan Theatre and the Exhibition Gallery. The Theatre recon-

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structs the idea of an Elizabethan one, based on what was known when the theatre was planned in the late 1920s. The Exhibition Gallery is a large long space between the two entrances. It combines simple square panelling in darkly varnished Appalachian oak and a high, richly decorated Tudor-style plastered vault. The two ends of the hall again contrast two worlds. To the East, the mask of tragedy is to be found on the tiled floor, on the wall above the coatof-arms of Queen Elizabeth I, and lines from Garrick’s pantomime Harlequin’s Invasion (1759), in which the Powers of Pantomime are finally overcome by Mount Parnassus, Shakespeare rises and Harlequin sinks, a moment celebrated in the final song, which starts with the lines quoted. In context the quotation may therefore be read as being critical of the English neglect of Shakespeare’s serious art: “Thrice happy the nation that Shakespeare has charm’d. / More happy the bosoms his genius has warm’d! / Ye children of nature, of fashion and whim, / He painted you all, all join to praise him.” To the West, there is the mask of comedy on the floor, the contemporary crest of the United States above and the words of the American poet, essayist and drama critic William Winter (1836–1917), from his poem “At Shakespeare’s Grave”: “There is not anything of human trial / That ever love deplored or sorrow knew, / No glad fulfilment and no sad denial / Beyond the pictured truth that Shakespeare drew.” The arrangement of the Exhibition Gallery suggests a history, which takes us from East to West, like the symbolic geography of the capital, from England to the United States, from tragedy to comedy, from an old world to a new one, from the distant past, the periods of Elizabeth and Garrick, to the present (and future) of America, a history of progress. These contrasts and juxtapositions become crucial once we include the main reading room in our considerations. Running parallel to the Exhibition Gallery, the main reading room is the heart of the Folger. It is a gigantic Tudor hall, which forms a complete contrast to the art déco exterior. Several conflicting perspectives emerge: whereas the Exhibition Gallery looks from East to West, the perspective in the main reading room is clearly from West to East, towards the copy of the Stratford monument and the portraits and urns of the Folgers, from the modern world not simply back into history, but towards transcendental value offered by it. At the same time, the conflict between the Tudor reading room and the art déco façade – between inside and outside – remains unresolved. The Folgers wanted the scholars to be able to work in surroundings reminiscent of Shakespeare’s England, whereas the architect saw the need to adapt the outside of the building to the classical style of its surroundings. But this only explains the conflicting intentions of those involved. As the exterior of the building and the interior of the main reading room, the container and its contents, now exist beside each other, their conflict marks both the attempt to appropriate Shakespeare in the idiom of imperial classicism and the impossibility of doing this in any way other than by ingesting it whole. Today, there is an addition, the so-called new reading room, built in the early 1980s, which forms a striking contrast both to the old Tudor one just north of it and to the building’s exterior. Its colours are simple white and sand, its shape based on rectangle and semi-circle. The barrel vault, defying the laws of gravity, hangs from the ceiling. From its edges and perforations indirect light streams into the room, creating a space of unearthly meditative beauty without obvious historical associations; where they are perceptible, they are to an idealized form of late eighteenth-century architecture, the period when Shakespeare acquired his universal role. Strikingly, but not surprisingly, the American rhetoric of Shakespeare’s universality,

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and paradoxically their special rights in him, resembled the one used in Germany for the same purpose before the war. As Slade suggestively remarked at Henry Folger’s funeral: “It was probably more by chance than by conscious direction that active operations looking to the construction of the Memorial building began on an Armistice Day. That anniversary is the annual reminder of the human kinship written large in Shakespeare’s plays” (Slade, 1931, 70). The Folger may not be a sculpture in the narrow sense defined at the beginning. But its sculpted exterior, its location, its association with a culture of memory and the role, ascribed to it of connecting a community with a great personality, make it a perfect monument – even a monument in the Elizabethan sense if we consider the fact that the founders of the library are buried in it. Indeed, it is this connection between the Bard and the monument that ensures that any piece of Shakespearean sculpture, from the small tourist knick-knack to the Folger Shakespeare Library, is both an act of memorialization and an aesthetic and ideological comment upon the multifarious cultural usages of “Shakespeare”.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Dobson, Michael (1992). The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Engler, Balz (1997). “Stratford and the Canonization of Shakespeare”. European Journal of English Studies 1.3, 354–66. ——(1999). “Shakespeare, Washington, Lincoln: The Folger Shakespeare Library and the American Appropriation of the Bard”, at http://pages.unibas.ch/shine/shine_folgerwf.htm ——(2002). “Der Stein sich leise hebt: Das Shakespeare-Denkmal in Weimar”. ShakespeareJahrbuch 139, 146–60. Hartmann, S. (1901). Shakespeare in Art. London: L. C. Page. Janson, H. W. (1985). Nineteenth-Century Sculpture. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Jonson, Ben [1609] (1925–53). The Masque of Queenes. In Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, VII, 267–317. Kimberley, M. (1989). Lord Ronald Gower’s Monument to Shakespeare. Stratford: The Stratfordupon-Avon Society. Lee, Sidney (1906). “The Commemoration of Shakespeare in London”. In Shakespeare and the Modern Stage, with Other Essays. London: John Murray, 214–42. Michalski, S. (1998). Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997. London: Reaktion Books. Roscoe, I. (1994). “The Monument to the Memory of Shakespeare”. Church Monuments 9, 72–82. Slade, W. (1931). “The Significance of the Folger Shakespeare Memorial: An Essay towards an Interpretation”. In Henry Clay Folger. New Haven: Privately printed, 41–71.

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SHAKESPEARE EXHIBITION AND FESTIVAL CULTURE Mark Thornton Burnett

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his chapter discusses the policies and ideologies underpinning Shakespeare exhibitions and festivals. Once enshrined as a crucial element of national celebrations in Britain, and now often financed globally by corporate sponsorship, festivals represent a development of the Shakespearean franchise, involving issues of internationalism, patronage and access. As this discussion reveals, particular anniversaries are often selected for celebration, supporting occasions that span, variously, the activities of galleries, the repertory choices of theatres and the cultural projections of educational institutions. The uses of Shakespeare in exhibitions and festivals throughout the world, as is argued here, are complementary and point up distinctive assumptions about the author and his period. Accordingly, via a series of case studies, six thematic areas will be explored. Firstly, I engage with the question of the historical influence exercised by the Stratford-upon-Avon Jubilee of 1769. Secondly, I consider the extent to which this seminal moment in the reification of Shakespeare spawned a dialogue about the Bard that brought national and international forces into play. Thirdly, I examine the tensions between pilgrimage and tourism in expressions of Shakespearean festive culture, arguing that both serve similar ends. Fourthly, I turn to the role of the text in the celebratory Shakespearean impulse: arresting is the fact that it is not so much the sanctity of the word that is privileged as a looser set of meanings precipitated by the Bardic name. Any act of commemoration is dependent upon its shaping contexts: thus, the fifth movement of the chapter centres upon the ways in which particular historical junctures determine the complexion of Shakespearean construction on a global basis. Lastly, and sixthly, I assess the relationship between commerce and education. Both are at work in Shakespeare exhibition and festival culture, I maintain, and in a way that discloses their mutually constitutive significance. Across the chapter, I suggest that these six thematic areas have a common point of origin and possess characteristics that are strikingly continuous. Shakespeare, in his festive and exhibited instantiation, offers a rationale for, and serves as the crystallization of, values of aesthetic achievement and spiritual connection that are consistently taken up and reinvigorated. Or, to put the point in another way, Shakespeare emerges from celebration as inspiring and transcendent, even as an instrument of moral and educative improvement. What distinguishes an exhibition from a festival is worth pausing over. An exhibition, often linked into a festival, has at its core a display or demonstration of some kind, invariably of an artefact or property associated with Shakespeare in his bookish or theatrical guise. By contrast, a festival is marked, as Douglas Lanier writes, as a “short

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[theatrical] season” that takes place over the summer, as unfolding in a “public space”, as enjoying the status of a “‘destination’” event, as having “local and regional associations” and as attached to “educational outreach programmes” (Lanier, 2002, 154). Shared traits embrace populist interpretations of Shakespeare, a quasi-democratic orientation and an espousal of traditionalist images and motifs, to the extent that, as Dennis Kennedy notes, festivals make visible their affiliations with the “religious festivals of ancient Greece, which for the theatre were idealized as arenas of . . . integration” (Kennedy, 2009, 102). Festivals are numerous and extensive – sixteen years ago, a count identified 150 in the US alone (Engle, Londré and Watermeier, 1995, vii) – and, generally speaking, are organized either around Shakespeare’s date of birth (taken to be 23 April 1564, St George’s Day) or his death (which, conveniently, is also 23 April 1616). But these are only the immediate temporal co-ordinates. All manner of other occasions, such as Armada Day, the 1623 publication of the First Folio, the 1769 Jubilee, the opening of Stratford-upon-Avon’s first purpose-built theatre and the anniversary of the National Gallery, can attract a Shakespearean festive imprimatur. Shakespeare’s cultural prestige anchors expressions of artistic quality and aspiration in more than one sense and in more than one venue, as the festivals of the various Globe theatres also attest. Shakespeare’s Globe in London is matched by others in, for example, Germany and the US, each of which claims Bardic credentials in the same moment as advertising traditions of performative excellence. A festival is a means of affirming the enduring nature of Shakespeare in the same way that Shakespeare operates as the necessary foundation for many forms of festive practice.

I Any consideration of Shakespeare and the festival begins, of necessity, with the 1769 Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon conceived of, and presided over, by David Garrick, the London impresario. Extending over three days, and comprising of musical interludes, poetic recitals, a masked ball, dinners, a firework display and a horse-race, Garrick’s paean to the Bard helped inaugurate the dominant conception of Shakespeare in the popular consciousness, as a string of encomiums composed for the occasion suggests. Written in anticipation of the Jubilee and delivered as an epilogue at the Drury Lane theatre, a verse by Garrick runs: My eyes, till then, no sights like this will see, Unless we meet at Shakespeare’s Jubilee! On AVON’s bank where flowers eternal blow! There let no revel, shew our fond regard, On that lov’d spot, first breath’d our matchless BARD; To him we honour, gratitude is due, To him we owe our all – to him, and you. (Garrick, 1785, II, 426) Clearly, there is an economic imperative here: Garrick uses the opportunity of a London performance to advertise his forthcoming extravaganza, with the reference to “owe”, and the extolling of the audience, indicating the fiscal and patron–client nexus in which the speaker is implicated. But there is also in evidence a more ethereal – and less material – elaboration of the Jubilee’s importance. Crucially, Garrick’s discovery of Shakespeare is a pastoral one and serves to forge a lasting idea of the dramatist as a creature of the bucolic

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world. Classical discourses are reanimated in Garrick’s address to establish the interpretive parameters within which Shakespeare’s greatness can be celebrated. At the same time, allusions to the creation myth function so as to discover Shakespeare as a representative of primacy and divinity. There is, then, in the flattery of his clientele, a vivid sense of eighteenth-century social decorum and the institutional hierarchies that Garrick was obliged to acknowledge, but there is also the suggestion that the Jubilee itself is to be recognized as the commemoration of an extraordinary Bardic genesis. Of course, the Stratford-upon-Avon Jubilee showcased Garrick’s ambitions to solidify his reputation just as powerfully as it did a desire to hymn the Bard. As Michael Dobson notes, self-promotion was the order of the day for Garrick during the proceedings, with the actor-manager carving out a place for himself as “Prince . . . Hamlet [and] . . . Ghost” (Dobson, 1992, 171), a type of author in his own right. Part of Garrick’s agenda was to court favour and broadcast the cultural authority of London; protestations of universality notwithstanding, the Jubilee was nothing less than socially exclusive, critical of provincialism and approving of metropolitan interests. Yet, these personal considerations aside, the 1769 festivities, in hindsight, were more striking for sounding the key notes in what was to become the Shakespeare industry. Typical are the lines dedicated to the need for Shakespearean remembrance: IMMORTAL be his name, His memory, his fame! Nature and her works we see! Matchless Shakespeare, full in thee! Join’d by everlasting tyes, Shakespeare but with Nature dies. (Garrick, 1785, II, 434) Prominent here is the attention given to testimony, with Shakespeare’s singularity appearing as such because it is witnessed. In addition, it is suggested, the incomparable qualities of Shakespeare are familiarly located, for the Bard is seen as the sublime offspring of “Nature”, and he and his mother are locked in a symbiotic relationship. Above all, according to the verse, what distinguishes Shakespeare is his claim to perpetuity. By recollecting Shakespeare, and by contemplating the past, we might better confront the present, the argument runs, the associated idea being that memory and the Bard are customary bedfellows.

II But the 1769 Jubilee was not just enmeshed in Stratford-upon-Avon or even London: it was deeply bound up with the fortunes and status of the nation. Jonathan Bate argues that the occasion served to create Shakespeare as “the National Poet” (Bate, 1989, 30), while Michael Dobson adds that a concomitant effect was “Bardolatry’s rise to orthodoxy as a national religion” (Dobson, 1992, 6). Garrick’s own elaboration of the festival bears out these reflections, not least in his ditty, “Warwickshire”: Our SHAKESPEARE compar’d is to no man, Nor Frenchman, nor Grecian, nor Roman, Their swans are all geese, to the Avon’s sweet swan, And the man of all men, was a Warwickshire man . . . (Garrick, 1785, II, 428)

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The “Our” is revealing, pointing as it does to issues of ownership and possession at a time of fledgling imperialism. Illuminating, too, is the differentiation between goose and swan: the verse deploys a vocabulary of taxonomy and systems of animal classification to situate Shakespeare as an elevated breed. Despite its seeming subscription to county pride, “Warwickshire” is, in fact, directed towards asserting the intrinsic worth of Shakespeare as a distinctive national symbol. The notion went further, for, once the celebrations were completed, Garrick penned their narrative in a theatrical piece for a Drury Lane run; The Jubilee features a comic “stage Irishman” who, bemused by the processions before him, asks oafish questions only to fall into a drunken sleep. The satirical drama operates so as to set out normative and anti-normative positions and, as Ramona Wray comments, derives its impact from the application of “charged indicators of cultural inferiority” (Wray, 1997, 235). But, given historical conditions and movement, Shakespeare could only remain a national cipher for so long, and England’s relations with its “others” would shift into newer contours. More often than not in later periods, the prevailing mood meant that a substantial collocation of nation-states, building upon local trajectories of adaptation and appropriation, were able to stake a claim to Shakespeare as their own, as belonging to unique national traditions. Emerging from this plurality of “Shakespeares” are the unique features of modernity – the gradual diminishing of a singular national identification and an increase in cross-country and multi-denominational initiatives. At the birthday festivities in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1912, for example, according to the official programme, the will to commemorate the Bard “has become almost international in interest and importance”, and this is in spite of components that would seem to pull in the opposite direction, such as the ceremonial unfurling of the flags of the empire and the accompanying exhibition of English “Banners and Surcoats of Knights” (Shakespeare Festival Celebrations, 1912, 21, 15). The instancing of the term “international”, and the insertion of the qualifying “almost”, are of interest, refracting, as they do, anxieties about the situation in Europe and the beginnings of deterritorialization. More stridently, across the Atlantic, at the roughly contemporaneous moment of 1916, Percy MacKaye, the American author of Caliban by the Yellow Sands, a pageant-masque staged at the Lewisohn Stadium, the City College of New York, could with greater confidence declare that his tercentenary celebrations demonstrated how Shakespeare’s “uninterable spirit” might “create new splendid symbols for peace through harmonious international expression” (MacKaye, 1916, xiii). The unambiguous assertion of internationalism here alerts us to a newer national–cultural configuration, one less dependent on the assumptions of empire and more reliant upon the meshing and mobilization of disparate interests. A loosening and diffusion where Shakespeare was concerned was becoming detectable across the course of the twentieth century, a process characterized by an acceleration of exchange, conversation and common preoccupations. Hence, a Hamlet festival staged at Kronborg Castle, Elsinore, in 1950 serves, in the words of contemporary publicity, to “strengthen the ties between” Britain and Denmark and to make a “contribution to cultural relations” (Kronborg Castle, Elsinore, 1950, 13), the language conjuring the realities of the Cold War and the pulling together of European partners. And, by 1964, the subscription to Shakespeare’s international potential and qualifications had been firmly established. For the quatercentenary, public discourse finally caught up with the earlier American example, as Dr Levi Fox’s addresses outside the recently established Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive in Stratford-upon-Avon made clear. The year,

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he announced, “offers the great opportunity of furthering international understanding”, adding that the “international Shakespeare would be the point of emphasis” (Shakespeare Exhibition Press Cuttings, 1963, n.p.). Nor did this prediction prove insubstantial, for, as events in 1964 proved, prominent among the delights to be sampled in England was an “Exhibition of Foreign Translations of Shakespeare’s Works” and a display devoted to “400 Years of Shakespeare in Czechoslovakia” (Four Hundredth Anniversary, 1964, 2, 17), all in the interests of entertaining both “our own countrymen and . . . visitors from overseas” (The Shakespeare Exhibition, 1564–1964, 1964, 2). Imperceptibly, Shakespeare had been robbed via memorialization of some of his Englishness; Stratford-upon-Avon might still be the locus, the point of departure, but the concern was now with the world’s relation to Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s relation to the world. If Englishness was partly vitiated, so, too, was English, with the privileging of the Bard’s works in other languages suggesting a more capacious and less straitjacked conception of his orbits of circulation. And, although this was not the first time, in elaborating Shakespeare as the touchstone for various kinds of “understanding”, the 1964 quatercentenary spotlighted the advantages that might accrue from the Bard’s political deployments. Writing on the politics of museum display, Michael Baxandall maintains that “the juxtaposition of objects from different cultural systems signals to the viewer not only the variety of such systems, but the cultural relativity of his own concepts and values” (Baxandall, 1991, 40). Something approximating to this effect would seem to be at work in the most recent festive stagings of Shakespeare, stagings that subsume the national within a less bordered purview of Shakespearean activity. To put the point more precisely, the character of world politics in the late twentieth and early twenty–first centuries determines that an individual nation-state’s engagement with Shakespeare must, of necessity, acknowledge diversity, cross-pollination and dialogue. In Poland, for example, the Shakespeare Festival in Gda´nsk, which is organized by the Theatrum Gedanense, is angled towards spotlighting the city as a place for the meeting of cultures. The focus falls on harking back to the tradition of “foreign” theatrical companies visiting Gda´nsk, with a concomitant spirit of internationalism finding its roots in the early modern period. By the same token, festivals in the US, such as that at Ashland, Oregon, aspire to the promotion of a “repertory” possessing “a decidedly international flavour” (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2002, 1), the category of “international” here serving as a signifier of quality and distinction. And the trade in what is not of the nation is reciprocal: countries subscribing to Shakespearean festivals participate in importing and exporting particular productions so as to lend each representational endeavour kudos and credibility. Hence, if the policy of Ashland, Oregon, is to look beyond itself, then this is also an informing directive in some Asian enterprises; as Audrey Stanley writes of a 1994 Shanghai international Shakespeare festival, the presence of non-Chinese theatrical companies constituted “a reaching out for wider connections . . . a goal we can all support and recognize” (Stanley, 1996, 80). Internationalism, then, has become the watchword for many types of Shakespeare exhibition and festival in modernity. The development points up the extent to which there is no one “system” but a plethora of Shakespearean “systems” that sensitize spectators and audiences to “cultural relativity”. No longer is Shakespeare a body of meaning to be seized upon by a single organization, claims to ownership having dissolved in a more general sharing of his numerous utilizations. Interestingly, overlapping with these developments is the appearance of a conceptual category of Shakespeare exhibition and festival culture that takes us one step beyond

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the “international” designation. Two parallel examples, in different countries, illustrate the point. The typical approach of the well-known Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Ontario, has been criticized for purveying, in Ric Knowles’ words, “romantic, nostalgic and . . . a-historical images”, with the effect that “essentialist” thinking is endorsed and the “social” is effaced (Knowles, 2004, 106, 108). Yet, in the wake of objections and suggestions, a change in direction could be detected; the 2006 season was notable for staging Harlem Duet, “a prequel to Othello” (Kidnie, 2009, 70) by Djanet Sears, a black woman playwright, and, in 2009, announcements from the directorate made clear an investment in further innovation “with respect to race” (Parolin, 2009, 206). What this demonstrates is not so much a move away from Shakespeare’s language, and still less a rejection of a national-Canadian theatrical culture, but an enfolding (and thus concealing) of the “international” inside the “global”, a term that is increasingly the norm in this particular festival’s publicity. It is as if “international” – because it contains traces of the “nation”, a construction that the twin ciphers of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century conflict and transnationalism have arguably made problematic – entails interpretive difficulties or inconsistencies and needs to be replaced by another discourse, one that is more representative and less value-laden. What occurred at Stratford, Ontario, is stated with greater force at Stratford-uponAvon, England, as the so-called RSC Complete Works Festival, which took place from 2006 to 2007, shows. Katherine Duncan-Jones describes the event as an “artistic free-forall”, writing that “it was impossible . . . to identify any coherent overview, narrative, or larger concept” (Duncan-Jones, 2007, 354, 355), yet this is to miss one of the underlying purposes, which was to showcase, according to Jonathan Bate, “variety [in] . . . many languages and production styles” (Smith, Valls-Russell and Bradley, 2007, 4), as is reflected in the Munich Kammerspiele’s Othello in modern German, the Kuwaiti Culture Project’s Richard III: An Arab Tragedy and Tim Supple’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its multilingual cast. Crucially, in celebrating in Stratford-upon-Avon openness and collaboration – kinds of receptivity – the festival brought home what Michael Boyd, the RSC Director, aimed at – “a truly global event” (Complete Works, 2007, 1). The notion was embedded throughout, but is particularly in evidence in the production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which combined the talents of the Portuguese-speaking Brazilian company, Nós do Moro, and the English-speaking company, Gallery 37, thus providing an experience of cultural interchange for performers and audience alike. Here, as elsewhere, a bringing together of stated global interests is the prompt for a species of transformation and liberating theatrical scenarios. Arguably, the most expressive instance of the diminution of the national and the foregrounding of the global is to be found in the 2010 Shakespeare-Iqbal Festival, which, taking place in Stratford-upon-Avon, was billed specifically as a celebration of “world poetry and music”. The governing idea, according to the programme, was to place in fruitful juxtaposition “Islamic and European traditions” (Shakespeare-Iqbal Festival, 2010, 2), the chief instruments for the initiative being Muhammad Iqbal, the modern Pakistani poet and philosopher, and Shakespeare himself. Particularly striking in publicity was the studied avoidance of national signifiers; Iqbal is associated with “a separate homeland for . . . Muslims” (4), while Shakespeare at no point is credited with English or British origins or allegiances. The strategy bespeaks, of course, a particular conjunction of late twentiethand early twenty-first century political considerations, but it also communicates the mediating role of Shakespeare as a perceived force for a species of co-operation unconstrained

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by geographical barriers. In this connection, it is similarity that is stressed, a similarity that takes the form of a “bond of . . . humanity, charity, religious and social tolerance” (7). In keeping with the homogenizing tendencies of globalization, areas of difference are flattened out in a project that seeks to elevate a common cultural denominator. In this festive encounter, it is not so much Shakespeare’s dominating influence in the “world” that is emphasized as the role he might play as one member of a “world” community.

III Although taking place centuries earlier, as noted, Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee helped to flag up many of the elements that were to contribute the formation of Stratford-upon-Avon’s global tourist industry. Key to the celebration was, in Jonathan Bate’s words, the construction of Stratford-upon-Avon as “a shrine and . . . pilgrimage” (Bate, 1989, 30) destination: to visit the site, it was argued, was to engage in a form of worship and to recognize important sources of spirituality. The idea was constantly promulgated. A verse composed for an 1830 Shakespeare festival in Stratford-upon-Avon illustrates the point, the poet intoning: To thee, great Shakespeare! Would the fond muse bring Each tender flower that comes with dewy spring – With amaranthus buds she would entwine A festal garland for the poet’s shrine! (Collection of the Late Captain James Saunders, 1830, 60r) Over and above the self-evident seasonal references, which confirm Shakespeare’s relation to natural rhythms and a subscription to Romantic bardolatry, the passage is of note for its elaboration of a sanctified Stratford-upon-Avon and a deified Bard. It was in terms of a cult of veneration that the public image of Shakespeare was invariably associated. The shrine and the relic are often indissoluble from each other, and Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee was no exception to this rule. To honour the occasion, all manner of souvenirs were manufactured, such as sashes, medals and curios supposedly carved from Shakespeare’s “original” mulberry tree. Susan Stewart writes that, through the souvenir, “external experience is internalized”: appropriate objects, she notes, meet the “insatiable demands for nostalgia” and offer an empowering “narrative discourse . . . with regard to . . . origins” (Stewart, 1993, 134, 135, 136). Whether it is mugs, key rings or tea-towels, the souvenirs purveyed at Shakespeare festivals discharge such functions, allowing their possessors an illusion of mastery through remembrance and granting the past particular significances. At the Hamlet festival held at Kronborg Castle, Elsinore, in 1950, for example, a Shakespearean spoon was minted to commemorate the event. As the accompanying figure indicates, ownership of items linked to festive encounters is akin to enjoying both a world citizenship and a type of Shakespearean immortality. Acquisition of the souvenir places the owner in a superior category and, in the case of the spoon, affirms an additional subliminal suggestion – that union with Shakespeare can take place via ingestion, incorporation and communion. In this way, remembering Shakespeare and memorializing Shakespeare are equally important dimensions of exhibition and festival culture (Fig. 24.1). Functioning in these capacities, the souvenir is distinctive for summoning “traces of authentic experience” (Stewart, 1993, 134). To a greater or lesser extent, all Shakespeare exhibitions and festivals are premised on, and organized around, prioritizing

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Figure 24.1: Souvenir from the Hamlet Festival at Kronborg Castle, Elsinore, 1950. From Festpillene PAA Kronborg (København: S. Johnsen, 1950), p. 18

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the “authentic” in various ways. In different venues, and in discrete instantiations, the urge is foregrounded – the Shakespeare Festival in Gda´nsk, for example, aims ultimately at the reconstruction of an “authentic” Elizabethan-style playhouse, while central to the “Searching for Shakespeare” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2006 was, in Tarnya Cooper’s words, establishing the “claim” of the “Chandos portrait . . . to being an authentic lifetime portrait of the playwright” (Cooper, 2006, 33). As conjurations of Shakespeare, exhibitions and festivals dedicated to the Bard reference history as part of an attempt to resurrect history, using memory, performance and myth as tools of reanimation. The greater the sense of the authentic, the more successfully, it seems, can the process be realized. But the difficulty, of course, is that festival goers in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries inhabit the condition of postmodernity in which, as Jean Baudrillard notes, a “principle of simulation, and not of reality” is observed and in which “reality itself founders in hyperrealism” (Baudrillard, 1988, 120, 144) and simulacra. In addition, any attachment to the spiritual valences of Shakespeare has surely been compromised in the light of a related historical development, the apparent replacement of the culture of pilgrimage by the industry of mass tourism. As Nicola J. Watson states, Shakespeare’s modern and postmodern fortunes are deeply enmeshed in a larger “decline in religious sensibility” (Watson, 2007, 200) and a concomitant secularization of what had been enshrined institutional practices. Yet, as reflection on interrelated exhibitions and festivals suggests, the working expressions of Shakespearean culture are diverse and are not always in agreement with their surrounding circumstances. As far as Shakespeare in his festive manifestation is concerned, it is inevitably repetitions rather than divergences that impress. Notwithstanding the circulations of metonyms for the Shakespearean, the majority of festivals give credence to the recovery of the entity of the Bard, and accommodate a desire for his material points of departure, even if in a mystifying fashion. To adapt Catherine Silverstone’s assessment of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre: the institution “seeks relentlessly to make Shakespeare and his London concretely present” (Silverstone, 2005, 35). Many festivals publicly canvass their lineage and connections with the events that signalled a religious celebration. In addition, the language of pilgrimage and sacralization does not die out: it is merely refashioned and readjusted. In the tumultuous years of World War Two, for example, marked by “ruins in our cities . . . guns and the bursting of bombs”, a familiar vocabulary was utilized: “Year by year”, the 1941 Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare festival programme declares, “hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have come to hear our greatest actors and actresses declaim the immortal lines” (Theatre World Souvenir, 1941, 2). Distinctive in this formulation is the “pilgrim” as a bastion of cultural preservation in the midst of despoliation and disaster. A complementary enlistment of the figure is evidenced in an endorsement for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2002: “people today”, it is asserted, “openly acknowledge Ashland . . . as a place . . . for renewal. They have transformed from playgoing tourists into pilgrims [and are] . . . refreshed in spirit” (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2002, 82, 83). In a reversal of the customary trope, and a neat bypassing of the event’s status as commodity, the passage mobilizes spiritual signifiers as part of its approval of the festival’s salient contribution. This does not amount to a reinforcement of established religion, however; the wording is not pushed specifically in that direction. Rather, the emphasis falls on issues of reclamation and reinvigoration, which are themselves mediated through an endorsement of popular constructions culled from psychology and therapy. Healing and holistic recovery are drawn attention to, with the idea being

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that this is an inner and not an outer journey, a journey for the benefit of the individual. Via a discovery of personal growth and care of the self, we witness the continuing life of a much older concept as it is remodelled to answer to present demands and expectations.

IV The “book”, writes Barbara Hodgdon, “remains the clearest channel for Shakespearean evangelism” (Hodgdon, 1998, 202). From the evidence of Shakespeare exhibitions and festivals, however, a less centralized conception of text comes into view. If we take the example of the 1769 Jubilee, first, it is clear that Shakespeare’s language played only a minor role. “Not a single Shakespearean play was performed or even directly quoted” (Dobson, 1992, 214), and this is all the more remarkable in that the event was partly constructed as paying homage to Shakespeare’s facility with poetry and verse. Second, at the other end of the chronological spectrum, if we reflect on the ways in which the RSC Complete Works Festival of 2006 to 2007 was imagined, it is clear that, similarly, the word did not feature prominently, with several productions trading upon either a wordless approach or a transformation of Shakespearean language into related idioms and vocabularies. Notwithstanding claims to the contrary, the activities that constitute the Shakespearean festive impulse would not seem to be directed towards preserving the book of the Bard, and its manifold significances, as the point of entrance into larger kinds of appreciation. Yet, across the course of Shakespearean festive history, another pattern presents itself. If there is a constant, it is that the text – or simply text – comes in and out of focus. At times, this is prioritized, as befits the particular occasion, but, at other times, this is subsumed within, and mediated by, other forms of cultural representation. On the one hand, the First Folio of 1623 is held up as the material manifestation of Shakespearean distinction and achievement. Discussing the traditional display practices of museums, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes that “objects are . . . set in context by means of other objects, often in relation to a classification or schematic arrangement of some kind, based on typologies of form or proposed historical relationships” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998, 21), and such a procedure was abundantly exemplified in the British Museum Shakespeare Exhibition of 1923 mounted to coincide with the volume’s tercentenary. As the printed rationale notes, “the desire to give to the First Folio and its three successors the place of honour has governed the arrangement of the exhibition”, and it continues, “Placed in a pair of showcases facing the visitor as he walks up the King’s Library they should catch his eye the moment he enters” (British Museum, 1923, 3). Reflected in the structure of the exhibition is a keen sense of gradated importance and value, not least in the extent to which the First Folio is envisioned as the father, or well-spring, of other Shakespearean instantiations. Nothing could be more significant than the First Folio, it is implied: the book overshadows all else, other literatures occupying secondary and tertiary positions. Moreover, both the suggestion that the Folio represents the defining moment towards which Shakespeare’s career had progressed and the consistent use of socially-freighted terms (the Bard is seen as a sublime dinner guest) establish the exhibition as an exercise in taxonomy. Shakespeare’s book is in a class – or classification – of its own. If the 1623 First Folio is the first point of connection in 1923, by 1964, the quatercentenary, it is the last, the order having been reversed. In a touring Shakespeare exhibition devised to realizing the writer’s life, the “time traveller” moves through a number of reconstructed scenarios

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before arriving at First Folio, whose status as a crowning accomplishment is signalled by its placement on a pedestal at the exhibition’s conclusion (The Shakespeare Exhibition, 1564–1964, 1964, 68). This, we are led to believe, is the chief object through which Shakespeare must be remembered. On the other hand, it can be argued that the text – and text – are not always the only frames of reference. In the very same 1964 exhibition, for example, the “time traveller” is introduced to related contact zones for the Shakespearean, including music, “miniatures” and “jewellery”, “sculptures” and “cut-outs”, “paintings” and a “panorama” of London (The Shakespeare Exhibition, 1564–1964, 1964, 62, 63, 64, 66), suggesting that the aural and the visual are rich resources for communicating an illusion of the past. There is tactility here, and an appeal to sensory experience, that take away from the more rarefied elevation and sanctifying of the printed book. Where pertinent, the part of text in exhibitions and festivals recedes substantially. Hence, in the exhibition adjoining Shakespeare’s Globe in London, the First Folio is simply gestured towards via the presence of a seventeenthcentury printing-press and substituted for in a cornucopia of interactivity – witnessing an actor transform himself into a Shakespearean heroine, testing an authentic musical instrument, finding out about Elizabethan special effects, joining in role-play. Clearly, the agenda centres on the re-creation of performance and the pre-eminent cultural niche occupied by Shakespeare’s Globe in this regard. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the exhibition should also draw attention to the nexus of corporate sponsorships that made the theatre possible. The effect of privileging multiple engagements with performance is that words are lost; as Diana Henderson observes of the exhibition, “it was nearly impossible to take in the information displayed . . . the assumption [was that] nobody really wanted to stand and read text” (Henderson, 2002, 121). More broadly, what is discovered in the exhibition at Shakespeare’s Globe is the recent predilection for mixing and matching a whole host of routes to Shakespeare, words blurring with more dynamically conceived kinds of participation and representation. These various elements do not so much compete with each other as contribute to a composite Shakespearean experience. Thus, at the Complete Works Festival of 2006 to 2007, several film showings were billed at the same time as the scheduled theatrical performances with no prioritization being given to either medium. By the same token, at the St Louis Shakespeare Festival in the US in 2008, a prize was awarded for the best seven-minute film of a Shakespeare scene, a move that signalled the attention being paid to film in festivals otherwise premised merely on theatrical Bardic embodiments. In these manifestations of Shakespeare exhibition and theatrical culture, at least, the book yields up to a late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century investment in the plethora of mass media.

V Textual utterances betray their contextual anchorage, and a further constant typifying Shakespeare exhibition and festival culture is the way in which local and global developments mirror themselves in events particularly concerned with the Bard’s transcendent status. Dictating the form of the 1769 Jubilee, as we have seen, was the project of Garrick, its originator, to cement his own place in theatrical posterity. By contrast, the factors underlying Caliban by the Yellow Sands, the pageant-masque staged in New York in 1916, had less to do with Percy MacKaye, its Shakespeare-loving author, as with the broader issue of immigration. As the script for the production reveals, paternalistic ideology insists

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that Caliban, a creature of “brute force and ignorance” in urgent need of “education”, stands as synecdoche for the various community groups of a “still polyglot population” (MacKaye, 1916, xv, xvii, 152) that took part in performances. According to the conceit of Caliban by the Yellow Sands, Shakespeare’s art is the means of bringing together and at the same time reforming a disparate assembly of participants, many of whom had only recently departed from their places of origin. Thomas Cartelli summarizes the state of affairs when he states that a key imperative for MacKaye was “how best to ‘Americanize’ the newly arrived masses . . . and introduce them to the standards and obligations of Anglo-Saxon culture” (Cartelli, 1999, 63). Beyond the idealized tableaux of Caliban by the Yellow Sands lay the material realities of one of the twentieth century’s most far-reaching demographic transformations. Those first waves of immigration in modernity were themselves the products of global conflict, as several formulations in the pageant-masque seem to suggest. Personifications of “War, Lust, and Death” (MacKaye, 1916, xiii), and the expansion into a character of Caliban’s mother, Setebos, speak loudly of the spectres and horrors of World War One. To celebrate Shakespeare in periods of wartime placed some of the humanitarian myths associated with him under severe pressure; not surprisingly, therefore, particularly during World War One , it was a Bardic rhetoric of possession and victory that, in ways both agonistic and complementary, was promulgated by English and German interpretive constituencies. World War Two brought the qualities of a celebratory Shakespeare into sharper focus. Notably, the reparative potential of Shakespeare assumed a greater purchase. A 1941 Stratford-upon-Avon festival programme, for example, acknowledges wartime by stating that the “words of Shakespeare will rise to join the song of the birds” (Theatre World Souvenir, 1941, 2), the asseveration suggesting a heavenly union that counters the appalling experience of separation and division. Cast in a comparable mould is the impulse behind the Shakespeare Festival in Gda´nsk. As Russell Jackson reveals, the “aim is . . . to enliven the cultural life of this great . . . Hanseatic port which in its time has been the victim of tragic circumstances, most notably the destruction of most of its city centre at the end of the Second World War” (Jackson, 2007, 93). In this instance, an equation is posited between the revival of Shakespeare and the recuperation of the city’s fortunes. Reconstruction as a leitmotif, indeed, keeps pace with the acceleration of Shakespeare festivals after World War Two, gaining in centrality. The present had been seen to be traumatic, but Shakespeare in his conventional appearances held out the prospect of a recovery of faith, of the survival of continuities. He would offer a route out of the impasse and, in so doing, would have his claim to timelessness affirmed. These narratives gained energy from the cessation of hostilities in the postwar period; they also chimed with the ways in which attitudes to Shakespeare were increasingly inflected by political developments, including a commitment to decolonization and anti-imperialism. One of the hallmarks of the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Shakespeare festival, as we have seen, is a spirit of internationalism, a spirit that in turn brings to mind the democratic and plural aspirations of the theatrical cultures of modernity more generally. The RSC Complete Works Festival of 2006 to 2007 is perhaps the most eloquent instance of the phenomenon. And that belief in internationalism continues, even if subliminally, to be premised on anxieties that the world conflicts of the twentieth century may yet be repeated. The subtext behind the 2010 Shakespeare-Iqbal Festival of World Poetry and Music is the escalation of tensions between, on the one hand, Britain and the US and, on the other, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan: neither the history nor the present deadlock

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can be explicitly acknowledged, so publicity for the event takes refuge in a vaguer, poetic discourse of “the East and the West” (Shakespeare-Iqbal Festival, 2010, 6). Yet the backdrop still intrudes, not least in expressions such as “lasting links” and “endeavours towards . . . cohesion” (5, 6), whose forward-looking tenor alerts us to a situation as yet only imperfectly resolved. Festive Shakespeares are erected on paradox, for they disseminate myths of a-historicity in the same moment as they disclose the specific histories to which they owe their existence.

VI As the Shakespeare-Iqbal Festival’s interest in the will “to promulgate . . . ideals” (Shakespeare-Iqbal Festival, 2010, 7) suggests, Shakespeare is deemed valuable because his works teach and instruct. These educative aspects of Shakespeare festival and exhibition culture legitimize and underpin his commercial possibility. The process is two-way, for, in order to be commercial, festive enactments of Shakespeare are also required to demonstrate an equivalent educative component. Despite its emphasis on spiritual edification, the 1769 Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon still needed to recoup its financial losses, and it was only after Garrick subsequently staged The Jubilee that he was able to turn this first popular celebration of the Bard to profit. Gaining financially from commemorating Shakespeare is of long historical duration. On occasions, it is the local economy that hopes to benefit. At the Hamlet Festival at Kronborg Castle, Elsinore, in 1950, for instance, the gold spoon advertisement refracts the entrepreneurial foresight of Copenhagen-based business interests. In 2007, the Fairmont Hotel in Washington DC, taking note of the city’s Shakespeare Festival, decided to enter the market more forcefully, announcing “The Romeo and Juliet Package”. “Shakespeare lovers” staying at the Fairmont, a brochure stated, “will enjoy a luxurious guestroom with a balcony overlooking the hotel’s romantic courtyard garden, a DVD of Romeo and Juliet, and a ‘Love Potion’ for two” (Shakespeare in Washington, 2007, ii). All the necessary hallmarks of popular Shakespeare are here – such as romantic love, a sense of refinement and a pastoral connection – with the exception, perhaps, of the “Love Potion”, which, of course, is more strictly associated with joint suicide rather than a pleasant weekend getaway. On other occasions, the festival and commerce relation is integral to the consummation of the ambitions of national consortiums and organizations. The Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Ontario, is perhaps the most obvious example of an enterprise that deploys a variety of methods, including a cosmopolitan imaginary and the backing of the corporate sector, as part of a practical affirmation of the Canadian theatrical scene, but there are others. Exhibition and festival Shakespeares are no less powerfully global in conception and construction. The printed programme to the “Searching for Shakespeare” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2006, contains a “Sponsor’s Foreword” from none other than the Director of “Credit Suisse” (Cooper, 2006, 8), probably one of the largest of the Swiss banking federations and a major player in the international banking arena. Such transnational alliances bring in their train mutual advantages and invoke Shakespeare’s cultural worth so as the better to tap his economic capital. The global flavour of this foreword has the effect of authenticating the value of the partnership between what might appear to be divergent institutions. Elsewhere on the cultural scene, it is the educational purposes to which Shakespeare might be put that looms large as a theme, such programmes serving, in part, to warrant the inclusion in publicity

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of prominent sponsorship details. At Shakespeare’s Globe in London, which prides itself on an educational division of considerable power and scale, a “Schools’ Activity Book” is available for use: in it, students are invited to fill in the backgrounds for six characters planning a trip to see a Shakespeare play in the metropolis. Through a stress on performance, imaginative projection and subjective identification are canvassed, the idea being that empathy and invention bring us closer to a sense of Shakespearean realities. It is in more clearly identified festivals, however, that Shakespeare as education is most stridently enunciated. Typical is the way in which, during the RSC Complete Works Festival of 2006 to 2007, an “Embedded Writer Scheme” operated in tandem with traditional offerings; the persuasion behind the scheme was, presumably, that fledgling writers develop via exposure to Shakespeare and that Shakespeare is a tool for artistic production and encouragement. Comparable are the events billed at the Shakespeare Festival, Santa Cruz, in the US, in 1987 (classes at the local University of California campus and a “seminar for teachers” [Shakespeare: Santa Cruz, 1987, 19]) and at the Bath Shakespeare Festival, England, in 2003 (workshops for schools going under the title of a “Primary Shakespeare Marathon” [Bath Shakespeare Festival, 2003, 29]). In the former case, an agenda that simultaneously interfaces with higher education and empowers teachers in the community is the animating force; in the latter case, it is the suggestion that Shakespeare reveals the course consumer’s intellectual athleticism and endurance that is showcased. With both instances, it is the capacity of Shakespearean festive practice to engage other concerns and actors that is a defining structural feature. It is in the school or university that the educative role of Shakespeare takes on a particular urgency. Teaching and research institutions throughout the world, in common with other kinds of organization, arrange Shakespeare events – billed as festivals – for reasons of regional self-assertion, student enhancement and cultural appreciation. In 2008, as a member of a panel or jury, I attended two of these events, with the result that I was newly sensitized to the ways in which Shakespeare functions as a point of reference for the securing of social advantage and officially sanctioned kinds of success. At “Shakespeareana”, the festival of the students’ national symposium at the Universitatea “Duna˘rea de Jos” in Galat¸i, Romania, in April 2008, I was privileged to witness just how eagerly the name of Shakespeare could be taken up in efforts centred upon cementing widening participation and prospects. Academic papers given by students from throughout Romania concerned, for example, Shakespeare and the supernatural, Shakespeare and freemasonry, and Shakespeare and the miniature arts, among other subjects, suggesting an impressive array of approaches designed to illuminate the refining of intellectual skills. A series of performances (extracts from Shakespeare’s plays) demonstrated facility with other modalities of self-presentation, including the need to put forward a confident self to a discerning public. Shakespeare celebrated, it seems, was a means to self-improvement. In all of this, I was reminded of a rich historical lineage: individual performances took place in the “Gulliver Theatre” which, via an intimate interior and connections with traditions of puppetry, brought to mind both Elizabethan playing practices and the popular entertainments of Shakespeare’s Southwark. Similarly, the sight of backpacking students traversing the city streets suggested Galat¸i as a place of pilgrimage or, at least, pointed to a familiar trajectory of paying Shakespearean homage. At an event that, regrettably, has gone unacknowledged in the western canons of Shakespeare exhibition and festival culture, there were resonant connections. But to pay homage was also to participate in debate, as when, during a round-table discussion about the state of Shakespeare studies in Romania, students spoke

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Figure 24.2: The “Gulliver Theatre” in Galat¸i, Romania

with passion, commenting on how best academic consortium structures could be deployed to remedy a desperate shortage of books and bolster library provision. “Shakespeareana” celebrated Shakespeare, then, by remembering him, but it looked back only in order to contemplate the present and to anticipate a better future (Fig. 24.2). At the “Shakespeare Festival” at Aquinas Grammar School, Belfast, in December 2008, I was in the fortunate position of being able to see, at first-hand, how inventively primary schoolchildren engage with Shakespeare theatrically. In the place of academic papers the festival elected to concentrate on an aptitude for adaptation. If the text appears and reappears in festive culture, then this was pronounced at Aquinas Grammar School, with playlets such as A Mid-Surfers’ Night’s Dream demonstrating an approximation of Shakespeare’s play indebted to California slang and stereotypes, Hamwet, Pwinth of Denmark showing Elizabethan actors as toddlers, and MacBurger Royale translating Macbeth’s original ambition into a struggle for the ownership of a hamburger chain that possessed obvious brand-name parallels. Particularly noticeable was the extent to which each of these imaginatively responsive pieces was dependent on an immersion in forms of contemporary parlance, which suggested that Shakespeare is perceived as inextricable from – if not energizing – varieties of popular culture more generally. Arresting were references to children’s television, to rock music, to chat shows and even, although perhaps not consciously formulated, to incarnations of Shakespeare appropriated and appropriations of Shakespeare. Collapsing any sense of residual differences between outmoded binaries of

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high and low, the festival made a virtue of underscoring the wholesale absorption of the Bard in a multifaceted modernity: Shakespeare is always already reinvented, the participants wanted us to agree, a cultivation of the “original” having been freely dissolved. Here was perhaps the boldest celebratory claim – that expertise and achievement are defined by acknowledging the relations between Shakespeare and the media, a process that helps new versions of the Bard to emerge from older elaborations. Of course, “Shakespeareana” and the “Shakespeare Festival” were occasions different from each other in their institutional complexion, generational representation and place of location. Yet, with both, their conceptual possibility can be traced to established traditions of Shakespeare exhibition and festival culture in Romania and Ireland. In addition, despite some inconsistency in the degree of reverence, Shakespeare is still regarded, as both festivals discover, as a passport, as possessed of mobile authority. More broadly, it might be suggested, Shakespeare is the force that testifies to each geographical entity’s embrace of the modern and membership of a world community: respectively, Northern Ireland is beginning to reap the benefits of a protracted peace process, while Romania is enjoying its status as a recent recruit to the EU. In the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, a desire for autonomy coupled with a drive towards inclusion is increasingly apparent – nation-states vie with each other in the global marketplace – and it may not be accidental, in this respect, that both Shakespeare festivals were premised on types of competition: these were celebrations with implications for training and employment. Prizes were awarded on these occasions and, crucially, “Shakespeareana” unfolded in the Palace of Justice alongside a civic job fair. And beyond those developmental initiatives may be glimpsed other contexts – Romanian histories of communist misrule and Irish histories of political conflict that can be left behind through the commemorative Shakespearean impulse. In this way, both the “Shakespeare Festival” and “Shakespeareana” capture continuities in exhibition and festival culture: they featured demonstrations of student artwork and talent; they revealed the Bardic word as intermittent; they interpreted Shakespeare as an educational resource with transferable applications (Fig. 24.3).

VII In mapping six areas for discussion in this chapter, my aim has been to suggest not so much areas of dissimilarity as places of convergence – contacts across time and space. There is more than a rhetorical connection, for instance, between David Garrick’s promotion of himself in the 1769 Jubilee and contemporary educational initiatives dependent on Shakespeare for the popularization of social amelioration. A constant, too, is Shakespeare as a cult and Shakespeare as culture, as any number of exhibitions and festivals will attest. Even religious and spiritual elements recur with frequency: just as the traditional religious festival celebrates inclusion and membership, so does a Shakespearean event signal community. And, as we have seen, particularly over the course of the twentieth century, the Shakespeare festival was the excuse to reinforce a cultural need for renewal and resurrection. Shakespeare exhibited and celebrated, then, is not a bookish phenomenon; rather, the emphasis is on the ways in which his corpus of meaning signifies. According to this logic, Shakespeare is an instrument for keeping in touch with important truths. Exhibitions and festivals dedicated to him enable an experience of authenticity and they allow for an idealization of universality. Invariably, these processes take place in denial of informing material contexts, which include the relation between symbolic capital and

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Figure 24.3: The Palace of Justice hosts the “Shakespeareana” Festival at the Universitatea “Duna˘rea de Jos”, Galat¸i, Romania economic capital and the purposely obfuscating operations of memory. Yet, even inside the obvious mystification of Shakespeare in festival and exhibition culture, responsiveness to the complexities of the moment can be detected. History is bodied forth in Shakespeare exhibitions and festivals to the extent that new histories to emerge into view. The loss of empire, the role of the nation, the situation of English, forms of domination and the question of relativity – these and other developments and considerations are enshrined in the festive Shakespeare in ways that have reflective value and purchase. Celebrating Shakespeare offers us an insight into the past at the same time as it invites us to contemplate alternative bonds of association and as yet untested commemorative possibilities.1

Notes 1. Since several of the resources drawn upon for this chapter are archival, I have listed the relevant holdings and repositories in Further Reading and List of Works Cited.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Bate, Jonathan (1989). Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830. Oxford: Clarendon. Baudrillard, Jean (1988). Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster. Cambridge: Polity.

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The Bath Shakespeare Festival 2003 (2003). Bath: n.p. Shakespeare Institute and Library, Stratfordupon-Avon, P/Box 231. Baxandall, Michael (1991). “Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects”. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 33–41. British Museum Shakespeare Exhibition, 1923: Guide to the MSS. & Printed Books Exhibited in Celebration of the Tercentenary of the First Folio (1923). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cartelli, Thomas (1999). Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. London and New York: Routledge. Collection of the Late Captain James Saunders of Stratford-upon-Avon (1830). Shakespeare Central Library and Archive, Stratford-upon-Avon, ER1/83. The Complete Works Yearbook, Stratford-upon-Avon: April 2006 to April 2007 (2007). Coventry: John Good. Cooper, Tarnya, with essays by Marcia Pointon, James Shapiro and Stanley Wells (2006). Searching for Shakespeare. London: National Portrait Gallery. Dobson, Michael (1992). The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769. Oxford: Clarendon. Duncan-Jones, Katherine (2007). “Complete Works, Essential Year? (All of) Shakespeare Performed”. Shakespeare Quarterly 58.3, 353–66. Engle, Ron, Felicia Hardison Londré and Daniel J. Watermeier, eds (1995). Shakespeare Companies and Festivals: An International Guide. Westport: Greenwood. Four Hundredth Anniversary of Shakespeare’s Birth: List of Events in Shakespeare Festival Year (1964). London: Arts Council. Shakespeare Institute Library, Stratford-upon-Avon, P/Box 3. Garrick, David (1785). The Poetical Works. London: George Kearsley, 2 vols. Henderson, Diana (2002). “Shakespeare: The Theme Park”. In Shakespeare after Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt. New York: Palgrave, 107–26. Hodgdon, Barbara (1998). The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jackson, Russell (2007). “Shakespeare in Gda´nsk, 2006”. Shakespeare Quarterly 58.1, 93–108. Kennedy, Dennis (2009). The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kidnie, Margaret Jane (2009). Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998). Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Knowles, Ric (2004). Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kronborg Castle, Elsinore: ‘Hamlet’ Festival 1950 (1950). København: S. Johnsen. Lanier, Douglas (2002). Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacKaye, Percy (1916). Caliban by the Yellow Sands. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2002: Official Programme (2002). Ashland: n.p. Shakespeare Institute Library, Stratford-upon-Avon, P/Box 203. Parolin, Peter (2009). “‘What Revels are in Hand?’: A Change of Direction at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada”. Shakespeare Quarterly 60.2, 197–224. The Shakespeare Exhibition, 1564–1964 (1964). London: Arts Council. Shakespeare Institute Library, Stratford-upon-Avon, P/Box 3. Shakespeare Exhibition Press Cuttings, January-February 1963. Shakespeare Central Library and Archive, Stratford-upon-Avon, DR 352/4/1. Shakespeare Festival Celebrations, Stratford-upon-Avon, April 22 to May 11, 1912: Official Programme

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(1912). Stratford-upon-Avon: n.p. Shakespeare Central Library and Archive, Stratford-uponAvon, DR 349. Shakespeare in Washington January-June 2007: Official Festival Guide (2007). Washington, DC: Shakespeare Theatre Company. Shakespeare-Iqbal Festival of World Poetry and Music, Stratford-upon-Avon, 23–25 April 2010 (2010). Stratford-upon-Avon: n.p. Shakespeare: Santa Cruz, 1987 (1987). Santa Cruz: n.p. Shakespeare Institute and Library, Stratford-upon-Avon, P/Box 223. Silverstone, Catherine (2005). “Shakespeare Live: Reproducing Shakespeare at the ‘New’ Globe Theatre”. Textual Practice 19.1, 31–50. Smith, Peter J., Janice Valls-Russell and Kath Bradley, eds (2007). The Royal Shakespeare Company Complete Works Festival, Cahiers Élisabéthains, Special Issue. Stanley, Audrey (1996). “The 1994 Shanghai International Shakespeare Festival”. Shakespeare Quarterly 47.1, 72–80. Stewart, Susan (1993). On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Theatre World Souvenir: Shakespeare Festival, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1941. Stratford-upon-Avon: E. P. Ray. Shakespeare Central Library and Archive, Stratford-upon-Avon, DR 451/8. Watson, Nicola J. (2007). “Shakespeare on the Tourist Trail”. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199–226. Wray, Ramona (1997). “Shakespeare and the Sectarian Divide: Politics and Pedagogy in (Post) Post-Ceasefire Belfast”. In Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 235–56.

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SHAKESPEARE AND SILENT FILM Judith Buchanan

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he idea of silent Shakespeare strikes many as oxymoronic. In its muting of Shakespearean drama, silent Shakespearean cinema robs its inherited source of that which most frequently, and perhaps most crucially, has been taken to define it. In effect, the collaboration of this dramatic material with this medium of expression can be read as a liaison of naturally antithetical forces: one imaginatively evokes the image through the suggestive power of the poetically employed word, the other does not just erode the power of the word in its privileging of the image, but all but ousts words from its performance space. For a project that can now seem odd at best, it is striking that in cinema’s so-called “silent” era, Shakespeare films were both numerous and popular.1 In total, between 1895 (when cinema was born) and 1927 (when the first commercial “talkie” was released), approximately 300 Shakespeare films were made (of which now approximately forty survive).2 In an age in which the film industry reached eagerly and repeatedly for literary and theatrical sources of many kinds both to feed its voracious appetite for narrative material and to give the medium an economical leg-up towards artistic respectability, Shakespeare was comfortably the most frequently adapted literary or dramatic author of the period. The moving picture industry was beset by accusations about the scurrility of its subject matter throughout the silent era, and the desire to slough off the related social and moral stigma was keenly felt. The most effective way that film production companies, distributors and exhibitors found to combat the institutional slur was to embrace and promote material that might emphatically counteract it. Thus it was that in order to avoid being castigated for the degeneracy of their films, they sought instead to be directly commended on their cultural and artistic ambition. The public rhetoric employed in this regard was usually couched (insistently and repetitively, in fact) in terms of the educative and “improving” influence moving pictures could have on society. More pressingly, however, there were also commercial imperatives to attend to, impelling the industry to expand its market base: peddling more cultural fare was part of the strategic “uplift movement” through which filmmakers hoped to reach out to a “better class” of patrons. Shakespeare proved to be a key, and much cited, player in this campaign. Even through the vigorously compressed form of the one-reel picture (which remained the standard format of the majority of films made before c. 1912), Shakespeare was unrivalled for the efficiency and market penetration with which his name could denote “quality”, thereby helping to

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brand individual production companies, and implicitly the medium more generally, as disseminators of artistic, cultural and even moral worth.3

The Pioneering Years, 1899–1906 and Herbert Beerbohm Tree The film industry’s first engagement with Shakespeare took place in September 1899, just four years after the Lumière brothers’ pioneering screening in Paris. In collaboration with the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, a few disparate and unconnected moments from Herbert Beerbohm’s Tree’s London stage production of King John, then in final rehearsals at Her Majesty’s Theatre, were shot on film for inclusion on the varied Biograph moving picture programme of actualities, sketches and sporting news. The short (c. four-minute) resulting film was made up of four scenes from the play, each of which was blocked on a flat plane at Biograph’s open-air London studio, played with marked gestural extravagance (perhaps an enhanced extravagance for the benefit of the camera?) by the stage actors from Her Majesty’s and set against a scene-setting theatrical backdrop appropriate for each piece of action. Though only a single still from each of three of these scenes survives, the scene of the death of King John has survived almost in its entirety and is now commercially available to view (BFI DVD). It depicts a poison-wracked John (played by Tree) writhing in pain, earnestly mouthing inaudible words, spurning comfort, clutching at his chest, desperately stretching out his arms as if in a direct appeal to the camera and then collapsing histrionically back into his chair on the point of death (McKernan, 2000; Buchanan, 2009, 57–73). Even in the brevity of the surviving scene and in the excess of Tree’s performance style on display within it – so decisively adrift from contemporary performance tastes – this short film gives rare access to a Shakespearean actor-manager of significant moment and lasting influence from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (see also Richard Foulkes’ chapter in this volume). It is precisely these affecting encounters with the precariously captured performances of long-gone actors that provide the emotional reward for the study of silent Shakespeare films (and of silent film more generally). The chanciness of the contingent factors that have preserved a particular performance (while losing so many others through the destruction and irreversible deterioration of the film prints) injects a sense of fragility into the viewing experience of each surviving film. A film from the era may, therefore, be interpretively illuminating, technically impressive and/or culturally revealing but it can, on occasion, be more than this also – a place of unexpected sympathetic communion with figures who play with uncompromising commitment, touching earnestness and/or skittish delight as they reach out from another time. Their mute gestures implicitly invite us to make sense of their performance codes and so rescue them from being merely figures marooned in time playing to a world that has moved on without them and that now finds them antiquated, excessive, or even accidentally comic. The films, therefore, reward the imaginative effort required to remember that these actors were not always poignantly stranded in the wrong moment as they sometimes now seem. Rather, as first committed to film, they occupied the moment and the screen with dignified confidence, and often played to considerable acclaim. Understanding the circumstances of their production, exhibition and reception can usefully reconnect us with this curious world and so absorb these performances into the rich spectrum of the history of Shakespearean interpretation as more than merely historical eccentricities. Tree himself was strategically aware of the increased profile and proportionally

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enhanced acclaim (and income) that an actor could earn by subjecting himself to (and, in his case, actively enjoying) the attentions of the film industry. His 1899 pioneering film of King John was not, therefore, the last time he personally was to do business with the motion picture men, his later moving picture collaborations including three further Shakespearean projects: the 1905 filming of the dramatic storm scene from his stage production of The Tempest (Ball, 1968, 30–2; Buchanan, 2007, 321–4); a 1911 Henry VIII (Burrows, 2003, 62–76); and a 1916 Macbeth (Pearson and Uricchio, 1994; Buchanan, 2009, 197–200). Since Tree’s four forays into Shakespearean film-making economically chart some interesting developments in the film industry, it is worth breaking momentarily from the broader chronological organization of the chapter to follow, in telescoped form, the cinematic career of this one influential British Shakespearean. The 1905 storm scene from Tree’s stage production of The Tempest (rich in highly dramatic and complex theatrical effects), was filmed by the Charles Urban Trading Company and given an exhibition in its own right on variety film bills. The initial spur for capturing it on film, however, was to be able to incorporate it directly into Tree’s stage production for the provincial tour then in prospect. Once the production was uprooted from its theatrically well-resourced London home at (the now renamed) His Majesty’s Theatre, the two-minute filmed shipwreck scene could then innovatively constitute the twodimensional projected preface to the three-dimensional live action that followed, thereby dispensing with the expensive need to hire and rehearse “supers” to play mariners in each town of the tour, and economically reducing the number of sets, properties and effects machinery the company needed to transport between venues (Ball, 1968, 30; Buchanan, 2007, 321–2). The composite show that resulted from this was a noteworthy early foray into a mixed media production. Tree’s next encounter with the film industry was with Henry VIII, an adaptation of his stage production (in which Tree himself played Cardinal Wolsey), made and promoted by British filmmaker William Barker. The distribution deal Barker ran for the release constituted a startling piece of entrepreneurial marketing. The film was given a strictly time-bounded six-week run after which, as clearly announced ahead of its release, all the prints were recalled and destroyed in a public fire (a ceremonial burning which was itself turned into a film-recorded performance “event”). The aim was to generate publicity and revenue by making audiences feel the urgency of seeing the film in the limited window of time in which it was available (and extant). And however painful knowledge of that strategically choreographed blaze may be to those of us from a subsequent generation to whom the film is now apparently lost, judging from the success of the six-week run, there is no denying the efficacy of the strategy as a commercially driven marketing ploy at the time (Ball, 1968, 80–2; Burrows, 2003, 68–70). Tree’s 1916 film of Macbeth was his only Shakespeare film that did not derive from one of his own stage productions. This was a Hollywood production, directed by John Emerson for the Triangle-Reliance studios under the supervisory oversight of D. W. Griffith. Tree did not, therefore, have authorial control on this one, being simply the celebrity name – and one from the “classy” legitimate English stage at that – brought in to lend cultural weight and artistic credibility to the project. A lavish set-piece spectacle was made of the coronation of Macbeth, and the fight between Macbeth and Macduff was reportedly highly charged with dramatic action. Nevertheless, despite the much-vaunted interpolation of some “wild dances” and even some “special large greyhounds” (offered as a particular draw), on its release in June 1916, the film was still accused of a failure of nerve as an

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adaptation (Buchanan, 2009, 199). The Bioscope thought that despite its freedom from any direct theatrical heritage, stylistically the production felt duty-bound to remember theatrical practice too conspicuously and, in effect, offered itself more as a taster experience for a “proper” version of Macbeth that could be had in a legitimate theatre than as an experience entire unto itself. In response, the reviewer issued the following rallying-call on behalf of the cinema: “[T]he moving picture play is capable of serving some finer purpose than to be a mere aperitif. It is a complete and fully satisfying art on its own account” (The Bioscope, 29 June 1916, 1290. Qtd Buchanan, 2009, 199). Since Macbeth did not – according to this reviewer at least – own the full potential of what the medium could offer, it would be for other Shakespeare films released later that year to meet the terms of this call by supplying not simply the aperitif but self-evidently the full menu themselves. Tree’s approach to acting Shakespeare for the camera may have done little to help the fortunes of the 1916 Macbeth. Reports from on-set are revealing in this respect. The production crew, it seems, became frustrated by their English guest’s unshakeable determination to speak out loud long sections from the play. The crew reputedly even took entertainingly duplicitous steps to avoid wasting precious film-stock on his lengthy Shakespearean verse-speaking (diversionary as this now was) while avoiding giving offence to their distinguished foreign guest. To this end, they set up an additional and unloaded camera on set and it was this camera that they politely and pointlessly continued to crank, in a charade of filming, throughout Tree’s undeflectably long declamations. An English interest in textual fidelity was even then, it seems, coming into conflict with an American desire to privilege the pace and autonomy of the movie as a whole. The crew’s frustration with Tree was not, however, apparently reciprocated. Indeed, Tree’s own reflections on the production process suggest he was genuinely entranced with the American film industry. After just one day on set for Macbeth, for example, his delight in the project, as reported to Pictures and the Picturegoer, is fully apparent: It is quite wonderful . . . how many things can be done in pictures for the Shakespeare tales that cannot be done on the stage . . . [I]t is possible to illuminate and accentuate many details so as to produce a marvellously truth-telling commentary on the text and at the same time heighten the dramatic values . . . The pictorial possibilities grow, as one studies [the scenario] in the light of this strange new art, into something very beautiful and wonderful – not precisely a play in the Shakespearean sense, perhaps, but a dramatic narrative of great power. (Pictures and the Picturegoer, 9.105, 19 February 1916, 483–4. Qtd Buchanan, 2009, 72–3) From his new-found experience of the wonderful “pictorial possibilities” the film industry of 1916 could bring to “the Shakespeare tales”, Tree then retrospectively considered his earliest experiment in bringing an edifying brush with Shakespeare to the mixed audiences of the moving picture show and the significantly compromised viewing experience it must, on reflection, have offered. In contrast to the Triangle-Reliance Macbeth in which the narrative was the central drive of the project, for example, Tree remembered the King John film as a picture that would only have been intelligible to those who were themselves already fully familiar with the detail of the play (Buchanan, 2009, 63). That early, brief King John film could not, indeed, have functioned as a piece of autonomous story-telling since, in itself, it made no pretence to narrative coherence. As exhibited on variety bills in London through the autumn and winter of that year, it served most efficiently as a sample advertisement for the full theatre production that was showing con-

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currently at Her Majesty’s Theatre up the road. As exhibited further afield (both in Britain and abroad), however, it offered a taster insight into a great contemporary Shakespearean actor showcasing in reviewable and distributable form a packaged slice of his celebrated theatrical style for the appreciation of the masses. In this respect, the approach of the King John film was in tune with the industry’s filmmaking impulses in relation to adaptation more generally in the pioneering years. In this period, brief cameo references to literary works were typically privileged over cogent narratives. Literary or theatrical subjects cinematically exhibited in these early years were, therefore, enjoyed primarily as momentary visual “quotations” from known works, and “read” partly through the processes of recognition and narrative supplementation on the part of picture-goers. This approach – appealing directly to the collusive engagement of the audience – produced a clutch of short Shakespeare-related films in cinema’s first decade, typically of two or three minutes screening time each: Sarah Bernhardt’s 1900 Hamlet duel scene featuring synchronized sound; Georges Méliès’ 1901 largely unShakespearean Le Diable et la Statue featuring Venetian lovers Roméo and Juliette and a Shakespeareevocative balcony scene; a 1902 Burlesque on Romeo and Juliet, distributed by Edison, with another Shakespeare-imitative balcony scene; Edison’s 1905 Seven Ages of Man which, in the tradition of the Magic Lantern, provided an illustrated gloss on Jaques’ speech; the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s 1905 Macbeth–Macduff fight scene (kilted warriors on a stage) (Kino DVD); Méliès’ probably only mildly Shakespearean 1905 Le Miroir de Venise (Une Mésadventure de Shylock); Charles Urban’s 1905 storm scene from Tree’s stage production of The Tempest; and Messter’s 1907 Death of Othello from the Verdi opera (also with synchronized sound) (Ball, 1968, 22–34). Each of these fleeting Shakespearean film vignettes depended on an audience’s familiarity with the original to become meaningful in narrative terms.

The Transitional Era (c. 1907–1913)4 In cinema’s transitional era, however, the impulse to provide sample visual quotations from a literary or theatrical source ceded to a desire to be able to tell an autonomous narrative in moving pictures. The story was often conveyed by creating a connected sequence of the best-known dramatic and iconic moments from the plays. Such imagery was already well peddled, familiar to many from artistic representations, edition illustrations, vaudeville sketches, satirical cartoons and a wide variety of other forms in which Shakespeare was culturally disseminated in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. And for those familiar with the play, such imagery could quickly have called to mind the quotations associated with it. Thus it was that the American production company Vitagraph was specifically commended in 1908 on its expertly edited one-reel release of Julius Caesar which omitted all but “the vital scenes”, thereby clarifying the story while keeping it free from obscurity (New York Dramatic Mirror, 12 December 1908, 6. Qtd Buchanan, 2009, 16). The action of such vigorously truncated versions of Shakespeare necessarily moved swiftly from one dramatic highlight to another, implicitly establishing (or confirming) a “best of” summary form in which the plays could circulate manageably and (more or less) intelligibly (Pearson and Uricchio, 1993, 66–7). In this period, the number of Shakespearean films being made increased dramatically. The year 1907 saw just three focused Shakespearean releases: Hamlet and Shakespeare Writing Julius Caesar both by Méliès, and Othello from Italian production company Cines.

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All three were a new departure for Shakespeare films in that they told a shaped and selfcontained story. Released by the story-telling possibilities thereby opened up, in 1908 there was then an explosive flurry of Shakespearean releases in both Europe and the United States. In America, this included production company Lubin’s Julius Caesar, Kalem’s As You Like It, Biograph’s The Taming of the Shrew (Kino DVD) and from Vitagraph Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet. In Europe, the same year’s Shakespearean releases included a Tempest (Clarendon) (BFI DVD), two Othellos (Nordisk and Pathé), two Hamlets (Cines and Milano) and two Romeo and Juliets (Cines and Gaumont). The year 1909 saw a further fifteen Shakespearean releases on both sides of the Atlantic and 1910 saw twenty-two more (some of which were parodies). These included the Danish company Nordisk’s Hamlet (1910), which sought to exploit a local Danish resource of significant Shakespearean relevance by being shot on location in Helsingör (Elsinore). (Italian companies had similarly capitalized on their unique access to “authentic” Shakespearean dramatic milieus in the well-plugged use of Venice and Verona for the shoots of The Merchant of Venice (BFI DVD), Romeo and Juliet and Othello (Buchanan, 2005, 53–5)). The three-year period of 1908 to 1910 remains, in fact, the time in which more individual Shakespeare films were released than in any equivalent period before or since.5 Whereas in the early days, a Shakespeare film’s closeness to a celebrated stage production had often explicitly been perceived as providing a boost to its marketing, by contrast in the transitional era advertisements for Shakespeare films were proudly predicting that even spectators who did not know the Shakespeare origin could not fail to be delighted by the latest releases. No longer conceived primarily as mute recordings of acclaimed theatrical performances, therefore, Shakespeare films were now beginning to celebrate their own status as stand-alone vehicles for Shakespearean story-telling (Buchanan, 2005, 26–7). There were, of course, exceptions. Frank Benson’s Shakespeare films with the British Co-operative Cinematograph Company (of which the 1911 Richard III survives (BFI DVD)) deliberately identified themselves as records of particular performances at the Stratford Memorial Theatre and of Benson’s own hyper-physical, emphatically gestural acting style (Burrows, 2003, 76–87; Jackson, 2000). Films such as the Clarendon Tempest (1908) (BFI DVD) and the many Shakespeare films produced from 1908 onwards by the American Vitagraph Company (Pearson and Uricchio, 1993; Collick, 1989, 40; Buchanan, 2009, 105–46), however, were more of their moment in having no genesis in a stage production. They simplified the action and presented whistle-stop narratives, offering high culture to the masses in easy to digest, bite-sized chunks punctuated by explanatory inter-titles. Some were even linked to seasonally festive holidays. Although shot in the summer of 1909, for example, Vitagraph’s frolicsome and visually fetching Midsummer Night’s Dream (BFI DVD) was not released until Christmas Day, apparently in order to maximize on a seasonal market (Buchanan, 2009, 132). The same company’s Macbeth (1909), by contrast, courted controversy, and its three goriest scenes had to be cut for the film’s Chicago exhibition (Buchanan, 2009, 108). Indeed, such censoring directly called into question some of the insistently expressed contemporary claims made about Shakespeare’s “improving” influence. In the USA, Thanhouser followed Vitagraph in regularly including Shakespearean subjects amongst its output of prestige films, from A Winter’s Tale (1910) (Thanhouser DVD) (Buchanan, 2009, 126–9) to Cymbeline (1913) (Thanhouser DVD) (Buchanan, 2005, 43–4) and the looser adaptation Two Little Dromios (1914). The company’s real

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triumph, however, came in 1916 with a feature-length King Lear (Thanhouser DVD) starring the eminent Shakespearean stage actor, Frederick Warde (Buchanan, 2005, 44–6). Warde had already made a 1912 multi-reel Richard III with the Broadway Film Company (recently discovered and restored and now commercially available on AFI DVD), and was, moreover, the most eminent of the entrepreneurial performers who gave live lectures and recitations as educative accompaniment to Shakespeare screenings in the venues that could afford such a thing. The practice of moving picture lecturing was at its height during the transitional era. The lecturers hired to supply the commentary varied decisively in knowledge, charisma, wit, mellifluousness and general lecturing competence. Warde’s recitals and commentary to accompany the exhibition of the Richard III feature film were certainly at the most culturally edifying end of the scale. At the other end of the spectrum, however, a spectator’s potential enjoyment of the screening of a film of Othello in Berlin in 1912, for example, would not, presumably, have been helped by the brusque interventions of the lecturershowman on that occasion who not only intruded crassly upon the poignant moments of the drama to draw insensitive attention to, for example, Desdemona’s final death spasm, but also proved to be as preoccupied with general crowd control within the venue as he was with commenting on the pictures (Buchanan, 2009, 10–13). Although the project to make Shakespeare films was always, therefore, officially infused with the culturally ambitious desire to elevate the industry and educate its patrons, in practice the exhibition conventions through which the films were disseminated were so coloured by the prosaic particularities of the local market as to compromise that ambition significantly in some quarters (Buchanan, 2009, 102–3). The year 1913 saw the release of three significant Shakespeare films: Paulo Azzuri’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Italy which gave the wood near Athens an aura of shimmering, retrospective romance (Buchanan, 2005, 129, 146); Film Industrie Gesellschaft’s Macbeth starring the English actor Arthur Bourchier (Ball, 1968, 183–8); and British Gaumont’s Hamlet directed by Cecil Hepworth and starring Sir Johnston ForbesRobertson, whose grave, unhurried performance of a reflective and princely Hamlet was unfavourably compared by some critics with Bourchier’s more screen-attuned performance as Macbeth (Buchanan, 2009, 184). The fact that the Italian Dream was a two-reeler whereas the other two Shakespeare releases of that year were both feature-length pictures illustrates how on the cusp between dominant forms 1913 was, as the convention for showing several shorter films on the same programme ceded to the new preference for a bill to be dominated by a single longer film advertised ahead of time.

The Feature-Film Era That year of 1913 was also, perhaps, the last moment in which describing a film as a record of a stage performance might still be thought to carry any cachet amongst moving picture audiences. Within two years of the British release of the Forbes-Robertson Hamlet film, it had been given an extensive international release, including to Germany, India and the USA. There, however, its reviews were far from consistently enthusiastic. While this surviving film helpfully records and remembers an intellectual and much lauded stage Hamlet, as a work of cinema it is stylistically conservative, almost as if in well-meaning but misguided deference to the theatrical pedigree of the material it was cinematically memorializing (Burrows, 2003, 112–40; Buchanan, 2009, 147–89). In relation to the status of

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filmmaking amongst Shakespeareans in this period, it is perhaps also worth noting that despite the film’s considerable profile on both sides of the Atlantic, Forbes-Robertson did not consider his (reputedly reluctant) brush with the film industry of sufficient significance to merit a reference in his own autobiography (Buchanan, 2009, 184). This lack of pride in the Shakespearean filmmaking venture is perhaps symptomatic of how the film industry was viewed by the Shakespeare establishment more generally in the years leading up to and including the Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1916. Beyond a few high profile forays into the questionable dignity of the moving picture show by one limelight-grabbing Shakespearean (Herbert Beerbohm Tree), one educationally well-intentioned one (Frank Benson) and one clearly coerced one (Johnston ForbesRobertson), the Shakespearean community en masse had, in fact, paid little serious attention to the new medium. Indeed, although by 1916 cinema was a mature expressive form that was technically proficient, globally ambitious and earnestly engaged in a debate about its own cultural elevation, it was nonetheless not considered sufficiently culturally weighty or artistically respectable to be included in the coterie of art forms selected to fete the Bard as part of the raft of tercentenary commemorative events. This institutional snub was not lost on the film industry. Directly in response to it, James M. Barrie made a skittishly barbed film, lampooning the making of a British and an American film of Macbeth. Barrie’s film was entitled The Real Thing At Last and, among its other satirical targets, it specifically caricatured cinema’s conspicuous exclusion from the Shakespeare celebrations (Buchanan, 2009, 191–8). Barrie’s parody was not, of course, the only film to emerge in 1916 as an informal acknowledgement of the Shakespearean significance of the moment: more earnest adaptations appeared that year too (including the Thanhouser Lear and the Tree Macbeth that was a further object of The Real Thing At Last’s parodic attack). Most spectacularly of all, on 22 October 1916, two highly commercial American film production companies, Metro and Fox, released separate big-budget motion pictures of Romeo and Juliet (Ball, 1968, 235–41; Buchanan, 2009, 202–16). The Metro version starred Beverly Bayne and Francis X. Bushman, Hollywood’s premier screen idols of the moment. More notably yet, the Fox version starred the sexually charged screen vamp Theda Bara as Juliet, in an unexpected but commercially savvy piece of bravura casting. Bara reported, with a finely tuned instinct for self-promotion, that the Juliet she played was “no Sunday girl” (qtd Buchanan, 2009, 203). Given the simultaneity of the releases of the Fox and Metro films, the two were immediately received as artistic competitors. Moreover, the on- and off-the-record needle between the respective production companies turned a commercial competition into a high-profile public spat. Unsurprisingly, though, in market terms the public rivalry proved far from an encumbrance for either film. Picture-goers who, for example, attended the Metro Romeo and Juliet film at George Steiner’s Playhouse on New York’s Fourteenth Street in late October 1916 would, as one contemporary trade paper pointed out at the time, have also wished to attend the Fox version playing at the neighbouring Academy Theatre specifically that they might compare the two: Shakespeare on Fourteenth Street – playing to capacity in two big theaters within one block of each other – is a most interesting phenomenon. Shakespeare ‘turning them away’ on the lower East Side, where vast audiences sit spellbound by one of his

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greatest tragedies, is proof enough of the timely educational character of the screen . . . Such pictures, be it emphasized once more, are of the greatest value and importance to the reputation and the prestige of the screen. (Moving Picture World, 30.6, 11 November 1916, 825. Qtd Buchanan, 2009, 206) Indeed, given the significant publicity burst by which each release was accompanied, no self-respecting picture-goer could have felt satisfied knowing just one of the films. The strategic coincidence of their release – Fox had, in effect, stalked Metro specifically in order to release in tandem – therefore boosted sales for both pictures. Moreover, in the struggle for critical approval and market share, neither film had to suffer the ignominy of being required to act as foil for the alleged superior qualities of the other; rather, although critical preferences varied, both films were declared a critical triumph and both proved a huge commercial success. Exhibitors across the United States even had to order in additional prints of both Romeo and Juliet films in order to satisfy the overwhelming audience demand by which they found themselves pleasurably assailed. The decorousness of particular performances, the sets, the costumes, the judiciously chosen quotations that appeared on the inter-titles, the sensitivity of the interpretation overall and, inevitably, the sensual appeal of the Fox Juliet (seen snuggling little birds, smelling flowers, pirouetting in front of a mirror, murmuring Romeo’s name in her sleep, kissing the bottle of poison sensuously and extracting it later from her cleavage) were all very warmly received. Since, sadly, no print of either film seems to have survived, we are dependent on contemporary reports, stills, reminiscences and the 77-page surviving shooting script of the Fox film to catch their flavour (Buchanan, 2009, 203–4, 211–12). But what is not in doubt is that for a profitable period in autumn 1916, the overwhelming success of these two glamorous Romeo and Juliet releases meant that there was, in fact, nothing short of a market storm in progress in the world of Shakespearean motion pictures. Though there is no record of premises being besieged or paving stones ripped up in 1916 as had been the case in New York in 1849 at the height of the passionately antagonistic rivalry between Edwin Forrest’s and William Charles Macready’s stage versions of Macbeth, the two directly contemporaneous Romeo and Juliet moving pictures did nevertheless generate a buzz of partisan comparisons in New York and beyond in ways flatteringly reminiscent of that earlier grand contest between competing Shakespearean productions. The following year, while still doing excellent box office in their respective international distributions, both Romeo and Juliet films were then additionally given a form of institutional validation, though of differing kinds. The Metro film received a symbolic stamp of approval from the American film industry by being included in the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry’s highly selective exhibition programme designed to publicize to the film trade the very best of what was possible in motion picture production. And while the Metro Romeo and Juliet was being thus lionized by the film industry, the Fox film secured its own analogue accreditation from the Shakespeare establishment through being included on the 1917 programme for the prestigious annual Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare Festival. This dual honouring represented a double rite of passage for Shakespeare films. Though often popular with audiences, lauded for their educational worth and celebrated for their contribution to the industry’s campaign for cultural respectability, Shakespeare films had not previously tended to attract artistic plaudits specifically from cineastes. Indeed, for some early film theorists, the mere idea of a Shakespeare film was considered inherently

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anti-cinematic, since adapting Shakespearean material was thought to burden the medium with unhelpfully stultifying associations imported from another genre. Writing in 1915, the American poet and film theorist Vachel Lindsay had made the case emphatically for cinema to distance itself from what he perceived as a fettering theatrical heritage: “the further [the motion picture] gets from Euripides, Ibsen, Shakespeare, or Molière – the more it becomes like a mural painting from which flashes of lightning come – the more it realizes its genius” (Lindsay, 1970, 194). For Lindsay and others, Shakespeare constituted a medium-inhibiting impediment that prevented the cinema from realizing its own potential. Lev Kuleshov spoke for many cinephiles in 1918 when he called upon filmmakers to reject the alleged charge of being “not literary enough” and “not dramatic” and to embrace instead the idea that “the cinema’s language [should be] cinematographic!” (qtd Bordwell, 1997, 27). Inherited literary and dramatic values had, in this characteristic articulation, become the inappropriate import that was stifling cinema’s own uninhibited engagements with its own “language”. That a Shakespeare film should have been selected by the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry in 1917 to advertise the best in moving pictures was, therefore, a watershed moment in how Shakespearean cinema could be perceived by the industry. Similarly, after the neglect of the industry by the Shakespeare establishment for the planning of the tercentenary celebrations the previous year, the symbolic embracing of a Shakespeare film (the Fox Romeo and Juliet) by the Shakespeare Festival in 1917 represented a telling change in the institutional relationships between cinema and the Shakespeare establishment. In sum, therefore, 1916/17 was a significant coming-of-age moment for silent Shakespearean cinema. It marked a change in the evolving recognition of the film industry’s ability to exhibit its own specifically cinematic strengths through the vehicle of a Shakespeare film, and, simultaneously, a first-level change in the recognition of and respect for cinema as a legitimate interpretive medium for an expressive, if necessarily partial, Shakespeare. Meanwhile, in Italy in 1917, a feature-length Hamlet (Amleto) starring the eminent Italian stage actor Ruggero Ruggeri was released by Rodolfi-Film, its imaginative cinematography pointing up some of the cinematographic timidities of the earlier 1913 ForbesRobertson film (Buchanan, 2009, 147–89). However, the Ruggeri film was not given a release in the USA (both the war and changing American market preferences hampering its international distribution) and, in Europe, its moment in the sun as the Hamlet film of choice was soon after supplanted by a remarkable 1920 film adaptation directed by Svend Gade and Heinz Schall entitled Hamlet: Drama of Vengeance released by the German film industry and starring the Danish film star Asta Nielsen (Ball, 1968, 272–8; Rothwell and Melzer, 1990, 57; Howard, 2007, 137–59; Buchanan, 2009, 217–40). As Ruggeri’s film had exposed the cinematic dullness of the 1913 Hamlet, so Nielsen’s unmannered performance in turn exposed what now seemed the antiquated hyperbole of Ruggeri’s acting style. Asta Nielsen (“die Asta” and “the Silent Muse” as she subsequently became known) produced an exquisitely turned performance, which managed to combine high pathos with wry comedy in a genuinely affecting, if oddly conceived, production. The film’s central premise, devised by screenwriter Erwin Gepard in discussion with Nielsen, drew both on a twelfth-century Saxo-Grammaticus Nordic saga and on Fratricide Punished, a 1704 German drama. It additionally sought legitimacy from the speculations of an idiosyncratic American researcher named Edward P. Vining. Vining’s 1881 publication The Mystery of Hamlet had outlined a maverick, but by no means carelessly worked,

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theory that Hamlet’s mental processes and the indecision that results from them are essentially feminine in character (see Thompson, 1997). Vining posited that the character’s behaviour and characteristics of mind are therefore consistent with, and best explained by, “his” being female. As a version of Hamlet, the film that resulted from this unlikely elision of composite sources borders on the racy: the “prince” (Nielsen) is, in this telling of the tale, in truth a girl who at birth is publicly declared a boy in an attempt to safeguard the succession to the vulnerable Danish throne. Having grown up with this duplicity, she is obliged to sustain the pretence of maleness until her death when her “tragic secret” is finally discovered. Understanding Hamlet as a woman disguised as a man shed new light upon the harsh brush-off Hamlet gives to Ophelia and added heightened colour to the peculiar warmth of Hamlet’s affection for Horatio. As Nielsen’s emotionally burdened Hamlet acknowledges her womanhood keenly in her own private self while making bravely tortured efforts to deny it to the world, part of the effect of the regendering is to add an additional plot thread of ardent but thwarted desire (of Hamlet for Horatio) to the existing complexities of the Shakespearean drama. Regendering Hamlet in this way also intersected with the long-standing theatrical fashion for the role to be played by women. The play’s performance history already suggested that the role lent itself to female actorly appropriation far more readily than did most other major tragic parts. Hamlet’s thoughtfulness, sensitivity, capriciousness, vulnerability and indecision were all thought to make him ripe for feminizing and the list of actresses to have taken up the challenge was extensive (see Howard, 2007). Nor was Nielsen even the first female Hamlet on film. The French classical actress Sarah Bernhardt had scooped that honour in 1900 when she played opposite Pierre Magnier as Laertes in the fencing bout that Clément Maurice had filmed to memorialize Bernhardt’s famous stage Hamlet (Ball, 1968, 24–8). Subsequently there had been suggestions that Bernhardt herself (Ball, 1968, 108–9), or the flamboyant Russian émigré actress, Alla Nazimova, or American actress Helen Gardner might make a full screen version of Hamlet (Buchanan, 2009, 220–1). Since, however, none of these projects was finally realized, by the time Nielsen took to the screen as a female Hamlet in 1920, there was a significant bequeathed aspiration for her to inherit and significant cumulative expectation for her to satisfy. And, for all the eccentricities of the production in which Nielsen starred, her own performance did not disappoint. In the USA, one reviewer was very taken with the subtlety Nielsen brought to the screen in comparison with the more anodyne performances given by American actresses of the time: Rare it is indeed to see so complete a subjection of all physical means – appearance, gesture, even the movement of an eye-lid – to the sheer art of showing forth the soul of a character as that which Asta Neilsen [sic] accomplishes in her role of Hamlet. This is what will be most acclaimed – and it will deserve any amount of acclamation – in this picture out of Denmark. For here is a woman whose like we have not on our own screen. Asta Neilsen’s [sic] art is a mature art that makes the curly-headed girlies and painted hussies and tear-drenched mothers of most of our native film dramas seem as fantastic for adult consumption as a reading diet restricted to Elsie books and Mother Goose. (Exceptional Photoplays, 2.1, January–February 1922, 8. Qtd Buchanan, 2009, 228–9) This reviewer’s enthusiasm is symptomatic. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic were impressed by the nuance and variety Nielsen was able to achieve without resort to

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extravagant histrionics. Her performance was received as offering an insight into a Hamletian tortured world. The stylish minimalism of Nielsen’s performance stands out the more in the context of the film’s other performances – performances that embrace cartoon villainy (Eduard von Winterstein’s iniquitous Claudius), self-pitying complicity (Mathilde Brandt’s Gertrude), caricatured silliness (Hans Junckermann’s muddle-head Polonius), dull prettiness (Lilli Jacobsson’s Ophelia) and lumbering obviousness (a thick-set but surprisingly dandified Horatio). Overall, the rather overplayed or colourless performances by which Hamlet is surrounded in this production act as flattering foils to the scope, control and delicacy of the central performance given by the prince(ss) in their midst. As a Weimar film (made within a year of Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), it is no surprise that the 1920 Hamlet should have been significantly inflected by the expressionist aesthetic preferences of its production context. In keeping with the tonal predispositions of its moment, in this Hamlet the set becomes an eloquent commentary on both character and action. Its dramatic stone arches plunge characters in and out of shadow while repeatedly drawing attention to implicitly demarcated spaces and to the ways in which identitystamped characters linger on thresholds. The twists and turns of the castle through which Gertrude winds her duplicitous way for a clandestine tryst with Claudius are suggestive not just of an architectural but also a moral tortuousness. The dramatic taper-lit grand staircase seems ironically to highlight how far removed from the world of romance to which it alludes is the sensitively tragic Hamlet who descends it. Casement windows feature frequently as the filter through which Hamlet observes others’ pleasures in the carefree world beyond the literally and emotionally circumscribed spaces that she inhabits. As Elsinore’s architecture draws her irresistibly into positions – in particular by windows looking out – in which the fettered quality of her life finds graphic form, the production’s visual scheme not only illustrates but seems to sympathize with her plight. At their most expressive, therefore, the film’s sets do not only frame this Hamlet’s strikingly elegant and dignified form; they also underscore her plight by giving visual representation to her emotional and political separation from those around her. The 1920 Hamlet rewrites Shakespeare in many respects. As a “version” of Hamlet that includes visits to snake-pits, arson attacks, death by smoke inhalation, a prince who is secretly female and a Horatio unknowingly in love with Hamlet, it allows itself to reflect thoughtfully and humorously on selected aspects of the dramatic landscape and central protagonist of Shakespeare’s Hamlet while eliding this reflection with a composite engagement with its other source texts. And in doing so it also filters the whole through an interest in contemporary concerns about gender construction particular to its production moment (Buchanan, 2009, 227–8). Its invoking of Shakespeare, therefore, often serves as much to clarify its distinction from too close an adherence to the specificity of both the detail and the dramatic vision of its Shakespearean source as to assert anything more closely bonded about its adaptive relationship. Even when the production quotes snippets directly from Shakespeare in its inter-titles, in fact, the reattributed context makes them serve less to bind the film in to a proximity to Shakespeare than as a further means of illustrating this production’s tense interplay of intimacy with, and resistance to, the play. Furthermore, by denying us some of those visual cameo moments that form part of the sequence of iconic moments that dwell in our collective memory of the play – the Ghost, Yorick’s skull, the grave-diggers – Nielsen’s film daringly challenges the intuitively valued summary version of Hamlet of common cultural reference and recognition.

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Less iconoclastic was the German film industry’s next feature-film contribution to the evolving story of Shakespeare on silent film. Dmitri Buchowetzki’s 1922 film of Othello specifically courted the interest of Shakespeareans by casting theatre stars Emil Jannings and Werner Krauss as Othello and Iago respectively (Kino DVD; Ball, 1968, 279–84; Rothwell, 1999, 25–7; Buchanan, 2009, 240–51). Jannings’ screen performance as Othello, however, sadly illustrates The Bioscope’s opinion, published back in 1909, that it is all but impossible “for any actor to invest Othello with due dignity and greatness by gesture alone” (qtd Buchanan, 2009, 100). Difficult for any tragic character, this is perhaps particularly so for Othello whose rhetorical power acts as his major (if not his sole) defence against indignity. Robbed of poetic power, Jannings’ wordless rendering of Othello lacks the necessary nuanced physical eloquence to compensate sufficiently for the character’s lack of language and he is left looking a caricature of ungoverned, eye-popping ire, adrift in a medium to which, in this production, he conspicuously fails to accommodate himself (Rothwell, 1999, 25–7; Buchanan, 2009, 240–2).6 In comparison with Jannings’ untempered facial and gestural expressivity (particularly disquieting when dwelt upon in lingering, attentive close-up), Krauss’ Iago is a winningly entertaining version of gleeful villainy (cartooning villainy successfully proving a more feasible project than cartooning tragic misunderstanding). Dressed in sleek black with a piratical earring, he creeps, limps and scuttles swiftly through grand courtyards, halls and galleys to garner information in pursuit of his dastardly schemes. Whereas other characters merely live out their dramatic interactions in the balconies, hallways, staircases and assembly halls of this film’s Venice, galley and Cyprus, Iago manages to transform these spaces into part of his personal, warped playground in which he draws out and exploits the territory’s possibilities for misapprehension, delusion and selective occlusion. Frequently, in fact, the sets in this production too are thoughtfully employed to frame and comment on the action. Most striking of all is the set for Desdemona’s bedroom whose structural design, statuary, scale and lighting make the space directly evocative of a cathedral. This architectural symbolism finds its resonant apotheosis when Othello makes his slow and self-consciously priestly way to Desdemona’s sleeping form laid out upon her spiritually lit altar-like bed. There he strangles her violently in a quasi-liturgical sacrificial rite. To observe the scale, solidity, depth of perspective and overall visual design of this sequence – so purposeful in its thematic contribution to the meaning of the scene – is also to remember, by contrast, the shallow stage, cluttered blocking, rushed action, still, fixed camera position and lack of focal variety of the early Shakespeare films. Despite a distracting performance register at times, therefore, the 1922 Othello is a film that provides a useful gauge of the industry’s progress in, among other things, set design, lighting in depth of field, camera sensitivity for deep-focus photography and, most significantly, its desire to incorporate its visual thinking sensitively into the central interpretive conception of a film adaptation.

Conclusion In their first moment of exhibition, silent Shakespeare films were more usually praised for their cultural ambition, edifying social effects and delicacy in execution than mocked for their oddity or presumption. Nevertheless, there was no denying that silent Shakespeare films were often burdened by having to play host to a set of obligations decisively at odds with each other. On the one hand, they felt a duty to reference a close association with a

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theatrical history and with stage practice; on the other to employ and develop the evolving conventions of screen performance and screen practices. On the one hand, they felt obliged to exhibit a reverence for the inherited Shakespearean language; on the other to find image-driven ways of courting a medium-specific communication and poeticism not dependent on the word. On the one hand they wished to reach out to a culturally more discriminating target market as part of the “uplift” movement; on the other to bring a taste of Shakespeare to the masses as part of a more socially-minded outreach lobby. On the one hand they wished to record remarkable Shakespearean performances and celebrated productions as these had been enjoyed previously by theatre audiences; on the other to create a new work drawing on the cinema’s particular proclivities and medium-specific presentational strengths. In sum, the direction of their gaze was regularly torn between facing backwards and facing forwards and the result was an inner tension discernible, to varying degrees, within the films themselves. Being caught between worlds in this way created abrasions and contradictions in the films that, whether providing a conduit by which the institutional tussles at play may be the better discerned or simply proving artistically disruptive, are always culturally illuminating. Inevitably, though, historically their ambivalent allegiances have not endeared these films either to Shakespeareans or to cineastes. For some Shakespeareans, silent cinema showcased actors engaged in frantic and undignified gesturing and then had the gall to call that “Shakespeare”. As Jack Jorgens was to put it, the idea that “great poetic drama” and “dumb-show” could ever make common cause was clearly risible (Jorgens, 1977, 1). The films have fared no better in the history of the film industry. The accusations levelled at them here have been that they are paralyzed by textual fidelity and diluted in potential force by a medium-inhibiting reverence for stage practice. At root, they have struck cineastes as inherently anti-cinematic, burdened by the memory of a literary wordiness that they cannot slough off even in silence and, as a result, unable fully to embrace the cinematic resources on offer (Lindsay, 1970, 194). In recent years, however, the antagonism from both directions has, however, abated significantly and been replaced by a cautiously enthusiastic curiosity from both film communities and Shakespeareans. Thus it is, for example, that in the past decade the British Film Institute, American Film Institute and the Deutsches Institut für Film (German Film Institute) have each separately celebrated the successive rediscovery and rerelease of the Tree King John (1899), the Warde Richard III (1912) and the restored colour print of the Nielsen Hamlet (1920) respectively. Part of these celebrations has involved the commissioning of new musical scores to bring the films to life for new audiences: string quartets and pieces for solo piano by Laura Rossi for the seven films on the BFI Silent Shakespeare DVD; an orchestral symphony by Ennio Morricone for the rereleased Richard III on the AFI DVD; and Michael Riessler’s part-avant-garde, part-classical piece for strings, bass clarinet and electronic effects composed for the 2007 international Berlin film festival’s screening of the colour Hamlet. Meanwhile, with pleasing symbolism, on Shakespeare’s birthday (23 April) in 2007, Shakespeare’s Globe on London’s Bankside projected silent Shakespeare films onto the exterior walls of its playhouse – an appropriate screening venue, not quite within the privileging walls of the central Shakespearean performance tradition but enjoying its delicately flirtatious relationship with that tradition by having its position on the peripheries (the literal peripheries in this case) of that space now emblematically sanctioned. The symbolic stamp of implicit validation for silent Shakespeare extends back, in effect, to 1990 when Kenneth Branagh was honoured as

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the Hamlet of his generation by being given Forbes-Robertson’s personal copy of his own acting edition of Hamlet – a volume that had since been symbolically bestowed upon a succession of actors, including, in the post-war years, Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave and Derek Jacobi (Buchanan, 2005, 1–2). In its relayed passage from Forbes-Robertson through to Branagh, there was a sense that the book had, in its latest act of transmission, passed not just from one stage Hamlet to another, but from one film Hamlet to another, the unknowing originator of this tradition having himself been a screen Hamlet back in 1913. Forbes-Robertson may himself have stomped through a wood shouting “Lines, damn you, give me lines!” to an unsuspecting cameraman when asked to commit his Hamlet to film (Buchanan, 2009, xvii), but the fact of the filming of the celebrated Drury Lane stage production is part of what sealed his greatness for international audiences at the time and for subsequent generations since. In a range of ways, therefore, cineastes have extended their interest to incorporate silent Shakespearean films not only as works of striking cinematic strength in themselves in some cases but also as cinematic documents that bear tellingly on cultural debates about the identity, declared social purposes and target markets of the films. Furthermore, as a symptom of their broadened interest in the diverse forms in which knowledge of and access to Shakespeare have been culturally disseminated, Shakespeareans have adjusted their position from dismissing the idiosyncratic curio of silent Shakespeare films as a collection of “absurd little charades” (Manvell qtd Buchanan, 2009, 6) to brokering a cautious peace with them. The press book that accompanied the sound release of Sam Taylor’s 1929 film The Taming of the Shrew starring Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks was insistent about its status as the first Shakespeare film (see Cartmell, 2008). The implication was clear and chimed with what later Shakespeareans would also claim: that the silent “Shakespeare” films that had preceded could not possibly qualify as Shakespeare films at all and were not, therefore, worthy of consideration in any account of Shakespearean performance history. The silent Shakespeare films that have survived from the era may, sadly, be only a small proportion of the hundreds originally made, but those that we still have are more than sufficient to point up the blatant injustice of this claim.

Notes 1. “Silent film” is the term conventionally employed to refer to films made between 1895 and 1927. As a descriptive label, however, it is actively misleading. Although, barring a few experimental exceptions, the films produced in the medium’s first thirty years did not typically have an integrated, synchronized sound-track, nonetheless they were never silent at the point of exhibition. As a minimum, they were always accompanied by live music (ranging from a solo piano to a full symphony orchestra). In addition, the better-resourced venues would often hire a live lecturer to explain the story of the pictures to the assembled spectators. As a reception experience, therefore, films of this period were far from “silent”. 2. Of these, sixteen are currently commercially available (see “Commercially Available DVDs”); the rest exist only in archival prints that must be viewed on site in one of the archives dedicated to the preservation of film materials. 3. A one-reel picture took between ten and fifteen minutes to project, depending on projection speed. 4. There is no definitive consensus amongst film historians about how precisely to identify these developmental phases. In identifying 1907–1913 as the transitional period, I follow Keil.

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5. It should, however, be noted that the films in this period were still short (one- and two-reelers) and so the greatest number of overall titles does not equate to the most overall Shakespearean film footage. 6. Jannings’ other screen performances of greater nuance attest that this ungoverned performance was not his only register. His most celebrated role is as Professor Immanuel Rath in von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930). He was also awarded the first ever Oscar for The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command (1928).

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Ball, R. H. (1968). Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History. New York: Theatre Arts Books. Bordwell, D. (1997). On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buchanan, Judith (2005). Shakespeare on Film. Harlow: Longman-Pearson. ——(2007). “‘In Mute Despair’: Early Silent Films of The Tempest and their Theatrical Referents”. Shakespeare 3.3, 330–51. ——(2009). Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burrows, Jon (2003). Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films 1908–1918. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Cartmell, Deborah (2008). “Shakespeare and the Coming of Sound: Sam Taylor’s The Taming of the Shrew (1929)”. Paper delivered at the Scaena conference. Cambridge: Anglia Ruskin University. Collick, John (1989). Shakespeare, Cinema, Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ellison, J. (2007). “Beerbohm Tree’s King John (1899): A Fin-de-Siècle Fragment and its Cultural Context”. Shakespeare 3.3, 293–314. Foulkes, Richard, ed. (1986). Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gunning, T. (2004). “The Intertextuality of Early Cinema: A Prologue to Fantômas”. In A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo. Oxford: Blackwell, 127–43. Howard, Tony (2007). Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Russell (2000). “Staging and Storytelling, Theatre and Film: Richard III at Stratford, 1910”. New Theatre Quarterly 16.2, 107–21. Jorgens, Jack (1977). Shakespeare on Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Keil, Charlie (2001). Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style and Filmmaking, 1907–1913. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Lindsay, V. (1970). The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. McKernan, Luke (2000). “A Scene – King John – Now Playing at Her Majesty’s Theatre”. In Moving Performance: British Stage and Screen, 1890s-1920s, ed. Linda Fitzsimmons and Sarah Street. Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 56–68. McKernan, Luke and Olwen Terris, eds (1994). Walking Shadows: Shakespeare in the National Film and Television Archive. London: British Film Institute. Pearson, Roberta E. and William Uricchio (1993). Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ——(1994). “‘Shrieking from below the Grating’: Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree’s Macbeth and His Critics”. In Reclamations of Shakespeare, ed. Ton Hoenselaars. Amsterdsam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 249–71. Rothwell, Kenneth S. (1999). A History of Shakespeare on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Rothwell, Kenneth S. and Annabelle H. Melzer (1990). Shakespeare on Screen: An International Filmography and Videography. London: Mansell. Schoch, Richard W. (2002). Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, E. (2000). “‘Sir J. and Lady Forbes-Robertson left for America on Saturday’: Marketing the 1913 Hamlet for Stage and Screen”. In Moving Performance: British Stage and Screen, 1890s-1920s, ed. Linda Fitzsimmons and Sarah Street. Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 44–55. Thompson, A. (1997). “Asta Nielsen and the Mystery of Hamlet”. In Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV and Video, ed. Richard A. Burt and Lynda Boose. London and New York: Routledge, 215–24.

Commercially Available DVDs 1. Silent Shakespeare (BFI). Includes seven silent Shakespeare films: i. King John (BMBC: dir. W.-K.L.Dickson, 1899), starring Tree. ii. The Tempest (Clarendon: dir. Percy Stow, 1908), cast unknown. iii. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Vitagraph: dir. J. Stuart Blackton and Charles Kent, 1909), starring Ranous, Costello, Swayne Gordon and Turner. iv. King Lear (FAI: Gerolamo Lo Savio, 1910), starring Novelli and Bertini. v. Twelfth Night (Vitagraph: dir. Charles Kent, 1910), starring Turner, Kent, Swayne Gordon. vi. The Merchant of Venice (FAI: dir. Gerolamo Lo Savio, 1910), starring Novelli and Bertini. vii. Richard III (Co-operative Film Company: dir. F. R. Benson, 1911), starring Benson and Constance Benson. 2. Othello (Kino). Includes five silent Shakespeare films: i. Othello (Wörner-Filmgesellschaft: dir. Dimitri Buchowetzki, 1922), starring Jannings and Krauss. ii. Duel Scene from Macbeth (AMBC, 1905). iii. The Taming of the Shrew (Biograph: dir. D. W. Griffith, 1908), starring Florence Lawrence and Arthur V. Johnson. iv. Romeo Turns Bandit/Roméo se fait bandit (Pathé: dir. Bosetti, 1910), starring Max Linder. v. Desdemona (Nordisk: dir. August Blom, 1911), starring Valdemar Psilander and Thyra Reimann. 3. The Thanhouser Collection, Vol. 7 (Thanhouser Company Film Preservation Inc.). Includes three silent Shakespeare films: i. The Winter’s Tale (Thanhouser: dir. Barry O’Neil, 1910), starring Martin Faust. ii. Cymbeline (Thanhouser: dir. Frederick Sullivan, 1913), starring Florence LaBadie. iii. King Lear (Thanhouser: dir. Ernest Warde, 1916), starring Frederick Warde. 4. Richard III (Kino). Includes one silent Shakespeare film: i. Richard III (Shakespeare Film Company: dir. James Keane, 1912), starring Frederick Warde.

Filmography For a full filmography of Shakespeare films from the silent era and beyond, see the (open access) online International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio (BUFVC) at

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SHAKESPEARE ON FILM, 1930–90 Anne-Marie Costantini-Cornède

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rom 1930 to 1990, the phenomenon of Shakespeare on film was characterized by a great variety of activity, from landmark “mainstream” films, deferential to textual authority, to a full range of innovative cinematic essays of all kinds, including modernizations, derivatives or non-English cinematic Shakespeares, and transcultural appropriations trading on radical time and space transpositions, such as Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985), which shift Macbeth and Lear to Sengoku-Jidai (“wartroubled”) medieval Japan. Five main tendencies may be distinguished from the early days of sound movies to the beginning of the Shakespeare on screen revival marked by Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 version of Henry V. Hollywood glamour of the 1930s is followed by the “classic” productions and trilogies of actor-directors (such as Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles), by monochromatic films noirs and by lush and colourful cinematic productions (such as Renato Castellani and Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptations of Romeo and Juliet in 1954 and 1968 respectively), productions that follow the tenets of cinéma vérité realism and are marked by a picturesque authenticity. At the same time, in the 1960s and the 1970s, dark pessimism prevails, with the release of “political” Shakespeare films set in bleak, cold and northern landscapes, as is reflected in Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970) and Peter Brook’s Lear (1970). Meanwhile, state violence takes up the themes of hard-core naturalism in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971). The 1980s saw a crop of radical experimental essays – campy transgressive “derivatives” (Derek Jarman’s The Tempest of 1979 and Celestino Coronado’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream of 1984) and metacinematic conceptual Shakespeares (Jean-Luc Godard’s Lear of 1987 and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books of 1991). These works are marked by not so much “presenting” the model in a deferential way as “interpreting” it or entirely remoulding it, an example of the imitative processes at work in the adaptation initiative.1 Such vast and complex material entails restrictive subjective choices and a contrasting approach based on a two-fold perspective, both historical and aesthetic. Films are not made in one piece: all works reveal an intermingling of, and oscillation between, various aesthetic strategies and modes of representation, from the more “stagy” to the filmic. The scriptwriter first makes choices in the way he or she renders dialogue and opts for exact restitutions, deletions, simplifications or shifts. As he or she manipulates the camera and composes each frame, the director writes the film’s diegesis. His or her personal choices may draw from genre conventions and announce themselves in the way he or she uses the cinematic medium: tight framings, close-ups or extreme close-ups, long shots and high

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and low angles (techniques not allowed by a theatrical mise-en-scène) convey specific impressions, create meaning and impart a rhythm to the narrative. High and low camera angle variations make relations and hierarchies between characters visual, while variations between large and tight framings create complicity or alienation between spectator and actor. We will offer some comments here in relation to numbers, idiosyncratic styles, ideological differences and the use of the film noir genre for various adaptations of Hamlet (from a classic adaptation to non-English modernizations and parody offshoots). In this latter category, cross-cultural transposition and socio-political satire provide interesting examples of experimental essays and of the adaptive process at work. Postmodern adaptations of The Tempest, as exemplified by Derek Jarman’s satirical version, and pictorial conceptual approaches, as exemplified by Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, will provide final examples of radical fin de siècle aesthetics.

Numbers, Types, History From 1930 to 1990, more than eighty films drawing on Shakespeare material were released. However hard it may be to draw definite conclusions, one is struck by the fact that the majority of adaptations were of the tragedies – about sixty films for the big screen, most being Hamlet adaptations. The preference for tragedies is not specific to particular periods but reflects trends over the whole century. Beyond purely quantitative issues lies the question of terminology. The phrase “Shakespeare film” actually covers a wide range of films, from films that merely borrow from or allude to a Shakespeare play to films that unambiguously claim the status as clear and “straightforward” adaptations (these are films whose narratives directly derive from the actions and events of the plays). Any Shakespeare film adaptation may be regarded as a diegetic film.2 The film narrative hinges on the play’s plot and the themes and motifs developed take up those of the play. If one sees adaptation as a dual process, both imitative and deferential, this means that various attitudes may be adopted by artists in relation to source. Jack Jorgens categorizes Shakespeare films according to three different degrees or levels of adaptation (Jorgens, 1991, 7–16): “presentation” refers to the way in which a film is essentially based on the text and respects textual authority, even with deletions and transformations. The term “interpretation” applies to films that reveal a mixture of respect for text and personal innovation: the artist tries to assert his or her vision, with the film constituting a re-vision or anamorphosis of the play. With “adaptation”, the artist fully asserts independence, which leads to the metamorphosis of the model. Here, the play is but pretext, “adaptation” signalling derivatives, transgressions, modernizations, parodies, cultural appropriations and offshoots of all kinds. As Douglas Lanier puts it, cinematic endeavours to respond to “the radical mobility of Shakespearean content” (Lanier, 2003, 154). Jorgens goes on to draw a distinction between three different modes of adaptation. These are: the theatrical-classical mode which has some similarity to a stage mise-en-scène (a fixed camera, close shots and a focus on the actor, positioned in the foreground, facing the camera), the realistic mode which aims at producing historical-cultural authenticity and creating verisimilitude (a sense of reality is rendered via authentic properties and settings, while landscapes are realized in long shots and encompass vast vistas), and the filmic or poetic mode, in which the filmmaker, deploying the full potentialities of cinematic language, expresses his or her own vision and indulges in long visual or aural extrapolations from brief passages of text. For

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instance, the forty-minute Agincourt battle sequence in Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V films of 1944 and 1989 respectively is based on a handful of lines in the original play. The same film may show an alternation between moments of pure “staginess” – theatricality may be necessary because there remains “something fundamentally theatrical about Shakespeare that resists full appropriation by the cinema” (Lanier, 2003, 155) – and moments of pure cinema, such episodes revelling in movement and visual impact. This is suggested, for instance, in the use a mobile camera, in tracking shots and pans, and in long shots and deep focus perspectives. Montage also provides information and builds up meaning. Parallel montage sequences are often resorted to in battle sequences. Editing effects, through which the narrative is either made clear and fluid or is made fragmented, interiorized and subjective, also define the director’s style.

From Silent Shakespeare to Sound: Hollywood’s Glamorous Romances Maurice Dieterle and Maurice Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) and George Cukor and Irving Thalberg’s Romeo and Juliet (1936), two-hour Hollywood studio productions, are glamorous romances enlivened by the lyrical music of Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky. Dances visualize the poetics of love (improvised fairy ballets in Reinhardt’s film and traditional Renaissance dances like the joyful pavane in Cukor’s film), even though these are romances of a different kind. Cukor and Reinhardt’s styles compare to those utilized by Méliès and the Lumière brothers: Cukor draws on realism and verisimilitude to contextualize a “real” Renaissance Verona, while Reinhardt invests in fantasy romance, drawing on a Méliès-like illusionism and visionary mode to translate the verbal poetics of Shakespeare’s play. Both films depend on established actors and rising stars (for instance, Olivia de Havilland plays Hermia and Dick Powell plays Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; by contrast, the decision to have Joe E. Brown play Flute and James Cagney play Bottom has often been thought of as iconoclastic). Similarly, the choice to cast Leslie Howard as a young Romeo and Hollywood superstar Norma Shearer as Juliet in Cukor’s film – the actors were then in their late thirties or early forties – was felt out of keeping with the need to convey the impetuousness of youthful passion. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the forest and fairy worlds, which lie “across the border between ‘reality’ and the dreamlike” (Jackson, 2007, 26), are shown in terms of primary oppositions: Oberon’s dark world is presided over by an ominous and Mephistophelian king of darkness (Victor Jory): he is seen suddenly looming out of murky recesses to rebuke an impish Puck (the fourteen-year-old Mickey Rooney), who is only too keen to torment the lovers. Titania (Anita Louise) is turned into a very queen of light and kinetics; she is surrounded by an army of white-winged and bare-footed gossamer-like fairies which, during an outstanding ballet sequence, appear as aerial creatures dancing in long lines that unfold and dissolve in spirals in the fading sky.3 A lavish use of chiaroscuro creates a myriad of mirroring and crystal-like effects, with the fairy world featuring as a dazzling kaleidoscope of visual uncertainties, a symbol of human mutability. Thalberg and Cukor’s MGM Romeo and Juliet initiates the series of straightforward “classic” adaptations that attempt to achieve a successful visualization of the play while remaining close to the text. This is also the first of the three lush and/or colourful adaptations – Castellani’s and Zeffirelli’s films are the others – that exemplify the realistic

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mode of representation and privilege historical-picturesque authenticity. The opening wide shots showing the sunlit piazza, its campanile, the colourful markets, crowded noisy streets and merchants and craftsmen involved in daily activities lead the audience to recognize a portrait of a lively, fifteenth-century Verona composed of elegant arcades and refined architecture. The illuminated and spacious Capulet mansion, which is registered in a long, high-angle shot that shows majestic interiors adorned with garlands and dancers executing arabesques on a shiny square-patterned floor, is turned into the very locus of luxury and gracious manners. Properties, costumes (such as white-gowned women and men in tights) and settings (such as paintings and frescoes) belong with the same quest for topical authenticity and accurate contextualization. In this sense, the film might be said to represent a kind of “docudrama” as far as regards background details, yet this is not a cinéma vérité production, since it focuses on individual romance rather than the social dimensions of tragedy. Both Castellani and Zeffirelli opt for refulgent colours and location filming and cast young, fresh and spontaneous actors as the titular Romeo and Juliet (Laurence Harvey and Susan Shentall in 1954 and Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in 1968).4 This, for Castellani, was part of an important neo-realist stand, as was his attention to social manners and emphasis on the origins of the lovers’ predicament – the absurd feud animating the Capulets and the Montagues, “households both alike in dignity” (Prologue, 1) and despotism.

From 1944 to 1989: Crossing-Cutting in Two Versions of Henry V Contrasting with these Romeo and Juliet films was Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, the first Technicolor Shakespeare. Olivier’s ideological position is clearly announced at the start via a title card (“To the commandos and airborne troops of Great Britain . . . This film is dedicated”). It is also suggested in the depiction of a clean and orderly battle waged by selfpossessed and heroic soldiers, of an aloof and legendary king who is seen from a distance (Olivier as Henry V is filmed in long shots), and of a highly colourful conflict unfolding under blue skies: the debt here is to the illuminated illustrations of Pol de Limbourg and Jean Colombe’s Book of Hours (Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry) of 1413–16. This “pictorial stylization”, as it has been termed, moves the film “close to the fairytale”: all is “glamour and spectacle” (Davies, 1988, 27). In addition, the pictorial mode of interpretation is both an aesthetic and a historical construction and, because the fifteenth-century illuminations referred to are contemporaneous with Agincourt, the narrative is contextualized effectively. Narrative, in fact, is built on three intertwined historical layers: the first is the idea of Britain at war in 1944 (ironically enough, the film was shot on location in Ireland) which is signalled by the patriotic opening announcement. Then there is the c. 1600 representation of the play at the Globe: this is a self-reflexive construction designed to prompt questions about the codes of difference that obtain between the cinema and the stage. Staginess in these scenes (characters are still, the text is delivered in real time, and there are close shots or tight framings that focus on the actor) contrasts with the full movement, long shots and impressive outer vistas that are reserved for the battle sequences.5 The opening sequence’s long pan shot that sweeps over Renaissance London’s roofs before ducking into the inner enclosed world of the Globe points to cinematic “real” life as opposed to theatrical artifice: the camera’s journey, which at the close moves in the contrary direction, establishes the framing device that embeds the narrative as whole.

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The third historical dimension, the battle of Agincourt of 1415, is best illustrated in the Eisenstein-inspired forty-minute pan showing the cavalry charge. This is an extraordinary visual extrapolation and technically bravura statement which has been summarized as “a virtuoso display of cinematic codes” (Rothwell, 2004, 51). For all its pictorial artificiality, Henry V, however, can still resort to cinematic poetics, revealing hails of arrows falling on soldiers, a silver-armoured king gloriously galvanizing his troops on a rearing horse (there are allusions to Serge Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevski (1938) here) and technically elaborate devices such as composite frames and extreme close-ups of a horse’s nostrils. Filmic, realistic and theatrical modes intertwine compellingly in a three-dimensional historicized narrative. “Flamboyant realist” (Crowl, 2007, 226) Kenneth Branagh clearly departed from Olivier’s idealized and patriotic vision, settling on a naturalistic stance for his 1989 version of the play. His film represents a chaotic Agincourt battle and underlines the pettiness and horrors of warfare; for instance, an audience is invited to contemplate the unsettling episodes of the execution of the French prisoners and Bardolph’s own execution (his feet dangle grotesquely, forming a pitiful sight that draws tears from the king).6 For Branagh, realism meant creating “effets de réel” or verisimilitude effects designed to sustain diegetic clarity, a procedure that followed the tenets of Hollywood “Movement Image” cinema. The technique also applies no less characterization, as Ramona Wray also suggests in her chapter in this volume. An inquisitive camera spies on the actor’s face, with the result that his innermost feelings are discovered. Introspective or extreme close-ups magnify the tiniest details and establish psychological subtexts, such as the angry, cold gleam in Henry’s eyes after receiving the French king’s present (“tennis balls, my liege” (1.2.258)). During the Harfleur siege, “dread sovereign” (1.2.97) Henry is shown in a close, low-angle shot riding an impressive rearing horse (the shot enhances the impression of his overpowering strength) and shouting out a demand for immediate surrender: “Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters . . . Your naked infants spitted upon pikes” (3.3.112, 115). The speech is made all the more powerful by the camera’s intimate contemplation of the actor’s lips and focus, in an extreme long shot, on his wide open mouth: “What say you? Will you yield?” (3.3.119). Branagh’s technique is paradoxical: it is both cinematic and “stagy”. The “proximity effect” – or (secondary form of) identification between spectator and actor, which is suggested by the use of tight framings – tends to fade after a while, and we are encouraged to forget the diegetic character, and the Harfleur conqueror, so as the better to grasp a sense of the actor uttering the text. Ultimately, the focus moves from the purely visual to the purely verbal and to the text itself, as on stage. Henry, it seems, has only been play-acting the “dread sovereign”, and this is confirmed when the camera spotlights the king’s discreet sigh of relief when the Governor yields: the simple, immediate (and purely visual) development points to the internal contradictions of a protagonist Branagh wanted to make “human” and “vulnerable” (Branagh, 1989, 101). Exemplified here is the actor-director’s duality as he endeavours to balance the theatrical and the filmic, cinematic novelty and reverence, indulging in excited reinventions that simultaneously honour textual specifics.

Hamlet: From “Classic” Adaptation to Modern Parody For his second Shakespeare film, Olivier drew on German Expressionist styles and the then popular American film noir genre to create an innovatively filmic innovative Hamlet

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(1948), a literal and deferential adaptation that nevertheless featured substantial textual cuts. Elsinore castle stands as a powerfully cinematic character all of its own – it is a Protean, prismatic place, all curves and secret corners, alcoves and mazes painted in poetically black-and-white shades. Its dark recesses and gloomy interiors conceal Claudius’ (Basil Sydney) plots, while its dizzy heights and vertical spaces are made up of multiple sets of planes linked by spiralling staircases leading to ramparts overlooking raging seas. The maze-like architectonics of the castle and its spatial disjunctions typify anxieties and the projections of a weak and melancholy mind (“the native hue of resolution . . . sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (3.1.86–7)), with the particular take on Hamlet being clearly communicated (via a voiceover) at the outset: “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” Later, Hamlet (Laurence Olivier), led by a silvery armoured Ghost (we are not sure if it is a “spirit of health” or a “goblin damned” (1.4.21)), is seen climbing a twisting staircase through mists and past the battlements and ramparts to the uppermost tower. The labyrinthine motif is taken up in Tony Richardson’s 1969 film version of the play. However, whereas Olivier represents the encounter as recalling biblical motifs of a heavenly elevation and an awe-inspiring being (the encounter itself reveals neither love nor familiarity but seems informed only by a sense of duty), Richardson inverts the pattern, showing us a Hamlet (Nicol Williamson) who enters the depths of the castle (the haunts of the “old mole” (1.5.164)), which points to a negative reading of the ghostly being as a “devil” with “the knowledge of death” (Wilson Knight, 1986, 39).7 The use of chiaroscuro here, which is enhanced by the shiny reflections of the surrounding mists, sustains the supernatural effect. This is further enhanced by rhythmical heartbeats heard on the soundtrack. Up above, a pusillanimous and hysterical Hamlet kneels before the god-like Ghost and declares, almost fainting: “O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?” (1.5.92). It is at this location where, later, during another climactic moment, Hamlet delivers a despaired and frantic “To be or not to be” soliloquy (it is placed after the “nunnery” scene). As he ponders the inanity of things, contemplating rest and death (“to die, to sleep” (3.1.62)), Hamlet’s dagger falls into the water, suggesting an effeminate weakness. An extraordinarily mobile, “inquisitive” and “roving” (Davies, 1988, 62) camera actively constructs the narrative and reinforces the filmic mode, poking down long endless corridors to find gloomy depths and then pursuing a route up winding staircases. In particular, the camera follows Hamlet rushing to his mother’s room to chide her about her frailty. Gertrude’s (Eileen Herlie) closet is a central site in the castle: clearly, it represents the heart of the matter and a psychological focal point. Here, an enraged son is seen threatening with a conspicuously phallic dagger his frightened mother lying on the bed in a languishing posture, sobbing and panting (“Thou wilt not murder me?” (3.4.21) she asks): the opened and softly curved curtains to the bed appear particularly inviting. Eventually, an intrusive Ghost interrupts, only to precipitate the son’s kneeling and pleas for forgiveness. The omniscient camera, spying upon what appears to be a passionate lovers’ encounter, relishes a notably voyeuristic moment in its geo-psychological journey, “a complex journey with moral, psychological and philosophical dimensions” (Davies, 1988, 43) that unveils secrets in the darkest recesses. The closet scene thus provides one of the most climactic moments of the film, epitomizing this long “cinepoem” (Jorgens, 1991, 210) and enhancing the vision of an “Oedipal” Hamlet (the Freudian reading follows in the footsteps of other readings by John Dover Wilson, André Green and Ernest Jones).8

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Deep focus effects, which are used in repetitive ways, form visual leitmotifs that sustain the filmic mode.9 White-gowned “fair” Ophelia (Jean Simmons) is an ethereal and ghost-like figure: she is shown silently roaming, forlorn and neglected, the very image of despair. Filmed in long shots, she is estranged even from the spectator’s gaze, as she is visually diminished and turned into a minor entity in the immensities of a labyrinthine Elsinore. We are also provided with Ophelia’s point of view, as when, for example, she bids Laertes farewell and spots Hamlet watching them from a distance. Alternatively, we may be provided with Hamlet’s point of view. Thus a long shot combined with a deep focus effect shows Ophelia seen from a distance, “an eternity away down the long corridor” (Olivier, 1987, 179), silhouetted in an arch, resting motionless, observed by a mute and brooding Hamlet whose back appears in the foreground right part of the frame. The effect is both metonymic and symbolic.10 Both protagonists appear in the same frame, but the physical distance between them powerfully conveys an impression of alienation and growing estrangement: Ophelia stands as if waiting with “love in her eyes” (Olivier, 1987, 179), while Hamlet ponders, muses and is unable to express his feelings. The impression of mental confinement is further enhanced by the fact that, behind Ophelia, beyond the gloomy walls of Denmark’s prison, can be glimpsed the bright background of the outer natural world, an idealized but simultaneously unattainable world of love. In the same way, the repetitive pattern of long shots operates so as to provide a rhythmical pulse to the film, rushing the narrative to its tragic ending. Associated with the character of Ophelia, these long shots combine with high-angle effects that further reinforce a sense of helplessness and vulnerability. For example, after the nunnery scene, a shattered Ophelia is revealed by a crane shot’s extreme high-angle view to be lying on the stairs crying (“I, of ladies most deject and wretched” (3.1.154), she states). Crushed by an overpowering and god-like camera, she appears a pitiful puppet in the hands of fate, the episode anticipating the doom to come. A mobile and expressive camera, a prismatic castle, and chiaroscuro and shadow effects build up a suggestive filmic mode or what has been termed the mode of “the film poet . . . whose works bear the same relation to the surfaces of reality that poems do to ordinary conversation” (Jorgens, 1991, 10). The filmic-poetic mode clearly asserts the preference for visual imagery over text and verbal detail, for spectacle over dialogue. Grigori Kozintsev also recognized the need to depart from a purely realistic approach. “The aural has to be made visual. The poetic texture has itself to be transformed into a visual poetry, into the dynamic organisation of the film imagery” (Kozintsev, 1967, 191), he famously announced. The choice of the “cool greys of the North” (266) and of a primitive elemental world for his 1964 Hamlet reveals a will to construct a mental world shaped by personal predilections. “I have in mind,” he noted, “stone, iron, fire, earth and sea” (266), these properties not so much standing in for reality but suggesting reality seen from within, from the artist’s inner eye. In this respect, Kozintsev’s “primary intention was to emphasize man’s essential dignity in a world representing his indignity” and to “‘make visible’ the poetic atmosphere of the play” (Manvell, 1971, 80). Similarly, the director’s King Lear (1970), also northern set and northern cast, takes place in and around a fifteenth-century castle in the frozen landscape of the Baltic River Narwa. This provided the neutral, timeless background appropriate to the atmosphere and spirit of the play and suggested, according to the filmmaker, “a mélange of periods from the distant past” (Kozintsev, 1967, 85).11

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Transcultural Hamlets Other versions of Hamlet draw on the film noir genre. Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960) is a Hamlet-infused adaptation. Although the director denied all influence of Shakespeare, the film, which is critical of the civil service and the corrupt world of big business in modern Japan, bears several similarities to Shakespeare’s play: for instance, Nishi (Toshiro Mifune) seeks revenge after the unnatural death of his father, Furuya, a high-up official at the Housing Corporation, who was forced to commit suicide by his peers. Nishi’s success in revealing the company’s nefarious practices (corruption, lies and the intimidation of its members) falls short, as he fails to act in time and is finally killed by his enemies, who inject him with alcohol. The order of events, the bleak gloomy atmosphere which echoes Shakespeare’s play, the protagonist’s procrastination and his “stagy” theatricals designed to unmask the guilty are the constitutive elements that allow for the film be considered an offshoot. In 1987, Aki Kaurismäki offered a modern mock film noir version of Hamlet. The black and white film, produced in Finland and running for eighty-six minutes, is clearly a Shakespeare adaptation, as is suggested in the title – Hamlet Goes Business – and in a narrative that closely follows the original plot. Old Hamlet is treacherously murdered by his brother, Klaus (Esko Salminen), a strong-willed and assertive Gertrude (Elina Salo) commits adultery, Klaus and Polonius (Esko Nikkari) take over the family firm, and suspicion and surveillance are everywhere apparent – these are among the film’s Shakespearean features. Even the spies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find their modern-day and Mafia-like equivalents in Oslo and Wallenberg, who are killed by Hamlet on board the ship taking him to England. Yet, if this satire on a crisis-afflicted Finland and a corrupt business world evokes the main themes of revenge tragedy (ambition, murder and hatred), an overall commitment to parody makes the film a tongue-in-cheek creation, which ultimately seems to debunk the very essence of tragedy itself. The secondary plot is gestured towards and then subverted in similarly debunking fashion. After Hamlet’s sexual approaches to the young, plump Ophelia (Kati Outinen) are rejected, father and daughter speculate that frustration may result in a profitable marriage. “His family has too much money to leave it to a dactylographer” is an ironic echo of the play’s “At such a time I’ll loose my daughter to him” (2.2.163). A particularly cynical scene shows father and daughter sitting on a sofa calmly discussing the matter; the cigarchomping Polonius even advises Ophelia to buy a new dress for the next meeting, and she appears to consent. Similarly infantilized is Hamlet (Pirkka-Pekka Petelius): he is shown as a vain and superficial glutton who passes for an idiot and is easily gratified by gifts of “pocket money”. He returns safely from London only to learn of Ophelia’s pitiful suicide in a bath tub. The extreme high-angle establishing shot that shows Klaus pouring a suspicious liquid into a bottle in the bathroom strikingly introduces the spectator into the film’s diegetic world. Such suspense as is put into play here is supported by a filmic score that either clarifies the action or enhances the dramatic intensity of the moment. An extreme close-up of the glass, one of the main visual motifs of the film, invites us to recognize a poisonous substance, and we later learn that Klaus has been gradually poisoning his brother so as to usurp his place. Slowly paced action, close shots and inquisitive camerawork are the techniques deployed in a ten-minute sequence that both reinforces tension and establishes connections with the thriller genre.

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Dialogue is arresting in its curt cynicism. The Ghost returns to tell Hamlet of his condition, but he does so in a darkly humorous way, announcing that “hell is very hot indeed”. Diverting effects are quickly generated, and they are affirmed in Hamlet’s unmoved reply that it is “cold outside” and that he fears he is about to “miss the dinner”. The statement is elaborated on an opposition, with the hot–cold dichotomy drawing the Ghost’s attention to his own predicament and highlighting the son’s blasé indifference. Equally noticeable is the discrepancy between the visual and the aural: words, delivered in icy fashion, contrast with the serious tone suggested by Hamlet’s dark gaze and the Ghost’s solemn appearance. Gertrude emerges as entirely capable of justifying her love for Klaus, which she declares with a typical cynicism: “Your father showed as much passion for me as for his snow tyres”, she records glumly. Despite its parodic complexion, the representation of a mature Gertrude helps to banish the tradition of weak, hysterical and son-infatuated mothers (the most obvious instance is Eileen Herlie in Olivier’s film of the play) and to anticipate the genuine breakthrough suggested by the casting of Glenn Close as Gertrude in Franco Zeffirelli’s action-centred film of Hamlet (1990). With this film, a strong-willed and unyielding mother stands firm before her angry son: she is marked out as powerful, as Carol Chillington Rutter notes, by being imagined as “flushed” and “adolescent” (Rutter, 2007, 256). In this version, both Gertrude and Ophelia (Helena Bonham-Carter), “the true intellectual in a pre-Raphaelite action-man Elsinore” (Rutter, 2007, 256), appear in forthright terms and possessed of a pronounced modern credibility. In contradistinction to the Zeffirelli Hamlet, Hamlet Goes Business discovers action as burlesque: the duel summons and mocks the conventions of the Hollywood gangster movie, discovering Hamlet as an unexpected action hero who shoots Klaus/Claudius far too quickly and dispatches Laurï/Laertes by throwing a radio set at his head. Few chronological inversions or deletions characterize the unfolding of the plot. The exception to this rule is the end which, despite an overall subscription to parody, hinges on a tragic coup de théâtre. Hamlet confesses his murderous schemes to Simo/Horatio (Nannu Valtonen), the boss’ driver and the protagonist’s childhood friend, admitting that he “did not like [his] father very much”: he had been aware of Klaus’ machinations right from the start. Simo and Helena, his fiancée, supposed symbols of a working class waking up to having been unscrupulously exploited by a corrupt order, ultimately emerge as cast in the same cynical mould that we have seen elsewhere. Satire reaches a climax of cynical proportions. Hence, Simo calmly poisons Hamlet and takes the money out of the safe; the couple neatly close the door, leaving the dead behind, and depart with their spoils. In a last debunking stroke, tragedy is transformed into black comedy and grim social critique. The innovative or adaptive effects sketched here (which are related to plot, themes, symbols and text) emerge from a discrepancy between the representation of recognizable tragic events from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a debunking interpretive strategy. In both Kurosawa and Kaurismäki’s off-shoot versions, the success of a minimalist mise-en-scène can be traced to the incisive deployment of a slow pace, of a motionless camera, and of meticulously arranged frame compositions that reveal only a few carefully positioned props and characters. Frontal viewpoints as well as tight framings – the focus is invariably either on characters slowly executing a crime (murderous hands) or on the props themselves (the glass and the small bottle containing poison) – partake of the thriller genre. Generically consistent, too, is the use of chiaroscuro and contrasting effects between light and dark suggestive of primary symbolic oppositions. Kurosawa’s film essay focuses on the social dimensions of tragedy and reveals collective flaws; by contrast, Kaurismäki balances collective

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and individual responsibility so as to highlight a general perversion of human character in thrall to a ubiquitous corruptive process.

Macbeth: Monochromatic Visual Poetry The black and white power, and generic allegiances, of these Hamlet films bring similarly conceived film versions of Macbeth to mind. Orson Welles’ Macbeth (1948) is typical. A visual “metaphysical drama” (Bazin, 1978, 101), the film opens with an evocation of a primitive timeless world, and this is realized via artificial papier-mâché sets and mist-laden settings. No less atmospheric are the three enigmatic and ragged “barbarous” witches (Bazin, 1978, 101) and the crowned wooden effigy of Macbeth at their feet, a sign of their occult power (the film was made with frequent reference to the well-known 1936 “Voodoo Harlem” production of the play). Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), known too as Castle of the Spider’s Web, also draws on symbolism, suggesting more than fully showing. Thus, the enchanted forest, a rain-saturated landscape where Washizu/ Macbeth (Toshiro Mifune) and Miki/Banquo (Minoru Chiaki) lose their way, appears as a labyrinthine world, its blurred limits suggesting visual uncertainties and moral confusion. There, in the indistinct centre of an invisible web – a snare into which fall the warriors and the weak – sits the old Weird Woman, who slowly spins and chants monotonously the enigmatic words prophesying Macbeth’s fortunes to come (“All men are mortals; there is only bondage where men fret . . . Washizu will be Lord of Cobweb Castle”). The image of an ethereal spirit, which vanishes once the chant is concluded, merges with that of the spinning wheel, which stands here as a wheel of time or fate that is forever manipulated to oppress the vulnerable: Kurosawa’s film offers us a particularly despairing and cyclical vision of experience. Asaji/Lady Macbeth (Isuzu Yamada), her blank expressionless face modelled on Noh drama masks, appears as a further powerful figure of evil (“Kill, and take possession of Cobweb Castle”, she instructs). Invariably, Kurosawa resorted to Noh to suggest types and moods, as in Ran (1985), based on King Lear, in which Hidetora/Lear’s green mask betokens terror: as James Goodwin states of the film, “For the final stage of . . . madness . . . makeup . . . sculpts a rigid image on the face” (Goodwin, 1994, 206). In Throne of Blood, at its end, the closing sequences take up the symbolic stance of the start, with a view of a waving forest of trees moving through the mist, of Washizu pierced by a hail of arrows (his open mouth and eyes are typical expressionist devices) and of a protagonist’s gaze that recalls the fate of a hunted animal. The witch’s low and fateful chant is heard after a dissolve, suggesting a malevolent power that has been in operation all along. Although differing from these films in its colourful palette, Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971) is similarly pessimistic. The film’s aesthetic relies on crude naturalism rather than metaphysical symbolism: hence, we are granted views of tyrannical practices, of hanged prisoners surveyed by Macbeth (Jon Finch) and Banquo (Martin Shaw), of the assassination and suggested rape (off camera) of Lady Macduff, and of Macbeth’s final execution, his head indecently displayed on a pole. These are scenes that are Holocaust-like in their impact and horror. By the same token, the vision elaborated evokes Kozintsev’s political Shakespeare films, which are themselves indebted to a pessimism that recalls Jan Kott, and discovers individuals crushed by the grand mechanisms of power. As Jan Kott states of the play: “Politics hangs here over every feeling, and there is no getting away from it. All the characters are poisoned by it. The only subject of their conversation is politics. It is a

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kind of madness” (Kott, 1964, 197). It is a view that remarkably anticipates the tenor and complexion of Polanski’s film.

Welles’ Othello: Enmeshing the Viewer’s Gaze After Macbeth (1948), Welles directed his Shakespearean energies to Othello (1952). Judged an “authentic flawed masterpiece” (Jorgens, 1991, 175), the film, in fact, offers us some brilliant cinematography. The narrative is erected on the basis of a carefully assembled montage and operates according to a series of visual oppositions between the antagonistic worlds of reason and chaos: the Venetian orderly world (which was shot in Morocco) is set in productive juxtaposition with Othello’s world (as doubts gradually possess and destroy him). Equally contrasting to productive effect are the bars and lattices suggestive of confinement that are seen alongside moving watery compositions, shadows, distortions and grotesque shapes symbolizing disorder, a pagan Cyprus and the devilish Iago (Micheál MacLiammóir). Basic oppositions between black and white assist characterization – a dark and sombre-looking Welles appears antithetical to the fair and innocent Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier). The film is rife with motifs that serve as metaphors for the central image of the web, the trap or net laid by Iago to “ensnare” (2.1.169) all of the major players. Crucially, in the handkerchief scene, Othello is made to watch the scene from behind bars. The fragmented frame, and ensuing shattered vision, suggest that, from this point on, he will have only a twisted access to truth, his gaze having been irrevocably damaged. Bars, lattices, gratings and grilles not only convey a sense of confinement (they estrange characters from the rest of the world); they also confine the spectator’s gaze, creating visual distortions and allowing only a partial view. Such a process of disclosure, a paradoxical one which hides the truth rather than revealing it, offers a visual correlative to Iago’s enmeshing ploys and verbal innuendoes.12 In the opening sequence, Iago’s dark eye is captured in close shot, peering through the criss-crossed bars of his suspended cage. From here he watches a slow funeral procession, since the film narrative, taking the play’s plot backwards, starts with the tragic deaths of the central couple. The high-angle shot directed from his gaze to the crowd below points up the force of a warped perspective. Furthermore, “throughout the film”, as Patricia Tatspaugh notes, “shots of the empty cage foreshadow Iago’s punishment and fit into a pattern of images that confine Desdemona and Othello” (Tatspaugh, 2007, 151). Hence, the recurring image of the cage, the “locus classicus for the rest of the movie” (Rothwell, 2004, 78), displaces that of the trap, which functions as a microcosm for the prison’s moral and mental resonances. Unlike Welles’ dark and symbolic statement, which is premised upon imprisonment, Sergei Yutkevitch’s Othello (1955), starring Sergei Bondarchuk and Irina Skobtseva, discovers open spaces and presents a lyrical, “romanticized and highly pictorialized” (Manvell, 1971, 73) reading of the Shakespearean original. Elaborately composed camerawork and generously visual extrapolations announce the filmic poetic mode, with a particular use being made of panoramic scenic shots of the Crimea’s “spectacular coastal scenery” (Manvell, 1971, 73). Such shots bolster the impression of vulnerable human actors lost in a vast universe and crushed by overpowering natural forces. As such, this mode of cinematography – which is constituted by “real” landscapes and spatial externalization – may be set against Welles’ interior and individual visions that play on a fragmentation rather than an elaboration of cinematic space.

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The stylistic devices with which Welles became identified can be found again in his Chimes at Midnight (1965), a film based on the two parts of Henry IV. The narrative demonstrates a carefully structured alternation between court sequences and tavern sequences, with the two worlds being visually contrasted. The bare high walls and Gothic arches of Spain’s Cardona Cathedral point towards unknown heavens and suggest elevated truths as stern and remote as the king himself (John Gielgud). In contrast, the narrow, tortuous corridors and low rooms of the tavern hint at a rounded (Falstaff-like) world that, for all its miserable appearances, embraces guests in an atmosphere of warm humanity. Eastcheap, then, is the space of freedom and comedy. Here, by means of the mock play staged by Hal (Keith Baxter) and the old jester, the two worlds, court and tavern, are briefly united. Falstaff (Orson Welles), who sits on a rickety chair by way of an improvized throne, and wears a copper saucepan for a crown, performs the role of a derisory king, the mock king of merry old England (“false-staff ”). The camera shoots him ironically from a low angle which mimics Hal’s point of view, the Prince playing a subdued and kneeling Falstaff. Then the two players switch roles: Hal takes over as king and blames the dissolute son for associating with a base “trunk of humours” and a “stuffed cloak-bag of guts” (1 Henry IV, 2.5.410, 411–12). Via such cinematic reflexive devices the film casts a glance at Shakespearean metatheatrical devices. Yet, despite its comic tone, the scene reveals a sinister underside: the detail of a kneeling, imploring Falstaff (“Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world” (2.5.438)) is a proleptic hint that anticipates the more sombre episode towards the close when the knightly protagonist indeed falls to his prayers. The parallel between the two moments is established by means of a quick succession of low-angle and high-angle shots, the playfulness of a mobile camera being a particular “Wellesian” speciality. In the cathedral, Falstaff is represented as having to struggle to reach the king – the way is obstructed by soldiers’ pikes. And, as he clumsily calls out to the newly crowned monarch (“My king, my Jove, I speak to thee, my heart!’” (2 Henry IV, 5.5.45)), Henry, his back turned, administers the fatal blow: “I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers” (5.5.45). Falstaff literally flings himself forward, falling to his knees and, showing dark wrinkles under his half-closed eyes, appears absolutely exhausted. Energy and authority, instead, are reserved for a king who, shot in medium close-up and framed from an extreme low angle, slowly and solemnly turns to pronounce the final rejection: “How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester!” (2 Henry IV, 5.5.46). The low-angle (dominant) view functions in such a way as to crush Falstaff beneath the weight of the ritualistic conventions of the coronation ceremony. At the same time, the now humiliated – “deflated” – Falstaff lifts imploring eyes to the king as if in recognition of the unattainable world above: the low–high vertical dynamic deployed here metaphorically announces both a new divide and an established hierarchical order.13 The Shrewsbury battle sequence shows war in a realistic light, revealing ragged soldiers wading through mud and heaps of corpses littering the blood-soaked ground. Savage carnage is suggested by speeded up shots and the quick movements of a hand-held camera. Yet, despite the crude realism, the poetic mode still rises to the surface, as when a massive Falstaff, clad in armour, appears alone and motionless, a monstrous shape looming out of the haze of the battlefield. The old man has been actively pursuing an escapist strategy, hiding behind bushes and, with another of his witty turns of phrase, will then justify his cowardice (“The better part of valour is discretion” (1 Henry IV, 5.4.117–18)). His boastful lie about his having killed Percy creates a definite rift between the friends, as is shown in Hal’s disappointed frown, and marks a seminal moment in their relations.

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In all of Welles’ films, skewed angles and pronounced camera mobility allow for unconventional frame compositions and create a general effect of spatial fragmentation or disjunction suggestive of psychological complexities. The “Wellesian” style invites appreciation of an Othello devoured by jealousy and an Iago realized as a slanted, distorted personality. Chiaroscuro, montage effects and shots in quick succession serve to disrupt the “reasonable” expectations encouraged by narrative cinema and constitute the director’s signature stance, a stance that draws heavily on strategies of implication and the symbolic mode. And yet, for all their cinematic characteristics, Welles’ Shakespeare films remain “adaptations” that respect the essentials of the Shakespearean text.

Cross-Cultural Adaptation: Akira Kurosawa’s Ran In some ways, Welles’ approach anticipates a number of transcultural Shakespeare films that draw on visual poetry to support particular interpretations. Ran, a “free” and indirect adaptation of King Lear that resembles the Shakespeare-infused The Bad Sleep Well more than Throne of Blood, is a colour-saturated, “periodizing” film that condenses plot and merges character. The plot, which concerns the tragedy of Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai), a powerful head of a clan, merges two stories into one, that of the medieval historical warlord Motonari Mori (1497–1571) and his three sons, and that of the fictitious Lear (Raison and Toubiana, 1985, 11). In several interviews, Kurosawa explained that he wanted to simplify the plot, to eliminate “useless details”, to reduce the number of characters and to opt for incisive dialogue, not least because he believed that Shakespeare’s characters were generally “too talkative” (Raison and Toubiana, 1985, 13).14 This, in turn, led him to a form of characterization that verged on type and allegory: characters appear in more strident colours in keeping with the contexts of a bellicose and patriarchal Japan, with action emphasized and motives clearly externalized. As Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto has stated of the method: “Some of the remarks by the principal characters sound naive, didactic or overstated . . . The notion of character does not adequately describe the function of human figures . . . mere types, without any illusion of psychological depth, parts of a magnificent tapestry” (Yoshimoto, 2000, 57). In Ran, the third son, the loyal Saburo (Daisuke Ryu), represents a Cordelia–Kent amalgam (he also represents Mori’s actual second son, Motoharu). In keeping with this reading, Saburo is not so much the modest, subdued Cordelia who utters “nothing” as an assertive, aggressive samurai who rebels against his father’s folly (“You must be senile, senile or insane”, he exclaims), his manner recalling Kent’s rude sincerity. Tsurumaru (Mansai Nomura), blinded by Hidetora and living alone in the wilderness, resigned to his fate, stands as both Gloucester and Edgar in his philosophical “poor Tom” guise. This also serves to make of Hidetora a combination character: he appears both as a cruel Cornwall and as the old and fragile father, once predator and now victim. As part of his approach to the Shakespearean text, Kurosawa looked for reasons underlying the characters’ predicaments. In particular, he imagined Hidetora’s past exactions, implication in torture and murder, the general mayhem of other clans (recurrent features of a violent and warlike medieval Japan) and the protagonist’s subsequent guilt as informing his madness. As the director stated, “I believe my film to be less pessimistic than King Lear; in any case, it is with this sense that I made the film. In contrast to King Lear, who has no regrets . . . Hidetora reflects on his past and regrets it . . . I think my work is less tragic” (Goodwin, 1994, 204). Even more characteristically, the fiendish Dame Kaede (Mieko Harada), who

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pursues revenge against the Ichimonji clan, is discovered as a metonymic type bringing together evil, duplicity and hypocrisy: she is enlivened by her similarities to the amoral bastard, Edmund, and to Regan and Goneril, the “foxes”, “wolves” and “serpents” of the play. Multiple verbal invocations of the feline converge in a central image when Kaede is gifted a stone effigy of a fox’s head, with the character’s Machiavellian wiles being graphically illustrated. Kurosawa’s cinema revels to the full in the medium of film: it is characterized by distinctively mobile cameras, by pan tracks, by sophisticated long one-take shots and by a theatrical mise-en-scène (a motionless frontal camera which is close to the actor).15 In Throne of Blood and Ran, lyrical battle sequences based on extreme movement alternate with more static scenes involving characters sitting or dancing according to Noh-like conventions. The studied and solemn movements of Asaji and Kaede, for example, constitute a kind of visual minimalism that point up both characters’ calculating machinations. Kyoami, the Fool, played by the transvestite actor Pita, also sings and dances short pieces styled after the Funa Benkei plays. His mockery exposes either flaws – Hidetora is particularly naive in dividing up his kingdom (“And I give my house, I give my land!” he states) – or dubious motives, as when, Taro, the first son, reveals the extent of his wife’s domination over him by depriving his father of the clan’s banner, a salient symbol of authority. At the same time, Noh intermezzi offer comic diversion and function as a corrective to the warfare scenes in which a primitive feudal violence is unleashed. In Ran, in particular, the rhythmical alternation between quick movement and slow static sequences both supports the action and provides relief from violence, the third castle battle sequence being one of the film’s most harrowing episodes. Here, the yellow and red-flagged armies of Taro and Jiro approach with calm solemnity. Then, the intertwined banners signal the beginning of the conflict, and this is followed by a full unleashing of violence, which is envisioned in terms of explosions, soldiers running and falling in confusion under hails of arrows, the castle in flames, copper-illuminated skies and piles of bodies. Yet, generally, violence is suggested and aestheticized rather than clearly demonstrated, for long shots impart a sense of distance and the carefully modulated score by Toru Takemitsu takes attention away from immediate content. As Kurosawa stated, reflecting on his strategy for the sequence, “In eliminating the sounds from the . . . battle, I wanted to indicate that the perspective was that of the heavens: the heavens watch such unthinkable and bloody battles and become literally mute” (Goodwin, 1994, 211). Notably, sound is only reintroduced at the point where Taro is killed by a deadly gunshot. Within the burning castle, we are shown Hidetora’s attempt to take his own life: he decides to commit sepukku to escape hell but can only find a useless broken sword. It is this failure that shapes his distraught and wild-eyed appearance (“less a man than the mask of a man” (Goodwin, 1994 , 206), as James Goodwin states) in the castle’s courtyard. It is also this failure that precipitates his exile on the volcanic wastes, as the monumental gates are opened for Hidetora to roam in the wilderness.16 An extreme high-angle shot shows the forlorn figure running, his white kimono blowing in the wind, the implication being that he has been crushed by fate. These are but a few instances of meticulously elaborated frames that distinguish a lyric narrative, a succession of visual tableaux carefully composed by the director himself. And, beyond these tableaux, it is helpful to recall that the 400 or so drawings executed by Kurosawa prior to shooting served to convince producer Serge Silberman to invest the extraordinary amount of $9 million in the film, thus making Ran materially possible. A particularly evocative tableau is reserved for the close. Here, the

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blind Tsurumaru is glimpsed feeling his way along a cliff that leads towards an unknown abyss (the allusion to Gloucester’s “false” cliff is ironic, since this abyss is only too real), his dark shadow profiled against glowing red skies. The condition of an imminent fall suggests “complete emptiness” (Rothwell, 2004, 191) and reinforces a nihilistic vision of isolation and helplessness in a godless universe.

Postmodern and/or Metacinematic Shakespeares Moving to the beginning of the 1980s, the decade with which this chapter ends, it becomes clear that it was Derek Jarman who was mainly responsible for announcing the radical mood of the period, particularly in the light of his transgressive 1979 production, The Tempest. The Prospero (Heathcote Williams) in this film is far from the almighty magus and absolute master portrayed by John Gielgud in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), for this latter work shows a traditionally imagined Renaissance humanist and a “prime manipulator” (Greenaway, 1991, 9). Authority inheres, in particular, in Gielgud/Prospero’s taking on all of the parts until the moment of forgiveness; as the director suggests, the magician-protagonist shapes “characters so powerfully through . . . words that they are conjured up before us” (Greenaway, 1991, 9). By contrast, Williams’ Prospero is unconventional; he is discovered as an immature, moody master of a gloomy island, overall unfit for temporal power. In this, he resembles Professor Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), the mad scientist in Forbidden Planet (dir. Fred McLeod Wilcox, 1956), based on The Tempest, who creates a Caliban-like monster from his unconscious, and Professor Pluggy (Jean-Luc Godard), the bizarre antenna-adorned figure in Lear (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1987), based on King Lear, who relentlessly searches for the truths of cinema. In Jarman’s imaginative take on The Tempest, the “cell” is dimly lit according to Caravaggio’s tenebrist aesthetic and constitutes a self-enclosed, claustrophobic “maze” that is “trod indeed / Through forthrights and meanders” (3.3.2–3). Interesting in this respect is the fact that the rooms are arranged according to no coherent pattern, their strange architecture reflecting the protagonist’s split personality. Prospero also represents the deviant power figure that Jarman the satirist delighted in attacking. As the director stated, “I distrust all figures of authority, including the artist” (Buchanan, 2005, 164). It is entirely appropriate, then, that Prospero is repeatedly shown ill-treating Caliban (Jack Birkett), ruthlessly crushing his hand under his shoe, or tormenting a sad and white-faced Ariel (Karl Johnson), himself a cheerless spirit longing for liberty and love.17 Homoerotic overtones in The Tempest abound. During the masque sequence, in a brightly lit hall adorned with flowers, forty white-clad sailors dance in a long, serpentine line, swaying their hips suggestively to the tune of “Stormy Weather” sung by the well-known jazz performer, Elizabeth Welch, here impersonating three goddesses in one. Meanwhile, Toyah Willcox plays an impish Miranda, occasionally unveiling her charms to a lewd Caliban. A number of scenes are angled iconoclastically – as when a naked, flabby Sycorax (Claire Davenport) jubilantly feeds her “monstrous” adult-baby son – and bolster the sense of a film that is distinctive for taking Shakespeare in purposely irreverent directions. Prospero’s Books is more affirming in its Shakespearean attitudes. This version of The Tempest – “after William Shakespeare” – understands “magic” in terms of a recreation of humanist Renaissance contexts. A sense of context is communicated via multiple references to quattrocento and mannerist virtuosi (such as da Messina and Bronzino,

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with Michelangelo’s Biblioteca Laurenziana serving as the model for Prospero’s library). Cinematic magic is expressed through a complex of self-conscious motifs, frame-withinthe-frame devices and mise en abyme effects that equate the metatheatrical dimensions of the play. As the director states, Prospero’s island is “full of superimposed images, shifting mirrors and mirror-images . . . where pictures conjured by text . . . are constantly framed and reframed. This framing and reframing becomes like the text itself – a motif – reminding the viewer that it is all an illusion constantly fitted into . . . a picture frame, a frame” (Greenaway, 1991, 12). These motifs both frame the story and contribute to a dazzling mirage of gaze-baffling intricacies and visual uncertainties – purposely illusionist, they furnish a potent impression of the “subtleties o’th’ isle” (5.1.126). Such images also recall a Deleuzian concept of time that discloses the nature of cinematic machinery and shows art as an artifice. Metatheatre is signalled via red curtains drawn by satyrs and close-shot frontal views of Prospero delivering a disenchanted epilogue. Yet this mode of reflexive questioning is not of a piece with Jean-Luc Godard’s in Lear, a film haunted by the failure of the visual to convey meaning. Rather, Greenaway is concerned to anatomize cinematic strategy and technique; he is interested, in particular, in how spatial limits are defined by the screen, as is illustrated in the scene where Ariel attempts to leap out of the frame (“But release me from my bands” (Epilogue, 9)), seemingly rushing out to embrace the spectator. No less suggestive of a preoccupation with the capabilities of the screen is the way in which Prospero’s twenty-four magic books encompassing all art and knowledge – The Book of Water, the Book of Motion and Anatomy of Birth, among others – fill the screen space, displaying their treasures in full textual, visual and aural detail. These magnificent books, that bring to mind Renaissance artists and practitioners such as da Vinci and Vesalius, not only evoke the wunderkammer collections of early modern potentates like Emperor Rudolf II of Prague; they also show Shakespearean film itself as an amazing phenomenon, a veritable cinematic cabinet of curiosities.

Notes 1. Kenneth S. Rothwell (2004, 208–10) defines seven kinds of “derivatives” including biographies and documentaries. 2. Christian Metz makes a distinction between narrative, diegetic and representative films that follow a clear plot and foster effects of verisimilitude (effets de réel) and non-fictional and non-diegetic films that create deceptive (dysnarrative) effects, attempt to break the illusion of verisimilitude and introduce conceptual, reflexive images. See Metz, 1993, 64. 3. The choreography was orchestrated by Bronislava Nijinska and Nini Thelaide, the music was arranged by Korngold and the lighting effects were by Hal Mor. 4. Zeffirelli also made the The Taming of the Shrew (1966), starring the famous pairing of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, the operatic Otello (1986) and an action-hero Hamlet (1990). 5. A close shot shows Olivier clearing his throat in the backstage area. 6. Olivier has been criticized for purposely omitting these episodes. 7. Zeffirelli, in his 1990 Hamlet, represents a more familiar and affectionate encounter between a pitiful father (Paul Scofield), who is seen as almost weeping, and a compassionate son (Mel Gibson). 8. The “Oedipal” dimension is enhanced by the fact that Eileen Herlie was only twenty-seven years old while Olivier was forty years old. The casting-generational idea had already been explored in the Tyrone Guthrie 1936 Old Vic Theatre stage production, from which the film was drawn. 9. Such a device is also metacinematic: it explicitly signals one of the specific potentialities of

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10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

anne-marie costantini-cornède cinematic mise-en-scène. Incidentally, the perspective effect also evokes ideas of Renaissance architectural standards and can be instrumental in historicizing the narrative. In Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film version of Richard III, the huge crown effigy suspended over Richard’s head represents a visual metonymy of power. Peter Brook’s King Lear (1970), which was set in North Jutland, breaks away from realism and romanticism and subscribes to an atmospheric minimalism, as it trades upon vast expanses of snow-covered ground and barren interior settings. The overall impression of blankness and emptiness conveys a vision of a bleak and hopeless universe, which takes up the play’s trope of nothingness. In a similarly minimalist fashion, characters utter dialogue in close shots against bare backgrounds. Paul Scofield plays Lear as a pathetic and weak old man who has lost all dignity, while dark-haired Annelise Gabold is a sternly realized Cordelia. The Othello/Iago opposition can also be seen in terms of a basic opposition between exterior/ noble (Othello) and interior/infected. See Jess-Cooke, 2007, 60–1. The end is ironic: Ralph Richardson, in voiceover, can be heard quoting passages praising the king from Holinshed’s Chronicles while the huge coffin is carried away. For discussion of the genesis of the film and the merging of the two narratives, see Raison and Toubiana, 1985, 10–13 and Tassone, 1990, 274 as well as the works by Goodwin and Yoshimoto. The final battle scene was shot in an open field using three mobile camera perched on cranes. The three sons’ castles were modelled on sixteenth-century Japanese fortresses by the set designers in keeping with a commitment to history and realism. Typical, too, are the costumes and references to samurai manners and code of honour. Verisimilitude effects operate in tandem with a recreation of the contexts of medieval Japan. Jack Birkett also appears as the “Incredible Orlando” in Celestino Coronado’s burlesque film, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1984).

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Bazin, André (1978). Orson Welles: A Critical Review. New York: Harper and Row. Branagh, Kenneth (1989). ‘Henry V’ by William Shakespeare: A Screen Adaptation. London: Chatto and Windus. Buchanan, Judith (2005). Shakespeare on Film. Harlow: Longman. Crowl, Samuel (2007). “Flamboyant Realist: Kenneth Branagh”. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 226–42. Davies, Anthony (1988). Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook, Akira Kurosawa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, James (1994). Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Greenaway, Peter (1991). ‘Prospero’s Books’: A Film of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’. London: Chatto and Windus. Ishaghpour, Youssef (2001). Orson Welles Cinéaste, Une Caméra Visible: Les Films de la Période Nomade III. Paris: Éditions de la Différence. Jackson, Russell (2007). Shakespeare Films in the Making: Vision, Production and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jess-Cooke, Carolyn (2007). Shakespeare on Film: Such Things as Dreams are Made of. London: Wallflower. Jorgens, Jack J. (1991). Shakespeare on Film. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Kott, Jan (1967). Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski. London: Methuen. Kozintsev, Grigori (1967). Shakespeare: Time and Conscience. London: Dobson. Lanier, Douglas (2003). “Nostalgia and Theatricality: The Fate of the Shakespearean Stage in the

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Midsummer Night’s Dreams of Hoffman, Noble and Edzard”. In Shakespeare the Movie II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, and DVD, ed. Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose. London and New York: Routledge, 154–72. Manvell, Roger (1971). Shakespeare and the Film. London: Dent. Metz, Christian (1993). Le Signifiant Imaginaire: Psychanalyse et Cinéma. Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur. Olivier, Laurence (1987). On Acting. London: Sceptre. Raison, Bernard and Serge Toubiana (1985). Le Livre de ‘Ran’. Paris: Seuil/Greenwich Film Production/Cahiers du Cinéma. Rothwell, Kenneth S. (2004). A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rutter, Carol Chillington (2007). “Looking at Shakespeare’s Women on Film”. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 245–66. Tassone, Aldo (1990). Akira Kurosawa. Paris: Flammarion. Tatspaugh, Patricia (2007). “The Tragedies of Love on Film”. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 141–64. Wilson Knight, George (1986). The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy with Three New Essays. London and New York: Routledge. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro (2000). Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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SHAKESPEARE ON FILM, 1990–2010 Ramona Wray

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his chapter offers an overview of Shakespeare in his cinematic incarnations across two specific decades. It aims not so much at comprehensiveness, for such a project would necessitate a much longer and more intensive approach, but, rather, at a series of critical engagements with feature films that testify to the valences and values embedded in the Bard at a specific historical juncture. The period from 1990 onwards has been dubbed the “Kenneth Branagh Era” and, certainly, there is much to be said for seeing the director, producer and performer – recipient of awards and retrospectives – as central to Shakespeare on film, not least because of the effect and longevity of his seminal screen interpretations. But Branagh represents one dimension only of a shifting temporary field that encompasses related Hollywood undertakings, grass-roots productions and a host of adaptations and appropriations in different languages. In an assessment of the Bard’s fluctuating cinematic fortunes, this chapter considers the means whereby certain filmmakers have been privileged while others have been sidelined. It pursues six routes into the topic – in this order, they are auteurism, the popularity of particular plays, conceit/genre, adaptation/appropriation, the past/nostalgia and postmodernism/the present. These are, of course, not mutually exclusive categories: at any time, one or other of the examples I cite could be seen to exhibit a variety of traits from what are admittedly broad categorizations of filmic activity. Accordingly, as the chapter progresses, I flag areas of correspondence and overlap, arguing that Shakespeare films are distinctive for referencing related trends in cinema history as well as themselves.

I To begin with the decades of the 1990s and the 2000s is almost inevitably to begin with Branagh’s Shakespearean oeuvre and his status as auteur. In many ways, Henry V (1989) announced a break with the past, with constructions of and attitudes towards Shakespeare that had built up and solidified since Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film version of the same play. The film is positioned against Olivier’s more theatrically inflected interpretation, as is attested to in Branagh’s predilection for slow motion effects, mud-soaked forms, a rapid pace and the use of flashback, not to mention the inclusion of previously excised and potentially unpalatable elements, such as the speech at the siege of Harfleur. As Henry, Branagh cuts an impressive figure, although there are stages through which he must pass before ascending to a heroic masculinity. Hence, when the traitors are met by the king

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on the eve of the French departure, the swoop of hands reaching aggressively for phallic swords, the balletic choreography of physically proximate bodies and the touch of Henry’s finger upon Scroop’s (Stephen Simms) cheek suggest a sublimated homoerotic attraction: the implication, assisted by the episode’s prying camera work, is that these are connections to be severed in order for the titular protagonist to find himself. For Henry to be inspiring, he must be witnessed; that, at least, is the impression afforded by a film that, as Bernice W. Kliman states, “concentrates on reaction shots to tell us what to feel” (Kliman, 1989, 9). Nowhere is the procedure more obvious than when, delivering the St Crispin’s Day speech, Henry is discovered in primarily relational terms: his forces gather about him, following him, as if in pilgrimage. A beacon in studded red, Henry is here individuated and universalized at one and the same time. Point of view shots mix and combine the yeomen and the aristocrats, suggesting that a levelled and owned set of aims and aspirations has been achieved. As the sequence unfolds, Henry is glimpsed taking Nym’s (Geoffrey Hutchings) hand to assist him up onto the cart and placing his other own hand upon the Boy’s (Christian Bale) head. The mirroring of the gesture implies that the king supports and is supported, assists and is assisted: the systems of his rule function successfully because they are mutually constitutive. As the movement up the incline of the cart is matched by the swell and crescendo of the music, a sense of sublime elevation, coupled with a democratizing imperative, is forcefully conveyed. And, as the closing sequence of the film establishes, with victory secured all that is then required is for Henry to woo successfully Katherine (Emma Thompson) as the culmination of his achievement. The note of marital affirmation on which Henry V concludes brings the ending of Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993) to mind. In this energetic, buoyant realization of Shakespeare’s comedy, sunny, Italian settings are of a piece with a joyous orientation, and nowhere more so than in the final scene, the occasion of a choric rendition of a “Hey Nonny Nonny” refrain led by Benedict (Kenneth Branagh) that extends to the entire cast. On the one hand, the uplifting tone, lushly orchestrated score and spectacle of couples twirling happily in dance argue for a celebratory impetus. On the other hand, the prevailing point of view is problematic, organized, as it is, according to a scheme that downplays and makes indistinguishable the female voice. Such a reading is prompted by the ways in which Much Ado About Nothing more generally represents what Cora Kaplan describes as the “male-centred . . . field of language” becoming susceptible “to invasion and subversion by female speakers” (Kaplan, 1986, 92). That is, Beatrice’s (Emma Thompson) solitary voiceover at the start – she speaks but does not sing the “Hey Nonny Nonny” theme – is significant because it is a woman’s perspective that is prioritized. The suggestion is that a canonical Shakespearean script is experienced in a moment of revision; or, to adopt one of the concepts of the song, a woman authorizes a process of textual and ideological “conversion”. What has been termed Beatrice’s “iconoclastic voice” (Howard, 1994, 68), moreover, is allowed aural and visual expression, particularly when we see her recital from a book enrapturing her picnic party and taking precedence over other forms of (male) representation, such as Leonato’s (Richard Briers) painting of the Tuscan landscape. Much Ado About Nothing is an arresting addition to Branagh’s recreations of Shakespeare in showing the woman agitating for articulation and command of her social domain. The next film in the Branagh trajectory – Hamlet (1996) – is also concerned with detailing the forces that press upon women’s efforts to enunciate an unfettered subjectivity. A sumptuous cinematic spectacle, filmed in 70 mm format and distinctive for locating the play in a snow-bound European environment at the turn of the nineteenth century,

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Hamlet imagines Ophelia (Kate Winslett), in particular, in terms of confinement. The grilles and bars against which she is pushed are the most obvious signs of incarceration; the straitjacket in which she is encased becomes a literal instance of her repression; and the tiled cell in which she is subjected to hydrotherapy operates as a potent symbol of a need to quell a seemingly disturbed sensibility. Given its period setting, this is, of course, a historically evocative representation, the implication being that Ophelia, in common with her “mad” nineteenth-century counterparts, is being treated for hysteria or a “wandering womb”. More generally, assertions of will are dictated to by this filmic Hamlet’s grandeur. Widescreen shots of Blenheim Palace standing in for Elsinore reinforce a sense of huge scale, while Branagh’s decision to film the whole play (or, rather, to combine the three extant early modern printings) points up a magisterial undertaking. Cinematography is conceived of in comparably epic ways: the Ghost (Brian Blessed) is realized as a colossus whose lofty form is replicated in a Stalin-style statue that, towards the end, is toppled to the ground. This is no idle detail, for what characterizes Hamlet above all is an engagement with political subtexts. Fortinbras (Rufus Sewell) is a threatening presence whose movement towards Denmark is registered in preparations for war, in reminders of his campaign and in the nervous attitude of the sentry at the gates. Towards the close, in a suitably excessive finale, Fortinbras’ troops crash through the windows of the state hall. It is a fitting end for a monarchy that, throughout, has concentrated on its own concerns rather than those that lie beyond. Additionally marking Hamlet is the extent to which each of the characters is isolated, whether in a cell, a study or a closet, and the idea of a court that can only look inwards is graphically illuminated in the mirrors that adorn the state hall, ciphers for a culture of narcissism. Arguably, Branagh’s realization of his Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, addressed, as it is, to the speaker’s reflection, is the film’s most eloquent example of the dangers of interiority. The extended running time of Hamlet, which befits the ambition of the production, is in contradistinction to the more truncated film version of Love’s Labour Lost (2000) that ensued: Shakespeare’s text survives only in fragments, those parts that are missing being substituted by songs from the 1930s and 1940s whose lyrical wit approximates the play’s linguistic invention. As a musical, Love’s Labour’s Lost boasts an equivalent period setting: the place is “Oxbridge” and the time is the interval between the wars. Music and theme coalesce in facilitative fashion. As Michael Anderegg observes, “music and dance reinforce or at least complement the characters and action” (Anderegg, 2004, 127). Thus, Jerome Kern’s song, “I Won’t Dance”, and Irving Berlin’s song, “No Strings”, with its references to being “fancy free”, succinctly capture a sense of female resistance. “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”, the George and Ira Gershwin song with its bittersweet refrain, refracts nicely the mood of melancholy as the central couples part. The Shakespearean play’s conclusion is identified by its unconventional deferral of sexual consummation – its continuing privileging of male–male alliances – and it is towards a more acceptable redefinition of that situation that the film is ultimately geared. For, following upon a breakneck run-through of World War Two composed of fictive interpolations and stock footage, Love’s Labour’s Lost presents viewers with a montage of D-Day in which the celebrations surrounding the reunited heterosexual couples function as a response to Shakespearean generic anomalousness. Ever the auteur, Branagh rewrites Shakespeare to bring the Bard into line with linear narratives of cinematic conformity. As You Like It (2006) takes up the comic gauntlet of Love’s Labour’s Lost – its ending, too, is a confetti-strewn, ebullient concoction – and the earlier film’s imprint of an unex-

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pected temporal and geographical shift. In As You Like It, an audience is invited, as an on-screen announcement makes clear, to “the nineteenth century” and to “Japan”. This was a moment, we are informed, when “Japan opened up for trade with the West”, with a corresponding focus in the film falling on such signifiers of location as a cross-dressed Kabuki performer, a temple in a park, silk screens, streamers and raked gardens. Crucially, the film points up its “dream”, to use its parlance, of a meeting between court and country by emphasizing the interpenetration of Eastern and Western perspectives. In new environments, it is implied, fresh forms of character and personal action can be initiated and explored. Dominating the production, in this connection, is Rosalind (Bryce Dallas Howard): with her brown peaked cap and rustic jerkin, she is discovered as at home in and learning from the pastoral setting, making a journey towards other forms of selfhood. Pertinent is the winding walkway made of reeds straddling the marshland, an emblem for a journey between gendered positions and psychic states. It is also a journey that encompasses the business of filming Shakespeare for late twentieth- and early twenty-first century audiences. As Rosalind delivers her epilogue, she traverses a modern car park thronged by technicians and camera crew – the personnel of the production. This cinematically aware moment acknowledges the play’s dismantlement of its world at the same time as it registers its own status as a modern artefact. In this, the last of Branagh’s Shakespeare films to date, the director takes the unprecedented step of making visible part of the creative process. In what senses does As You Like It typify a career trajectory? It is sometimes inadvisable to attempt to pin down patterns across an individual filmmaker’s work, although, in Branagh’s case, some broad features do emerge. His is a filmic method that glories in the possibilities of the medium (his signature shots being crane-shots and 360 degree pans); his is also a construction of Shakespeare that has circled back upon itself in its use of conventions and its approach to textual particularity. As You Like It resembles Henry V in elaborating a paradigm of interpretation that sustains the particular filmic vision. Distinctive, too, is Branagh’s slow withdrawal from the Shakespearean filmic frame: As You Like It is the only work in which he does not appear, except in cameo as the director exclaiming “And cut!” The move suggests a less obvious role for Branagh as a Shakespearean practitioner, even a will to close down what has been a point of reference for many of his other endeavours. One also wonders about the fate of his own brand of Shakespeare films more generally. As You Like It, although it enjoyed limited theatrical release, was funded by HBO essentially as a work for television, and it may be that the Branagh brand of Shakespeare in the cinema has been superseded by related forms of, and approaches to, the Bard that he himself has inspired. His cluster of Shakespeare films, however, remains a significant and revealing achievement, one that puts a defining cultural mark on both sides of the millennium. In a sense, Branagh stakes his claim to auteurism at precisely the moment that Franco Zeffirelli, who had, of course, produced much-lauded films of The Taming of the Shrew (1967) and Romeo and Juliet (1968) announced his own final Shakespearean screen statement. Hamlet, directed by Zeffirelli in 1990, lacks the distinctive golden glow of his earlier encounters with Shakespeare, replacing sunny Italian climes with darker northern environs. The production is notable for its insertion of Mel Gibson, usually thought of as an action hero, into the role of Hamlet and for a reading of the play that privileges the tense relations between a dominant triumvirate. Vexed, anxious glances exchanged between Hamlet, Claudius (Alan Bates) and Gertrude (Glenn Close) establish this familial triangle as the dynamic of the narrative, with watching and eavesdropping its defining

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characteristics. Zeffirelli’s Hamlet is a bold revisioning – innovative in its casting and emotionally demanding in its dedication to psychic realism. The last decade has added two further auteurs to the roster of Shakespearean directors if, by auteur, we mean to designate a filmmaker who has consistently returned to the same subject or thematic. Indian director Vishal Bhardwaj’s paired films, Maqbool (2004), an adaptation of Macbeth, and Omkara (2006), an adaptation of Othello, address Shakespeare in terms of localized practices. Where Maqbool, for example, concentrates on Mumbai’s gangland (internecine rivalries in Scotland are the prompt for violently imagined and drug-related urban warfare), Omkara exploits the state of Uttar Pradesh, discovering the Omkara/Othello (Ajay Devgan) character as tracing his power to his position as a corrupt political aide. Other instances of the local nature of the adaptations include the ways in which, in Omkara, religious ceremonies mark occasions of promotion and appointment and, in Maqbool, the role of the witches is taken by two colluding police inspectors: the horoscopes they devise are of a piece with an indigenous subscription to a culture of prophecy. From these translations multiple effects are generated. Hence, although Omkara/Othello is represented as enjoying considerable kudos, he is hampered by his status as a “half caste”: race is sublimated inside India’s historic system of classification. In Maqbool, similarly, a key Shakespearean preoccupation is productively rethought: Maqbool/Macbeth (Irfan Khan), the henchman of Abbaji/Duncan (Pankaj Kapur), lusts after his boss’ mistress, Nimmi/Lady Macbeth (Tabu), which makes for a complex enmeshing of desire, motive and the potential for treachery. Ties of loyalty are additionally strained in that Maqbool/Macbeth, a foundling, has been adopted into the underworld, making him substitute son as well as rival lover. In the scenarios of both films is a carefully thought through response to the “original”. Typical is Omkara and its discovery of a village compound overlooking a lake that evokes Shakespeare’s Venice; salient, too, is the way in which, in Maqbool, Nimmi/Lady Macbeth gives birth to a child. At one level, of course, the baby functions to mediate Lady Macbeth’s loss (“I . . . know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me”, 1.7.54–5); at another, it is the prompt for Maqbool/Macbeth’s eventual abnegation of his profession. For the sight of the child being cradled in the hospital causes Maqbool/Macbeth to drop his gun, leaving himself vulnerable to his enemies, with the moment richly communicative of Macbeth’s personification of a “naked new-born” as “pity” (1.7.21). One of the consummate skills of Bhardwaj as a filmmaker is precisely in introducing developments enlivened by their Shakespearean suggestiveness. Music is an equally powerful vehicle for referencing the plays, not least because, as Patrick Colm Hogan notes, songs in Indian film are closely tied to the “communication of themes” and the “emotional experience” of particular “narrative junctures” (Hogan, 2008, 164). Maqbool features a romantic song by Sameera/Malcolm (Masumeh Makhija) that illustrates the point in underscoring the idea of conflicted allegiances and hence Maqbool/Macbeth’s own situation (the dominant lyric is “I am torn”); the equivalent song in Omkara, by Billo/Bianca (Bipasha Basu), concerned, as it is, with the need to “borrow heat from the next fellow’s oven” constitutes a performative rendering of Othello’s absorption in anxieties about sexual infidelity and exchange. Maqbool and Omkara readily accommodate Shakespeare to the filmic genres of “Bollywood”. They place on display the work of a director who allows the plays to speak anew inside structures of alternative cultural identification. As such, Bhardwaj’s Shakespearean interpretations represent an exciting and innovative departure for the global cinema industries. Equally at ease in theatre as film, Julie Taymor established herself as a significant inter-

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preter of Shakespeare via her Titus, released in 1999, and has since garnered praise for an aesthetically enlivened version of The Tempest (2010). Both films lay bare the extent of rich lineages: in The Tempest, the immediate influence is a long line of actresses who have taken on the role of Prospero in theatrical productions (Helen Mirren plays Prospera in the film). Certainly, The Tempest is an inherently theatrical production, as is evidenced in the numerous masque-like elements and the aerial display managed by Prospera comprised of signs of the zodiac. As Taymor herself reflects, her method in the film is that of a “heightened expressionism” (Taymor, 2010, 14). As far as its inspirations are concerned, Titus draws from Luchino Visconti, Leni Riefenstahl and the Wachowski brothers, among others, which indicates an eclectic immersion in a variety of artistic forms. Clearly paralleling each other in numerous ways, Titus and The Tempest nevertheless assume different stances in terms of periodization. Its sepulchral, grey-filtered and candle-lit interiors, populated by black-costumed courtiers in veils and ruffs, bespeak The Tempest’s subscription to a Gothic vision of the continental Renaissance; here, Prospera, overseeing a secret alchemical laboratory made up of vials and astrolabes, appears quite at home. By contrast, Titus unfolds in a historical no-place, with modern and pre-modern moments being purposely collapsed. The interpolated character of the Boy (Osheen Jones) plays with his toy soldiers in a modern kitchen; this leads onto an ancient arena featuring horse-drawn chariots; and later the classical proportions of Mussolini’s EUR Building from the Fascist era are highlighted. An overriding implication that the horrors of Shakespeare’s play are all too easily transferable and that the danger of violence is that it is not chronologically containable. Playing fast and loose with history enables Taymor to experiment comparably boldly with gender. Thus, with The Tempest, Prospera is no conventional magus; rather, via a brown trouser-suit costume adorned with furs and resembling a cloak, and through a sparkling blue garment woven together from shards of hard natural material, the character is constructed so as to bifurcate and blur standard male–female lines of demarcation. Samuel Crowl rightly points out that the “world” of Titus is “sexually decadent” (Crowl, 2003, 208), although neglects to mention the precise complexions of maternal dominance and infantilized disempowerment that this preoccupation assumes. An early shot, for example, reveals Saturninus (Alan Cumming) sprawling in a throne beneath a huge metallic head of a she-wolf, the spatial dynamics of the scene reflecting the character’s diminution at the hands of a matriarchal regime, for the animal represented is, of course, the adoptive foundress of Rome itself. A later sequence reveals Saturninus sporting gold eye make-up, a figurative expression of his intimacy with and proximity to Tamora (Jessica Lange), whose golden breast-plate conjures a militaristic and eroticized ethos. More arrestingly, when arrows pierce the confines of the palace, puncturing the huge-breasted blow-up goddess that floats in the pool, and when Saturninus is glimpsed naked nuzzling at Tamora’s breast, viewers are confronted with a constellation of sexual substitution, maternal sublimation, child-like dependency and adult sustenance. The imaginative recasting of the individual Shakespearean play in Taymor’s work is conducted via a concomitant rethinking of masculine and feminine constructions. As the visual appurtenances – colours, palette, composition and connotation – of discrete episodes across Titus and The Tempest suggest, Taymor is adept at creating a particular “look” for her films, at cultivating a unique style. This is reflected in Titus in the extent to which changes in dress imitate the mood of the characters and in the use of PANs or “Penny Arcade Nightmares”, animated insets that, distributed over the course of the film, have the immediate effect of raising the emotional timbre. The PAN that shows the raped

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Lavinia (Laura Fraser) besieged by tigers is indicative, hinting, as it does, at guilt and conscience. Or, the “look” of Taymor’s Titus announces itself in architectural fragments. The shattered pillars and broken debris around which Titus (Anthony Hopkins) is forced to move are expressive here – they operate as material reminders of the protagonist’s own dispossession and collapse. A similarly arresting visual dynamic is at work in The Tempest, not least in the mottled, scaly and piebald appearance of Caliban (Djimou Hounsou), an apt emblem of monstrous indeterminacy. Caliban’s skin brings to mind the harsh complexions of his environment, while the insults that are carved onto his body evoke the denigrating treatment to which he has been subjected. A similar “look” is reserved for Ariel (Ben Whishaw): he is filmed so as to recall the elements of water and fire with which he is associated, to the extent that his appearance in a pool, or his connection with burning bloodhounds, makes perfect thematic sense. Perhaps, more arrestingly, The Tempest is visually set off by its Hawaii and Lanai island locations: shots of volcanoes, for example, assist in approximating the fluctuating and sudden rages of Prospera, while the context of an unrelenting and rocky terrain lends force to a filmic narrative in which, like the play, raw emotion is to the fore. Arguably, Taymor aims at a recognizable “look” because she is concerned to flag up the particular Shakespearean play’s contemporary applications. Titus is typical: the use of the colosseum in Pula, Croatia, for the opening and closing sequences, analogizes the political reverberations of the Shakespearean imprimatur. In addition, at the end, when the Boy leaves the colosseum with the child of Aaron (Harry Lennix) in his arms, advancing towards the dawn, a configuration that transcends local rivalries (and racial differences) is highlighted. The equivalent manoeuvre in The Tempest announces itself in the intertextual echoes precipitated by the casting of Helen Mirren as Prospera: associated with convention-breaking roles and authoritative interpretations in cinema and television, the actress brings to what is one of the most patriarchal parts in Shakespeare a vitality that insists upon the modern urgency of female empowerment. These two features are seen at their best in the epilogue which, to a haunting musical refrain sung by female vocalist Beth Gibbons, offers us Shakespeare’s words to the accompaniment of shots of books drowning in the sea: the sequence foregrounds the concept of an isolated and aggrieved protagonist – Taymor describes Prospera as fashioned from “erratic fury, cruelty, maternal warmth, cold authority, and poetic introspection” (Taymor, 2010, 15) – and the prospect of literary creativity in competition with technology. Taymor ranks as auteur not least in repeatedly demonstrating the extent to which a stylistic signature is possessed of considerable ideological purchase. Hailing from traditions comprised of opera, musical and puppetry, Taymor brings to twentieth- and twenty-first Shakespeare on film bold conceptual transpositions and an eye for extraordinarily compelling and engaging spectacle.

II Auteurism, dependent on a history of filmmaking and an identifiable vision, is, of course, but one approach to Shakespeare on film. It cannot account for other, discrete interventions in the genre, nor does the notion of a presiding creator map easily onto discussions of public consumption, canonical citation or the ways in which Shakespeare is accessed in terms of a particular play-work. One of the most striking features of the 1990 to 2010 decades of Shakespearean filmmaking, for example, is the prominence of plays that attracted repeated filmic treatments, A Midsummer Night’s Dream being an obvious case in point. Shakespeare’s seasonal dramatic fantasy has appealed as a resource for straight

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adaptations as well as youth culture appropriations. In the latter category, Get Over It (dir. Tommy O’ Haver, 2001) centres upon the plan of American high-school student, Berke (Ben Foster), to join a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in order to win back his disaffected girlfriend. As the film understands it, Berke’s success ratifies the significance of the Bard as an agent for affirming communitas; as Mark Thornton Burnett states, the film is “committed to a critical anterior construction of a liberal humanist playwright who can be positively recycled” (Burnett, 2007, 16). In the former category, a clutch of adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream responds to the play’s potential as a repository for negotiating questions about youth, authority and social emancipation. This constellation of interests is abundantly evident in three works – A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Adrian Noble, 1996), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Michael Hoffman, 1999) and The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Christine Edzard, 2001). Noble’s film impresses in its foregrounding of the Boy (Osheen Jones), who, whisked off from his Victorian bedroom to the Athenian court, functions both as a manifestation of the “changeling” (2.1.120) child and as a cipher for generational integration, as at the end of the film where, in a telling incorporative shot, he is embraced by fairies and cast alike in a montage suggestive of theatre as a form of family. Or, as Judith Buchanan remarks, the Boy is “acknowledged as a participator in the story and warmly absorbed into the wider community” (Buchanan, 2005, 136). If it is the Boy who sublimates desire and power in Noble’s reading of the play, it is Bottom (Kevin Kline) who assumes this role in Hoffman’s screen statement, which relocates A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Tuscany in the 1890s, thereby positioning the narrative on the cusp of historical change. Crucially, Bottom is envisaged as expressing a longing for alternative, ulterior existences. First, he is represented operating the gramophone so as to allow “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s opera, Norma, to astonish the assembled fairies: the episode works to situate the weaver as possessed of technological mastery and enjoying a predictive importance. Second, having woken up from his dream, Bottom fondles in his hands a tiny ring or fairy crown, a souvenir from an intense experience of social and amatory release, with the detail working to suggest that, as much as the film looks forward, so does it reflect backwards in its evocation of a fin-de-siècle moment marked by a tug-of-war of competing forces. The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream takes the idea of competition or contest to its furthest extent and bases its realization of the play on a modern puppet performance of Shakespeare’s comedy, which is witnessed by children in an Elizabethan-style private theatre. In so doing, the film juxtaposes to purposeful effect the wonder of the spectators (London schoolchildren aged between eight and twelve) and the wooden conservatism of the puppet players. It is not accidental, for example, that Derek Jacobi and Samantha Bond voice Theseus and Hippolita, for these are dignitaries of the Shakespearean establishment, and their mediated presence lends a particular generational complexion to the film’s performance dynamic. Class connotations enrich the encounter, as in the moment where the children interrupt the play to act out the Shakespearean dialogue and assume the parts, suggesting that the Bard is at his most forceful in instances of appropriation and that he is reinvented through a kinship with the demotic. The idea is crystallized in the closing sequence; here, the children interrupt with a greater confidence, the implication being that they have been bolstered by the imaginative take-over of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that is the film’s central premise. This is a film that invokes, only in order to resituate, the cultural capital with which Shakespeare has been historically associated. Yet, at least at first sight, these engagements with A Midsummer Night’s Dream are not

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identical in their invocations of the Bard as a source of authority. Michael Hoffman, in his 1999 adaptation, enfolds Shakespeare inside ideals of classicism: the ornate gardened setting, and frequent glimpses of Renaissance statuary, function as guides to understanding and indicate a mindset that subscribes to a reaffirmation, rather than a debunking, of the play’s enshrined status. By contrast, Christine Edzard in her The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream proposes a much less reverential view. For this director, Shakespeare is a body to be fought over and uncrowned, as the sounds of jeers from the audience make clear. Where the films do agree is in the construction of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a play that affords personal enfranchisement and development of various kinds. The earliest of this filmic cluster, Adrian Noble’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is typical in granting to the character of the Boy theatrical agency; he generates fairies from a toy pipe and stage-manages the film’s finale in such a way that he appears as both internal director and external dramaturge. In comparable fashion, Hoffman elaborates from a period-specific detail a dominant motif, with the bicycle coming to signify opportunities for mobility and relocation that test the constrictions of the film’s imagined nineteenth-century environs. And, most obviously, Christine Edzard in The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream reveals the freedoms that accompany a species of cultural antagonism and makes a point of stressing the nature of a challenge that gives rise to a new poise and articulacy. All three films endorse a transferable model that sees A Midsummer Night’s Dream as making available fresh paradigms for self-expression and thereby carve out a place for this play in particular as inculcating importantly assertive energies.

III Central to the task of reanimating Shakespeare for modern audiences is the deployment of a concept or conceit that allows for updating in the same moment as the narrative contours of the “original” are respected. Films produced in the two decades under discussion make visible as part of their interpretive logic a governing idea that is designed both to insist upon audience attention and to ensure generic consistency. Prospero’s Books (dir. Peter Greenaway, 1991) – The Tempest but not in name – establishes its credentials and introduces spectators into its dominant mode of reading by casting John Gielgud as a Prospero who voices all the other characters at the same time. Immediately, an audience is invited to recognize the “high art” value of the undertaking and, because the film abounds in animated sequences involving faux Renaissance books, to appreciate that this is a film that judges the Shakespearean text an elevated cultural property. As Douglas Lanier states, Prospero’s Books preoccupies itself with “the monumentality of art forms . . . which constitute an ideal order of signification” (Lanier, 1996, 193). The conceptual underpinning of a production might also reveal itself in the invocation of certain generic codes. It is no accident, for instance, that Mel Gibson as Hamlet in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 film is represented spending a great deal of time running up and down corridors or stairwells as befits his qualifications as an action hero. As Anthony B. Dawson states, reflecting on the resonances of the casting for Hamlet, “lethal weapon meets fatal attraction in what turns out to be a dangerous liaison indeed” (Dawson, 1995, 205). And, of course, as is self-evident from Kenneth Branagh’s films, each of them invests in a leading defining concept – whether this is the Western in Much Ado About Nothing (1993) or the musical comedy in Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) – as a market identifier and tag on which to hang potential commercial response. Indeed, if there is an overriding characteristic of

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the Shakespeare films produced over the two decades, it is in the strategic mobilization of imaginative templates that have little in common with the plays’ “originary” situations or their Renaissance equivalents. A filmic concept, successfully executed, can make or break Shakespeare on screen, if by “success” we mean international distribution in theatres and subsequent video or DVD exposure. Othello (dir. Oliver Parker, 1993), riding on the back of Branagh’s early visibility, is emblematic in this regard, since the film was widely billed as an “erotic thriller” in method and design. Accordingly, alternating excitingly between Venice and a medieval castle near Lake Bracciano as centralizing locales, the film is animated by putting into play the formulae of the genre to good effect: Iago (Kenneth Branagh) is a source of uncomfortable reference in his addresses to camera, while his manipulation of black and white chess pieces encodes the central tensions along racial lines. Eroticism is kept continually to the fore, not least in the fetishization of Othello’s (Laurence Fishburne) form – we see him undress, he is reified, his body is intimately dwelled upon. In particular, suiting the thriller genre in which woman is invariably victim and agent, Desdemona (Irene Jacob) stands out as a player who looks and acts. In the film’s consummation scene, Desdemona is played, as Lisa S. Starks reminds us, as a “desiring subject”: hers is the point of view that is privileged, and the specular economy of the encounter belongs with her constructed experience (Starks, 1997, 72). The idea is more fully enunciated in the film’s opening sequence: here, Desdemona is imaged running through a darkened colonnade. Flight is stressed, but so, too, are movement and a personality in purposeful transit. The veil concealing Desdemona’s face is then removed in a gesture which, because it is accompanied by a look to camera or to some unspecified off-screen presence, takes on semi-defiant associations. True to its generic affiliation, Othello transforms the flight of the start into a concluding chase through the castle, which serves to reaffirm the film’s “thriller” connections. At the close, as the camera pans outwards to reveal the central couple and Iago spread-eagled on the bed, an impression of locked destinies is afforded in a composition that brings to mind twin features of the genre – erotic entanglement and an intrigue tragically resolved. Othello is typical of a number of the Shakespeare films produced during the 1990 to 2010 period in garnering for itself a respectable profit. But other films did not fare so well, arguably because their underlying conceits were too tangential to, and did not fit the dominant profile of, the tastes of mainstream audiences. In this connection, Christine Edzard’s As You Like It (1992) suggests itself: an independent feature, the film transports Rosalind (Emma Croft) not so much to a pastoral Arden as to an anti-pastoral urban waste scarred by polythene tents and camp fires on the banks of the Thames. It is as a dystopian parable, then, that the film can be most readily identified, a conceptual fleshing out of As You Like It that may have put the film at too many removes from the popular imaginary. Negative reviews – as Amelia Marriette notes, “the film was poorly received on release” (Marriette, 2000, 75) – miss the director’s point, however, and obscure the fact that Edzard’s anti-pastoral elaborations are purposely political. Images of the blighted waterside constitute a critique of Thatcher’s benighted Britain and spell out a narrative of national decline. The critical impetus is continued in the film’s representation of the court, which is seen as an unsympathetic business empire in the form of a mirrored office complex. As You Like It did not reap substantial financial rewards, although its overarching vision is to be applauded in pushing the play in some unexpected directions. Notwithstanding its exposure at a number of conferences and festivals, Hamlet (dir.

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Stephen Cavanagh, 2006) is a further Shakespeare film that did not manage to secure canonical cinematic legitimacy. This is surprising for, arguably, Cavanagh’s Hamlet, an independent feature produced by the Derry Film Initiative, is one of the most compelling interpretations of the play to emerge in recent years. Its conceptual premise is to be found in setting: unfolding in Derry/Londonderry in Northern Ireland, Hamlet capitalizes upon some wonderful parallels (including the walls of the city standing in for the ramparts of Elsinore) while simultaneously foregrounding its location’s political interstices. The notion, for instance, that there has been some “eruption to our state” (1.1.68) is entirely at home in the production, especially in view of Derry/Londonderry’s troubled history. Too, the decision to present the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in the Irish language is profoundly suggestive and brings into circulation multiple concerns centred on resistance, counter-hegemonic movements and the occlusion of cultural identity. Above all, Hamlet revels in the conceit of uniform surveillance. Each of the characters is involved in taking footage with a hand-held camera, which again rhymes with a political situation in which recording and representing are central to more general kinds of testimony and the need to escape the past. Shakespeare films in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are obliged to straddle numerous requirements, from the organic features of the production itself and its narrative plausibility to the expectations of the multiplex consumer. In this grouping of examples we see the possibilities and the limitations of a conceptual approach to the Bard, an approach that is intimately tied up with the question of a film’s fortunes in the larger marketplace.

IV In a powerful sense, the deployment of an underlying concept in Shakespeare film constitutes a response to the cultural associations that surround the Shakespearean word. Conceits translate language or, at least, assist in making palatable and comprehensible the complexions of early modern verse and metaphor. How to address the construction that Shakespeare is unavailable, or belongs to a category of irrelevant and hidebound elitism, is variously managed by filmmakers. At once, and again typical of the period, filmmakers have turned to parody as a means of negotiating Shakespeare, finding in the dramatist’s historically sacrosanct reputation a rich comic potential. Tromeo and Juliet (dir. Lloyd Kaufman, 1996), which satirically deconstructs Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet via its absorption in the sub-cultures of punk, the horror film and the abattoir, bears out the imperative of parody which is, as Dan Harries argues, to “ridicule another text by mimicking and mocking it” (Harries, 2000, 5). In the same moment, the films produced during this period have taken a position somewhere along the spectrum of adaptation and appropriation. As Julie Sanders notes, an “adaptation” signals “a relationship with an informing sourcetext or original”, while “appropriation” often “affects a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain” (Sanders, 2006, 26). Adaptation is a route popularly followed. For example, in their conjuration of Shakespeare’s language, and in their acknowledgement of inspiration, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool (2004) and Omkara (2006) singularly stand out as adaptations that make a point of flagging up their narrative point of departure. At a further remove are films such as My Own Private Idaho (dir. Gus Van Sant, 1991), which references Henry IV in its representation of the lifestyle of two young hustlers in Portland, Oregon, and The King is Alive (dir. Kristian Levring, 2000), whose narrative concerns an attempt by an abandoned party of

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tourists to stage King Lear in the Namibian desert: these are appropriations that take the premise of a particular play or plays and elaborate narratives essentially independent of the immediate Shakespearean connection. Of course, the question arises: is this Shakespeare? The question is, in fact, a moot one, for, as the critical consensus now agrees, the issue is not one of textual fidelity but, rather, cultural value. That is, since Shakespeare in his own time was a composite construction, or collaborative phenomenon, it is difficult to pin the Bard down as an inviolable and unproblematic category. More profitable is to attempt to assess the ways in which the name and significance of Shakespeare as an indicator of prestige or kudos are instanced in popular culture, mass media and cinema. In this way, a citation of Shakespeare on screen is no less interesting than a “straight” Shakespeare film, such as Henry V (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1989), that reveres and reproduces the particular play. Adaptation and appropriation operate in juxtaposition as equal signifiers of a filmic fascination with Shakespeare, and both forms ask for investigative attention. A film that runs the gamut of the various registers of Shakespearean representation is Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998). An adaptation in that it reworks Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare in Love is also an appropriation in that it fabricates a biographical story of the dramatist’s early theatrical career. The date is 1593, and the situation is that of the London-based young Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), struggling with the need to produce another theatrical hit. His writer’s block is comically reflected in his phallicloaded formulation, “My quill is broken”, and inspiration is in short supply. Even the skull on his desk, a reminder of mortality, cannot spur him into creativity, the joke being that, at this stage, Hamlet, the archetypal reflection on such concerns, had not yet been written. What goes on to distinguish Shakespeare in Love is the emergence of the eponymous protagonist into authorship and authority. As he writes in an early sequence, practising his signature as if in anticipation of posterity, the titles of the film fill the screen: Shakespeare, it is suggested, gives form to the romantic fantasy, and he is its authorial frame of reference. Yet this is no conventional assessment of Shakespeare as individual genius. Instead, Shakespeare in Love discovers its hero as a product of his culture and profiting from it in collaborative fashion. He is represented as filching from a preacher some of his more infamous choice lines and finding in Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow) a lover who chivvies him into a flurry of writing activity. It is here that Shakespeare in Love assumes the proportions of Romeo and Juliet, with Shakespeare standing in for Romeo and Viola incarnating Juliet; because the couple’s relationship faces hurdles, and because Wessex (Colin Firth), the rival suitor, is placed in the position of Paris, the Bard’s most famous love story becomes the measure of comparison. At the end of Shakespeare in Love, other plays enter the equation. Having reassembled his masculinity and productivity via an experience of gendered instability (Viola’s impersonation of a boy actor), Shakespeare is stimulated to begin work on a new play, Twelfth Night, the suggestion being that a twinlike connection is a source of imaginative power. The accompanying montage of Viola traversing the empty beaches of Virginia – a “New World” – infuses this development with echoes of The Tempest. Fired by his muse, the Bard is enabled to invent – and so colonize – on paper, to see in the shores of lands as yet not fully explored opportunities for dramaturgy. Virginia presents itself to Shakespeare’s mind as a blank page onto which he projects his masterworks, with Viola functioning as the medium through which he recovers his imperatives. Early manifestations of Shakespeare’s drama join with a summoning of the close of his career in a filmic trajectory that looks to endings so as the better to celebrate putative beginnings.

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V Even if reliant on a fictive base, Shakespeare in Love is distinctive for exhibiting another feature of the films of the period – a reification of the past that amounts to nostalgia. Clearly, the film does not recollect an actual history; rather, as Susan Bennett argues in a discussion of nostalgia, it demonstrates a “longing for certain qualities and attributes in lived experience that we have apparently lost, at the same time as it indicates our inability to produce parallel qualities and attributes that would satisfy the particularities of lived experience in the present” (Bennett, 1996, 5). Several Shakespeare films play upon such just such a past and present dialectic. Hamlet (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1996), for instance, sentimentalizes the end of the familial dynasty of Elsinore and invites its audience, notably through a grandiose funeral and melancholic score, to be responsive to equivalent – although unspecified – feelings of loss. It is a filmic manoeuvre that, with variation, is endlessly reproduced as an aid to narrative understanding, as a prompt for gendered reflection and as an instrument of aesthetic involvement. If, as Fredric Jameson argues, the “nostalgia film” approaches “the ‘past’ through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image” (Jameson, 1991, 19), then this is refracted in Richard III (dir. Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine, 1995) in which a precise evocation of the 1930s is vital to the discovery of a quasi-fascistic protagonist. Period details (cars, sepia tones and smoke) are contributory elements, but so, too, are the genres (such as the gangster film) invoked and the songs that form part of the soundtrack. A jazz-inflected rendition of the Marlovian lyric, “Come live with me and be my love”, for example, has a two-fold function: it anchors Richard III aurally in a particular timeframe and it points up, via intertextual association, the idea of a homoerotic protagonist. The dominant “image” of the film, and one possessed of significant “connotation”, is that of Richard III himself, played by Ian McKellen as endeavouring to make up for some phallic “deformity” (1.1.27). Hence, the anti-heroic aspirant, glimpsed looking down at a urinal, then glances knowingly to camera in a scene that, in the context of related phallic motifs (such as the gas mask and the gun barrel of a tank), suggests compensatory behaviour. Elsewhere in the film, the “image” of Richard III hints at the nightmare of a monstrous consanguinity. In the sequence in the morgue, for instance, the mise-en-scène discovers Richard III’s familiar shape looming up behind the figure of Lady Anne (Kristin Scott Thomas) and momentarily making her, too, misshapen, with the brief physical similarity between the characters implying a fateful connection. Visuals may be bodily; they are also architectural. At the end of the film, the nostalgic quotient is increased through the deployment of Battersea Power Station as an exterior location substituting for the field of the battle of Bosworth and the overlay of the Al Jonson song, “I’m sitting on top of the world”. As Richard III falls to his death, Richmond (Dominic West), his vanquisher, smiles to camera: the replication of this self-conscious shot gestures to the cyclical nature of violence – as James N. Loehlin comments, it “calls into question the apparently simple relation between good and evil” (Loehlin, 1997, 76) – and invites the audience to consider forms of tyranny as interchangeable. The “stylistic” characteristics of the ending reinforce the film’s subscription to an illusion of “pastness”; they also show how Richard III plays with the dynamic of nostalgia by envisaging the “past” as continuing through into “present” configurations. The nostalgia film following Richard III, Twelfth Night (dir. Trevor Nunn, 1996), answers no less powerfully to the dominant hallmarks of the genre. The use of Lanhydrock

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House in Cornwall as the setting, turn-of-the-century costume, corseted appearances and compositions made up of ornamental gardens bespeak a rosy evocation of an eclipsed social world. Above all, as the emphasis on liveried servants, cavalry and croquet suggests, it is a high Victorian moment that is conjured and a studied recreation of heritage. Julianne Pidduck notes that the heritage film foregrounds “the romantic desires and social aspirations of female protagonists against the constraints of convention . . . repression and . . . disadvantage” (Pidduck, 2004, 1), and Twelfth Night takes such a reading as the impetus for a series of linked gendered questions. The shipboard prologue to the film figures Viola (Imogen Stubbs) and Sebastian (Stephen Mackintosh) as entertainers in a concert party. Initially, the twins are represented in oriental attire as women from a harem, yet, in the wake of the voices separating into soprano and baritone, and after the veils have been torn aside to reveal mutually worn moustaches, precise affiliations are thrown into disarray. Against this background the accompanying song – a version of the “O mistress mine, where are you roaming?” (2.3.35) ditty – appears as a reflection on the predicament of gender and its similarly “roaming” status. And, because the film prioritizes the idea of masquerade, male and female roles, it is suggested, are only matters of enactment, lacking in intrinsic and essentialist determinants. Twelfth Night takes to another level the constitutive components of the nostalgia film, suggesting that transvestism is a form of liberation and that gender amounts to no more than theatre and play. At first sight, William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (dir. Michael Radford, 2004) presents itself as typical in its referencing of nostalgia film features. Belmont is expectedly engineered as a colourful concoction of decorative frescoes and shimmering lights, while the interiors of the Venetian palazzos are lavish and splendid – all is lovely, luminous. But this realization of a maritime sixteenth-century Italian state is also possessed of a melancholic underside. A series of connected episodes towards the close reveals a common denominator of loss, as Antonio (Jeremy Irons) looks longingly back to Venice and his love, as Jessica (Zuleikha Robinson) fingers a ring that symbolizes a broken faith, and as Shylock (Al Pacino) walks past a closed synagogue, an emblem of rejection. Clearly, the association of nostalgia with loss is an informing energy, but so, too, is the idea that film, as Andrew Higson notes, might “articulate . . . critiques of heritage” (Higson, 2003, 6). The critical edge of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is best evidenced in its privileging of a thematic of anti-Semitism (as in the opening scene of a riot on the Rialto) and its suggestions of Christian complicity in acts of persecution (isolated incidents hint at institutional approval). In this acerbically-angled nostalgia film, it is the occluded status of Shylock that stays in the audience mindset; his are nocturnal spaces, the colours with which he is associated are dun rather than refulgent and adverse weather conditions announce his appearances. Notably, in the trial scene, Shylock’s reflections on the situation of the “purchased slave” (4.1.89) go hand-in-hand with the camera’s identification of a black servant in the audience, suggesting that Jews and ethnic others have ever been subjected to victimhood and stigmatization as minorities. William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice makes for unsettling viewing in mediating nostalgia film conventions to support what amounts to a post-Holocaust reading of the play. We would be mistaken to think that the nostalgia film, as it bears upon Shakespeare, operates only within an English or European frame of reference. The Chinese feature, The Banquet (dir. Xiaogang Feng, 2006), for instance, which resembles Hamlet in many respects, richly accords with the argument that a sense of “pastness” is communicated in a “glossy” aesthetic. In particular, the film trades in orientalized signifiers – possibly

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with a view to Western markets – and, in so doing, bears out Linda Williams’ thesis that “fantasies are not . . . wish-fulfilling linear narratives of mastery and control leading to closure . . . They are marked, rather, by the prolongation of desire” (Williams, 2000, 216). Thus, an on-screen statement that the action is located at the time of the “Tang dynasty” establishes the necessary historical distance, while the representation of a fraught erotic triangle – Wu Luan/Hamlet (Daniel Wu), his stepmother-lover, Empress Wan/Gertrude (Ziyi Zhang) and Emperor Li/Claudius (You Ge) – keeps issues of desire to the fore. A lofty hall, brilliant red fabrics, golden detailing and an ornamental pool, as well as a loving attention to material objects such as jade jewellery and elaborate carvings, meet the need for a sumptuous visual spectacle; at the same time, the discovery of Empress Wan/Gertrude as both heroine and villain allows her to function in sustained alternation as object of desire and desiring subject. More generally in the film, a tension between desire and consummation of the same is held in play in repeated scenarios – theatrical performances (that is, there is more than one play-within-a-play), feasts and sentences of exile – the effect of which is thrillingly to defer the expected outcome. In this way, The Banquet ravishes the eye as a “fantasy” of “pastness” that is complemented by its obvious Shakespearean affiliation.

VI That characteristic cultivation of the past co-exists in Shakespeare film with a revelling in the manifold permutations of the present. Or, to put the point in another way, as much as the productions of the 1990 to 2010 period read the Bard through the lens of history so do they agitate to reinforce his links with concerns that are resolutely contemporary. Urging Shakespeare to accord with the here and now is undertaken in a variety of ways. One strategy is to seize upon a setting with a clear currency for late twentieth- and early twenty-first century audiences. For example, Get Over It (dir. Tommy O’ Haver, 2001) is but one example of the Shakespeare in the high school genre; others include Ten Things I Hate About You (dir. Gil Junger, 1999), which plays on The Taming of the Shrew, ‘O’ (dir. Tim Blake Nelson, 2001), which updates Othello, and She’s the Man (dir. Andy Fickman, 2006), which is based on As You Like It. All four films utilize the resonances of a youth institution so as to make Shakespeare speak. To cite Jennifer Hulbert, Robert L. York and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr, the so-called “teen film” emerges from the “popularization of Shakespeare in the mass media” as part of a dismantlement of “perceptions of the ‘classical’” (Hulbert, York and Wetmore, 2006, 61–2). Related to this development is the dissemination of materials – tie-ins, publicity and merchandise – that confirm Shakespeare as a popular spokesperson. Despite his films’ endorsement of a generally reverent attitude towards Shakespeare, Kenneth Branagh simultaneously insists upon the idea that the Bard is demotically intelligible. In his published screenplay for Hamlet (1996), for example, the director-actor inserts passages that illuminate the proximities of the play to the trends of today, as when he states that Hamlet and Laertes are nothing less than “two graduates of the Robocop academy” (Branagh, 1996, 163). Branagh’s is ultimately a bifurcated construction of Shakespeare – sacralizing on the one hand, but demythologizing on the other. Another strategy is the mapping of Shakespeare onto a postmodern aesthetic. Postmodernism finds its rationale in bricolage, hybridity, fragmentation, simulacra and the conjunction of random styles; to this breakdown might be added, to cite Michael Drolet, the “commodification of art . . . rapid and accelerated reproduction [and] . . . the

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effacement of the distinction between high and low culture” (Drolet, 2004, 32). Typical of the postmodern filmic Shakespeare is a work such as Scotland, PA (dir. Billy Morrissette, 2001), a comic retelling of Macbeth that knowingly recycles popular music from the 1970s so as the better to promulgate a retro-chic vision of the Shakespearean. Overwhelmingly postmodern in orientation, too, is Coriolanus (dir. Ralph Fiennes, 2011). The central conflict involving the Romans and the Volscians is realized as a struggle between a power state and an older order striving to hold onto autonomy, with the film deploying the full range of postmodern representational resources. Motifs from other film genres are strategically reproduced (exploding cars and burning buses punctuate the action); seemingly unconnected cultural registers are allowed to intermingle (dapper suits appear in the same frame as camouflaged fatigues); different stylistic modalities consort with each other (at once a documentary Coriolanus is in the same moment a war movie); and signifiers of a late capitalist economy are introduced as means of identification (tattoos and bandanas operate as militaristic fashion statements). At the same time, filmed, as it is, amidst the ruined neighbourhoods of the Serbian capital, Belgrade, Coriolanus conveys a telling sense of millennial culture as fragment, with the city coming to function as synecdoche for other war-torn and afflicted regions. Nowhere is this more obvious than at the close where Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes) and Aufidius (Gerard Butler) meet in a final homoerotic encounter. Filmed in the striking but dilapidated Hotel Jugoslavia in Belgrade, the sequence makes full use of ruined staircases and peeling pillars, as the two protagonists strip off their military garb to the sound of gutturals, their denuded appearances mirroring the primitivism of their surroundings. All manner of distinctions are blurred in a film that is animated by the mobilization of productively discordant elements. Of course, the postmodern Shakespeare film par excellence of this period is William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 1996), a frenetically paced, technically dizzying and MTV-influenced extravaganza of a production that, as Barbara Hodgdon notes, celebrates a “bizarre parallel universe comprised of . . . icons . . . the image . . . and inventive raids on the cinematic idiom” (Hodgdon, 1999, 90, 97). Its direct descendant is Macbeth (dir. Geoffrey Wright, 2006), also by an Australian director, which attempts to reproduce its predecessor’s highly successful formula. Both films are stylistically impatient, adventurous and versatile. Hand-held camerawork in Macbeth, for example, follows the lead of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, in which a jumpy speed, rapid editing and references to spaghetti Westerns and music videos contribute to a stimulating and vertiginous cinematic experience. An insistent rock music score has a comparable effect. In William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, the performance, in drag, by Mercutio (Harold Perrineau) of the “Young Hearts, Run Free” number at the Capulet ball suggests not so much gender confusion as roles negotiated and rejected: restriction is abandoned in the interests of an unfettered subjectivity. In Macbeth, the equivalent sequence takes place in a club named the “Cawdor” where the protagonist (Sam Worthington), engulfed in dry ice, encounters the witches: here, as elsewhere, the film jokily alludes to its intertextual constitution. Whatever titles or places are instanced in the films, however, take a subordinate position to a market-driven stress on multiculturalism. Macbeth nominally unfolds in Melbourne, although the representation of white and Asian drug gangs suggests any number of urban criminal underworlds; more forcefully, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet invokes the geographies of Los Angeles, Mexico City and Miami in its elaboration of a postmodern anywhere. Consistent with their rehearsal of global cities, Macbeth and William Shakespeare’s

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Romeo + Juliet pay an equal attention to issues of consumerism. The question, in Macbeth, of how to figure the Scottish aristocracy is addressed via a concentration on celebrity lifestyles and trophy accessories (Lady Macbeth [Victoria Hill] is clearly imagined as belonging to this category), while William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet makes of the theme a governing dialectic: guns carry expensive logos and crosses are displayed as items of personal adornment. Everything is in thrall to the signs and symbols of the late capitalist ethos. Interestingly, this common denominator between the films is a motor for their Shakespearean acknowledgements. Postmodern predilections notwithstanding, the Bard, in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Macbeth, is never too far away. The language of the plays underpins the action, and related forms of citation recall a Shakespearean presence. An advertisement for an armchair in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet has, as caption, “such stuff / As dreams are made on” (4.1.156–7), lines from The Tempest; cast in the same mould is the scene in Macbeth where a lorry bearing “Birnam Timber” crashes into the protagonist’s glitzy residence and cements his downfall. In both instances, the conjuration of Shakespeare as brand works self-consciously to implicate the process of his reproduction in larger systems of commerce. And it is arguably as a force indissoluble from the operations of that wider network of consumption that the Bard is finally identified. Telling, in this respect, is the way in which Macbeth and William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet culminate in transpositions that implicate the Shakespearean play in technologies of mass communication. The titular protagonist in Macbeth, for example, is undone because his crimes are witnessed on CCTV (a culture of surveillance is his ultimate nemesis). The “star-crossed lovers” (Prologue, 6) of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, too, are subject to spectacle, as when, in the closing shot, an anchorwoman, in a news programme that disappears into television snow, references the “pair” (Prologue, 7) only in terms of the wedding rings that have been exchanged. Shakespeare, in these formulations, both fully inhabits the postmodern realm and is one of its most eloquent representatives. I close with some reflections on Hamlet (dir. Michael Almereyda, 2000). In many ways, this millennial film, poised half-way between the 1990s and the 2000s, typifies the six features my discussion has been pinpointing. Nostalgia is part of its fabric, since one of the film’s central premises is the protagonist’s attempt to remember via video technology: Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) is an amateur filmmaker. Although contrasting with, and to an extent intertextually pitched against, Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, smaller-scale and hardly epic in proportions, still demonstrates the enduring popularity of the play as a Shakespearean work ripe for re-evaluation. The conceit of Hamlet as filmmaker allows for Shakespearean language to fuse with other modalities of (contemporary) discourse, making the film an adaptation with some elements of appropriation. And, if Almereyda does not immediately present himself as auteur, then auteurism as a thematic is powerfully bodied forth – in Hamlet’s resistant footage of himself, in his utilization of the chaff of popular culture, in the heretically conceived playwithin-a-play (here a film-within-a-film). Above all, this Hamlet wears its postmodernism unabashedly, looking to a flashy, vacuous and glassy New York for symptoms of youthful angst and expressions of globalization gone awry. Such are the alienating effects of the metropolis (the “Elsinore Corporation” is its most obvious manifestation) that Hamlet appears as a fractured type. His “To be or not to be” soliloquy is continually broken and recycled across the course of the film, and it is only at the end, it is suggested, when he abandons the camera for a less mediated communicative method, that he is empowered to settle on a coherent subjectivity.

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VII In conclusion, it would be helpful to remind ourselves that the approaches adopted here are not hermetically sealed. They are, rather, interchangeable. Hence, films such as In the Bleak Midwinter (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1995) and Looking for Richard (dir. Al Pacino, 1996), which allude to Hamlet and Richard III respectively, might be seen as adaptations but equally could be read in terms of the auteur, particularly given their pedigree. Christine Edzard, director of As You Like It (1992) and The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (2001), possibly qualifies as an auteur, meaning that her films are understood differently, and the role of commercial success and cinematic visibility in constructions of auteurship is an absorbing question. Examining Shakespeare film multiply encourages other cross-fertilizations. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Michael Hoffman, 1999) is significant not just as a recasting of Shakespeare’s play but also as an exercise in nostalgia; there are various plays that repeatedly attract filmic treatment; a postmodern work is also a concept-anchored production. Categorizations co-exist. Is this still the “Kenneth Branagh Era”? It is important to be responsive to the ebb and flow of Shakespearean filmmaking – to the rise and fall of backers and interests, to inconsistencies in revenue and income, and to representational dips and flourishes – and this chapter would suggest that while, at the start of the period, Branagh was the name and the prompt to action, the business of Bardic cinema has now transmigrated elsewhere, to other figures, constellations of concern, styles, methods and formats. There are, then, alternative points of comparison, and this extends to distribution. We have shifted from cinema to new media (or, rather, these two forms interpenetrate), as Michael Best suggests in his chapter in this volume, and Shakespeare is no longer an entrenched icon in the multiplex alone. Hamlet (dir. Stephen Cavanagh, 2006), for instance, avoided conventional exposure routes and is, at the time of writing, available as playable clips on Video Google. None of the films discussed in this essay is isolated from other films or from other technologies. And, in resources such as YouTube, viewers may enjoy the capability of making new films out of old, becoming, like Almereyda’s Hamlet, species of Shakespearean dramaturge. By alluding to the films around them as well as themselves, the productions of the 1990 to 2010 period make up a highly intertextual corpus. It is difficult to envisage the end of Hamlet (dir. Michael Almereyda, 2000), which places the First Player’s speech in the mouth of a newscaster, without the similar conclusion to William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 1996). Nor can we fail to recognize in the fast food McBeth’s of Scotland, PA (dir. Billy Morrissette, 2001) an echo of the meat factory metaphor in Tromeo and Juliet (dir. Lloyd Kaufman, 1996). These are films that launch raids on Shakespeare in the same moment as they filch from their immediately surrounding cultures and contexts. A filmmaker such as Vishal Bhardwaj is able to poke fun at himself when he allows a character in Maqbool to remark that Abbaji/Duncan “would have been a great film star”; Julie Taymor exhibits a like mindset in her casting of Anthony Hopkins, fresh from his performance as Hannibal Lecter, as the eponymous protagonist in Titus (1999). This is an assembly of representation and interpretation marked, in equal measure, by stylistic interreference, by playfulness and by homage. The range of reference reaches out still further. In Othello (dir. Oliver Parker, 1995), we encounter the spectre of O. J. Simpson, while in Hamlet (dir. Stephen Cavanagh, 2006), the shades of the Saville Enquiry appear in the impulse to piece together the shards of memory. If they are nothing else, the Shakespeare films of the period consort with the contemporary in vitally reflexive ways: they are of the

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moment. Functioning in such capacities, they showcase a move from national to international perspectives. I have argued elsewhere of the need for “enfolding, integration [and] polysemy” (Wray, 2007, 279) in Shakespeare on film criticism, and it is welcome in this connection to discover how the Bard is currently firmly placed as a global phenomenon, whether that takes the form of his purchase in “Bollywood” or his incarnation in the socalled “New Chinese Cinema”. Shakespeare’s filmic haunts have diversified, following the travels and travails of global capital, as he continues to operate as treasure-house of meanings and applications open to reinvention.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Anderegg, Michael (2004). Cinematic Shakespeare. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Bennett, Susan (1996). Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. London and New York: Routledge. Branagh, Kenneth (1996). ‘Hamlet’ by William Shakespeare: Screenplay and Introduction. London: Chatto and Windus. Buchanan, Judith (2005). Shakespeare on Film. Harlow: Pearson Education. Burnett, Mark Thornton (2007). Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Crowl, Samuel (2003). Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era. Athens: Ohio University Press. Dawson, Anthony B. (1995). Shakespeare in Performance: ‘Hamlet’. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Drolet, Michael (2004). “Introduction”. In The Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts, ed. Michael Drolet. London and New York: Routledge, 1–35. Harries, Dan (2000). Film Parody. London: BFI. Higson, Andrew (2003). English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hodgdon, Barbara (1999). “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet: Everything’s Nice in America?” Shakespeare Survey 52, 88–98. Hogan, Patrick Colm (2008). Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Howard, Jean (1994). The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England. London and New York: Routledge. Hulbert, Jennifer, Robert L. York and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr (2006). Shakespeare and Youth Culture. New York: Palgrave. Kaplan, Cora (1986). Sea Changes: Essays in Culture and Feminism. London: Verso. Kliman, Bernice W. (1989). “Branagh’s Henry V: Allusion and Illusion”. Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 14.1, 1, 9–10. Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso. Lanier, Douglas (1996). “Drowning the Book: Prospero’s Books and the Textual Shakespeare”. In Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman. London and New York: Routledge, 187–209. Loehlin, James N. (1997). “‘Top of the World, Ma’: Richard III and Cinematic Convention”. In Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt. London and New York: Routledge, 67–79. Marriette, Amelia (2000). “Urban Dystopias: Re-approaching Christine Edzard’s As You Like It”. In Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 73–88.

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Pidduck, Julianne (2004). Contemporary Costume Film. London: BFI. Sanders, Julie (2006). Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge. Starks, Lisa S. (1997). “The Veiled (Hot)Bed of Race and Desire: Parker’s Othello and the Stereotype of Screen Fetish”. PostScript 17.1, 64–78. Taymor, Julie (2010). ‘The Tempest’: Adapted from the Play by William Shakespeare. New York: Abrams. Williams, Linda (2000). “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”. In Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller. Oxford: Blackwell, 207–21. Wray, Ramona (2007). “Shakespeare on Film in the New Millennium”. Shakespeare 3.2, 270–82.

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SHAKESPEARE ON TELEVISION Stephen Purcell

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don’t believe I’ve ever seen a memorable Shakespeare on television,” wrote The Guardian’s Nancy Banks-Smith in 1994; “or, if I have, I’ve forgotten it” (7 November 1994).1 Indeed, televised Shakespeare productions have rarely been as high-profile or as widely-discussed as their cinematic counterparts, and certainly academic discussion of screen Shakespeare has been emphatically weighted towards the latter. One might be surprised, then, to observe that according to the BUFVC’s International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio, television Shakespeare productions outnumber films on a ratio of something like 8:5. Why, then, is television Shakespeare so forgettable (or, to be more charitable, neglected)? One reason may lie in the ambiguous nature of televised Shakespeare, most of which does not take the form of feature-length, made-for-television Shakespearean drama, but rather occupies a huge range of forms from documentaries and loose adaptations to parodic citation in sitcoms and children’s shows. Olwen Terris identifies a decline in what she calls “straight” Shakespeare television productions since the end of the BBC Television Shakespeare series in 1985, noting that: [t]he perception that the BBC Television Shakespeare series should offer a definitive permanent canon ironically may have been another nail in the coffin for Shakespeare on television, relieving the BBC of the obligation to produce any more. (Terris, 2009, 32) One might go further and argue that the so-called “straight” made-for-TV Shakespeare film is something of a rarity because it is rarely necessary: film does film far better than television can, and cinematic releases with much higher production values will almost always find their way onto television eventually. Many of the more recent cinematic Shakespeare films seem to have been designed with such an end in mind, making extensive use of small-screen-friendly close-ups. The precedent was set as far back as 1956, in fact, when Laurence Olivier’s film of Richard III was broadcast on NBS on the very same day that it was released to cinemas. In their “selective filmography” of Shakespeare on screen, Graham Holderness and Christopher McCullough limit their list to “complete” versions of Shakespeare’s plays, interpreting “complete” as “a full though possibly abridged version of the play’s action” (Holderness and McCullough, 1994, 18, 19). Such adaptations have commanded the vast majority of the academic attention afforded to television Shakespeare, and naturally

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this has tended to focus on the success or otherwise with which these adaptations have translated Shakespearean theatre to the new medium. What has been subject to much less academic scrutiny is the wider presence of Shakespeare on television in the form of citations, appropriations and adaptations that are conceived and framed as “television” first and foremost and as “Shakespeare” second. This chapter, then, will explore what might be called “Shakespeare on television” and “Shakespeare as television” respectively, before turning its attention to a broader analysis of some of the ways in which television has presented “Shakespeare” the cultural icon.

The Plays on Television Television is a rapidly-evolving medium, and any account of its history must note that the codes, conventions and viewing practices associated with it have varied enormously from decade to decade. Its inventor described it as “a machine for television – seeing by wireless” (Baird, 2004, 50), and the extent to which early television was constructed as an extension of radio broadcasting should not be underestimated. Combined television and radio sets were common well into the 1950s, and the physical design of televisions borrowed heavily from that of wireless sets. Until the late 1960s, most TV sets were controlled by turning dials rather than by pressing buttons. The “small screen” really did deserve its nickname: in the late 1930s, the screen of the typical domestic set (itself a relatively unusual item) was bulbous, with acutely curved edges, and measured only 5 inches across. It makes sense, then, that televised Shakespeare in this early period was conceived, like radio broadcasts, as the transmission of live events. Although the very first televised broadcast of Shakespeare – by the BBC in August 1936 – was an excerpt from Paul Czinner’s film of As You Like It, it was the live broadcast of an 11-minute excerpt from the same play in February 1937, performed by West End actors Margaretta Scott and Ion Swinley, which set the tone for what was to follow. Before long, extracts and full-length plays alike were filling the schedules, live from the BBC studios at Alexandra Palace or from the stages of the West End. Series such as Scenes from Shakespeare (1937–8) would broadcast 25-minute excerpts from the plays, while a live 70-minute Julius Caesar marked the BBC’s first “complete” television adaptation of Shakespeare in 1938. In January 1939, the corporation transmitted what was at the time its longest-ever broadcast – a 150-minute Twelfth Night, starring Peggy Ashcroft as Viola and Michael Redgrave as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, relayed live from the stage of London’s Phoenix Theatre. In the earliest days of TV, then, televised Shakespeare meant live theatre. After the war, Shakespeare on television continued to be conceived in fundamentally theatrical terms. George More O’Ferrall directed a full-length, two-part Hamlet for the BBC in 1947, rehearsing a full cast over five weeks before broadcasting live from Alexandra Palace. In an accompanying article in the Radio Times, O’Ferrall argued that television “comes nearer to the Elizabethan theatre, for which the plays were written, than the modern theatre can do”, citing as evidence the fluid and flexible studio stage, and the (imagined) proximity of the audience to the actors (7 December 1947). When the BBC broadcast the Elizabethan Theatre Company’s Henry V in 1953 (directed by a young John Barton), producer Michael MacOwen emphasized the production’s essentially theatrical nature in even clearer terms, inviting audiences to see it

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not so much as a television production of Henry V, but as an attempt to show on the television screen the work that is being done by a group of young actors who are trying to return to the essentials of Elizabethan playing. (Radio Times, 19 May 1953) In 1955, the BBC’s commercial competitor, ITV, was launched. They made it clear that they, too, would frame Shakespeare on television as the broadcasting of theatre, relaying Peter Brook’s Hamlet live from the Phoenix Theatre in February 1956 (cutting away 30 seconds before the end to go to commercials) and The Comedy of Errors from the Arts Theatre three months later. It was American television that made the first serious attempts at a fundamentally televisual (rather than theatrical) Shakespeare. Worthington Miner produced Julius Caesar and Coriolanus for CBS in 1949 and 1951 respectively, both cut down to 60 minutes and both in modern-dress; the New York Times’ Jack Gould described the former as “the most exciting television yet seen on the home screen”, noting that the director’s key achievement was his ability to translate Shakespeare’s text into visual art. What Miner had done, he argued, was to “think with his eyes” (New York Times, 13 March 1949). The production made much of the filmic technique of juxtaposition: a shot of Antony just before his funeral oration revealed him nervously smoking a cigarette, while his address itself contained what was for at least one critic a powerful moment of visual contrast: [A]t the moment of ‘This was a man’, a guard kicked the noble Brutus down the steps. The dramatic force of the kick, achieved by its juxtaposition to the noble words, was reminiscent in its intensity of that famous scene in Eisenstein’s Potemkin in which the baby carriage cruelly and mercilessly races down the Odessa steps. (Schreiber, 1949, 185) With its low-key lighting and militaristic costumes, the production evoked connotations of both film noir and twentieth-century fascism. What was to become the best-known series of Shakespeare adaptations made for American television was launched on NBC in 1953: the Hall of Fame series sponsored by the greeting card company Hallmark. The first of these, broadcast on 26 April 1953, was Hamlet, starring English actor Maurice Evans and adapted from George Schaefer’s Broadway production of 1946 (in which Evans had also played the lead role). Whilst heavily cut, it was, at 108 minutes, longer than any drama previously broadcast on American television. Like the stage production, it was set in the late nineteenth century: an opening shot of King Hamlet’s tombstone gave the year of his death as 1890, and the first scene (the play’s 1.2) revealed a set filled, in Bernice Kliman’s phrase, with “‘Victorian clutter’ – candlesticks, vases, statues, paintings, clocks, cushions and other such ornaments” (Kliman, 1988, 92). This then formed what was by all accounts a somewhat distracting background to the rest of the play. The production was caught somewhere between theatre and television. On the one hand, it emphasized its medium with its use of what Martin Rosenberg described at the time as “tricky points of view”: at various moments, for example, actors were filmed in a mirror, through a fire, or from the other side of a window. “Although this was an interesting technical novelty,” Rosenberg noted, “it had the disadvantage of reminding the viewer of what an interesting technical novelty this technical novelty was” (Rosenberg, 1954, 169). On the other hand, the production’s acting (rooted, as it was, in an earlier stage version) was arguably too theatrical for the more naturalistic requirements of the

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television medium – Evans himself, a 52-year-old veteran of the stage, delivered his verse “with quaver in voice and quiver on lips” in what was rapidly becoming an outmoded style (Kliman, 1988, 94). In any case, the reality of the production’s “liveness” was unmistakeable in the closing shots: a close-up of Evans’ face revealed the dead prince blinking. The production was evidently successful enough to convince Hallmark to bankroll further Shakespearean adaptations, since Richard II and Macbeth followed in 1954, The Taming of the Shrew in 1956, Twelfth Night in 1957 and both The Tempest and a remake of the earlier Macbeth in 1960. Evans played a lead role in each of these, and all except Twelfth Night were directed by Schaefer. This should not, however, be taken to suggest a consistency of style. Though the earlier productions shared many of the characteristics of the 1953 Hamlet – Rosenberg complains again of camera tricks “that were too obviously tricks” in Richard II (Rosenberg, 1954, 173) and the sets for many of the productions were distinctly stagey – by 1960, the adaptations were much more filmic. The remake of Macbeth was recorded on location in Scotland rather than relayed live from a studio and the kitsch and garish adaptation of The Tempest (exploiting the possibilities of colour television to the full) featured sequences of filmic special effects in which a miniaturized Ariel (Roddy McDowall) was superimposed in the air before Evans’ avuncular Prospero. Hallmark did not return to Shakespeare after this until 1970, with a new Hamlet starring Richard Chamberlain – which remains, to date, the last of the Hall of Fame Shakespeares. Contemporary responses to the early Hallmark productions tended to review them using theatrical frames of reference. Jack Gould hailed the 1953 Hamlet, for example, as “superbly arresting theatre” (New York Times, 27 April 1953), though he complained that the effect of Richard II’s “elaborate physical production” was diminished on the home screen, “where the proscenium arch is only twenty-one inches” (New York Times, 25 January 1954). A similar worry impeded his enjoyment of the 1954 Macbeth: “[B]y eliminating the physical proscenium arch,” he argued, “the televised Macbeth also lost the play’s unifying arch of tragic human greed” (New York Times, 29 November 1954). Gould’s concerns about the potentially limiting effects of television realism were shared by Alice Griffin in Shakespeare Quarterly, who felt that “the direction by Mr. George Schaefer approached the nonrealistic plays realistically, reducing them in stature”, turning the tragedy of Macbeth in particular “into a domestic rather than cosmic one” (Griffin, 1955, 64, 65). For Martin Rosenberg, the visual realism of Richard II was such that it seemed to cheat the theatrical conventions assumed by its status as a live studio broadcast: its castle front was so “seemingly genuine” that he “could not help but wonder about its presence in a television theatre” (Rosenberg, 1954, 173). It was in 1960 that the BBC started to adapt Shakespeare into formats specific to television. Produced by Peter Dews, An Age of Kings was an epic 15-episode adaptation of Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, Henry V, 1, 2 and 3 Henry VI and Richard III, splitting most of the plays into two parts each. The series presented the plays as a seamless chronicle of English history – ignoring the fact, of course, that Shakespeare had written them in a different order and had addressed each play to the politics of very different periods of Elizabethan history. Nevertheless, the serial structure allowed the series a broad appeal, gaining an average viewing figure of 3 million per episode; the series was also well-received critically. In 1963, the same team followed up their success with The Spread of the Eagle – a 9-part adaptation of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. This was rather less successful – probably because the format of the television serial was less easy to impose on plays that had a much less obvious narrative through-line. ITV, meanwhile, found a

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different way of translating Shakespeare’s plays into TV ratings-winners, casting popular television personalities like Benny Hill and Tommy Steele in their productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1964) and Twelfth Night (1970) respectively. The emerging trend for serialized Shakespeare collided with the well-established tradition of broadcasting Shakespearean theatre in 1964. The newly-formed Royal Shakespeare Company had achieved one of its first great triumphs in Peter Hall’s productions of John Barton’s The Wars of the Roses, a three-part adaptation of the Henry VI plays and Richard III. Barton had cut Shakespeare’s texts heavily and added several hundred lines of new dialogue to rearrange them into three new plays, “Henry VI”, “Edward IV” and “Richard III”. These theatrical productions were restaged and filmed in the RSC’s theatre in Stratford, and initially broadcast in full on the BBC before being divided into 50-minute episodes for transmission in America and elsewhere. The series was, according to the BBC’s 1964–5 Annual Report, “the most elaborate form of co-operation yet devised between theatre and television” (BBC, 1966, 24). The BBC’s most ambitious staging of Shakespeare on television was, of course, the BBC Television Shakespeare series, which was first broadcast on both the BBC and PBS between 1978 and 1985. The brainchild of BBC producer Cedric Messina, it was a bid to film all of Shakespeare’s plays for television and video, making them (as Messina (1978) put it in his preface) “in permanent form, accessible to audiences throughout the world”. Evidently, the development of domestic video technology had changed the field of television Shakespeare: no longer was it transient and disposable, transmitting the thrill of the live event but doomed to be lost to posterity. Now it had the chance to be permanent, and to be definitive. The ambition was arguably the series’ downfall. Produced in partnership with US company Time-Life Television, each adaptation had to conform to a strict house style: sets and costumes were to be “traditional” and radical or revisionist interpretations were out of the question. The publicity hand-out that accompanied the launch of the series made the claim that there had been “no attempt at stylisation; there are no gimmicks; no embellishments to confuse the student”. The straightforward nature of the series was to be its major selling point, designed as it was as a durable educational aid; but as Martin Banham has pointed out, that same quality could be interpreted simply as “a lack of boldness, a lack of imagination” (Banham, 1988, 217). Two years into the series, TV critic Stanley Reynolds lamented its latest production, The Tempest, as “more of the BBC’s ghastly middle taste”: “this was yet another stiff production aimed at the archives”, he observed, “and one can certainly see it gathering a lot of dust there in years to come” (The Times, 28 February 1980). When Jonathan Miller took over the running of the series in 1980, he found himself constrained by the contract with the American co-producers. Directors whom he would have liked to employ, among them Peter Brook and Ingmar Bergman, were put off by the insistence on “traditional” staging, and when Michael Bogdanov found his plans for a modern-dress Timon of Athens disallowed, he resigned from the project. Bogdanov later called the series “the greatest disservice to Shakespeare in the last twenty-five years” (The Guardian, 30 December 1982). Miller turned the series’ limitations into an advantage in his own productions, however, developing (along with director Elijah Moshinsky in particular) a style that drew on Renaissance paintings for intertextual visual quotations. Aside from the TV films of the BBC series, most of the “straight” televised Shakespeares since the 1970s have been restaged versions of celebrated theatre productions. Much of

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Trevor Nunn’s work with the RSC, for example, was filmed and subsequently broadcast on television in both Britain and the United States: Antony and Cleopatra (1972), The Comedy of Errors (1976), Macbeth with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench (1979), Othello, once again with McKellen (1989), and King Lear – also McKellen (2008). The work of the National Theatre has often been adapted in a similar manner, notable examples including Jonathan Miller’s The Merchant of Venice (1969), Trevor Nunn’s production of the same play (2000), Deborah Warner’s Richard II with Fiona Shaw in the title role (1997) and Richard Eyre’s King Lear with Ian Holm (1998). The trend has been just as noticeable on American television, with many of the productions mentioned above broadcast as part of PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre or Great Performances series and American stage productions like Kevin Kline’s Hamlet (1990) or Nicholas Hytner’s Twelfth Night (1998) filmed in a similar way. American television has repeatedly broadcast the work of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival, in 1973 (an “Americanized” Much Ado About Nothing), 1977 (James Earl Jones in King Lear) and 1983 (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Reviewing the televised version of Warner’s Richard II for the Times Educational Supplement in 1997, Bernard Adams describes nearly all such broadcasts when he notes that it was “interestingly poised between being a film and a play” (28 March 1997). Indeed, televised Shakespeare often seems to aim at being both. As Maurice Hindle observes: the core of the stylistic debate about presenting Shakespeare on TV revolves around whether drama should aspire to film or to the theatre, to a strong notion of representation aiming for realism of place, or to providing a suggestivity of place or space, a strategy often employed in open staging productions. (Hindle, 2007, 225) The BBC Shakespeare series often fell victim to this identity crisis, aiming on the one hand for a kind of television naturalism, but confining itself on the other to stagey box-sets. The 1978 Romeo and Juliet is at times uncomfortable to watch, its studio-bound set failing to look like anything other than a cheap imitation of the opulent locations used in Zeffirelli’s film of ten years earlier. Kenneth Rothwell notes the series’ “recurring indecisiveness about whether to be theatrical or telegenic”, suggesting that its 1980 Hamlet succeeds simply “in being neither” (Rothwell, 1999, 113). One could make the same criticism of some of Trevor Nunn’s television Shakespeare. In the theatre, his award-winning The Merchant of Venice was consummately theatrical: set in jazz-age Europe, it recontextualized the play’s anti-Semitism chillingly and effectively, so that the rise of the Nazis was never far from one’s mind. Nunn set much of the play in a Kander-and-Ebb-style cabaret bar, provoking warm applause and laughter from the audience and at other times undercutting it with stark depictions of racism. When the same production was adapted for broadcast on BBC2, however, it was filmed in a studio without an audience. What had been strikingly theatrical on stage becomes uncomfortable on television: visual gags fall flat without a laughing and responding audience (the only exception being Launcelot Gobbo’s stand-up comedy sequence, which has an intradiegetic audience in the form of the laughing patrons of the cabaret bar). Running at nearly three hours, the TV broadcast also badly misses the theatre production’s interval. The absence of a live audience has frequently been a stumbling-block for televised Shakespeare. As Sheldon Zitner has argued, much of Shakespeare’s stagecraft depended on “the presence of a responsive live audience”: an audience who were enlisted to help “create and then abandon dramatic illusion” (Zitner, 1988, 33), as suggested by the prologue to Henry V. Without a sizeable and immediate audience to address, Falstaff loses

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some of his playfulness, Antony some of his persuasive force, Henry V some of his rhetorical power. Unfortunately, the BBC Shakespeare adaptations testify to these losses. In the comedies, the absence is even more acutely felt. As Stanley Wells notes in his review of the BBC Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1980): Concerted comic scenes seem far less likely to do well, and I suspect that this is because one important participant is invariably missing: the reacting audience. Comedy written especially for television acknowledges this need by providing studio audiences, not only for broadly comic shows but also for the more subtle kinds of situation comedy. (Wells, 1982, 272) Indeed, the absence of a studio audience from several of the BBC Shakespeare productions is conspicuous. The Merry Wives of Windsor (1982) seems to advertise its status as sitcom by casting Prunella Scales as one of the titular wives, and Ben Kingsley’s manic Ford belongs to the same heightened register, but clearly the BBC producers were not comfortable enough with this conflation of elite and popular forms to follow through and add a studio audience into the mix. Scales’ Fawlty Towers co-star John Cleese was Petruchio in the aforementioned The Taming of the Shrew, and while his performance is searching, intelligent and humorous, it fails to achieve the laugh-out-loud comedy of his more famous roles. Compare this production with the anarchic commedia-influenced Shrew of the American Conservatory Theatre broadcast on US television in 1976 and one sees the difference a live audience can make. The latter was filmed before an audience at the theatre itself, and its laughter can be heard throughout. Rothwell describes this strategy as “frankly theatrical, not telegenic, in the sense that even the off-stage audience was made a part of the mise-en-scène” (Rothwell, 1999, 106) – though this assessment does perhaps ignore the very emphatically “telegenic” nature of the offstage audience that is usual in TV sitcom. The presence of a live, responding audience in such TV adaptations as the Flying Karamazov Brothers’ The Comedy of Errors (1987) and Michael Bogdanov’s The Wars of the Roses (1989) adds greatly to these productions’ comic effects. Perhaps one answer is to be found in a return to television Shakespeare’s origins. BBC4’s live broadcasts of Richard II and Measure for Measure from Shakespeare’s Globe (in 2003 and 2004 respectively) turned the television audience into an extension of the televised audience, the former watching interviews with the latter before and after the play, and (perhaps) responding simultaneously with them during the broadcast itself. The sense of imaginative collusion and audience complicity which is so much a part of spectatorship at the Globe became, by extension, part of the experience of viewers at home. They were witnesses to – but also, to an extent, participants in – a live multimedia event, analogous to a televised football match or the last night of the Proms. It is striking that the most effective of the “straight” television Shakespeares tend to be those that emphasize their own theatrical qualities. In an essay on the ITV broadcast of Nunn’s Macbeth, Michael Mullin notes that: “instead of re-conceiving the production for television, the television director Philip Casson seems to have set himself the task of finding ways in which television could recreate the experience of the theatre” (Mullin, 1987, 356). The adaptation therefore opens with an overhead shot of fourteen actors entering a circular playing space and sitting down on stools all around the edge of it. Minimal décor is used throughout, with few concessions to television naturalism and much direct address to the camera (particularly from McKellen’s Macbeth). The whole production plays

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out against a symbolically dark and empty background, into which Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, both clad in black, are constantly on the verge of disappearing. Television Shakespeares seem to respond well to metaphorical rather than realistic staging. Like Nunn’s Macbeth, the TV versions of Warner’s Richard II (1997) and Eyre’s King Lear (1998) deploy vigorous colour symbolism and abstract or impressionistic settings which emphasize the plays’ archetypal, elemental conflicts. In Lear, a non-realistic set of large, blank, red walls forms the background to the first half of the play, giving way after a ferocious storm sequence to a seemingly endless thick white mist, and then to stark blocks of black and white for the play’s denouement. In Richard II, Richard’s return from Ireland (3.2) is drenched in light: white costume, pale pebbles and a great expanse of whiteness behind him which seems all the more vast in some beautifully-framed long shots. It marks a strong contrast to the deposition scene (4.1), in which the background space is divided between a sea of candlelight on one side, which washes Fiona Shaw’s Richard with a golden glow, and a dark gloom on the other, which keeps Richard Bremmer’s Bolingbroke in shadow. The very fact of Fiona Shaw’s casting as the male Richard, of course, disrupts one of the most basic conventions of television drama: the production advertises itself as one that is to be read metaphorically rather than naturalistically. In many cases, the best television Shakespeares are those that flout the conventions of the medium. Filmed and conceived as a tetralogy, Jane Howell’s productions of the Henry VI plays and Richard III for the BBC Shakespeare series (1983) are all shot on the same selfcontained adventure-playground set, with wooden ramps and swinging doors. As the plays progress, the set becomes increasingly shabby and damaged, reflecting England’s descent into chaos and destruction. Self-advertising theatrical techniques are used throughout: the Duke of Gloucester and the Bishop of Winchester’s confrontation in Part 1 is conducted on hobby-horses, while the eponymous protagonist emerges at the beginning of Richard III to scrawl the play’s title onto the set in chalk. Long takes on a moving camera allow actors to turn to the TV audience for asides and then back into the scene in one fluid movement. The productions are widely considered the most successful of the BBC series.

Shakespeare as Television These observations appear to lead us towards the conclusion that television Shakespeare is, at best, merely a successful translation of Shakespearean theatre, and that the more successfully it finds a means of replicating the dynamics of theatrical performance, the better. The argument is, however, a circular one: done “straight”, television Shakespeare incorporates as much of Shakespeare’s text as possible, rearranging it as little as possible and rewriting even less. “Straight” Shakespeare, then, is the attempt, as Michèle Willems puts it, to use “a theatrical text as a film script with only minor changes, thus assuming that a visual medium can somehow accommodate an abundance of verbal signs” (Willems, 1994, 74). It stands to reason that an adaptation using a virtually unmodified theatrical script will be more likely to succeed if, indeed, it treats it theatrically. If Shakespeare is to be made to speak the language of television (rather than vice versa), it must be reworked in a more fundamental way. Channel 4’s Head of Drama, David Aukin, argued as much in The Guardian in 1994: Television as a medium has developed its own language and grammar which you disregard at your peril. You can no longer just place cameras in front of a stage

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performance and expect the result to be anything but bad television and bad representation of theatre. (20 April 1994) Typically, television drama will cut between speakers and between scenes with a greater frequency than stage drama, and it will rely to a much greater extent on visual (rather than verbal) storytelling: the words follow the pictures, rather than the other way around. As John Adams explains, modern viewers, after years of watching naturalistic television drama, have been trained to read images of the body and especially the face as signification of “an inner world of motives, desires and feelings” (Adams, 1998, 151). Language plays only a secondary role in this essentially character-focused sign system: “Information may be exchanged, stories told, but the rhythms of enactment and performance insistently subjugate worlds within language to the attitudes and emotions of the character at any given moment” (Adams, 1998, 154). The long passages of verbal density typical of Shakespeare’s plays, then, are fundamentally unsuited to the conventions of television drama. In 1991, the BBC revived the tradition of broadcasting regular adaptations of stage plays with the creation of their Performance strand on BBC2. Its producer Simon Curtis explains the kind of theatre that he feels translates well to television: “[W]hat I’ve learned is that those more immediate, emotional, claustrophobic plays are the ones that do best for us. There’s no doubt that those gutwrenching, emotional dramas are the ones that most succeed and get the strongest reaction” (Ridgman, 1998, 202). For this reason, it is perhaps no surprise that the first Shakespeare he commissioned for the series was Measure for Measure (1994) – a play that comprises, in H. R. Coursen’s phrase, “a series of vivid one-on-one confrontations” (Coursen, 1988, 182). Curtis’ discussion of the adaptation indicates a significant departure from the priorities of the 1978–85 BBC series: What seems important when we do plays like that or The Changeling, is to go in and edit them. With the BBC Shakespeares, the guidelines were that you had to do the whole play or do them as written, which was rather deadening. David Thacker has a really fresh, bold vision of Measure for Measure and if you read the script of his adaptation it reads almost like a modern film. (Ridgman, 1998, 203) Certainly Thacker’s adaptation, set in a surveillance-laden police state, was a pared-down and cleverly rearranged version of the text. Even this, however, was by a director best known for his stage work, who had directed a not-dissimilar theatre production of Measure for Measure at the Young Vic in 1987, starring the same actor (Corin Redgrave) as Angelo. Olwen Terris reports that only eleven “straight” productions were broadcast on British TV between 1985 and 2005, and that of these, only Thacker’s Measure for Measure was “made specifically for television” (Terris, 2009, 33). She does not give a full list, but her definition of “straight” appears to discount productions that were broadcast on schools programming, since Alan Horrox’s The Merchant of Venice (1996), Michael Bogdanov’s Macbeth (1998) and Tim Supple’s Twelfth Night (2003) – all using Shakespeare’s text and all feature-length (though some were initially broadcast in serial form) – were certainly made specifically for television. She also overlooks the twelve adaptations that comprised Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (presumably because these were, at 26 minutes each, heavily abridged versions of the texts) and Penny Woolcock’s excellent Macbeth on the Estate (1997). The omissions are striking because all of these productions reconceived Shakespeare as television drama rather than staging it as televised theatre. Both Macbeth on the Estate and Supple’s Twelfth Night set the plays in modern Britain,

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emphasizing contemporary social and political parallels. Supple’s film turns Viola and Sebastian into Asian asylum seekers and Feste into an underground musician; most of the language used is Shakespeare’s, though Antonio and Sebastian lapse once or twice into subtitled Urdu. The production is self-consciously filmic, with intermittent jump-shots illustrating the text: a cutaway of Antonio as a gun-wielding mercenary flashes briefly onto the screen when he reveals that he “did some service” in a sea-fight against Orsino (3.3.27), while a shot of a crashed car appears suddenly when Feste asks Olivia why she is in mourning (1.5.62). Juxtaposition is employed at key moments: Orsino’s opening speech is inter-cut with images of Viola and Sebastian escaping violence in their unspecified home country and a non-verbal sequence showing Olivia in mourning is interspersed with shots of Feste pulling faces at a CCTV camera as he arrives at her house. The production’s rhythm is fast and choppy, full of intense visual imagery, extreme close-ups and quick cuts. Olivia especially experiences multiple flashbacks, first of her late brother and then of her conversation with Viola. Soliloquies are frequently illustrated with rapid intercutting and given in voiceover, while Nitin Sawhney’s musical score – often incorporated intradiegetically – accompanies almost all the densest passages of poetry. Woolcock’s film, meanwhile, relocates Macbeth to an inner-city estate in modern Birmingham, turning it into a story of gang warfare: once again, most of the text (aside from a prologue addressed to camera by Macduff) is from Shakespeare’s play. As its title suggests, Macbeth on the Estate is shot on location (on Birmingham’s Ladywood estate), lending it a strong sense of realism: this is compounded by a recurring use of “shaky” handheld camera, and the strong Birmingham accents with which most of the characters speak. Woolcock finds various ways of translating Shakespeare’s decidedly non-realistic play into TV naturalism: the witches become creepy children, Macbeth’s letter to his wife is delivered as an answerphone message, soliloquies (when delivered aloud) are mumbled into mirrors and the dizzying footage of Banquo’s ghost implies that his appearance is a result of the drunk Macbeth’s subconscious mind rather than supernatural forces. The heightened register of the language is matched, as in Twelfth Night, with a visual density: freeze-frames, voiceover soliloquies and quick intercutting recur throughout, often underscored by music. The text is heavily edited and there are multiple passages in which language plays no part: close-ups of faces reveal characters’ internal dilemmas, lingering shots of the estate emphasize the urban context and, memorably, a montage of violence cross-cut with footage of a party underlines the drama’s brutality. If the key challenge in making Shakespeare work as television is that of finding appropriately heightened modes of visual storytelling, then perhaps the single most successful example is the Animated Tales series. Produced by Welsh channel S4C for the BBC in 1992 and 1994, this was a series of twelve short adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays (six per season) by children’s author Leon Garfield. The individual episodes were animated in a variety of styles by leading artists from the influential Russian studio Soyuzmultfilm and voiced by well-known British actors (including Antony Sher, Zoë Wanamaker and Hugh Grant). Each episode is a beautifully-crafted visual response to its Shakespearean source: Stanislav Sokolov’s painterly stop-motion animation brings out the fairy-tale qualities of The Tempest, while his The Winter’s Tale is permeated by a visual motif of torrential snow. Nikolai Serebryakov’s cel animation for Macbeth allows the witches’ prophecies to be illustrated with eerie supernatural visions, and contrasts an ethereal and almost featureless Lady Macbeth with her jaggedly furrowed husband. The series’ most remarkable adaptation, though, is Natalya Orlova’s Hamlet, which employs the unusual technique of

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paint on glass to create a swirling yet stuttering motion in various monochromatic hues; it achieves a powerful kinaesthetic effect. As Laurie Osborne has argued, the Animated Tales “prepare their audience to understand the plays cinematically rather than theatrically or literarily” (Osborne, 1997, 103). An alternative model for Shakespeare-as-television emerged in the first few years of the twenty-first century (though in fact something similar had been done as far back as 1973, in John Bowen’s Heil Caesar! for the BBC). Andrew Davies, famous for his TV adaptations of classic novels such as Pride and Prejudice (1995), was approached by London Weekend Television in 2001 to script a contemporary reworking of a Shakespeare play for ITV. Davies responded by writing a modern-language update of Othello set amongst the Metropolitan Police, with Eamonn Walker’s Othello as its first black chief commissioner and Christopher Eccleston’s Jago (Iago) as his resentful inferior. The adaptation is, for the most part, naturalistic – but in an equivalent to Shakespearean soliloquy, Jago addresses the camera directly (with much of the rapid cross-cutting we might have come to expect from modern televisual Shakespeare), in what is often a meta-dramatic and self-mocking tone. “Well, well,” he concludes, after a fiery (and racist) outburst to the viewer, “what a passionate performance – I quite surprised myself. All over now.” In 2005 the BBC picked up where ITV left off, commissioning a season of four similarly-updated adaptations for broadcast under the umbrella title ShakespeaRe-Told. These were, in order of transmission: David Nicholls’ Much Ado About Nothing, which recasts the play as an ensemble comedy set in a regional TV newsroom; Peter Moffat’s Macbeth, a thriller about the murder of a celebrity chef by the ambitious head chef at his restaurant; Sally Wainwright’s The Taming of the Shrew, in which Conservative MP Katherine Minola is told to find a husband in order to be in with a chance of winning the party leadership; and Peter Bowker’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set at a holiday camp. All four feature both paraphrases of and direct allusions to their source texts. The first three successfully translate the Shakespearean plays into recognizable TV formulas: Macbeth into a psychological thriller in the style of the BBC’s Murder in Mind (2001–3), and both Much Ado and Shrew into Four Weddings-style romantic comedies (indeed, Shrew’s closing sequence quotes the 1994 film’s cascade of happily-ever-after photographs). The latter two also allow room for some post-feminist revisionism: Hero refuses to marry Claude (Claudio) following her public humiliation (thwarting viewer expectations in a potentially challenging way) and Kate’s speech of subjugation at the end of Shrew becomes an expression of the importance of mutual respect, masked by a heavily ironic account of modern gender roles (“All we do is sit around all day eating chocolates. I know I do, when I’m not running the country”). Bowker’s Dream attempts something a little more stylistically complex than the other three, interweaving the language of television naturalism with Shakespeare’s own blank verse. Bowker had made a similar experiment in his 2004 series Blackpool, a detective serial in which characters would intermittently break into the heightened registers of song and dance (much like Dennis Potter’s 1978 series Pennies from Heaven). In Bowker’s Dream, the heightened mode of Shakespearean verse is used to signify otherworldliness, contrasting radically (and playfully) with the modern and informal speech registers that surround it. It is employed especially by Lennie James’ Oberon: OBERON Remember that stuff I used the night I heard the mermaids sing? PUCK Those mermaids! Aw, man, we ’ad a wobble on that night!

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OBERON All in maiden meditation, fancy-free, yet marked where the bolt of Cupid fell. PUCK I can score ya for love-juice. No danger. OBERON It fell upon a little western flower – Before, milk-white; now, purple with love’s wound – And maidens call it love-in-idleness. PUCK D’ya want the bleedin’ love-juice, or what? At times, the verse is empty pastiche rather than meaningful in itself: the missing “I” from Oberon’s second line in the extract above, for example, renders it rather indecipherable. But clearly Shakespearean verse is present here as a signifier in its own right – it signifies simply because it is Shakespearean verse, regardless of any textual meanings. It is worth noting that with the exception of Bowker’s Dream, all of these “retellings” focus on figures from television itself. Chief Commissioner Othello appears on news broadcasts; Katherine Minola is interviewed on Newsnight; Bianca is a supermodel; Duncan a TV chef; and Beatrice, Benedick, Hero and Claude are all television presenters. Perhaps this is simply a symptom of our media-obsessed age, but arguably there is something more to it: these adaptations use television self-referentially, in a similar manner, perhaps, to the way in which Shakespeare’s plays refer self-reflexively to the theatre. Margaret Kidnie argues that the pervasive presence of TV screens in Much Ado “exposes, rather than reinforces, the reality effect typically associated with television . . . making of the passive viewer a self-aware watcher” (Kidnie, 2009, 122–3). Television has been a powerful motif in other productions, too. Gregory Doran’s 2009 Hamlet cleverly adapted his RSC stage production to the new medium by adding a variety of intradiegetic cameras: David Tennant’s Prince became a budding filmmaker, recording his “How all occasions do inform against me” soliloquy direct to his own camera. CCTV footage recurs throughout the film, providing an interesting perspective on the appearance of the Ghost (he does not show up on it) and allowing Hamlet to disable a spy-camera before uttering the line “Now I am alone.” Spying by television has been a popular device. Thacker’s 1994 Measure for Measure opens with the Duke watching scenes of Vienna’s depravity on multiple TV screens in his office, and later on, Claudio and the Provost observe the events of Act 5 via closedcircuit. A comparable strategy is employed in Supple’s Twelfth Night, in which Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Fabian watch Malvolio’s gulling on CCTV from the safety of a security office. Rather similarly, in the ShakespeaRe-Told Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick’s gulling is observed by his friends on the internal TV monitors of the news studio. All three productions allow the television audience to join with an intradiegetic audience of Shakespearean characters, sharing their reactions as they watch the events of the play together; the gulling sequence is certainly the funniest moment in Supple’s otherwise rather melancholy adaptation. TV screens and video cameras have also featured prominently in notable (but as yet untelevised) Shakespearean stage productions of recent years: Complicite’s Measure for Measure (National Theatre, 2004), Nicholas Hytner’s Henry V (National Theatre, 2003), Trevor Nunn’s Richard II (Old Vic, 2005), the Wooster Group’s Hamlet (2007) and Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s Roman Tragedies (2009) are just five of many that have employed the television screen as a recurring and symbolically-rich motif. Moreover, television has been a key presence in films like Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo

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+ Juliet (1996), Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000). Perhaps it is only a matter of time before Shakespeare on television becomes just as much about television as it is about Shakespeare.

“Shakespeare” on Television An assumption made by some of the academic writing on televised Shakespeare surveyed thus far is that it is possible to distinguish between those productions that are “straight”, and those that are not. RSC adaptations and the BBC Television Shakespeare, for example, will typically be categorized as “straight”, while the Animated Tales and ShakespeaRe-Told may be excluded from the definition. The ambiguous status of productions like Macbeth on the Estate, however, suggests that “straightness” is not so much an objective quality as an interpretive frame. It is not simply a matter of the presence or absence of Shakespearean language: few would question the canonicity of the Hallmark Shakespeares (all heavily abridged) or The Wars of the Roses (which featured a great deal of non-Shakespearean dialogue). Rather, it is the extent to which television adaptations conform to our preconceived notions of what “Shakespeare” is. In his “Afterword” to The Shakespeare Myth, Terry Eagleton made a distinction between, on the one hand, Shakespeare the man and his playtexts, and on the other, “Shakespeare” the myth (Eagleton, 1988, 204). Whenever Shakespeare’s drama is presented, so too is a myth (or rather, an interweaving and often mutually-contradictory set of myths) about what it is that we are watching: universal truths, historically-contingent politics, theatre, literature, the English, the global, high culture, pop culture, the past, the present. To televise Shakespeare is also, inevitably, to televise “Shakespeare”, and the range of “Shakespeares” with which television has presented us is a subject worthy of extended analysis. The “straight Shakespeare” of the BBC series provides a useful benchmark. Broadcast in the UK on Sunday evenings at peak time, the series occupied a slot traditionally reserved for culturally edifying television (and, of course, religious programming). The series operated within a wider cultural frame constituted by TV, radio, journalistic, scholarly and educational tie-ins: previews of each broadcast in the Radio Times would be accompanied by feature articles and productions were guaranteed extensive coverage after the event in both newspaper and academic criticism (that this was not always positive is neither here nor there: the coverage itself framed the broadcasts as culturally-central). Specially-made radio programmes presented by luminaries of the British theatrical firmament (such as Sir Michael Redgrave and Dame Peggy Ashcroft) asserted the series’ continuity with the best of classical theatre, while a series of accompanying TV documentaries called Shakespeare in Perspective added cultural weight: the programme on Henry V, for example, was presented by Lord Chalfont, a former minister of state. Teachers’ packs, book lists and of course the series’ eventual destination as video situated it as an object designed for study. In short, the broadcasts were meant to be viewed as events of high culture. This self-positioning is confirmed by the series’ opening titles. The earliest productions open with an Elizabethan trumpet fanfare and a sequence of shots of well-known heritage sites from around Europe. The sequence is accompanied by the stamps of one great British institution after another: “SHAKESPEARE” is emblazoned across the screen in capital letters, before fading to “The Complete Dramatic Works of”, and then an image of Shakespeare’s signature (“authorizing” the series, perhaps). We are then assured, in

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capital lettering just as large, that it is presented by “THE BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION”. Shakespeare’s monumental importance thus reflects back on the BBC, serving the corporation’s cultural and economic interests (as a publicly-funded organization, it was, after all, under attack at the time from the right-wing of British politics and its prestige and cultural centrality were key lines of defence). The title sequence of the later productions changes in accordance with the series’ shifting emphasis: whereas the earlier films aimed at permanence and cultural importance, the later ones, framed as they are by Tudor music and mocked-up folio-style titles, suggest literariness and historical authenticity (paradoxically signifying the authentic with a simulacrum). In both Britain and America, “straight Shakespeares” are typically imbued with signifiers of “Englishness”. The broadcast of Elizabethan Theatre Company’s Henry V was appropriated, in 1953, as “the BBC’s official contribution to the festivities for the coronation of Elizabeth II” (Holderness, 2002, 13), while in America, the Hallmark Hall of Fame’s 1954 Richard II opened with newsreel footage of the coronation. Hallmark, of course, populated their adaptations with British actors – alongside Maurice Evans, Rosemary Harris, Michael Hordern, Richard Burton and Roddy McDowall all played central roles. Numerous British Shakespeares have been broadcast as part of PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre (1971–), a showcase, in Douglas Lanier’s term, for “all things Anglophile” (Lanier, 2002, 107): Foyle’s War (2002–), Jeeves and Wooster (1990–3) and Andrew Davies’ adaptation of Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1999) have little in common with one another other than the fact that all of them advertise a nostalgic picture of English life. As Ramona Wray has argued, even ShakespeaRe-Told plays the Shakespeare-as-heritage-tourism game, in Much Ado About Nothing’s “Anglican churches, windy seaside promenades and historic county hotels”, and The Taming of the Shrew’s “establishing shots of derelict stately homes, Big Ben and leafy London parks”: “Englishness,” she argues, “becomes the meal ticket with which appeals are made to a global, postmodern audience” (Wray, 2006, 186). Television often presents a “Shakespeare” which is somehow set apart from regular broadcasting. Holderness points out that whereas in the early days of television Shakespeare was presented as an integrated part of a “programmed sequence of variety and entertainment”, by the 1950s, Shakespeare broadcasts were presented very much as “special occasions” (Holderness, 2002, 11). Series such as Performance present their plays as a privileged kind of television drama, and certainly the studio adaptations of RSC productions advertise their origins very prominently. The recent RSC Hamlet (2009) is a perfect example – featured in the Radio Times, accompanied by three late-night documentaries on BBC2’s Learning Zone and shown on BBC2 at 5 p.m. on Boxing Day, it was framed in a very similar way to the broadcasts of the 1978–85 BBC series. Television documentaries on Shakespeare (and especially Shakespearean theatre) will typically present a “Shakespeare” that is “universal”, and yet at the same time both mysterious and the province of a very small number of exceptionally talented experts. ITV’s long-running arts documentary series The South Bank Show (1978–2010) often featured coverage of Shakespeare, usually in the form of profiles of individual performers or directors: examples include Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Peter Brook, John Barton and Peter Hall. The format itself appears to ascribe success in Shakespearean theatre to individual genius rather than collaborative effort. Discussing Shakespearerelated episodes of both The South Bank Show and the BBC’s Omnibus (1967–2003), Peter Reynolds observes that the extensive use of shots of heritage sites, religious iconography and the trappings of high culture, repeatedly mythologize classical theatres as “different,

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rarefied art houses, in which the true mysteries of theatre were created by actors” (Reynolds, 1998, 164). Television has not, however, allowed this sanctification of Shakespeare to reign unchallenged. Norbert Smith – A Life (1989), in which the real-life South Bank Show host Melvyn Bragg interviewed comedian Harry Enfield as the fictional theatrical legend Smith, was a direct parody of the South Bank Show episode “Laurence Oliver – A Life” (1982). The programme demystifies television’s own conventions of mythologization: in its opening sequence, classical music plays while the camera pans across framed photographs of Smith’s greatest roles (including Hamlet) and gives us an accidental glimpse of a packet of Anusol suppositories. Later, Smith recalls working with “the young Sir John Gielgud”: “I performed with him before he was Sir John – when he was plain Larry Olivier. I was Bottom to his Front End of Pantomime Horse. In The Scottish Pantomime.” We see a clip of his 1949 Hamlet (“which he adapted in collaboration with Noel Coward”): in a setting strongly reminiscent of Olivier’s film, a Hamlet with a cigarette holder declares to Horatio that he is “longing to catch up on all the gossip”. Unsurprisingly, it is the high-culture “Shakespeare” that is most frequently parodied on television. This often takes the form of allusions to (and demystifications of) specific screen Shakespeares: Laurence Olivier’s film performances, for example, are parodied in programmes as varied as the historical sitcom Blackadder (the 1983 episode “The Foretelling” features Peter Cook as an Olivier-like Richard III), The Muppet Show (a 1980 episode featuring Christopher Reeve spoofs Hamlet) and even a 1965 broadcast of The Music of Lennon and McCartney, in which a costumed Peter Sellers delivers the lyrics to “Hard Day’s Night” in the style of Olivier’s Richard III. Other highly-institutionalized Shakespeares come in for mockery, too: a sketch on BBC2’s Big Train (1998) sends up the BBC Shakespeare series’ stagey and over-reverent acting style, as a group of Shakespeare lookalikes fondly remember Portaccio, the “one true master” among Shakespeare lookalikes; a recurring strand on Sesame Street, meanwhile, parodies Masterpiece Theatre as “Monsterpiece Theater”, with the Cookie Monster as host “Alistair Cookie”. John Drakakis describes the Shakespeare parodies of TV comedians Tommy Cooper (who spoofs Olivier’s Hamlet) and Morecambe and Wise (who parody Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar) as “carnivalesque demystifications” of “highbrow” Shakespeare (Drakakis, 1997, 168–9). Arguably, however, many citations of Shakespeare in popular television serve simply to entrench further the perceived disparity between Shakespeare and pop culture. When Miss Piggy performs Romeo and Juliet in an episode of Muppets Tonight, she ruins it. The characters of The Simpsons enact Hamlet in the 2002 episode “Tales from the Public Domain”, and the inappropriateness of their casting drives much of the episode’s humour. The BBC sketch show Dead Ringers achieves comic incongruity by putting the characters from Hamlet on the British tabloid talk show Trisha (subtitle: “My Mother Married the Uncle who Killed my Father!”). The audience’s laughter, in such instances, takes for granted that Shakespeare is irrevocably separate from, and superior to, the crassness of popular culture. Some appropriations are more ambiguous. The “Pyramus and Thisbe” scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been staged twice as a stand-alone television sketch: first by comedy troupe The Crazy Gang on The Music Box in 1957 and then by the Beatles in their television special Around the Beatles in 1964. In the latter broadcast especially, the sketch is both a send-up and a reappropriation of Shakespeare’s scene, ambiguously both

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“Shakespeare” (the dialogue is largely his) and “not Shakespeare” (the sketch seems to parody a bombastic, outmoded acting style that might be associated by the audience with Shakespeare itself). When George Harrison’s Moonshine responds to staged heckling with an apparently transgressive departure from Shakespeare’s text, the crowd scream their approval: Look you: all I have to say is to tell you that this lantern is the moon, you see – got it? – I’m the man in the moon; this thornbush here’s my thornbush; and this doggywoggy here’s my dog – and if you don’t wrap up I’ll give you a kick in the – the arse! But as anyone familiar with the original play will recognize, Harrison is merely paraphrasing Starveling’s line from the play: “All that I have to say is to tell you that the lantern is the moon, I the man i’th’moon, this thorn bush my thorn bush, and this dog my dog” (5.1.247–9). As I have argued elsewhere, Harrison’s apparently unauthorized interpolation is “based on an original ‘unauthorised interpolation’ authored by Shakespeare” (Purcell, 2009, 116). A television format that can provide the site for a more literal contestation of Shakespeare’s cultural status is the workshop. Holderness describes Michael Bogdanov’s series Shakespeare Lives! (1983) as “an impressive piece of marginal opposition” to the BBC Television Shakespeare, noting that by staging workshops and discussions, it allows the texts to become “battlegrounds for the play of conflicting attitudes, interpretations and ideas” (Holderness, 2002, 23, 24): In place of the monumental stability of a definitive version, the cultural authority of an institutional production . . . we have the provisional, tentative, unfinished debate of the practical rehearsal, and the spectacle of people struggling to make meaning out of Shakespeare. (Holderness, 2002, 25) The format was repeated in John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare (1984) and more recently in his Shakespeare Sessions (2003). These programmes also allow room for debate – participant Ian McKellen contests Barton’s historicization of naturalistic acting a few minutes into the first episode of Playing Shakespeare, for example. However, the emphasis in these broadcasts is very much on Barton as Shakespearean specialist, perhaps in keeping with Playing Shakespeare’s origins as a two-part “masterclass on Shakespeare’s verse” for The South Bank Show in 1979. Bogdanov took the workshop format a stage further in Penny Woolcock’s documentary Shakespeare on the Estate (1994). In this programme, Bogdanov visits Birmingham’s impoverished Ladywood Estate, persuading an initially suspicious and sceptical local community to rehearse and eventually perform passages from Shakespeare. The documentary explores some of the cultural meanings embodied in the word “Shakespeare” – Bogdanov’s participants tend at first to identify Shakespeare as, variously, for “white people”, “men” and “the upper class”, before they start to find meaningful engagements with the plays and apparently genuine enjoyment in them (Woolcock returned to Ladywood, of course, to film Macbeth on the Estate in 1997). Michael Waldman’s film My Shakespeare (2004) attempts something similar: actor Paterson Joseph returns to his hometown of Harlesden, north London, to direct an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet. Harlesden suffers from high unemployment, poverty and crime, and is home to a large Asian and black community, as well as many refugees and asylum seekers; Joseph’s aim in the documentary is to prove that people from the area are capable of creating “high art” and indeed, of course, he succeeds.

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By 2010, the format had become well-established: the Daily Telegraph’s review of When Romeo Met Juliet (2010), a BBC documentary in which National Youth Theatre director Paul Roseby coaches a group of Coventry teenagers through a production of Romeo and Juliet, recognized it as the one where a passionate champion of the arts arrives in a council estate/ impoverished town/comprehensive school and has just a few weeks to get the people there to perform something they never thought they could. (14 June 2010) The three-part narrative of “auditioning in the midst of local indifference, rehearsal and its tribulations, and eventual performance”, is, as Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy note, now generic (Greenhalgh and Shaughnessy, 2006, 91). The narrative of a precarious rehearsal process followed by a triumphant first performance has been popular in fictional drama too. In the cinema, it can be seen in such films as In the Bleak Midwinter (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1995), Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998), Stage Beauty (dir. Richard Eyre, 2004) and A Bunch of Amateurs (dir. Andy Cadiff, 2008), in which central characters rehearse and perform productions of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and King Lear respectively. On television, the most extensive application of this formula has been in the critically-acclaimed Canadian series Slings and Arrows (2003–6), a satirical portrait of the Stratford Festival set at the fictional “New Burbage Theatre Festival”. Its three seasons follow the troubled rehearsal processes of several successive productions at the Festival; all culminate in a “triumph” of sorts, but each season finale presents a very different sort of victory. The performance of Hamlet at the end of Season One succeeds because its central actor, a Hollywood star who is inexperienced in classical theatre, finally finds a way of reconciling his method-based approach with Shakespeare’s verse – and the power of his performance convinces Richard (Mark McKinney), the Festival’s weak-willed general manager, to ditch corporate-sponsored plans to turn the Festival into “Shakespeareville”, a retail-heavy theatrical theme park. Season Two culminates in not one but two triumphant opening nights: at the last minute, pretentious director Darren Nicholls (Don McKellar) abandons his plans for a postmodernist Romeo and Juliet in which the leads are “just signifiers”, opting instead for a more heartfelt production, while the Festival’s artistic director Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross) deliberately disorientates the experienced but stubborn star of his Macbeth in order to achieve a more vulnerable performance. Season Three concludes on an altogether bleaker note: Darren’s crowd-pleasing musical East Hastings replaces Geoffrey’s King Lear on the main stage when it transpires that the latter’s star, veteran actor Charles Kingman (William Hutt), is dying of cancer. The Lear is cancelled altogether when it is revealed that Geoffrey knew all along that Charles had only weeks to live, prompting Geoffrey to resign as artistic director of the Festival; he is succeeded by Darren, who begins his reign with the words “Let’s talk box office!”. The erstwhile cast and crew of Lear then reconvene, at the risk of their Festival contracts, to stage the production for a single performance in a local church, and after one last magnificent show, Charles dies in his dressing room. Anna, the loyal Festival administrator (Susan Coyne), resigns her position, telling the manager: “You came so close, Richard, to becoming a human being. But you lost your soul. And now you’re just a fool.” I conclude this chapter with Slings and Arrows because it embodies many of the recurring concerns and contradictions of Shakespeare on television. The programme sets up a series of oppositions: the “soul” and immediacy of Shakespearean performance is con-

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trasted, variously, with Hollywood, theme parks, commercialism, intellectual pretension, celebrity ego, Broadway musicals and frequently with television itself – leading lady Ellen Fanshaw (Martha Burns) leaves the Festival in Season Three for a lucrative five-year contract on a sci-fi show, but finds the experience soulless and returns to the theatre (forfeiting her house in the process, since the TV producers sue her for breach of contract). Slings and Arrows negotiates a “Shakespeare” positioned ambiguously between elite and popular culture, accessible yet emphatically non-commercial, immediate but mysterious. Above all, like many TV Shakespeares, it positions the authentic Shakespeare as fundamentally and essentially theatrical – while demonstrating, paradoxically, the manifold creative possibilities offered to Shakespeare by television.

Notes 1. For the sake of brevity, all newspaper and magazine articles are cited parenthetically.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Adams, John (1998). “Screen Play: Elements of a Performance Aesthetic in Television Drama”. In Boxed Sets: Television Representations of Theatre, ed. Jeremy Ridgman. Luton: Arts Council of England / University of Luton Press, 141–57. Baird, John Logie (2004). Television And Me, ed. Malcolm Baird. Edinburgh: Mercat Press. Banham, Martin (1988). “BBC Television’s Dull Shakespeares”. In Shakespeare on Television: An Anthology of Essays and Reviews, ed. J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 213–20. BBC (1966). The BBC Annual Report and Accounts for the Year 1964–65. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. Coursen, H. R. (1988). “Why Measure for Measure?” In Shakespeare on Television: An Anthology of Essays and Reviews, ed. J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 179–84. Drakakis, John (1997). “Shakespeare in Quotations”. In Studying British Cultures: An Introduction, ed. Susan Bassnett. London and New York: Routledge, 156–76. Eagleton, Terry (1988). “Afterword”. In The Shakespeare Myth, ed. Graham Holderness. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Greenhalgh, Susanne and Robert Shaughnessy (2006). “Our Shakespeares: British Television and the Strains of Multiculturalism”. In Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 90–112. Griffin, Alice (1955). “Shakespeare through the Camera’s Eye 1953–1954”. Shakespeare Quarterly 6.1, 63–6. Hindle, Maurice (2007). Studying Shakespeare on Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Holderness, Graham (2002). Visual Shakespeare: Essays in Film and Television. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. Holderness, Graham and Christopher McCullough (1994). “Shakespeare on the Screen: A Selective Filmography”. In Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television, ed. Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 18–49. Kidnie, Margaret Jane (2009). Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge. Kliman, Bernice W. (1988). “The Setting in Early Television: Maurice Evans’ Shakespeare Productions”. In Shakespeare on Television: An Anthology of Essays and Reviews, ed. J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 91–101. Lanier, Douglas (2002). Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Messina, Cedric (1978). “Preface”. In Richard II: The BBC TV Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 6–9. Mullin, Michael (1987). “Stage and Screen: The Trevor Nunn Macbeth”. Shakespeare Quarterly 38.3, 350–9. Osborne, Laurie E. (1997). “Poetry in Motion: Animating Shakespeare”. In Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV and Video, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt. London and New York: Routledge, 103–20. Purcell, Stephen (2009). Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Reynolds, Peter (1998). “Actors and Television”. In Boxed Sets: Television Representations of Theatre, ed. Jeremy Ridgman. Luton: Arts Council of England / University of Luton Press, 159–71. Ridgman, Jeremy (1998). “Producing Performance: An Interview with Simon Curtis”. In Boxed Sets: Television Representations of Theatre, ed. Jeremy Ridgman. Luton: Arts Council of England / University of Luton Press, 199–208. Rosenberg, Martin (1954). “Shakespeare on TV: An Optimistic Survey”. The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television 9.2, 166–74. Rothwell, Kenneth S. (1999). A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schreiber, Flora Rheta (1949). “Television: A New Idiom”. Hollywood Quarterly 4.2, 182–92. Terris, Olwen (2009). “Shakespeare and British Television Broadcasting 1936–2005”. In Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio: The Researcher’s Guide, ed. Olwen Terris, Eve-Marie Oesterlen and Luke McKernan. London: British Universities Film and Video Council, 20–39. Wells, Stanley (1982). “Television Shakespeare”. Shakespeare Quarterly 33.3, 261–77. Willems, Michèle (1994). “Verbal-Visual, Verbal-Pictorial or Textual-Televisual? Reflections on the BBC Shakespeare Series”. In Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television, ed. Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 69–85. Wray, Ramona (2006). “Shakespeare and the Singletons, or, Beatrice Meets Bridget Jones: PostFeminism, Popular Culture and Shakespea(Re)-Told”. In Screening Shakespeare in the TwentyFirst Century, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 185–205. Zitner, Sheldon P. (1988). “Wooden O’s in Plastic Boxes: Shakespeare and Television”. In Shakespeare on Television: An Anthology of Essays and Reviews, ed. J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 31–41.

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SHAKESPEARE AND RADIO Susanne Greenhalgh

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he all-star Renaissance Theatre Company production of Hamlet (BBC Radio 3, 26 April 1992), featuring Kenneth Branagh as the Prince and John Gielgud as the Ghost, is a bold and richly textured achievement, one which points to many of the issues that this chapter on Shakespeare and radio will seek to address.1 Just under four hours long, with an “entirety” script conflated from the First Folio and Second Quarto, the production presents a version “probably never heard in the author’s lifetime (and perhaps never envisaged by him)” (Jackson, 1994, 202). Effectively this is a new work, one that raises fascinating questions concerning its relationship both with the company’s previous stage productions of the play and with the full-text film that Branagh went on to direct (1996), which shared some of the same actors, notably Derek Jacobi as Claudius and Richard Briers as Polonius, together with the music of Patrick Doyle. The play’s BBC scheduling not only marked Shakespeare’s traditional birthday three days before but celebrated Gielgud’s first radio performance of Hamlet, in a production by his brother, Val (BBC National Programme, 5 or 15 June, 1932), thus privileging specific narratives of radio and theatre history and, by analogy, staking a claim for the future status of Branagh’s own reputation. Later the recording would be broadcast around the world, constituting “event radio” in Canada and elsewhere, and made available on cassette, CD and digital download by BBC Worldwide. But perhaps the most telling element for the analysis of radio Shakespeare is the production’s retention of the dumb show, surely to be regarded as one of the most non-radiogenic scenes in the whole of Shakespeare. A series of expressive sounds by the players and their audience evoke an invisible performance which the listener is invited to restage, as Hamlet says of his father’s image, in the mind’s eye (1.2.184). Such confidence in the aesthetic and interpretive powers of the radio medium is just one outcome of the BBC’s enduring commitment to sound broadcast of Shakespeare which, in 1992, had already notched up almost seventy years of aural heritage and hundreds of adaptations of the plays. Perhaps more than any other mass medium, radio dips deep into the personal and collective memory of the listener, to create “a simulated world that is both ‘real’ and original . . . instinctively memorable in the imagination of those who experience it” (Rattigan, 2002, 120). Radio also retains and enacts a strong sense of its own past; a past that it often replays, through repeat broadcasts (now increasingly at the listener’s own choice via recordings and “Listen Again” digital technologies) and the creation of anniversary events, themed series and seasons, such as the months of programming that led up to Shakespeare being voted “Man of the Millennium” by Radio 4 listeners in

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2000, the Shakespeare Day on 23 April 2006 and the schedule of programmes and readings accompanying BBC 1 television’s ShakespeaRe-Told season in 2006. The recycling of sound clips from the archives in new programmes is an important element of such events and Hamlet has been a particularly popular choice. In 1964, as part of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, To Be or Not to Be featured sound clips and interviews with a wide range of actors of the role of the Prince, including early radio performers such as Ernest Milton, Henry Ainley and Leslie Howard. Such “replay” need not always take the form of nostalgic retrospection, however, but may instead generate new perspectives, in dialogue with the present. The online BBC archive collection Talking Hamlet: Playing Shakespeare’s Dane (2010) illustrates the increasing “convergence” of radio with television and the internet, as well as theatre. Compiled to mark the television adaptation of the RSC Hamlet, starring David Tennant (BBC2, 26 December 2009), it brings together extracts from discussion programmes and interviews first broadcast between 1954 and 2008. Radio, and especially the BBC, has always talked Shakespeare, as often as it has played and replayed his works, and this long-running conversation between academics, performers, directors and audiences provides a significant record of the ways in which his works have been understood, debated and recreated down the years. It is therefore strange, indeed “a disgrace” (McKernan, 2009, viii), that while Shakespeare’s prominence as cinematic and filmic property is well known, his equally significant place in radio is so neglected in critical literature, despite sound broadcasting’s important role in the history of modern Shakespearean performance and mass media across the world. From the very early days of radio emerging stations and networks seized upon Shakespearean performances both as guarantees of “quality” content and respectability, and as a means of enriching a sense of occasion and celebration as their own institutional milestones were achieved. While early radio sourced many of these performances directly from the stage, broadcasters also embraced and celebrated Shakespeare as chief model for the development of radio as an art form. One critic, writing as early as 1926, proposed that radio writers “should be required to read and assimilate every one of Shakespeare’s dramas, to learn how to make words and sound substitute for the visual resources of scenery and lighting” (Wallace, 1926, 399). Rudolf Arnheim invested the microphone with the “treasure and mystery” of Portia’s caskets in The Merchant of Venice (Arnheim, 1936, 20), while Erik Barnouw included his own half-hour adaptation of Macbeth in a handbook to writing for radio, stating that it provided the perfect example of radio storytelling (Barnouw, 1949, 221). Shakespeare has gone on to inhabit the airwaves in multiple ways: as the subject of talks and features, and as inspiration for musical broadcasts, as well as in the accustomed form of his plays and poetry, together with the plays and stories inspired by or borrowed from them. This chapter outlines the history of radio Shakespeare across the English-speaking world, from the first broadcasts of his plays on the privatized and commercial stations of America, to the emergence of a persistent and still-flourishing “self-association” of the public service BBC with Shakespeare at home and abroad, together with the ways in which this “imperial theme” was diffused and eventually attenuated in the BBC-influenced radio institutions established in countries of the former British Empire, particularly Australia, New Zealand and Canada. It considers some of the debates about the role of Shakespeare in the development of radio as an art form, and the aesthetic and interpretive choices of the resulting programmes, with particular attention to adaptations of Hamlet, a play wellsuited to illustrate the ways in which radio, as the first technology to facilitate the creation

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of a mass, home-based audience for entertainment, information and education, locates Shakespeare simultaneously in popular, political and domestic cultures. Diverse moments of aural Shakespearean celebration can be found across the world, variously informed by perceptions of national crisis, cultural reinvention and social change. A recurring aspect of this broadcasting history is the body of specially commissioned “birthday” plays and narratives devoted to Shakespeare’s career, as well as his works, which testify to the ways in which radio has served as a uniquely personalized medium for the elaboration and perpetuation of Bardic mythologies. Combining as it does intimate, domesticated modes of communication with the discourses of public and political events, and often transmitted to and heard by audiences other than those of the producing culture, radio constitutes significant terrain on which shifting Shakespearean ideologies are played out globally. As illustrated by the Renaissance/Radio 3 Hamlet, radio is also quintessentially “intermedial”; a complementary medium to related forms of (visual) representation, from which it often takes subject matter for information, comment and interpretation, while sometimes in turn becoming an unacknowledged influence on changing conventions of theatre, film and television. While intrinsically a collaborative medium, radio has produced its own auteurs and artistic oeuvres, too, represented most prominently by the precocious experiments of Orson Welles on American radio in the 1930s and 1940s, but also by the bodies of work created by producers such as Forrest Barnes, Vernon Radcliffe, Brewster Morgan and Charles Warburton in America, Andrew Allan in Canada, Val Gielgud, Rayner Heppenstall, Barbara Burnham, Peter Creswell, John Richmond, Peter Watts, John Tydeman and many more at the BBC (see Jensen, 2008). However, these individual achievements must be understood, as Julie Sanders argues of musical works derived from Shakespeare, “in terms of their own specific, historical, disciplinary and sociopolitical contexts” (Sanders, 2007, 4), together with the recognition that, as a world-wide medium, radio’s performance and adaptation of Shakespeare has often been highly international, the product of movement of personnel, broadcasting theory and policy, scripts and artistic practices between national cultures and institutions. Compelling though the arguments for further research into radio Shakespeare may be, the difficulties cannot be underestimated. Many early programmes no longer survive as either scripts or recordings, although a surprising amount is available to download from the internet, and/or purchase as CDs. Much previous work in this field has concentrated on excavating and cataloguing a lost history, an endeavour which in the USA up to now has been the preserve of Old Time Radio enthusiasts, recorded on websites of varying reliability. Until recently, other than the British Universities Film and Video Council’s online TRILT database, based largely on records of its off-air recording service and listings of archive holdings such as those of the Sound Archive of the British Library or the Library of Congress, there were few searchable records of radio Shakespeare content equivalent to those available for many films and television programmes. The BBC’s brief trial of its own digital catalogue, based on its archived broadcasting logs, is incomplete and sometimes inaccurate, and at the time of writing is no longer available to the general public. Fortunately we now have the BUFVC’s invaluable online International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio which was funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council with a special remit to catalogue radio productions and citations. However, there remain many examples of missing or inaccurate information even in this expertly conducted project. At the time of writing the database lists a 1928 Canadian production as the earliest radio Shakespeare in North America. As outlined

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below, there is evidence to support the claims of at least two other productions, broadcast in 1922, which therefore also precede the BBC programmes in 1923 that have hitherto been regarded as the first Shakespearean transmissions. Research on radio thus offers that rare phenomenon in Shakespeare studies, a history still in the process of being outlined and documented.

Sounds and Sweet Airs: Shakespeare and the Aesthetics of Radio When sound broadcasting first developed across the world in the 1920s, it was regarded primarily as a means to relay and comment on events, performances and subject matter produced by pre-existing cultural institutions such as theatre, publishing and the cinema. However, radio practitioners almost immediately began to explore the possibilities for original sound-based art forms and genres. Radio held out the promise of a new type of drama, no longer tied to the history and conventions of theatre, but capable of evolving its own styles of dramaturgy and modes of performance, variously labelled as a “stage of the mind”, “invisible” theatre or “theatre of imagination”. Although criticism of radio drama has always been haunted by the idea that it can give only an “impoverished”, “incomplete” representation, especially of artworks originally designed for audiovisual perception in the theatre, early attempts at constructing a poetics of radio frequently envisaged it as a mode of performance analogous to the Shakespearean ideal stage evoked by the opening Chorus speech of Henry V, in which the “imaginary forces” of the listener called up an “inner vision”, variously likened to the workings of the mind in dreams, reading, stream of consciousness, or the processes of memory. It was argued that absence of visual stimuli was compensated for by an experience in which “the pictures were better”. More recent theoretical discussions argue that this apparent “lack” of visual dimension is at the core of the aesthetic of radio drama, the outcome of an intrinsically “invitational” medium that mobilizes the phenomenological, not merely mental or cerebral, experience of the listener in response to speech and sound: “a collaborative dramaturgy that, at its best, generates an extraordinarily rich intellectual, affective, sensual experience” (Stanton, 2004, 103). This “complex, allusive acoustic bricolage” has the effect of investing a play or radio feature with many potential meanings and simultaneously making those meanings unstable; since place “may be real or imaginary, present or past” and atmosphere “may stimulate a different kind of affective response from what is being said” (Stanton, 2004, 105, 99). The “present-tenseness” of the radio medium, the sense it gives of an experience still moving towards the future, even when its auditory codes remind us of its historicity, also paradoxically convinces us that its utterances are living and dynamic even when we know the speakers to be long dead. While some recordings of Shakespeare radio broadcasts sound their age, others can have a much longer shelf-life than television or film, whose reliance on visual style links them firmly with the period in which they were designed and recorded. As Russell Jackson comments, a ‘“Gothic’ Elsinore might be achieved by music and sound effects . . . but Claudius’ taste in interior design won’t be apparent” (Jackson, 1994, 197). As a sound-only medium, radio emphasizes the significance and effects of Shakespearean language and invites consideration of how far the works can be successfully adapted for a non-visual mode of communication and reception. It is disappointing, therefore, that discussion of radio rarely features in the lively field of adaptation studies. As Douglas Lanier suggests, while radio drama initially maintained “an affiliation with the theatre” the

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need to recode performance “to a more individualized home entertainment experience” (Lanier, 2006, 506) was soon recognized. All successful radio depends on the creative combination and transmutation of performance modes and technical resources. Its basic components are speech, sound and music, recorded before or after, or produced during the performance by technicians, actors or musicians, as “spot” sound effects (sfx), and the controlled mixing of all of these, during or after recording. This may seem a simple signifying system, but its “terms of engagement” are complex and demanding, for producers, actors and audiences alike, dependent on concentrated attention to language, active imaginative construction of the mise-en-scène together with successful orchestration of a variety of techniques such as distance from the microphone, use of echo chambers and multiple studios, and the orchestration of sound effects produced during performance or recorded radiophonically in order to intensify the aural experience of the plays. On radio dramatic poetry such as Shakespeare’s can be extremely powerful since it fully exploits the medium’s ability to merge and overlay sound, speech and emotion to keep multiple meanings and perceptions of time and space in play, in a way analogous to poetic imagery. When rendered in a sound medium, Shakespeare’s combination of words together with the unseen utterances and silences can create sharp contrasting rhythms of consciousness . . . The imaginative juxtaposition of what is unseen-but-heard sharply focuses our attention upon the dramatic nuances, which are part of the complex intricacies of what it is to be human. (Rattigan, 2002, 226) The Shakespearean soliloquy can be particularly well-served by radio’s capacity to convey thought and inner emotion through speech and sound, while crowd scenes and battles can be produced effectively and economically. However, radio also needs to overcome specific obstacles, notably the need to find aural equivalents, through sound effects or narration, for visual aspects of the original play. Traditionally radio drama avoids having too many characters in a scene, since the medium has only a few means of focalizing a speaker compared with the resources of theatre, film and television. This is not such a problem in a play like Hamlet, in which even the crowded set-pieces of the play scene or the final duel tend to be made up of a succession of public addresses, private conversations, or asides. The play’s words themselves often paint pictures of the action, as in the description of the Ghost, but certain scenes, such as 2.1, in which Claudius and Polonius spy on Hamlet and Ophelia, require that an audience remains aware of concealed characters and, in this case, needs a decision on whether Hamlet discovers them and how this is to be conveyed. This requirement to replace visual action and concentrate on the principals in a scene, together with the assumption that listeners can only hold attention for set periods of time, means that many radio productions of Shakespeare have been radically cut or rearranged, making textual editing a key skill of the radio producer or adapter. Orson Welles was invited to inaugurate the experimental Columbia Workshop series by directing Hamlet and playing the Prince in a thirty-minute time slot. Faced with the dilemma of either merely presenting a selection of famous speeches or cutting deeply to produce a bare outline of the plot, Welles chose instead to present only the first two Acts and invite audience reaction, a decision rewarded by the opportunity to complete the production (though without “To be or not to be”) two months later. Competing productions by the American networks CBS and NBC in 1937 were limited to one hour and forty-five minutes respectively. Both required substantial use of a narrator and had to lose characters such as Fortinbras, and

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even Ophelia. By contrast, the BBC’s 1948 version of Hamlet, in which John Gielgud starred (Third Programme, 26 December), used a script that combined elements from the First Folio and Second Quarto, prepared by the Shakespearean editor, M. R. Ridley, as did Branagh for his 1992 production, working this time with the film scholar Russell Jackson, while the “full-cast” 1999 version, adapted by Jenny Barnwell and Jeremy Mortimer, is described on its CD cover as “revitalised, original and comprehensive.” All three ran for approximately three and a half hours, though the 1948 production was originally broadcast with intervals and employed a narrator to set the scene, a device that flourished in the thirties, forties and fifties, but is rarely used today. As Jackson emphasizes, radio drama must be “staged” as well as heard (Jackson, 1994, 203–4) through the creation of atmospheric sound effects and music (“atmos”). Both the most recent BBC productions make Elsinore a place of echoing stone halls, but while the 1992 production emphasizes the sound of enormous doors opening and closing in ways reminiscent of Branagh’s use of this device in his film of Henry V (1989), Jeremy Mortimer’s 1999 production makes frequent, impressionistic use of bells, accentuating the significance of religion in the play as well as the passing of time in a production focused on Hamlet’s rite of passage into maturity and death. There is an “audio-movie” realism to Branagh’s production, which fluently alternates interior and exterior settings created through use of recorded sound effects of seagulls, bird song, a travelling carriage and a fountain playing, and climaxes in a breathless, sword-clashing duel. The 1999 production is more of a poor theatre version, which stresses the characters’ movement in imagined space by varying the actor’s distance from the microphone and capturing the sound of their footsteps and shifts of position on a wooden floor that could simply be a stage. Four musicians play a variety of instruments and motifs, which keep the setting unlocalized, ranging from Irish fiddle tunes to a piano that provides silent movie style backing, complete with audience boos and hisses, for the dumb show, with oriental flutes for the play itself, and occasional ominous drum taps and electronic chords underscoring the action throughout. At the play’s end, instead of following the implied aural stage direction contained in Fortinbras’ final line, “Go, bid the soldiers shoot” (5.2.347), the sounds of walking feet, drum beats, religious chant and musical motifs are overlaid, providing a poignant synthesis of the production’s key aural themes. In Branagh’s version Patrick Doyle’s showy synthesized score is generally used between Acts, shifting the emphasis firmly to the naturalistic delivery of the play’s language. When radio drama was broadcast live the cast was present for the entire performance, available to ad lib crowd reactions or play other roles as required. With modern recording technologies actors can be brought in just for the scenes in which they appear, which are then edited together by the producer post-production. Radio rehearsals are considerably shorter than those for the theatre, as is the recording process compared with those of film or television, but the fact that actors perform with scripts to hand allows the producer to spend time on matters such as clarifying the rhythm and structure of the production, establishing an intimate or public perspective for each scene and keeping the listener close or distant, through the positioning of the actors in relation to the microphone, or the use of studios with “dead” or “live” acoustics, thereby conveying a sense of spatial vastness or confinement, exterior or interior setting. Radio acting requires not only a distinctive voice but command of a range of techniques together with strong powers of imagination and concentration to communicate and respond to the interaction between characters more easily conveyed by visual means. Experienced radio actors habitually “react visually”

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at the microphone (Evans, 1987, 113) even when their characters have no lines, through eye contact and by producing the sighs, laughs, hesitations, or intakes of breath that mark shifts of thought and emotion, keep long monologues dynamic, or simply remind an audience that there are listeners present in the scene. These “unseen utterances and silences” are particularly important in Michael Sheen’s passionate performance of an angry young Hamlet in the 1999 version, while Branagh skilfully conveys an older, more controlled character: a sophisticated, intellectually curious and companionable prince whose disillusion and disgust with the rotten state of Denmark are consequently all the stronger.

Shakespeare Calling: “Bardcasting” Worldwide The precise nature of Shakespeare’s presence and remediation on English-speaking radio is bound up with the way radio developed in different countries and periods, especially the degree to which broadcasting was commercially based, state-funded, or a mix of the two. Early Shakespeare broadcasts alternated between recitations of single speeches or scenes, often by well-known stage actors, and versions of the plays heavily cut for broadcasting, and were selected from the most frequently taught or performed tragedies, comedies and histories. Two productions in America have claims to be considered the first broadcast Shakespeare in history (and quite possibly the first drama ever to be heard over the airwaves). A performance of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet was transmitted by WLW Cincinnati in November 1922 (Bernouw, 1966, 137), while in the same month WCAL, operated by the Department of Physics at St Olaf’s College, Minnesota, relayed that year’s annual play production, As You Like It, which apparently proved so popular with listeners as far afield as Canada that it was given a repeat transmission (Clement, 1924, 60). In Britain the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius from Julius Caesar was the first drama broadcast by the BBC on 16 February 1923, followed a few weeks later by an adaptation of Twelfth Night (see Oesterlen, 2009 for a detailed account of the BBC’s early Shakespeare programming). In New York in 1926 the WEAF Shakespeare Players began a “series of tabloid presentations of Shakespeares [sic] dramas” with a version of The Merchant of Venice, followed by Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet among others. These were one-hour presentations, with most of the subplots removed and the cast list reduced to eight, but a contemporary reviewer praised the way in which key speeches and the “best” scenes had been retained: “This ‘cutting’ was not sustained to the point of mutilating the text” (Wallace, 1926, 137). Such concerns to stay faithful to the “essence” of Shakespeare would not prevent countless future broadcasters taking whatever liberties were needed to bring this non-copyright, well-known and (in some quarters) popular drama to the airwaves. In Britain, where the BBC had a monopoly for many years and continues to be funded by a licence fee paid by listeners, broadcasting was regarded as a form of public utility, charged with delivering high standards of information, entertainment and education. From its first year there were regular broadcasts of Shakespeare material on or close to 23 April, for the BBC, in its desire to serve as a “national theatre of the air”, identified itself with the national and cultural values represented by the Bard, a dedication expressed in publications and activities as well as commissions and scheduling (see Drakakis, 1981; Greenhalgh, 2007). From 1932 Shakespeare content was no longer limited to Britain’s national radio services but became a staple of the BBC’s overseas broadcasts, first by the Empire Service and later by the World Service, which was inaugurated in 1965 (see

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Oesterlen, 2008). The growth of an ambitious and increasingly confident drama department, headed for a number of years by Val Gielgud, ensured that Shakespeare productions were high-profile events cast with celebrated actors, promoted in BBC publications and later sold as recordings. This tradition continues. Since 1923 the BBC has produced hundreds of productions of the plays, with The Tempest, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet the most frequent, while those plays that depend extensively on visual comedy, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Comedy of Errors, or have been viewed as potentially offensive, such as Titus Andronicus, have been least popular. These productions have reflected theatrical fashion and advances in broadcasting technologies alike, but have continually experimented to find ways of replacing what the first director general, John Reith, called the “theatre effect” with the “radio effect”. In recent years, however, the BBC has returned to its Shakespearean origins and the recording of theatrical performance. Broadcasts at the start of the twenty-first century included Michael Grandage’s acclaimed production of Othello (Donmar 2008), in which the film star Ewan McGregor starred as Iago. Performances have also been recorded on location; for example, a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, accompanied by Mendelssohn’s score, performed at the Middle Temple in the Inns of Court, scenes from which could be viewed via the BBC’s website (Radio 3, 10 May 2009). Or one might instance Hydrocracker’s Shakespeare à la Carte (BBC4, 13 April 2009) in which waiters in a pizza restaurant offer a menu of favourite Shakespeare scenes when the RSC fail to arrive. Perhaps the most striking event to date is the World Service live broadcast of King Lear staged before an audience at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre as a Boxing Day tribute marking the 400th anniversary of the play’s premiere. This turned the theatre into a “high-tech open air radio studio” (Oesterlen, 2008, 38) which intermixed nostalgia for the “golden age” of live broadcast drama with “localism” of time and place, and the internationalist aspirations of both the Globe and the BBC. As well as seeking workable ways in which to present the plays on air BBC schedules have also included plenty of adaptations of Shakespeare-related theatre plays, as well as new commissions on Shakespeare’s life or theatre (see Greenhalgh, 2007), frequent concerts of Shakespeare songs and music, and talks and features on all aspects of Shakespearean performance and cultural significance Above all the BBC has continually disseminated and arguably helped create a particular concept of Shakespeare “as a form of ghostly linguistic possession which comes to embody the English language itself, in all its diversities” (Greenhalgh, 2007, 178). This concern with Shakespearean language inevitably raises issues of class, ethnicity and postcolonial politics. The BBC’s postwar reordering of its networks into the Light, Home and Third was widely regarded as having implicitly divided its audience along social and educational lines with speech radio (and therefore Shakespeare) categorized as quintessentially middle and upper class. While radio has been linked with the disappearance of Shakespeare’s works from working-class cultures of reading and theatre-going evident in the nineteenth century it can also be argued that the BBC’s self-identification with Shakespeare and consequent regular scheduling of Shakespearean content has kept some faint sense of familiarity and recognition alive in popular culture, enabling linguistic parody and debunking of the elite culture his works are assumed to represent. Terence Hawkes has argued that the juxtaposition of Shakespearean references with gay appropriations of the Roma derived dialect polari in programmes such as Round the Horne and Beyond my Ken in the forties and early fifties opened up a space in which a homosexuality officially regarded as “unspeakable” could find a way to articulate

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itself in the domain of public speech (see Hawkes, 2005). In a more aurally surreal way the performers of the popular BBC comedy series, The Goon Show, subjected Shakespearean speech and plot fragments to a vocal makeover, which was widely recognized as an “embodied utterance” of postwar experience. A radio adaptation of Harry Secombe’s autobiographical novel Twice Brightly (BBC Radio 4, 19 May 2007) captured the combination of aural anarchy with social and cultural critique that would evolve into the Goons’ radio comedy, in a performance of the “Once more into the breach” speech from Henry V, which mimicked Olivier’s delivery in his 1945 film version, with the clipped tones of an RAF wing-commander and vocally produced explosions. Another aspect of the BBC’s “linguistic possession” by Shakespeare is its apparent obsession, not simply with preserving the speech and sounds of the recent past, or juxtaposing speech modes for serious or comic effect, but with bringing to life, or re-enacting, the speech and sounds of Shakespeare’s age. Typically these programmes combine the style and sound conventions of contemporary radio journalism or documentary with the conceit that the audience is listening live to a moment hundreds of years ago. In 1936, the BBC broadcast a programme called London Calling, 1600, based on a then-running news and current affairs series, which imagined a broadcast from the Elizabethan age. The following year produced Take Your Choice, in which Act 1, Scene 5 of Twelfth Night was spoken first in modern speech and then in Elizabethan pronunciation, with boys playing the women’s parts. It is suggestive that the Twelfth Night project is structured and titled as presenting a choice to the listener, between a “contemporary” aural version (which no doubt would sound quaintly archaic to our ears today) and an “authentic” acoustic rendering purporting to have been beamed in from Shakespeare’s own time. By foregrounding the historicity of Shakespeare’s language the codes of conventional (for the time) theatrical delivery perhaps became, by contrast, more familiar, accessible and attractive to the listener: in short, domesticated. This “Original Pronunciation” strand of Shakespeare programming has produced more recent examples, notably various documentations of the linguist David Crystal’s work at Shakespeare’s Globe on OP productions of Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida. Lend Me Your Ears (BBC Radio 4, 25 April-16 May 2000) was a four-part series presented by the actor Fiona Shaw, which attempted a detailed reconstruction of the soundscape of Elizabethan London, including that of its theatre, using location work at the new Globe, carefully edited to cut out twenty-first century noise pollution. Hark! An Acoustic Archaeology of Elizabethan England (BBC Radio 3, 5 October 2008) was a more scholarly exploration, featuring Bruce Smith’s work on the acoustic world reflected in Shakespeare’s plays. Such experiments do not simply ventriloquize Shakespeare in different voices, but create a distinct aural space, at a temporal distance from the speech sounds to which listeners are accustomed, alerting scholars and performers to new possibilities in Shakespeare’s language. Another, more polemical, strand of BBC programmes concerned with recording, analyzing or challenging “authentic” Shakespearean language is illustrated by a series of commissions that recorded the black comedian Lenny Henry discovering how to speak “proper” Shakespeare; a quest that would lead directly to his critically well-received performance as Othello in the Northern Broadsides theatre production directed by Barry Rutter in 2009, with a full radio broadcast of the play taking place in 2010 (Lenny and Will, Radio 4, 25 March 2006, Lenny and Will Act 2, Radio 4, 23 December 2006 and an audio diary, Lenny Henry Plays ‘Othello’, BBC Radio 4, 20 February 2009). There has also been

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a distinctive group of features that have explored and compared “global” Shakespeares performed in other languages and theatrical traditions, a trend that goes back at least as far as the late 1940s on the BBC Third Programme, when the closet scene from Hamlet was performed successively in English, French and Spanish, as a celebration of the newly inaugurated Edinburgh International Festival (Third Programme, 11 August 1947). Such Sweet Thunder (20 October 1964) was an Overseas Service celebration of the 400th anniversary that transmitted speeches from the plays in twenty-one languages. The five-part series Everybody’s Shakespeare (Radio 3, 14–18 November 1994), part of a combined radio television and theatre season of the same name, featured an episode “Shakespeare minus English” that compared translations, while another, “English, Un-English”, featured the scholar Ania Loomba on Shakespeare in colonial India and postcolonial appropriations in contemporary street theatre. More recently in 2006 a Sony Prize was awarded for the series Sonnets Alive!, which recorded all the poems spoken by ordinary listeners across the world. While a number of recent play productions have drawn on multicultural settings and casting perhaps the fullest experiment so far is the BBC’s Indian version of Two Gentlemen of Verona, retitled as Two Gentlemen of Velasna (Radio 3, 29 July 2007), which set the play in a princely state at the time of the Indian Mutiny and was recorded on location in Maharashtra by an entirely Indian cast, with parts of the drama performed in Hindi by actors drawn from Bollywood performers, television celebrities and some trained in the classical English theatrical tradition. Another notable feature of this production was the set of on-location photographs mounted on the BBC website at the time of the broadcast. Increasingly the BBC accompanies its news programmes and documentaries with downloadable pictures and film clips: when this is done for radio drama it might suggest that faith in the power of “invisible theatre” is on the wane, yet the production’s soundscape, baffling at times for a non-Hindi speaking listener, also testifies to an enduring commitment both to experimentation and to the perpetuation of a “worldwide Shakespeare” that also mirrors the BBC’s own global ambitions. The model for public service broadcasting set by the BBC was largely followed by radio in countries which now form part of the British Commonwealth. Early Canadian radio stations were private, or affiliated to commercial American networks, some of which were consolidated and nationalized in 1932 as the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC; CBC from 1936), one aim of which was to shore up Canadian identity against too much influence from its powerful neighbour across the border, though American broadcasting always remained the strongest influence in English Canada. While in 1935 a radio adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1 December) was based on the Warner Brothers’ spectacular film of that year, Shakespeare became an especially important part of the national service during World War Two, when celebration of historical ties with British culture, as well as Canadian patriotism, were combined in appropriations of the works, most notably through the work of an ex-BBC trainee, Andrew Allan, who became director of drama in 1943, having previously directed Proud Procession (23 April 1941), a dramatization of the similarities between England at war in 1415, the year of the battle of Agincourt represented in Henry V, and in 1941. Between 1944 and 1955 the CBC produced Shakespeare sixty times, included the first complete cycle of the English history plays adapted for radio in 1953–4 and celebrated the culture that produced them in productions such as a panoramic drama, The Age of Elizabeth, by Lister Sinclair (28 February 1951), perhaps broadcast in anticipation of a royal visit by Princess Elizabeth

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later that year. The plays and poetry remained a central component in English Canadian education, and consequently CBC devoted time and attention to schools broadcasts, producing a series of Readings from Shakespeare (1944–5), followed by other CBC series, such as the highly popular weekly Stage, in which Shakespeare adaptations featured alongside Canadian, American and European works. After the war, Shakespearean plays were also translated for radio stations serving French Canada, where they might be “localized”, as when The Taming of the Shrew was made over into a Quebecois farce, but also viewed with suspicion as instruments of Anglophone ascendency. CBC also produced recordings of Shakespeare performance in collaboration with the newly established Stratford Festival Theatre, Ontario, whose founder, Tyrone Guthrie, had worked as a radio producer at both the BBC and CBC, and which rapidly became a focus for Canadian nationalist pride. As in Britain and America, there were also productions of Shakespearean offshoots and spin-offs, and CBC commissioned John Beckwith’s The Trumpets of Summer for the 1964 quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth, with a libretto by the celebrated novelist Margaret Atwood which interweaves the Canadian climate and landscape with images from the poetry and plays. Canadian familiarity with Shakespeare is also evident in frequent comic parodies, such as those of Wayne and Shuster in the 1940s, and more contemporary comedy by Royal Canadian Air Farce, which targets Shakespeare as national icon in relation to multiculturalism, media culture and regional politics. Although there appear to have been fewer radio broadcasts of Shakespeare plays in recent years these have increasingly celebrated the current ethnic diversity of Canada, as in a multicultural Othello (3 June 2008), which was adapted by the director of the hit television show, Little Mosque on the Prairie, cast one of its stars, Carla Rota, as the Moor and was given a simultaneous television production. The Australian Broadcasting service (ABC) consciously took the BBC as mentor and model, seeing itself tasked with raising the level of Australian culture; a process which inevitably accentuated distinctions between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” listening. Shakespeare was seized on as an imprimatur of Britishness, especially when delivered in the Received Pronunciation (RP) accent often labelled “BBC English”. Under the leadership of Frank D. Clewlow, an expatriate English actor and producer (who once gave an on air performance of all the parts in the gravediggers’ scene from Hamlet), there were broadcasts of the entire canon between 1936 and 1938 and a “great plays” series, From Shakespeare to Shaw, in 1939. In the 1950s radio productions frequently involved British actors on tour, consolidating the connection of Shakespeare with the theatre and values of the “old country”. While there were as many as five Shakespeare broadcasts a year in this period, as in North America productions became much more sporadic once television took off in the mid-1950s, while in the 1960s Australia also began to re-evaluate its place in Pacific geopolitics, as increasingly racially diverse immigration and world events such as the Vietnam War caused it to review its status as a country headed by a British monarch and dominated by British cultural values. While there remains a steady stream of features and discussions about Shakespearean topics, especially theatrical productions, on Australian national radio, the most recent play productions appear to have been The Taming of the Shrew by the Bell Theatre Company, best known for its pioneering “Australianized” stagings of Shakespeare, which was broadcast as a “Shakespeare Day” broadcast in 1994, followed by Twelfth Night and Pericles the following year. This growing impetus to “revoice” Shakespeare as an Australian is documented in an episode in the Lingua Franca series, “Shakespeare with an Oz Accent”, which examined the nationalist challenge to British

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RP delivery of the language represented by the Bell Theatre Company’s groundbreaking 1975 production of Much Ado About Nothing (ABC, 2 February 2002). A similar, though smaller-scale, picture emerges in New Zealand, where early broadcasting was only semi-nationalized in 1925, retaining a somewhat fragmented regional and commercial form until a National Broadcasting Service (NZBS) was established as a government department in 1935, which now, as New Zealand Radio (NZR), is an entirely independent BBC-style institution. It is noteworthy that here, as in other Commonwealth countries, British expatriates with an enthusiasm for Shakespeare played significant roles in developing the artistic and cultural aspects of the radio service. James Shelley, a politically radical and charismatic English academic and educationalist who had championed Workers Educational Association drama activities across New Zealand, became the first director of broadcasting and appointed a Shakespeare aficionado, Bernard Beeby, as head of drama. Surviving radio broadcasts directed by Beeby include what the New Zealand Listener called a miscast “comic strip” Macbeth (1952), in which the future film director, John Schlesinger, played the Doctor; The Masque of Macbeth, an opera version of the play; and a 1953 production of Othello, adapted by the New Zealand mystery writer and avid Shakespearean, Ngaio Marsh, which starred members of the Stratford Memorial Theatre touring company headed by Anthony Quayle and Barbara Jefford. Once a conservative “settler” society for which Shakespearean theatre represented ties with a “native” culture tenaciously maintained through visits home and celebrated tours by famous actors from the motherland, New Zealand’s growing sense of itself as a bicultural nation, both Maori and Pakeha, means that it both embraces and resists the “Britishness” associated with Shakespeare, using his texts to construct new, local narratives as well as conserve tradition. Jean Betts’ feminist and postmodernist stage play, Ophelia Thinks Harder, written for the anniversary of women’s suffrage in New Zealand, was turned into an award winning radio drama in 1996. However, to date there appears to have been no radio equivalent of the Maori film, Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Weniti/The Maori Merchant of Venice (dir. Don Selwyn, 2002). Instead, in 2009, Shakespeare programming took the habitual mode of anniversary celebration as a year-long series of weekly readings commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Radio in America was primarily a commercial and competitive industry from the start. Its self-definition as a popular medium meant that Shakespeare’s “highbrow” and literary connotations, while conferring desirable status and guarantee of quality on the new medium, were also viewed as potentially antithetical to its popular appeal. In the so-called “golden age” of American radio, from the mid-1930s to mid-1950s, as in the early years of the BBC, Shakespeare most often appeared as extracts or readings in anthology and variety programmes or as occasional adaptations in series of “sustaining programmes”, supported by the networks rather than by commercial sponsorship. Unsurprisingly, the theatre and film centres of New York and Hollywood were the main source for most early radio performances of Shakespeare. NBC’s pioneering Radio Guild (1929–40) produced a cycle of the English History plays between December 1935 and January 1936, adapted into one-hour productions by the English actor Charles Warburton (also an early radio performer of radio Shakespeare), which was used three years later by CBC for a Shakespeare Cycle in Canada. In 1936 the Los Angeles station WECA produced a short Shakespeare Series, intended as a prologue to a complete run of the plays, which never came about. In the same year CBS’ New York-based The Columbia Workshop, specifically designed to encourage new modes of radio writing and production, invited wunderkind Orson Welles

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to inaugurate the series with a production of Hamlet. Welles went on to produce and often star in a range of Shakespeare programming on CBS, gaining several sustained drama series of his own in which to experiment with his company of actors, the Mercury Players, including First Person Singular, Mercury Theatre of the Air and finally the sponsored Campbell Playhouse. Surviving recordings of his Shakespeare productions or performances include an atmospheric rehearsal of Julius Caesar, performed by the same cast that created his famous fascist stage version (CBS, 11 September 1938), with the addition of a commentary based on Plutarch by the contemporary news broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn; a Scottish Macbeth which was a precursor of his 1948 film; and as swan song a strongly acted, if compressed, “scenes from King Lear”, sponsored by Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer (CBS 1946). Although Welles had made his reputation in theatre his aim was always to establish radio as a popular yet sophisticated art, devising a style that exploited the medium’s potential for dramatizing psychological states and emphasized story in a deliberately novelistic way. In keeping with his theories of radio as a subtle, intimate medium Welles does not overdecorate his Shakespeare productions with sound effects or music, but orchestrates them to serve the mood of the play as in his urgent and up to date Caesar. Nor does he seek to bamboozle an audience with documentary effects, as in his notorious adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1938) but instead concentrates on intense, naturalistic performances, verse speaking which delivers clarity of meaning rather than vocal self-indulgence, and a narrative given forward-moving rhythm and structure, even when deep cuts have been made to accommodate the programming requirements of the networks. All these elements would feed into his Shakespeare films, where the skilled interplay of visual and aural elements has only become apparent with the remastering of soundtracks that were often recorded in adverse conditions. As in his films, Welles also delighted in Shakespeare references and scenes in non-Shakespearean works, for example in a dramatization of part of the British playwright Clemence Dane’s best-selling theatrical novel Broome Stages (Campbell Playhouse, 4 February 1940), which enabled him to portray two generations of a dynasty of Shakespeare-obsessed actors. As a radio celebrity Welles also showcased Shakespeare (alongside his role as the Shadow in the popular radio thriller series of that name) in countless anthology and variety programmes, becoming the subject of admiring parodies and even a Canadian radio play. Welles’ radio Shakespeare represents both artistic achievement and a politically liberal attempt to appropriate Shakespeare in the service of uniting popular and elite culture, theatre and mass media. Another attempt to combine the popular reach of the new medium with traditional cultural values can be found in CBS’ 1937 Shakespeare Festival, produced from Hollywood, which broadcast eight of the best known plays in one-hour productions with film star casts, including Rosalind Russell and Leslie Howard as an engaging Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing (CBS, 19 June or July) and Edward G. Robinson as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew (3 July). In direct competition NBC scheduled its rival Shakespeare Streamlined, starring the celebrated stage actor John Barrymore, in 45-minute broadcasts. A comparison of the two productions of Hamlet is illuminating. The souvenir script of the CBS version instructs the announcer to deliver his introduction “quietly, modestly”, while setting a tone of high expectation through an emphasis on “modern actors . . . creating fresh interpretations”, who are described as “dynamic”, “superb”, “distinguished” and “talented”. In line with the aim to combine tradition and modernity the narration simultaneously conjures up a contemporary setting and a more conventionally Gothic one, and the action, though fast-paced, retains the main features and characters

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of the play, and provides in the performance of the rising young star Burgess Meredith, a dynamic if sometimes vocally thin, Hamlet. Barrymore, whose celebrated performance in the role had been heard (and mimicked) in countless radio broadcasts since at least 1926, is omnipresent, since he doubles the Ghost and was also responsible for the adaptation and narration. The production is framed by the line “the play’s the thing”, setting the stage for a gloriously over the top abbreviated replay of his theatrical interpretation, in which the only concessions to aural reinvention are the spooky sounds accompanying the Ghost and Barrymore’s narrative interruptions in place of the scenes containing Laertes, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildernstern, the players and Claudius’ attempt at repentance. “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” is the high spot (and only soliloquy). Set side by side both productions fail to grasp the possibilities for radio artistry, but do capture the shift from an acting style still wedded to the traditions of barnstorming, actor-managed theatre to one beginning to experiment with the more conversational and internalized performance modes required for acting in the media. In this period the American networks, though more intermittently than the BBC, also acknowledged Shakespearean anniversaries with special commissions portraying his life and times, analogous to ways in which popular theatre helped “naturalize” Shakespeare as an American citizen (see Teague, 2006). Perhaps the most intriguing biographical drama to emerge was the 22-part serial Shakespeare’s England (17 July to 25 December 1938), scripted and acted in by associates of Welles’ Mercury Theatre, with episodes directed by Charles Warburton. This detailed evocation of an emerging Elizabethan theatre reflects the Mercury Players’ rise to nationwide fame on the airwaves, and may have some direct connection with preparations for Welles’ stage compilation of the English history plays, Five Kings (1939). More conventionally, Will of Stratford (NBC, 26 April 1937) was written especially for radio by Bosley Crowther, a theatre reviewer who would go on to become a famously acerbic film critic for the New York Times. It is a reverential collage, in which snippets from the plays mirror stages of Shakespeare’s professional life, from leaving Stratford to becoming a confidante of Elizabeth I, who tells him: We, you and I, are children of a glorious age . . . I was born to rule in it. You were born to capture with your pen the very heart and soul of who we are . . . You are greater because the lives of queens and humble folk are figures in a passing pageant: you have given reasons for the show. (My transcription from a recording in the Sound Division of the Library of Congress) A similar presentation of Shakespeare as “soul of the age” is heard in Time to Remember (NBC, 24 April 1943, writer Peter Martin) produced by the future film director, Joseph Losey. This play has a more interesting, almost filmic, structure, however, moving from the present to the past as Shakespeare (Alexander Scourby) is called back for a “birthday present” press conference to face questions about how he got started, who the Dark Lady was and why he wrote Hamlet. The rest of the play provides answers in flashback, inter-cut with Shakespeare’s own voiceover reminiscences of how he overcame personal loss and despair to resume writing. His final idealistic speech takes on a messianic ring, delivered in Scourby’s famously resonant voice, as it pictures his plays contributing to the ever rising stream of man’s knowledge of himself, for those unborn to find there some hint of our faiths, our loves, our noble deeds, and grievous errors to the end . . . that one day this stream of knowledge shall overflow its banks, ridding mankind

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forever of the dust of ignorance. (My transcription from a recording in the Sound Division of the Library of Congress) However overblown the rhetoric, these sentiments testify to the ways in which Shakespeare has been incorporated as part of a specifically American heritage that is also a “declaration of faith” in the nation’s future (Teague, 2006, 175–6) and might well have matched the national mood in 1943, as American forces in the Pacific prepared to retake occupied territories from the Japanese (an appeal to buy War Bonds was broadcast immediately after the play). Although radio also sometimes portrayed a bard comically out of step with new media, as in Mister Shakespeare (NBC, 14 January 1947), which depicts him as an unsuccessful screenwriter (played by Vincent Price), this is usually done to satirize media institutions seen as crassly and opportunistically commercial. A more ambivalent attitude appeared in Shakespeare references and borrowings in a wide range of comedies, thrillers and Westerns, some acting to support traditional ideas of Shakespeare’s cultural and moral value but others, as Lanier (2006) has argued, connecting his works or theatre with the pathology of murder and crime, in ways that testify to the suspicion that sometimes marked American radio’s relationship with the Bard. A more positive attitude is expressed in several Columbia Workshop productions which used Shakespeare to reflect on the radio medium’s power to innovate and enhance radio art, as in a 1937 episode, Public Domain (2 January 1937), which dealt comically with the attractions of out-of-copyright literature as sources for radio writing, and featured Hamlet meeting up with the White Knight from Alice in Wonderland. The work of Norman Corwin, one of the most original of American producers and writers, rarely referred directly to the plays, but was greatly influenced by the rhythms and inventiveness of Shakespearean language. Corwin celebrated both Shakespeare and the advent of radio in his play Seems Radio is Here to Stay (CBS, 24 April 1939), which was rebroadcast to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of American broadcasting (6 November 1945) and given a Canadian production in 1941 (CBC, 2 February). Shakespeare, like other classic drama and new plays, largely faded from the airwaves with the coming of nationwide television, but did not completely disappear. From 1951 the WNYC annual Shakespeare Festival provided an opportunity for the replay of Shakespearean recordings and at least two Shakespeare-based programmes, representing the biographical and theatrical emphasis respectively, Conversations with Will Shakespeare and Certain of his Friends (KAOC Radio Corvalis, 1972) and Speaking for Everyman: Ian McKellen Celebrates Shakespeare’s Birthday (WBUR-FM, Boston, 1988) won prestigious George Foster Peabody Awards for broadcasting. In the USA the politics of Shakespearean language have mainly been played out as attempts to turn archaic verse into contemporary American, as in Audition Hamlet 1951 (NBC, 24 May 1951), a short demo, for a “modern radio dress” production of Hamlet, which proposed a “provocative, replete with showmanship, controversial in a constructive way” radio event. A more sustained venture in updating was attempted by Hiram Brown’s CBS Radio Mystery Theatre, with its weekly promise of “fear you can hear”, which in 1975 produced a modern retelling of Hamlet, That Hamlet was a Good Boy (25 June 1975). This was followed the next year by a “birthday” week of retitled and modernized adaptations, Murder Most Foul (Macbeth), The Assassination (Julius Caesar), The Love Song of Death (Romeo and Juliet), The Greeneyed Monster (Othello), Long Live the King is Dead (Hamlet), The Prince of Evil (Richard III) and The Serpent of the Nile (Antony and Cleopatra). Although the “thriller” aspects of these

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productions lie more in the series context than any generic rewriting they represent a late, semi-Wellesian attempt to reconnect Shakespeare with radio and with American popular culture more broadly. In conclusion, Shakespeare on radio has frequently been the product of national needs and the focus of international transactions and policies. It has been appropriated and applauded as high culture and made the pretext for popular modes of critique and subversion. It has also often been dominated by conflicting imperatives: to serve the founding art of theatre and to evolve a radio art capable of taking theatre’s place. This mix of dependency and rivalry comes full circle in a stage performance directly inspired by radio. SITI Company’s Radio Macbeth (2007) was devised and directed by Anne Bogart together with sound designer Darron L. West and draws on memories of Orson Welles’ “Voodoo” theatre version of the play, as well as his radio work. A troupe of actors nervously assembles in an abandoned theatre to rehearse a “golden age” radio performance of the Scottish play. As they employ the techniques of sound-only staging, in which a battle is created through slamming folding chairs together, a private subtext of passion, jealousy and infidelity emerges counterpointed with a violent political drama which mirrors the murderous action of the play and is expressed in struggles to control the microphone. From the shadows beyond the lit stage uncanny voices take possession of the performers, spirits “that tend on mortal thought” and embody all the psychic “interference” created by previous performances of the play, whether political, psychological, or metaphysical in interpretation. If the history of radio Shakespeare is best imagined as a kind of echo chamber in which soundscapes created for the stage have been continually recorded, replayed and, like Ariel, set free to ride the air in new forms, this evocative and disturbing theatrical performance pays fitting homage to radio’s enduring power as a medium which calls spirits from the vasty deep, confident in the belief that they will indeed come and speak.

Notes 1. This chapter draws upon research funded by the British Academy, whose support is gratefully acknowledged.

Further Reading and List of Works Cited Arnheim, Rudolf (1936). Radio, trans. M. Ludwig and H. Read. London: Faber and Faber. Barnouw, Erik (1949). Handbook of Radio Writing: An Outline of Techniques and Markets in Radio Writing in the United States. Boston, MA: D. C. Heath. ——(1966). A History of Broadcasting in the United States: Vol.1: A Tower of Babel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clement, F. (1924). “What a College can do in Broadcasting”. Radio Broadcast 4, 57–61. Drakakis, John (1981). “The Essence that is Not Seen: Radio Adaptations of Stage Plays”. In Radio Drama, ed. Peter Lewis. London and New York: Longman, 111–33. Evans, Stuart (1987). “Shakespeare on Radio”. Shakespeare Survey 39, 113–22. Greenhalgh, Susanne (2007). “Shakespeare Overheard: Performances, Adaptations and Citations on Radio”. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 175–98. ——(2009). “Listening to Shakespeare”. In Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio: The Researcher’s Guide, ed. Olwen Terris, Eve-Marie Oesterlen and Luke McKernan. London: BUFVC, 74–93.

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Hawkes, Terence (2005). “Nanti Everything”. In Rematerialising Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage, ed. Bryan Reynolds and William N. West. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 130–8. Jackson, Russell (1994). “Two Radio Shakespeares: Staging and Text”. In Shakespeare: Cosmopolitisme et Insularité, ed. M. T. Jones-Davies. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 195–204. Jensen. Michael P. (2008). “Lend me your Ears: Sampling BBC Radio Drama”. Shakespeare Survey 61, 170–80. Lanier, Douglas (2002). “WSHX: Shakespeare and American Radio”. In Shakespeare After Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 195–219. ——(2006). “Introduction. Shakespeare on Radio”. In Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, ed. Richard Burt. Westport: Greenwood Press, 506–8. McKernan, Luke (2009). “Introduction”. In Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio: The Researcher’s Guide, ed. Olwen Terris, Eve-Marie Oesterlen and Luke McKernan. London: BUFVC, vii–xiii. Oesterlen, Eve-Marie (2008). “Lend Me Your 84 Million Ears: Exploring a Special Radio Event – Shakespeare’s King Lear on BBC World Service Radio”. Radio Journal 6.1, 33–44. ——(2009). “Full of Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs: Shakespeare and the Birth of Radio Drama in Britain”. In Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio: The Researcher’s Guide, ed. Olwen Terris, Eve-Marie Oesterlen and Luke McKernan. London: BUFVC, 51–73. Rattigan, Dermot (2002). Theatre of Sound: Radio and the Dramatic Imagination. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Sanders, Julie (2007). Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings. Cambridge: Polity Press. Stanton, William (2004). “The Invisible Theatre of Radio Drama”. Critical Quarterly 46.4, 94–107. Stout, A. K. (1954). “Shakespeare on the Air in Australia”. The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television 8.3, 269–72. Straznicky, Marta (2002). “A Stage for the World: Shakespeare on CBS Radio 1947–55”. In Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere?, ed. Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 92–107. Teague, Fran (2006). Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallace, J. (1926). “Wanted: a Radio Shakespeare!” Radio Broadcast 7, 388–9. ——(1927). “Shakespeare by Radio”. Radio Broadcast 8, 36.

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SHAKESPEARE ON THE INTERNET AND IN DIGITAL MEDIA Michael Best

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t those moments when yet another window pops up on our computer screen warning us that we need to update our software, we surely feel rather like King John when he is beset with multiple disasters: “Withhold thy speed, dreadful Occasion” (4.2.125). John is invoking the figure Occasionem, or “Opportunity”, pictured in the emblem books of the period with winged feet, her hair trailing in front, where she can be seized, but bald behind (Fig. 30.1). Opportunity must be seized boldly. In this chapter I will explore the ways that scholars and Shakespeare enthusiasts have been seizing the opportunities that have opened up in electronic media despite the speed of change. Because of this state of mutability, I mention only a representative sample of projects to illustrate general issues. As recently as three years ago, an article on this subject would have treated the internet and other digital media (CD-ROMs, DVDs) separately; today the media are increasingly merging as higher bandwidth makes streaming video more practicable, and as web browsers have become capable of displaying different data types (text, image, sound, video) in a way that is transparent to the viewer. The CD-ROM has all but disappeared other than as a medium for the distribution of software, and even DVDs are surviving more as a means of maintaining intellectual property rights than as a necessity for distributing the data they contain. Not much more than a decade ago, the excitingly new concept of hypertext was still much discussed at a theoretical level. George Landow, J. David Bolter and others wrote at length of the potential of the computer to link text and to create new structures for information. Pre-eminent in their claims was a belief that hypertext permitted a new way of organizing information that closely reflected current debates in critical theory: hypertext would perform literally the postmodern function of decentring the text and offering multiple potential perspectives on it. A student of literature is already familiar with the kind of associative thinking that is made concrete by hypertext: through its puns, metaphors, symbols and other figures of speech, a literary work encourages the reader to make links to related or contrasting concepts. Not surprisingly, a typical modern edition of a play – with its footnotes, lists of variant readings, appendices, cross-references, parallel passages from other literary works – seems to crave hypertextuality as a way of expressing the webs of meaning that Shakespeare constructs. The unprecedented expansion of the internet has rather overtaken the theoretical debate about hypertext as the concepts of linked data and lateral, networked units of meaning have become commonplace – even banal – and as the members of a new genera-

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Figure 30.1: Alciati’s Occasionem

tion of students (and scholars) reach for a mouse or a touch screen more readily than they reach for a pen. The electronic medium has expanded in ways that a bare ten years ago were not so much unimaginable as simply unimagined. While some of the expectations of the theorists have been realized, especially in the way that those accustomed to the internet move comfortably through a lateral rather than linear logical structure, the medium has developed in unanticipated directions. Alan Liu (who describes himself as “weaver of the Voice of the Shuttle”, the Humanities gateway maintained at the University of California, Santa Barbara) has pointed out that the actual process of reading is evolving, as “readers” become “users”, and as the norm of an extended linear exposition becomes a hypertext exploration (Liu, “The Transliteracies”). At the same time as the theorists were trumpeting the potential of hypertext to move the act of reading from linear to the lateral linking of ideas, Neal Stephenson, in his classic science fiction novel Snowcrash (1992), was imagining a three dimensional virtual world, the “Metaverse”, which took the shape of an enormous black sphere. Those who visit the Metaverse, or work in it, do so as avatars of varying complexity, and their spaces in this world, like the internet, are addresses, based on the familiar concept of physical real estate, with The Street running like a belt around the sphere. In the most literal way, Stephenson imagined the Metaverse as a globe that globalizes, since an avatar could enter it from anywhere in the physical world. The internet we now experience daily is as global as the Metaverse, but as it has evolved it has become

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less logically constructed, more informal and chaotic than the black sphere Stephenson imagined.

Making Familiar: A Liminal Space The words we use as we engage with the new medium attempt metaphorically to make its otherness familiar. While Stephenson imagined a sphere divided into conceptual cities, communicating through the metaphor of a street map, popular usage has come up with engaging and revealing terms like “surfing the web”. “Surfing” describes accurately the play-like activity of many users of the medium as they skim on the surface of information, borne along by waves of interest, or bailing out of sites that are overwhelming or unattractive. On the other hand, the familiar term “web” is not wholly accurate as an image for the structure we navigate, since the internet is far less ordered than the image that the beautifully regular architecture of the spider web suggests. A more effective metaphor will accept that the internet is more haphazard, more organic in topography than is suggested by these metaphors. Perhaps it is more like the evolutionary branching bush suggested by Stephen Jay Gould in Full House, or even more like the intimately interconnected rhizome proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri (Deleuze and Guatarri, 1987). Rhizomes propagate through roots that form new nodes, sprouting shoots above the surface of the ground and continuing the process so long as the territory they occupy permits. Since the electronic space of the internet is effectively infinite, the ultimate size or spread of the internet rhizome is impossible to predict. The speed of change is such that only the most foolhardy will claim to know what direction the medium will take in the next decades. We are still in that transitional and liminal space where we expect the new medium to behave like the old, as in the early days of film or television, where the technical capabilities of the camera were underexploited, simply because they had not been fully discovered (see Bolter and Grusin, 2000). As discussed by Judith Buchanan in her chapter in this volume, the first film of a Shakespeare play was a series of short scenes from Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s spectacular stage production of King John. Only one clip survives; it shows a seated King John surrounded by several attendants as he mouths (silently, of course) his dying speech. The camera is stationary and placed at a distance from the actors as it attempts to reproduce the visual experience of a member of the audience in the theatre. It is a long way from current conventions where, as AnneMarie Costantini-Cornède observes in her chapter in this volume, the camera has become an active agent in the film, directing attention and commenting on the action through close-up or movement. Beerbohm Tree’s death agonies, though silent, seem to a modern viewer to be overacted, because we have become accustomed to actors performing in more intimate theatres or in front of the revealing eye of the camera. It is no surprise, then, that on the internet we are still using the vocabulary of the book, as we browse our web “pages”, with most of those pages using the familiar layout either of the book or of a magazine or newspaper. We are clearly still very much in an early stage of the evolution of the medium, borrowing conventions from earlier media; already, as the web has become capable of full multimedia, many sites have added the conventions of television to the already well-established adoption of newspaper-like layout on the computer screen. Although book-loving Shakespeareans may regret the takeover of the web by commerce, with its attendant glossy advertising and graphics-heavy screens, there are some ways in which the medium has matured into a tool that could ultimately provide

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a more complete way of reading the works of Shakespeare as creator of what we now see as multimedia works: stage and voice as well as page. The truth is that we really don’t know what the internet will look like in five years’ time, let alone in another two decades when the web will have doubled its age. The surge in power and ubiquity of hand-held devices like the iPhone and iPad has already changed patterns of behaviour, and we can only expect this kind of connectedness to take on regularized contours (see Fisher, 2009). Devices like Amazon.com’s Kindle, with its comfortable, paper-like display, suggest that yet more portable and readable digital media will become increasingly the norm.

Reader Beware One result of the continuous presence of the internet on laptops, cell phones and other computers, is that the library is becoming the last resort for many engaged in research; only when they really can’t find what they want online will they will go to the physical building and look on the shelves for a printed book. And because some of the best electronic resources are available only by subscription, those who have no access to these sites will make do with what they find by open access online. Reader beware: Shakespeare is particularly vulnerable to those who have special agendas to argue (see Murphy, 2010). It has always been true that readers need to have some critical awareness of the books they read, even if they find them on the shelves of a university library, but on the web the risks are far greater. The best defence is scepticism and a careful check of the “about” link found on just about all reputable sites; it is also a good sign if the site includes information about when it was last updated. The same ease of access to materials ready to copy and paste into a research paper makes the need for scholarly care even more important; accidental – or deliberate – plagiarism has increased, together with the number of anti-plagiarism services. Web searches on words associated with common essay topics students encounter will turn up dozens of sites that offer both free and paid papers; a parallel development is the commercial success of services like Turnitin.com that scan papers for possible instances of plagiarism.

Some History For all our concern about the way the electronic medium is transforming our ways of communicating and conducting research, it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment the internet has become. Early mainframe computers were created using differing sets of standards, and the variety between systems was a formidable challenge to overcome before they could be linked. From a modest beginning in the seventies, the first truly internetworked systems led to the beginnings of the web in the early nineties. In the earliest days of the internet, sites were limited to text alone, transferred by FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and by the now defunct Gopher system. Shakespeare’s high profile made certain that his works were amongst the first literary texts to be made freely and widely available on this text-only network. From 1971, Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg has provided the complete Works for downloading. Not surprisingly, the Gutenberg text has permeated the web since that time. To avoid the problems of copyright, this text – known as the Moby Shakespeare – was a transcription (not always accurate) of the influential Globe edition, first published in the 1860s. For a great number of general readers, the Moby edition is perfectly satisfactory, though scholarship since that time has deeply changed the way we

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view Shakespeare’s texts (see Sonia Massai’s chapter in this volume). But for those looking to track down a quotation or to copy a well-known passage, the Moby Shakespeare will do. An early electronic discussion technology was the listserv, where subscribers received co-ordinated emails; Shaksper was created in the early days of the internet as a listserv to provide a forum for those interested in Shakespeare; it continues to this day, thanks to the labours of its moderator, Hardy Cook. Over the years it has amassed an impressive and searchable database of discussion points. When the world wide web was created in the early 1990s, still limited to text-only display, the first widely used browser was Lynx; still maintained by dogged volunteers, its interface permits hypertext linking by the use of cursor keys rather than the mouse. In 1993, the Mozilla browser for the first time made hyperlinking trivially easy to follow. Almost immediately, two websites, still operating though not maintained, provided access to the Moby Shakespeare: Matty Farrow’s The Works of the Bard at the University of Sydney and at MIT Jeremy Hylton’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Both offered ways of searching the texts; Farrow’s especially used the powerful search capacities of the Unix operating system to permit sophisticated searches for multiple words near each other. Although the Mozilla browser, and those that followed, brought for the first time the ability to display graphics, serious scholarship in the electronic medium focused for a number of years on the CD-ROM. A. R. Braunmuller’s Macbeth, originally designed for the Macintosh, showed for the first time what a multimedia text might look like, and the somewhat later Cambridge King Lear in Performance, edited by Jacky Bratton and Christie Carson, demonstrated the shift from the limits of a print edition towards something much closer to a full electronic archive. Inadvertently, these pioneering publications demonstrated that a CD, like print, rapidly gets past its “use-by” date. The aging of a CD-ROM, however, can be more catastrophic, since it is not only the content that is fixed, and therefore subject to becoming outmoded, but the software that delivers the content becomes obsolete and no longer functions at all. My early CD-ROM, Shakespeare’s Life and Times, lives on only because its content has been fully adapted to the web and is now part of the Internet Shakespeare Editions’ site. In contrast, the development of the web began to speed up with its new capacity to display images and the beginnings of interest from commercial sites; by 1995 there were enough websites dealing with Shakespeare and related subjects that Terry Gray was able to set up his Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet, a “gateway” site that provides links to other sites of interest in the field. Gray’s site is unusual in the changing world of the web, as it remains well maintained, and is an excellent starting point for exploration. In the following year, I began posting old-spelling texts on the newly-created site for the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) at the University of Victoria. Since the Moby Shakespeare was generally available on the web, and since the project to re-edit the plays for the new medium is a task of major proportions, our first publications were careful transcriptions of the first published versions of Shakespeare’s texts, as published in the First Folio and the early quartos. Old-spelling texts present a special challenge, since the originals contain a great deal of information of interest to the scholar but are difficult to display on screen: they are full of what we consider to be typographical inconsistencies, some of which may reveal important information about the underlying manuscript (see Sonia Massai’s chapter in this volume). Scholars are also interested in the minutiae of printing, where older type-forms (like the long “s”) can be important if the text is possibly in need of amendment. Mine was not the first attempt to create old-spelling texts from the period:

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in the 1960s, Trevor Howard-Hill transcribed Shakespeare’s texts in old spelling and in 1994, Ian Lancashire developed a standard for the recording of Early Modern texts for the computer. The Internet Shakespeare Editions adapted these standards for its own texts. One of our principal aims was to claim a space in the new medium for careful scholarship at a time when publications on the internet were generally considered to be inferior. To this end, we made clear which of our texts had been peer reviewed by locating them in a virtual “library”, while texts not yet reviewed were in an “annex” to the main site. Even in the early days of the web, it was clear that the medium offered an unparalleled opportunity to provide supporting documentation and annotation to a text. The electronic space is not limited by a physical page, and it is possible for an explanation or discussion of the text to provide deep contextual information by linking to resources in related fields. In the early years of the web, those who posted texts of Early Modern writers, or information about the history and social background of the period, tended to be enthusiastic amateurs – a fact which is unsurprising since scholars were unlikely to be rewarded for publishing online. Outstanding among these for the quality of his work was the extensive collection created by R. S. Bear, Renascence Editions, originally hosted by the University of Oregon and now mirrored by Early Modern Literary Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. Anniina Jokinen’s Luminarium, also hosting a mirror site of the Renascence Editions, remains an invaluable resource. There is also a wide variety of information available from members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, though these can be uneven in quality, and are focused more on the medieval period. A more academic and still immensely useful site is Shakespeare’s World (Harry Rusche, Emory University), an extensive library of historical illustrations of scenes and characters from the plays. David and Ben Crystal have created an extensive and useful glossary to Shakespeare’s language in Shakespeare’s Words (shakespeareswords.com). The shape of things to come may be figured by the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, an ambitious cross-Atlantic collaboration that aims to collect graphic images of all Shakespeare’s pre-1642 plays published in quarto. Also noteworthy is the fine Holinshed Project based at Oxford which provides a full old-spelling text of a work that must have been among Shakespeare’s favourite reading. The Internet Shakespeare Editions has a substantial section of the site devoted to Shakespeare’s life and times, available by open access; this is an academic, peer reviewed resource, heavily visited by students and those interested in Shakespeare and Early Modern society.

The Evolution of the Web Since the first pioneering sites first appeared, the change behind the scenes on web pages has been dramatic. Rather than static pages, hand-coded by programmers or self-taught enthusiasts, web pages are now typically delivered from databases, where updating is made simpler, as a single change made at a basic level propagates automatically through the site. The move to database-driven sites has tended to make things harder for academic researchers, since databases require intensive programming to communicate effectively with the web. The result is that older academic sites are subject to “bit-rot” – the decay of the underlying computer code as it becomes outmoded. The immensely useful site on Alciato’s emblems housed at Memorial University is a good example. Its graphics, once state-of-the-art, are now only minimally useful. At least the site remains available; many links over time fail as the target site is changed, or ceases to function.

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A whole new discipline, Digital Humanities, has evolved in response to the need to shape the kinds of resources that interest scholars in the area. At the forefront of research in Humanities texts is the growing importance of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) as a means of encoding the appearance and structure of the texts we explore. The standard language of the web, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is powerful in the way texts can be encoded to appear attractive on screen; XML takes this functionality one important stage further by encoding the semantic meaning of texts as well as their appearance. Thus an XML document can contain embedded information about the structure of a text (division into Act, Scene and line, for Shakespeare’s plays, for example) and it can also include information about the meaning of a word. Unless it is told otherwise, a computer cannot tell whether the word “Hamlet” is a speech prefix before one of Hamlet’s soliloquies, a reference to Hamlet by another character, or the title of the play. An XML text of Hamlet, however, can provide this information as the encoding, in effect, turns the text into a database that can be searched intelligently.1 The second generation of contextual and bibliographical resources, in a manner typical of the way the web has been evolving, is available by subscription only. Some of these offer modest rates for individuals, but in general they will be available only through institutions where the libraries subscribe to a range of scholarly materials. Notable among these is the Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) at the University of Toronto; a basic site is available publicly, with an enhanced version by subscription. LEME uses Early Modern dictionaries and word lists to make possible sophisticated searches on words and their associated meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary is as invaluable as ever for those who subscribe to the online version. Shakespeare scholars are well served by online bibliographies, two of which offer modest rates for individual users: the World Shakespeare Bibliography, edited by James L. Harner, is now located at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and more general bibliographical information can be found in Iter (University of Toronto and others), an extensive database that covers articles, essays, books, dissertation abstracts, encyclopedia entries and reviews dealing with the years 400–1700. For the texts of non-Shakespearean dramatists there is now a range of projects to bring Shakespeare’s contemporaries to the web, by subscription, often as an adjunct to print: Middleton, Brome (an open access site), Jonson and others. The most ambitious project available to Shakespeare scholars by subscription is Gale’s The Shakespeare Collection, which combines the Arden Shakespeare in electronic form with substantial critical and research materials, from facsimiles to samples of prompt books, reference works and related works by other writers from the period. Two more general resources from ProQuest put the resources of the world’s great libraries at the student’s fingertips: Literature Online (LION) and Early English Books Online (EEBO). Those who have access to these databases can explore virtually every book published in the English Short Title Catalogue (itself also available online from the British Library). For Shakespeareans, the increasing dominance of the subscription model means that recent scholarship, whether in articles or in the newest editions, is available only in print or through institutions that subscribe to the specific services they need. The effect is far from the democratizing of knowledge, since materials of this kind are available only through institutions willing to pay the annual fees. Students of Shakespeare in nonEnglish speaking countries are unlikely to be able to access these resources. We may regret the limitations imposed by subscription services, since from its inception the web has been associated with open access to knowledge and services of all kinds, but the model for scholarly publishing by major presses requires that there be a reasonable return on their

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investment. Thus far, the subscription model is the most successful; perhaps in the future an alternative model might follow the success, in the world of music, of the iTunes store, where anyone can selectively download low-cost CD tracks.

Multimedia and Video The popularity of music-sharing sites, whether they are legitimate or set up to avoid copyright, has been a driving force in the movement of the web towards multimedia. Since the early days of Mozilla, browsers have evolved to present all kinds of data types seamlessly, with a resulting emphasis on image rather than text as the preferred interface. Graphics are more byte-hungry than text, video and sound even more greedy. Consequently, the demand for increased bandwidth to handle the larger files has put pressure on the architects of the internet and those who develop the technology of data delivery to make rapid access cheaper; at the same time, the development of increasingly sophisticated and effective compression algorithms has made large media files smaller. Music, compressed using the standard of MP3, has become ubiquitous, and similar compression has made video widely available on YouTube and many other sites. A search of YouTube will reveal tens of thousands of videos tagged with Shakespeare’s name; results vary from downloaded segments of Shakespeare films (notably from the popular Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998)) to comic sketches, to videos of pop groups that for some reason have “Shakespeare” as one of the tags attached to their songs. A more specialized project, Bardbox, collects the most interesting Shakespeare-related videos from YouTube and makes them available in accessible categories; some of the videos explore the works in unusual and insightfully experimental ways. Peter Donaldson’s work on the MIT Shakespeare Electronic Archive and the open access Shakespeare in Asia created with Alexander Huang, illustrates the potential that multimedia has in the scholarly presentation of Shakespeare performance. But the difficulty of providing open access remains, as film studios jealously guard their intellectual property to popular films. The running battle between the major music distributors and unofficial peer-to-peer downloading of popular music has extended to television and film through technologies like BitTorrent; there is at present no clear end in sight to the conflict between legitimate enforcement of intellectual property rights and the powerful movement towards open access to all kinds of artistic content on the web. Ideally, the facility with which browsers handle multimedia should make Shakespeare performances more available, but limitations of intellectual property mean that only unofficial snippets of popular movies are posted online, and the restrictions of actors’ unions mean that professional stage performances will not be filmed for general viewing. The question then becomes what kinds of evidence we can usefully make available to those interested in working with performance. As several chapters in this volume attest, the process of reimagining performances from the artefacts of stage practice is rather like recreating a dinosaur from scattered bones, or an antique vase from a few shards.

Stage Performance In the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, a suitably imperious Lord provides a miniature theatre review of a performance that he has seen. Speaking to the principal actor, he remarks: “I have forgot your name; but, sure, that part / Was aptly fitted and

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naturally perform’d” (Induction 1, 82–3). As a member of an audience, the Lord clearly found the actors themselves unimportant, as he cheerfully admits that he has forgotten their names – a forgetfulness that is a reminder of the evanescence of stage performance and the difficulty of critically examining a performance that has disappeared into inaccurate human memory. Performance critics turn to whatever they can find to flesh out the bones of performances that are considered to be important by examining the programme, reviews, prompt book, stills of the stage production, costume and set designs and so on. Some theatres record an archival video of the performance. Established theatres and festivals have archives, sometimes with full- or part-time archivists ensuring their preservation and organization, but many smaller companies – arguably of genuine interest in exploring a wider range of production strategies – have little more than scattered shoeboxes as repositories for their records. For the scholar, all this prospecting requires both energy and the necessary funding to travel to major archives; a corollary is that performance criticism inevitably privileges the “canonical” performances of a few well-funded theatre companies. An ideal solution would be to have these kinds of materials generally available online. There are, unfortunately, major limitations on the kinds of information online databases can provide: most obviously, there are relatively few material objects available for digitization, and even for these there are often significant difficulties in obtaining permission to make them public. An obvious place to start is the official programme for the performance or season. It will provide basic information: a list of the creative team, cast and crew, usually with biographies, and a note from the director. The International Movie Database (IMDB) records data of this kind; Touchstone, at the University of Birmingham, provides basic information about stage productions in the UK from 1996 to 2007; Shakespeare: An International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio records Shakespeare-related content in film, television, radio and video recordings internationally, with a starting date in the 1890s. Combining records of both film and stage productions, the Internet Shakespeare Editions’ database of Shakespeare in performance records details of Shakespeare films (our starting point is the exhaustive work of Kenneth Rothwell) and representative performances from theatre companies and Shakespeare festivals mainly in North America. In addition to providing full cast lists and digitized facsimiles of programmes, the fully searchable database records items like the director’s production notes, prompt books, costume and set designs, reviews of the performance and information about the music or other sound cues used in performance. Photographs of stage productions are included, again where permission is granted; despite the important reservations expressed by Barbara Hodgdon (2003), there is no doubt that an image can sometimes provide a valuable insight into staging. The value of databases of this kind is that they can provide extensive illustration of the range of responses to a given text from different directors and designers and over time will record changes in production style. As an example, our steadily increasing collection of digitized images reveals that there are very few productions that dress their actors in Elizabethan garb: the influence of Jan Kott is still strong and is no doubt reinforced by the need for theatre companies to attract audiences by directing and costuming the plays in such a way that their relevance to current culture is made evident. Accordingly, many productions are in some version of modern dress. More often, however, our database reveals that the plays are set at a slight remove from the present: the Victorian period, the earlier part of the twentieth century, or in some eclectic non-period. The advantage of this not-quite-

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modern setting seems to be that it makes the plays seem less fusty, but at the same time gives them enough distance that social attitudes – those towards women, for example – will not seem too absurdly out of step with the setting. This kind of choice suggests that directors are well aware that Shakespeare is not wholly our contemporary, after all. A number of sites focus on specific performance topics. Designing Shakespeare, created by Christie Carson, brings together the work of both onstage and backstage personnel: the database offers valuable glimpses of productions in Stratford and London in the later decades of the twentieth century. Individual theatre companies – the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe in London and many of the major companies in North America and Australia – house archives that are partially available online. Three notable Canadian projects look beyond standard Shakespeare production, each exploring further capabilities of the Internet in making performance materials widely available. The Queen’s Men Project (McMaster and Toronto Universities) is creating an archive both of texts and performance for the plays written for the early Queen’s Men players in the 1580s and 1590s; the plays include several that Shakespeare later reworked. Texts of the plays are being published through the Internet Shakespeare Editions; production materials are also posted online, though some sections of the site are available only to researchers because of restrictions from the actors’ union. From the University of Guelph comes the stimulating Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project; its focus is on the uses that Shakespeare has been put to as his works have been modified and transformed in the modern era. At the University of Toronto, the invaluable work of the Records of Early English Drama (REED) is making available online many of its discoveries about the habits and activities of early theatre companies as they toured the provinces. One of the most useful pieces of evidence in reassembling the shards of performance is the review. The ISE Performance Chronicle is providing a forum for both invited and guest reviewers to contribute their reactions to current performances and to comment on each other’s postings. “News on the Rialto”, a blog published by Shakespeare Magazine, also includes some reviews. Increasingly, newspapers make their reviews available online and there are a growing number of blogs maintained by theatre lovers. The most reliable way of finding materials of this kind is through the now standard method of beginning any session on the Internet – searching, most often through Google.

A Dynamic Text From the beginning of our interaction with the electronic text, users have been aware of, and delighted by, the capacity it provides for powerful searching, but few foresaw the arrival of the age of Google, where every browser (the software) invites a built-in Google search, and every browser (the person) routinely initiates a session on the web by Googling. In a well-watched video on YouTube released as part of their campaign to promote their browser, a Google spokesperson asked a series of people in Times Square what browser they used: most answered “Google”, unknowingly conflating the search engine they use with the software that makes the search possible. The movement towards an integrated graphic interface on the computer screen has made transparent the distinction between a computer application or program – the browser – and the activities the user performs with it. Bill Tancer, exploring a massive and detailed database of the behaviours of individual Internet users, makes clear the depth of the takeover of search engines: for example, from his data it is clear that many users (very possibly a majority) make no

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distinction at all between the space in the browser where one types an address, and the similar-seeming space for typing a Google search. Tancer concludes that “Search engines, despite their limitations, have for some of us become a teacher, a confidant, a willing listener to our confessions” (Tancer, 2008, 117). One recurrent research project in Digital Humanities has been the use of the computer for textual analysis, an activity that can be seen as a kind of super-searching. Although textual analysis has been with us for longer than the web itself, it is clear that there has as yet been no “killer” application that uses textual analysis in a way that would make it an essential tool for the student or scholar (Juola, 2008). In 1989, Ian Lancashire presciently coined the phrase “the dynamic text” to describe the multiple ways that the e-medium allows us to view a text. His TACT software, programmed in the now-obsolete DOS, provided powerful ways of searching for related words in a literary work (looking for “death” near “love”, for example) and displaying the results by frequency across the work as a whole. In the specific field of Shakespeare studies, Don Foster worked with an early software package, WordCruncher, to produce evidence that suggested what work Shakespeare was reading at a given moment in his career and which parts he may have acted in his own plays. The results of this early work have not yet been reproduced in modern software. Ward Elliot’s Claremont Shakespeare Clinic has amassed a considerable body of data to assist in identifying plays, and even sections of plays, written by different authors in the period. Elliot is characteristic of scholars who work with the way a computer can “read” large numbers of texts in applying this skill to the knotty problem of attribution. Attribution studies are of interest not only to those who seek to affirm or deny the identity of the writer of Shakespeare’s plays, but those who postulate the presence of more than one author in some of the plays accepted as principally by Shakespeare (see Craig and Kinney, 2009). Another problem to which the computer has been applied is in establishing the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays. This kind of study began well before the days of computers, as nineteenth-century scholars painstakingly counted rhymed passages, feminine endings and other metrical features in a search for markers of Shakespeare’s changing habits over time. In more recent years, MacDonald P. Jackson has insightfully explored both attribution and dating through computer analysis. One result of his research has been, for example, the dating of the Sonnets over a much longer period than has generally been assumed; Jonathan Bate used Jackson’s research in a recent study of the effect that dating different sections of the sequence can have on our reading of them. Many of these computer studies have looked at words that Shakespeare used rarely, since these are likely to signpost measurable influences. Some researchers, in contrast, have used the computer to look for patterns in common words. Even the most sensitive reader of Shakespeare is unlikely to be able to notice when one play uses a higher proportion of first person pronouns than another, for example, but such a task is trivial to a computer. It is surely possible, even likely, that at some stage in the future there will be cross-pollination between disciplines, with something designed for one world revealing unexpected riches in another. In the commercial world, many sites use complex programming to ensure that visitors to the site see advertisements tailored to their tastes, and if the kind of tools developed by the major governments and spy agencies for data mining the vast flow of information around the Internet ever leak out to the public, there is some likelihood that we might be able to apply their algorithms with interesting results in our disciplines. Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope have shown how effective this approach can be. Using software developed at Carnegie Mellon University’s English

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Department to support writing courses taught to information design and professional writing students (DocuScope), they showed that the program could differentiate between genres of plays through Shakespeare’s use of differing linguistic patterns. Central in the functioning of software like DocuScope is the way it is able to display data in visual summaries. Programmers are collaborating with scholars in exploring new ways of visualizing the text. Amongst a growing number, there are two of particular interest: Wordle, which lists the words on a web page in such a way that font size indicates word frequency; more inventive, but not yet a tool that will clearly assist the critic, is TextArc, where every word in a literary work is represented in a circle, and clicking on any of these shows its frequency, the distribution of the word in the work and its relationship to others. The power of the computer in counting words and in displaying them in various ways will certainly lead to further experiments of this kind. In the meantime, perhaps the closest we have come to a killer app in this area is Google itself, as it harvests data from billions of web pages, indexes it according to its proprietary algorithms and in fractions of a second spits out its guesses as to what it is the searcher wants. The downside of the increasingly dominant habit of Internet users to go to Google as their first entry to the web is that search engines rank sites by popularity rather than quality, and the uncomfortable fact is that we are all at the mercy of the unseen and heavily guarded functions of a corporation that is quite monolithically dominating the e-waves. So far no real alternatives have taken off, since those that try to select on the basis of quality tend to be heavily labour-intensive. The success of Google has meant a massive switch away from structured hypertext to searching as the main means of navigating both through the Internet as a whole and within individual sites. If a preference for searching as navigation means that the user ignores the carefully selected hypertext links of the site designer or the editor of an online edition, the positive gain is that they are creating their own pathways through the text, selecting links through their preferred search terms. The result may be more haphazard, but it may also be serendipitous, as a search may turn up unexpected connections. In effect, the activity of searching – unique to the electronic text – hands power to the user, in the process fulfilling one of the early claims for the medium, that it would lead to a greater democratizing of knowledge than is possible with the print medium.

A Democratic Text The Internet has certainly had a major impact on the more direct processes of democracy. Recent political movements have become increasingly reliant on electronic communication, as something of a running battle has developed between government in limiting access and the governed in circumventing censorship. Protests after the 2009 Iran election were to a significant degree broadcast to the outside world through the instant-messaging service Twitter, and the photograph-sharing site Flickr provided a forum for images of the protests. China expends considerable resources in limiting access to websites that deal with topics considered sensitive. For Shakespeareans, one of the most rewarding ways in which the democratizing effect of the Internet will be felt is in the wide availability of facsimiles of the plays as first published in quarto and in the First Folio. Several sites provide good quality images: the British Library, the ISE, the admirable Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University and the fascinating early annotations on a First Folio in the possession of Meisei University, Japan.

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The Shakespeare Quartos Archive, jointly undertaken by the Folger Shakespeare Library, the University of Oxford and the University of Maryland makes all available quartos for Hamlet available by open access. Resources of this kind are of immense value both for the scholar and in the classroom, as they provide the opportunity for active involvement of students in the process of “unediting” the plays, to use the felicitous and influential term coined by Leah Marcus. If there is one area that has justified claims for the web as a forum for democracy, it is in the sudden expansion of sites that permit anyone to publish pretty much whatever they like, from text to images to videos. In 2005, Tim O’Reilly recorded and schematized the changes that web applications were undergoing in an essay posted online, “What Is Web 2.0?” By comparing the different assumptions of the previously dominant Netscape and the increasingly successful Google, O’Reilly demonstrated the change from static software and content packages to dynamic and collaborative structures. He was writing before the advent of the immensely successful MySpace and Facebook social networks (he uses the earlier Flickr as one of his examples) and the now-dominant Wikipedia was then in its infancy. Even so, he was remarkably accurate in describing what have become even stronger trends. The astonishing growth in blogging and the success of YouTube are signs that web users are increasingly expecting collaborative and participatory websites that take advantage of sophisticated methods of organizing large, inchoate masses of data (and this is, of course, the triumph of Google). For both the student and teacher, the most visible creation of social networking will be the Wikipedia. Published in dozens of languages, and containing well over three million articles in the English section alone, the Wikipedia is an extraordinary phenomenon by any standard. Students love it because it provides quick access to the kinds of information they need; teachers – well, they may not hate it, but they will be deeply sceptical of it, since it does not come with the imprimatur of a recognized publisher and the accustomed academic process of peer review. My earlier caveats about the need for critical reading of online material are relevant here, as is the recognition that any encyclopaedia will provide only the barest of starting places for research. It is to Wikipedia’s credit that their policy on articles specifically states that “Wikipedia does not publish original thought: all material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable, published source”. The claim of those who advocate the Wikipedia model is that a collaboratively generated encyclopaedia will, by a process of continuing improvement, become as accurate as a traditional work, with the added advantage that as an electronic resource it can be continually updated. There are two problems with this model: the unknown quality of the information that self-elected contributors bring to the site, and the possibility that some will generate deliberately malicious entries. Over time, the Wikipedia has modified its practices, especially to deal with deliberate sabotage. The example of pages devoted to Shakespearean subjects is instructive. Entries have indeed become more reliable, but there have been a number of occasions on which the pages were closed to changes because they had been taken over by those who believe that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays, and the entries rewritten to suit their candidate of choice.2 Since these earlier troubles, the materials on Shakespeare have stabilized; the “discussion” section of the main entry on Shakespeare comments that it “has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community”, and there is now a spin-off “WikiProject Shakespeare”, devoted to “increasing the quality of any and all articles dealing with William Shakespeare”.

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The approach taken by Wikipedia follows the highly successful Open Source movement in the development of software. Its greatest success, the popular operating system Linux, is an example of collaborative programming with contributions from hundreds of volunteers. In his seminal essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, E. S. Raymond seeks to find metaphors to highlight the differences between the creation of software by traditional means and the processes that have evolved in the Open Source movement. Of the traditional model of software development, he writes, “I believed that the most important software . . . needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time”; he contrasts this with the seemingly more chaotic activity in Open Source, using Linux as an example: “the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches . . . out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles” (Raymond, 2000). To a purist, the metaphors here may seem rather mixed – an architectural structure of great beauty and complexity is compared with a commercial interchange that has no apparent structural outcome – but the distinction he is making is essentially between a “top-down” managerial structure and one that is much less hierarchical. The important thing to note here is the effectiveness of Open Source programming through a more decentralized structure that nonetheless provides for efficient interchange of code and ideas; indeed, Raymond argues that the software resulting from Open Source techniques is superior and more bug-free than that produced by centrally managed systems. The concept is an alluring one and clearly works in some contexts. But can it work in the world of Shakespeare scholarship? Eric Johnson’s Open Source Shakespeare begins a move in this direction. His site, hosted by George Mason University, provides sophisticated searching capabilities and makes available the “back-end” database and computer code for anyone to work with. But the site is not yet open in the sense that any visitor to the site could edit or improve the texts that lie behind the site: they are based on a careful revision of the same Globe edition that forms the basis of the ubiquitous Moby Shakespeare.

Socializing Online Recent evolution of web software and changes in the expectations of web users provide the opportunity for a potentially radical change in the way scholarly editions are conceived. Social networking software provides a mechanism for integrating comment and feedback from readers into an online edition, perhaps following the Wikipedia model. The result might produce an additional level of annotation, dynamically created by those who actually use the text. There are, of course, significant issues to be considered, most importantly whether annotations of this kind would really be useful. There is also a necessary debate between the admirable democratizing effect of open commentary and the question of scholarly integrity. Can a scholarly site that publishes original work accept comments from any visitor? Is it necessary to undertake continuous review of comments as they are added, with the attendant problem of finding – and funding – someone to act as “gatekeeper” to maintain standards? Even the Wikipedia relies on thousands of volunteers to watch changes so that cases of sabotage are rapidly caught. Since the seminal work by textual theoreticians like Jerome McGann and D. F. McKenzie, we have become accustomed to thinking of the texts we work with as the

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result of the interaction of many contributors: the author, of course, but also the scribes, printers, compositors and even those who made the paper on which the text was printed. A modern reader of an electronic text is experiencing a text where the layers of collaboration are at least one order of magnitude greater, even before the potential addition of social networking. The screen itself will be the end product of many years of research and development, from the old cathode-ray tube to the modern flat screen, each displaying the text in different pixel densities and slightly different colour intensities. The reader can manually change the brightness and contrast and can readily change the size of the font (a boon to the partially-sighted). Behind the screen is the computer that is running the system that supports the software. All will differ: the computer may be a Dell, an IBM, or a Macintosh; the system may be one of many flavours of Windows, Mac OS, or Unix; the software that drives the web browser may in turn be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, or one of the other minor players. Trying to make a given text look much the same on all these platforms and browsers is a major (and expensive) headache for programmer. And this is just what the reader of the online text sees. At the other end of the network is the server, sending out packets of information over the web. The server may equally be of different kinds and will again be working with different software that will produce different results. A further, essential layer of collaboration involves the team that creates the graphic layout of the virtual page, and designs and tests the navigational aids with the aid of usability studies. The text of a Shakespeare play that is displayed on a screen is itself deeply collaborative. Each editor engages in a conversation with the past, producing an extensive collation in the process. Here the electronic edition will be fundamentally different from its print predecessors, since collation is actively accessible from the screen in both conventional and new ways (colour-coding different readings, for example). The Electronic New Variorum Shakespeare on CD-ROM, with programming created by Alan Galey, offers some brilliant examples of the potential of this method of exploring and displaying textual variants. The computer screen also makes the display of variant editions more visually intuitive, most notably in the multiple-text plays like Hamlet, Lear and others; rather than requiring separate pages or volumes (as in the recent Arden III Hamlet), the screen can show through parallel windows or colour-coded text a fully inclusive edition where variant passages can be seen together or separately, and where readers can manipulate the result to create their own preferred or conflated text. When it comes to the explanatory and discursive commentary on the text, there are opportunities to reimagine both the format and the content of annotations in the new medium. The new audiences that the Internet invites to read online texts stimulate further, very basic questions: what is it that viewers and readers need to know? What do they want to know? And here is the crucial stage where social commentary may indeed contribute to an online text, if visitors to the site are given an opportunity to interrogate both the text and its associated critical apparatus. For a scholarly site the risk is that open commentary will give voice not only to those we can learn from, but also to the uninformed, the cranky and the downright obnoxious. The challenge is to find a way to make comment possible without compromising quality, and without requiring intensive, costly intervention by the editor or the manager of the site. One early experiment in this area is the ISE Performance Chronicle, where both invited and self-elected, or guest reviewers can enter reviews of recent plays in production. To control the postings we are relying on the two levels of reviewers, and, for guests, rating

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by the familiar star system to weed out the less useful comments and reviews. There is also a button, “Not suitable for posting” that alerts the manager of the site to check, and if necessary delete, a posting. The challenge, again, is the need to avoid the real danger of being taken over by the anti-Stratfordians, or by a team of reluctant schoolboys with shining morning faces twittering like spammers on their way to school with half-plagiarized assignments.

Social Play Those reluctant schoolboys and schoolgirls may well prefer to spend their time at home, or on their cell phones, interacting socially through multi-player computer games. The electronic medium has proven itself brilliant as an arena for games, from increasingly realistic first-person-shooters to the kind of advanced virtual world of Second Life. An ambitious experiment by Edward Castronova at Indiana University is instructive. In Arden, the World of Shakespeare, Castranova’s aim was to create a multi-player game in a virtual world where players would meet characters from Shakespeare’s plays and answer trivia questions to improve their scores. The result was disappointing; Castranova admitted that as a game “it’s no fun”. A far more successful, massively multi-player game is Second Life (SL). SL is an intricate social networking environment in which players (called “residents”) assume avatars, with which they can move around the conceptual regions of the game, by walking, jumping, flying, or teleporting. Anyone can create an avatar; a basic version is free, but more elaborate avatars and their costumes cost money – there is an entire economy on SL that involves real estate and all kinds of virtual goods and services. Many major institutions, including theatre groups and universities, have bought real estate on SL in order to allow residents to access their services both in the virtual and real worlds. At present, the most prominent Shakespeare connection is the SL Shakespeare Company, which has developed a replica of the Globe theatre, costumes for various plays and the necessary software add-ons to allow for performances. Social networking and social game-playing are areas where once again the speed of change makes it likely that activities that seem current at the moment will in all probability become stale and/or dated very quickly. It remains true that the scholarly and educational world has yet to come to grips with – let alone actually take advantage of – the ludic potential of the medium. Although Indiana University’s attempt to create a multi-player game based on Shakespeare and his work has failed, the gap between the expectation of the gaming community for entertaining, high-end action and graphics, and the educational community for high quality educational values must at some stage be bridged. There remains a wonderful opportunity for the right kind of imagination to create games that are Horatian in their capacity both to delight and instruct.

The Maintained Text Social networking depends on the capacity of the electronic medium to store new data almost without limit, and to permit ongoing changes to data already published on the web. Scholars, on the other hand, are used to print, where a work once published is fixed. The advantage of fixed data is that a text reaches a state where it can be considered finished, and all citation from it will be consistent. On the other hand, once fixed, a work will in due course be out of date, and citations from it will decline as it becomes less

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relevant. An online site can take advantage of the dynamic medium by keeping work up to date as new books appear and as the author discovers more relevant information. Most scholarly sites on the Internet eschew the process of updating once an article, for example, has been published, but an ideal electronic publication will be maintained after it is created. This will require a long-term commitment; it remains to be seen whether the academy will give due credit to the maintenance of texts, as distinct from their initial publication, and whether scholars will be willing to continue their work and to pass it on to their heirs and assigns. As Humanists, we like things to be stable and we like to provide citations to fixed textual objects. But as the electronic medium becomes more dominant it will become clear that the same energy needs to be expended on the maintenance of the content we provide.

An Archived Text As we move towards a system of continuously maintained and updated texts, there is a further, deeply important question: what happens to the older content? What happens to all the work if for whatever reason a site dies? Janet Murray, in a felicitous phrase, warned back in 1997 that we are inadvertently creating the second incunabulum, where vast quantities of information are being lost as hardware and software evolve, no longer backwardly compatible with earlier data formats. This problem is especially vexing in the academic world. A faculty member, or team, produces a fine site and makes it available to the public by open access; then the funding dries up because the project is complete, or the researcher moves on. And the data become subject to bit rot. Both content and the underlying computer code need to be maintained for a resource to be continuingly available and useful, but there are few opportunities for funding the mere maintenance of a database or website. The model assumed by granting agencies is still that of print: once an article or book is published, it needs no maintenance. Or so it seems. Because we are so used to them, we take for granted the immense resources expended on supporting the libraries that preserve our books, from the physical infrastructure, heating, light, and storage to the administrative costs in cataloguing, lending and recalling books as they are used. In the meantime, the digital world has become an almost Darwinian ecology, where projects survive if they generate enough interest in a wider community (successful Open Source programmes are one example), or they become extinct if interest wanes. In a Darwinian ecology, a species flourishes if it adapts, if it learns to change as circumstances change. Survival also favours the most effectively diversified. The rich variety of sites discussed in this chapter augur well for the future of the electronic medium in Shakespeare studies, whatever the speed of change. I began this essay by quoting King John’s lament upon the speed of “Occasion”. The speed of the web’s evolution has been daunting, as the students now entering our universities communicate fluently through texting, Twitter and other sound-bite technologies; but, though challenging, the speed of change need not be seen as daunting in the way that misfortunes overwhelmed King John; libraries now put electronic resources at the fingertips of students that a short decade ago would have been available only to well-funded scholars. In the long term, the speed of change will inevitably diminish, as technology reaches its limits and as the new medium establishes its own expectations and conventions, but in the meantime opportunity beckons, offering Shakespeareans and students of the Humanities a challenge to grasp the potential of the medium.

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Notes 1. The extensive work of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has provided invaluable research and guidance in creating XML structures for typical Humanities texts over more than two decades. See 2. For those who really want to know about the various candidates and the arguments that have been put forward to support them, see the endlessly patient and scholarly discussion of these claims by David Kathman on The Shakespeare Authorship Page at

Further Reading and List of Works Cited All sites were active in November 2010. Those not mentioned in this list can be readily found by a standard web search. Alciato, Andrea and Jean Le Fèvre (1536). Livret des emblemes de maistre Andre Alciat mis en rime francoyse. Paris: C. Wechel. Bate, Jonathan (2009). Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare. (US title Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare). Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin; New York: Random House. Best, Michael (2008). “The Internet Shakespeare Editions: Scholarly Shakespeare on the Web”. Shakespeare 4.3, 221–33. Bolter, J. David (1991). Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ——and Richard Grusin (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carson, Christie (2005). “Designing Shakespeare”. Arts and Humanities Data Service, at Collins, Jeff and Dave Kaufer (2001). DocuScope. Carnegie Mellon University, at Craig, Hugh and Arthur F. Kinney (2009). Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987). “Rhizome”. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 3–25. Fisher, Richard (2009). “Welcome to Appland”. New Scientist 203.2722, 32–6. Gould, Stephen Jay (1992). Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. London: Vintage. Hodgdon, Barbara (2003). “Photography, Theater, Mnemonics; or, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Still”. In Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History, ed. William B. Worthen and Peter Holland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 88–119. Hope, Jonathan and Michael Witmore (2004). “The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading of Shakespeare”. Early Modern Literary Studies 9.3 / Special Issue 12 (January, 2004): 6.1–36, at Jackson, MacDonald P. (2001). “Vocabulary and Chronology: The Case of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”. Review of English Studies 52.205, 59–75. Juola, Patrick (2008). “Killer Applications in Digital Humanities”. Literary and Linguistic Computing 23.1, 73–83. Kott, Jan (1974). Shakespeare Our Contemporary. New York: Norton. Lancashire, Ian (1989). “The Dynamic Text: ALLC/ICCH Conference”. Literary and Linguistic Computing 4.1, 43–50. Landow, George P. (1992). Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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——(1994). Hyper / Text / Theory. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Liu, Alan, “The Transliteracies Topic”. A posting on The Transliteracies Project: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading, at McGann, Jerome J. (1983). A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——(1991). The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ——(1995). “The Rationale of Hypertext”. Institute for Advanced Technology. University of Virginia, at McKenzie, D. F. (1999). Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacLean, Sally-Beth and Alan Somerset (2003–9). “Patrons and Performances”. Records of Early English Drama. University of Toronto, at Murphy, Andrew (2010). “Shakespeare Goes Digital: Three Open Internet Editions”. Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3, 401–14. O’Reilly, Tim (2005). “What is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”, at Raymond, Eric Steven (2000). “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. Thyrsus Enterprises. Version 3.0.

Stephenson, Neal (1992). Snowcrash. New York: Bantam Books. Tancer, Bill (2008). Click: What We Do Online And Why It Matters. New York: Hyperion.

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notes on contributors

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Best is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Victoria. David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. Erin C. Blake is the Curator of Art and Special Collections at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Judith Buchanan is Senior Lecturer in Film and Literature at the University of York. Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. Christie Carson is Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London. Anne-Marie Costantini-Cornède is Professeur Agrégé at the University of Paris Descartes (Paris V). Rodney Stenning Edgecombe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. Balz Engler is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Basel. Richard Foulkes is Emeritus Professor of Theatre History at the University of Leicester. Susanne Greenhalgh is Principal Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at Roehampton University. Adam Hansen is Lecturer in English at Northumbria University. Andrew James Hartley is Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

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Peter Holbrook is Professor of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Literature at the University of Queensland. Alexander C. Y. Huang is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University, Washington, DC. Michael P. Jensen is Adjunct Professor at Southern Oregon University. Edel Lamb is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. Sonia Massai is Reader in Shakespeare Studies at King’s College, University of London. Lucy Munro is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Keele. Marianne Novy is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Stephen Purcell is Assistant Professor in Shakespeare and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. Fiona Ritchie is Assistant Professor of Drama and Theatre at McGill University. Kate Rumbold is Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham. Julie Sanders is Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham. Amy Scott-Douglass is Assistant Professor of English at Marymount University. Adrian Streete is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. Fran Teague is the Josiah Meigs Professor of English at the University of Georgia. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at Loyola Marymount University. Christopher R. Wilson is Professor of Music at the University of Hull. Ramona Wray is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast.

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Index

INDEX

Illustrations are indicated by italic and notes by “n”. acoustics in theatres, 137–8, 334, 345n, 546–7 acting style film, 470, 476, 477–8, 479 radio, 546–7, 553, 554 stage, 283, 286–7, 294, 299, 302–3 see also theatrical aesthetics action hero, Hamlet as, 492, 505, 510 Actors Shakespeare Project, 341–5 actresses, 276, 282, 284–6, 304–5, 477–8 Adams, John, 530 adaptation change of ending, 248, 275, 276, 277 changes to characters, 241–2 Shakespeare as adaptor, 74, 240, 260 studies, 173, 176 theory, 240–1 see also translation African-American music, 226–9 Age of Kings, An (television), 525 Allot, Richard, 90 Allot’s collection, 90 American Conservatory Theatre (television), 528 American Shakespeare companies, 336–41 Amex (publisher), 389, 390, 391 Amleto (film), 476 Animated Tales series (television), 531–2 anniversaries, 446, 541–2, 543, 554 bicentenary jubilee 1769, 299, 446–8, 454, 457 tercentenary 1864, 299–300 anthologies, 88–103 antimasque, 122, 206–8, 212 anti-Semitism, 52–4, 57, 360–3, 515, 527 Antony and Cleopatra, dance, 215 Apotheosis of Shakespeare, The (relief), 436 apprentices, 377–8 Archer, William, 294

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Arlaud-Duchange portrait, 415, 416 Arlequin Cruello (burlesque), 248–9 Armstrong, Craig, 182 art illustrations, 20–2, 21, 26–7, 97, 388–405, 424–8 in children’s stories, 363–7, 365, 366, 367 pictures, 19, 409–33 sculpture, 1–2, 27, 93, 282, 411, 412, 435–42 Art of English Poetry, 92–3 As You Like It disguise, 265, 267–8 films, 504–5, 511 music, 121, 228, 231 novels, 56, 57–9 poetry, 37, 38, 42 stage productions, 135 television, 523 Ashton, Frederick, 210–13 Atkinson, Brooks, 190 attribution studies, 568 audience diversity, 296–7, 315, 339–40 auteurs, 502–8, 518 authenticity, 298, 311–16, 451–3, 485, 487 ayres, 120–1 Bad Sleep Well, The (film), 491 Balanchine, George, 191, 203, 210–12 ballads, 223, 224–5 ballet, 200–16, 486 circle and square shapes, 200–1, 203–5 fairies in, 202–4, 206–10, 486 banned plays, 70, 278 Banquet, The (film), 78, 79, 515–16 Barnes, Todd Landon, 344–5 Barry, Elizabeth, 285–6 Barry, Spranger, 287 Bate, Jonathan, 425, 450, 451

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index

BBC Television Shakespeare series, 522, 526–9, 534–5 Beatles, 536–7 Beauties of Shakespear (book), 93–5, 96–7 Beauties of Shakespeare, The, 94–5 Beerbohm, Max, 305–6 Benson, Frank, 305–6, 317–18 Berlioz, Hector, 142–3 Berryman, John, 44 Betterton, Thomas, 285, 425 Bhardwaj, Vishal, 506 Big Life, The (musical), 195 biography see Shakespeare Blackfriars theatre, 262 Blackie’s Stories Old and New (children’s book), 368–9 blood sports, 262–3 Blue Avenger Cracks the Code (book), 385 Boethius, Severinus, 126–7, 128, 129 Boitard, François, 425, 426 Boito, Arrigo, 149–50, 152–3, 155, 163 Bomb-itty of Errors (musical), 193–4, 196 Bowdler, Thomas and Henrietta, 96, 352, 356–7, 359 bowdlerization, 143, 352; see also censorship Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard, The (book), 404 boy players, 266–9 Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, 429–30 Boys from Syracuse, The (musical), 188–96 Branagh, Kenneth, 480–1, 488, 502–5, 516, 519 Bridge, Frank, 174 British Museum Shakespeare Exhibition 1923, 454 Brook, Peter, 319–20, 321, 324–5, 327, 484, 500n Bruster, Douglas, 270 Buhler, Stephen M., 225–6, 228–9 Burdett, Lois, 365, 366, 369 burlesque, 185–6, 248–50 Bysshe, Edward, 92–3 Caliban by the Yellow Sands (pageant masque), 448, 455–6 Calvert, Charles, 300–2 Cambridge Shakespeare (edition), 26, 29, 30–4, 32 camera effects, 488–97, 503, 511, 517–18, 525, 531 Capell, Edward, 28–31 Capell edition, 28–31 Capuletti e i Montecchi, I (opera), 215 Cardillo, Barby, 373 Carson, Neil, 313–14 Cartelli, Thomas, 54, 164, 456 casting, 245–6, 266, 278, 304, 327–8

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catches, 119, 224 Catharine and Petruchio (play), 279–80 Cat’s Eye (novel), 64–5 CBS Shakespeare Festival (radio), 553–4 CCTV in performance, 518, 531, 533 celebrities, 187, 191, 486, 526 celebrity culture, 428–9, 469, 518 censorship, 75, 77–8, 143, 352, 472 banned plays, 70, 278 see also bowdlerization Chambers, Colin, 317, 320, 322 Chandos portrait, 413–15, 438 Cheque, Mate, The (comic book), 404 Chetwood, William, 285 chiaroscuro, 486, 489–90, 492, 496 Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, 332–3 child performers, 304 Children of Light (novel), 59 children’s companies, 260–1, 262 Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, The (film), 509 children’s Shakespeare, 349–74 Chimes at Midnight (film), 495 choreography, 137, 191, 201, 208, 210, 214, 216 Churchill, Charles, 287–8 Chute, Marchette, 353–4, 360, 362–3 Cibber, Colley, 285–6 Cibber, Susannah, 285, 288 Clarke, Mary Cowden, 349–50, 355–6 Classical Comics (CC), 393–6, 397 classical music, 169–83 Cobbe portrait, 422 collected works, 88–103 colonialism, 62–3, 327 Comedy of Errors, The musicals, 188–96 translation, 70–1 comic books, 366, 371, 388–405 commerce commercial theatre, 258, 259–61, 270–2, 340 global finance, 312–13, 316–17, 318–23 marketing, 224–5, 457–8, 469, 470–1, 472, 475 community outreach, 195, 344, 372–3 complete works, 88–103 confinement as a theme, 494, 504 consumer society, 221–2, 378–9, 518 Coriolanus adaptations, 241 film, 517 music, 123, 134 television, 524 costume, 136, 246, 265, 307, 327, 507 disguise, 266–8 Cotgrave, John, 90–1 Cotgrave’s collection, 90–1

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index country music, 229–33 court, royal, 258, 261, 262, 270–1 Covent Garden theatre, 293, 294–5 Cymbeline children’s stories, 352 music, 182 Dah Boyz (musical), 195 dance, 171–3, 186, 191, 200–16, 486, 497, 503 Daniel Deronda (novel), 58, 60–1 Dating Hamlet: Ophelia’s Story (novel), 383–4 Davenant, William, 145–6, 274, 281 Davies, Thomas, 285, 286, 288 Days of Significance (play), 247, 250–5 de Grazia, Margreta, 19 Director’s Theatre, 310–11, 319, 323–5 disguise, 266–8 Diviners, The (novel), 62–3 Divisions of the Kingdoms, The (book), 33 Dobson, Michael, 240 documentaries, 534, 535 Dom Casmurro (novel), 55 Domingo, Plácido, 163–4 Donkey Show, The (musical), 194 drama and Shakespeare, 239–55 Droeshout portrait, 410–13, 410, 421 Drury Lane theatre, 283 Dryden, John, 274 du Guernier, Louis, 425–8, 427 Ducis, Jean François, 247–8 Duke of Saxe-Meiningen’s company, 306 early modern music, 119–38 early modern popular music, 223–5 early music movement, 135–8 education, 193, 388–96, 473, 526, 534 compulsory elements, 99–102, 372–3 in schools, 96, 380–3, 458–60 youth work, 344, 373 Elam, Keir, 137 Electronic New Variorum Shakespeare, The (CDROM), 572 electronic texts, 558–9, 562–3, 563, 567–70, 571–3 Elgar, Edward, 175–6 Ellington, Duke, 227 Emanuel, Giovanni, 152–3 exhibitions, 445–55 fairies in ballet, 202–4, 206–10, 486 Fairy-Queen, The (opera), 146 Falstaff (symphonic study), 175–6 Family Shakespeare (children’s book), 96, 352, 356–7, 359 Fashionable Tragedian, The (pamphlet), 303–4 Faucit, Helen, 304 festivals, 193, 307, 313, 318, 445–61

BURNETT PRINT.indd 581

581

Field-Pickering, Janet, 364, 371 film, 455, 467–520 camera effects, 488–97, 503, 511, 517–18, 525, 531 film noir, 488–90, 491–2 on television, 522 silent film, 467–81 stage versus film, 468–9, 473–4, 476 see also titles of individual films finance see commerce Finzi, Gerard, 180 “First Sonata on Shakespearean Characters”, 169–74 Florizel and Perdita (play), 279 Fokine, Mikhail, 202–3 Folger Shakespeare Library, 313, 442–4 footnotes, 12, 28–9, 31, 419–21 “found performance spaces”, 341–5 frontispiece illustrations see illustrations Gammons, David, 341–3 Garfield, Leon, 358, 360, 363, 366, 531 Garrick, David, 278–80, 282–3, 286–9, 429, 438–9 bicentenary jubilee 1769, 299, 446–8, 454, 457 gender author approach, 354, 355–6, 358 cross-dressing, 266–8, 282, 284, 505, 515 music, 224, 225–6, 228–9 single gender cast, 137, 245–6 women playing male roles, 60, 477–8, 507–8, 529 Get Over It (film), 509 Gilberton (publisher), 389, 390, 391 Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, The (book), 349–50, 355–6 globalization, 72, 197, 306, 324, 451, 518; see also multicultural Globe theatre (original), 224, 258–9, 261–2 Globe theatre Bankside (new), 315, 336, 455, 458 authentic performances, 136, 137–8, 314–16 Globe theatres around the world, 312–13, 446 Gobbi, Tito, 161–3, 162 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 59–60, 175 Golden Treasury, The (collection), 98 Grain of Wheat, A (novel), 62 graphic novels, 398–400 Greenhalgh, Susanne, 380 Gunn, Thom, 44, 45–8 Guthrie, Tyrone, 313–14 Hall of Fame (television series), 524–5 Hamlet adaptations, 241–4, 281 art, 75, 171, 425–8, 426, 427

11/08/2011 15:13

582

index

Hamlet (cont.) ballet, 212 comic books, 398–9 films, 473–4, 476–8, 480, 491–3, 511–12, 518: Banquet, The, 78, 79, 515–16; Branagh, 481, 503–4, 514; Olivier, 171–2, 488–90; Zeffirelli, 505–6, 510 music, 134, 171–2, 174–6, 224, 228, 231–2 musicals, 197–8, 249–50, 280 novels, 59–62, 64, 383–5 operas, 201 poetry, 41 radio, 541–3, 545–7, 550, 552–5 stage productions, 74, 176, 242–4, 245, 280, 303 television, 524–5, 533, 536 translation, 70, 76–7 Hamlet as action hero, 492, 505, 510 Hamlet: Drama of Vengence (film), 476–8, 480 Hamlet festival, Kronborg Castle, Elsinore, 448, 451–3, 452, 457 Hamlet Goes Business (film), 491–3 Hamlet – the Musical, 197 Hamlet Travestie (burlesque), 249–50, 280 Hamlet 2 (film), 193, 386n Hamlet II: Ophelia’s Revenge (novel), 384–5 Hanmer, Thomas, 26–8, 29 Hanmer’s edition, 26–8, 29 Harleian miniature, 415 Harlem Duet (play), 450 Harrington, Mary Edgeworth (novel), 52–3 Hedley, Philip, 195 Heminge and Condell edition, 409–11 Henry IV children’s stories, 352 film, 495 music, 132, 133, 175–6 poetry, 37–8 stage productions, 71 translation, 71 Henry V films, 487–8, 502–3 poetry, 38 radio, 550 stage productions, 263–4, 295, 301–2, 305–6 television, 523–4, 527–8 translation, 71, 73 Henry VI stage productions, 278 television, 529 Henry VIII film, 469 music, 122, 132 Henze, Hans Werner, 169–74 Hepokoski, James, 149, 150, 152 Her/His Majesty’s Theatre, 306–7 Hildy, Franklin J., 311–13

BURNETT PRINT.indd 582

hip-hop music, 228–9 History and Fall of Caius Marius, The (play), 277 History of Shylock the Jew, The (book), 350, 361 Hogarth, William, 428, 429 Hughes, Ted, 42–4 illustrations, 20–2, 21, 26–7, 97, 388–405, 424–8 children’s stories, 363–7, 365, 366, 367 immigration, 455–6 imprisonment as a theme, 494, 504 Indigo Girls, 226 instruments, 120, 123–5, 131–4, 137–8, 170, 177–9; see also music intercultural see multicultural internet see multimedia Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE), 562–3, 566, 567 Performance Chronicle, 572–3 Irving, Henry, 302–4 Ivanhoe (novel), 53–4 Jane Eyre (novel), 57–8, 63–4 Jannings, Emil, 479 Janssen, Gheerart, 437 Janssen portrait, 419–21, 420 jazz music, 227 Jennens, Charles, 419–21 Jennens’ edition, 419–21 Johnson, Samuel, 11–12, 39–40, 276 Johnson edition, 26, 28, 33 Johnson-Steevens edition, 29, 30 jokes, 186, 187, 190, 198, 249–50 Jonson, Ben, 44–7, 138, 409–10, 437–8 Jorgens, Jack, 485 Juliet and her Nurse (painting), 430 Julius Caesar film, 471 music, 133 radio, 547, 553 stage productions, 263, 306, 336 television, 523, 524 translation, 74 Juvenile Edition of Shakspeare, The (book), 352–3, 354 Kean, Charles, 298–9 Kean, Edmund, 293–4 Kemble, John Philip, 283–4, 289, 293–4 Kiley, Brendan, 332–3 Kill Shakespeare (comic book), 404 King John (film), 468, 470–1, 480, 560 King Lear children’s stories, 369 comic books, 395–6 films, 490, 496–8, 500n

11/08/2011 15:13

index happy ending, 143, 241, 275 music, 124, 125, 130–1 novels, 49, 50, 63–5 opera, 144 poetry, 41, 42 radio, 553 stage productions, 294–5, 342–3: Asian plays, 80–6, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85; Nahum Tate, 241, 274, 275, 276, 277 television, 529 text editions, 14–34, 419, 562 translation, 78–86 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang von, 180–1 Kozintsev, Grigori, 490, 493 Kurosawa, Akira, 496–8 Lamb, Charles and Mary, 75–6, 76, 350–1, 354–6, 359–61, 364–6 Lanier, Douglas, 223, 226–7, 445–6, 510, 544–5 Last Days of Shylock, The (novel), 54 Lear (Edward Bond play), 242 Lear (pan-Asian play), 83–6, 84, 85 Lear Is Here, 80–1, 81, 82, 83–4 Lee, Peggy, 225–6 Leicester Square statue of Shakespeare, 438–9, 440 Lessing, Otto, 441 Letters to Juliet (film), 2 Lewes, G. H., 294 Lewis, C. A., 219 Lindley, David, 119, 122, 125, 138, 181, 224 Lindsay, Vachel, 476 linguistic patterns, 568–9 Liszt, Franz, 174–6 Little Dorrit (novel), 60 Livewire (comic book), 392–3 localization, 72, 192, 196, 233, 286–7, 315–16, 506 Shakespeare as local experience, 317, 318–19, 324–5, 329, 332–45, 537–8 see also multicultural London Calling, 1600 (radio), 549 lost songs, 120–1 Love’s Labour’s Lost music, 120–1 musicals, 187, 195, 504 poetry, 38–9, 40, 41, 42 translation, 73 Luhrmann, Baz, 182, 220, 382, 517–18 Lyceum Theatre, 302 Mabie, Hamilton Wright, 368 Macauley, Elizabeth Wright, 361–2 Macbeth children’s stories, 354, 364, 365, 369 comic books, 398 dance, 214

BURNETT PRINT.indd 583

583

films, 469–70, 474, 493–4, 506, 517–18 music, 173, 176–8 opera, 143, 176 radio, 542, 552 stage productions, 274–5, 288–9 television, 525, 528–9, 530–1, 532 text edition, 562 MacKaye, Percy, 448, 455–6 Macklin, Charles, 287 McLuskie, Kathleen, 260, 310–11 McMillan, Scott, 185 MacOwen, Michael, 523–4 Macready, William Charles, 292–3, 293–6 madrigals, 119–20 Magee, Brian, 148 Malone, Edmond, 26, 29–30 Malone’s edition, 26, 29–30 Mama Day (novel), 63 Manchester, 300–2 manga, 396–400, 401 Manifold, John S., 123 Maqbool (film), 506 Markels, Julian, 64 marketing, 224–5, 457–8, 469, 475 Marsden, Jean, 98 Marshall, Cynthia, 221 Marshall, William, 411–13, 412 Marshall’s engraving, 411–13, 412 Martinelli, Giovanni, 156–9, 158 masque, 122–3, 205–6, 270–1, 275, 435–6, 498 Maurel, Victor, 153–4, 155, 161–2 Maxwell, Caroline, 352–3, 354 Measure for Measure children’s stories, 352, 356–8 music, 131, 135, 181 stage production, 246 television, 528, 530, 533 Memorial Theatre, Stratford, 300, 306, 318, 552 Mendelssohn, Felix, 179, 182, 202, 209–11 Merchant of Venice, The anti-Semitism, 52–4, 57, 360–3, 515, 527 children’s stories, 350, 360–3 films, 515 music, 123, 124, 127, 128 novels, 52–4 opera, 142 stage productions, 287, 303 television, 527 translation, 70, 73–4 Merry Wives of Windsor, The stage production, 260 television, 528 translation, 73 youth, 378 Metamorphoses, 74

11/08/2011 15:13

584

index

Midsummer Night’s Dream, A ballet, 179, 201–3, 206, 208–9, 211–13 children’s stories, 354 dance, 203–5, 206–7, 208 films, 179, 473, 486, 508–10 music, 134, 172, 173, 179, 209–11, 229, 233 musicals, 191, 194 poetry, 41–2 radio, 550 stage productions, 242, 320, 321, 324–8, 326, 341 television, 532–3, 536–7 theatrical references, 265–6, 267 translation, 73 Millais, John Everett, 75, 171 Miller, Jonathan, 526 Miller, Naomi J., 368, 369 Milton, John, 20, 44 Misery of Civil War, The (play), 278 mixed consorts, 121–2 Moby Dick (novel), 64 Moby edition, 561–2 modern stage, 310–29 montage, 486, 494, 496, 504, 513 monuments, 436–44 Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated (book), 94 Morley, Henry, 297 Morley, Thomas, 126, 128 moving picture lecturing, 473 Mr. Garrick as Richard III (painting), 428–9, 429 Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet (website), 562 Much Ado About Nothing film, 503 music, 120, 125, 180–1 musical, 191 radio, 552 stage productions, 247, 250–5, 288 television, 532, 533 Mullin, Michael, 528 multicultural, 72–3, 233–4, 311, 323–4 audience diversity, 296–7, 315, 339–40 cultural adaptation, 70, 71, 244–5, 327–8, 496–8, 551 global events, 316–23, 448–61, 520 international collaboration, 324–5, 448–61, 520 international distribution, 196–8, 306, 315, 511 tours, 295–6, 299, 302, 303, 316–23 see also globalization; localization; translation multilingual see translation multimedia electronic texts, 34, 558–9, 562–3, 563, 567–70, 571–3

BURNETT PRINT.indd 584

in performance, 220, 518, 531, 533–4 online, 102–3, 558–74 see also recordings Munro, Lucy, 313 Murphy, Andrew, 29, 96, 287 music as metaphor, 126–34, 170 concord/discord, 128–9, 169, 172–3, 175, 177 in performance, 134–8 incidental, 179–82, 209–10 instruments, 120, 123–5, 131–4, 137–8, 170, 177–9 interludes, 262 lost songs, 120–1 “of the spheres”, 127–8 see also specific genres of music musical theatre, 185–98, 504 My Shakespeare (television), 537 My Son’s Story (novel), 56 National Endowment for the Arts, 344–5, 345n, 372 Nature of Blood, The (novel), 57 Nesbit, Edith, 357–9, 362, 364, 366, 366, 367, 368 Newman, Ernest, 202–3 Nicoll, Allardyce, 205–6 Nicolson, Brinsley, 301 Nicolson’s editions, 301 Nielsen, Asta, 477–8 Nights at the Circus (novel), 58–9 No Fear Shakespeare (graphic novels), 398–9 No Fear Shakespeare series (books), 380 No Telephone to Heaven (novel), 63 Noble, Adrian, 322 Noh drama, 493, 497 Norbert Smith – A Life (television), 536 Norton Anthology of English Literature, 101 nostalgia, 451, 514–16, 518, 548 novels, 49–66, 383–5 Odell, George C. D., 300 O’Ferrall, George More, 523 Oh, Brother! (musical), 193 Old Price riots, 293 Omkara (film), 506 online media see multimedia Open Source movement, 571 opera, 142–65 Operation Shylock (novel), 54 Ophelia (painting), 75, 171 Orgel, Stephen, 11 Orlando (novel), 58 Oroonoko (play), 54 Otello (opera), 148–9, 150–64

11/08/2011 15:13

index Othello children’s stories, 358–60, 364, 367 comic book, 371 dance, 214 film, 164, 479, 494, 506, 511 music, 121, 123–4, 129, 178–9, 248 novels, 54–7 opera, 148–9, 150–64 radio, 549, 551, 552 stage production, 244, 246, 247–9, 265, 284, 450 television, 532 translations, 71, 74, 450 Othello, ou le Maure de Venise (play), 247–8 Outkast, 228 Oval Books, 393–4, 394, 395–6 “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, 179, 182, 202, 209–11 Ovid, 74 Oxford Shakespeare (edition), 33–4 Packer, Tina, 360, 366 pageant, 300, 448, 455–6 paintings see pictures Parker, Maceo, 228 Parker, Roger, 148 parody, 491, 512, 536, 548–9 patent theatres, 280, 284, 292–4 patronage, 19, 259, 261, 295, 299 Pavier, Thomas, 14–17 Pavier edition, 17 Pendulum Classics, 391 Perachi, Paul, 373 Performance (television), 530 Pericles music, 127, 133, 233–4 radio, 233–4 stage production, 297 Peterson, Roy, 423, 424 Petipa, Marius, 202–3 Phelps, Samuel, 296–7 photography, 298, 304 pictorialism on film, 470, 487–8, 494 on stage, 293, 295, 304, 306–7 see also theatrical aesthetics Picture This! Shakespeare (comic book), 392–3 pictures, 19, 409–33 illustrations, 20–2, 21, 26–7, 97, 388–405, 424–8 in children’s stories, 363–7, 365, 366, 367 Pierre (novel), 60 pilgrimage, 451–4, 458–9 Plautus, 189–90 Play On! (musical), 194 Playfair, Nigel, 135

BURNETT PRINT.indd 585

585

Playing Shakespeare (television), 537 Poel, William, 135, 307, 311–13 poetry, 37–48 point-of-view, 186, 384, 490, 495, 503, 511 Poisonwood Bible, The (novel), 65 politics, 158–61, 277–8, 318–23, 448–51, 455–7, 511–12 Pope, Alexander, 13, 22 Pope’s edition, 22–6, 23, 27, 93, 415–19 popular music, 219–34, 517 early modern popular music, 223–5 portraits, 19, 409–24 sculpture, 1–2, 27, 93, 282, 435–42 postmodernism, 498–9, 516–18 Prince’s Theatre, Manchester, 300–2 printers and publishers, 11–34 prints see pictures Pritchard, Hannah, 288 Project Gutenberg (online), 561–2 Propeller company, 314–15 Prospero and Caliban (essay), 62 Prospero’s Books (film), 498–9, 510 public monuments, 436–44 publicity, 224–5, 457–8, 469, 470–1, 472, 475 Purcell, Henry, 146, 179–80 Quin, James, 286–7 quotations, collections of, 89, 92–3, 100, 101–3 race, 191, 194–5, 226–9 Othello, 54–7, 359–60, 506, 511 Othello in opera, 150–2, 153, 155, 156–9, 163–4 radio, 159, 180, 541–56 Ralf, Torsten, 159 Ran (film), 496–8 rap music, 228–9 Real Thing At Last, The (film), 474 realism, 152–4, 488, 493, 495 recordings film, 220, 382, 480, 519 musicals, 187, 197 opera, 153, 155–64, 165 stage performance, 565–7 television, 526, 534 Renaissance stage, 258–72 repertory, 147–8, 258, 259–62, 280–4 Restoration stage, 274–89 Reviving Ophelia (book), 385 Richard II stage productions, 74, 278, 298 television, 525, 527, 528, 529 Richard III art, 428–9, 429 films, 473, 514, 522 music, 124, 132–3, 169–70, 172–3 stage productions, 242, 245, 276–7, 278

11/08/2011 15:13

586

index

Richard III (cont.) television, 522, 529, 536 Richard III: An Arab Tragedy (play), 242 Richmond, Velma Bourgeois, 352, 356, 363 Ricordi, Giulio, 150, 152, 153 Ricordi’s production book, 153 Rockabye Hamlet (musical), 186 Rokison, Abigail, 314–15 Rome and Jewels (hip-hop ballet), 194 Romeo and Juliet adverts, 188, 457 art, 1–2, 430, 431 comic books, 394–5, 397–8, 397, 401 dance, 194, 215–16 film, 1, 2, 78, 474–5, 484, 486–7: Baz Luhrmann, 182, 200, 382, 517–18 music, 71, 134, 143, 215, 225–6, 228–9 musicals, 381 opera, 215 poetry, 45–6 radio, 549 stage productions, 74, 77, 243, 277, 279 television, 527, 536, 537–8 translations, 71, 77–8 youth, 381–2 Roméo et Juliette (symphony), 71, 143 Rosenberg, Martin, 524–5 Roubiliac, Louis-François, 439 Rowe, Nicholas, 20–2, 281–2, 413–15, 424 Rowe’s 1709 edition, 20–2, 281–2, 413–15, 424 Rowe’s 1714 edition, 415 royal court, 258, 261, 262, 270–1 Rozmovits, Linda, 362, 369 RSC, 313, 315–16, 316–23, 340 RSC Complete Works Festival, 81, 250–2, 450, 454, 455, 458 Sadler’s Wells Theatre, 296–7 Sanders, Julie, 125, 195 Sanders portrait, 421, 423 Sandman (comic book), 402–3 Sargent, G. F., 430–2 Satanic Verses, The (novel), 57 scenery, 435–6 Schlegel, August, 150, 152 Schoch, Richard W., 298 Scotland, PA (film), 517 sculpture, 1–2, 27, 93, 282, 435–42 in Stratford, 411, 421, 436–7 Sea, The Sea, The (novel), 63 Seaboard Publishing, 389–90, 391 Season of Migration to the North (novel), 55–6 SelfMadeHero publisher (SMH), 399–400 Seng, Peter J., 126 serialized Shakespeare (television), 524–6 “Shakespeare” biography, 106–15, 534–9, 554–5

BURNETT PRINT.indd 586

Britishness, 88, 99, 317, 327–8, 551–2 canonization, 20–33, 240, 255, 282–3, 445–61 compulsory in education, 88, 99–101, 380–2 cultural icon, 11–12, 144, 146, 222, 316, 327–8 high and low culture, 182, 188, 190, 194, 219, 230, 249 house, 299 in fiction, 61, 385, 403–4 morality, 95, 467 name as authority, 14, 15 national poet, 91, 274, 299, 551–2 natural genius, 24, 143 portraits, 19, 409–24 sculpture, 27, 93, 282, 435–42 wisdom, 97–8 Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (book), 101 Shakespeare Can Be Fun (book), 365, 369 Shakespeare Comic Book Company (SCBC), 393–4, 394, 395–6 “Shakespeare Festival”, Aquinas Grammar School, 459–60 Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Ontario, 314, 318, 450, 457 Shakespeare, From Page to Stage (book), 100–1 Shakespeare in American Communities project (NEA), 344–5, 372 Shakespeare in Love (film), 106–7, 513, 514 “Shakespeare in Quarto” (website), 34 “Shakespeare in the Courts” (outreach), 373 Shakespeare in Time of War (book), 99–100 Shakespeare-Iqbal Festival, 450–1, 456–7 Shakespeare Ladies Club, 93, 282 Shakespeare Lives! (television), 537 Shakespeare Music Catalogue, The, 189, 192, 196 Shakespeare in Perspective (television), 534 Shakespeare Restor’d (book), 24–6 Shakespeare Revival of 1738, 93 Shakespeare Set Free series (books), 380 Shakespeare Stories (book), 358, 360, 363, 366, 531 Shakespeare Wallah (film), 69 Shakespeare was a Big George Jones Fan (film), 230–3 ShakespeaRe-Told (television), 532–3 Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (book), 138, 311–13 Shakespearean language, 93, 98, 544, 548, 549, 555 “Shakespearean Rag” (song), 227 “Shakespeareana” (festival), 458–60, 459, 461 Shaking Hands with Shakespeare (book), 380 Shaw, Bernard, 303 Siddons, Sarah, 288–9, 293

11/08/2011 15:13

index “Sigh no more, ladies” (song), 120 silent film, 467–81 Sillars, Stuart, 425 Skinhead Hamlet, The (play), 242–3 Slings and Arrows (television), 538–9 Smallwood, Robert, 325 Smiley, Jane, 49–50, 51 Smith, Bruce R., 225 Smith, Charles Alphonso, 351 social class, 51, 146, 229–30, 243, 509, 548 social networking sites, 570, 571–3, 573 soliloquies, 175, 177, 241, 249–50, 531, 545 sonatas, 169–70, 170–4 songs, 126, 134–7, 181–2, 503, 504 Sonnets anthology, 72 music, 129, 173–4, 234 radio, 550 translation, 70 sound effects, 545–6, 553 sounds of Shakespeare’s age, 549 souvenirs, 99, 451, 452 special effects, 186, 275, 525 sponsorship, 455, 457 Spread of the Eagle, The (television), 525 stage directions, 14, 20, 29, 120–1, 123 stationers, 11–34 statues see sculpture Steevens, George, 12, 29 Sternfeld, F. W., 125–6, 135 Stevens, Wallace, 38 Stories from Shakespeare (book), 353–4, 360, 362–3 Story of Edgar Sawtelle, The (novel), 62 Stratford-upon-Avon, 299–300, 306 sculpture, 411, 421, 436–7 Strauss, Richard, 176–8 subscription only websites, 564–5 Swingin’ the Dream (musical), 191, 193 Sylvester, Charles H., 369 symphonic poems, 171, 174–9 tableaux, 301–2, 497–8 Take Your Choice (radio), 549 Tales from Shakespeare (Lambs’ book), 75–6, 76, 350–1, 354–6, 359–61, 364–6 Tales from Shakespeare (Packer’s book), 360, 366 Tales of the Drama (book), 361–2 Tamagno, Francesco, 150, 152, 154–5, 154 Tamer Tamed, The (play), 239–40, 241 Taming of the Shrew, The children’s stories, 349–50, 358, 366 dance, 213 films, 383, 481 music, 129–30, 133 musicals, 191, 193

BURNETT PRINT.indd 587

587

radio, 551, 553 stage productions, 239–40, 241, 245, 246, 279–80, 565–6 television, 528, 532 Tar Baby (novel), 63 Taymor, Julie, 506–7 technology see multimedia teenagers, 344, 377–86 teenpix, 378, 382–3, 516 television, 382, 459, 522–39 Tempest, The ballet, 201, 213 children’s stories, 365–6, 368 comic books, 394 dance, 204, 207–8, 213 film, 469, 498–9, 507–8, 510 music, 119, 121–3, 170–1, 180, 182, 224 novels, 62–3, 65 opera, 144, 275 pageant-masque, 455–6 stage productions, 242, 246, 258, 262, 269–72, 274, 276 television, 526 Tempête, Une (play), 242 10 Things I Hate about You (film), 382, 383 Terris, Olwen, 522 Terry, Ellen, 302, 303, 304–5 Theatre Royal, Manchester, 300–1 theatres “found performance spaces”, 341–5 indoor and outdoor, 121–3, 180, 259, 261–72, 334–6, 338–9 local, 192, 315, 318, 324, 327–8, 336–41 patent, 280, 284, 292–4 reconstruction, 311–12; see also Globe theatre size, 292, 333–4 see also names of individual theatres theatrical aesthetics melodrama, 152–3, 154, 155 “Penny Arcade Nightmares” (PAN), 507–8 realism, 152–4, 488, 493, 495 scenery, 265, 275, 283, 297, 435–6 setting, 246, 479, 489–90, 503–4, 516–18 spectacle, 269, 271–2, 275, 279, 297–8, 469 staginess on film, 486, 487–8, 523–5 staging, 261–9, 325 tableaux, 301–2, 497–8 see also acting style; pictorialism Theobold, Lewis, 13, 22–6 Theobald’s edition, 24–6, 28, 415 “There is a willow grows aslant a brook” (song), 171, 174 Thousand Acres, A (novel), 50, 65 thriller genre, 491, 492, 511 Throne of Blood (film), 493

11/08/2011 15:13

588

index

Timon of Athens music, 123, 227 poetry, 43 television, 526 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (play), 240 Titus (film), 507–8 Titus Andonicus children’s stories, 352, 353–4 film, 507–8 music, 123, 124, 225 stage production, 341 translation, 74 Tonson family, 12, 26, 282 touring exhibition, 454–5 tourism, 451–4 tours, 261, 295–6, 299, 302, 303, 316–23 Tovey, Noel, 327–8 transcultural see multicultural translation, 68–86 change of play’s title, 69–70 in Shakespeare’s plays, 72–4, 173 into modern English, 242–4, 389–90, 393–5, 532–3 into other languages, 70–2, 76–8, 80–5, 550 see also adaptation; multicultural Tree, Herbert Beerbohm, 306–7, 468–71 Triangle-Reliance studios, 469–70 Troilus and Cressida music, 135 poetry, 46 radio, 549 stage production, 135, 274 Troyens, Les (opera), 142 tuckets, 124 Twelfth Night disguised gender, 77, 109, 266, 267 films, 514–15 music, 119, 133, 136–7, 173, 181, 224 musicals, 194 radio, 549 stage production, 136–8, 263 television, 523, 530–1, 533 translation, 77 Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (book), 357–9, 362, 364, 366, 366, 367, 368 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The music, 131, 132 musical, 187 radio, 550 stage production, 450 Ulysses (novel), 61–2 updating see adaptation; translation van der Gucht engraving, 413–15, 414 Verdi, Giuseppe, 143–4, 149, 150–2, 153–5

BURNETT PRINT.indd 588

Vertue, George, 413, 415–19, 417, 418 Victoria, Queen, 295, 298, 304 Victorian stage, 292–308 violence, 352, 353–4, 373, 497, 507–8 Vitagraph, 471 Völker, Franz, 159–61, 160 Wagner, Richard, 148–9, 159–61 Walsh, Marcus, 27–8, 30 war, 158–61, 252–5, 277–8, 301–2, 488 propaganda, 99, 456 Warburton edition, 26 Warde, Frederick, 473 Warde’s recitals and commentary, 473 Wars of the Roses, The (television), 526 Water with Berries (novel), 62 Welles, Orson, 494–6, 552–3 Wells, Stanley, 33, 310, 528 Werstine, Paul, 30 West Side Story (musical), 187, 189, 381 When Romeo Met Juliet (television), 538 “Where the bee sucks, there suck I” (song), 121 Wikipedia, 570–1, 571 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (novel), 59–60, 175 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (film), 182, 220, 382, 517–18 William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (film), 515 Williams, Marcia, 366–8 Williams, Roy, 252–5 “Willow Song” (song), 121, 178, 224, 248 Wilson, Christopher R., 144, 146, 223 Wilson, John, 121 Windsor Castle Theatricals, 295, 298 Winter’s Tale, The bear, 263 music, 223, 225 stage productions, 246, 279, 283 statue, 41, 436 Woman’s Prize, The (play), 239–40, 241 women see gender Wood, Graham, 187 world music, 233–4 Wright, Thomas, 223 Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro, 496 young adult literature, 383–5, 388–405 Young, Stark, 190 youth culture, 344, 366, 371, 377–86, 388–405, 516 Zeffirelli, Franco, 505–6 Zenatello, Giovanni, 156, 157 Ziegler, Georgianna, 369

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