The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance 9780190498788, 9780190498801, 9780190498795, 9780190873493, 0190498781

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

SHA K E SP E A R E A N D   DA N C E

The Oxford Handbook of

SHAKESPEARE AND DANCE Edited by

LYNSEY MCCULLOCH and

BRANDON SHAW

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: McCulloch, Lynsey, 1974– editor. | Shaw, Brandon, 1975– editor. Title: The Oxford handbook of Shakespeare and dance / edited by Lynsey McCulloch & Brandon Shaw. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Series: Oxford handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018013726 | ISBN 9780190498788 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780190498801 (companion website) | ISBN 9780190498795 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190873493 (Epub) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Knowledge—Dance. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Dramatic production. | Dance in literature. Classification: LCC PR3034 .O94 2019 | DDC 822.3/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013726 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents

Foreword Alan Brissenden Acknowledgments List of Contributors Introduction Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw

ix xi xiii 1

PA RT I   SHA K E SP E A R E A N D DA N C E Introduction to Part I Jennifer Nevile

13

1. “The Heaven’s True Figure” or an “Introit to All Kind of Lewdness”? Competing Conceptions of Dancing in Shakespeare’s England Emily Winerock

21

2. Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night Nona Monahin

49

3. “When the Play Is Done, You Shall Have a Jig or Dance of All Treads”: Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage Roger Clegg

83

4. “The Revellers Are Entering”: Shakespeare and Masquing Practice in Tudor and Stuart England Anne Daye

107

5. We Are All Made: The Socioeconomics of The Two Noble Kinsmen’s Anti-​Masque Morris Dance John R. Ziegler

133

6. The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque: Absence, Touch, and Religious Residues Lizzie Leopold

153

vi   Contents

7. Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies: The Case of Romeo Brandon Shaw

173

8. Dancing with Perdita: The Choreography of Lost Time in The Winter’s Tale Steven Swarbrick

197

9. “The Wisdom of Your Feet”: Dance and Rhetoric on the Shakespearean Stage Florence Hazrat

217

10. [They Dance]: Collaborative Authorship and Dance in Macbeth Seth Stewart Williams 11. Dancing with the Archive: Early Dance for Shakespearean Adaptation Evelyn O’Malley

237

261

PA RT I I   SHA K E SP E A R E AS DA N C E Introduction to Part II Margaret Jane Kidnie

283

12. Shakespeare, Modernism, and Dance Susan Jones

287

13. Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare: Balanchine, Holm, and Robbins Ray Miller

303

14. “Thou Art Translated”: Affinity, Emulation, and Translation in George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Amy Rodgers

327

15. “Hildings and Harlots”: Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet Lynsey McCulloch

343

16. Shakespeare Ballets in Germany: From Jean-​Georges Noverre to John Neumeier Iris Julia Bührle

359

17. “Therefore Ha’ Done with Words”: Shakespeare and Innovative British Ballets Elinor Parsons

387

Contents   vii

18. Measure in Everything: Adapting Hamlet to the Contemporary Dance Stage Elizabeth Klett

405

19. Hamlet, the Ballet: Examining a Choreographic Process Jo Butterworth

429

20. Haunted by Hamlet: Devising William Forsythe’s Sider Freya Vass-​Rhee

455

21. Dancing Her Death: Dada Masilo’s The Bitter End of Rosemary (2011) as a South African Contemporary Rethinking of Hamlet’s Ophelia Kathrina Farrugia-​Kriel

477

22. Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception: Shakespeare Adaptations in a Black Atlantic Context 499 Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman 23. Shakespeare and L.O.V.E.: Dance and Desire in the Sonnets James Hewison

525

24. Incorporating the Text: John Farmanesh-​Bocca’s Pericles Redux and Crystal Pite’s The Tempest Replica Linda McJannet

545

25. “A Delightful Measure or a Dance”: Synetic Theater and Physical Shakespeare Sheila T. Cavanagh

569

Index

585

Foreword

The merest glance at the list of references for the chapters in this stimulating collection will indicate the breadth of research into Shakespeare and dance over the past thirty-​ five years. During that period, the search for authenticity in performance has been developing in several art forms, particularly music. This has led to going back to original scores and whenever possible the use of original instruments, or close copies of them. With early modern drama it has meant performing on thrust stages and the building of theaters of which Shakespeare’s Globe near the site of the original Globe is the prime and most glorious example. Some of these essays use the Elizabethan stage as a starting point, but the editors have cleverly divided the subject matter into two sections: Shakespeare and Dance, dealing with dance within the plays, and in one case, beyond the play; and Shakespeare as Dance, discussing what can happen when the plays are used as material for dance works. No less than four of these take Hamlet as their subject, although the play itself contains no dance, and it is fascinating to see the different approaches taken by the writers of these chapters. The play was one of the earliest to be choreographed, Francesco Clerico producing a version in Venice in 1788, and one can only surmise what Louis Henry’s was like; performed in Paris in 1816, it had a happy ending. But Romeo and Juliet is by far the most choreographed of all the plays. The first recorded production was Eusebio Luzzi’s, which premiered in Venice in 1785. By now there have been at least 150 more, and others are doubtless being created as I write this. Several companies have two versions in their repertoires. And the play has been transformed in many different ways, in film by Baz Luhrmann as Romeo + Juliet, for example, and most outstandingly as the musical West Side Story with music by Leonard Bernstein, book by Arthur Laurents, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and choreography by Jerome Robbins, who first had the idea for it. The tragedies—​with their heroic, and mostly male, protagonists—​suited the male dancers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the development of dancing en pointe from about 1820 led to the domination of the ballerina. The title of Jean Coralli’s The Tempest: or The Island of Sprites (Paris, 1834) suggests that the ballet was made to exploit the impression of lightness afforded by the pointe shoe rather than to tell Prospero’s story. It is significant in this regard that after Romeo and Juliet—​and a long way after—​A Midsummer Night’s Dream is most popular with choreographers. The proliferation of research into Shakespeare and dance, and Shakespeare more generally, has been aided by the widening of accessibility to the plays in different forms. Complete series of the plays have been available for television screening for some time. More recently, live telecasts from Stratford and London bring actual performances into

x   Foreword cinemas throughout the world simultaneously and are then available later. Arts festivals bring live performances from various countries to places such as Avignon, Adelaide, and Edinburgh. Many productions are informed by what is continually being learned about performance practice. At the same time, modern literary theory can color written analysis and interpretation. Until 1981 there were no books and just one article specifically about Shakespeare and the dance. The essays in this Handbook are ample evidence of the riches that have since been, and continue to be, discovered about their relationship. I am grateful to the editors for giving me the privilege of writing the foreword to their impressive selection. Alan Brissenden

Acknowledgments

The editors of this volume would like to thank Oxford University Press for its support. In particular, our editor Norm Hirschy has been a staunch advocate of the project. His editorial assistant, Lauralee Yeary, has been invaluable in her advice and assistance. We would like to thank the Handbook’s anonymous readers for their rigorous and enlightening suggestions. We also extend our deepest gratitude to families and friends, without whom a project of this magnitude would not have been possible. Finally, we are immensely grateful to our contributors for their partnership, patience, and intellectual insight. It has been a privilege to work with you all!

Contributors

Alan Brissenden is Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. Iris Julia Bührle is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of Oxford and Junior Research Fellow at New College. Jo Butterworth is Professor of Dance Studies at the University of Malta, retired. Sheila T. Cavanagh is Professor of English at Emory University. Roger Clegg is an independent researcher and formerly Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University, Leicester. Anne Daye is an independent dance historian, and Director of Education and Research for the Historical Dance Society. Kathrina Farrugia-​Kriel is Head of Research at the Royal Academy of Dance. Denise Gillman is Associate Professor in Directing and Dramatic Literature at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Florence Hazrat is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. James Hewison is Senior Lecturer in Dance at Edge Hill University. Susan Jones is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St. Hilda’s College. Margaret Jane Kidnie is Professor of English Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Elizabeth Klett is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. Lizzie Leopold recently completed her interdisciplinary PhD at Northwestern University in Theater and Drama Studies. Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci is Associate Professor of Dance at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Lynsey McCulloch is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Coventry University and an associate member of Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research (C-​DaRE).

xiv   Contributors Linda McJannet is Professor of English and Media Studies (Emeritus) at Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts, and cofounder of the Shakespeare and Dance Project. Ray Miller is Professor of Dance Studies and Theatre Arts at Appalachian State University. Nona Monahin is Instructor in Renaissance and Baroque Dance in the Five College Early Music Program at Mount Holyoke College. Jennifer Nevile holds an honorary research position in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Evelyn O’Malley is Lecturer in Drama/​Theatre/​Performance studies at the University of Exeter. Elinor Parsons is Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University, Leicester. Amy Rodgers is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Mount Holyoke College and a cofounder of the Shakespeare and Dance Project. Brandon Shaw is a dance scholar and practitioner who has held positions at Brown University and the University of Malta. Steven Swarbrick is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. Freya Vass-​Rhee is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Kent and a dance dramaturg. Seth Stewart Williams is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Columbia University and a Summer Graduate Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts. Emily Winerock is a Visiting Scholar at the Chatham University Women’s Institute in Pittsburgh and cofounder of the Shakespeare and Dance Project. John R. Ziegler is Assistant Professor of English at Bronx Community College.

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

SHA K E SP E A R E A N D   DA N C E

I n t rodu ction Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw

Why don’t they dance? What did you make me come here for? Devil take all of you, dance! (King James I)1

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance convenes leading scholars in early modern to contemporary dance, literature, and theatrical practices alongside established dancers, choreographers, and dramaturges in an investigation of the centuries-​old partnership between literature and dance. It is the first collection on the subject to bring together such a diverse range of scholars and practitioners but, while it remains a multidisciplinary volume, it also encourages the development of subject-​specific knowledge; in this context, interdisciplinary discourses may be said to promote intradisciplinary insight. The areas of dance practice, dance scholarship, performance studies, and literary criticism not only inform one another, but also contribute to qualitative re-​renderings of fundamental questions allowing us to side-​step or leap beyond long-​established lacuna. If we accept that textual semiotics are no more stable or unambiguous than corporeal meaning-​making, that there is a strong sense of embodiment within Shakespeare’s works, and that notions of solitary geniuses (be they dramatists, choreographers, or a hybrid of both) can be placed aside in recognition of devising processes that also account for material conditions and group input, dance and literary scholarship may find themselves on a shared platform. Certainly this wide embrace of fields of knowledge which are currently sequestered within different disciplines was not foreign to the early modern era either. The polymath with significant practice in and appreciation of the arts—​the so-​called Renaissance man—​was not necessarily male, nor was this breadth exclusive to leisure-​loving courtiers. Leisure was a serious, time-​consuming business in the early modern English court, and the skills attained in one discipline were carried into another. Thus while grace and innovation were demonstrated through dance, the rationale for the physical comportment and divisions of rhythms drew upon mathematics. Outside the court, the education and life experience of a middle-​class boy might include Greek, Latin, and

2    Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw contemporary languages, dancing, music, elocution, theology, glove making, bookkeeping, martial arts (including wrestling and fencing), as well considerable access to theater, either by itinerate troupes in towns or, if living in London, city-​dwellers with even a modest income had “the choice of Shakespeare or the baiting of bulls and bears, the same choice as the Queen.”2 So while early modern England was indubitably oppressive to large groups of people, and even those living at the top echelons of the hierarchy may have felt captive in gilded cages (and Shakespeare’s oeuvre certainly speaks to both), nonetheless young male middle-​class non-​nobles such as Will Shakespeare could enjoy a great deal of social mobility, seeing the same acts and enjoying the same feats as the royal court. Themselves interdisciplinary, engaging diverse audiences, socially critical, and collaborative, Shakespeare’s plays provide the model for this collection. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is in fact only the second full-​length book dedicated to Shakespeare and dance. Alan Brissenden, who has written the Foreword to this volume, published the seminal Shakespeare and the Dance in 1981. It is worth noting that—​even after the “bodily turn” within scholarship alongside the flourishing of scholarly research into the material conditions of early modern performance, the founding of doctoral programs in dance studies in North America and Europe, broadly stated commitments to interdisciplinarity, and an ever-​increasing canon of Shakespeare adaptations into dance—​there remained no dearth of questions concerning Shakespeare and dance for our contributors to investigate. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is composed of two parts. Part I, “Shakespeare and Dance,” is a synchronic consideration of dance within Shakespeare’s time and works from the perspectives of dance historians and re-​ enactors, dramatic and literary scholars, and theorists. Contributors consider the early modern dancing body and its confidence in self-​presentation, both within and beyond the theatrical environment. How were these physical habits differentiated and refined, and then taught and circulated? To what degree were dance treatises and conduct manuals in consort, and how did the dancing body disrupt principles of the mannered or medically disciplined body? The challenges of excavating dance practice within Shakespeare’s era, and indeed his plays, are multifaceted. To what extent, for example, can the material from the comparatively well-​documented contemporary practices of dance in Italy and France be applied to England? And how are critical readings of dance references within Shakespeare’s plays and poems supported or tested by practitioner-​scholars who not only understand how a dance, such as the galliard, might have been performed, but who are physically familiar with its excitement and capacity to exhaust? More generally, Part I acknowledges the importance of dance within early modern culture and society. As an actor and man of the theater, Shakespeare would have been an accomplished dancer, and his employment of dance—​whether actively staged or referenced within his texts—​reflects his own choreographic expertise and interest in dance as a sophisticated mode of communication. The remit of Part II, “Shakespeare as Dance,” represents only a fraction of what may be over a thousand dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays by professional and semi-​ professional companies worldwide. Shakespeare’s relationship with dance is long-​ standing and extraordinarily varied. His works have been adapted in multiple countries

Introduction   3 and into multiple dance genres, from classical ballet to contemporary dance, jazz to physical theater, folk dance to hip-​hop. Choreographers have adapted Shakespeare’s most popular plays for dance—​notably Romeo and Juliet—​but they have also reimagined, and revived, his lesser-​known works. For example, Christopher Wheeldon’s 2014 adaptation of The Winter’s Tale proved immensely successful for the Royal Ballet, despite its relative obscurity with the general public. Full-​length narrative ballets are, however, only one version of Shakespearean adaptation within dance. Several choreographers have devised abstract pieces from the dramatist’s plot-​heavy works. Others have built new narratives from Shakespeare’s less tangible writings. Contributors to this volume recognize the diversity of choreographic approach to Shakespeare’s works, not to mention the appetite shown by audiences for dance reworkings of literary texts. They also ask several key questions of their material: How is text translated into movement? Does the dance supersede the text? Or is source material—​in this case, the works of a writer with the immense stature of Shakespeare—​still privileged over adaptive creations?

Part I: Shakespeare and Dance Within and around Shakespeare’s London, dance was the subject of immense controversy, fascination, and societal dynamism. For its admirers and participants, including Queen Elizabeth, her late father Henry VIII, and her heir, James I, dance presented an image of celestial and, equally important, royal order. Dance was also addictive and sexy. It neatly created horizontal divisions among classes and vertical distinctions between the sexes. It presented an opportunity for advancement—​not of the rags-​to-​riches variety—​ but rather a chance to distinguish oneself and display virtues bespeaking graceful humility before the throne, vigor for battle, moral backbone for contracts, and obedient comprehension of gender roles. While dancing masters sought to legitimatize dance through careful scriptural exegesis, historical exempla, and patriotic fervor, textual archives contain more invective against dance than apologia for it. For “danceaphobics,” dance was in itself satanic, a cauldron of sweating, convulsing, intertwined bodies that convened heedless of holidays and church hours. However, no apologia for dance was needed for Shakespeare’s playgoers (demons need no instruction in blasphemy, Puritans might say). From busking entertainers to dances strategically placed within many dramas to a set of raucous jigs following even the most somber tragedies, dance engulfed and permeated Shakespeare’s plays. Given the flow from itinerate summer productions of Shakespeare’s dramas throughout the country to the eventually regular performances before royalty and gentry as the Queen’s and then the King’s Men, Shakespearean dancing bodies were porous, moving dance across geographic and socially constructed boundaries. Following dance historian Jennifer Nevile’s introduction to “Shakespeare and Dance” and beginning our examination of dance within Shakespeare’s era, Emily Winerock addresses the scandal surrounding dance both on and off the stage within the epoch

4    Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw by scrutinizing anti-​dance tracts and a trove of legal documents hitherto neglected within early modern historical research (Chapter  1). Her chapter provides an overview of dance practices and perspectives in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, focusing on “offstage” dancing—​dancing on village greens, in city streets, in churches and churchyards, and in private homes both modest and magnificent. Sources include secular and ecclesiastical court records, personal correspondence and journal entries, religious sermons and treatises, and stagings of social dancing in Shakespeare’s plays, such as the rustic dance for shepherds and shepherdesses in The Winter’s Tale, Sir Andrew’s drunken galliard capers in Twelfth Night, and the courtly dancing in Romeo and Juliet. Remaining on the early modern stage, Nona Monahin (Chapter 2) presents a hypothesis of what would have been performed in Shakespeare’s theaters, informed by dance historical research, practice research, and historical re-​enactment. Monahin’s contribution exemplifies how knowledge of early modern dance conventions can “decode” dance references, thus unveiling layers of subtext relevant to thematic issues and characterization. More practically, it provides suggestions for contemporary stagings of Shakespeare’s dances. The bawdy, percussive, and raucous jigs that shared the stage with even the most somber tragedy are the topic of Roger Clegg’s contribution (Chapter 3). Popularized by dance legends including Richard Tarlton and William Kemp, jigs were a source of ire for conservative, anti-​dance tracts and sermons. Nevertheless, they are referenced within several of Shakespeare’s plays. By surveying and appraising the evidence relating to dance as a conclusion to the theatrical event—​whether featured at the close of the drama, or as a dance following the play, or as part of a comic musical afterpiece, or “jig”—​Clegg’s chapter explores the jig’s tradition, form, function, and significance, then and now. From the public theater to court entertainment, our next three authors consider the polyvalent masque especially beloved by James I.  Anne Daye (Chapter  4) addresses Shakespeare’s incorporation of the court masque genre into his plays for the public stage. During Shakespeare’s active work with a company of players, he embraced the Tudor form and the continental masquerade, which was subject to several new developments, including the appearance of the anti-​masque. By analyzing the chronological changes in masque and dance entries, Daye examines how Shakespeare and his company took the lead in interpolating the danced masque into drama, an innovation that was imitated by other playwrights. Daye argues for an increasingly specialized, professional role for the choreographer as a dancing master on the court payroll, one who would collaborate with Shakespeare in devising new dances. Next, John R. Ziegler focuses upon the anti-​masque in John Fletcher and William Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, which includes a version of the anti-​masque from the nuptial celebration of King James’s daughter (Chapter 5). When transferred to the stage, the dance became a commodity with multivalent appeal. As the anti-​masque appropriates the folk dance, it loses in part the ability to parody the form, while at the same time applying a new sheen of court association, selling the opportunity to experience part of a well-​known royal event via the play. Ziegler argues that the anti-​masque also provides a venue for the expression

Introduction   5 of female cross-​class desire, while it reflects and critiques socioeconomic norms. In Chapter 6, Lizzie Leopold considers the cancelled, absent masque in The Merchant of Venice. Through a Derridean decentering of presence, early modern understandings of touch and dance, and a deep interrogation of religious tensions, Leopold exposes how what is unwritten within Shakespeare proves powerfully choreographic. She concludes by considering how absence organizes bodies in space, particularly those separated by religious and gendered difference. Turning to the body that was dancing, Brandon Shaw considers how a confluence of Galenic, folk, and burgeoning modern medical theories, warring theologies, gendered social codes, as well as Shakespeare’s own poetics, partner with dance practices of his milieu (Chapter 7). He provides a consideration of Romeo and Tybalt’s fencing as a neighboring art, revealing the lethal potential of the disciplined body. As a further consideration of the dancing body in Shakespeare’s work and beyond, Steven Swarbrick considers Shakespeare scholarship’s long interest in the temporal dynamics of The Winter’s Tale (Chapter 8). Instead of turning to melancholic or traumatic time frames to explain the thematic persistence of lost time in Shakespeare’s romance, Swarbrick argues that dance provides a key interpretive framework for understanding the play’s interest in bodily movements that exceed static oppositions between absence and presence, time lost and time regained. Drawing on recent theorizations of “crip time” and the posthuman, he sets out to choreograph lost time via the space between movements—​ where generativity and negativity dance. Florence Hazrat examines the coincidence of moments of dance with particularly rhetorical language in Shakespeare’s plays, including examples from Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, and Romeo and Juliet, in Chapter 9. She explores how dance and rhetoric possess a power to persuade through patterned movement and language by drawing upon cognitive science’s discourses on cognitive dissonance and empathy. Hazrat scrutinizes the comic endings of Much Ado about Nothing and As You Like It, while Romeo and Juliet is discussed in terms of converging language and movement in the sonnet. Part I concludes with two chapters directly addressing issues of early modern composition and contemporary archiving. Seth Stewart Williams’s notion of “transtemporal collaborations” offers a hint as to why there is such a proliferation of dance adaptations even into the twenty-​first century (Chapter 10). As he argues, dance scenes were among the most radically collaborative components of a play’s text, prone to complicating questions of authorship and attribution. Drawing from The Two Noble Kinsmen and the witches’ dance in The Tragedy of Macbeth, Williams provides a historical and theoretical interrogation of textual stability and choreographic contributions to early modern drama. As a segue into the next part, in Chapter 11, Evelyn O’Malley examines how the appearance of twelve men dressed as satyrs in The Winter’s Tale assists with dating the play in the same year as Ben Jonson’s masque, Oberon, The Fairy Prince. In her role as director of Stone No More (2012)—​a practice-​as-​research performance envisioned as a choreographic conversation between The Winter’s Tale and Oberon—​O’Malley compiled archival material of the dances, music, and written texts for the two sources to reimagine the progression from chaos to harmony in both works. While an emphasis on historical

6    Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw reconstruction in early dance practice can be read alongside narratives of “authenticity” or “original” practices in Shakespeare, her chapter contends that implementing early dance can invigorate Shakespearean adaptations and open up adaptive possibilities in an alternative context by refiguring fragments and dancing with the archive.

Part II: Shakespeare as Dance Adaptations, re-​creations, replications, and reductions enrich our understanding not only of current and past dance practices, but of their performative strategies and material conditions. The choreographic attention given to Shakespeare’s writings since the mid-​ twentieth century brings a full-​bodied listening that engages with the text through a variety of idioms, devising and production techniques, singular responses, choreographic inquiries, and interrogations. What might be gained by posing the kinds of questions classicist E. R. Dodds warned against: the “questions that the dramatist did not intend us to ask”?3 Contemporary choreographers and dancers can be textual fundamentalists, parsing Shakespeare’s words meticulously, and may inform or oppose textual readings and theatrical performances with their understandings of the body. Thus, even while showing little interest in early modern dance, ballet choreographer Kenneth MacMillan and dancers Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable studied Romeo and Juliet “line-​by-​ line,” and some of the most memorable choreography in the Royal Ballet’s 1965 production was born from an embodiment of that close reading.4 MacMillan’s line-​by-​line technique mirrored, of course, Sergei Prokofiev’s own approach to the ballet’s score, in which he transposed Shakespeare’s verbal phrasing into musical form. Prokofiev’s close textual reading dictates, to a significant extent, the choreographer’s relationship with Shakespeare’s drama, but this formalist approach is just one possible means of negotiating the source text, and questions remain over the hierarchical relationship of literature and dance. Insofar as dance adaptations are expected to conform to a binary—​the danced translation of a phrase, the embodiment of a concept, the ephemeral performance of a stable text, the physical retelling of a story—​one form or the other will be relegated to a subsidiary role. More often than not, Shakespeare’s text—​however it was composed, and whatever decisions were involved in its current shape—​is considered the more foundational. And yet Shakespeare’s plays—​with the exception of The Tempest—​are themselves unproblematically adaptations of other works, be they textually or orally circulated. There is also ample evidence of coauthorship and collaboration with actors. With regard to his choreography for The Moor’s Pavane in 1949, José Limón subtly expresses an awareness that Shakespeare is not the lone voice of the story of Othello. He insists, “I know how hard I had tried not to make a ‘dance version’ of Shakespeare’s ‘Othello.’ I had worked with all will and conscience to find a form which might prove valid and pertinent in terms of dance. I did not wish to infringe, nor paraphrase.”5 Shakespeare is there, and so is Limón. If there is a correspondence between The Moor’s Pavane and Othello, it is that

Introduction   7 they are both responding (co-​responding) to the invitation to interpret the mythos of the Moor’s tortured soul. In the case of the myth of the jealous Moor, the choreographer’s task involves thoroughly investigating suspicion and wrath, then centering upon its kinetic aspects, and rendering these through the dancer’s idiomatic technique. If the text is not the origin, model, or apogee, disavowing Shakespeare as the source, influence, touchstone, or ghost might have less to do with a Bloomsian anxiety of influence than a testimonial to the actual process of devising: that the choreographer, like Shakespeare, was listening and responding to a pulse anterior to Elizabethan London and Stratford. Adaptations—​and an interrogation of the aptness of this term—​are the remit of Part II, “Shakespeare as Dance.” Following an introduction by M. J. Kidnie, who has adapted the theoretical insight of her Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (2009) to dance adaptations, Susan Jones explores the intersection of modernist aesthetics and danced adaptations of Shakespeare in the twentieth century (Chapter 12). While addressing a spectrum of danced interpretations, Jones focuses upon Robert Helpmann’s Hamlet (1942), José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949), and Limón and Pauline Koner’s Barren Sceptre (1960, based on Macbeth). The chapter explores how these choreographers respond to modernist psychological and skeptical interpretations of the plays that drive not only the presentation of character, but also the spatial design of the choreography. A less tragic Shakespeare tapped and sashayed up and down the streets of Broadway, as Ray Miller reports (Chapter 13). Miller’s chapter considers the partnership between text and dance in selected Broadway musicals based on the works of Shakespeare. Chronicling artistic exchanges between genres, ethnicities and nationalities, and socioeconomic classes, the chapter examines choreography for musicals by Jerome Robbins, as well as investigating little-​known Broadway choreographies by George Balanchine and German expressionist dancer and choreographer Hanya Holm. Further chronicling, while also theorizing, the fecundity of choreographic adaptations of Shakespeare’s work, Amy Rodgers argues in Chapter  14 that the translation of Shakespeare’s works into dance functions as a rite of passage for twentieth-​century choreographers, one that offers both the opportunity for dance makers to place themselves in the “great man” genealogy and to influence, even reshape, that canon through an alternative lexicon. Rodgers argues that Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962) is an exemplary participant in the intertextual construction of “Shakespeare,” and it provides an exemplary case of dance’s participation in that fashioning. In Chapter 15, Lynsey McCulloch also challenges Shakespeare’s foundational status within dance adaptations of his works by examining the nontextual additions made by choreographer Kenneth MacMillan to his iconic ballet reworking of Romeo and Juliet—​suggesting that infidelity to the text constitutes an adaptation’s creative success. In a welcome discussion of pre-​twentieth-​century adaptations, Iris Julia Bührle (Chapter  16) addresses Shakespeare’s presence on the German ballet stage from the eighteenth century to the present day and examines how John Cranko excavates and develops ballet’s narrative capacities in his The Taming of the Shrew (1969). Similarly, John Neumeier’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1977) and Othello (1985) demonstrate how he uniquely adapted and interpreted Shakespeare’s works. Elinor Parsons examines

8    Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw three ballets inspired by Shakespeare and created for the British Royal Ballet companies in Chapter 17. Kenneth MacMillan’s Images of Love (1964) and The Prince of the Pagodas (1989) provide the context for an analysis of David Bintley’s The Shakespeare Suite (1999). Tracking more allusive connections to Shakespeare, Parson considers character development, gender roles, and meta-​theatricality on the ballet stage. Words, words, words. Dance, dance, dance. Despite a notorious verbosity coupled with a reticence toward action, a number of choreographers have seized upon Hamlet’s kinetic qualities. Elizabeth Klett investigates the applicability of legibility and illegibility in her reading of Kenneth MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles (1988) and Stephen Mills’s Hamlet (2000) (Chapter 18). MacMillan’s choreography conceives a nonlinear approach to time shared by postmodern thinkers, whereas Mills’s Hamlet retains a successive understanding of time, even while engaging the play’s semantic ambiguity. Next, Jo Butterworth takes readers not only backstage, but also into the creative and rehearsal processes of the choreography for David Nixon’s Hamlet (2008) for Northern Ballet in Chapter 19. Through the themes of literacy and polysemanticism, materiality and signification, her chapter investigates how establishing the play in a new sociological setting—​that is, under dominance of Nazism and rife with a different historical conflict—​influenced the creative process and the spectator’s reception of the work. Freya Vass-​Rhee likewise draws upon her experience as dramaturg in her discussion of William Forsythe’s Sider (2011), which is a look at, around, and through Hamlet (Chapter 20). Sider’s devising process engages in the deconstruction of meaning and the dance among and with words central to Hamlet, and the choreographic product is continually engaging with ghosts perpetually haunting both the play and adaptations of it. Kathrina Farrugia-​Kriel offers the term “transmodern” in her reading of The Bitter End of Rosemary (2011) and conceptualization of the rise of South African choreographer Dada Masilo, one of the key women to be recognized both locally and internationally as a choreographer interested in reworking established works (Chapter  21). Farrugia-​Kriel analyzes The Bitter End of Rosemary in light of its circulation in European contexts and its reception locally within South Africa, arguing that the shards of performance histories suggest the nature of a uniquely transmodern condition. African and African diasporic dance’s engagements with Shakespeare are the remit of Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman’s contribution (Chapter 22). Adaptations include Orson Welles’s 1936 Negro Theatre Project’s “Voodoo” Macbeth, Aimé Césaire’s 1969 adaptation Une Tempête, the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2013, directed by Justin Emeka), and their own performance as research project integrating African Caribbean dance into Pericles. Utilizing Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic as a space of multiple cultures, ethnicities, and their encounters and exchanges, their chapter questions how these histories express themselves through adaptations of one of the most celebrated colonial writers. James Hewison’s likewise auto-​ethnographically informed analysis of a queer choreographic read of the Sonnets depicts a partnership between marginalized groups and the Shakespearean (Chapter 23). His chapter explores Volcano Theatre Company’s radical

Introduction   9 interpretation of the Sonnets through their award-​winning physical theater production, L.O.V.E. (1992). Drawing on literary analysis and sociological theory, Hewison considers the implications of the poetry’s homoerotic focus. The chapter then explores Volcano’s adaptation of this nontheatrical work with a scant plot into narratively driven performance material. Resisting the moniker adaptation, Linda McJannet examines John Farmanesh-​ Bocca’s Pericles Redux (2009) and Crystal Pite’s The Tempest Replica (2011) (Chapter 24). As adaptation deals with variation, propagation, and survival in evolutionary theory, McJannet theorizes that terms like “redux” and “replica” are primarily forward-​leaning concepts and approaches. They may “bring back” or “replicate,” but with a view toward choreographic renewal, reimagination, and rejuvenation. In Chapter  25, Sheila T.  Cavanagh also examines adaptations of Shakespeare’s works by physical theater companies and investigates the kinesthetic dynamism of Synetic Theatre’s wordless productions—​a dynamism that has drawn the (negative) attention of America’s conserv­ ative media and which defies Shakespeare’s adoption by the political right. While comprising contributions from nearly thirty scholars and addressing aspects of dance in and around Shakespeare from his birth until the composition of this Introduction, there are obvious gaps, even in such a large volume. Shakespeareans working on dance within Shakespeare’s writing remain few; we hope that the present volume encourages greater interest in this area and feel strongly that an appreciation of dance is integral to a wider understanding of the early modern period. Further analysis of how dance is represented, not only on stage, but also in language, would also be hugely beneficial to the field. Although adaptation studies often focus on more recent and perhaps more accessible artifacts, there is much work to be done in this area, especially given the sheer number of Shakespearean dance works. Moreover, information on several pre-​twentieth-​century balletic adaptations of Shakespeare’s work is scarce and would undoubtedly benefit from further research. The geographic representation in the Handbook is not as broad as we would wish. While calling across economic and ethnic strata within some nations, it is not surprising that Shakespeare adaptations have been more visible and available in countries where English is a primary language. The absence of Shakespeare choreographies in some countries should not be seen as a dearth or loss, but can be attributed to the fact that most language communities have their own Bards and central literatures, as well as performative and textual strategies to comment upon, rebel against, adapt, and contemporize canonical authors.

Notes 1. As reported by Orazio Busino, chaplain to the visiting Venetian embassy in 1618; cited by Stephen Orgel and Roy C. Strong, Inigo Jones:  The Theatre of the Stuart Court (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973), vol. 1, 370. 2. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–​1642 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009), 18.

10    Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw 3. E. R. Dodds, “On Misunderstanding the ‘Oedipus Rex,’” Greece & Rome, Second Series, 13, no. 1 (April 1966): 37–​49, at 40. 4. See Lynn Seymour, Lynn: The Autobiography of Lynn Seymour (London: Granada Press, 1984), 184. 5. José Limón, José Limón: An Unfinished Memoir (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 119.

Pa rt   I

SHA K E SP E A R E A N D   DA N C E

I n t rodu c t i on to Part I Shakespeare and Dance Jennifer Nevile

Dance in Shakespeare’s England and Its European Context Dancing was ubiquitous in early modern England and Europe, and it was an activity enjoyed by all levels of society. Members of the elite danced at social gatherings, in private, domestic spaces among close family members, and in public at official celebrations and festivities. They also performed in more theatrical settings, disguised as mythological heroes or gods, or fantastically costumed creatures. Those in the lower and middle levels of society danced in outdoor venues such as churchyards, village streets, and public squares, at inns and gambling rooms, in private houses, in guild chambers, and in especially constructed dance halls. Members of the elite often learned dancing at home as part of their formal education. For example, in 1562 the twelve-​year-​old Earl of Oxford was required to attend dance lessons every day between 7 and 7:30 a.m. before breakfast.1 Separate dance schools were also established from the mid-​fifteenth century onward, and in sixteenth-​century England there is evidence that dance schools existed in London prior to 1533,2 with the numbers increasing from the 1570s. Exactly how many dance schools existed in London at any one time is not known,3 but a figure is available for Paris in the early seventeenth century, courtesy of Michael Praetorius’s introduction to his collection of French dance music entitled Terpsichore and published in 1612, where he states that there were three hundred dance masters working in Paris.4 In spite of the widespread and popular nature of this activity, there is still a great deal that is not known about the different practices and contexts of dance in the sixteenth century, especially in England, where choreographic sources are scarce. As Barbara Ravelhofer remarked, “pronouncing on dance in [late sixteenth and early seventeenth-​century] England feels like having to reconstruct, say, modern dancing based solely on Ginger and Fred,

14   Jennifer Nevile Michael Jackson’s videos, and Martha Graham’s diary.”5 References to dance in letters, diaries, chronicles, and descriptions of festivals can all supplement scarce choreographic records. The manner in which dance is used in literature, in particular by dramatists, also provides an important source of material for increasing our understanding of not only the various contemporary choreographic practices, but also the way society viewed these practices. Dance practices throughout early modern Europe did share common choreographic elements, and specific dance genres, such as the pavane and galliard, were performed in many different countries. Ambassadors, royal brides and accompanying courtiers, and university students all traveled from one country to another, bringing with them the dances with which they were most familiar, and in which they had been trained. Dance music also traveled with the musicians who played it, as dance musicians lived and worked in more than one country. Dance masters also traveled to perform, choreograph, and teach at foreign courts and cities, and students took the opportunity to enroll in dance classes while they were traveling or studying in foreign cities. For example, in 1610 the son of Sir John Puckering was studying in Paris. There his studies included daily lessons in dancing from 2 to 3 p.m. every afternoon.6 The practice of undertaking dance instruction while on an international journey was even remarked upon in contemporary travel literature, as in Robert Dallington’s A Method for Travell, published in London in 1605. There is another exercise to be learned in France, because there are better teachers, and the French fashion is in most request with us, that is, of dancing.7

In spite of the international nature of the dance practices during this period, it is clear that people did distinguish between different national styles of dancing, but how people at the time made such distinctions between English, Irish, Italian, French, German, Slavonic, Polish, Hungarian, Spanish, and Neapolitan dances, for example, is not absolutely clear.8 As Roger Clegg recounts in Chapter 3, in 1599 the Dutchman Thomas Platter, while visiting London, attended a play in which English and Irish dancing featured. While we do not know what was danced, Clegg concludes that the dancing seems “intended to unite the audience around the triumphant [English] homegrown hero of the piece.” How dance is used in literary and dramatic works helps define exactly what constituted regional and national dance styles in early modern Europe. As Anne Daye has demonstrated, for example, in her work on the Stuart masques, the French practice of allowing courtiers and professionals to dance together in the ballets de cour was not acceptable in England, leading to the development of a uniquely English form of theatrical danced spectacle. She writes, “One outcome of the English aversion to such mixing is the strange development of the antimasque by professionals as a separate section of the masque.”9 Dance references in literary and dramatic works can also help reveal stereotypes; for example, dances enjoyed by one social class were quite differently regarded by those of another class. This is part of John Ziegler’s discussion of the morris dance in The Two Noble Kinsmen, which was a version of a dance originally performed

Introduction to Part I    15 in a courtly environment, whose meaning was altered when performed by members of the lower-​middle class as part of a public play by the King’s Men at Blackfriars in 1613 or early 1614. The sixteenth-​century Venetian Andrea Calmo and Shakespeare, although not exact contemporaries, occupy a similar position in regard to their life and work. Both were professional actors and playwrights, and as such were interested in how their dramatic works operated as a performance, as opposed to authors such as Ben Jonson who had more interest in the literary text. Both had to cater to a range of tastes in their audiences: Calmo used popular songs and vernacular dialects in his plays, as well as more learned elements to appeal to the Venetian patriciate, such as the performance of madrigals “to demonstrate virtuosity.”10 The way in which Calmo referred to dance in his literary works can help to shed light on how dance was regarded by a member of the Venetian middle class, the amount of knowledge of the current repertoire of dances and individual steps that an actor and playwright possessed, as well as providing evidence for how long particular dances remained in the living memory of individuals in society, even after such dances had ceased to be performed. Calmo’s “letters” (which can more accurately be described as short essays) illustrate this point very well.11 In one of his “letters” Calmo is railing against his lover, madonna Balzana, who has had the bad judgment to drop him and to take up with another man. Signora Balzana is ridiculed for rejecting a man (ostensibly Calmo) born into a good Venetian family, well educated, wealthy, well dressed, and well liked, for a man who is a foreigner—​a non-​ Venetian—​who has no family, who eats peasants’ food,12 who was raised among sheep, horses, and cattle, and who was taught the bassadanza by wolves (e i lovi g’ ha insegnao la bassa danza).13 The bassadanza was a dance whose choreographies were recorded in the fifteenth-​century Italian dance treatises. It was regarded as a dance of the elite, not the lower classes, as the fifteenth-​century dance master and author of a dance manual, Antonio Cornazano, records: We will come to those balli and bassedanze which are outside the [use and understanding] of the populace, [and are] created for noble halls and to be danced only by the most dignified ladies and not by the common people.14

Thus having a wolf teach someone a dance that was seen as existing for the exclusive use of the elite in society heightens the absurdity and exaggerated nature of Calmo’s description of his rival’s character. It also implies that with such a teacher this man would have performed this elegant and sophisticated dance very badly. The bassadanza was a dance pre-eminent in the fifteenth century, one that was first recorded approximately one hundred years before Calmo’s letters were published. Therefore, by referring to the bassadanza, Calmo is heaping another layer of insults onto his rival; that is, Calmo is implying that the dances he does know are old-​fashioned, and that his rival is similarly out of date and behind the times. Furthermore, by using a reference to a bassadanza as the foundation of his humor in this letter, Calmo reveals that knowledge of this dance must still have been present among his readers. If the view of the bassadanza as a

16   Jennifer Nevile dignified dance of the elite from fifty to one hundred years earlier had changed, or had been lost to mid-​sixteenth-​century Venetians, then much of Calmo’s humor would also have been lost. As we have seen from this examination of just one of Calmo’s “letters,” choreographic knowledge is essential for a comprehensive understanding of what he wrote. As the chapters in Part I demonstrate, Shakespeare is no different from Calmo in this regard, and without detailed knowledge of the choreographic practices at the time, much of the layered meanings in Shakespeare’s work is missed. Very often the references to dance in a play or other form of literature appear slight when viewed on the page, but contain a wealth of innuendo, humor, or puns, and operate on several levels at once. The full meaning of such references relies on an intimate knowledge of the relevant choreographic practices. This is made very clear by Nona Monahin’s discussion in Chapter 2 of the scene in Twelfth Night (1.3) between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, where her detailed exposition of the galliard and the coranto reveals that Shakespeare’s choice of dance terms here is as “clever as it is intricate.” As Clegg notes in Chapter 3, humor in a dance episode was often brought about by upsetting the expected choreographic norms, and the “comic potential in the figures and steps” of a dance was created “by offering moments of deviation or disruption from the expected,” in order, for example, to “highlight the characteristics of a role, advance the plot, add dramatic irony, or . . . help certain characters or clowning performers to appear all the more ridiculous.” If an audience does not know or understand these choreographic norms, then the impact of what they see and hear is lost. Attitudes toward dance in early modern continental Europe and England varied greatly, and as Emily Winerock reminds us in Chapter 1, during this period dancing was associated with “cosmic and marital harmony, with idleness and vanity, with elegance and virtue, with drunken disorder, with an ordered state, with emotional agitation, with neighborliness and good cheer, with strenuous exercise, and with the celebrating of both angels and devils.” In order to fully understand the reference to dance in Shakespeare’s plays, it is necessary to be aware of the differing attitudes toward dance in England, and how the dance practices of each level of society may or may not have corresponded to theoretical statements by both the advocates for dancing and those who were opposed to it. Thus Winerock’s examination of diverse primary sources, including dance treatises, conduct manuals, anti-​dance writings, and consistory court depositions, provides such a background for other chapters in Part I. Just as dance styles and genres traveled from one country to another, so too did dances and dance performances move across class boundaries. The French king Henri III’s love of dancing, for example, led him to participate at balls held not only in the royal palaces and the hôtels of princes, but also in the houses of the Parisian bourgeois.15 In 1549, as part of the festivities for the entry of Catherine de’ Medici into Paris, there was a ball at which the sons of the merchants danced with the ladies of the court.16 Authors of dance treatises in particular were quick to disparage the dancing of those in the lower levels of society. Antonius Arena’s opinion of dancing by those who live in the countryside was not flattering:

Introduction to Part I    17 When experts dance they ornament the steps and yet are always in time with the music. When our country folk dance they throw themselves about and do not even observe the beat. They run continually without respecting the cadence and invent everything out of their heads. . . . At the beginning of the dance they doff their caps too soon and without grace and shuffle their legs. They make the reverence so vigorously that, believe me, they turn up a spadeful of soil with their foot.17

Yet the opposite opinion is also found, as in Le Plaisir des champs, the 1583 work of the French poet Claude Gauchet, where he gives a detailed and positive assessment of the dancing in a village square for a festival, dancing that included branles and galliards.18 Thus we have examples of members of the elite dancing with those of lower social rank, as well as evidence of dances performed by courtiers—​branles and galliards—​also being danced by country dwellers. Dance did help to break down social barriers in early modern Europe, as well as being a means of displaying social order. The dancing that occurred in dramatic productions provides another prism through which we can interpret the movement of dances across social divisions. Dramatic works performed in the public theaters had to deal with a large range of social levels in the audiences they hoped to attract—​from apprentices, artisans, and working men to law students, gentry, foreign ambassadors, nobles, and, after 1600, even ladies.19 Some knowledge of elite dance practices was necessary for these theater companies, and the question remains of how they gained such knowledge. Anne Daye addresses this issue in Chapter 4, “ ‘The Revellers Are Entering’: Shakespeare and Masquing Practice in Tudor and Stuart England,” where she investigates how the masque episodes in Shakespeare’s plays were related to contemporary masquing practice in England, how Shakespeare gained his knowledge of an elite dance practice, as well as the personnel Shakespeare worked with in order to meld together the spheres of court dancing and public drama. Dance in early modern England and Europe was a part of everyday life to an extent that is, perhaps, difficult to comprehend today, and playwrights could not afford to ignore such an ever-​present part of their audiences’ daily experience. The way dance is used in literature, and particularly in dramatic performances, not only increases our knowledge of choreographic practices at this time, but also expands our understanding of the dramatic productions of which they were a part. The chapters in Part I bring to life the rich and intricate tapestry that emerges from a close examination of the choreographic elements in Shakespeare’s plays.

Notes 1. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–​1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 679–​680. 2. Ingrid Brainard, “Sir John Davies’ Orchestra as a Dance Historical Source,” in Songs of the Dove and the Nightingale: Sacred and Secular Music c. 900–​c. 1600, eds. Greta Mary Hair and Robyn E. Smith (Sydney: Currency Press, 1994), 199 n. 2.

18   Jennifer Nevile 3. Barbara Ravelhofer concludes that “early modern London boasted a respectable range” of dancing schools. Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque:  Dance, Costume and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 21. 4. Bruce R. Carvell, “A Translation of the Preface to Terpsichore of Michael Praetorius,” Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America 20 (1983): 51. 5. Barbara Ravelhofer, “Middleton and Dance,” in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, eds. Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2015), 133. 6. Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 695. 7. Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque, 35 and n. 33. Ravelhofer is quoting from the original publication on sig. [B4]v. 8. Possibilities include the choreographic structure of the dance, the choreographic style (that is, the precise manner in which individual steps were performed); the dancers’ gestures and the quality of their movements when dancing; the costumes of the dancers; and the music that accompanied the dances. 9. Anne Daye, “Dancing for King and Country: the Jacobean Court Dancer,” in On Common Ground 7: Kings and Commoners: Dances of Display for Court, City and Country (DHDS, 2009), 5. See also Daye, “‘Graced with measures’: Dance as an International Language in the Masques of 1613,” in The Palatine Wedding of 1613: Protestant Alliance and Court Festival, eds. Sara Smart and Mara R. Wade (Wiesbaden:  Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013), 289–​318. 10. For a discussion of Calmo’s work that focuses on his shift in emphasis “from the written text to the performance process,” see Paul C. Castagno, “‘Mente teatrale’: Andrea Calmo and the Victory of the Performance Text in Cinquecento commedia,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 8, no. 2 (1994):  37–​57. (The two quotations are from page  51 of Castagno’s article). 11. For a longer discussion on Calmo’s use of dance references in his letters, see Jennifer Nevile, “Learning the Bassadanza from a Wolf: Andrea Calmo and Dance,” Dance Research 30, no. 1 (2012): 80–​97. 12. Calmo’s rival is said to eat “three olives, one leek and one piece of polenta” (tre olive, un poro e un pezzo de polenta). Leeks had been regarded as part of the diet of rustics or peasant farmers since classical times, when books such as Virgil’s Georgics mentioned it as part of their diet. See Roy Strong, Feast: A History of Grand Eating (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 138. 13. Andrea Calmo, Le lettere di Messer Andrea Calmo, riprodotte sulle stampe migliori, ed. Vittorio Rossi (Turin: E. Loescher, 1888), 258–​259 [Letter 3, Book 4]. 14. Translation by the author. “Vegniromo a quelli balli et basse dançe che son fora del vulgo fabricati per sale signorile e da esser sol dançati per dignissime Madonne et non plebeie.” (Antonio Cornazano, Libro dell’arte del danzare, Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Codex Capponiano, 203, f. 12v). 15. Margaret M. McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 168–​169. 16. McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance, 9. 17. Antonius Arena, “Rules of Dancing,” trans. John Guthrie and Marino Zorzi, Dance Research 4, no. 2 (1986): 19. 18. McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance, 202.

Introduction to Part I    19 19. As Andrew Gurr has established, ladies were rare “at the common playhouses before 1600,” but attended “in numbers at the Globe from 1599 to 1614.” See Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 76). For further discussion of the social composition of theater audiences, see Chapter 3 of Gurr’s monograph, especially pages 69–​85.

Chapter 1

“ The Heaven’ s T ru e F igure” or an “ I nt roi t to Al l Kind of Lewdne s s ”? Competing Conceptions of Dancing in Shakespeare’s England Emily Winerock

Many of William Shakespeare’s plays contain dance scenes:  Sir Andrew capers in Twelfth Night, fairies and tradesmen foot it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Juliet’s graceful motions in Romeo and Juliet are what first attract Romeo’s attention. Yet, despite almost continuous production, there are surprisingly few sources that record how these scenes were staged, either during Shakespeare’s lifetime or subsequently. Moreover, Shakespeare himself offers little help in his stage directions and in-​text references. Scripts simply indicate, “They dance,” or “Music. Dance.” Indeed, many of Shakespeare’s play scripts omit dance stage directions entirely, forcing directors and readers to guess from the surrounding text when dancing occurs. In addition, there is an absence of surviving English dance manuals written between 1500 and 1651 that could compensate for the lack of choreographic specificity within the plays.1 Yet, we must not assume that the brevity of his stage directions means that Shakespeare did not know much or care about dancing, that the lack of detailed records signifies that dance was unimportant to English society, or that the dancing practices of Shakespearean England are entirely lost to time.2 As Alan Brissenden’s pioneering study, Shakespeare and the Dance (1981), demonstrates, Shakespeare frequently and mindfully stages dances in his plays to advance plots, convey character, and depict festivity. Furthermore, Shakespeare utilizes in-​text references to invoke the rich diversity of associations his audiences had with the art of Terpsichore. Shakespeare’s audiences had unusually complex, even contradictory, associations with dancing, because dance’s dangers and delights, and its benefits and detriments, were topics of passionate debate

22   Emily Winerock in late sixteenth-​and early seventeenth-​century England. Finally, even though we may lack English dancing manuals from the Shakespearean period, a wealth of printed and manuscript sources survive that mention dancing. Some detail the competing claims made for the dance, while others provide evidence of customary practices. This chapter offers an introduction to the multiple meanings and practices of dancing in late sixteenth-​and early seventeenth-​century England. Complementing other authors in Part I in their attention to “onstage” dance in theatrical forms such as plays, jigs, and court masques, this chapter focuses on dancing that occurred “offstage” at events such as social gatherings, civic celebrations, and church fundraisers. The first section of the chapter, “Contemporary Conceptions of Dancing,” introduces the diversity of perspectives on dance articulated by late Renaissance commentators and examines representative sources in detail. The second section, “Contemporary Dancing Practices,” examines direct evidence of dancing from printed and archival manuscript sources, modeling two different methods. The first approach delves deeply into a single incident, offering a concise case study of the 1602 Tortworth cushion dance scandal. The second approach is more statistical, aggregating hundreds of references to dancing in order to see general trends and patterns, such as who danced which dances where, when, and for what reasons. When combined, qualitative and quantitative methods can inform and complement each other, and both can provide the necessary documentation for testing claims about dancing made by commentators against the evidence of quotidian practices. The final section, “Shakespeare’s Conception(s) of Dancing,” highlights the moral ambiguity and nuance of the staged dances and textual references to dancing in William Shakespeare’s plays.

Contemporary Conceptions of Dancing In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a combination of religious, political, and cultural changes led to a reassessment of the role of dance in English society. On the one hand, conduct manual writers and education theorists saw dancing as an essential skill for the aristocracy and the gentility. It was also a useful tool for the “middling sort” trying to approximate their betters’ civilized behavior and artful “self-​fashioning.”3 On the other hand, moralists decried dancing as wanton and lascivious, accusing dancers of indulging their own sinful appetites and inspiring carnal lust in spectators. At the same time, the official adoption and increasing popularity of Protestantism in England led to attacks on festive dance traditions. The more zealous Protestants, or Puritans, viewed centuries-​old customs, such as dancing in churchyards and on Sundays, as irreverent and suspiciously Catholic or “papist” practices, and they condemned these traditions in sermons and treatises.4 But these are only a few of the possible examples. Dancing was also associated, however paradoxically, with cosmic and marital harmony, with idleness and vanity, with elegance and virtue, with drunken disorder, with an ordered state, with emotional agitation, with neighborliness and good cheer, with strenuous exercise, and

Competing Conceptions of Dancing    23 with the celebrating of both angels and devils. The following discussion gives a taste of these diverse conceptions, while also noting their commonalities. The Renaissance saw an explosion of treatises, guides, and instruction manuals, many of which discuss dancing, especially works focused on conduct, education, and recreation.5 Authors including Baldassare Castiglione, Sir Thomas Elyot, and Roger Ascham recommended dancing as an appropriate, even necessary, activity for the nobility and gentility. Some also noted the healthful benefits of exercise and offered different recommendations depending on gender (see Shaw, Chapter 7 in this volume). Still others found dance in the movement patterns of institutions, ideas, and planets—​ conceptions of dance likewise found in literary sources such as Sir John Davies’s Orchestra. However, many manuals also warned against dancing immoderately or immodestly, caveats that echoed those of religious anti-​dance writers such as Philip Stubbes, Christopher Fetherston, John Lowin, and even John Calvin himself.6 The best-​ known Renaissance work discussing courtly conduct, Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (1528), strongly influenced English ideas and writings about courtesy and gentility, including those pertaining to dance. In The Courtier, Castiglione argues that dancing proficiently, with gratia and sprezzatura, was a requisite skill for noblemen and women.7 In particular, Castiglione’s concept of sprezzatura (which Sir Thomas Hoby translates as “a certain recklessness” and Peter Burke as “contrived spontaneity”) acknowledges both the expectation that a courtier should be able to perform graceful yet athletic movements at the drop (or doff) of the hat, and that such skills, in reality, must be acquired or refined through careful instruction and diligent practice.8 Whereas Castiglione’s The Courtier was the most important Continental writing on courtesy and conduct, the most influential English work was Sir Thomas Elyot’s education and conduct manual, The Book Named the Governor (1531). Elyot goes beyond Castiglione’s approbation of dancing to recommend it as a method for teaching virtuous qualities:9 There is no pastime to be compared to that, wherein may be found both recreation and meditation of virtue: I have among all honest pastimes, wherein is exercise of the body, noted dancing to be of an excellent utility comprehending in it wonderful figures [ . . . ] of virtues and noble qualities.10

Not only is dancing an appropriate activity for the nobility, but it can also inspire virtuous and noble behavior in those who study it diligently. In Elyot’s view, dancing offers both physical and moral benefits. Many of the English manuals published subsequently repeat or embellish on Castiglione’s and Elyot’s recommendations. For example, Roger Ascham cites Castiglione’s “delineation of sports appropriate to gentlemen,” including dancing, in his education treatise The Schoolmaster (1570).11 Ascham, who was Elizabeth I’s tutor, argues that facility in dancing was not only appropriate for courtiers, but necessary: “To dance comely: to sing, and play of instruments cunningly,” along with hunting, tennis,

24   Emily Winerock and other pastimes, “be not only comely and decent, but also very necessary, for a courtly gentleman to use.”12 He sees dance as an “honest pleasure” and recommends it as a healthy refreshment from one’s studies.13 Ascham expresses some reservations, cautioning that recreations should be practiced “in open place, and in the day light,” but ultimately he believes that the benefits of dancing outweigh the dangers.14 The London schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster likewise classifies dancing “among the good and healthful exercises” in his treatise on children’s education and training.15 He notes that there are some people who “misuse” it, or who dance “for pleasure and delight only” instead of for exercise and for “directly tending to health.”16 Nevertheless, he argues that there are “sad and sober commodities” and significant healthful benefits that can be derived from dancing.17 Thanks to its properties of “heating and warming,” dancing helps to “driveth away stiffness from the joints, and some palsy-​like trembling from the legs and thighs,” relieves “aching hips,” strengthens “thin shanks” and “feeble feet,” cures indigestion, and is “beyond comparison good” for hastening the passing of kidney stones.18 At the same time, Mulcaster acknowledges that dancing is not a cure-​all for illness. The medical knowledge of the day indicated that some diseases were exacerbated by heat. Those who have “weak braines, swimming heads, weeping eyes, simple and sorry sight” or poor bladder control “must take heed” of dancing, because they can become dizzy and “trip in their turning,” or can “displease themselves” (and others, presumably) by having an embarrassing accident.19 In other words, dancing is beneficial for those with illnesses relieved by heating, but dangerous to those with conditions where “increasing their heat” is likely to “increase their diseases.”20 However, the impact on illness is only one of the aspects of dancing that Mulcaster addresses. He also discusses when to dance, or rather when not to dance, such as “after meat” or “with full stomach,” because that is when “digestion should have all the help of natural heat” rather than the artificial heat derived from dancing.21 In addition, Mulcaster reveals his detailed knowledge of specific dances, as well as his interest in health, by recommending gradually building up from the slowest, “most staid and most alman-​like” dances to the “springing galliard and quicker measures”22 (see Monahin, Chapter 2 in this volume). Finally, he contends that, provided it is “used in wholesome times” and in a “seemly and sober” manner, dancing is “an exercise of health” that also teaches “proportion in number” and “harmony in music,” increases limb strength, refines “bearing” and posture, and improves nimbleness and quickness, which enhance performance on the battlefield.23 Similarly, James Cleland claims in Institution of a Young Noble Man (1607) that dancing is “one of the best exercises that a Noble man can learn in his young years,” and that it “fashioneth the body best.”24 Dancing teaches one to have “a good grace in the carriage of your body.”25 Cleland also borrows Castiglione’s idea of sprezzatura, or as Cleland terms it, “mediocrity in all things,” and echoes Castiglione’s caveats about dancing in an inappropriate manner for one’s status:  “Take heed that your quality, your Raiment, and your skill go all three together”; otherwise “you will be derided.”26

Competing Conceptions of Dancing    25 At the same time, Cleland cautions against spending too much time on dancing. A young nobleman should be skilled and “well experienced” in dancing, but not to the point of neglecting his studies.27 Finally, although Cleland focuses on dance as a courtly art and physical exercise in his discussion, he also mentions a litany of other conceptions of dancing that he playfully explains he will not be addressing in his manual. These include dancing to “assuage” melancholy, as part of the religious rituals of pagans, as a battle technique, as “wanton and dissolute motions of base people,” and as a metaphor for the “Harmonical motions of the Celestial Spheres.”28 Even though Cleland’s list is included for comic effect, it nevertheless highlights the range and variety of contemporary conceptions of dancing. Institution of a Young Noble Man offers clear evidence that at least some commentators were aware of dancing’s multiple meanings and functions. Like earlier writers on gentility, Richard Brathwaite’s The English Gentleman (1630) stresses the importance of having a “graceful presence” and encourages the study of dancing among young gentleman who “intend to Court or Gallant it.”29 However, unlike Castiglione, who recommends dancing for both male and female courtiers, Brathwaite’s approbation is gendered. He condones dancing for gentlemen but condemns it for gentlewomen. In his companion treatise, The English Gentlewoman (1631), he writes that, although “to lead a dance gracefully” may seem “commendable,” ultimately, women who are “delighted in songs, pipes, and earthly melody, shall in hell roar terribly and howl miserably.”30 That most contemporary choreographies were couple dances for men and women to dance together is a logistical detail with which Brathwaite does not concern himself.31 Indeed, part of the inconsistency may be due to Brathwaite’s sources. His guide for gentlemen relies heavily on Castiglione, who encourages dancing for gentlemen. However, Brathwaite’s guide for gentlewomen draws primarily on Juan Louis Vives’s conduct guide for women, De institutione feminae christianae (1524).32 Although dedicated to the future Mary I, who, like her sister Elizabeth, was an avid dancer, Vives does not share Castiglione’s approbation of female dancing, even for noblewomen.33 Brathwaite’s unquestioning adoption of his sources’ contradictory views on dancing leads to the practical paradox of his encouraging gentlemen to dance, while discouraging their partners from dancing with them. Other conduct manuals approve of dancing for both men and women but indicate that steps and styling differ by gender. For example, in the aforementioned The Book Named the Governor, Sir Thomas Elyot explores expressions of ideal masculinity and femininity through movement. He writes that a man in his “natural perfection” should be fierce, hardy, and virile, and should dance in a “vehement” manner that conveys the “courage and strength that ought to be in a man.”34 On the other hand, the “good nature” of a woman, Elyot asserts, is to be mild-​mannered and modest. She should thus dance in a “delicate” manner with smaller steps than the man so as to convey the “pleasant soberness that should be in a woman.”35 Of course, there were logistical complications to Elyot’s vision of gender expressed in dance, since most choreographies called for male-​ female couples to dance together, and it is nearly impossible for dancers to hold hands if one partner is taking large “vehement” steps while the other is taking small “delicate”

26   Emily Winerock ones.36 Nevertheless, Elyot’s vision of ideal masculinity and femininity, joined together in the dance, made an appealing and intuitive metaphor for Renaissance marital harmony and concord, and other writers borrowed many of Elyot’s ideas, even if few conduct manual authors incorporated dance quite as extensively or prominently.37 Elyot portrays the dancing couple as the embodied union of the “vehement” movement of the man and the “delicate” motions of the woman.38 However, the Elizabethan work that most notably expands on Elyot’s metaphor of dance as marital concord and extends it to cosmic harmony is not a conduct manual but a poem. Sir John Davies’s lengthy reflection on dancing, Orchestra (1596), presents dancing as a form of embodied accord:  “Dancing itself both love and harmony, /​Where all agree, and all in order move.”39 Dancing makes an apt metaphor for marriage, because in a couple dance, the man and woman move together: “For whether forth or back, or round he go, /​As the man doth, so must the woman do.”40 While this articulation might be more patriarchal than modern visions of companionate marriage, Davies makes clear in other stanzas that it is the orderly “togetherness” of the dancing couple that he most prizes. Similarly, Davies sees dance-​like movement in the harmonious motions of the heavens. Dance is “[t]‌he heaven’s true figure” and “the model of the world’s great frame.”41 This planetary dance is impressive and admirable:  “What eye doth see the heaven but doth admire /​When it the movings of the heavens doth see?” Plus, its merits are obvious even to those who might otherwise criticize contemporary dance practices for their baseness and “frantic jollity.”42 Davies stresses that whether discussing the motions of people or planets, in a dance, dancers are always part of the same enterprise, even when performing different steps or variations: “every one doth dance a several part, /​Yet all as one in measure do agree.”43 This shared experience or vision enables the dancers to move in “perfect uniformity,” even in moments when their steps differ.44 These are not new conceptions of dance. There is ample evidence of dance’s popularity as a metaphor for cosmic harmony and human concord from classical times.45 Nevertheless, Orchestra’s lengthy and nuanced elaboration of dancing’s merits serves as an important counterexample to the negative visions of dance described in exhaustive detail in contemporary religious and moral writings.46 Not all of the conceptions of dancing depicted in early modern works are praiseworthy. Europe, in general, and England, in particular, saw a substantial number of anti-​dance treatises published or circulated in manuscript in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.47 The most notorious of these is Philip Stubbes’s wide-​ranging dialogue, The Anatomy of Abuses (1583). In notably vivid language, Stubbes condemns a variety of recreations and pastimes, but he saves his most passionate invective for dancing, because “as in all feasts and pastimes, dancing is the last, so it is the extreme of all other vice.”48 In an oft-​quoted passage, Stubbes asserts that dancing is “an introduction to whoredom, a preparative to wantonness, a provocative to uncleanness, and an introit to all kind of lewdness.”49 Yet, two other significant aspects of his views on dancing tend to receive less attention. The first is his qualifier that it is not dancing itself that he forbids, but only “the abuses thereof,” and the second is the range and variety of circumstances under which

Competing Conceptions of Dancing    27 he would consider dancing to be abused.50 The first point permits him to hold an anti-​ dance stance while still acknowledging the many biblical passages that approve or allow dancing, such as Ecclesiastes 3:4, which states that there is “[a]‌time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”51 The second component enables Stubbes to drastically limit the situations in which dancing is permissible to such a degree that most people would have been hard-​pressed to fulfill his requirements. Not only does Stubbes forbid dancing in a wanton or lascivious manner, as did most writers on dance, but he also decries dancing in public assemblies, dancing to lively music, men and women dancing together no matter how chastely, and dancing on Sundays or “from morning until night.”52 Since Sunday was the only “day off ” for working people until well into the nineteenth century, classifying dancing on Sundays and holidays as an “abuse” meant that only wealthy elites who did not have to labor daily could dance regularly.53 Nevertheless, sabbatarianism, or the drive to “reform” Sunday, eschewing recreations in favor of more restful or reverential activities, became an increasingly prominent aspect of Protestant reform efforts in England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.54 One finds complaints similar to Stubbes’s in other anti-​dance treatises, although many of these attempt a somewhat subtler, more balanced approach.55 Christopher Fetherston’s dialogue, A Dialogue against Light, Lewd, and Lascivious Dancing (1582), includes a spirited defense of contemporary dance practices by Juvenis (Young Man), even though his debating partner, Minister, eventually convinces him (and presumably the reader) that dancing’s threat to the soul negates its potential benefits. For example, Juvenis argues that dancing, including on Sundays, is an established tradition going back many generations, and it is a good way to meet your spouse. Minister counters that not all traditions are good, and that the kind of woman one meets at a dance is not the kind one wants to marry. Similarly, Juvenis argues that dancing is a good recreation, offering healthy exercise for the body. Minster responds that dancing can cause various ailments, including agues, shakes, heaviness, sleepiness, and sluggishness, and since “the temperature of the mind, doeth follow the temperature of the body,” dancing must make the mind sluggish and sleepy, as well.56 Therefore, since it refreshes neither the mind nor the body, Minister concludes that dancing is not a defensible recreation. In his treatise, Fetherston clearly condemns the dancing practices of his time, but he also acknowledges and articulates some of the arguments made in dancing’s favor. The religious treatise Conclusions upon Dances (1607), generally attributed to Shakespearean actor John Lowin, offers a more even-​handed perspective on dancing than either Stubbes or Fetherston, while still ultimately condemning the common practices of the time.57 Lowin divides dancing into three categories: godly, profane, and morally neutral or “indifferent,” providing relevant biblical passages for each classification. For example, King David dancing before the Ark of the Lord exemplifies godly dancing, the Israelites dancing before the golden calf is profane, and the dancing and banqueting sponsored by the father of the prodigal son upon his return are considered morally neutral. Not surprisingly, dances of the first category are permissible, those of

28   Emily Winerock the second category should be avoided, while neutral or “indifferent” dances are allowed or not, depending on the context in which they occur. Whereas Baldassare Castiglione and James Cleland, among others, emphasize the importance of context in assessing a dance’s appropriateness, Lowin considers many more contextual factors than simply rank. In addition to specifying that social inferiors should only dance among or in the presence of their superiors if they are asked or invited to do so, Lowin recommends that men and women dance separately in single-​sex groups to avoid the temptation of lust or wantonness. Moreover, in a short section under indifferent dances entitled, “What sort of Dancing is more convenient for the health,” Lowin notes that dancing affects the bodies of individuals differently. For example, some dances “do strongly stir the body” and are useful for dislodging “obstructions in the ways of the urine,” that is, kidney stones.58 Conversely, those who “perceive their own Brains to be weak” or who have other physical infirmities should avoid overly vigorous dances that could exacerbate, rather than cure, their condition.59 Despite the moral and religious concerns expressed in the opening passages of Conclusions upon Dances, Lowin’s dispassionate tone and attention to status, health, and context resemble the perspectives found in conduct manuals more than those in other religious treatises. In Lowin’s final section, however, “Why Dances are forbidden in some places among the Christians,” he departs from his prior neutrality. Here, Lowin notes and praises the prohibition against dancing in Geneva and other Protestant strongholds. He calls contemporary dancing “vain and profane,” being performed only for “the pleasure of our eyes” instead of to praise God.60 Since the Bible says that one should cast away one’s own hand or foot if it offends, one should definitely avoid dancing, which can prompt sinning and “pernicious evils,” yet cannot even be justified as a thing “profitable & necessary.”61 Because a condemnation concludes the work, Conclusions upon Dances is generally considered an anti-​dance treatise. However, in most of his text, John Lowin offers nuanced, persuasive examples of dancing that is beneficial or morally neutral. Did dancing provide evidence of self-​control or its absence? Did it promote health or undermine it? Was dancing the embodiment of cosmic, community, and marital harmony, or the first step along the path of sin leading to eternal damnation? The early modern debate on dancing was a debate as to whether dancing was the solution for, or the cause of, individual and communal ills. At the same time, it is critical to recognize that those who appeared to be on opposing sides often shared many assumptions and beliefs about dancing, even if their proposed solutions to mutually acknowledged problems differed. Dancing was contentious in this period in part because its meaning was so open to interpretation. Very few late Renaissance dances fall neatly into either Lowin’s “holy” or “profane” categories. Rather, the vast majority of contemporary dances were considered morally neutral by default, and their acceptability was determined by context. Happily, many of the surviving references to dancing in printed and archival sources provide evidence of these contextual factors, even if many of the performative aspects, such as footwork or accompanying music, have been lost.

Competing Conceptions of Dancing    29

Contemporary Dancing Practices To say that historical sources from the Shakespearean period mention dancing frequently would be a great understatement. A search of the term “dance” and its variants between 1550 and 1650 in the Early English Books Online (EEBO) collection returns over 16,400 mentions in more than 3,500 published works.62 In addition, the collection includes references to specific dance types, such as the galliard (490 examples in 210 records) and jig (89 examples in 68 records). Most are tangential references, such as Jean Bodin’s derogatory aside in a legal text that, “Nowadays they put at the end of every tragedy (as poison into meat) a comedy or jig.”63 Yet, even these brief mentions of dancing can be informative. From Bodin’s aside, we gain confirmation that in the early seventeenth century, jigs were increasingly common as afterpieces for tragedies as well as comedies (see Clegg, Chapter 3 in this volume), but we also learn that not everyone approved of that trend. Barnaby Rich’s short but descriptive reference to courtly dancing in A Right Excellent and Pleasant Dialogue between Mercury and an English Soldier (1574) similarly confirms practices and hints at their interpretation. The titular English soldier, peering into a room by chance, discovers “lusty” gentlemen and “brave and gallant dames” entertaining themselves in “a marvelous large and beautiful chamber” with “many amorous exercises,” including singing to the lute and dancing “the pavanes and galliards.”64 Likewise, in a poem by John Drout, we learn that a gentleman, at a social gathering, “took the maid” to dance (i.e., asked an unmarried young woman to dance with him), requesting that the musicians play a galliard, “a galliard he did bid.”65 He then “led her twice about” (i.e., they danced the galliard together around the room twice, or perhaps danced two sections of the music).66 At several points, they bowed to each other, “her he capped, she curtsy made” (i.e., he removed his cap or hat as he bowed and she curtseyed).67 Moreover, Drout uses distinctive terms associated with the galliard to describe the dancing in between the bows. The gentleman “trips about with sinkapace,” “capers very quick,” and he shows “a pretty trick” or two (i.e., performs fancier step variations or embellishments). The gentleman concludes the dance with another bow to the lady, which Drout quips is “the courtesy /​that dancers use to pay.”68 Not only do these sources provide glimpses of galliards danced in practice rather than in theory (as in dancing manual instructions), but their detailed specificity also demonstrates that at least some English authors and readers were intimately familiar with these dances. This allows scholars to more confidently associate English dance references with the fuller choreographic descriptions of similar dances in the extant Continental European dancing manuals.69 In addition, they can link specific dances with particular contemporary conceptions of dance, such as galliards and pavans with love and courtship versus the volta’s insinuations of licentiousness and wantonness. English archival records sometimes offer similar linkages, in addition to providing a wealth of contextual information.70 Although the majority of archival records provide

30   Emily Winerock only brief, passing references to dance, in aggregate, these records can provide contextual details that help with assessing more fully described dance occasions. For example, aggregated archival records enable us to identify what is typical and what is surprising about a cushion dance that is described in unusual detail in the court records of an early seventeenth-​century English bishop. In 1602, in the small village of Tortworth, Gloucestershire, at the celebrations following a wedding, John Wilmot, according to multiple witnesses, did “amongst divers others of his parishioners, dance and lay a cushion on the ground and kneel down upon it and kiss a woman that then danced with him, as all the rest that then danced with him (being 5 or 6 or more) also did.”71 Wilmot was the parish rector, and he was already at odds with the Bishop of Gloucester and the lord of Tortworth manor for a litany of transgressions, including public drunkenness.72 That he was dancing on a Sunday, the Lord’s Day, did not help matters. The incident is inherently interesting to the dance historian because two depositions in the resulting consistory court case provide the earliest known choreographic description of the cushion dance, as well as offering insights into the perspectives of participants and spectators. From two of the surviving depositions, or witness statements, we learn the cushion dance has a leader who is followed, probably in a line, by several other dancers, all male. The deposition holds, “[He]e began, and led the cushion dance with a cushion on his shoulder and kneeled down as the order of the dance is, and kissed one goodwife Hickes.”73 The leader carries a cushion on his shoulder initially, then places it in front of a woman, kneels on the cushion, and kisses her (Figure 1.1). Then each of the other dancers does the same. While the precise steps are not mentioned, this description suggests a general floor pattern and structure, indicates that the cushion dance is a dance game and social mixer, and confirms that it is a prop dance, as one might surmise from the dance’s title.74 This description varies significantly from the next available choreographic description, the round dance, “Joan Sanderson, or The Cushion Dance,” in the seventh edition of John Playford’s The Dancing Master (1686).75 Christopher Marsh sees a “striking resemblance” between the cushion dance by John Wilmot in 1602 and the choreography in The Dancing Master.76 However, although both are kissing dances that use a cushion as a prop, there are a number of differences, including the ratio of men to women, the use of a chair, and specifying a song to accompany the dance. Dance styles had shifted considerably during the intervening decades, from Italian-​influenced late Renaissance to French-​influenced Baroque, so even if the figures stayed the same, the steps and styling would have changed noticeably.77 Moreover, in Playford’s version, the men and women alternate leading the dance and selecting whom to kiss. The Tortworth records make no mention of women leading the dance or choosing men to kiss, so these components may not be part of earlier versions of the dance. From the Tortworth depositions, we also learn that both men and women participate in the cushion dance, although it is not a traditional couple dance like the majority of choreographies in the dancing manuals of Fabritio Caroso, Cesare Negri, and Thoinot

Competing Conceptions of Dancing    31

Figure 1.1  Emblem IV, Johannis de Brunes, Emblemata of Zinne-werck (Amsterdam, 1624), 23.

Arbeau.78 In addition, at this event the dancers come from a range of social ranks and are of different ages.79 Some resided in Tortworth, while others lived in nearby parishes. The dance takes place inside, in the church house, in the evening, on a Sunday.80 (A witness mentions that the cushion dance occurs after candle lighting, suggesting that it is dark enough outside to need candles.) Since there was no mention of anyone going to fetch one, the church house apparently contained among its furnishings an appropriate cushion and all other props needed for the dance.81 Music is not explicitly mentioned, but the presence of musicians can be assumed. Similarly, although other dances are not described, it is unlikely that the cushion dance was the only dance performed that evening, even if it was the only one that attracted official scrutiny and censure. Furthermore, the surviving documents give a much clearer idea of the internal reactions of the participants, spectators, and larger community than historical records usually convey. Although Wilmot was one of half a dozen men who danced the cushion dance in Tortworth, he was the only one who was prosecuted. This suggests that it was not the dance itself that was considered illicit, but the dancing of it by a clergyman, especially one at a church-​sanctioned wedding on church property. The articles of objections prepared by the Bishop of Gloucester, which list Wilmot’s transgressions including the cushion dance incident, support this view. The bishop objects to the rector’s dancing the cushion dance “before all the people,” and in so doing, inviting “public derision.”82 Those in attendance seemed to have shared the bishop’s perspective. Both witnesses report (in almost the same words) that just before he starts dancing, Wilmot declares,

32   Emily Winerock “Now the Bishop hath suspended me from preaching I  will practice and study all knaveries.”83 That both witnesses remembered these words so precisely suggests that they found the rector’s declaration surprising, even shocking, especially when he then called for and led the cushion dance, a kissing dance.84 Most important, Wilmot’s statement demonstrates that the rector himself agreed that his behavior was inappropriate for the context and that he was fully aware that for him, unlike for those who danced with him, dancing the cushion dance was scandalous knavery. The Tortworth cushion dance case gives a rare glimpse into precisely where the dividing line was between acceptable and unacceptable dancing in a particular community. Yet, how representative is it? While few archival records offer as detailed descriptions as the Tortworth depositions and articles of objection, in aggregate, they do supply a substantial amount of information about customary practices more generally.85 Not only are these practices interesting in their own right, but they can also help us identify what aspects are unusual or typical in individual accounts of dancing. Court records often include biographical information about defendants and witnesses, enabling us to get a sense of the typical age, gender, and marital status of dancers. While exact ages are rare, many records note if dancers are children, youths, or elderly. Interestingly, the elderly appear both as “expert witnesses” on local dance traditions and as hosts of illicit dances, such as the eighty-​year-​old man in Glastonbury, Somerset, who was presented in 1617 for “keeping minstrels and dancing in his house during the whole time of divine prayer upon a Sunday.”86 Children sometimes danced at festivals for a few pence or at celebrations for an honored visitor.87 However, youths are the most numerous among archival records mentioning dancers’ age or age bracket.88 Dancing was seen as both the province of the young and a corrupting influence on them. A presentment in the Archdeacon’s Court Book from 1572 complains that it is “the most part of the youth” who on Sundays “pass the day in dancing” in Bethersden, Kent.89 Moreover, dancers, especially youthful dancers, might find themselves in court, not for dancing itself, but for some of the disorderly behaviors that often accompanied it. Of these, excessive drinking, fighting, game playing, and gambling appear most often.90 For example, in 1601, a shoemaker got so drunk at a Sunday afternoon dance party in Tunstall, Kent, that, although he did make it to evening prayers, “He vomited and cast in our church in most beastlike manner to the great annoyance of all those that were about him.”91 An even more dramatic incident had occurred in Harbledown, Kent, in 1593. A large group of “diverse youths” had assembled to watch a Whitsuntide morris dance, when the dancers and their friends “fell a quarreling” with one Richard Bridges, “a man of no good name nor fame.”92 Bridges, a notorious drunkard, drew a knife “to smite them therewith,” and disaster was only narrowly diverted by the quick intervention of spectators.93 A few years later, in 1600 in nearby Newenden, frustrated churchwardens presented Richard Kemp for “seeking the unjust vexation of his neighbors.”94 Kemp was a “great dancer” and “procurer of minstrels” whom he would invite to his house on Sundays to provide musical accompaniment for his dancing hobby-​horse show.95 His performances became so popular that they would “draw the people from their due obedience to the

Competing Conceptions of Dancing    33 service of God,” because many parishioners attended the show instead of church services.96 To make matters worse, in addition to neglecting their religious obligations, young men watching the dancing also took to “quarreling, fighting, swearing, drunkenness” and similar disruptions whenever the hobby horse performed.97 On the one hand, these examples provide a sense of the diversity of occasions in which dancing could contribute to or provide an excuse for disorder. On the other hand, they are also representative in that it is men, especially young men, who get accused of disorderly behavior at dance events. It is worth noting that it is not usually clear in these cases whether young women were also in attendance or participating in the dancing at these events. While men are more likely to be prosecuted for disorderly behavior accompanying dancing, records that mention men and women dancing together, or at least at the same dance event, are roughly as common as those that only mention men dancing. However, there are many fewer references to only women dancing.98 This likely reflects the types of surviving records, which are primarily prosecutions and payments to professional dancers. Orderly, uncontroversial dancing, especially for exercise or private entertainment, as female-​only dance tended to be, does not feature prominently in the surviving records. Still, the abundance of male-​only records is surprising given that anti-​dance literature claimed that mixed dancing was the only kind of dancing in which contemporaries had any interest. “You in your dances must have women, or else the market is marred,” claims Christopher Fetherston.99 Another surprise is the scarcity of accounts of lascivious dancing or dancing leading to illicit sexual encounters.100 Despite the claims of commentators such as Philip Stubbes that “filthy groping and unclean handling is practiced everywhere in these dancings,” archival records contain little evidence of overly or overtly sexual dancing.101 This is true even among the records of the church courts, which tried adultery and fornication cases. One of the exceptions that proves the rule is the 1617 case of Nicholas Ruddock and Katherine Chauker of Glastonbury, Somerset. Their illegitimate child was the result of a post-​dance liaison, which apparently inspired the judge, vicar general Arthur Duck, to order an unusually theatrical punishment. He sentenced them to be whipped through the streets “until their bodies shall be both bloody.”102 This was a severe but common punishment to which Duck added a thematic embellishment: “there shall be during the time of their whipping two fiddles playing before them in regard to make known their lewdness in begetting the said base child upon the Sabbath day coming from dancing.”103 Having dance music accompany their punishment stressed the connection, or the potential connection, between dancing and lewdness.104 However, most people viewed dancing as a perfectly respectable activity for young married or courting couples.105 Indeed, approximately the same number of married and unmarried couples are mentioned going out dancing together.106 As in the example of Ruddock and Chauker, when “lewd” dancing is prosecuted, it is either because the judge seemed unusually interested in the dance component of the situation or because it was an extreme case. These are rare and include examples such as when Henry Pillchorne of Bridgwater, Somerset, “danced with his britches down about his heels” and “did show his privy members unto the company most uncivilly there being then many women

34   Emily Winerock present.”107 Pillchorne, however, was dancing solo while behaving lewdly, rather than dancing too intimately with his partner. Indeed, when dancing is mentioned in cases of suspected adultery or incontinence, it is rarely the dancing per se but rather what it represents that brings dancing to the attention of the authorities. This was certainly the case for Thomas Houlder and Katherine Bendle of Westbury, Somerset. In 1605, their neighbors accused them of traveling to the town of Wedmore together “to make merry” during Whitsuntide and staying out all night dancing.108 Moreover, they had traveled together “to revels, and other places of merriments” and “kept company” dancing and drinking together on several other occasions.109 One of Katherine’s neighbors called her “a lewd and idle housewife, a common resorter to alehouses & other places where dancing is both by day and by night.”110 Indeed, Richard Wilcox, who had an alehouse in Westbury, confirmed that Thomas and Katherine had come to his alehouse together many times and “there did dance, and spent the time in merriment.”111 Dancing is repeatedly mentioned in the witness statements, but it was not the manner in which Thomas and Katherine danced that caused objections but because their dancing together so frequently suggested inappropriate intimacy off the dance floor. Thomas was married and Katherine was single; it is not surprising that their “keeping company” was “to the dislike, and offence” of their neighbors.112 Whereas with Thomas Houlder and Katherine Bendle, it was a married man dancing too frequently with a single woman that raised suspicions, in a court presentment the following year in nearby Frome, the genders were reversed. Elizabeth Davies was married to Christopher Davies, but in 1606 she was presented for suspected adultery with John Cole, who was unmarried. John “used to call [on] her in the night time” and then “carry her to dancing & other sports and merriments.”113 These outings, witnesses reported, took her “out of her house from her husband.”114 Again, it was not how John and Elizabeth danced, but the fact that Elizabeth was repeatedly going out dancing with John and leaving her husband at home that caused “the great dislike of their neighbors” and led to their being presented in the church courts to answer the allegations.115 In the aforementioned cases of sexual misconduct, it is who and with whom rather than how that brings dancing to the attention of the courts. Kissing dances like the cushion dance might be considered a little risqué, but they are not prosecuted as lewd or illicit. For the laity to kiss during the structured and regulated interactions of a dance game was not perceived as threatening by the authorities. Kissing one’s dance partner, or dancing together, in general, was only problematic when the dancers’ intentions were already under suspicion. The fears about licentious dancing expressed in religious works do not appear to have been shared by the bishops and their surrogates who judged the consistory courts, or by the justices of the peace who passed judgments in the secular courts. The discrepancy between the ratio of licit to illicit dancing in moral literature versus in archival records serves as an important reminder that even contemporaries could be misinformed about the habits of their neighbors. Not only can archival records tell us a bit about who danced and how, but often they also include information about the types of events that included dancing, their venues

Competing Conceptions of Dancing    35 or locations, and when they took place. As one might expect, dancing was a common component of informal social events in private and semi-​private locations such as houses and alehouses.116 Life-​cycle celebrations, such as weddings, regularly featured dancing, as did spring and summer seasonal celebrations like May Day and Midsummer with their large-​scale processions through the streets and countryside, athletic games and competitions, and dances ’round the maypole.117 Afternoon and evening were the most popular times, but dancing also took place in the morning, throughout the day, and even throughout the night, on occasion.118 While the preferred times of day for dancing are what one would expect, the prevalence of dancing at religious celebrations and church fundraisers, with dancing occurring in the churchyard, church house, or even the church itself, may surprise modern readers. For example, the “young men, and maidens” of Catcott, Somerset, like many young people across England, were in the habit of dancing the cushion dance in the churchyard on Sundays in the summer.119 However, these traditions increasingly came under attack in the latter half of the sixteenth century, with Puritan ministers and parishioners prosecuting their neighbors for dancing in the churchyard, which they considered egregious irreverence. Churchyard dancers denied the legitimacy of such complaints, providing evidence of the ancientness of the tradition and accusing the reformers of presumptuous “innovation” and sowing discord. Initially in these cases, the acceptability of churchyard dancing was decided by the religious leanings of individual judges. However, in the 1630s, Archbishop William Laud and his anti-​Puritan supporters joined the Puritan movement to suppress dancing in churchyards. By the time the newly ascendant Puritans closed the public theaters in 1642, the symbiotic relationship between dance and the church had largely been severed.120 But to return to our case study, what light does the additional archival evidence shed on the Tortworth cushion dance incident? Choreographically, we see that the participation of both men and women was typical for country, as well as courtly, dances of the day. It is difficult to know how commonly people danced the cushion dance, since records rarely specify the dance type performed. However, as seen in the preceding, it was mentioned in several early seventeenth-​century accounts and remained sufficiently popular (in some form) to get notated in John Playford’s 1686 edition of The Dancing Master. All ages danced in early modern England, but youths and maidens were most closely associated with courting and kissing dances like the cushion dance. For an older gentleman, like Giles Daunt, or a married man, like John Wilmot, to participate in the cushion dance would be atypical but not necessarily scandalous. The cushion dance was only considered truly problematic for Wilmot to perform because he was the officiating clergyman. However, that someone accused of inappropriate dancing would be suspected of other disorderly behaviors was quite common; accusations of excessive drinking, gambling, and fighting frequently accompany presentments for illicit dancing. The Bishop of Gloucester accused Wilmot of being drunk in six different parishes, playing tables (backgammon) for money in alehouses, “swearing grievously,” and in Gloucester, attempting to climb onto the stage during a play.121 Still, the abundance and variety of

36   Emily Winerock Wilmot’s transgressive behaviors were unusual, and to have been committed by a clergyman, highly irregular. That said, certain logistical components of the Tortworth cushion dance were quite representative. The event (wedding reception), time of day (evening), day of week (Sunday), and location (church house), might have seemed objectionable to Puritan reformers, but they were entirely typical for the period. The Tortworth cushion dance also offers a concrete example of how a single occasion of dancing could simultaneously invoke multiple, sometimes contradictory, conceptions of dancing. Religiously, we see dancing presented as a sanctioned, even expected, component of a wedding reception, naturally conveying the joy of the guests at a union blessed by the Church. At the same time, since it took place on a Sunday on church property, some community members likely found it distasteful and irreverent. Physically, dancing imposed order and structure on the body of the individual or the group; yet it also provided opportunities for disorder and license. Witnesses noted that Wilmot and the other dancers followed the “order” of the dance, but at the same time, dancing provided the rector with an opportunity to practice knavery; he indulged in the vices of youth instead of setting a positive example of self-​control. Socially, dancing could garner respect and admiration when it highlighted the grace and athleticism of the dancers, but if they danced poorly or in an inappropriate manner, it could be shameful and invite “public derision.” Finally, a kissing dance game like the cushion dance could facilitate licit courtship by allowing flirtation and the mixing of the sexes in a structured, supervised setting. However, it could also foster illicit sexual interest, especially if, as in Wilmot’s case, some of the participants were already married. In other words, to borrow Philip Stubbes’s terminology, the Tortworth cushion dance both exemplified the proper and customary “use” of dancing—​and its “abuse.”

Shakespeare’s Conception(s) of Dancing During Shakespeare’s lifetime, England became embroiled in a number of cultural controversies. One of the least studied fields of battle, but certainly not the least important, was the dance floor. Diverse sources—​including plays, conduct manuals, anti-​ dance treatises, sermons, account books, and court records—​indicate that there were multiple conceptions of dance that coexisted uneasily, forming the foundations of the so-​called debate on dance. These conceptions sometimes overlapped. Commentators might share many points of agreement, such as the potential physical and moral dangers of dancing and the importance of context when assessing a dance’s appropriateness, even if they disagreed on whether the benefits outweighed the risks. However, the conceptions of dancing articulated by both proponents and opponents do not always correspond exactly with the evidence of dancing practices. Archival records, especially court records, reveal a greater concern with irreverence and disorder

Competing Conceptions of Dancing    37 than with wantonness. Prosecutions for dancing on Sundays or in churchyards, or when accompanied by drunkenness or fighting, dominate the ecclesiastical and secular court cases, respectively. Moreover, archival records contain numerous examples of male-​ only group dancing, a configuration that appears only rarely in the choreographies of dancing manuals, and is entirely absent from conduct literature and moral treatises. Lack of knowledge of, or attention to, these discrepancies has sometimes led to incorrect or overly simplistic interpretations. Hopefully more accurate, accessible, and detailed information and analysis about the perceptions and practices of dancing in the early modern period will facilitate more nuanced assessments and contextualization of individual references to and occasions of dancing, whether these occur within court records or plays. Shakespeare’s stagings and textual references to dancing within his plays suggest that, like many of his contemporaries, his approbation of dancing was complex and conditional. Indeed, he offers few, if any, stagings where the dancing is clearly beyond reproach. For example, the choreographies of the witches in Macbeth, the conjured spirits in The Tempest, and the “true” and “false” fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor, respectively, would have had to reflect the otherworldly, if not diabolical, status of their dancers, which would have caused concern and discomfort for some audience members. Shakespeare’s rustic country dances would have been similarly problematic. The bergomask of the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the morris dance in Two Noble Kinsmen (see Williams, Chapter 10 in this volume) were likely raucous and rambunctious—​hardly the solemn, controlled measures advocated by pro-​dance authors such as Sir Thomas Elyot and Sir John Davies. Conversely, in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare uses Perdita’s notably graceful dancing to hint at Perdita’s inner nobility. However, since the dance takes place at a rustic sheep-​ shearing festival, it too would have been a raucous country dance. Moreover, the scene would have reminded some audience members of the ongoing controversy over dancing at religious and seasonal festivals, perhaps intentionally, as Phebe Jensen has argued.122 Most important, even when the choreographies themselves were likely elegant, orderly, and well-​executed, the responses of on-​stage spectators, as well as subsequent plot developments, cast the dancing in a negative light. For example, in Romeo and Juliet and in Pericles, the titular characters perform at respectable private balls, likely in a modest, as well as graceful, manner. Nevertheless, both Juliet’s and Pericles’ dancing unwittingly arouses lust in their spectators. Likewise, the masque-​style dance of the Amazon women in Timon of Athens highlights their exotic sexual appeal, while the banter during or preceding the dancing of the mismatched couples in Much Ado about Nothing and the soon-​to-​be married couples in As You Like It suggests that the subsequent choreographies and performance choices likely emphasized their amorousness rather than the sober solemnity of marriage.123 Some audience members might have found dancing a perfectly appropriate and logical symbol of, or euphemism for, “marital relations,” especially when those involved were about to be married. However, it is not

38   Emily Winerock hard to imagine that others would have found “suggestive” dancing, in this sense, offensive, invoking the worst fears of manual and treatise writers. Of course, detailed descriptions of the dancing that was actually performed on early stages have not survived, and it is certainly possible to stage a dance that goes against what the text seems to call for. Therefore, one can argue with the hypotheses sketched in the preceding regarding the likely choreography, styling choices, and messages conveyed in early performances of plays like Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It. Nevertheless, the strong indication from the plays themselves is that Shakespeare was neither an advocate for nor an opponent of dancing, but instead saw it as a flexible tool of expression that could powerfully convey both positive and negative attributes, moods, and themes—​ associations that many of his audience members shared. The cultural clashes over dancing in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries mean that every reference to or staging of dancing in a Shakespeare play has potential political and religious implications. It is no coincidence that in Twelfth Night it is Malvolio, the character most opposed to festive reveling, who is accused of being a Puritan, while it is his nemesis and anti-​Puritan, Sir Toby Belch, who encourages Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s drinking and dancing. Nevertheless, to conceive of dancing as inherently morally neutral or flexible, and to assume that meaning and significance were primarily decided by the context in which a dance occurred, suggests that William Shakespeare’s views on dancing were actually quite similar to those held by most of his contemporaries, even if they disagreed on certain particulars. Knowledge of both the common dance practices and the multilayered conceptions of dancing in Shakespearean England is thus essential to understanding how and speculating about why Shakespeare uses dancing in his plays, and also casts light on some of the darker fears that gripped his audiences and contemporaries.

Notes 1. There are scattered choreographic descriptions, such as those for the “old measures” collected by James Cunningham, David R. Wilson, and Ian Payne, but there are no surviving English dancing manuals between the Gresley Manuscript (ca. 1500) and John Playford’s The English Dancing Master (1651). It is not clear to what extent the two French dancing manuals dedicated to George Villiers in the early seventeenth century describe English dancing, since Villiers was often criticized for his overly French tastes. See Barthélemy Montagut and François de Lauze, Louange de la Danse, 1623, ed. Barbara Ravelhofer (Cambridge: RTM Publications, 2000). 2. While the term “Shakespearean” could be used to describe a number of different time frames within the early modern period, conventionally 1500–​1800, here “Shakespearean” encompasses the reigns of the two monarchs, Elizabeth I (1558–​1603) and James I (1603–​ 1625), who ruled during Shakespeare’s lifetime (1564–​1616). The argument for this time frame rather than Shakespeare’s own lifetime is that it allows us to better see the political and cultural developments that shaped the world in which Shakespeare grew up and that affected the reception, performance, and legacy of his plays after he left the stage.

Competing Conceptions of Dancing    39 3. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-​ Fashioning:  From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Given that the class consciousness associated with “the middle class” emerged later, scholars of early modern England prefer to describe those in the middle of the social and economic hierarchies as “the middling sort,” a term in use at the time. 4. Emily F. Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry:  The Practices and Politics of Dancing in Early Modern England, c. 1550–​c. 1640” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2012), 359. See also Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–​1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Alistair Dougall, The Devil’s Book: Charles I, The Book of Sports, and Puritanism in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011). 5. See Ann Wagner’s doctoral thesis, “The Significance of Dance in Sixteenth Century Courtesy Literature” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1980), which builds on Ruth Kelso’s exhaustive surveys of Renaissance conduct and courtesy literature: Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), and The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century, With a Bibliographical List of Treatises on the Gentleman and Related Subjects Published in Europe to 1625 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964). 6. Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” 195. John Calvin was notably suspicious of dancing and forbade it in Geneva, although with little success. Martin Luther, however, was not bothered by dancing in general, nor by dancing on Sundays and holy days, provided that the dancing was not actually lewd or lascivious. The differences in attitudes toward dance among the early Protestant reformers not only caused confusion and conflict in the early modern period but also had long-​term consequences for practices and perceptions of dancing throughout Europe and North America. 7. Baldassare Castiglione, The courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio diuided into foure bookes. Very necessary and profitable for yonge gentilmen and gentilwomen abiding in court, palaice or place, translated by Sir Thomas Hoby (London, 1561), Book I, sig. E1. See also Mark Franko, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography, c. 1416–​1589 (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1986), 55. Sir Thomas Hoby’s English translation, The Courtier of Count Baldassarre Castilio, published in 1561, as well as citations and blatant plagiarism of The Courtier in other works, amplified the influence of Castiglione’s dialogue. 8. Emily F. Winerock, “‘Performing’ Gender and Status on the Dance Floor in Early Modern England,” in Worth and Repute:  Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Essays in Honour of Barbara Todd), eds. Kim Kippen and Lori Woods (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011), 460; Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 31, 52. 9. For help unraveling Elyot’s intertwined metaphors and choreographic references, see John M. Major, “The Moralization of the Dance in Elyot’s Governour,” Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958): 27–​36. For more on the basse dance and other dances of the period, see Jennifer Nevile, The Eloquent Body:  Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-​Century Italy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), and the chapters by Nevile and Barbara Sparti in Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Timothy McGee (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2003). 10. Sir Thomas Elyot, The boke named the gouernour (London, 1531, 1537), fol. 79v. The spelling and punctuation in quotations and in-​text titles have been modernized for readability.

40   Emily Winerock 11. Linda Bradley Salamon, “The Courtier and The Scholemaster,” Comparative Literature 25, no. 1 (1973): 19; Roger Ascham, The scholemaster or plaine and perfite way of teachyng children, to vnderstand, write, and speake, the Latin tong but specially purposed for the priuate brynging vp of youth in ientlemen and noble mens houses, and commodious also for all such, as haue forgot the Latin tonge (London, 1570), Book I, sig. G3v. 12. Ascham, The scholemaster, Book I, sigs. G3v–​G4; Barbara Ravelhofer, “Dancing at the Court of Queen Elizabeth,” in Queen Elizabeth I: Past and Present, ed. Christa Jansohn (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004), 109. 13. Ascham, The scholemaster, Book I, sig. G3v. 14. Ascham, The scholemaster, Book I, sigs. G3v–​G4. 15. Richard Mulcaster, Positions vvherin those primitiue circumstances be examined, which are necessarie for the training vp of children, either for skill in their booke, or health in their bodie (London, 1581), 71. 16. Mulcaster, For the training vp of children,  71–​72. 17. Mulcaster, For the training vp of children, 72. 18. Mulcaster, For the training vp of children, 72. 19. Mulcaster, For the training vp of children, 72. 20. Mulcaster, For the training vp of children, 72. 21. Mulcaster, For the training vp of children, 73. 22. Mulcaster, For the training vp of children, 73. 23. Mulcaster, For the training vp of children,  74–​75. 24. James Cleland, Institution of a Young Noble Man (Oxford, 1607), 225. 25. Cleland, Institution of a Young Noble Man, 226. 26. Cleland, Institution of a Young Noble Man, 226. 27. Cleland, Institution of a Young Noble Man, 226. 28. Cleland, Institution of a Young Noble Man, 225. 29. Richard Brathwaite, The English gentleman containing sundry excellent rules or exquisite observations, tending to direction of every gentleman, of selecter ranke and qualitie; how to demeane or accommodate himselfe in the manage of publike or private affaires (London, 1630), 204. 30. Richard Brathwaite, The English gentlevvoman, drawne out to the full body expressing, what habilliments doe best attire her, what ornaments doe best adorne her, what complements doe best accomplish her (London, 1631), 76–​77. 31. Winerock, “ ‘Performing’ Gender and Status on the Dance Floor,” 458. Regarding gender and number of dancers in Tudor and Stuart masques at court and in Shakespeare’s plays, see Daye, Chapter 4 in this volume. 32. Richard Hyrde translated Vives’s manual into English as A very fruteful and pleasant boke callyd the instruction of a christen women (London, 1541). 33. David Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 31–​34. 34. Elyot, The boke named the gouernour, fols. 82v–​83. 35. Elyot, The boke named the gouernour, fols. 82v–​83. 36. Winerock, “ ‘Performing’ Gender and Status,” 467–​468. 37. Skiles Howard, “Hands, Feet and Bottoms:  Decentering the Cosmic Dance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44, no. 3 (1993): 330. 38. Sir Thomas Elyot, The boke named the gouernour (London, 1531, 1537), fols. 82v–​83. 39. Sir John Davies, Orchestra or A poeme of dauncing Iudicially proouing the true obseruation of time and measure, in the authenticall and laudable vse of dauncing (London, 1596),

Competing Conceptions of Dancing    41 stanza 96. Davies’s title, Orchestra, like Arbeau’s Orchésographie, invokes the Greek name for the “large semicircular area in front of the stage” where “the chorus danced and sang.” See “orchestra, n.” in OED Online (Oxford University Press, 2016), Web. Interestingly, the OED gives Davies’s Orchestra as the first of only two uses of “orchestra” to mean the “art of dancing.” The second example is in John Marston’s Scourge of Villanie (1598): “Praise but Orchestra and the skipping Art” (3.11.225). 40. Davies, Orchestra, stanza 111. To have a man “lead” a woman in a dance was actually a more philosophical concept than a choreographic one. It is not until later dances like the waltz that we find clearly defined, consistently gendered “leading” and “following” roles in partner dances. In the Renaissance, either a man or a woman could lead a dance, but this usually meant leading a line of dancers around the room, as seen subsequently with the cushion dance, not guiding a single partner. Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” 170–​171. 41. Davies, Orchestra, stanzas 96, 33. 42. Davies, Orchestra, stanzas 26–​27. 43. Davies, Orchestra, stanza 111. 44. Davies, Orchestra, stanza 111. 45. See Karin Schlapbach, The Anatomy of Dance Discourse:  Literary and Philosophical Approaches to Dance in the Later Graeco-​Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Regarding classical dance as inspiration for and influence on Renaissance and later dance forms, see The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Response to Greek and Roman Dance, ed. Fiona Macintosh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 46. Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), 3. 47. Other treatises in English that primarily or substantively address concerns about dancing include John Northbrooke, A treatise wherein dicing, dauncing, vaine playes or enterluds with other idle pastimes &c. commonly vsed on the Sabboth day, are reproued by the authoritie of the word of God and auntient writers (London, 1577); Stephen Gosson, The schoole of abuse conteining a plesaunt inuectiue against poets, pipers, plaiers, iesters, and such like caterpillers of a commonwelth (London, 1579); the anonymous A Treatise of daunses wherin it is shewed, that they are as it were accessories and dependants (or thinges annexed) to whoredome (London, 1581); Christopher Fetherston, A dialogue agaynst light, lewde, and lascivious dauncing (London, 1582); John Lowin, Conclusions vpon dances, both of this age, and of the olde (London, 1607), and Brief conclusions of dancers and dancing (London, 1609). For secondary literature, the most comprehensive examination of English anti-​ dance treatises is Mary Pennino-​Baskerville’s “Terpsichore Reviled:  Antidance Tracts in Elizabethan England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 22, no. 3 (1991):  475–​494. For pan-​ European perspectives, see Alessandro Arcangeli’s “Dance under Trial: The Moral Debate 1200–​1600,” Dance Research 12, no. 2 (1994):  127–​155; H. P. Clive’s “The Calvinists and the Question of Dancing in the 16th Century,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 23, no. 2 (1961):  296–​323; and the opening chapters of Ann Wagner’s Adversaries of Dance: From the Puritans to the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). Also relevant is Jeremy Goring’s Godly Exercises or the Devil’s Dance? Puritanism and Popular Culture in Pre-​Civil War England (London:  Dr.  William’s Trust, 1983), which analyzes dance references in English sermons and biblical commentaries. Many of Jonas Barish’s insights in The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1981) apply to dance, as well.

42   Emily Winerock 48. Philip Stubbes, The anatomie of abuses contayning a discouerie, or briefe summarie of such notable vices and imperfections, as now raigne in many Christian countreyes of the worlde:  but (especiallie) in a verie famous ilande called Ailgna (London, 1583), Book I, sig. O2. 49. Stubbes, The anatomie of abuses, Book I, sig. M7v. 50. Stubbes, The anatomie of abuses, preface. 51. Ecclesiastes 3:4. KJV. 52. Stubbes, The anatomie of abuses, preface. 53. Witold Rybczynski, “Waiting for the Weekend,” The Atlantic (August 1991): 35–​52. 54. The main work on English sabbatarianism is Kenneth Parker’s The English Sabbath: A Study of Doctrine and Discipline from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 2002). For the impact of sabbatarianism on English dancing practices, see Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” especially the Introduction and Chapters 3–​5. 55. Interestingly, Philip Stubbes was not a Puritan (indeed he attacked Puritans or “precisionists” in his writings), but he did share their suspicion of dancing and theatrical entertainments. 56. Fetherston, A dialogue agaynst light, lewde, and lascivious dauncing, sig. B2. 57. Martin Butler, “Lowin, John (bap. 1576, d. 1653),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://​www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​17096. John Lowin (1576–​1653) was a prominent actor with the King’s Men. He seems an unlikely author for these treatises, but recent biographers continue to uphold the attribution. Barbara Wooding contends that the actor was trying to clarify the importance of dancing in the correct manner, as well as arguing that actors were not immune from sin; John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–​ 1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 26–​28. In 1609, Lowin’s treatise was reissued with no substantive changes to the text under the title Brief Conclusions of Dancers and Dancing. 58. Lowin, Conclusions vpon dances, sig. C2. 59. Lowin, Conclusions vpon dances, sig. C2. 60. Lowin, Conclusions vpon dances, sig. D2. 61. Lowin, Conclusions vpon dances, sig. D1v. 62. These results are from the subset “keyed full text” records, and include spelling and part-​ of-​speech variants such as “daunce” and “dansinge,” as well as some nonrelevant phrases containing variants, such as “abou~dance” and “atte~dance.” (The “~” denotes a letter “n” or “m” that is understood but not written.) Certain spelling variants are not automatic, such as “da~ce” and “dau~ce,” and must be searched separately. Searches were done on January 17, 2016: there were 130,305 total records in the EEBO collection, 25,277 searchable or keyed full text records, and 15,536 searchable works printed between 1550 and 1650. For searches on additional dance terms and phrases, see Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” 46. 63. Jean Bodin, The six bookes of a common-​weale. VVritten by I. Bodin a famous lawyer, and a man of great experience in matters of state. Out of the French and Latine copies, done into English, by Richard Knolles (London, 1606), 645. 64. Barnaby Rich, A right exelent and pleasaunt dialogue, betwene Mercury and an English souldier contayning his supplication to Mars: bevvtified with sundry worthy histories, rare inuentions, and politike deuises (London, 1574), sig. J2.

Competing Conceptions of Dancing    43 65. John Drout, The pityfull histori[e] of two louing Italians, Gaulfrido and Barnardo le vayne, which ariued in the countrey of Grece in the time of the noble Emperoure Vaspasian and translated out of Italian into Englishe meeter by John Drout (London, 1570), sig. C5v. The origins and survival of this work are steeped in mystery and controversy. See Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), vol. 1, 428–​429. 66. Drout, The pityfull historie, sig. C5v. 67. Drout, The pityfull historie, sig. C6. 68. Drout, The pityfull historie, sig. C6. 69. For a nuanced and in-​depth discussion of the more and less speculative links between English practices and Continental European manuals, see Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque:  Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006),  16–​20. 70. The following analysis draws heavily on the Records of Early English Drama (REED) collections. These feature excerpts pertaining to drama, music, and dance drawn from court and civic records, account books, and other archival materials rarely available outside of public record offices. Most of the hundreds of dance references are to social rather than theatrical dancing and to dancing in the countryside and in towns rather than at court. Spinoff projects include the REED Patrons and Performances website (https://​reed. library.utoronto.ca) and the Early Modern London Theatres database project (https:// emlot.library.utoronto.ca). 71. Gloucester Diocese Consistory Court Deposition Books, GRO:  GDR 89, fol. [106] (October 13), quoted in Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield, eds., Records of Early English Drama: Cumberland/​Westmorland/​Gloucestershire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 343. 72. Sir Thomas Throckmorton was influential and notoriously bad-​tempered—​not a good person to have as one’s enemy. He was also the patron of the rectory and so would have been the one who had recommended Wilmot for his post. He and Wilmot fell out due to the lord’s well-​founded suspicions that the rector was a bad influence on his son. Jan Broadway, “Throckmorton family (per. c. 1500–​1682),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://​www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​72341. 73. Gloucester Diocese Consistory Court Deposition Books, GRO:  GDR 89, fol. [106v] (October 13), quoted in Douglas and Greenfield, REED: Gloucestershire, 343. 74. On the Tortworth cushion dance as a dance game, see the author’s essay, Winerock, “‘Mixt’ and Matched: Dance Games in Late-​Sixteenth-​and Early-​Seventeenth-​Century Europe,” in Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games, ed. Allison Levy (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017), 43–​45. 75. John Playford, “Joan Sanderson, or The Cushion-​Dance, a Round Dance,” in The Dancing-​ Master, or, Directions for Dancing Country Dances with the Tunes to each Dance for the Treble-​Violin (London, 1686), 208. 76. Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 385. 77. See Montagut and de Lauze, Louange de la Danse, regarding specific differences in Renaissance and Baroque styling. 78. Winerock, “ ‘Performing’ Gender and Status on the Dance Floor,” 473, Table 16.1.

44   Emily Winerock 79. Wilmot was probably in his thirties. He was married with several young children. One of the witnesses, William Lawrence, was thirty-​two and a husbandman, or farmer, from Tortworth. The other witness, Giles Daunt, was forty-​six and a gentleman from a nearby parish. Lawrence was a spectator, while Daunt was one of the half dozen men who joined Wilmot in the cushion dance. 80. The church house was a separate building, usually close to the church itself, in which congregants hosted a wide variety of private and public events, including baptism and wedding receptions. Like a modern-​day community hall, it was not considered a sacred space per se, but attendees were still expected to behave with more circumspection and decorum than at an alehouse or bearbaiting. Patrick Cowley, The Church Houses:  Their Religious and Social Significance (London:  S.P.C.K., 1970), 15, 17. 81. Presumably the church house had cushions since the depositions imply that the leading of the cushion dance was a spontaneous rather than a premeditated gesture. 82. Articles Objected, GRO: B4/​1/​2642, fol. 1. 83. Gloucester Diocese Consistory Court Deposition Books, GRO:  GDR 89, fol. [106v] (October 13), quoted in Douglas and Greenfield, REED: Gloucestershire, 343. 84. The records do not say whether the rector’s wife, Mistress Wilmot, was present at the event, but Daunt’s testimony states that Wilmot kissed Mistress Hicks, so even if his wife was there, that is not whom he chose to kiss. 85. The following discussion and numbers are based on a database of 325 dance-​related records assembled as part of the author’s doctoral research. Some of these records can be found in the REED collections, while others were discovered in the course of doing research in English county archives. 86. James Stokes, ed., with Robert J. Alexander, Records of Early English Drama: Somerset, including Bath (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) vol. 1, 101–​103, quoting Bishop’s Court Deposition Book (deposition of Simon Cotton, curate on behalf of John Fabian, vicar), Somerset Record Office (SRO): D/​D/​Cd 71, fols. 209–​9v, fol. 216v, fols. 176–​7v; and vol. 1, 139, quoting Compert Book, SRO: D/​D/​Ca 160, fol. 51v. 87. See, for example, Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills, eds., Records of Early English Drama:  Cheshire (including Chester) (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2007), vol. 1, 69, quoting Cordwainers and Shoemakers’ Records, CCA: Account Book I G/​8/​2, fols. 43–​3v (November 11), and Stokes, REED: Somerset, vol. 1, 371–​373, quoting Corporation Act Book 3, WTH: Wells Town Hall, fol. 376. 88. Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” 86, 88. Of the records specifying age, 6 refer to children dancing, 4 mention elderly persons dancing, and 34 refer to young men, young women, maidens, or youths dancing. 89. James Gibson, ed., Records of Early English Drama:  Kent (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2002), vol. 1, 11, quoting Archdeacon’s Court Book, CCA: DCb/​J/​X.1.11, fol. 145v. 90. Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” 90. Where specified, 22 records mention drinking, 9 fighting, and 12 game playing as occurring alongside the dancing. 91. Gibson, ed., REED: Kent, vol. 2, 894, quoting Archdeacon’s Court Book, CCA: DCb/​J/​ X.3.6 part 2, fol. 184. Interestingly, Robert Burt, the host, defended himself against the accusations by explaining that the shoemaker, Mathew Norman, had already been drunk when he arrived at the party. He also emphasizes that the party was over before church services started.

Competing Conceptions of Dancing    45 92. Gibson, ed., REED:  Kent, vol. 2, 606–​607, quoting Parishioners’ Petition to Quarter Sessions, CKS: QM/​SB 37. For a comprehensive examination of morris dance, see John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing 1458–​1750 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Regarding the tradition of morris dancing at Whitsuntide specifically, see also Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England. 93. Gibson, ed., REED: Kent, vol. 2, 607, quoting Parishioners’ Petition to Quarter Sessions, CKS: QM/​SB  37. 94. Gibson, ed., REED: Kent, vol. 2, 730, quoting Archdeacon’s Court Book, CCA: DCb/​J/​ X.4.5, fol. 7. 95. Gibson, ed., REED: Kent, vol. 2, 730, quoting Archdeacon’s Court Book, CCA: DCb/​J/​ X.4.5, fol. 7. 96. Gibson, ed., REED: Kent, vol. 2, 730, quoting Archdeacon’s Court Book, CCA: DCb/​J/​ X.4.5, fol. 7. 97. Gibson, ed., REED: Kent, vol. 2, 730, quoting Archdeacon’s Court Book, CCA: DCb/​J/​ X.4.5, fol. 7. 98. Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” 91. Of the records specifying gender of the dancers, 53 mention male-​only, 48 mention mixed gender, and 10 mention female-​only dancing. 99. Fetherston, A dialogue agaynst light, lewde, and lascivious dauncing, sig. D4v. 100. Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” 93–​94. Out of the sample of 325 records, only 12 (4%) could possibly be referring to dancing in a “lewd” manner, with only another 13 (4%) mentioning dancing leading to illicit sexual encounters. 101. Stubbes, The anatomie of abuses, Book I, sig. M8v. 102. Stokes, REED:  Somerset, vol. 1, 139, quoting Ex Officio Act Book, SRO:  D/​D/​Ca 231, fol. 218. 103. Stokes, REED:  Somerset, vol. 1, 139, quoting Ex Officio Act Book, SRO:  D/​D/​Ca 231, fol. 218. 104. Fiddlers and pipers (whether playing tabor and pipe or, especially in the North, bagpipes) most commonly provided musical accompaniment for rustic dancing, while viol players and lutenists accompanied courtly dances. 105. Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” 95. 106. Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” 95. It is quite difficult in these records to identify couples, whether married or not, but for those that can, 10 were married and 9 were unmarried. 107. Stokes, REED: Somerset, vol. 1, 60, quoting Ex Officio Act Book, SRO: D/​D/​Ca 263, fol. 46v. 108. Stokes, REED: Somerset, vol. 1, 234, quoting Deposition Book for Dean’s Peculiar, SRO: D/​D/​Cd  28. 109. Stokes, REED: Somerset, vol. 1, 234, quoting Deposition Book for Dean’s Peculiar, SRO: D/​D/​Cd  28. 110. Stokes, REED: Somerset, vol. 1, 235, quoting Deposition Book for Dean’s Peculiar, SRO: D/​D/​Cd  28. 111. Stokes, REED: Somerset, vol. 1, 234, quoting Deposition Book for Dean’s Peculiar, SRO: D/​D/​Cd  28. 112. Stokes, REED: Somerset, vol. 1, 234, quoting Deposition Book for Dean’s Peculiar, SRO: D/​D/​Cd  28. 113. Stokes, REED: Somerset, vol. 1, 121, quoting Ex Officio Act Book, SRO: D/​D/​Ca 146, fol. 42. 114. Stokes, REED: Somerset, vol. 1, 121, quoting Ex Officio Act Book, SRO: D/​D/​Ca 146, fol. 42.

46   Emily Winerock 115. Stokes, REED: Somerset, vol. 1, 121, quoting Ex Officio Act Book, SRO: D/​D/​Ca 146, fol. 42. 116. Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” 101. For records where the venue could be determined, 71 were people’s homes, 58 were church properties, 32 were public spaces (village greens, town halls, city streets), and 20 were alehouses or inns. However, many of the homes mentioned might have been de facto alehouses, where people sold ale in their front room without a license. See Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–​1830 (London: Longman, 1983). 117. Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” 101. For records where the type of event could be determined, 32 were informal social events, 18 were ales, 16 were holiday celebrations (Whitsuntide, All Saints’ Day, Easter, and Christmas), 14 were seasonal celebrations (May games, Midsummer watches), 6 were performances, 5 were life-​ cycle celebrations (weddings and christenings), 5 were civic entertainments, and 4 were dancing lessons. These numbers likely do not reflect the true ratios of these events featuring dancing due to lack of records for most weddings, performances by traveling players, May games, etc. 118. Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” 98. Of the records that mention the time of day of the dancing, 57 are in the afternoon, 48 in the evening, 7 in the morning, 6 throughout the day, 3 throughout the night, and 1 described dancing that lasted all day and all night. 119. Stokes, REED: Somerset, vol. 1, 72, quoting Compert Book for Bishop’s Peculiar, 1625, SRO: D/​D/​Ca 233, fol. 70v (October 14). 120. Winerock, “Reformation and Revelry,” 8. See also Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing 1458–​1750, 173, 204–​205, 212. 121. Articles Objected, GRO: B4/​1/​2642, fol. 1. For more radical Protestants, simply attending a play might be considered scandalous behavior for a clergyman. However, one hardly had to be a Puritan to be appalled when one’s parish rector, noticeably drunk, got so caught up in a play that he tried to climb onto the stage, as John Wilmot apparently did, with other audience members having to physically restrain him. 122. Phebe Jensen, Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 217. 123. Performance choices that stressed amorousness might include exaggerated swaying of the hips for women and of the shoulders (pavoneggiarsi) for men, maintaining eye contact and/​or holding hands with one’s partner for as long as possible while turning away from each other, dancing closer than usual to one’s partner, etc.

Bibliography Cunningham, James. Dancing in the Inns of Court. London: Jordan & Sons, 1965. Davies, Sir John. Orchestra or A poeme of dauncing. London, 1596. Forrest, John. The History of Morris Dancing, 1458–​1750. Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 1999. Jensen, Phebe. Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008. Kemp, William. Kemps nine daies wonder, performed in a daunce from London to Norwich. London, 1600. Lowin, John. Conclusions vpon dances, both of this age, and of the olde. London, 1607.

Competing Conceptions of Dancing    47 Nevile, Jennifer, ed. Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250–​1750. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Payne, Ian. The Almain in Britain, c. 1549–​c. 1675: A Dance Manual from Manuscript Sources. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2003. Pennino-​Baskerville, Mary. “Terpsichore Reviled: Antidance Tracts in Elizabethan England.” Sixteenth Century Journal 22, no. 3 (1991): 475–​494.

Chapter 2

Dec oding Da nc e i n Shakespeare ’ s M u ch A d o ab ou t Nothing a nd T welfth  N ight Nona Monahin

Shakespeare employs dance in two distinct but related ways: as part of the action of a play, and in the form of verbal references, often to specific dances. In this chapter I address the latter context.1 Shakespeare mentions seventeen different dances (more if one includes variants of the same dance type), some courtly (such as the measure, or the galliard), some popular (jig, morris), a few exotic or elusive (bacchanals, roundel). The dances are listed in Appendix 1 at the end of this chapter. At times the dance names form the basis for word play; at other times the images they evoke help to illuminate a particular character or dramatic situation. The courtly dances would have been familiar at least to members of the nobility and gentry, those for whom dancing was an essential social skill to be cultivated and practiced on a regular basis, while the popular dances were probably recognizable to most. The dance names would have conjured up associations, however clichéd, just as today a waltz may evoke elegance, while a tango might suggest passion. But what images do dances such as the measure, galliard, cinquepace, coranto, canary, lavolta, or brawl bring to mind for present-​day audiences, readers, actors, and directors? Sadly, Shakespeare’s references to dance are often ignored or misunderstood in contemporary productions, and sometimes are cut altogether—​possibly because of the assumption that either they would not be understood by the audience or that they are not important.2 In explaining the pervasiveness and significance of Shakespeare’s figurative language, Russ McDonald laments the tendency by some readers and spectators to dismiss such language as “unnecessarily flowery,” and consequently to “read over” it, thereby “spectacularly  .  .  .  miss[ing] the point,” and proposes that “readers unaccustomed to early modern language and to Shakespeare’s poetic use of it may need some help

50   Nona Monahin in confronting the images, similes, metaphors, and other tropes on which he and his contemporaries heavily (and happily) depend.”3 By a similar token, my goal in the present chapter is to acquaint the reader with several of the dances that are mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays and to consider their ramifications. I have chosen to focus on dance references in Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night, two comedies that between them involve five dances for which choreographic information is available: the measure, the “passy-​measures pavan,” the coranto, the galliard, and the galliard’s simpler relative, the cinquepace. Both plays also mention the jig, a term that could refer, among other things, to a discrete dance (as it does in these two plays), as well as to a short postlude drama featuring song and dance. Unfortunately, there are no extant choreographies for a jig from Shakespeare’s period, and, as a result, this dance will not be examined here in detail. The jig as a postlude to a play forms the subject of Roger Clegg’s Chapter 3 in this volume. My approach is threefold: for each scene involving dance references, I introduce the relevant dances through a review of extant choreographic sources, after which I examine the references in the context of the dramatic situation in which they occur. Finally, I consider approaches to staging the respective scene with the aim of making the dance references meaningful to audiences today. As Lynsey McCulloch has noted, since the appearance of Alan Brissenden’s seminal book, Shakespeare and the Dance (1981), there has been a substantial growth in interdisciplinary research on dance in the early modern period.4 The last few decades have also seen the discovery of a number of new choreographic sources, as well as the appearance of several major studies on dance in early modern Britain, Italy, and France.5 The French and Italian sources are important for studying dance in Shakespeare because of the paucity of extant English writings on dance from the period. From England we have choreographic descriptions for vernacular—​that is, specifically British—​dances, such as the measures, which are preserved in several manuscripts mostly associated with the Inns of Court, and so-​called country dances (though the latter are in a later, mid-​seventeenth-​ century source).6 The Inns of Court manuscripts also name several dances of foreign origin that are referred to in Shakespeare’s plays—​the cinquepace, galliard, French brawl, canary, coranto, and lavolta—​but do not provide enough detail for us to be able to reconstruct them. Detailed choreographies for these dances are found in the French and Italian dance sources of the period. While transferring choreographies across national borders can be potentially problematic, it is well known that in early modern Europe dances and dancing styles, at least those of the elite, traveled widely, one reason being the frequent intermarriages between noble households. Eyewitness accounts attest to an assortment of international dances in vogue at various European courts.7 Italy served as the role model for dance in other European countries, and Italian dancing masters were employed throughout Europe, including at the Tudor court; Queen Elizabeth I herself is said to have learned to dance “in the Italian manner.”8 To approach the matter from another angle, when we compare choreographies for the same dance from different locations, the various versions, though rarely identical, are similar enough in at least those key elements that distinguish

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    51 that particular dance type from another.9 Thus it seems reasonable to use foreign dance sources for interpreting and choreographing dances in Shakespeare’s plays, as long as one does so with caution, assessing each situation on a case-​by-​case basis. A listing of primary sources relevant to the study of Shakespeare’s dances is included in Appendix 2.

Much Ado about Nothing, Act 2, Scene 1: The Jig, Measure, and Cinquepace In this late sixteenth-​century comedy, goodwill, wit, and some devious matchmaking combine to overcome misunderstanding, mischief, and malice, culminating in a double wedding. Early on in the play, Beatrice, a feisty, outspoken young woman, tries to impart her negative view of matrimony to her artless, trusting cousin, Hero, who is expecting a proposal of marriage: BEATRICE: The fault will be in the music, cousin, if you be not wooed in good time. If the Prince be too important, tell him there is measure in everything, and so dance out the answer. For hear me, Hero, wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinquepace. The first suit is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig—​and full as fantastical; the wedding mannerly modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry. And then comes repentance, and with his bad legs falls into the cinquepace faster and faster till he sink into his grave. (2.1.62–​72)10

Beatrice here mentions three dances. As already noted, there are no extant choreographies for a jig from Shakespeare’s period. Therefore, I can address this dance only briefly, and my main focus will be on the measure and the cinquepace, since I believe it is the connection, as well as the contrast, between these two dances that is crucial to the understanding of Beatrice’s warning to Hero.

Jig By all accounts, the term “jig” has had multiple meanings throughout the course of its history.11 Depending on the time and place, it could signify a dance, a song or ballad, a piece of instrumental music, as well as a short dramatic postlude—​with singing and dancing—​performed at the end of a play.12 Beatrice is obviously referring to a danced jig, since she has just advised Hero to “dance out the answer” should the prince offer her a proposal of marriage. The jig was of country, rather than courtly, origin, which may explain the lack of written choreographies.13 There was apparently no one standard form of the jig as a dance, but what little information we have suggests that by the seventeenth century its characteristic features were its energetic leaping, hopping, stepping, and spinning

52   Nona Monahin motions.14 Jigs could combine dancing and singing, often in the form of “short, repetitive dance songs in which the lyrics of the refrain are usually impetus to the steps, intended to drive the dance on.”15 The texts of sung jigs could be bawdy (with the rapid up-​and-​down hopping motions of the dance providing ample opportunities for sexual innuendo).16 Many jigs were labeled “Scotch,” or “Scottish.” Baskervill, writing about the situation in late sixteenth-​century London, notes that whatever Scottish features about the jig song and/​or dance may have initially appealed to people in the capital city in the south, at one point it became common practice to advertise songs as “northern or Scottish, or as sung to northern or Scottish tunes”—​a designation that may have given them a rustic, or exotic, flair.17

Measure “Measure” is one of the most frequently mentioned dance terms in the works of Shakespeare. It is, of course, a wonderful word to pun on because of its multiple meanings. Apart from its dance connotations (discussed in the following), it could signify, among other things, quantity, limit, or extent: “Tell me for truth the measure of his love” (Henry VI, Part III, 3.3.120); means, option: “My life will be too short, /​And every measure fail me” (King Lear, 4.6.2–​3); moderation, proportion, normalcy: “why are you thus out of measure sad?” (Much Ado about Nothing, 1.3.1–​2). Several meanings could be combined: “But let them measure [judge] us by what they will, /​We’ll measure [allot, apportion] them a measure [dance], and be gone” (Romeo and Juliet 1.4.9–​10). In Shakespeare’s time, “measure” could be used as a general term for dance, or it could denote a particular category of dances described in several manuscripts mostly associated with the Inns of Court.18 Sometimes the usage is ambiguous, such as when Romeo states “The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand” (Romeo and Juliet, 1.5.49), although when the “Muskovites” arrive, in Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.2.184), to “tread a measure” with the ladies on the grass, the general meaning seems more likely. The only extant choreographies for dances labeled “measure” are preserved in eight manuscripts that had belonged to various people most of whom were associated in one way or another with the Inns of Court.19 Although the earliest of these manuscripts is believed to date from the mid-​sixteenth century, and the last one a century later, all of them describe more or less the same dances.20 In particular, eight dances, labeled collectively in some of the manuscripts as “The Old Measures,” are present, in the same order, in all but the earliest manuscript, which lacks one of the dances. Some of the manuscripts contain additional measures, interspersed among these eight. Included under the gen­ eral heading of “measures” are dances labeled “pavin,” “almain,” and “measure,” in various spellings, as well as some whose type is not stated. Several manuscripts also mention other dance types, such as the cinquepace, galliard, coranto, and others, which were apparently danced after the measures.21 Only one manuscript contains music for several of the dances.22 The Inns of Court manuscripts are listed in Appendix 2.

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    53 The dance descriptions in these manuscripts are very brief, suggesting that they were primarily intended as aides-​mémoire. The basic outline of a dance is given, as well as the names of the steps involved, but the steps themselves are not explained. For example, one manuscript describes the dance known as the “Quadran pavan” as “2 singles & one double forward 2 singles side & a double back 4 times over,” while another describes the “Earle of Essex Measure” as “[a]‌double forward & a single backe 4 times then to [two] singles sides with a double forward & a double backe all over againe & soe end.”23 The most commonly occurring steps in these measures are called “singles” and “doubles,” and each measure has its own unique combination of these, and at times other, steps.24 To find out how to do these steps, one needs to look outside of the Inns of Court manuscripts. A comparatively late source, John Playford’s The English Dancing Master (1651), describes “singles” and “doubles” as follows: “A Double is foure steps forward or back, closing both feet. A Single is two steps, closing both feete.”25 (The “closing” refers to finishing the step by placing the trailing foot next to the stepping foot.)26 This is identical to an earlier description of similarly named steps (pas simples and pas doubles) in a 1589 French manual by Thoinot Arbeau, as well as to descriptions of analogous steps (puntata, or passo puntato, and doppio) in the Italian manuals of Fabritio Caroso (1581, 1600) and Cesare Negri (1602).27 Arbeau distinguishes between two kinds of pas simples and pas doubles. Those described in the preceding are used in the pavane and the basse danse, while in a related dance type, the allemande, the trailing foot is brought forward, ending raised in front, instead of being placed beside the stepping foot. Because the “measure” category in the Inns of Court manuscripts includes “pavins” and “almains,” both versions may be applicable. Either way, these are walking steps, making these measures fairly sedate dances. Occasionally a few sprightlier steps are introduced: one manuscript calls for “hopped doubles” (which concurs with Arbeau’s description of similar hopped steps in the final section of his allemande), while some measures include “slydes,” or “French slides” (which may resemble steps later known as chassés), but the small number of such insertions does not alter the measure’s overall unruffled nature.28 Given the variety of meanings associated with the term “measure,” it is tempting to seek a correlation between the term and the type of dance it signifies. To be sure, “measured,” in the sense of “unhurried” or “moderate,” would be a fair description of the Inns of Court measures, and this association may have been recognized during the period when the dance was in vogue. But the label more likely derives from an earlier dance type known as the basse danse, which was popular in many parts of Europe, including England, during the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries.29 Like the measures, basse danses were danced by couples, and used similar steps. Furthermore, the steps of a basse danse were grouped into dance phrases known as mesures.30 The connection between the measure and the basse danse is further highlighted by the translation of basse-​ danse as “a measure” in Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French-​English dictionary, and by the subtitle le basse to the measure called Turquylonye in the earliest of the Inns of Court dance manuscripts.31

54   Nona Monahin

Cinquepace and Galliard “Cinquepace” is the English term for a particular sequence of five steps (French: cinque pas; Italian:  cinque passi) that formed the basis of a dance called the galliard (French: gaillarde; Italian: gagliarda). The term was also used for the complete dance. The five steps were taken over six beats of music (two bars of triple meter), and comprised four initial actions, such as sprung kicks (described in the following) done with alternating feet, on the first four beats of the music, followed by a jump that occupied the last two beats. The clearest description of a “five step” sequence comes from Arbeau, who described the individual steps and explained their timing.32 The sprung kick was called greve when performed vigorously, and pied en l’air (foot in the air) when done with the foot just off the ground; the jump could be a sault majeur (high jump), or a sault moyen (moderate jump), and the landing was called posture—​with the sault and posture together making up the cadance (cadence). This information is summarized in Table 2.1. When this dance is performed energetically, the jump is not an isolated movement, confined to the fifth count, but is connected to the execution of the greve on count four. The momentum created by the rebound from the spring accompanying the fourth greve carries the dancer into the jump. This explains why the strong beat in the music occurs just before the jump, on the fourth count (out of the total of six). On count five, then, the dancer is already in the air, which is possibly why this part was not counted as a separate step. Descriptions of the basic steps of the gagliarda in Italian manuals are similar in principle to Arbeau’s, in that the cinque passi consist of four initial actions followed by a cadenza. One difference is that Arbeau dislikes landing with both feet simultaneously, and prefers that the back foot land slightly earlier than the front foot.33 This type of landing (on counts “and six”) is reflected in the rhythm of much galliard music (“ONE, two, Table 2.1 The basic five-​step pattern according to Arbeau Music counts

1

2

3

4

5

6

Step counts

1

2

3

4

-​

5

Step names

Left greve or pied en l’air

Right greve or pied en l’air

Left greve or pied en l’air

Right greve or pied en l’air

Sault (majeur or moyen)

Posture

Cadance Descriptions

Spring  onto right foot, raising left foot in front

Spring  onto left foot, raising right foot in front

Spring  onto right foot, raising left foot in front

Spring  onto left foot, raising right foot in front

Jump

Repeat the above sequence of steps, reversing left and right.

Land, feet parallel; right foot back, left foot forward

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    55 three, FOUR, [five], and six”). The cadenza described in the Italian manuals, on the other hand, has both feet landing on count six.34 When used to refer to a complete dance, the terms “cinquepace” and “galliard” are often used interchangeably (today, and possibly also in Shakespeare’s time). Strictly speaking, however, the galliard proper built on the basic five-​step sequence by adding variations (called “tricks” in England) made up of different combinations of assorted jumps, hops, kicks, spins, leaps, stamps, and turns in the air. These could replace the four greves shown in the preceding table while still preserving the cadence on counts five and six, or they could be combined into longer phrases, taking the time of two or more “five-​ step” sequences, and postponing the cadence until the very end. The galliard could be a discrete dance, or a section of a danced suite made up of several different dance types. Such suites (abundant in the Italian manuals) are usually designed to be danced by just one male-​female couple, though there are suites for several couples as well. A typical galliard included solo passages for the man and the woman in turn; during these, the man could display his athletic skills by performing vigorous variations, while the woman, doing smaller, lighter steps, could impress with her grace and nimble footwork. Such solos alternated with passages where the couple danced together, hand in hand, performing the basic “five steps” and perhaps a few of the lighter variations. Arbeau distinguished between the galliard proper and a less vigorous version of it, called the tourdion, performed with smaller springs and jumps (pieds en l’air and saults moyen), and therefore suitable for a male-​female couple dancing hand in hand (“in dancing the tourdion one always holds the damsel by the hand and he who dances it boisterously causes needless discomfort and jolting to the said damsel.”)35 Arbeau furthermore noted a temporal difference between the two versions: because large leaps and jumps require more time to execute than small ones, the galliard was danced to a somewhat slower tempo than the tourdion.36 It is possible that when the English sources apply the term “cinquepace” (or even “galliard”) to a dance done by several male-​female couples simultaneously, they may be referring to an English counterpart of the French tourdion. So popular was the galliard (and in particular the pyrotechnics of the men’s solos) that during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries hundreds of galliard variations appeared in print, presumably for young men to pick and choose from for practice and performance (should they be disinclined to invent, or improvise, their own). Arbeau described over a dozen different galliard variations, but it is the Italian authors who provide the largest number of possibilities. Cesare Negri devoted seventy pages of his three-​hundred-​page manual to a discussion of the galliard and its variations, with additional variations included in the individual dance choreographies.37 Several other Italian dance manuals consist almost entirely of galliard variations.38 Descriptions of the cinquepace and galliard in English sources are scant, although this is part of the general situation regarding the scarcity of English dance sources from the period, and does not reflect on this dance in particular. In the Inns of Court manuscripts, the cinquepace is described only as “one, two, three, foure, & five”39—​which makes perfect sense when one knows the French and Italian descriptions—​while the galliard is

56   Nona Monahin performed “with the cinque pace and 4 or 5 severall trickes,” or “with the cinquepace, halfe capers, traverses, the round turnes & such like, learned onlye by practice.”40 The distinction between the simple cinquepace and the fancier galliard is highlighted in another English source: Barnaby Rich, in his Farewell to Military Profession (1581), wrote, “Oure Galliardes . . . are so full of trickes and tournes, that he whiche hath no more but the plaine Sinquepace, is no better accoumpted of then a verie bungler.”41 These brief accounts confirm what the foreign sources describe in detail: that the galliard consisted of the basic “five steps” with added variations.

Jig, Measure, and Cinquepace in Context In Much Ado about Nothing, Beatrice’s opinion of courtship is almost as low as her opinion of marriage. She describes wooing as “hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig—​and full as fantastical” (2.1.67–​68). “Hot and hasty” rings of passion, excitement, and lust (the audience could not help but be aware of the jig’s bawdy connotations), but also of foolishness, infatuation, and thoughtless action. “Fantastical” evokes the unreal, something illusory (or maybe delusory), and thus perhaps carries a suggestion of insincerity. It also suggests ridiculous excessiveness, which is how Benedick will later perceive the newly betrothed Claudio’s altered discourse: “He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier; and now is he turned orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes” (2.3.18–​21). Beatrice’s negative view of courting may be prompted in part by her own past experience with Benedick, at which she later hints, somewhat enigmatically, to Don Pedro when she notes that Benedick once before had won her heart “with false dice” (2.1.260–​262).42 Once the courtship has progressed to matrimony, the wedding—​“mannerly modest, full of state and ancientry”—​proceeds in an orderly fashion, and according to tradition. The measure is the perfect dance for it—​unhurried, unpretentious, consisting mainly of different combinations of walking steps. Done as a procession of couples, one behind the other, it could certainly appear stately, as the image evoked by Arbeau’s description of a pavane (one type of measure, as noted earlier) suggests: On solemn feast days the pavan is employed by kings, princes and great noblemen to display themselves in their fine mantles and ceremonial robes. They are accompanied by queens, princesses and great ladies, the long trains of their dresses loosened and sweeping behind them, sometimes borne by damsels.43

“State” also connotes status, or rank, a topic later broached by Don John when he taunts Claudio by pretending that the prince loves Hero who “is no equal for his [the prince’s] birth” (2.1.155). Finally, given that the measure’s possible ancestor is the older basse danse, its lineage may well be described as “ancient.” While the significance of the first two dances is generally undisputed, the dance chosen to portray repentance—​who “with his bad legs falls into the cinquepace faster

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    57 and faster till he sink into his grave” (2.1.70–​72)—​has elicited considerable discussion. Some writers, prompted by the depiction of “repentance” as male (“his bad legs,” “his grave”), have focused on the situation of the husband (or the authority he represents) in a marriage. Thus, for example, Harry Berger sees the reference to dancing “faster and faster” as suggesting the man’s desperate yet futile attempt to regain the jig tempo of his bachelor days.44 Skiles Howard draws attention to the increasing dominance of the husband as the wife gradually fades out of the picture, noting, however, that the married man has plenty to regret as he is weighed down by his ever-​increasing responsibilities, just as repentance has “a million different variations to make him sorry.”45 Since Shakespeare’s references tend to be multilayered, and the various explanations need not be mutually exclusive, I wish to propose another interpretation of Beatrice’s speech, one that would have been understood by Shakespeare’s audiences, but that is not necessarily obvious to spectators and readers today. It concerns the order of the dances mentioned by Beatrice, in particular the juxtaposition of the measure and the cinquepace, to indicate what she views as the inevitability of a marriage leading to repentance. If the wedding is a measure, it stands to reason that the next stage almost has to be a cinquepace or a galliard. While such pairing of a slower dance with a faster, sprightlier one is an old tradition,46 with several different dance types fulfilling the roles of “slower” and “faster” dance depending on time and place, the dance that most frequently follows the measures in the extant English sources is the cinquepace or galliard.47 Beatrice herself outlines this progression, as it were, when, immediately after expounding on the wedding/​measure, she continues with the words “and then comes repentance . . .” (2.1.69–​70). The measure and the cinquepace/​galliard are decisively linked, syntactically and conceptually, and would have been perceived that way by many in Shakespeare’s audience. A jig, on the other hand, was not historically connected to either of the other two dances. It even stems from a different milieu—​country, rather than courtly. It may well evoke the “hot and hasty” nature of the wooing phase, but one would not expect a jig to be followed by a measure (any more than one would expect every attempt at wooing to result in a wedding). One could, however, expect a measure to be followed by a cinquepace. Beatrice is therefore suggesting that repentance after marriage is unavoidable, just as the cinquepace follows the measure. Shakespeare no doubt chose the term “cinquepace” here, rather than “galliard,” for the obvious pun on “sink into the grave.” Yet the pun goes even deeper, for “grave” evokes “greve,” the French term for the animated sprung kick that, strictly speaking, belonged to the more vigorous galliard. Granted, the two dance names could be used interchangeably, but, because English sources from the period tend to acknowledge the difference between the two, it seems worthwhile to review the attributes of both versions of the dance to see how they can coalesce to paint a multifaceted portrait of “repentance.” The galliard proper, with its extensive repertoire of energetic, elaborate “tricks,” to tax both the physical and mental capacities of the male dancer, is a most appropriate dance to assign to “repentance,” and Beatrice’s description conjures up well a vivid image of the male dancer struggling to perform the galliard on “his bad legs,” until the

58   Nona Monahin strenuous demands of the dance injure his body and pull him into what Skiles Howard has termed “an uncontrollable dance of death.”48 But this fate need not be suffered by the male partner alone. The “he” in this passage refers to repentance, not to the husband, suggesting that “repentance” is an experience potentially shared by all. The image of a couple dancing the cinquepace together, after having danced the measures, is actually an excellent means of suggesting the inevitability of repentance after marriage: it was the plain cinquepace, rather than the fancy galliard with its intricate solo passages, that was more likely to have been danced at the end of the measures by a group of male-​female couples proceeding hand in hand, regardless of what they called it. Additionally, the cinquepace’s lack of variety could evoke monotony (as hinted at by Barnaby Rich, quoted earlier), and the possible faster tempo (as stipulated by Arbeau for the tourdion) would easily lead to exhaustion. Thus the future that Beatrice envisages for the married couple is a very monotonous and tiring one. In Beatrice’s speech, Shakespeare appears to be exploiting the ambiguous nature of the cinquepace/​galliard terminology to draw on qualities from both versions of the dance to paint a composite picture of assorted negative images, not restricted to one or the other partner. Beatrice’s warning to Hero can therefore apply equally well to both unfortunates who participate in the “dance” of matrimony until, worn out by its demands—​symbolized by its characteristic step, the greve—​they sink into their final resting place.

Staging If Beatrice’s advice to Hero is not to be cut in productions, it is imperative that the audience “gets” the humor. While an obvious solution would seem to be for Beatrice to demonstrate some of the dance moves as she speaks her lines, the challenge would be to make such interpolations look integral to the overall action. In the following I examine some possible ways that one might stage this scene with this aim in mind.49 Beatrice could ease into the dance demonstrations gradually: she might accompany her remarks about the “hot and hasty” jig with hand gestures and facial expressions. Next, she might take Hero by the hand (perhaps to keep her from leaving) and lead her about briefly in a stately measure before breaking into a few steps of the cinquepace. Because of the proximity of her speech to the ensuing revels (only three lines separate the two) the audience could be expected to retain enough of Beatrice’s demonstrations to recognize the measure and cinquepace, and their stated associations, if these two dances reoccur during the actual revels. However, to ensure that the associations are cemented even further, one may wish to set up aural, as well as visual, links. Having a musician (or two) wandering about, playing a few snippets of the dance tunes, as if preparing for the revels, would certainly not be out of place in this scene. In fact, the music could serve as the motivation that prompts Beatrice’s remarks about dancing in the first place; she does, after all, begin with the line, “The fault will be in the music.” (What, if anything, to do about the “fault” in the music would be up to the director.) The preceding recommendations can still apply to a production that is not being done in

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    59 period style. One could choose two highly contrasting dances from any period, as long as the music that accompanies them is distinctive enough to remain memorable from one context to the other. Turning now to the revels themselves, these involve four couples conversing in turn.50 There is some debate as to whether these conversations take place before the dancing begins, or during it.51 The location of the stage directions (“Musicke for the dance” in the First Folio, and “Dance” in the 1600 Quarto) suggest the former.52 On the other hand, as Alan Brissenden has noted, the structure and substance of the dialogue of the four couples strongly suggest that they are dancing.53 Of course, the earlier direction, “Enter . . . Maskers with a drum,”54 could indicate the beginning of the music, during which the characters could select partners while conversing, and gradually ease into a short “bout” of a measure. The second set of music directions would then refer to a second dance. Whichever option one choses, it is still possible to incorporate elements of both the measure and the cinquepace, even without making the scene too much longer if the dancing is delayed, as I show in the following. A tranquil measure is an ideal dance to accompany a conversation. Brissenden suggests a pavan, though a set of several short measures—​perhaps one to accompany each couple’s dialogue—​would also work well in this situation.55 The change of music to a cinquepace, then, could be what prompts Beatrice (who, along with Benedick, had stopped dancing in order to argue) to observe that they “must follow the leaders” (2.1.141).56 If, however, the dancing of a measure is delayed until after the dialogues, time constraints may prohibit including two dances.57 In that case, once the measure has been danced, the musicians could start playing a cinquepace while moving off the stage, as if the revels were progressing to another room. The dancers would follow them (Beatrice’s line “we must follow the leaders” could again be put to good use here), and the music, now offstage, could fade away. This would also be an effective way of clearing the stage in preparation for the next, more austere, episode.

Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 3: The Galliard, Cinquepace, Coranto, and Jig Twelfth Night, an early seventeenth-​century festive comedy, features two indolent knights, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek. The more astute Sir Toby uses flattery to gull his wealthy but foolish companion into financing their carousing and reveling habits. In the following passage, during which Sir Toby lauds Sir Andrew’s dancing skills, Shakespeare uses both terms, “cinquepace” and “galliard,” in the same paragraph; he also juxtaposes the galliard with the coranto, and makes a passing reference to the jig. SIR TOBY: What is thy excellence in a galliard, knight? SIR ANDREW: Faith, I can cut a caper.

60   Nona Monahin SIR TOBY: And I can cut the mutton to’t. SIR ANDREW: And I think I have the back-​trick simply as strong as any man in Illyria. SIR TOBY: Wherefore are these things hid? Wherefore have these gifts a curtain before ‘em? Are they like to take dust, like Mistress Mall’s picture? Why dost thou not go to church in a galliard, and come home in a coranto? My very walk should be a jig. I would not so much as make water but in a cinquepace [spelled “sinke-​a-​ pace” in the First Folio].58 What dost thou mean? Is it a world to hide virtues in? I did think by the excellent constitution of thy leg it was formed under the star of a galliard. (1.3.115–​128)

The galliard, cinquepace, and jig were described previously. I will return to them when I discuss the dances in the context of this scene, following a description of the coranto.

Coranto Although the name of this dance suggests “running” movements, the only extant choreographies describe a skipping dance. The name is the English counterpart of the French courante and the Italian corrente, both of which are related to the verb “to run” (French: courir; Italian: correre). (It should not be confused with the slow dance, also named courante, that was popular during the baroque period.) Florio’s 1598 Italian-​ English dictionary translates coranta, corranta as “a kinde of French dance,” while Cotgrave’s 1611 French-​English dictionary translates courante simply as “a curranto.”59 In Shakespeare’s Henry V “swift corantos” are mentioned (3.5.33), and in John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida a character enters “running a coranto pace.”60 Thomas Morley described the coranto as “travising and running,” while Sir John Davies spoke of running “close by the ground with slyding passages.”61 Most coranto music is notated in triple meter, of the kind that in today’s terminology is called “compound duple,” that is, with two groups of three notes per measure. It is faster than the galliard, which, if notated in equivalent note values, and using the same measuring criteria, would have one group of three notes per measure.62 The coranto is mentioned in two (or possibly three) of the Inns of Court dance manuscripts, but the choreographic instructions are either too brief or not explicit enough to allow the dance to be reconstructed.63 Nevertheless, the frequent inclusion of hops in between other steps, in the coranto descriptions in one of the manuscripts, suggests that some skipping movements were involved (at least in that particular case), which correlates with descriptions of this dance in the Italian and French dance manuals.64 The clearest description is again in Arbeau’s Orchésographie, even though the music that Arbeau gives for this dance is in duple meter, rather than the more usual triple. However, the choreography works well in either meter. Moreover, two more dances in Arbeau, also notated in duple meter when most other sources give them in

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    61 triple, as well as certain indications in Arbeau’s descriptions, suggest that in all three cases he may have intended something approaching a compound duple meter.65 Arbeau’s courante consists of a repeated sequence of two hopped “single” steps and one hopped “double” step, done with alternating feet. This is the same step sequence as that used in the duple-​meter pavan, except that in the courante the added hops turn the pavan’s walking steps into skips, and the triple (compound duple) meter gives the music a lilting quality.66 If the transitions from one step to another are made smoothly, and the hops kept very small, the dance does take on a gliding, or “sliding” character, as suggested by Sir John Davies, quoted earlier. Table 2.2 summarizes Arbeau’s descriptions of a courante step sequence beginning with the left foot, in both duple and triple meters. The dance begins with a preparatory hop on the upbeat (either count two or three, depending on the meter).

Table 2.2 The courante step sequence according to Arbeau Duple meter counts

Triple meter counts

2

3

Hop*on right foot

Preparatory hop

1

1 [2]‌**

Step forward on left foot

Left Single

2

3

Small leap onto right foot (next to left foot)

1

1 [2]‌

Place left foot next to right foot

2

3

Hop on left foot

Preparatory hop

1

1 [2]‌

Step forward on right foot

Right Single

2

3

Small leap onto left foot (next to right foot)

1

1 [2]‌

Place right foot next to left foot

2

3

Hop on right foot

Preparatory hop

1

1 [2]‌

Step forward on left foot

Left Double

2

3

Hop on left foot

1

1 [2]‌

Step forward on right foot

2

3

Hop on right foot

1

1 [2]‌

Step forward on left foot

2

3

Small leap onto right foot (next to left foot)

1

1 [2]‌

Place left foot next to right foot Repeat from beginning, reversing left and right

*  Note the distinction here between two different kinds of springs: a hop, where one springs off one foot and lands on the same one, and a leap, which is a spring from one foot to the other. **  In the table, the second beat in the triple meter version is enclosed in brackets to indicate that there is no new action at that point. However, to make the transitions between the steps smooth, the preparation for the leap on count three is already taking place on count two.

62   Nona Monahin Cesare Negri gives one choreography for a corrente in his Le Gratie d’Amore. While not as clearly described as Arbeau’s courante, Negri’s dance is, nevetheless, based on steps combined with hops, which again translates into skipping movements. An additional figure in Negri’s corrente involves doing several steps while moving first to one side and then to the other; whether or not this is related to the “travising” (traversing) referred to by Morley (quoted earlier) is unclear.67

The Dances in Context Returning to the exchange between Belch and Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s choice of dance terms here is as clever as it is intricate. Sir Toby can make use of the cinquepace (spelled “sinke-​a-​pace” in the First Folio) to formulate a crude pun involving a sink and urination when referring to himself (just as he names the jig, with all its coarse associations, as the dance that suits him best), but for flattering Sir Andrew he chooses the galliard, the dance par excellence for showcasing manly physical prowess. Sir Toby, who enjoys making fun of the gullible knight, uses the galliard to try and bait his hapless companion into saying and/​or doing something absurd. And Sir Andrew does not disappoint. After his initial astounding boast about cutting a caper—​a feat that involves moving one’s legs back and forth while in the air during a jump—​which, incidentally, provides Sir Toby with an additional opportunity for some lewd punning, Andrew reveals that he merely “thinks” he can perform a “back-​trick” well, perhaps implying that he has not yet mastered it.68 While this could be attributed to false modesty, or simply meekness, it can also conjure up a very amusing image of poor Sir Andrew practicing this step at home, many times over, in an effort to keep up with his more agile peers. (The fact that every noble “man in Illyria” may also have been practicing it is outside of the immediate image.) We do not know if Shakespeare had any specific “back trick” in mind; Arbeau describes a galliard variation that involves raising the back foot, a movement he calls ruade.69 However, this is only one of several possibilities involving backward movements that could be featured in a galliard, as an examination of the Italian sources reveals. Judging from the quantity and content of the literature devoted to this dance, a good male dancer could have been expected to have quite an assortment of variations in his repertoire, including more than one kind of caper and “back-​trick.” Perhaps, by singling out two tricks that he claims to be able to perform (one of them dubiously at that), Sir Andrew unintentionally reveals that his step vocabulary is rather limited, and by extension, his dancing skills fairly mediocre, which is exactly what Sir Toby was hoping to hear, as his subsequent exhortations suggest. As Sir Toby continues his jibing of Andrew (and riffing on dance names), he asks, “why dost thou not go to church in a galliard, and come home in a coranto?” The contrast between these two dances is considerable. One feature of the galliard (and the cinquepace) was the somewhat halting start-​stop motion inherent in the construction of the “five step” pattern, in which one moved forward on the four sprung kicks, and then did the jump more or less in place. In the galliard proper, further starting and stopping resulted

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    63 from the dance’s overall form, with its alternation of simple cinquepace passages—​ during which the partners moved around the dance space—​and solo variations, which were performed more or less in place. The galliard could also include figures such as turning back, dancing backward, as well as circling around, and changing places with, one’s partner. The coranto, on the other hand, was a skipping dance, and one that was faster than the galliard, as has been noted. Skipping movements, furthermore, suggest a childlike quality, with a feeling of lightness and freedom. The image of Sir Andrew going to church “in a galliard” and returning “in a coranto,” therefore, turns out to be an amusing one, as this idler appears to be in no hurry to get to his destination: he may stop to converse and “show off ” for a while, he may turn back briefly, and the whole excursion may appear to him to be somewhat of a chore, with its ever-​present starting and stopping, and the need to perform challenging variations. The return journey, “in a coranto,” is a different matter—​he cannot wait to get home once the service is over! Shakespeare’s choice of dance terms here does not appear to be random. Let us suppose he had chosen two different dances (with the same number of syllables as “galliard” and “coranto,” to preserve the scansion)—​the “cinquepace” and “canary,” for example. Going to church “in a cinquepace” rather than “in a galliard” would not evoke as strong an image of stopping and starting, of distracting and being distracted, or of expending effort. It would be a more direct, perhaps even a faster, route. Going home in a “canary” would not get one very far, since the canary, a dance of possible Spanish—​via the Canary Islands—​origin or influence, was characterized by percussive stamping motions done in place, as the man and the woman stamped out a dialogue with their feet, punctuated by short passages of sliding footwork during which the partners approached, and retreated from, each other.70 This is not to suggest that the audience would deliberately analyze such technicalities. It more a matter of what image would be more likely to come to mind when a certain word was heard.

Twelfth Night, Act 5, Scene 1: The Passy-​Measures  Pavan I now wish to look at a dance reference that has puzzled scholars since at least the eighteenth century: the “passy-​measures pavan,” which is how Sir Toby Belch, having been injured in an altercation, denounces the inebriated doctor who is unavailable to treat him.71 SIR TOBY: Sot, didst see Dick Surgeon, sot? FESTE [a clown]: O, he’s drunk, Sir Toby, an hour agone. His eyes were set at eight i’ th’ morning. SIR TOBY: Then he’s a rogue, and a passy-​measures pavan. I hate a drunken rogue. (5.1.195–​199)

64   Nona Monahin “Passy-​measures pavan” is the English counterpart of the Italian passamezzo (in various spellings), which was the name of a dance.72 Both expressions were also used to mean music based on certain popular chord progressions, or basses. The dance, as described in Italian and French dance manuals, was a hybrid that combined features of both the pavan and the galliard; like the pavan, it was in duple meter, but the music was played at a brisker tempo; it began with the sedate steps of a pavan, but soon introduced sprightlier steps normally associated with the galliard.73 The livelier tempo is explicitly mentioned by Arbeau, and is borne out by the notation of passamezzo music in Italian choreographic manuals.74 The situation in England is complicated by the shortage of available dance sources. Florio translates passamezzo as “a passemeasure, a cinquepace,” the latter term resonating well with the Italian and French descriptions (regarding the insertion of galliard steps), and, given the diverse nature of the European dance scene, these versions of the dance were probably known in England.75 However, the only English choreography by the name of “passinge measure pavyon” has unfortunately had a checkered history: in 1844, in an article concerning Sir Toby’s remark in Twelfth Night, John Payne Collier claimed to have in his possession a manuscript containing the following choreography for a “passinge measure pavyon”: “2 singles and a double foreward, and 2 singles syde. Reprynce back.”76 This description actually corresponds to all of the extant choreographies for the opening dance—​a measure—​in the Inns of Court manuscripts, where it is named “quadran pavan” in all but the earliest manuscript (MS Rawlinson Poet. 108), which simply labels it “the pavyan.”77 Because of Collier’s dubious reputation concerning forgery, both the authenticity and the existence of this alleged manuscript have been questioned, so that scholars have been reluctant to follow up on the implications contained therein. However, this manuscript has now been located, and was recently studied by Anne Daye, a contributor to the present volume, together with Jennifer Thorp, with both scholars concluding that it is authentic.78 The apparent choreographic connection between the “passy measures pavan” and the “quadran pavan” is intriguing, since in England these two expressions (more commonly spelled “passing measures pavan” and “quadro pavan”) shared another link: they were used to describe two varieties of passamezzo music. The former was based on a chord progression also known as passamezzo antico (or passamezzo per B molle, in reference to its minor mode), the latter on one known as passamezzo moderno (or passamezzo per B quadro, in reference to its major mode).79 It is possible that dances named “passing measure pavan” and “quadran pavan” were performed to passamezzo music. Certainly the melody for the quadran pavan choreography in RCM MS 1119 fits well with a passamezzo moderno bass, as do other contemporary music pieces titled “quadran pavan.”80 Why the choreography in Collier’s manuscript was named “passinge measure pavyon,” however, is unclear; perhaps the same choreography could be danced to either version of passamezzo music. Regarding the passamezzo’s faster tempo, this would not contradict the measure’s sedate nature. The steps of the quadran pavan, being walking steps, make the dance sedate, and the

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    65 increase in tempo from that of a pavan is not enormous—​Arbeau calls the passamezzo tempo “moderate.”81 Given the problems of identifying the dance that Shakespeare had in mind (or was it perhaps the music?), it is not surprising that Sir Toby’s remark has engendered a multitude of possible interpretations, only a brief sampling of which can be given here.82 Some writers, equating the “passy measures” with Arbeau’s pavan, focused on the pavan’s slow tempo as an indication of the surgeon’s tardiness (and also found themselves stumped at having to explain the tautological expression “pavan-​like pavan.”)83 Others speculated on the possibility of a reference to the surgeon’s drunken walk.84 Additionally, the spelling, in the First Folio, of “pavyn” as “panyn” presented problems; because the latter term could mean “pagan” or “barbarian” (and hence “rogue”), Karl P.  Wentersdorf suggested that Sir Toby was calling the surgeon a slow (pavan-​like) rogue.85 Although the “slow” part of this interpretation may be disputed, the “panyn” reading seems possible: Shakespeare might have envisaged a drunken Toby mispronouncing the name of the dance, thereby creating an unintentional (for Toby), intentional (for Shakespeare), pun. Collier suggested a different pun, with “passy measure” describing the surgeon who “has passed the ordinary measures of discretion in his cups”—​an explanation that seems both simple and plausible.86 I wish to add to this discourse by offering one more interpretation, as well as one observation, that may shed additional light on this puzzling passage. Let us look at the context in which Sir Toby’s remark occurs. The injured knight is angry because the doctor was not acting like a doctor when he needed him. A doctor is supposed to be on call, ready to heal the sick at any given moment, but instead he goes out drinking. How might Sir Toby respond without using the expression “passy measures pavin”? Perhaps: “Then he’s a rogue. And he shouldn’t be calling himself a doctor! He’s a fraud, a charlatan. . . .” Could the “passy measures” be associated with fraud and duplicity? As shown earlier, the passamezzo was a more lighthearted version of the pavan, with a somewhat quicker tempo, and with choreographic embellishment in the form of added galliard steps. Even if the latter did not apply to the English “passy measures pavin” (for there are no galliard steps in the version described by Collier), the upsurge in tempo nevertheless would have tempered the pavan’s gravity.87 Likewise, Toby’s doctor, whose profession requires him to be solemn and serious, goes out and behaves frivolously. Hence, “he’s a rogue, and [a fraud, a charlatan,] a passy-​measures pavan!” (with the alliteration on the repeated “p” adding an explosive quality to the outburst). As a final note, it appears that at least some passamezzo music at times had derogatory connotations. Thomas Morley, in his 1597 A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, included an anecdote in which one musician supposedly insulted another one by alluding to the “Gregory Walker,” for which Morley’s gloss in the margin reads: “The name in derision they have given this quadrant pavane because it ‘walketh’ amongst the barbers and fiddlers more common than any other.”88 R. Alec Harman, the editor of Morley’s volume, explained that “Gregory” was a name associated with barbers (after a wig of the same name, and the barber who supposedly invented it), and that barbershops sometimes

66   Nona Monahin provided instruments, such as lutes and viols, for customers to amuse themselves with while awaiting their turn.89 It would appear, then, that the “quadro” (passamezzo moderno) chordal progression was so ubiquitous as a basis (and bass) for musical composition that it came to be associated with recreational music-​making, and was therefore regarded as common. (One thinks of the numerous guitar-​accompanied songs today, many of which are based on simple, hackneyed chordal progressions; one can imagine an assortment of similarly tedious soundscapes emanating from a Renaissance barber’s waiting room.) I  am not, however, aware of similar derogatory associations with the “passing measures” (passamezzo antico) musical scheme, which, being in a minor mode, had quite a different character from the music of the “quadran pavan,” but, given the possible connections between the two, suggested by Collier’s manuscript, it is possible that there is even more to Sir Toby’s insult than has been explored thus far.

Staging Whereas Much Ado about Nothing calls for dancing as part of the action of the play, the dances in Twelfth Night, apart from Sir Andrew’s brief demonstration of a caper, are merely mentioned in conversations. This raises the question of whether or not to try to stage them. Program notes aside, it would be difficult indeed to convey all the subtle and often multilayered meanings to a modern audience by physical means alone, and one would obviously not want the scene to degenerate into a gratuitous pantomime of the “Little Teapot” variety.90 Demonstrating snippets of the dances as they are mentioned works in Much Ado about Nothing because of the substantial length of Beatrice’s comments, and the appropriate context (preparing for the revels, at which the dances could be seen and heard once more). By contrast, Sir Toby’s quips regarding the galliard and the coranto fly by in the context of his (or rather, Shakespeare’s) general riffing on dance names, so that the specific references, while undoubtedly providing an additional layer of enjoyment for those in the know (and those who happen to catch them!), are not intended to be dwelt on. Nevertheless, it seems a pity to allow these vivid images to be lost on the audience, to let the witty dance references dissolve into a mass of quasi-​meaningless verbiage, without at least trying to think of some sort of remedy. Certainly one could stage Sir Andrew’s presumably clumsy effort at demonstrating his cherished galliard “back-​ trick.” If he does it badly, perhaps with a few failed attempts, this image could then resonate when Sir Toby talks about going to church in a galliard; all it would take to complete the illustration would be for Toby to add a swift sweeping hand gesture on the word “coranto.” Sir Toby could also make foppish gestures, in parody of the frivolous doctor, when speaking of the “passy-​measures pavan.” Such subtle hints may or may not be picked up by the audience, but, at the very least, an understanding of the dance references would inform the actors’ relation (and reaction) to the spoken lines. As an example, Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s potential mediocrity in dancing is not immediately apparent. He can, after all, “cut a caper,” for when

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    67 he demonstrates it for Sir Toby, the latter’s exhortations, “Ha, higher! Ha, ha, excellent” (1.3.137), even if not entirely sincere, seem to suggest that some kind of satisfactory initial attempt had been achieved. Therefore, without an awareness of the significance of the galliard and its myriad variations, one could play Andrew as if dancing were his one saving grace. But knowing the dance background opens up possibilities for a different interpretation. This, in turn, would affect not only Andrew’s execution of the “back-​ trick” and caper, but his movement style in general. As I hope to have shown with the preceding examples, knowledge of Renaissance dance conventions can be of tremendous value in reading (and staging) Shakespeare’s plays:  “decoding” dance references in Shakespeare unveils layers of subtext that are relevant to an understanding of thematic issues and of the psychological makeup of characters; it suggests visual ways in which scenes can be staged, whether in period style or in more abstract approaches; and it informs the actors about how physically to inhabit the characters they play.

Acknowledgment I wish to thank my husband, Christian Rogowski, for reading this chapter and providing helpful feedback.

Notes 1. Earlier versions of portions of this chapter appeared in Nona Monahin, “‘And So Dance out the Answer.’ Interpreting and Staging Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays,” in Deciphering the Roanoke Mystery, edited by lebame houston and Douglas Stover, 315–​331. Manteo, NC: National Park Service, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, 2015, and are used here with the permission of the publisher. 2. A noted example is Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film of Much Ado about Nothing, which cuts the passage in Act 2, Scene 1, where Beatrice talks about the Scotch jig, the measure, and the cinquepace—​although in this case the decision may have been motivated by considerations to do with the film’s running time. Much Ado about Nothing, directed by Kenneth Branagh (1993; London: Renaissance Films PLC, 2003, DVD). 3. Russ McDonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (Oxford; New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2001), 52. 4. Lynsey McCulloch, “Shakespeare and Dance,” Literature Compass, 13, no. 2 (2016): 69–​78. 5. New primary dance sources published during the last twenty-​five years include: Lutio Compasso’s Ballo della gagliarda, Florence, 1560, facsimile, ed. Barbara Sparti (Freiburg: fa-​gisis, 1995); a collection of dance descriptions found with the Gresley family papers in the Derbyshire Record Office, D77 box 38, 51–​79, transcribed and published in David Fallows, “The Gresley Dance Collection, c. 1500,” Royal Music Association Research Chronicle 29 (1996): 1–​20; an early seventeenth-​century manuscript, “Instruction pour dancer les dances cy après nomnez,” in the Darmstadt, Hessische Hochschul-​und Landesbibliothek, HS304, facsimile, Instruction pour dancer: An Anonymous Manuscript,

68   Nona Monahin ed. Angene Feves et al. (Freiburg: fa-​gisis, 2000); Ercole Santucci’s Mastro da ballo, 1614, facsimile reprint, ed. Barbara Sparti (Hildesheim; New York: G. Olms, 2004); a recently rediscovered manuscript of English measures published in Anne Daye and Jennifer Thorp, “English Measures Old and New:  Dulwich College MS. XCIV/​f.28.” Historical Dance 4, no. 3 (2018): 27–​40. For newer secondary literature (since 2000), see the bibliography for publications by the following authors: Clegg, Daye, Daye and Thorp, Kendall, Malkiewicz, McGinnis, McGowan, Monahin, Nevile, Payne, Ravelhofer, Sparti, Van Orden, Winerock. 6. John Playford, The English Dancing Master: or, Plaine and Easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, with the Tune to each Dance (London: Thomas Harper, 1651). Additionally, country dances are mentioned or briefly described in a number of seventeenth-​century manuscripts; see Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque:  Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 42. The Inns of Court dance manuscripts are discussed in the following and listed in Appendix 2. 7. See, for example, Anne Daye, “Graced with Measures: Dance as an International Language in the Masques of 1613,” in The Palatine Wedding of 1613: Protestant Alliance and Court Festival, eds. Sara Smart and Mara R. Wade (Wiesbaden:  Harrassowitz, 2013), 289–​318; Jennifer Nevile, ed., Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250–​1750 (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2008), 13–​16; Margaret McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance. European Fashion, French Obsession (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2008), 12, 15–​ 16. McGowan notes that the Grand Prieur of France, who had trained with an Italian dancing master, on several occasions danced with Elizabeth I when he visited her court; Cesare Negri, Le Gratie d’Amore (Milan:  Ponti & Piccaglia, 1602, facsimile reprint, New  York:  Broude Brothers, 1969), 7. Negri, who was a renowned Milanese dancing master, recorded that on several occasions he danced together with distinguished visitors to Milan, including “Don Giovanni” of Austria, and the Princes Rudolf and Ernest, sons of Emperor Maximillian II. 8. Negri, Gratie, 2–​6, provides a long list of names of his colleagues and disciples who were employed at various European courts; Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 29, notes that Jasper Gaffoyne, an Italian dancing master, is documented as being employed at the Tudor court between 1542 and 1584, and also cites the well-​known remark by French ambassador De Maisse about Queen Elizabeth’s Italian-​style dancing; Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), 118, n. 38, notes that King James and Prince Henry both owned copies of Italian dance treatises. 9. Compare, for example, descriptions of the galliard in Thoinot Arbeau’s 1589 French manual, Orchésographie, trans. as Orchesography by Mary Stewart Evans, with corrections and new intro. by Julia Sutton (New  York:  Dover, 1967), 101–​102, and the gagliarda in Fabritio Caroso’s 1600 Italian manual, Nobiltà di dame, trans. as Courtly Dance of the Renaissance by Julia Sutton (New York: Dover, 1995), 117. Likewise, the descriptions of the pavane in Arbeau, Orchesography, 57–​58, and the “quadran pavan” in the Inns of Court dance manuscripts; for example, in Taunton, Somerset Record Office, DD/​WO 55/​7 (1594), Item 36, henceforth: SRO DD/​WO 55/​7; and London, British Museum Library, Reference Division, MS Harley 367 (n.d.), fol 178r, henceforth: MS Harley 367). 10. Unless otherwise specified, all quotations from Shakespeare’s works are from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, eds. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 11. See Roger Clegg’s Chapter 3 in the present volume; see also Charles R. Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929, reprint, New York: Dover, 1965).

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    69 12. For more about the jig as a postlude, see Roger Clegg’s Chapter 3 in the present volume. 13. For more about the jig as a dance, see Roger Clegg and Lucie Skeaping, Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs—​Musical Comedy on the Shakespearean Stage: Scripts, Music and Context (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2014), 4-​10; Roger Clegg, “‘A Ballad Intituled a Pleasant Newe Jigge’: The Relationship between the Broadside Ballad and the Dramatic Jig,” Huntington Library Quarterly 79, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 301–​322. 14. Clegg and Skeaping, Singing Simpkin, 5; Clegg, “A Ballad,” 302. 15. Clegg, “A Ballad,” 306. 16. See Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols. (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 2.737; Clegg and Skeaping, Singing Simpkin, 4. 17. Baskervill, Elizabethan Jig, 12. 18. Richard Mulcaster, Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children, 1581, ed. William Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 81, uses the term in the general sense when he refers to several diverse dances all as “measures”: “Howbeit there be in it some more violent measures then some:  and in beginning with the most staydest and most almanlike, and so marching on, till the springing galliard and quicker measures take place. . . .” 19. For more on the measures, see publications listed in the bibliography by the following authors: Cunningham, Daye and Thorp, Durham and Durham, Mullally, Payne, Pugliese and Casazza, Stokes and Brainard, Ward, Wilson. 20. The “Old Measures” may have been traditional dances performed at revels and other festivities held at the Inns of Court. Certainly the later (mid-​to late seventeenth-​century) manuscripts explicitly state that the measures described were danced in the Inner Temple Hall (London, Inner Temple Library, Records of the Inner Temple, Vol. XXVII, folios 3r–​ 6v, henceforth: Inner Temple, Vol. 27; and London, Royal College of Music, MS 1119, folios 1r–​2v, henceforth: RCM MS 1119). Another theory, perhaps prompted by the title “Practise for Dauncinge” at the head of the measures in one of the manuscripts (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 280, folios 66 (a)v–​66 (b)v (c. 1609), henceforth: MS Douce 280), is that this set of dances may have comprised the teaching repertory of dancing schools attended by the young men of the Inns. See John Ward, “Apropos ‘The Olde Measures,’” Records of Early English Drama 18, no. 1 (1993): 2. For a more recent discussion on the measures at the Inns of Court see Anne Daye and Jennifer Thorp, “English Measures Old and New: Dulwich College MS. XCIV/​f.28.” Historical Dance 4, no. 3 (2018): 27–​40. 21. An account of Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn in 1594 makes references to couples dancing the measures, followed by other dances such as galliards and corantos. See William Canning, Gesta Grayorum (London: Gray’s Inn, 1688), 20, 66. 22. RCM, MS 1119. 23. “Quadran pavan”: SRO DD/​WO 55/​7; “Earle of Essex Measure”: MS Harley 367, fol. 178r. The choreography of a pavane in Arbeau’s Orchesography, 57, also consists of a repeated formula of two single steps (pas simple) followed by one double step (pas double). 24. John M. Ward, “The English Measure,” Early Music 14 (1986): 18, has suggested that the term “measure” was applied “to dances with individual choreographies . . . to distinguish them from dances whose steps were typical,” that is, those based on well-​known choreographic formulae. This would mean that the term “measure” was used in England in a similar way to the term “balletto” in the sixteenth-​century Italian dance manuals. See Nona Monahin, “The Balletto Suites in the Choreographic Manuals of Fabritio Caroso and Cesare Negri: A Study of Danced Suites in Italy during the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries” (PhD diss., Monash University, Australia, 2014), 63.

70   Nona Monahin 25. Playford, English Dancing Master, unnumbered prefatory pages. 26. This “closing” action is described in Arbeau, Orchesography, 55–​57; Fabritio Caroso, Il Ballarino (Venice: Ziletti, 1581), fol. 5r, 8v; and Negri, Gratie, 105, 110. 27. Arbeau, Orchesography, 55–​56; Caroso, Nobiltà di dame (Venice: Il Muschio, 1600), facsimile reprint (Bologna: Forni, 1970), 21, 33–​34; Negri, Gratie, 105, 110. In his explanation of the doppio all’Italiana (“double step in Italian style”) Caroso notes, “when you do a passo puntato, you take a step and then join the following foot; now here [in the doppio all’Italiana] you do three, but then you add the fourth step in the same way” (Caroso, Nobiltà, 34; my translation). 28. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poet. 108, folios 10r–​ 11r (henceforth MS Rawlinson Poet. 108), includes “doubles hopped,” which concurs both with the final section of Arbeau’s allemande, where the “doubles” end with a hop (Arbeau, Orchesography, 125), and with an entry in Randle Cotgrave’s A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London: Adam Islip, 1611), n.p., which translates “trois pas, & un saut” (“three steps and a hop”) as an “alman, leape.” The “Blacke [Almain]” in MS Douce 280 has “slydes.” In the later manuscripts (Inner Temple, Vol. 27; RCM, MS 1119) these steps are called “French slides.” 29. See, for example, Ward, “English Measure,” 17; Ian Payne, The Almain in Britain, c. 1549–​c. 1675: A Dance Manual from Manuscript Sources (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 30–​31. 30. The northern basse danse came in several different forms, which were determined by the number, length, and arrangement of the choreographic phrases called mesures. The fifteenth-​century Italian counterpart—​the bassadanza—​had even more variety. See Ingrid Brainard, “Bassedanse,” in The International Encyclopedia of Dance: A Project of Dance Perspectives Foundation, Inc., founding editor, Selma Jeanne Cohen; area editors, George Dorris [and others]; consultants, Thomas F. Kelly [and others] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1: 378–​382. 31. Cotgrave, Dictionarie, n.p.; MS Rawlinson Poet. 108, fol. 10r. 32. Arbeau, Orchesography, 86–​87 (greve, or grève [also called coup de pied], pied en l’air); 89–​ 92 (saut majeur, posture, cadence); 95 (saut moyen); 94–​96 (the “five-​step” sequence). 33. Arbeau, Orchesography, 89, remarks that when “both [feet] come down together it looks as if a sack of grain had been dumped on the ground.” 34. Caroso, Nobiltà, facsimile, 56. 35. Arbeau, Orchesography, 87 (advice for dancing with a woman); 93–​94 (similarity between tordion and galliard). 36. Arbeau, Orchesography,  93–​94. 37. Negri, Gratie, Trattato Secondo, 31–​102. 38. For example, Compasso, Ballo della gagliarda, 1560; Prospero Lutij, Opera bellissima nella quale si contengono molte partite, et passeggi di gagliarda (Perugia: Orlando, 1589); Livio Lupi, Mutanze di gagliarda, tordiglione, passo e mezzo, canari e passeggi (Palermo: Carrara, 1600), revised, expanded edition: Libro di gagliarda, tordiglione, passo e mezzo, canari e passeggi (Palermo: Maringo, 1607). 39. MS Douce 280, fol. 66(a) v. Cited in Ian Payne, The Almain, 224. The galliard rhythm, which is reflected in this mnemonic, is, incidentally, the same as that in the tune of “God Save the Queen,” or “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Another source, James Cleland, The Institution of a Young Noble Man (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1607; New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1948), 226, also makes reference to the same mnemonic: “Wherefore I praise not

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    71 those Ordinarie Dauncers, who appeare to be druncke in their legs . . . in shaking alwaies their feet, singing continuallie, one-​two-​three: foure; & five.” 40. MS Douce 280, fols. 66(a) v–​66(b) v. Cited in Payne, The Almain, 224, 227. 41. Barnaby Rich, Farewell to the Military Profession, 1581, ed. Thomas Mabry Cranfill (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1959), 4. 42. Beatrice’s past relationship with Benedick, hinted at in this comment, is not explained further. However, another hint, later in the play, suggests that if the early relationship did end badly, the fault was not necessarily all Benedick’s. Despite appearances to the contrary, Beatrice’s opinion of Benedick is actually quite high, for once she is persuaded that he loves her, she immediately resolves to requite his love, noting, “for others say thou dost deserve, and I believe it better than reportingly” (3.1.115–​116). 43. Arbeau, Orchesography, 59. 44. Harry Berger, Jr., “Against the Sink-​a-​Pace: Sexual and Family Politics in Much Ado about Nothing,” Shakespeare Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1982): 302. 45. Skiles Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 84. 46. See, for example, Brainard, “Bassedanse,” 1998, regarding the bassadanza and saltarello pair. 47. The Inns of Court dance manuscripts always list the measures first. Of those that include other dances, all but one list either the cinquepace or galliard immediately after the measures. The exception is MS Rawlinson D 864, which contains only the measures and a “coranta” (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D 864, folios 199r–​199v, 203r–​ 204r, ca. 1630, henceforth: MS Rawlinson D 864). The last two of the Inns of Court dance manuscripts, dating from the mid-​to late seventeenth century, explicitly state, “Then after all the measures be done hold hands and dance the Sinke a pace once round the Hall till you come to your owne place again and soe ende” (Inner Temple, Vol. 27. The wording in RCM MS 1119 is almost identical.) Despite the late date of these two manuscripts, the fact that all the manuscripts list the dances in the same order suggests that they may be outlining a tradition of actual dance practice. Further evidence comes from several references in William Canning’s Gesta Grayorum (London: Gray’s Inn, 1688), which describe Christmas revels that took place at Gray’s Inn in 1594: “Then His Highness called for the Master of the Revels, and willed him to pass the time in Dancing: So his Gentlemen-​ Pensioners and Attendants, very gallantly appointed, in thirty Couples, danced the Old Measures, and their Galliards, and other kind of Dances, revelling until it was very late” (Gesta, 20; I have modernized the spelling in this and subsequent references from this source); “After their Departure, entered the six Knights in a very stately Mask, and danced a new devised Measure; and after that, they took to them Ladies and Gentlewomen, and danced with them their Galliards, and so departed with Musick” (Gesta, 44); “At their first coming on the Stage, they danced a new devised Measure, etc. After which, they took unto them Ladies; and with them they danced their Galliards, Courants, etc. And they danced another new Measure” (Gesta, 66). The last reference recalls a similar arrangement in MS Douce 280 (ca. 1609), where an additional measure is listed after the galliards, coranta, and other dances. In Arbeau’s manual, the tourdion (a version of the galliard, one that is perhaps closer to the cinquepace, as discussed earlier) does not merely follow the basse danse (a possible precursor of the measure), it is counted as part of it: “The complete basse dance contains three parts. The first is called the basse dance, the second is called the retour of the basse dance, and the third and last part is called the tordion (Orchesography, 53),” and

72   Nona Monahin in numerous musical collections of the period—​both British and continental—​musical pieces labeled “pavan” (a type of measure) are paired, in suite form, with galliards. (For more on the musical suite, see David Fuller, “Suite,” in Grove Music Online: Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, http:////www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/ view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000027091, accessed October 20, 2018.) 48. Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing, 83. 49. These suggestions are not intended to be prescriptive. They are partly based on my choreography for the Hampshire Shakespeare Company’s 1998 production of this play, directed by Benjamin Ware, and performed in Amherst and Northampton, Massachusetts. 50. Three of the four couples are Hero and Don Pedro, Ursula and Antonio, and Beatrice and Benedick. There is some disagreement regarding the fourth couple. The Oxford edition used for the present study names Margaret and Balthasar (Shakespeare, Complete Works, 2005, 575). The First Folio, however, pairs Margaret first with Benedick and slightly later with Balthasar (The Shakespeare First Folio, Folger copy no.  68, 105. Online at http://​www.folger.edu/​the-​shakespeare-​first-​folio-​folger-​copy-​no-​68#page/​ Comedies%2C+page+104+/​mode/​2up). 51. Anne Daye also discusses this scene in Chapter 4 of the present volume. 52. In the First Folio edition, the direction “Musicke for the dance” comes after the direction “Exeunt” that follows Beatrice’s line, “Nay, if they leade to any ill, I will leave them at the next turning” (The Shakespeare First Folio, Folger copy no. 68, 105). This is most likely an error. In the 1600 Quarto edition, the directions, in the same place, read “Dance,” followed by “exeunt.” Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles, No. 15 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) 92.1.559–​561. 53. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 49–​50. The dance-​related dialogue includes the lines: “God match me with a good dancer” (2.1.97), “I know you by the waggling of your head” (2.1.105), “Here’s his dry hand up and down” (2.1.108). 54. The Shakespeare First Folio, Folger copy no. 68, 105. 55. When I  choreographed this dance scene for the Hampshire Shakespeare Company, my decision to use several measures was motivated by practical considerations. Our stage was very small, so, in order to accommodate the sixty or so lines of dialogue, the dancers would have had to traverse the same space many times over. If this were all done to the same tune, the risk of monotony would have been great. Having several shorter dances in succession created variety, both musical and choreographic. We had different combinations of couples dancing, since an opportunity to enter or exit the dancing existed during the change from one measure to another when the dancers performed an “honour” (bow/​curtsey). Anne Daye (in Chapter 4 of the present volume) gives other contemporary examples of such dance scenes with dialogue, the structure of which suggests that dancers changed partners in between sections of a dance, but notes that there is “no evidence for a comparable ballroom practice.” The closest hint at the possibility of such a practice that I am aware of comes from Arbeau, who makes mention of dancers walking, or standing and conversing, during pauses between the first and second sections of the basse danse, as well as the allemande; these would seem to be suitable places where the dancers might change partners, if such changes were accepted practice (Arbeau, Orchesography, 53, 125). 56. Brissenden, Shakespeare, 50, suggests a galliard. As noted earlier, the terms “galliard” and “cinquepace” were often used interchangeably.

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    73 57. Additionally, there may be other reasons for avoiding the cinquepace/​galliard: the constant hopping and jumping could be challenging for inexperienced dancers, while doing so on a concrete or other nonresilient floor could mean risking injury. 58. The Shakespeare First Folio, Folger copy no. 68, 257. 59. Cotgrave, Dictionarie, n.p.; John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes (London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598), 86. 60. John Marston, Antonio and Mellida (2.1.54.2–​4). Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge (London: Oxford University Press, 1922). Additionally, in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (2.3.44), an ailing king, previously gravely ill, has recovered so much that he is able to “lead . . . a coranto.” 61. Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London:  Peter Short, 1597); Reprint, ed. R. Alec Harman, as A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (New York: Norton, 1973), 297; Sir John Davies, Orchestra, or, a Poem of Dancing (London, 1596), ed. E. M. W. Tillyard (London: Chatto & Windus, 1945), stanza 69. 62. Compare, for example, the notation of the gagliarda (one three-​note unit per tactus—​a term used in the sixteenth century to relate the musical pulse of different compositions) in Caroso and Negri, with the notation of the corrente (two three-​note units per tactus) in Negri (Gratie, 265–​266) as well as the related saltarello in Caroso (Caroso, trans. Sutton, Courtly Dance, 59–​60). For a discussion of this notation in Caroso, see Caroso, trans. Sutton, Courtly Dance,  59–​60. 63. MS Douce 280, fol. 66(b)r contains a brief reference to a “Temple Coranto.” Hopping steps are mentioned in the coranto descriptions in MS Rawlinson D 864, fols. 203v–​204r. Another possible reference to a coranto, in MS Rawlinson Poet. 108, fol. 10v, has been disputed: this manuscript contains a description (without any mention of hopping steps) of a “Quanto dyspayne,” which has sometimes been read as “Coranto d’Espagne.” John Ward, however, proposes that “quanto” was intended to be “guanto” (glove), and that the dance may be a version of an Italian ballo from the early to mid-​sixteenth century titled Li guanti di Spagna (Ward, “Apropos,” 4). 64. In addition to the sources already noted, mention should be made of François de Lauze’s Apologie de la Danse, published in 1623 (English translation by Joan Wildeblood, London:  Frederick Muller, 1952), and dedicated to George Villiers, who later became Duke of Buckingham. This volume describes courantes, branles, and a gaillarde, but the dance instructions are hard to decipher, a situation not made any easier by the fact that no accompanying music for any of the dances is provided. De Lauze’s volume was plagiarized by B. de Montagut, and published three years before de Lauze’s work. See B. de Montagut, Louange De La Danse, ed. Barbara Ravelhofer (Cambridge: RTM Publications, 2000). 65. See Nona Monahin, “Writing for Posterity: A Reassessment of Arbeau’s Orchésographie (1589),” Congress on Research in Dance Conference Proceedings (2015):  125–​135. http://​ journals.cambridge.org/​abstract_​S2049125515000217. For an analogous situation regarding Arbeau’s allemande, see Sarah Reichart, “Music for the Renaissance Allemande,” Dance Chronicle 8, no. 3–​4 (1985): 211–​18. 66. See Arbeau, Orchesography, 57–​58, for a description of a pavane. Likewise, all the descriptions of the Quadran pavan in the Inns of Court manuscripts. The music that Arbeau gives for the pavane (60–​64) is in duple meter. 67. Negri, Gratie, 265. 68. Alan Brissenden explains that the pun is on mutton with caper sauce, noting that “mutton” was a slang word for “whore.” Brissenden also suggests that, in this context, the “back-​ trick” can also take on a bawdy meaning (Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 58).

74   Nona Monahin 69. Arbeau, Orchesography, 88. 70. See Julia Sutton and Pamela Jones, “Canary,” in The International Encyclopedia of Dance, 2:  50–​52. The canary was regarded as an “exotic” dance. That, plus the fact that it was believed to have been of Spanish origin, or influence, highlights another of Shakespeare’s appropriate choices regarding dance references. In Love’s Labour’s Lost (3.1.7–​11), Moth asks his master, Don Adriano de Armado, if he intends to woo a country lass in a “French brawl” (a dance, if not of country origin, then certainly replete with “rustic” features). Upon Armado not understanding that Moth means a dance, the latter elaborates, citing the canary, a dance the exotic Spaniard could be expected to recognize. 71. The earliest discussion of this topic that I am aware of is in Thomas Tyrwhitt, Observations and Conjectures upon Some Passages of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1766), cited in Horace Howard Furness, ed., Twelfth Night or, What You Will (Philadelphia; London: J. B. Lippincott, 1901), 295. Furness (265–​297) provides numerous other early examples of various scholars’ interpretations of this passage. 72. Although the Italian term suggests “a step and a half,” the exact origin and significance of the name are uncertain. Many theories have been proposed. One possibility is that the expression may have concerned the dance’s tempo. Alessandro Arcangeli cites a remark by a sixteenth century physician who suggested that the title described a movement done first backward and then slightly forward, although it is not clear how this description correlates with the extant choreographies for this dance. Alessandro Arcangeli, “Dance and Health: The Renaissance Physicians’ View” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 18, no. 1 (2000): 3–​30. 73. Caroso, Ballarino, “Passo e Mezo,” fol. 46r; Caroso, Nobiltà, “Passo e Mezzo,” 130. Julia Sutton has noted that, despite the lively steps, “the general affect [of an Italian passo e mezzo] is oddly gentle, if not lyric (Praetorius confirms this), possibly because of the music’s slow harmonic rhythm (one chord change every four bars). The resulting affect differs so sharply from the galliard, with its powerful rhythmic motto.” Julia Sutton, “Passo E Mezzo,” in The International Encyclopedia of Dance, 5: 110–​112. 74. Arbeau, Orchesography, 66. See also Julia Sutton’s and F. Marian Walker’s table of proposed relative dance tempos, in Caroso, trans. Sutton, Courtly Dance, 60. 75. John Florio, Queen Anna’s New World of Words (1611), 360. Florio’s earlier dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes (London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598), 260, translates it as “a passameasure in dancing a cinquepace.” 76. John Payne Collier, “Illustration of a Passage in Twelfth Night:  The Passing Measure Pavin,” Papers of the Shakespeare Society 36 (1844): 25. 77. Intriguingly, not only is the wording in Collier’s manuscript identical to that in Rawlinson (with both manuscripts including a step called “reprynce backe” where all the later Inns manuscripts use the alternative name, “double back”), but Collier actually mentions the Rawlinson manuscript in a post script, noting that he was made aware of it only after he had written the main part of his article. 78. Anne Daye and Jennifer Thorp, “English Measures Old and New: Dulwich College MS. XCIV/​f.28.” Historical Dance 4, no. 3 (2018): 27–​40. I am grateful to Dr. Daye for alerting me to the rediscovery of this manuscript before the publication of the above article, as well as for reading parts of the “passy-​measures pavin” section of my chapter and providing helpful feedback. 79. See Giuseppe Gerbino and Alexander Silbiger, “Passamezzo,” in Grove Music Online:  Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press http://​www.oxfordmusiconline. com/​subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​21027, accessed November 9, 2016.

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    75 80. See Patri J. Pugliese and Joseph Casazza, Practise for Dauncinge:  Some Almans and a Pavan, England 1570–​1650 (Cambridge, MA:  P. J.  Pugliese, 1980), 13, and unnumbered music supplement; London, Royal College of Music, MS 1119, folios 1r-2v (mid- to late seventeenth century). 81. Arbeau, Orchesography, 66. 82. Numerous interpretations are summarized in Horace Howard Furness, ed., Twelfth Night, 295–​297, and several are cited in Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance,  60–​61. 83. See, for example, Karl P. Wentersdorf, “The ‘Passy Measures Panyn’ Crux in Twelfth Night:  Is Emendation Necessary?” Shakespeare Quarterly 35, no. 1 (Spring 1984):  83. Ironically, Wentersdorf cites the observation in the 1966 Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians that “the passemezzo had a somewhat brisker rhythm than  .  .  .  the regular pavan,” but nevertheless proceeds to equate the two dances. 84. Wentersdorf, “ ‘Passy Measures Panyn’ Crux,” 83. 85. Wentersdorf, “ ‘Passy Measures Panyn’ Crux,” 83. Wentersdorf acknowledges that the same argument has been suggested by several writers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 86. Collier, “Illustration,” 24. 87. Julia Sutton has emphasized that “[w]‌hat is certain is that all passo e mezzo choreographies are elaborated variants of the pavan.” Caroso, trans. Sutton, Courtly Dance, 39. 88. Morley, Plain and Easy, ed. Harman, 214. 89. Morley, Plain and Easy, ed. Harman, 214, n. 2. 90. “I’m a Little Teapot” is popular children’s song in the United States, usually sung accompanied by simple pantomimic gestures.

Bibliography Arbeau, Thoinot (pseud. for Jehan Tabourot). Orchésographie. Langres: Jehan des Preyz, 1588, 1589, 1596. English translation, as Orchesography, by Mary Stewart Evans, with corrections, new introduction, and notes by Julia Sutton, and a new Labanotation section by Mireille Backer and Julia Sutton. New York: Dover, 1967. Baskervill, Charles Read. The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1965. Berger, Harry, Jr. “Against the Sink-​a-​Pace:  Sexual and Family Politics in Much Ado about Nothing.” Shakespeare Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1982): 302–​313. Brainard, Ingrid. “Bassedanse.” In The International Encyclopedia of Dance: A Project of Dance Perspectives Foundation, Inc., founding editor, Selma Jeanne Cohen; area editors, George Dorris [and others]; consultants, Thomas F. Kelly [and others], 1: 378–​382. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Brissenden, Alan. “The Dance in As You Like It and Twelfth Night.” Cahiers Élisabéthains 13 (1978): 25–​34. Brissenden, Alan. Shakespeare and the Dance. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981. Caroso, Fabritio. Il Ballarino. Venice:  Ziletti, 1581. Facsimile reprint. New  York:  Broude Brothers, 1967. Caroso, Fabritio. Nobiltà di dame. Venice: Il Muschio, 1600, 1605. Facsimile reprint of 1600 edition. Bologna: Forni, 1970. Translated and edited by Julia Sutton, music edited by F. Marian Walker. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986; reprinted as Courtly Dance of the Renaissance: A New Translation and Edition of the Nobiltà di Dame (1600), translated

76   Nona Monahin and edited by Julia Sutton, music transcribed and edited by F.  Marian Walker, with Appendix: Italian Renaissance Dance Steps, a Labanotation Manual of Dance Step-​Types Selected from Fabritio Caroso’s Nobiltà di Dame (1600) by Julia Sutton and Rachelle Palnick Tsachor. New York: Dover, 1995. Clegg, Roger. “‘A Ballad Intituled a Pleasant Newe Jigge’:  The Relationship between the Broadside Ballad and the Dramatic Jig.” Huntington Library Quarterly 79, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 301–​322. Clegg, Roger, and Lucie Skeaping. Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs—​Musical Comedy on the Shakespearean Stage: Scripts, Music and Context. With an appendix of dance instruction by Anne Daye. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2014. Collier, John Payne. “Illustration of a Passage in Twelfth Night.” Papers of the Shakespeare Society (1844): 24–​28. Compasso, Lutio. Ballo della gagliarda. Florence, 1560. Facsimile reprint, with introduction by Barbara Sparti. Freiburg: fa-​gisis, 1995. Cunningham, James P. Dancing in the Inns of Court. London: Jordan and Sons, 1965. Daye, Anne. “Graced with Measures: Dance as an International Language in the Masques of 1613.” In The Palatine Wedding of 1613: Protestant Alliance and Court Festival, edited by Sara Smart and Mara R. Wade, 289–​318. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013. Daye, Anne, and Jennifer Thorp. “English Measures Old and New:  Dulwich College MS. XCIV/​f.28.” Historical Dance 4, no. 3 (2018): 27–​40. Durham, Peter, and Janelle Durham. The Old Measures, 1570–​1675. 2nd ed. Redmond, WA: The Authors, 2001. Online at http://​www.peterdur.com/​pdf/​old-​measures.pdf. Fallows, David. “The Gresley Dance Collection, c.  1500.” Royal Music Association Research Chronicle 29 (1996): 1–​20. Gombosi, Otto. “Some Musical Aspects of the English Court Masque.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1948): 3–​19. Howard, Skiles. The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Hudson, Richard. The Allemande, the Balletto, and the Tanz. 2 vols. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Kendall, G. Yvonne. The Music of Arbeau’s “Orchésographie.” Hillsdale, NY:  Pendragon Press, 2013. Malkiewicz, Michael. “Fabritio Caroso:  Il Ballarino (Venetia 1581)—​Studien zu Leben und Werk eines Tanzmeisters des 16. Jahrhunderts.” PhD dissertation. 2 vols. University of Salzburg, 2001. McGinnis, Katherine Tucker. “Moving in High Circles: Courts, Dance, and Dancing Masters in Italy in the Long Sixteenth Century.” PhD dissertation. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001. McGowan, Margaret. Dance in the Renaissance:  European Fashion, French Obsession. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Monahin, Nona. “The Balletto Suites in the Choreographic Manuals of Fabritio Caroso and Cesare Negri: A Study of Danced Suites in Italy during the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.” PhD dissertation. Monash University, Australia, 2014. Monahin, Nona. “Writing for Posterity: A Reassessment of Arbeau’s Orchésographie (1589).” Congress on Research in Dance Conference Proceedings (2015): 125–​135. Mullally, Robert. “Measure as a Choreographic Term in the Stuart Masque.” Dance Research 16, no. 1 (Summer 1998): 67–​73.

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    77 Mullally, Robert. “More about the Measures.” Early Music 22, no. 3 (August, 1994): 417–​438. Negri, Cesare. Le Gratie d’Amore. Milan:  Ponti & Piccaglia, 1602. Facsimile reprint. New York: Broude Brothers, 1969. Translation, with musical transcription, by G. Yvonne Kendall. DMA dissertation. Stanford University, 1985. Negri, Cesare. Nuove Inventioni di balli. Milan: Bordone, 1604. Facsimile online at Library of Congress: https://​lccn.loc.gov/​12018603. Nevile, Jennifer. “Dance in Early Tudor England: An Italian Connection?” Early Music 26, no. 2 (1998): 230–​244. Nevile, Jennifer, ed. Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250–​ 1750. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. Nevile, Jennifer. “Dance Steps and Music in the Gresley Manuscript.” Historical Dance 3, No. 6 (1999): 2–​19. Nevile, Jennifer. The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-​Century Italy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Payne, Ian. The Almain in Britain, c. 1549–​c. 1675: A Dance Manual from Manuscript Sources. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Playford, John. The English Dancing Master: or, Plaine and Easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, with the Tune to each Dance. London:  “Printed by Thomas Harper, and are to be sold by John Playford, at his Shop in the Inner Temple neere the Church doore,” 1651. Edited by Hugh Mellor and Leslie Bridgewater. London: Dance Books, 1984. Pugliese, Patri J., and Joseph Casazza. Practise for Dauncinge; Some Almans and a Pavan, England 1570–​1650, A Manual for Dance Instruction. Cambridge, MA: P. J. Pugliese, 1980. Ravelhofer, Barbara. “Dancing at the Court of Queen Elizabeth.” In Queen Elizabeth I: Past and Present, edited by Christa Jansohn, 101–​115. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004. Ravelhofer, Barbara. The Early Stuart Masque:  Dance, Costume, and Music. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Santucci, Ercole Perugino, and Barbara Sparti. Mastro da Ballo (Dancing-​Master). 1614. Facsimile reprint, edited, with historical introduction, by Barbara Sparti. Hildesheim; New York: G. Olms, 2004. Shakespeare, William. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works. 2nd ed. Edited by Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Sparti, Barbara. “Historical Introduction” to Ercole Santucci Perugino and Barbara Sparti. Mastro da Ballo (Dancing-​Master). 1614. 1–​2 7. Hildesheim; New  York:  G. Olms, 2004. Sparti, Barbara. “Introduction” to Compasso, Lutio. Ballo della gagliarda. Florence, 1560. Facsimile reprint. Freiburg: fa-​gisis, 1995. Stokes, James, and Ingrid Brainard. “‘The olde Measures’ in the West Country:  John Willoughby’s Manuscript.” Records of Early English Drama Newsletter 17, no. 2 (1992): 1–​10. Sutton, Julia. “Late-​ Renaissance Dance,” Chapter  4; “Dance Types in Nobiltà di dame,” Chapter  5; and, with F.  Marian Walker, “The Music,” Chapter  6; and “The Musical Edition,” Chapter  7, in Fabritio Caroso, Courtly Dance of the Renaissance. New York: Dover, 1995. Sutton, Julia. “Passo E Mezzo.” In The International Encyclopedia of Dance: A Project of Dance Perspectives Foundation, Inc., founding editor, Selma Jeanne Cohen; area editors, George

78   Nona Monahin Dorris [and others]; consultants, Thomas F. Kelly [and others], 5: 110–​112. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Sutton, Julia, and Johannes Holub. Il Ballarino [video recording]: 16th Century Step Vocabulary and Dances, directed by Julia Sutton and Johannes Holub. Pennington, NJ: Dance Horizons Video, 1991. Van Orden, Kate. Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Ward, John. “Apropos ‘The Olde Measures.’” Records of Early English Drama 18, no.1 (1993): 2–​21. Ward, John. “The English Measure.” Early Music 14 (1986): 15–​21. Ward, John. “Newly Devis’d Measures for Jacobean Masques.” Acta Musicologica 60, no. 2 (1988): 111–​142. Wentersdorf, Karl P. “The ‘Passy Measures Panyn’ Crux in Twelfth Night:  Is Emendation Necessary?” Shakespeare Quarterly 35, no. 1 (Spring, 1984): 82–​86. Wilson, David. “Dancing in the Inns of Court.” Historical Dance 2, no. 5 (1987): 3–​16. Wilson, David. “The Old Measures and the Inns of Court: A Note.” Historical Dance 3, no. 3 (1994): 24–28. Winerock, Emily. “‘Performing’ Gender and Status on the Dance Floor in Early Modern England.” In Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Essays in Honour of Barbara Todd), edited by Kim Kippen and Lori Woods, 449–​472. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011. Winerock, Emily. “Reformation and Revelry:  The Practices and Politics of Dancing in Early Modern England, c.  1550–​ c . 1640.” PhD dissertation. University of Toronto, 2012.

Appendix 1: Choreographic Sources for Dances Mentioned in Shakespeare’s Plays Column 1: Dance names in bold are as they appear in Shakespeare’s plays; alternate (including non-​English) dance names are in parentheses. Columns 2–​4: Sources are listed by last name of author (or title if author is unknown). Full details are provided in Appendix 2. The sources in bold contain the most substantial and/​or the clearest descriptions. Dance name

English sources

French sources

Italian sources

Arbeau

Caroso, Negri, Santucci, Lupi

Bacchanals Bergomask Canary (canaries, canario) Carole Cinquepace, sink-​a-​pace (cinque pas, cinque passi) see: Galliard

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    79 Dance name

English sources

French sources

Italian sources

Coranto (coranta, courante, corrente)

Inns of Court MSS (unclear instructions)

Arbeau, de Lauze (unclear instructions), de Montagut (unclear instructions)

Negri

Country Dance

Playford

French Brawl (branle, bransle)

Arbeau, “Instruction pour dancer” MS, de Lauze

Galliard (gaillarde, gagliarda)

Inns of Court MSS (notes too brief to reconstruct a galliard)

Arbeau, de Lauze (unclear instructions), de Montagut (unclear instructions)

Hay (hey) [a figure of a dance]

Playford (many dances have “hay” figures)

Arbeau (one dance has a “hay” figure)

Caroso, Negri, Lutij, Compasso, Lupi, Santucci

Jig Lavolta (volta)

Arbeau

Matachins (mattachins, bouffons)

Arbeau

Measure (almain, pavin)

Inns of Court MSS

Morris Passy Measures Pavin (passamezzo, passo e mezzo, passe meze) Round (Roundel)

Arbeau (allemande, pavane)

Caroso (1581 only) (brief pavana)

Arbeau (excerpts) Inns of Court MSS (passinge measure pavyon)

Arbeau (brief note re passe meze)

Caroso, Negri, Lupi (passamezzo, passo e mezzo)

80   Nona Monahin

Appendix 2: Summary of the Main Choreographic Sources Relevant to Shakespeare English Sources The Inns of Court Manuscripts The so-​called Inns of Court Manuscripts provide brief descriptions of dances known as “measures,” a category that included dances labeled “pavin,” “almain,” and “measure” (in various spellings). Several of the manuscripts also mention or provide brief notes about other dances, but the choreographic instructions for these are either too brief, or not explicit enough, to allow the dances to be reconstructed. One manuscript includes music for several of the measures. Although the origin of the recently rediscovered Dulwich College manuscript is not known, it is included here because the contents suggest a connection to the other Inns of Court dance manuscripts. • Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poet. 108, folios 10r–​11r (ca. 1563–​1570) Contents: Descriptions of thirteen measures. Other dances: “Quanto dyspayne,” “The nine muses.” • Dulwich College MS, 2nd Series XCIV, fol. 28 (ca. 1570–​1590) Contents: Descriptions of thirteen measures. • Taunton, Somerset Record Office, DD /​WO 55/​7, item 36 (1594) Contents: Descriptions of eight measures. Other dance: galliard. • Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 280, folios 66 (a)v–​66 (b)v (ca. 1609) Contents: Descriptions of eleven measures. Other dances: cinquepace, galliard, coranto, Spanish pavin, volta, spanioletta, French brawles. • London, British Library, MS Harley 367, folios 178r–​179v (1611–​1621) Contents: Descriptions of eight measures. • Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D 864, folios 199r–​199v, 203r–​204r (ca. 1630) Contents: Descriptions of eight measures. Other dance: coranto. • London, Inner Temple Library, Records of the Inner Temple, Vol. XXVII, folios 3r–​6v (mid-​to late seventeenth century) Contents: Descriptions of nine measures. Other dances: sinke a pace. Also, brief description of a “ceremony.” • London, Royal College of Music, MS 1119, folios 1r–​2v (mid-​to late seventeenth century)

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Plays    81 Contents: Descriptions of eight measures, some with music. Other dances: snicke [sic] a pace, “Tricetees,” “An Holy Dance.” Also, brief description of a ceremony with mention of a “House Measure.” Transcriptions: For a transcription of measures (with the exception of those in the Dulwich MS), see: Ian Payne, The Almain in Britain, c. 1549–​c. 1675: A Dance Manual from Manuscript Sources (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003); David Wilson, “Dancing in the Inns of Court.” Historical Dance 2, no. 5 (1987): 3–​16; Peter Durham and Janelle Durham, The Old Measures, 1570–​1675, 2nd ed. (Redmond, WA: The Authors, 2001). Online at: http://​www.peterdur.com/​pdf/​old-​measures.pdf. For a transcription of measures in the Dulwich MS, see: Anne Daye and Jennifer Thorp. “English Measures Old and New: Dulwich College MS. XCIV/​f.28.” Historical Dance 4, No. 3 (2018): 27–​40. Dates: The dates of the manuscripts are based on information collated from these sources. John Playford, The English Dancing Master (London, 1651) (Also many later editions, with some changes in contents, titled The Dancing Master). Contents: Descriptions, with music, of many English “country dances.” Reprint of 1651 edition: Edited by Hugh Mellor and Leslie Bridgewater (London: Dance Books, 1984).

French Sources Thoinot Arbeau (pseudonym of Jehan Tabourot), Orchésographie (Langres, 1588/​ 1589) Contents: choreographies and music for several dances mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, such as gaillarde, tourdion (galliard, cinquepace), volte (lavolta), branle (brawl), allemande (measure), courante (coranto), and canaries (canary), pavane, very brief excerpt of morisques (morris). Also mentioned: passe meze (passy measures). English translation: Thoinot Arbeau. Orchesography, by Mary Stewart Evans, with corrections, new introduction, and notes, by Julia Sutton (New York: Dover, 1967). François de Lauze, Apologie de la danse (n.p., 1623) Contents: Descriptions of gaillarde, courante and several bransles. Instructions are difficult to interpret. No music. English translation: F. De Lauze, Apologie De La Danse, French, with English translation by Joan Wildeblood (London: Frederick Muller, 1952). Barthélemy de Montagut, Louange De La Danse (n.p., 1620s) Contents: Montagut’s plagiarized version of de Lauze’s work. English translation and edition by Barbara Ravelhofer (Cambridge: RTM Publications, 2000).

82   Nona Monahin “Instruction pour dancer les dances cy après nomnez” (ca. late sixteenth century) Manuscript in the Darmstadt, Hessische Hochschul-​und Landesbibliothek, HS304. Contents: Descriptions of pavanne,a several bransles, and other dances. Facsimile reprint: Instruction pour dancer: An Anonymous Manuscript, eds. Angene Feves, Ann Lizbeth Langston, Uwe Schlottermüller, and Eugenia Roucher (Freiburg: fa-​ gisis, 2000).

Italian Sources Lutio Compasso, Ballo della Gagliarda (Florence, 1560) Contents: 166 galliard variations. No music. Facsimile reprint: Barbara Sparti, ed. (Freiburg: fa-​gisis, 1995). Fabritio Caroso, Il Ballarino (Venice, 1581) Contents: 54 “rules” comprising step descriptions and advice on comportment. Choreographies and music for 82 dances by Caroso and others. Illustrations. Facsimile reprint: New York: Broude Brothers, 1967. Prospero Lutij di Sulmona, Opera Bellissima . . . Passeggi di Gagliarda (Perugia, [1587, 1589]) Contents: 31 galliard variations and 24 simpler “passages” to be danced between galliard variations. No music. Fabritio Caroso, Nobiltà di dame (Venice: Il Muschio, 1600) Contents: 68 “rules” comprising step descriptions; 28 “rules” consisting of advice on comportment. Choreographies and music for 48 dances by Caroso. Illustrations. Facsimile reprint: Bologna: Forni, 1970. English translation: Fabritio Caroso, Nobiltà di dame. Translated and edited by Julia Sutton, music edited by F. Marian Walker (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986; reprinted as Courtly Dance of the Renaissance. New York: Dover, 1995). Livio Lupi da Caravaggio, [Libro di] Mutanze di Gagliarda . . . (Palermo, 1600, 1607) Contents: 300 pages; mainly galliard variations but also other dances. 1607 edition has two extra dances with music. Cesare Negri, Le Gratie d’Amore (Milan, 1602) Contents: Lists of dance teachers, places where Negri danced; 55 “rules” comprising instructions for dancing galliard variations and advice on comportment; 25 additional “rules” of step descriptions. Choreographies and music for 44 dances by Negri and others. Illustrations. Facsimile reprint: New York: Broude Brothers, 1969. Ercole Santucci, “Mastro da Ballo” (Manuscript, dated 1614) Contents: 214 “rules” comprising steps descriptions and advice on comportment; 12 choreographies mostly by other choreographers. No music. Facsimile reprint: Barbara Sparti, ed. (Hildesheim; New York: G. Olms, 2004). aThe choreography of this pavanne is more akin to the Italian pavaniglia, as described in the manuals of

Fabritio Caroso and Cesare Negri, than to the pavanes in Arbeau or the Inns of Court manuscripts. (Notes to facsimile reprint, 21.)

Chapter 3

“ W hen the Pl ay I s D one , You Shall Have a J i g or Dance of All T re a d s ” Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage Roger Clegg

Frequent visitors to the reconstructed Globe on London’s South Bank will be familiar with what has now become something of a hallmark: at the end of the final scene of the play, the remaining players disappear into the tiring house, only to re-​emerge with the full company to end the show with a dance, or “jig,” incorporating a bow, to great applause. Exactly how each performance of a Shakespeare play was concluded on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage is, however, unknown. The published texts end in a number of ways: some simply instruct the players to exit; some call for music (Hamlet ends with a march followed by a loud discharge of guns, King Lear with “a dead march,” and Timon of Athens with “Let our Drummes strike”), or singing (Love’s Labour’s Lost) or dancing (Much Ado about Nothing and As You Like It); others conclude with an Epilogue—​a commendatory speech by a single actor, occasionally sung (Twelfth Night) or accompanied by dance (Henry IV, part 2), with, on rare occasions, a request for applause (Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Rosalind in As You Like It, and Prospero in The Tempest). There is no evidence that the whole cast appeared to take a bow, which only became practice after 1660.1 However, the end of the play was not generally the end of the afternoon’s entertainment in the public playhouses: Thomas Nashe writes of “the queint Comaedians of our time, /​That when their play is done do fal to ryme”; John Marston states that “the Iigge is cald for when the play is done”; Ben Jonson talks of the ordinariness of “a jigge after a Play”; and later, Donald Lupton observes that “most commonly when the play is done, you shal haue a Iigge or dance of all treads.”2 In addition to the dance, song, or epilogue that closed the play, further entertainment followed. By the seventeenth century the term jig had come to be applied indiscriminately to a type of instrumental music (in

84   Roger Clegg which, characteristically, the strong beats are divided into groups of three, for example compound duple [6/​8] or triple [9/​8] time), a lively country dance (though no complete jig choreographies survive from the sixteenth century, seventeenth-​century references suggest revolving motions, vigorous stepping or hopping, and leaping), a song or ballad; and, in combining these things, the term took on a specialized meaning in London’s playhouses—​a short, usually comic, often bawdy, dramatic afterpiece sung and danced to popular tunes of the day.3 Danced endings on Shakespeare’s stage functioned in different ways. Dancing that concluded the plot of the play might symbolize harmony, restore character roles or hierarchy, and offer closure to the dramatic plot; however, the type of dance may lay challenge to collective order. Dancing that occurred after the play might bridge the liminal space between player and character, between the world of the drama and the reality of the spectator, and foster a sense of community—​the energy and symbolism of which may, however, spill into the streets beyond the theater, making those responsible for civil, moral and religious order nervous. In the hands, or rather the feet, of the company’s clowns, dance also featured as part of a dramatic jig that followed the play (dance might be used as a means to enter or exit, to support action or drive the plot forward, or to signal a character’s social type or generate humor, for example); and they could, through ambivalent or critical laughter, lay challenge to the notion of social harmony, reinscribe hierarchy, and disrupt any sense of closure. The ability of dance to blur the lines between drama and reality was purposefully employed. This chapter traces the tradition of dancing as a conclusion to playgoing in early modern England in general, and to Shakespeare’s plays in particular:  What was its purpose, function, and significance? Furthermore, it considers the new “tradition” at London’s reconstructed Globe of following Shakespeare’s plays with a company dance: Just what is being witnessed in their “jig” in the twenty-​first century, and how far does their postlude dance carry us toward original practice on the Shakespearean stage?

Dancing at the End of a Play Dancing at the end of Shakespeare’s plays seems to have been part of a longer tradition. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, surviving texts suggest that plays performed in public outdoor spaces sometimes ended with a call for spectators to stay around to drink and dance with the players and each other before making their way home. In what seem to be the earliest recorded instances in England, several Cornish Miracle plays call for minstrels to pipe so that the players and spectators may dance.4 Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits, a satirical morality by Sir David Lyndesay performed in Cupar, Fife, in June 1552, concludes with Diligence inviting the spectators to “Let sum ga drink, and sum ga dance: /​Menstrell, blaw vp ane brawl of France; /​Let se quha hobblis best.”5 The public performance of Tom Tyler and His Wife, circa 1551, concluded with Patience calling, “Then take hands, and take chance, /​And I will lead the dance. /​Come

Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage    85 sing after me, and look we agree,” seemingly an invitation to player and spectator alike.6 Whether these were isolated instances or part of a wider performance tradition, dancing was at any rate an integral part of communal and social, as well as performance, culture. The move from communal to presentational dancing was a logical outcome of the rise of professional performance in the public theaters over the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Several plays call for dancing as the natural conclusion of the plot:  George Chapman’s Sir Giles Goosecap (1606) ends with an unspecified number of Lords and Ladies dancing a courtly measure as part of wedding festivities, followed by a song; the pastoral comedy The Maid’s Metamorphosis (1600) ends with three or four muses in a round dance accompanied by singing; and Every Woman in Her Humor (1609 [1607])7 ends with the Host giving a solo dance of display: “Let the Pipers strike, ille daunce my cinquepace, cut aloft my brave capers, whirle about my toe, do my trickes above ground.”8 However, it is in Shakespeare’s “festive” comedies, where the narrative moves from disorder toward resolution, reconciliation, or recognition, that a harmonious conclusion in dance is most often employed. Worthy of exploration, however, is that in most cases it seems that a vernacular dance of the people, a jig or a country dance, is employed, rather than more elite dancing measures. In the published quarto of Much Ado about Nothing (1600 [ca. 1598–​1599]), in which courtly dancing is central, Benedick ends the play with “lets haue a dance ere we are married, that we may lighten our own hearts, and our wiues heeles.” The printed play ends with his request to the musicians, “strike vp Pipers,” and a stage direction, “dance.”9 The type of dance is unspecified, but the dancing acts as the visual representation of concord, albeit one from which villainous and discordant characters are excluded. For Beatrice “wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch ijgge [sic], a measure, and a cinquepace.”10 Skiles Howard argues that when the pipers play the final pre-​wedding dance, “they certainly do not accompany a constipated matrimonial processional, nor a fancy galliard, but most likely ‘a rustic and provincial’ jig.”11 In seventeenth-​century ballads, for example, dancing a jig is most often associated with wooing, courtship, and pleasure, usually between couples from the rural, laboring, and farming communities.12 Suggesting both a lively dance and rapid up-​and-​down motion, the term jig became a euphemism for sexual intercourse, wedding night activity, lust in the young, or sexual rejuvenation in the old.13 The Scottish jig could be both a vigorous dance employing hops, leaps, and turns, and a “rustic and provincial” dialogue ballad, so that Beatrice may have conjured for the audience—​in both their mind as well as, perhaps, their bodies—​a “hot and hasty” country dance, which tied into the dramatic jig that probably followed the play.14 Based on wooing narratives, the postlude dramatic jig would counter the up-​beat celebration of marriage with a less romanticized, more down-​to-​earth picture of domestic affairs (in both senses) after the romance of true love is gratified. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600 [ca. 1595]) concludes with Oberon and Titania entering to sing a song with the fairies, who are invited to “daunce it trippingly.”15 Here again, it is not a courtly dance that concludes the play, but the linked dance of the fairies—​an image of the rounds and hays associated with popular festivity. In this play, the tradition of the danced ending is also hinted at after the mechanicals finish their play of Pyramus

86   Roger Clegg and Thisbe—​Lion asks the Duke if “it please you, to see the Epilogue, or to heare a Bergomaske daunce, between two of our company?”16—​and perhaps suggests the usual ending of entertainments at court. Employed extensively in the sixteenth century by composers in England to refer to “a wanton and rude kinde of musicke . . . like enough to carrie the name of some notable Curtisan of the Citie of Bergama,”17 the term is also defined as “[a]‌rustic dance, framed in imitation of the people of Bergamo, ridiculed as clownish in their manners” (Oxford English Dictionary [OED], n.), a style that was perhaps influenced by Arlecchino and Brighella, the comic masks from commedia dell’ Arte, who were represented as natives of Bergamo. The role of Bottom was likely to have been designed for Will Kemp, clown, popular dancer, and jig-​maker, so it is possible that his acrobatic prowess in the morris was utilized in the end-​of-​play Bergamask, danced by a clown “already inept, performing a dance imitating the inept” in a rustic, rude, and ridiculous dance, anticipating his reappearance at the end of Shakespeare’s play for his star role in the dramatic jig that featured as afterpiece.18 Evidence suggests that the court of Prince Henry patronized dramatic jigs,19 and Hamlet suggests that Polonius prefers “a Iigge, or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps.”20 In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the vernacular dance at the end of the rude mechanicals’ interlude, the round dance at the end of the play proper, and the ribald dramatic jig afterward affirmed as well as questioned the collective order: the disorderly Bergamask introduces comic topsy-​turvydom and popular tradition into the Athenian court; the fairies’ ring dance—​hands linked, inward facing, and emblematic of connection and collective embrace—​engenders reconciliation through rotations that unite the earthly, the cosmic, and the supernatural; and the afterpiece handed the stage to the improvising clown and his comic companions to “dance out” stories of social rivalry, neighborly conflict, and sexual misdemeanor. The invitation to end with a dance is not always so open. Love’s Labour’s Lost (Q1598 [ca. 1596]) concludes—​untraditionally for a comedy—​with all weddings, and therefore celebratory dancing, delayed for a year. Brissenden, following Granville-​Barker’s lead, suggests that the players countered the solemnity of the conclusion with the country folk returning to dance the hay called for by Dull (5.1).21 A dramatic jig would have served as well. As You Like It (F1623 [1600]) ends with the characters exiting toward the promise of dancing—​“So to your pleasures, /​I am for other, then for dancing meazures,” says Jaques to Duke Senior.22 Whether the audience saw the players dance is not known, although modern editions sometimes add a stage direction. Brissenden suggests that a measure between four couples would provide “an image of harmony which resolves the confusions of the play’s actions and indicates the hoped-​for concord of marriage,” and since they were especially dances of the court, “it would be inappropriate to end this play with a country dance.”23 The staging of As You Like It marks a hotly debated crux in the performance history of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Mary Crane, for example, argues that, as the first play staged at the newly built Globe, it represents a decisive move by the company away from improvised clowning, and that any surviving elements of the afterpiece are contained within the play. If, however, the afterpiece persisted, the dramatic jig would perhaps counter the courtly, ending the afternoon with a musical comedy featuring country dances and jigs.24

Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage    87

Dancing after the End of a Play Dancing also sat comfortably outside the frame of the drama, whether it was performed solo or in groups, appended to an epilogue, or featured as part of a dramatic jig. The published quarto of Henry IV, part 2 (1600 [ca. 1596–​1599]), ends with an ironically defensive Epilogue: If my tongue cannot intreate you to acquit mee, will you commaund me to vse my legges? And yet that were but light payment, to daunce out of your debt, but a good conscience will make any possible satisfaction, and so woulde I . . . my tongue is weary, when my legges are too, I wil bid you, good night.25

The unnamed speaker then either danced solo—​the hopping, leaping, and turning steps of a jig?—​or returned to the stage to dance in the musical afterpiece, or both.26 The Porter in Narcissus, a merriment performed “by youths of the parish at the College of St. John the Baptist, Oxford,” delivers a comparable epilogue, concluding, “If there bee any that expecte some dance, /​’Tis I must perform it.”27 Epilogues are a liminal convention, sitting between the drama and reality, which “prolongs the play and the actor-​ audience relationship whilst simultaneously announcing that the play is over, at least temporarily.”28 Whether after the play or at the end of an epilogue, dance functioned similarly. Group dances seem also to have been anticipated. On September 21, 1599, the Dutch traveler Thomas Platter records in his diary that after watching fifteen players stage Julius Caesar, possibly at the Globe, “zủ endt der Comedien dantzeten sie ihrem gebrauch nach gar überaủß zierlich, ÿe zwen in mannes vndt 2 in weiber kleideren angethan, wủnderbahrlich mitt einanderen” [“at the end of the play, as is customary, they danced extremely elegantly, with two people dressed as men and two as women.”]29 There is no certainty about what exactly Platter saw; most translators of Platter take it for granted that the dance at the end of the play was performed by four people, two dressed as men and two as women.30 Cross-​dressing was a feature of the bawdy afterpieces, but elegance, as Brissenden observes of Platter’s entry, seems “more suitable to one of the court dances, a pavan, almain, or even the faster coranto.”31 Ernest Schanzer, however, considers that “already in sixteenth-​century usage the distributive ‘je’ [ÿe] indicates that more than a total of four dancers must have been involved, that there were in fact several groups of dancers, each consisting of two actors in male and two in female attire. From the formation we can infer that the steps were those of a country-​dance, presumably one of the ‘Longs-​for-​four,’ similar to those recorded in Playford’s Dancing Master (1651).”32 The following day “at Bishopsgate”—​either at the Curtain or the Boars Head—​ Platter witnessed a play in which an Englishman overcomes suitors of different nations to win a girl: “In conclusion they performed English and Irish dancing quite beautifully.” Frustratingly absent is any indication of exactly who or what was danced, but what he saw seems intended to unite the audience around the triumphant homegrown hero of

88   Roger Clegg the piece. What is certain is that dancing seems to have been equally acceptable after all classifications of play, including history, comedy, or tragedy. The popularity and variety of postlude dancing is borne out by Paul Hentzner, a tutor who visited England with his pupil in 1598. In his account of their travels, he comments that “Sunt porrò Londini extra Urbem Theatra aliquot, in quibus Histriones Angli Comœdias & Tragœdias singulis ferè diebus, in magna hominum frequentia agunt, quas varijs etiam saltationibus, suavissimâ adhibitâ Musicâ, magno cum populi applausu finire solent” [“There are, further, some theaters outside the city of London in which nearly every day English actors play comedies and tragedies in front of a great audience of people; which usually end with various dances, accompanied by the sweetest music, and with great applause from the people”] (my emphasis).33 “Saltatio” can refer to leaping or dancing; “saltator” to one who leaps, an acrobat, or a tumbler. That the activity was accompanied by “the sweetest music” would suggest dancing, perhaps involving leaping? Payments made to Lord Admiral’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men included “feats of activity,” such as tumbling, vaulting, and rope-​dancing. Leaping, dancing, and acrobatics sometimes ended or followed plays given by European professional troupes, which may have influenced the English stage. Whether designed to bring a community together at the end of a mystery cycle, to reconcile characters at the end of a drama, to appease an audience, or draw players and spectators together in a collective act, dancing at the end of a play served to unite. The custom persisted into the reign of Charles I, leading Donald Lupton to observe, “Most commonly when the play is done, you shal haue a Iigge or dance of all treads, they mean to put their legs to it, as well as their tongs. They make men wonder when they have done, for they all clap their hands.”34 Given the variety of dancing that followed plays in the rapidly developing proto-​capitalist theaters, it seems that playwrights and theater managers saw added value in employing vernacular, communal, ritual, social, and festive dancing as a way to conclude the afternoon’s playgoing. The common player was called upon to perform with equal ability a variety of dances, from the leaping of a galliard or a dignified measure to the vigorous stepping of a jig: Encompassing a wide range of practices, the dancing of Shakespeare’s theatre was a metonym of the interactions and circulations in the society it reflected and generated, with courtly dancing reinscribing hierarchy through codified movement, and popular dancing celebrating affinity with traditional motions. . . . Dancing on the public stage was not a monolithic activity, but a kinetic economy: competing cultural assertions were visually articulated in the divers traditions of dancing, and were certainly understood as such by their audiences.35

But danced endings also reinscribed hierarchy in other ways:  the professional stage synthesized dances from the courtly and the popular, the city and the country, the grotesque and the bucolic, so that dancing at the end of the plays—​both at court and in the playhouse—​licensed, as part of a long tradition of popular carnival, a reversal of the social order. Courtly dances were played out by mere players in the same way that the

Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage    89 court subsumed, for their entertainment, vernacular country dances and dramatic jigs. Such freedoms in the dance brought joy to some and concern to others. From courtier to country clown, dancing was a communicator of communal unity as well as social division; its traditions, innovations, interactions, codifications, and significance were employed, reflected, and sometimes mocked in the public theaters. The surviving texts suggest that Lupton’s dances “of all treads” were most often rooted in the vernacular dances of the people. It was the vigorous stepping of the “hot and hasty” jig, not the figures of a courtly measure, that was to have a resounding impact on the danced endings on the early modern public stage—​in “the Sceane after the Epilogue . . . (about a nasty bawdy jigge)”—​and that brought both player and spectator back to their earthly plain with a thud.36 Of curiosity is why, by 1612, the popularity of dramatic jigs and post-​play dances so concerned the Westminster Magistrates that they issued an “Order for suppressinge of Jigges att the ende of Playes” commanding that “all Actors of every playhouse within this cittye and liberties thereof and in the Countie of Middlesex that they and everie of them utterlye abolishe all Jigges Rymes and Daunces after their playes.”37

Dancing a Dramatic Jig The dramatic jig was a short, sometimes bawdy, often comic musical-​drama that included elements of dance, stage fighting, and disguise. Frequently based around sexual and social misdemeanor, misplaced wooing, and age-​old tales of courtship and cuckoldry, they featured a cast of comic types from aging or wayward husbands, enterprising young wives, knavish clowns, roaring soldiers, falsely coy maidens, and country bumpkins. Sometimes linked to libel, the dramatic jig was also employed to poke fun at private individuals, stock types, and public authorities, calling into question personal honor, reputation, and status—​the very things that were necessary to maintain social order.38 Given also at fairs, on village greens, in taverns, and private houses, such musical entertainments featured regularly on London’s professional stage. Shakespeare’s attitude to the dramatic jig is, however, uncertain. The form was developed to the height of its fame with Richard Tarlton and his successor William Kemp, London’s famous jig-​mongers. If Shakespeare’s career in London began by the mid-​1580s, he may have witnessed Richard Tarlton (d. 1588), player with the Queen’s Men and often noted as London’s first jigging clown, singing ballads accompanied by dancing at the end of plays, whose legacy gives us a picture of “individualism opposed to petty authority, charlatanism and prissiness.”39 Tarlton’s Newes (1590) has the Ghost of Tarlton recall how he was appointed to “sit and play jigs all day on my tabor,”40 and John Scottowe’s drawing of Tarlton (Figure 3.1) shows him playing the pipe and tabor, with his left knee bent and leg raised as if in a dance. There is speculation that Shakespeare joined the Queen’s Men in 1587,41 but even if he never saw Tarlton on stage, he would have heard talk of him before joining the Chamberlain’s Men in 1594. William Kemp, dancer, jig-​maker, and “Iestmonger and

90   Roger Clegg

Figure 3.1.  John Stowe’s drawing of Richard Tarlton. Source: Reproduced with permission of © The British Library Board, Harley MS 3885, f19.

Vice-​gerent [deputy] generall to the Ghost of Dicke Tarlton,” joined the company at the same time.42 We can assume that, following his roles as Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing and Peter in Romeo and Juliet (and Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, and perhaps Falstaff), he returned to the stage at the end of the play to star in the song-​and-​dance afterpiece. John Marston refers to dancing “Kemps Iigge” in rotations, which “reuel with neate iumps”;43 and the anonymous author of Old Meg of Herefordshire (1609) notes that “Kemp’s morris to Norwich” was no more “than a galliard on a common stage, at the end of an old dead comedy,” suggesting that both courtly and country dances were employed by clowns

Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage    91

Figure 3.2.  Title page of Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder (1600). Source: Reproduced with permission of © The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 4°.L.62 Art.

in dramatic jigs.44 Kemp is also depicted with one leg raised in a morris on the title page (Figure 3.2) of Nine Daies Wonder (1600), his account of a dance from London to Norwich in which he “jumps,” “leaps,” and “footed it merrily,” accompanied by tabor and pipe.

92   Roger Clegg The Stationers’ Register records a number of jigs attributed to Kemp between 1591 and 1595. The bawdy afterpiece was probably retained during the company’s time at the Curtain, a playhouse noted for its rowdy afterpieces, while the playhouse called the Theatre was being dismantled and its timbers moved piecemeal across the Thames to be redeployed in the building of the Globe. There is no definitive evidence to confirm or reject the idea that dramatic jigs were performed after plays at the first Globe. Whether by design or fortune, the Globe proved attractive to wealthier patrons from the west side of London, and it may have been in the company’s interest to deter the unruly crowds who preferred dramatic jigs to plays. If subsuming the afterpiece into the end of As You Like It or Feste’s song at the end of Twelfth Night (1602) signaled an alternative way of providing closure, the company’s change of direction—​from “clown” to “fool”—​when Robert Armin joined may have been an attempt to compensate for the loss of Kemp in 1599. The dance Platter witnessed that same year may suggest that the Globe and perhaps other playhouses offered a mix of post-​play entertainments, including dances, or perhaps that they had dispensed with clownish jigs. There is precious little elbow-​room in Kemp’s jigs for the kind of artificial fool that became Armin’s specialty; as Shapiro observes, “While Armin could step into some of the roles Shakespeare had created for Kemp (such as Dogberry in Much Ado), Kemp’s improvisational and physical style and commonsensical if at times dim-​witted demeanor couldn’t have been further from the sardonic, witty style of the diminutive Armin.”45 That’s not to say there weren’t potential replacements for Kemp’s jigging clown available.46 In order to survive, a theater company must adapt to changing times, yet we should be wary of tracking change on the strength of a single sentence in a tourist’s travelogue. If Julius Caesar ended with a company dance on September 21, 1599, that is no proof that the same applied at every subsequent performance of that play, let alone to the rest of the Chamberlain’s Men’s repertoire. That early dramatic jigs featured dancing is certain; the appellation jig would not otherwise have become established. Of the eight surviving texts dating from before the Restoration, however, only “Wooing of Nan” (ca. 1590–​1600), based around a dance contest in which a country fool wins the maid’s hand, explicitly calls for episodes of dance and seems likely to have included solo, paired, and group country dancing, as well as perhaps a galliard, while several others include sung dialogue that nods toward possible locations and types of dance.47 No choreographic information is given. Just because neither dialogue nor stage directions call for dancing, it does not follow that there was none. We know that many of the melodies the texts were sung to were popular dance tunes; and changes of tune, meter, and stanzaic form in the texts might also sometimes be taken as implying changes in dance style.48 Furthermore, some of the German translations of English dramatic jigs, which have not survived, also indicate dance.49 Either less dancing occurred in the afterpieces than might be assumed or, more likely, much more dancing occurred than is left behind in the extant texts. From the surviving texts, in seems that dramatic jigs usually featured between two and six characters, ideal for combinations of solo, pair, and small group dances. While the element of dance in these jig texts is mostly unrecorded, if the dancing featured in

Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage    93 plays of the same period is any indication, then of those between 1570–​1608 so far recorded in British Drama, 1533–​1642: A Catalogue, the majority of dances are solo (21 episodes) or paired (22) and include galliards, jigs, capers, and la volta; those involving three performers (6) reference rounds (although in plays, rounds are often danced by supernatural figures), horn-​pipe, and unspecified country dances; those involving four dancers (6) include dancing a round or dancing in two pairs; only one dance, a round, involves five people; and dances involving six (7) make reference to an almain and to dancing in three pairs; no dances explicitly call for seven people, but eight dancers (3) involve four pairs in a country dance, and there is a single episode of a dance involving nine performers who dance in groups of three.50 The possibility that the dramatic jigs’ dependence on dance diminished over time cannot be ruled out, but the absence of explicit dancing cues is not, in itself, evidence of diminution. In his survey of British broadside ballads between 1550 and 1650, Bruce Smith notes that explicit dancing cues had virtually disappeared by the end of the sixteenth century. The same may be true of dramatic jigs. There was no easy way to indicate movements or record them in print; dance was fundamentally an embodied experience, passed from person to person through observation or participation. It may be that in translating the afterpiece from performance to print, episodes of dancing were left unrecorded, just as the tunes that accompanied them are generally unspecified; as Smith observes, “dance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was kinetic knowledge, something known in and through dancer’s bodies.”51 Stage players included the playing of instruments, singing, and dancing among their professional accomplishments; it is likely that the dancers in dramatic jigs were highly skilled in performing steps and figures that they thoroughly understood. Dancing was, after all, part of a performance as well as a communal culture, and it is likely that significance was placed on who was dancing what, when, and with whom, as well as attention being drawn to those whose feet were determinedly not taking part. It was common for the plots of dramatic jigs to involve the pitting of social types against one another—​sometimes divided into those from the country and those from the town—​with those of the lowest degree often ending the afterpiece triumphant. Dance was a clear communicator of social type as well as social divisions: it might be used to indicate or support the significance of character (for example, by the style of dance they engage in or by how well they dance—​in Wooing of Nan, structured around a dance contest, characters of different estates use dance to try to win the affection of Nan, but all lose out to the Fool, who is the best dancer); to enable action (for example, a distraction or a means of escape by persons of one degree from persons of another—​in The Black Man, the text implies that dancing is used by Susan, a barmaid, and Thumpkin, a country clown, as a means to escape the sexual predation of two Gentlemen); and to further the plot (for example, as a device to facilitate courtship and signal sexual liaison, however inappropriate—​although not made explicit in the text, dancing was perhaps employed in Attowell’s Jig by Francis, a Gentleman, to celebrate what he believes is his sexual conquest with the wife of his neighbor, a farmer). Dancing could both articulate and mitigate social distinctions, which the jig-​makers surely exploited for theatrical

94   Roger Clegg ends; players could turn their hands, or rather feet, to the courtly or the rustic, in playhouses whose audiences were likewise socially mixed. The extant dramatic texts feature the full range of social types that made up the population of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from squires and gentlefolk, yeomen and the professional class, farmers and laborers, servants, peddlers, and vagrants. In coming to a conclusion about the nature of dancing in the dramatic jig, Baskervill is surely right when he suggests that “if a complete study of stage practice could be made, it might easily involve the whole range of dance in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.”52 Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, stage dancing was closely tied to social dancing. Dancers performed established steps and figures and, although the search for complete novelty and new movement did not emerge until the early twentieth century, some dances invited virtuosity. This presumably offered room for the addition of comedy, even when the dance itself is not necessarily comic. Examples are not confined to the afterpiece. In Robert Greene’s James the Fourth (1598), dancing is used comically to distract Slipper, a rustic clown and sometimes filcher, who, while lording it pretentiously, has his pockets picked by Andrew Snoord, whose character defines a world in which “sinners seem to dance within a net.”53 Similarly, in a dramatic jig performed and published after the Interregnum, Moll Medlar, a prostitute, uses dancing the steps of a jig as a ruse to distract Wat, a rustic clown on his visit to the capital, in order to palm off onto him a basket containing a child.54 The humor is in the enactment of deception through dancing. In Twelfth Night (1623 [ca. 1601]), having demonstrated a leap, Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s confidence in his dancing skill—​“Faith, I can cut a caper”—​is met with Sir Toby Belch’s comic retort, “And I can cut the mutton to ‘t’.”55 Rather than the lofty galliard, the comically crude drunkard Sir Toby’s “very walk should be a jig.”56 In a similar way, in Wooing of Nan, a dramatic jig based around a dance contest, the Gentleman suitor is comically put in his place by the object of his affection when, having danced together, Nan retorts, “I fear you are a gelding, you caper so light.”57 In both cases, a bawdy pun is used to relate dancing ability to sexual prowess, and one that was surely exploited in dramatic jigs to comic effect. While some dances of the period, such as the jig or the galliard, allowed for virtuosic embellishments by the dancer, it is likely that, when employing the more formal dances of the day, jig-​makers sometimes executed them in a way that drew out comic potential in the figures and steps by offering moments of deviation or disruption from the expected. Such comic variations might be used to highlight the characteristics of a role, advance the plot, add dramatic irony or, if juxtaposed against more “serious” dancers, help certain characters or clowning performers to appear all the more ridiculous. Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1600 [ca. 1592]), for example, includes a comically inept morris set, an overzealous hobby horse, and poorly executed country dancing, prompting Summers to exclaim, “I never sawe worse daunsers.”58 To dance badly, then, was to subvert the norm; expectation and outcome are employed conversely to comic effect. We do not know whether the creators of dramatic jigs knowingly alluded to the plays their offerings followed onto the stage, but a relationship of some kind was unavoidable. The dramatic afterpiece presented the opportunity of “reinscribing

Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage    95 hierarchy.” Following a tragedy, which moves from threat to catastrophe, the comic realism of the free-​speaking clowns in cahoots with the spectators reduced the political embroilments of kings, princes, and statesmen to the folly of the common man, caricaturing state quarrels as domestic brawls between artisans. Following a history play, the dramatic jig may have served, as Howard observes, “to re-​establish the popular equilibrium of a stage top-​heavy with historical monarchs.”59 For some members of the audience (and not only the much-​maligned groundlings), the transition was from historical or courtly fantasy to more immediate real life. Following a comedy, in which the move is from confusion toward resolution and finally marriage, the dramatic jig would offer a less romanticized, more down-​to-​earth picture of domestic relations. David Wiles argues that “the clown’s wooing recreates symmetry, reassuring the audience that the play world is relevant to the whole of society . . . the Shakespearean hero represents intellectual and spiritual experience, while the clown represents physical experience.”60 The clown’s primary “language,” Wiles argues again, is physical not verbal—​a point Bruce Smith elaborates when he argues that dramatic jigs encouraged a movement away from semantic sense “toward kinetic sensation . . . the nimble body [triumphs] over verbal rigor.”61 Everard Guilpin’s muse, who dances a “salt La volto jest,”62 presents an image of how the leaping, hopping, and turning of the courtly (but nevertheless risqué) volta may have been employed, or further appropriated, by players at the Curtain in the dancing of a bawdy afterpiece. In Orchésographie (1588), the dance is described as “wanton and wayward . . . the damsels are made to bounce about in such a fashion that more often than not they show their bare knees unless they keep one hand on their skirts to prevent it.”63 “Salt” here puns on its English meaning, “to leap” (from Lat. saltus; Fr. saut) and “sexual desire or excitement” (OED, n.  2), and link the dancing to “salt jests” or “pungent or stinging speech or wit” (OED, adj. 1.5) and the dancers with being “salacious” (OED, adj. 2.b).64 John Trapp’s definition of “salt jests” as one which is “to the just grief or offence of another” may also give some indication of the content.65 Dancing in the dramatic jig traced out a movement toward moral license and bodily freedom so that, as Wiles observes, the afterpiece sometimes stood in for the sexual consummations promised by the romantic ending of the play that had preceded it.66 Added to which, the fact that men and boys played (and danced) cross-​dressed “must have added a further charge to the complex cross-​currents of communication that flowed through the theatre.”67 The 1612 Westminster Order to ban jigs after plays was born out of concern that “cutt-​ purses and other lewde and ill disposed persons in greate multitudes doe resorte thither at th’end of euerye playe.”68 The afterpieces drew apprentices to the playhouses after work who were looking for recreation, creating “a second or supplementary audience to the playhouses, presumably at cheap prices, to see and hear the afterpieces only.”69 For as we see at all the play house dores, When ended is the play, the daunce, and song: A thousand townsemen, gentlemen, and whores, Porters and serving men together throng. . . .70

96   Roger Clegg But it was also born out of increasing anxiety about the relationship between dancing, immorality, and disorder, and how such entertainments might “recreate” (revitalize, remake) and unify its spectators, so that they experience what Christopher Featherstone refers to as “a seconde making, or a making agayne of that thing which was once made.”71 For some, dance “was seen as the means by which order came out of primal chaos”; 72 for others, it was out of step with religious doctrine and worked against the maintenance of social order. Besides the concern that afterpieces encouraged people away from evening prayer, the Puritan John Rainolds feared what the players may learn from counterfeiting fools and foolishness, much less the unseemliness to dress in women’s apparel (an infringement of Deuteronomy 22.5) and “to danse like unhonest wemen” with other men, whereby “what a flame of lust may bee kindled in the hearts of men.”73 Likewise, John Nothbrooke concerned himself with what sins might be learned and practiced from attending the theaters and what lusts the “wanton enticements of daunces” might insight in its spectators, whereby “[d]‌auncing must needs be the extreme of all vices.”74 Given control of the stage at the end of the main play, the dancing clown disrupted the comfort of closure and brought with him onto the stage vestiges of the popular traditions of subversion, anarchy, and misrule. Perhaps the Order was simply a sop to the righteous. In any case, it didn’t last long. Whether dramatic jigs had been abandoned earlier by Shakespeare’s company in their new playhouse or withdrawn in response to the Order, evidence suggests that they were restored at the rebuilt Globe by the 1620s. On March 16, 1623/​1624 Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, noted the granting of a license “[f]‌or the King’s company. Shankes Ordinarie, written by Shankes himself,” referring perhaps to a tavern or gaming-​house.75 Costing just £1, far less than the average cost of a play, it is possible that this was a dramatic jig by John Shanks, who joined the King’s Men in 1613—​clown and jig-​maker, famed for his knockabout and dancing with Prince Henry’s Men at the Fortune playhouse. Gurr suggests that the decision to revive the jigging-​afterpieces at the Globe was a sign of the company’s recognition that this outdoor playhouse had to cater to a different audience from the one they appealed to at the indoor Blackfriars: “If these socially divisive acknowledgements of divergent taste were observed by the King’s Men, it would have made sense in 1624 to revive Shanks’s old practice of performing in a dramatic jig at the end of performances at the [second] Globe.”76 The construction of a third Globe playhouse on London’s Southbank in 1996 offered a unique opportunity once again to revive and to test in performance the old practice of following Shakespeare’s plays with “a Jigge” or “dance of all treads.” Having considered the history of dancing after the end of a play, how does this relate to the new Globe’s approach to postlude entertainment during its experiments in “Original Practices”—​ an approach to exploring ways of staging Shakespeare’s plays that would have been possible at the time of the first Globe—​and what was, and is, being witnessed by audiences of their now established tradition of following a play with a company dance?

Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage    97

Shakespeare’s Globe and Their New Tradition Between 1997 and 2005, the new Globe experimented with “original practices” (OP) for some of their productions, an approach to staging particular known historical practices developed by Mark Rylance (artistic director), Tim Carroll (associate director), Claire van Kampen (director of theater music), and costume designer Jenny Tiramani (director of theater design), which they felt may be helpful in exploring the relationship between actor and audience—​music, costume, and single-​gender casting, direct engagement with the audience, for example—​and rejected those thought to constrict that relationship—​original pronunciation, for example. The aim was to recreate or replicate many of the performance practices on Shakespeare’s stage without insisting dogmatically on the authority of the performances that resulted. In the absence of any real knowl­ edge of how Shakespeare’s original audiences thought or to what they were accustomed, Rylance cautioned against calling the work “authentic”; the ethic was not an “exercise in archaeology but a radically alternative way of engaging with the present,”77 a sentiment echoed by the director Carroll in the program for the OP production of Richard II (2003): “We don’t, of course, pretend that what we are doing is ‘authentic,’ partly because the word implies a fatuous value judgement and partly because . . . we can never exactly recreate all the original performance conditions.” So when the new Globe first experimented with “doing it Shakespeare’s way,” records Veronica Howell, “the scholars and theatre folk encountered the jig problem.”78 In conceiving the idea of “original practices” (OP), Rylance had to work out how to make theatrical sense of endings. In June 1996, prior to the Prologue season at the Globe, Rylance saw the results of an experiment in the reconstruction of “authentic” jigs, researched and directed by Tony Green, whose program included seventeenth-​century dialogue-​ballads and dramatic jigs.79 In an interview with Edward Fox, Rylance acknowledges that he thought them “weird and primitive.” Certainly, the extant texts are likely to seem archaic and even politically incorrect to modern audiences. His initial solution to “the jig problem” was intuitive and pragmatic rather than academic: “one or two [original dramatic jigs] would be interesting and delightful . . . but I would soon really want to have a new writer write new versions . . . about life in contemporary south London. . . . It might work and it might not, and . . . there might not even be enough money for jigs.”80 The other practical consideration was whether audiences would have the time to stay around to watch an afterpiece of up to a half hour. The subsequent development of the Globe’s post-​play dance, or “jig,” evolved over the first decade of the new theater’s history, the term having been appropriated by the new Globe to refer to their afterpiece.81 From early experiments in writing new verse accompanied by dance, to quickly abandoned attempts at staging extant historical texts, to following a play with a dance based on historical precedents, to a celebratory company dance choreographed to connect the characters and narrative of the preceding play, historical precedence became secondary to establishing the new

98   Roger Clegg Globe’s new tradition. Van Kampen concludes that “rather than having failed to reproduce an ‘authentic jig’ we have in fact arrived at a consensus: the Globe has created the jig that is now usually employed for not only Original Practices productions but also, rather gratifyingly, it seems now to be the ‘Globe tradition’ in the 21st Century.”82 In 1996, the Globe’s first production, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, was followed by a bespoke entertainment by Cindy Oswin consisting of a “rap” seemingly unconnected to the play it followed, and loosely satirical of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative government. (Oswin’s first draft—​a verse satire on the [romantic] affairs of members of the Royal Family, dressed as horses, which was prevalent in the newspapers and media at the time—​was never performed.) The beat of a drum drew the spectators into clapping in unison as the performers swayed, moved back and forth, kicked their legs, or danced across the stage in angular movements. Wearing grotesque masks, the dancer-​performers stepped forward in turn to sing-​speak their parts to audible waves of laughter from the audience. A complete rewrite for the production’s tour to New York was presented. Based on the New York Times bestseller The Rules, a self-​help book for women who want to marry the ideal man, this “jig” attempted to bridge the world of the play with that of the spectator by drawing on the themes of the battle of the sexes, friendship and infidelity, conflict between friendship and love, and the foolish behav­ ior of people in love.83 In the only review to comment on the afterpiece, theater critic John Simon issued a warning that “[i]‌ntransigent feminists may want to leave before the play’s porcinely sexist ending.”84 The program stated that the jig was “an Elizabethan theatre tradition whereupon at the end of the play the company presents a satirical sketch lampooning the social and political issues of the day,” although this rather overstates the historical evidence. Either way, Oswin’s “jig” was an original work and was not concerned with an analysis of the extant texts of dramatic jigs of the period.85 In 1997, when the first OP production, an all-​male Henry V directed by Richard Olivier, was in rehearsal, the possibility of following it with an “authentic” dramatic jig was under discussion. With little time to rehearse, priority was accorded to the play, and approaches to the afterpiece were “desultory,” according to the then director of the Musicians of the Globe, Philip Pickett.86 Several hours were spent working on two of the surviving texts, Rowland’s Godson (1590?) and Singing Simpkin (noted in the Stationer’s Register in 1595, published 1656), both arguably connected to Will Kemp.87 Company members tried to come to terms with the demands of “original” melodies, but the text was considered too archaic. As a result, Singing Simpkin was radically updated and was given the new title of Ghost Sonata. A note in the program, written in anticipation of a public performance that never took place, stated that “The jig at the end of this production is based on ‘Will Kemp’s Jig’—​one of the few existing examples of this tradition, with modern lyrics by the company.” In place of the characters in Singing Simpkin were Shakespeare (dressed in goatee beard, with quill and big paper ruff), Kemp himself (in a jester’s hat with bells and period pitch pipe or penny whistle), and the personification of Sam Wanamaker, who instigated the project to reconstruct Shakespeare’s Globe; each wore a sash identifying himself. After discussion, it was decided that work on the afterpiece would require time and energy that the company felt was needed for Henry V.

Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage    99 The actors were reluctant to let go of the positive benefits of performing a “jig” at the end of a show: “the sense of ‘completing’ an experience which had been shared by actors and audience.”88 It was decided to find an alternative to the dramatic jig. In 1999, the Globe’s all-​ male OP production of Julius Caesar, directed by Rylance, was followed by a dance choreographed by Sue Lefton. Inspired by Thomas Platter’s 1599 diary entry (see above), once the dead bodies had been borne from the stage, the sixteen-​strong company returned for a dance after which three male dancers and two performers in women’s clothes took center stage. The three men danced in galliard style while the two “women” watched. Shakespeare’s Globe appears to have favored Ernest Schanzer’s reading that “there were in fact several groups of dancers, each consisting of two actors in male and two in female attire,” for it is his translation of Platter that appears at the end of the prompt copy for the Globe’s production in 1999. Again, the beat of a drum prompted the audience to clap along in rhythm with the dance, “a huge and genuinely spontaneous outburst of the crowd’s praise for the show.”89 A company dance became the accepted means to mark the end of the drama—​to blur the lines between actor and role, and the world of the play and that of the audience; to invite the spectator to join in the conclusion to the entertainment; to affirm their appreciation through applause; and as a way to include the modern practice of the “curtain call.” Under the direction of Sian Williams (master of dance, Shakespeare’s Globe), there was a slight shift of emphasis, with the entire cast returning to the stage for a celebratory dance choreographed in such a way as to connect with the characters and narrative of the preceding play. It is worth exploring a few examples, as it is Williams’s approach that has established the Globe’s new tradition for the afterpiece. At the end of the OP production of Twelfth Night (2002), the full company emerged during the third verse of Feste’s song. The dance began with a slow march, in double-​step, then broke into galliard variations. After a pause for Feste to finish the verse, performers then executed figures drawn from period country dances, the play’s characters celebrating their good fortune in a dance of arches, weaves, and hays that involved the enforced swapping of partners and comic dismay until the logic of the dance restored the status quo. Character-​specific dances were choreographed, most notably to accommodate Aguecheek’s doomed attempt at his “back-​trick,” but also playfully referencing Fred Astaire and the Highland Fling. Each rank of four then sidestepped away, exited, and finally re-​entered for the “curtain call.” In 2003, the all-​male OP production of The Tragedy of Richard II, directed by Tim Carroll, concluded with a “jig,” again choreographed by Williams, “constructed around the idea of the competition for power between Richard and Bolingbrooke . . . proudly strutting in an attempt to out-​manoeuvre one another. It is a good natured display of prowess. There is a sense of celebration in spite of the tragedy that just concluded.”90 Unlike previous afterpieces, at this point in the evolution of the Globe’s postlude dance, the galliard steps lose some of their identity and the choreography, now at odds with original practices, involves a “medley” of athletic kicking and stamping steps, interspersed with claps.91 A  selection of the reviews attest to its effect on the

100   Roger Clegg audience: Taylor observed that “[t]‌his sexy, leaping dance pushed the Globe audience, already elated by the play and production, into communal ecstasy”; Brown reports that “[in the jig] their high spirits are infectious. I left the theatre on a tide of exhilaration”; and Lancing records that the tragedy ends with a “tension-​releasing celebratory jig.”92 The historical accuracy of the choreography was secondary in importance to the effect that ending the play with dancing had on the Globe’s audience. In 2004, the all-​female OP production of Much Ado about Nothing had the post-​play “jig” pick up from Benedick’s closing command, “Strike up, pipers.” What followed combined a lilting country-​style square dance that employed both period and modern steps as the postlude dance, explains the production program, “set out to feature all the combinations of relationships in the story. Characters who disappeared before the end of the play—​such as the banished Don John—​are returned good-​humoredly to receive ‘brave punishments’ such as danced kicks in the rear.” Williams further explains that the afterpiece “set out to feature vignettes of all the combinations of relationships in the story: Don Pedro with several women in attendance suggesting potential wooers in response to Benedick’s ‘Get thee a wife’; Dogberry with the actor playing the Friar who hoists his cassock to reveal his other role of Verges (a bit of an in joke with the audience); an Italian style courtship dance phrase for Hero and Claudio and a mock sparring, fencing dance phrase for Beatrice and Benedick.”93 Williams is clear about the priority: “as with all the jigs with which we close plays at the Globe, we celebrate the bond between actors and audience who have journeyed together through the story.”94 Her post-​play dances “told complex stories of each character through the choreography,”95 a new form of ending at Shakespeare’s Globe that became a hybrid, wordless “story-​summary” told through dance. Over time a choreographic style arose, which consists of a palette of steps that give an impression of historical authenticity while being only loosely based on known practices. Recognizable steps from the galliard provided a foundation for the choreographies, with basic single and double pacing steps also used. Authentic Renaissance patterns were served up as a Globe “medley” of kicking, stamping, leg-​swinging, and turning, accompanied by clapping sequences with raised hands, and using the chest and legs to slap against—​in part, Williams explains, a response to the abilities of the performers. Performers on Shakespeare’s stage were highly skilled dancers, performing steps and figures they thoroughly understood, with a focus on neat footwork; but, as Horwell observes, “Globe actors are the most mismatched chorus line ever—​short, tall, wide, narrow, chaps with three left feet, and [those] who can carry a Broadway musical, no problem,” so much so that Williams leaves the choreography loose enough to incorporate the abilities, ideas, and inspiration brought to the dance by the cast.96 Given the relatively scant evidence for quite when and how the dramatic jigs and postlude dances followed plays at the original Globe(s), Rylance and his team determined to play the old game by modern rules to create a modern “jig” at the end of original practices productions that were demonstrative of the emergence of “a new kind of ‘original’ Shakespeare . . . that was simultaneously new and old—​like the great Globe itself.”97 When Dominic Dromgoole took over from Mark Rylance as artistic director

Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage    101 at the Globe in 2005, he made a decision to discontinue “original practices,” but by then the Globe’s “jig” had become a familiar, even expected, end to the entertainment, and the approach developed by Williams to the postlude company dance has remained fairly consistent. Would Shakespeare recognize the jigs at the third Globe? While in performance practice the new Globe’s new “tradition” is in many ways “invented” (traditions that, Hobsbawm and Ranger suggest, “appear or claim to be old [but] are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented” through “a process of formalisation and ritualization, characterised by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition”98), Gurr observes that it reconnects to its historical purpose: “A closing jig would go with the basic need of every play’s conclusion, restoring the sense of reality, that vital awareness of the falsity of illusion, that we today have lost but that Shakespeareans could never forget.”99 The new Globe’s end-​of-​play dance also reconnects modern audiences to a time when celebratory postlude dance served to release the players from any illusory connection to the world of the drama and invited the audience to join in the conclusion to the afternoon’s entertainment. But rather than recreating dances from the period or staging bawdy song-​and-​dance comedies, they have embraced a company dance that acts more like “an action-​replay of the play, all the important themes of the play restated in motion.”100 The guiding aesthetic has been that of consistency: the conclusion has been in keeping with the play, the choreography driven by harmonization. The historical evidence points, rather, toward contrast, comic discord, disruption, and sometimes subversion. At the time of publication at least, the third Globe has yet to follow a performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays with one of the surviving dramatic jigs. Shakespeare’s Globe is a uniquely interactive playing space where the original practice of uniting, for example, a bloody tragedy and bawdy song-​drama has still to be tested. Early modern playgoers relished tragedies. They also relished clowns. And they were not so purist that they needed tragedies and dancing clowns to be kept in separate compartments. The third Globe could, if the choice were made, accommodate Titus Andronicus followed by Singing Simpkin to help more fully understand danced endings on Shakespeare’s stage.

Notes 1. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–​ 1642, 4th ed. (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009), 10–​11. 2. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse, His Supplication to the Diuell (London, 1592), Sig. I4v (The Huntington Library, 62762); John Marston, Jacke Drums Entertainment (London, 1601), Sig. C1v (The Huntington Library, 59122); Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humor (London, 1600), Sig. E1v (The Huntington Library, 31190); Donald Lupton, London and the Countrey Carbonadoed (London, 1632), Sig. G1r (British Library, 1080.b.7). 3. “Dramatic” has been used as a prefix to differentiate the term’s use to refer to a piece of instrumental music, a dance, and ballad. This chapter extends discussion and analysis in Roger Clegg and Lucie Skeaping, Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs: Musical Comedy

102   Roger Clegg on the Shakespearean Stage, Scripts, Music and Context (Exeter:  University of Exeter Press, 2014). 4. See “Resurrexio Domini Nostri” in Ordinalia (Bodleian Library, MS. Bodl. 791, f. 82r); Gwreans an bys, from an otherwise lost cycle in Cornish but preserved in a manuscript written out by William Jordan dated 1611 (Bodleian Library, MS. Bodl. 219, f. 27r); and Beunans Meriasek, a two-​day performance dated 1504 but which probably dates from the second half of the fifteenth century (Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru, Peniarth MS 105B, ff. 51r, 92r). 5. Sir David Lyndesay, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits:  In Commendation of Vertew and Vitvperation of Vyce (Edinburgh, 1602), Sig. V4r (The Huntington Library, 62230). 6. Anon., Tom Tyler and His Wife (London, 1661), Sig. D2r (The Huntington Library, 125492). 7. Dates in parenthesis refer to that given on the title page of the earliest extant publication. Dates in square brackets refers to the approximate date of the first performance, where known. 8. George Chapman, Sir Gyles Goosecappe (London, 1606), Sig. K2r (The Huntington Library, RB 61145); Anon., The Maydes Metamorphosis (London, 1600), Sig. G4v (The Huntington Library, 60707); Every Woman in Her Humor (London, 1609), Sig. H4r (University of Illinois Library, IUA04707). 9. William Shakespeare, Much Adoe about Nothing (London, 1600), Sig, I3v (British Library, C.34.k.31). 10. Shakespeare, Much Adoe about Nothing. For discussion of Beatrice’s reference to the measure and the cinquepace, see Monahin, Chapter 2 in this volume. 11. Skiles Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 91–​92. 12. For information on dancing a jig, including steps, extant choreographies, and historical sources, see Clegg and Skeaping, Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy,  4–​10. 13. See Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols. (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 2: 737–​738. 14. Charles R. Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 1965), 12. For further discussion, see my article “‘A ballad intituled a pleasant newe Jigge’: The Relationship between the Broadside Ballad and the Dramatic Jig,” Huntington Library Quarterly 79, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 301–​322. 15. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Nights Dreame (London, 1600), H4r (British Library, C.34.k.29). 16. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Nights Dreame. 17. Thomas Morely, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London, 1597), The Third Part, Sig. Aa3v/​180 (The Huntington Library, 62715). 18. Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), 45. 19. See John H. Astington, “An Afterpiece and Its Afterlife: A Jacobean Jig,” English Literary Renaissance 44, no. 1 (February 2014): 108–​128. 20. William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke (London, 1604), Sig. F4r (British Library, C.34.k.2). 21. William Shakespeare, Loves Labors Lost (London, 1598), Sig. G1v (British Library, C.34.l.14); Granville-​Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare: Love’s Labour’s Lost (London: Nick Hern Books, 1993), 47; Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 37.

Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage    103 22. William Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623) (British Library, C.39.k.15). 23. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance,  54–​55. 24. Mary T. Crane, “Linguistic Change, Theatrical Practice, and the Ideologies of Status in As You Like It,” English Literary Renaissance 27 (1997): 361ff. 25. William Shakespeare, The second part of Henrie the fourth (London, 1600), Sig. L1v (British Library, C.34.k.12). The published text appears to be a conflation of two epilogues written for different occasions; the excerpt here is intended to be spoken by a player. 26. Solo dances in plays of the period include the galliard, la volta, and the jig, all of which featured vigorous leaping. The character’s status suggests that a solo jig is the most suitable. Perhaps the closing dance by the Host in Everie Woman in Her Humor (London, 1609), Sig. H4r (University of Illinois Library, IUA04707), offers a clue to the choreography. 27. Narcissus, A Twelfe Night Merriment, ed. Margaret L. Lee (London: D. Nutt, 1898), 27. 28. Paul Prescott, “Endings,” in Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, ed. Stuart Hampton-​ Reeves and Bridget Escolme (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 60. 29. Basel, Universitaetsbibliothek, MS. A λV7 & 8, ff. 682v–​683r. 30. See Edmund K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1923), 2: 364–​365; T. S. Dorsch, ed., Julius Caesar, New Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1955), 1; Janette Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2007), 52; Clare Williams, Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 166–​167; and John D. Wilson, ed., Julius Caesar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), ix. 31. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 15. 32. Earnst Schanzer, “Thomas Platter’s Observations on the Elizabethan Stage,” Notes & Queries 201 n.s. 3, no. 11 (1956), 466. Schanzer raises the possibility that the play was not Shakespeare’s and the playhouse the Rose, and that the Admiral’s Men at the Rose had new Caesar plays in 1594–​1595 and again in 1602 (“Thomas Platter’s Observations on the Elizabethan Stage,” 466). 33. Paul Hentzner, Itinerarium Germaniae, Galliae, Angliae, Italiae (Noriberga, 1612), Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, sing. 117,/​Sig. R2v/​132. 34. Donald Lupton, London and the Countrey Carbonadoed (London, 1632), Sig. G1r–​v (British Library 1080.b.7). 35. Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England, 69. 36. Thomas Dekker, A Strange Horse-​Race (London, 1613), Sig. C4v (British Library, C.27.b.9). 37. John C. Jeaffreson, Middlesex County Records, 3 vols. (London: The Middlesex County Records Society, 1886), 2: 83. 38. See Clegg and Skeaping, Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy,  35–​38. 39. Peter Thomson, On Actors and Acting (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 28. 40. Anon., Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie (London, 1590), Sig. H2v (British Library, C.40.c.68). 41. Katherine Duncan-​Jones, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 34. 42. Thomas Nashe, An Almond for a Parrat, Or Cutbert Curry-​knaues Almes (London, 1589), Sig. A2r (Houghton Library, Harvard, Film E 306). 43. John Marston, The Scourge of Villanie (London, 1598), Sig. H3v (The Huntington Library, 32459). 44. Anon., Old Meg of Hereford-​shire (London, 1609), Sig. C1v (The Huntington Library, 61197).

104   Roger Clegg 45. James Shapiro, Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 27. 46. Thomson, On Actors and Acting, 34. 47. For more information about the location, type and function of dancing in the surviving dramatic texts, see Clegg and Skeaping, Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs, 281–​288. For discussion about the relationship between singing and dancing in dramatic jigs, see Clegg, “ ‘A ballad intituled a pleasant newe Jigge.’ ” 48. For an overview of dance styles that may have been employed in jigs as well as plays toward the end of the sixteenth century, see Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama, 335ff. 49. For examples, see Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama, 141–​142. 50. Martin Wiggins (with Catherine Richardson), in British Drama, 1533–​1642: A Catalogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–​2015), 5 vols. 51. Bruce Smith, “Putting the Ball Back into Ballad,” Huntington Library Quarterly 79, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 323–​338. 52. Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig, 335. 53. Robert Greene, The Scottish Historie of James the Fourth, Slaine at Flodden (London, 1598), 4:3, Sig. G4r (The Huntington Library, 61133). 54. The Cheaters Cheated, in Thomas Jordan’s Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie (London, 1663 [1664]), 34–​55 (Bodleian Library, Mal. 451). See Clegg and Skeaping, Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs, 222–​250. 55. The pun is on capers as accompaniment to mutton, mutton as slang for woman (or, more particularly, a whore), with “cut the mutton” suggestive of sexual penetration (see Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols. [London: Athlone Press, 1994], 2: 927), so that, as Brissenden points out, Sir Andrew’s innocent remark, “I think I have the back-​trick simply as strong as any man in Illyria,” takes on a bawdy meaning (Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 58). 56. For analysis of other dances in this passage, see Monahin, Chapter 2 in this volume. 57. Untitled (Wooing of Nan), Dulwich College MSS (Henslowe Papers), I. f. 272 (no. 139). See Clegg and Skeaping, Singing Simpkin and Other BawdyJigs,  70–​85. 58. Thomas Nashe, A Pleasant Comedie, called Summers Last Will and Testament (London, 1600), Sig. B4r (The Huntington Library, 62748). 59. Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England, 81. 60. David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown:  Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 53–​56. 61. Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 161. 62. Everard Guilpin, Skialetheia (London, 1598), “Satyre Preludium,” Sig. B8v (The Huntington Library, 61235). 63. Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesography, trans. M. S. Evans (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), 87. 64. Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press, 2017). 65. John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition Upon all the Books of the New Testament (London, 1656), 766. 66. Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 56. 67. Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 389. 68. Jeaffreson, Middlesex County Records, 2:83.

Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage    105 69. Astington, “An Afterpiece and Its Afterlife: A Jacobean Jig [with text],” 109. 70. John Davies, Epigrammes and Elegies (London, ca. 1599), Sig. B2v–​B3r (British Library, C.34.a.28). It seems to have been reasonably common to end plays with either a song or a dance. In Martin Wiggins’s British Drama, 1533–​1642:  A Catalogue, of the plays recorded up to the year of Davies’s observation, twenty-​two end with a song, with the notable exception of Tom Tyler and His Wife (1661 [ca. 1551]) which ends uniquely in dance and song. Notably, Davies refers to what happens after the play, the dance and the song. 71. Christopher Featherstone, A Dialogue Agaynst Light, Lewde, and Lascivious Dauncing (London, 1582), Sig. A8v (Bodleian Library, Douce G 329.1). 72. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 3. 73. John Rainolds, Th’overthrow of Stage-​playes (London, 1599), Sig. D1r, D2r (The Huntington Library, 69096). 74. John Northbrooke, Spiritus est Vicarius Christi in terra. A treatise wherein dicing, dauncing, vaine playes or enterluds with other idle pastimes &c commonly vsed on the Sabbath day (London, 1577), Sig. K2r-​K2v, S2v, T2v (British Library, 698.e.26). For discussion of other anti-​dance treatise, see Winerock, Chapter 1 in this volume. 75. Joseph Q. Adams, ed., The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert Master of the Revels 1623–​1673 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1917), 27. 76. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company (London: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 77. 77. Rylance in Paul Taylor, “A Night to Remember,” The Independent, February 2, 2002, 9. 78. Veronica Horwell, “The Jig is Up—​Shakespeare’s Globe Sends Them Out Dancing,” The Guardian, October 1, 2014, n.p. 79. For an investigation into the relationship between dialogue-​ballad and dramatic jig, see Clegg, “ ‘A ballad intituled a pleasant newe Jigge.’.” 80. From an interview with Rylance by Edward Fox, “Global Ambition,” Telegraph Magazine, August 10, 1996, n.p. 81. While the choreography of the Shakespeare’s Globe’s afterpieces may occasionally include the dance called a jig, or be danced to music known as a jig or in jig rhythm (for example, compound duple [6/​8] or triple [9/​8] time), the term has been placed here and throughout in quotation marks to distinguish from its use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 82. Quoted from an email exchange between this author and Claire van Kampen, June 2012. See also Claire van Kampen, “Music and Aural Texture at Shakespeare’s Globe,” in Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds., Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 87. 83. Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, The Rules: Time-​Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right (New York: Grand Central, 1996). 84. John Simon, “Dog Has Its Day,” New York Magazine, January 27, 1997, 51, 54. 85. For analysis of the form and the eight extant jig texts dating between 1590 and the Restoration, see Clegg and Skeaping, Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs. 86. Quoted from a telephone interview between this author and Philip Pickett, April 10, 2014. 87. For information on “Rowland’s God Son” and “Singing Simpkin,” see Clegg and Skeaping, Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs, 86–​118. 88. Pauline Kiernan, “Findings from the Globe Opening Season:  Henry V,” Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin, 2 (1998), n.p.

106   Roger Clegg 89. Andrew Gurr, “Sam Wanamaker’s Invention: Lessons from the New Globe,” in Shakespearean Performance: New Studies, ed. Frank Occhiogrosso (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont, 2008), 117. 90. Quoted from an email exchange between this author and Sian Williams, August 31 and September 18, 2014. 91. My thanks to Anne Daye, specialist in sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century historical dance practices and reconstruction, for spending time with me at Shakespeare’s Globe Library and Archives watching video recordings of each of the postlude dances or “jigs” following “original practices” performances between 1997 and 2005 and offering her opinion on the relationship between the choreography and known period dance practice. 92. Paul Taylor, “It’s a Man’s World,” The Independent, May 16, 2003, 21; G. Brown, “Hot Gossip and a Very Cool King,” Mail on Sunday, May 25, 2003, 69–​70; K. Lancing, “This Is an Unmissable Experience,” Caterham Advertiser, May 23, 2003, 8. 93. Quoted from an email exchange between this author and Sian Williams, August 31 and September 18, 2014. 94. Much Ado about Nothing, production program, dir. Tamara Harvey, 2004. 95. Claire van Kampen in Carson and Karim-​Cooper, eds., Shakespeare’s Globe, 87. 96. Horwell, “The Jig is Up.” 97. Farah Karim-​Cooper, “Twelfth Night and Original Practices [September 20,  2012],” http://​shakespearesblog.webstarsltd.com, accessed July 3, 2015. 98. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1, 4. 99. Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–​1642, 4th ed., 13. 100. Horwell, “The Jig is Up.”

Bibliography Baskervill, Charles R. The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1929; repr. New York: Dover, 1965. Clegg, Roger. “‘A ballad intituled a pleasant newe Jigge’:  The Relationship between the Broadside Ballad and the Dramatic Jig.” Huntington Library Quarterly 79, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 301–​322. Clegg, Roger, and Lucie Skeaping. Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs—​Musical Comedy on the Shakespearean Stage:  Scripts, Music and Context. Exeter:  University of Exeter Press, 2014. Wiles, David. Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Chapter 4

“ The Revell e rs A re Enteri ng ” Shakespeare and Masquing Practice in Tudor and Stuart England Anne Daye

By taking a tight chronological focus on Shakespeare’s plays in relation to the court masque, fresh insights reveal his inventiveness as a dramatist. The first section of this chapter places the masque episodes in Shakespeare’s plays in relation to the Tudor masque, and also makes comparisons to the deployment of masque episodes by contemporary dramatists. This investigation demonstrates Shakespeare’s leadership in incorporating a specialized form of dancing into a drama. The second section discusses Shakespeare’s manipulation of the innovations in the Jacobean masque, once more confirming his avant-​garde approach. The third section explores the likely channels of liaison between the separate spheres of Shakespeare’s public drama and that of court dancing, with a new proposal that it was mediated by an entrepreneurial individual. Informed by recent dance historical research, this chapter offers a more nuanced interpretation of the masque elements for Shakespeare scholars, while extending understanding of a significant stage of dance history in England.

European Mascarade and Tudor Masque The Tudor form of the masque stems from the early reign of Henry VIII, in imitation of the Italian mascherata. The key elements were the entry of a group of masked and costumed courtiers to dance for their peers, after which the maskers invited the company to dance with them. A pretense for the maskers’ disguise might be announced

108   Anne Daye briefly, or developed into a more elaborate presentation. At the Stuart court, heightened elaboration of dance, speech, music, set design, and costume took place in emulation of the ballet de cour of France. A major development was the introduction of professional dancers as contrast and counterpoint to the royal and courtier dancers, called an anti-​masque, by which means a sophisticated form of expressive and pantomimic dance emerged. It is within this context that we should consider Shakespeare’s appropriation of the masque. Working for the public stage, Shakespeare’s genre was the drama of character and plot, recognizably different to his contemporaries from the genre of masque, which combined an entertainment of dancing with an exclusive social revel1 for court and elite participants. Although a speaker might provide an explanation for the arrival of a group of masquers, supported by mute symbolism in costume or staging, a masque did not have a developed narrative or plot. Between 1595 and 1613, Shakespeare’s plays included excerpts from the masque genre, resulting in much critical discourse on the rationale and effect of such scenes, including Brissenden’s dance-​centered analysis.2 Following new research into the Stuart masque from a dance perspective, it is now possible to scrutinize Shakespeare’s use of masque elements more closely in the light of changing court practice.3 The ephemerality of dance is an ongoing problem for the dance historian. Dance records for England are scattered and so elliptic as to require interpretation from French and Italian sources (see also, in this volume, Winerock, Chapter 1; Monahin, Chapter 2; and Shaw, Chapter 7). The identity of only a few dance professionals is known, while the numerous English dancing schools teaching “lavoltas high and swift corantos” (Henry V 3.5.33) have left virtually no trace.4 Play texts contain the very briefest of dance information: for example, “at another door, the masquers” (Romeo and Juliet 1.5, stage direction). Masque texts provide a little more information: names of court dancing masters, costume details, and occasionally a descriptive phrase. Associated records for the court masque offer financial information, costume designs, music, and eyewitness accounts. This richer seam of evidence can illuminate masque scenes in the drama, interpreted in the light of knowledge of dance practice and culture of the day. The importance of dancing in Shakespeare’s time has been well researched.5 Most players would possess adequate dance skills for an ensemble measure or coranto, with some good enough to do a showy galliard or lavolta to impress an audience familiar with them, while boys and youths could dance as women. Individuals might be skilled in the vernacular dances of the morris, jig, and hornpipe, plus the international professional repertoire of the mattachin and moresca (see also Clegg, Chapter 3 in this volume, for dancing at the end of plays).6 It is often suggested that Shakespeare would have had direct knowledge of the court masque, but, pending concrete evidence, my view is that his understanding would be at secondhand, like most of his class, as masquing was at heart a social event, led by courtiers or gentry, with little employment for professional players.7 Furthermore, in the closing decades of Elizabeth’s reign, the occasions of masquing declined, and by the time of the Stuart revival Shakespeare had ceased to act.8

“The Revellers Are Entering”    109 As Shakespeare was writing his plays at a time of sequential change in the dance content of masques, this analysis will follow a mainly chronological line. To place Shakespeare’s masque episodes in time in relation to other dramas, as well as to court masques, I  have reconfigured the items designated as masque episodes in Fuzier’s checklist of meta-​dramatic insertions into a chronological order.9 Eliminating all that are not truly masques,10 this leaves only the entries of dancers in disguise, their identity hidden by vizards, who proceed to dance and then invite the company to join them as partners. The best dates for performance of these plays (rather than publication) have been checked.11 The pattern that emerges is interesting: Romeo and Juliet (1595), Love’s Labour’s Lost (1596), and Much Ado about Nothing (1598) are the first plays to include a masque-​entry. Then a rush of masques-​within-​plays by the boys’ companies from 1599 to 1606 precedes Timon of Athens (1607). From then until 1614, The Winter’s Tale (1611), The Tempest (1611), Henry VIII (1613), and Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) demonstrate clear evidence of influence from the new court masque, with Shakespeare and the King’s Men once more leading an innovation. Shakespeare’s first two plays in this chronology are set in Italy and Navarre, for which he presents a form of impromptu masquing that was not practiced in England at the time: the mascherata of Italy and the mascarade of France. Typical of the carnival season of late winter, young men adopted a disguise, covering their faces with a mask in order to parade through the streets escorted by torchbearers and musicians. Their goal was to gain entrance to houses and solicit the favor of dancing with the company. Félix Platter’s journal of his time as a medical student in Montpellier between 1552 and 1557 provides insight into an open-​house period of carnival with casual mascarades, sometimes a mask alone sufficing to gain entry as a dancer.12 A frisson of danger added to the excitement of admitting strangers to your home. There is no evidence of this as a customary or acceptable practice in England and Scotland.13 Indeed, a law passed by Henry VIII in 1417 declared night-​walking in disguise illegal, while sanctioning honest merriment “with in his owne hous dwelling.”14 The continental practice was, however, familiar to Londoners, and certainly to those who lived in the more cosmopolitan neighborhoods inhabited by strangers, such as Shakespeare.15 The different styles of masque engagement can be seen in two rare depictions. Representing the impromptu continental mascarade in the album amicorum of Moyses Walens (1610), two masked dancers enter hand in hand to a company at supper with hats pulled down over their brows and cloaks swathing their chins, bearing torches, followed by a pair of musicians in full-​face antic masks, playing violin and lute (Figure 4.1). For England, in the vignette of a masque entry in the Unton portrait, probably depicting a wedding feast circa 1580, we can see the taborer (drummer), the presenter handing his speech to the hostess and the procession of six maskers and six torchbearers, headed by characters as Mercury and Diana, all wearing a full-​face vizard and matching costumes. In the center of the scene, six musicians sit playing to accompany the dancing after the entrance heralded by the drum. Here is a thoughtfully planned in-​house masque, matching English court and household records (Figures 4.2 and 4.3).

Figure 4.1.  Masquers and Musicians Making an Entry. Source: British Library, Add Ms 18991, f.11r, © The British Library Board.

Figure 4.2.  Portrait of Sir Henry Unton (ca. 1596), artist unknown, oil on panel. Source: © National Portrait Gallery, London.

“The Revellers Are Entering”    111

Figure 4.3.  Portrait of Sir Henry Unton, masque scene, detail (cropped version of NPG Portrait of Sir Henry Unton). Source: © National Portrait Gallery, London.

For Romeo and Juliet, the mascherata plot by which Romeo gains entry to the Capulet house was based on Shakespeare’s source in Brooke, which in turn was derived from narratives going back to da Porto (ca. 1530).16 The significant alteration by Shakespeare is to make Romeo a torchbearer instead of a masquer, so that he can fall for the beauty of Juliet dancing. As he expresses this aloud, Tybalt overhears him. In fact, despite the Italianate pretext for the masquers’ entry, there is a recognizable Englishness in the delivery. As they pass through the street, the young men debate having a spoken prologue to explain their arrival, and in marching off, Benvolio commands the taborer to strike up. Capulet welcomes Benvolio and the masquers in the language of English hospitality, calling for “a hall, a hall! Give room; and foot it, girls” (1.5.26), later offering them

112   Anne Daye the traditional banquet of generous hospitality. We gather that they are wearing antic vizards with “beetle brows” (1.4.31) but can only guess at their costume, which therefore might be the quickly swathed cloak as a simple disguise. The maskers make their entry to the Capulet hall as the servants are clearing up after supper, removing furniture to make space for dancing. Reliant as we are on merely indicative stage directions, there is ambiguity about the stage action here, as Capulet and his guests enter to greet them. In the dynamics of the occasion, it seems necessary for the visitors to offer a dance to justify their incursion, before Capulet’s invitation to lead out the ladies. In his guise as a torchbearer, Romeo then stands to one side, while his masquer friends, in their “dancing shoes /​with nimble soles” (1.4.14–​15), commence the revel, accompanied, it seems, by Capulet’s household musicians. The entry of the king and his lords as masquers in Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.2) presents the same blend of foreign mascarade with English masque. Their arrival in the guise of Russians is impromptu and uninvited, but with a prologue to be spoken by Moth. Accompanied by blackamoor musicians, their entry should typically be in a danced procession with the music heralding their arrival. Sabol proposes that the music for this entry has survived in the form of “The Earle of Darbyes coraunta” (in alman and coranto meters), also known as “The French Kings maske.”17 Forewarned by Boyet, the women proceed to thwart the unfolding of the action, first by putting on vizards and swapping love tokens, and second by refusing to dance. Couple by couple, they come forward to exchange repartee. With punning on the word “measure,” the king in his frustration begs Rosaline: “Then in our measure do but vouchsafe one change” (5.2.208). To Shakespeare’s audience, the women’s refusal to dance when invited, while the music plays, clearly breaks an important rule of conduct, although the men’s self-​importance may warrant it. In contrast to this outdoor revel, the masque in Much Ado about Nothing (2.1) is devised in-​house and planned as part of the evening’s revel. The men enter masked with a drum, but without prologue. As Antonio apparently joins them as they enter, it seems only a vizard conceals their identity, so, as in Romeo and Juliet, a cloak is all they have as disguise. If so, then perhaps the audience recognized this as a mascarade in continental style, for a Sicilian household. Convention suggests that they enter dancing, before approaching the women for partners. Each of four couples comes forward in turn for a brief dialogue, then moves away, but whether this is in the context of a dance in progress is unclear. Beatrice curtails her exchange with Benedick in order to follow the leading couples as music sounds, at which point a dance is completed before they all leave the stage. Such scenes of dialogue within a dance setting in Shakespeare’s two plays also occur in the masque scenes of plays by other dramatists from 1601: Satiromastix, Dekker (1601), 2.1; Blurt, Master Constable, Middleton (1601), 1.1; The Malcontent, Marston (1603), 5.6; A Woman Is a Weathercock, Nathan Field (1609), 5.1; The Insatiate Countess, Marston et al. (1610), 2.1; Wit at Several Weapons, Middleton and Rowley (1613), 5.2. A pattern of action emerges: a company in couples, dancing measures, with up to three changes matched to different strains in the music. The changes provide an opportunity for men

“The Revellers Are Entering”    113 and women to meet afresh, or even slip away together, and between changes couples can talk with each other. Presumably replicating a social reality familiar to the audience, this poses a puzzle to the dance historian, as we have no evidence for a comparable ballroom practice, which I call “measures-​with-​changes” (see also the Vision Scene of All Is True [4.2], discussed in the following).18 As the chronology for this phenomenon reveals, Shakespeare introduced an effective staging device to his colleagues. Shakespeare later returned to the Tudor form of the masque in All Is True (Henry VIII) (1613) 1.2, following the historical record of Holinshed.19 For greater dramatic impact, he introduces Ann Bullen, and dispenses with the archaic dice game of mum-​ chance, in favor of a striking entrance by the king and his company in noble guise, albeit as shepherds. Passing the Cardinal in a dancing procession in order to salute him, they then dance with ladies from the assembled company, during which Henry is struck by Ann’s beauty. A concordance to the circular procession to honor the monarch is found in the exit dance of Hymenaei, the court masque of 1606. In all four plays, the masked protagonists speak and are heard by others. A  mask vizard was a full-​face covering. The Unton portrait (Figures 4.2 and 4.3) depicts the neutral mask with essential human features, colored or white, which was probably the norm for masques from around 1600, with the taborer wearing an antic mask with a mustache, like the bearded masks found in Tudor court records. In the portrait we can also clearly see that the presenter, the speaker who has ushered in the maskers, is wearing a full-​face vizard, as are Mercury and Diana, who may also have spoken to explain their arrival. If there is an aperture for the mouth, also essential to aid breathing, then the wearer’s voice can be projected. For modern productions in large auditoria, either the domino half-​mask or a hand-​held mask is often substituted for the full-​face vizard. Such masks were fashionable for eighteenth-​century masquerade balls, derived from the commedia dell’arte, but they fail to hide the wearer’s identity, which is the point of a masking disguise. When we place plays with masque scenes in chronological order, we find that Shakespeare and his company took the lead in interpolating the dance genre into the drama. From 1599 to 1611, playwrights employed by the boys’ companies at St. Paul’s and the Blackfriars included masques in their plots.20 In addition to the plays listed earlier, these were Antonio and Mellida, Marston (1599); Antonio’s Revenge, Marston (1600); Cynthia’s Revels, Jonson (1600); The Dutch Courtesan, Marston (1604); The Revengers Tragedy, Middleton (1606); Your Five Gallants, Middleton (1607); The Maid’s Tragedy, Beaumont and Fletcher (1611). Now the masque-​within-​a play became the pretext for vengeance, violence, and duplicity, as playwrights took the genre to a more fantastic, less realistic level. This points up the fact that Shakespeare used his mascarade/​masque scenes as realistic settings for sociable courtship encounters, with only playful deception or subsequent tragedy. Interestingly, Chapman also presents straightforward masque scenes without the fictional duplicity in May-​Day (1604), The Widow’s Tears (1605), and Duke Biron (1608). Paul’s Boys resumed playing in their small but elite venue from 1599, but had ceased to do so from 1606. The Blackfriars Boys played in the indoor Blackfriars theater from 1600

114   Anne Daye to 1608, and continued playing elsewhere until 1613, although during these times they underwent changes in management and name.21 The increasing inclusion of masques and dances in the repertoire showcased the boys’ special abilities in dancing and music, trained by London dancing masters; as a German visitor noted, “These boys have special praeceptors in all the different arts.”22 Evidence in the plays of their repertoire indicates that individual boys had notable talents for dancing.23

Innovation on Stage and at Court By the time the King’s Men performed Timon of Athens in 1607, written by Shakespeare in collaboration with Thomas Middleton, Paul’s Boys had ceased playing. We do not know what happened to individual boys at this point, but some, along with youths outgrowing boyhood from the Blackfriars company, may have brought specialized skills as dancers to the adult theater companies. Meanwhile, the new Stuart monarchy was bringing new approaches and more money to the court masque than had been the policy of the Elizabethan court. To reinforce the notion of Timon as an open-​handed host, a masque enters at the banquet (1.2). There is only an oblique prompt for this in one of the sources for the play by Plutarch, which comments that Alcibiades enjoyed “light women, riotous in banketts.”24 Middleton was responsible for this scene and had been writing for Paul’s Boys up to 1606, and is now identified as the greatest user of masque scenes in his plays.25 In essence, the entry mimics a conventional Tudor masque, organized by Timon, although he pretends that it is a surprise—​a common convention of masquing in England. Following a speech by the presenter Cupid, the ladies (played by youths) enter disguised as Amazons, dancing, and then the lords rise to take them out for the masque revel, after which Timon offers them a banquet. The unusual twist given to this entry is in the stage direction “with lutes in their hands, dancing and playing.” The soft melodious music of lutes is incongruous with the martial style of the typical warlike Amazon. Indeed, the only extant piece of music for an unidentified entry of Amazons has a brisk martial rhythm.26 A clue to the effect of this puzzling entry is Apemantes’ cynical judgment that all is depravity in front of him: “They dance? They are madwomen” (1.2.129), implying that the performance is transgressional, rather than martial. Winerock (Chapter 1 in this volume) explores contemporary condemnation of dancing as lewd. The skill of combining dancing with playing an instrument was certainly rare in England at the time. A lone example of a Blackfriars Boy who can dance, sing, and play is found in Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1604): in 5.1, the courtesan Francischina enters “cantat saltatque cum cithera” (singing and dancing with a lute). The dancing instrumentalist was a special feature of the French court ballet.27 For Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (Jonson), the French dancing master Monsieur Confais trained eleven lutenists to enter in a dancing procession while singing and playing, a new skill for English musicians.28 The masque entry in Timon is performed by a discrete, mute group of six, to dance

“The Revellers Are Entering”    115 with six knights in the paired dancing. While these parts could be covered by doubling in the cast, the dancers could also have been a separate group hired for the entry. The dance went beyond the usual repertoire of the regular player, so it had to be devised and rehearsed by an expert, such as a dancing master. The occurrence of dancing musicians in The Dutch Courtesan (1604), Timon (1607), and Love Freed (1611) indicates some exchange between the stage and the court masque, a development for which, once again, Shakespeare was at the forefront. Four years pass until masque elements appear again in Shakespeare’s plays:  The Winter’s Tale (1611), The Tempest (1611), Henry VIII (1613), and Two Noble Kinsmen (1613). During that time, significant developments had taken place in the court masque, including the introduction of dancing by professionals. I have proposed the thesis that James I and his circle were the drivers of this innovation, in emulation of the court ballets of France, with the aim of developing an effective means of mute expression of policy for the diplomats in attendance at his court.29 English concepts of decorum appropriate to the nobility curtailed experiments in histrionic presentations, which were otherwise acceptable in France, where princes and lords took on comic and grotesque roles. For example, in the nuptial masque Hymenaei 1606, eight noblemen entered dancing “with a kind of contentious music” (lines 98–​99), probably to the tune of Essex Antic Masque, then drew their swords to challenge the solemnity of the rites.30 The martial spirit of this dance has a parallel in the dance in armor of Pericles (1607) 2.3,31 evidence of interest in the pyrrhic dance of classical sources. Neither social nor current, such a dance needed imaginative choreography by a dance expert. Rather than “antic” or irregular dancing by noblemen, professional boys performed in Haddington (1608) as “the sports and pretty lightnesses of love” to execute “a subtle capricious dance to as odd a music . . . nodding with their antic faces.” (lines 133–​136) While there is no record of the identity of these dancers, the only group of boys available were the Blackfriars Boys, formerly holding royal credentials as the Children of the Queen’s Revels. Even this novelty dance had been preceded by a subtle preparation: the addition of cupids as torchbearers to Queen Anna and her lady masquers in The Masque of Beauty, which took place a few weeks beforehand. Jonson records “a multitude of Cupids (chosen out of the best and most ingenious youth of the kingdom, noble and others).” (lines 188–​190) Some sat on the steps to the throne, while others plucked apples from a golden tree and threw them at each other, while leverets (young rabbits) picked them up, took a few bites, and then discarded them. The so-​called multitude must have comprised at least sixteen noble youths to escort the lady masquers, in addition to professional boys as frolicking cupids and leverets.32 After some success in 1608, the next risky step was to add a dance by professional men in The Masque of Queens (1609), who performed two dances as witches. The risk lay in challenging the decorum of a masque, which was at heart a social occasion, by introducing player-​dancers into the exclusive dance space. The planning for this masque was meticulous and collaborative across the whole team, from the royal patrons to the poet, designer, musicians, and dancing masters.33 The outcome was a new genre of professional and expressive dancing that matured across three decades, becoming known

116   Anne Daye as the anti-​masque. This neologism, which Jonson first airs in 1609 in reference to the antic cupids of 1608, did not become current until 1613, when Chapman used it for the entry of baboons in The Memorable Masque. A rich seam of dances expressing character and action developed, forming part of the argument of each masque, sometimes beautiful, often comic or grotesque, delivered by professionals. In 1609, the two dances were cut short and performed to irregular music, thus remaining incomplete and inharmonious, so that they did not challenge the prerogative of the courtier-​dancers, while at the same time the performers left the space before the masquers danced in. The twelve men who played the witches were capable dancers, nevertheless, to cope with both the shifting meters of the music as well as the challenging characterization.34 Jonson identifies the choreographer as Master Jeremy (Hierome) Hearne, but does not identify the dancers.35 In the winter season of 1608–​1609 the King’s Men were unable to play due to the plague, so a pool of performers was available. However, the Blackfriars Boys were enjoying favor at court, providing three plays in January 1609, and gaining a new manager in Philip Rosseter, court lutenist.36 The team of twelve dancers might have been made up of the best dancers of both companies. An alternative proposal is that Hearne recruited individual players with promising dance skills, including former members of the defunct Paul’s Boys and men who had graduated from the boys’ companies in recent years. The practice of using hired men to augment the core of shareholder players offered a current professional model. The entry of lute-​playing and dancing Amazons in Shakespeare’s Timon (1607) can be seen as contributing to a new form of dance that developed characterization, rather than conventional social dancing. I think there is little doubt that the anti-​masque of satyrs from Oberon (1611) was transferred wholesale to The Winter’s Tale (1611). Oberon was only the second masque to feature professional dancers. As in 1609, the dancers had to speak, create action as twelve satyrs, then perform a dance to irregular music, which was also cut short suddenly by the crowing of the cock announcing dawn and the arrival of Oberon. An eyewitness recorded: “some dozen satyrs and fawns . . . danced a ballet in their wild fashion, with appropriate music with a thousand gestures and strange grimaces,” suggesting that both adults and boys were in the dance team.37 The financial record includes a payment of £15 to the players employed in the masque; this divides neatly into £1 each for the twelve speaking and dancing satyrs, and three speakers (Silenus and two sylvans). Three dancing masters were employed, and I deduce their spheres of responsibility to be as follows: Thomas Giles, paid £40 for three dances, clearly the three masque dances led by Prince Henry as Oberon; Monsieur Confais, £20 for coaching the noble boys as Lesser Fays; and Hearne, £20 for the dance of satyrs by the players. The music for the anti-​ masque dance is similar in its irregular sequence of varied meters to the Witches Dances of 1609. Such music was a striking innovation in its day, devised by the dancing master to fit unconventional choreography. The financial record also gives a clue to the satyr outfit in a payment of £15 for “forheades & beards,” alongside the inclusion of cloven feet, crooked legs, and shaggy thighs in the dialogue.38 The design by Inigo Jones for a dancing satyr of 1632 indicates the kind of costume (Figure 4.4).39

“The Revellers Are Entering”    117

Figure 4.4.  Satyrs like Dancers, Inigo Jones (OS 196 (2)). © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.

For The Winter’s Tale (4.4), Shakespeare devised a pretext congruous with the plot: a show of satyrs by countrymen comprising three carters, three shepherds, three neatherds, and three swineherds with great skill in jumping. The music for the anti-​ masque entry includes two passages in galliard meter, the virtuosic dance of the day, in which such jumps could be showcased. With only one performance of the carefully rehearsed number before an elite audience, an enterprising professional would wish to repeat a novel and lively dance with avant-​garde music for a different audience, in a complete rather than interrupted mode. The servant’s expectation of “A gallimaufry of gambols” (4.4.326) implies a dance combining skill with comedy. As Pitcher suggests, the same performers could double as the shepherds and shepherdesses who dance with

118   Anne Daye Mopsa, Dorcas, Perdita, and Florizel/​Doricles.40 There is another doubling to be covered in the bear who chases Antigonus off the stage in 3.3. Oberon had made his entry in a chariot pulled by two white bears. Although some continue to speculate that these were live animals, I favor the common-​sense approach of Bullough: “Proponents of the ‘live bear theory’ could speedily end the controversy by trying the feat once or twice!”41 Besides the fact that real animals are unpredictable and dirty, there is a growing use of animal movement by player-​dancers that goes alongside the development of new expressive skills in dance prompted by the anti-​masque at court. Shakespeare again weaves the masque into The Tempest (1611), using its conventional features but with intriguing artistic manipulation. The incursion of the goddesses into the drama is given a pretext as the work of Ariel and the spirits under Prospero’s control. The fable is announced by Iris arriving as messenger from Juno to summon Ceres to help celebrate a marriage; as she speaks, Juno descends, according to a stage direction. Juno and Ceres then sing honors to the nuptials, after which Iris summons naiads of the brooks and reapers of the fields to dance “in country footing” (4.1.138). The dance is suddenly interrupted as Prospero remembers Caliban and his confederates and the dancers (at least three couples) and goddesses disappear to “a strange, hollow and confused noise,” according to the stage direction. Scholars have noted that Prospero’s masque resembles the main masque entries of the court form, but there are significant differences.42 The majority of court masques were presented by a single gender group; exceptionally, an entry of two groups, one of men and one of women, called a “double masque,” symbolized the unity of marriage, as in the nuptial masques of Hymenaei (1608) and The Lords’ Masque (1613).43 The entry of nymphs and reapers is in effect such a double masque, with two separate entries followed by a joint dance. Similar naiad nymphs had been seen in Tethys Festival of 1610 with elaborate costumes and headpieces full of watery symbols.44 In contrast, the Reapers are thoroughly homely, “properly habited” in their rye-​straw hats, lacking the pomp or refinement of court masque costume. The main masque dances were also refined, harmonious, and complete: in The Tempest, the dance commences in a graceful vein, but in a non-​courtly country style, then is suddenly curtailed. This was a device of the first anti-​masque dances, as noted earlier, in order to ease acceptance of an innovation at court. A court masque should also include the revel between the masquers and the audience: here the early cessation forestalls that convention. So this dance entry subverts the genre, being neither anti-​masque nor main masque. Juno’s descent has caused much debate:  Is she arriving in her peacock-​drawn chariot or descending alone? What technical means might have facilitated the entry in a playhouse or at court? At what point in the scene does she descend and enter? The Blackfriars Playhouse may not have had the equipment to do more than lower or raise a player on a wire, and it is unlikely that a stage with machinery was in place for the court performance in the autumn of 1612.45 Juno walks in to greet Ceres, so her flying descent may only need to be evoked imaginatively by the words “Her peacocks fly amain” (4.1.74). When Prospero calls for the presentation to cease, the group of three goddesses and at least six dancers vanish “heavily.” The meaning of this stage direction

“The Revellers Are Entering”    119 is ambivalent: Does it mean “slowly and sadly” or “violently”? A speedy departure by Prospero’s spirits seems a likely coup de theatre, but would be difficult to effect for a group of at least nine performers. Even with limited technical means, however, the scene could evoke the wonders of the masque stage through language and dance. The use of sudden staging devices is found throughout the play. The opening scene of the storm with a ship already in distress is a remarkable coup de theatre, as often noted.46 In 3.2 the banquet, so mysteriously brought in by strange Shapes, is suddenly made to disappear with a clap of a Harpy’s wings and thunder and lightning. In 4.1 Prospero suddenly sets dogs on Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo to chase them away. Shocking and unexpected actions were a new feature of The Masque of Queens of 1609. Instead of the usual prolix speeches against a picturesque scenic stage, the audience were confronted with “an ugly hell, which flaming beneath, smoked unto the top of the roof.” Then, “with a kind of hollow and infernal music,” eleven hags emerged and immediately began to dance, which stopped when “on the sudden” one of them realized that their Dame had not arrived. After their second dance, the twelve “quite vanished . . . scarce suffering the memory of such a thing” (lines 16–​19; 29; 321–​322). It seems possible that the use of startling effects throughout The Tempest was inspired by The Masque of Queens. With a masque-​style dance and staging effects derived from the masque, The Tempest indicates close liaison between theater and court practitioners, and a willingness on Shakespeare’s part to incorporate new ideas into his drama. With the Vision Scene of All Is True/​Henry VIII (1613) 4.2, Shakespeare presents a dance of marked innovation. There is no precedent for this scene in Holinshed, Shakespeare’s source for the play, but a striking image in Richard Vennar’s The Right Way to Heaven (1601) may have prompted the choreography. Two angels stand either side of Queen Elizabeth I, seated on a throne, holding a wreath above her head, watched from above by an arc of five putti.47 The dance is not a social or masque dance, but an expressive dance with elements of pantomime, similar to the anti-​masques at court. The unusually detailed stage direction, consonant with other full instructions in the text, provides a good basis for recreating the dance. It is a powerful and moving expression of Katharine’s emotional suffering and her Christian faith. Six “personages” appear, like the angels of Revelation in white robes and golden vizards, bearing garlands of bays. They move through a figured measure to a sad and solemn music, in which they honor Katharine in reverences while taking turns to hold an extra garland above her head, indicating that she is one of them. The eerie impact of a masked group robed identically, their individuality subsumed to create a universal symbol, is an aesthetic of the main masque of the Stuart court, while the gestural element and the atmospheric music belong to the anti-​masque. As in The Tempest, Shakespeare synthesizes the characteristics of anti-​masque and main masque entries. The detailed stage direction may have been supplied by the dancing master who composed the dance.48 Furthermore, the big set-​ pieces of the play require an experienced person to arrange and marshal them—​often a choreographer’s task in today’s theater.49 The principal event at court in 1613 was the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick Elector Palatine. Three masques were mounted: the principal one was The

120   Anne Daye Lords’ Masque by Thomas Campion, funded entirely from the king’s purse and danced by high-​ranking courtiers. The Inns of Court funded the second and third masques, the dancers being the young gentlemen students: The Memorable Masque presented by the Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn, written by George Chapman, and The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, written by Francis Beaumont. An overarching theme of the four elements linked them into a cycle: fire with air in the first, earth in the second, and water in the third.50 The Tempest was one of the many plays performed at court as part of the hospitality for Frederick and his entourage. Is it just coincidence that the masque in that play also alludes to the elements?51 Juno and Iris belong to the air, Juno represents light, Ceres and the sicklemen symbolize the earth, while Iris and the naiads symbolize the waters. It is certainly conceivable that the four elements of Shakespeare’s play would have suggested a fresh nuptial theme for the royal wedding. Between 1609 and 1612, the anti-​masque was not consistently used in the court masque.52 Following anti-​masques of fresh sophistication for the high-​profile wedding masques of 1613, one or more anti-​masques became a regular component of the court masque. An entry of twelve Frantics in The Lords’ Masque created a scene of danced action, in which the poet Entheus was harried, then freed as the mad people were calmed by the music of Orpheus. In The Memorable Masque fourteen boys danced as baboons in the guise of Neapolitan travelers as a divertissement. Two anti-​masques enriched the final masque of The Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn: the first was an elegant yet comic action of courtship between four naiads, five hyades, four cupids, and four statues introduced by Iris, while the second anti-​masque comprised six comic couples in a dance of “country jollity,” introduced by Mercury, that rushed in, danced, and rushed out. The tune for the second can be identified as Graies Inne Maske, which was reused for a country dance in Playford 1651.53 That anti-​masque of country jollity was transferred to Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) 3.5, by Fletcher and Shakespeare. Although tangential to the main plot, a context for its performance is developed by four countrymen in 2.3 discussing the forthcoming May games. When they gather with the Schoolmaster, the team lacks one woman, so they decide to recruit the Gaoler’s Daughter, a character in the subplot, who is descending into madness. Master Gerrold, the Schoolmaster, makes plain that the group of six couples of countrymen and women are dancing a morris, with himself as the usher. This helps identify the anti-​masque dance as a performative morris, rather than a social country dance in couples. The country people of the play adopt a second identity for their morris dance, matching the characters in the anti-​masque. Three women are not assigned characters, but are likely to be Country Wench to partner the Clown and She-​Baboon to partner the Bavian, with the Gaoler’s Daughter as the She-​Fool. Timothy the taborer is an addition for the play. He is not the only musician, as the others are “dispersed” and accompany the dance, so the treble and bass parts of the original tune could have been used. The five countrywomen are mute performers, as are two of the male characters. The team of dancers could well be the same as in the anti-​masque.54 In the history of morris dancing, this dance is also indicative of a new stage of experimentation with

“The Revellers Are Entering”    121 country dance figuring as well as presenting the novelty of women dancing for public display alongside men in the morris.55 Further interaction between the King’s Men and the court anti-​masque during Shakespeare’s active engagement with the stage is evident. In the autumn of 1613, the company introduced another entry from the wedding anti-​masques with the dance of madmen for The Duchess of Malfi 4.2 by Webster. Adapting the six couples of the anti-​ masque in a “medley of madness . . . a mad measure fitted to a loud fantastic tune,” the play had eight madmen dancing “with music answerable thereto.” It seems likely that the music and dance specially composed for the anti-​masque of Frantics in The Lords’ Masque was used again, although no extant music can be identified. We can deduce similar interaction between Macbeth and The Masque of Queens in the presentation of the witches synthesizing characteristics of hags, weird sisters, furies and fates; (see also the discussion of collaboration re Macbeth by Williams, Chapter 10 in this volume). The influence of Middleton at some stage of the evolution of the play between 1606, 1610, and 1613 prior to the First Folio of 1623 is generally accepted. The incantatory rhythm of the witches’ language in 1.1.1–​11 and 4.1.6–​38 is also found in Jonson’s charms for the anti-​masque witches of 1609, notably Charm 9, which leads straight into the second dance to music of the same meter. The rhythm is that of the double steps of the time (three paces on three beats, closing both feet on the fourth), indicating that the chant is in a familiar dance meter: “To which we may dance /​And our charms advance” (325–​326). The witches of Macbeth may also have incorporated basic dance steps with their speeches in 1.1 and 4.1. The number play on three and nine, as an evil inversion of the power of three, is a feature of both Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s witches. Jonson’s twelve hags complete their malevolent incantations with Charm 9, which comprises nine metrical groups equivalent to nine double steps. Following the careful chronological approach of this article, it is significant that both Macbeth and The Masque of Queens were innovative in presenting Scottish and European notions of witches working in consort, at a time when the English witch was a solitary figure. Here is a further example of a possible exchange of ideas between the public stage (whether Shakespeare as author or Middleton as reviser) and the anti-​masque at court.56 We can also trace developing skills in the physical portrayal of animals across both plays and masques. The bears of Oberon and Winter’s Tale have a brief appearance, with a precedent in the bear of Mucedorus, which the King’s Men showed at Whitehall in 1610. The satyrs of Oberon probably used goat-​like movements, carried over to the play. Prospero’s Spirits metamorphose into dogs and hounds in a realistic hunting action to harry Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban in The Tempest (4.1). The comic baboons of The Memorable Masque had outings in Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, as well as Two Noble Kinsmen. Boys represented leverets eating apples in Beauty, while Orpheus had “several wild beasts” moving about him, indicating the power of music in the opening of The Lords’ Masque. The comedian Thomas Greene (d. 1612) was known for his ability to represent beasts, such as a baboon and an ass, at The Red Bull playhouse.57 As with the dancing and lute-​playing Amazons, a possible pattern of development is the passing on

122   Anne Daye of an individual skill by training others in order to extend physical versatility, stimulated by the requirements of both anti-​masques and Shakespeare’s plays.

Shakespeare’s Choreographer and Collaborator Prospero’s Spirits epitomize the use of a group of highly trained mute and speaking dancers, as nymphs and reapers, chasing dogs, partially human Shapes, goddesses, and echoing singers, as noted by Sturgess.58 The existence of similar groups has been proposed from Timon to The Duchess of Malfi. The interpolation of a dance of satyrs into The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl by Robert Tailor, performed by apprentices on February 21, 1613, is indicative of another performance for a popular anti-​masque dance by a group of dancers. The emergence of a new profession of dancer from that of common player can be traced through the anti-​masques of the court masque, leading to increasing sophistication in the mute depiction of character and action.59 Even court records of the financing of masques are limited, but the sum of £15 paid in 1611 to the performers of the anti-​masque indicates very good earnings paid to an agent for the group.60 This is clearly the case in 1633 when the court dancing master Sebastian La Pierre was the named recipient of the anti-​masquers’ fees for The Triumph of Peace.61 I propose that a group of dancers involved in new work were managed by an individual to recruit, provide training, and create dances, while handling payments and negotiating further work. A likely individual is a court dancing master, operating at the heart of innovative practices in dance, ready to liaise with the public theater. Jeremy Hearne might well be this entrepreneurial figure. As a court employee, Hearne’s career can be traced through financial records.62 In parallel to these, the life of one Jeremy Hearne is found in public records, matching the court artist closely enough to suggest that he is the same man. Baptized at St. Mary’s Hemel Hempstead on October 9, 1586 (father William Hearne), Jeremy Hearne died at Christmas 1640 in St. Martin’s in the Fields, having made a short nuncupative will, leaving everything to his wife Katherine, except £100 for a daughter. The baptismal records of seven sons reflect the family’s increasing prosperity as they moved from St. Dunstan’s in the East (1609) to St. Dunstan’s in the West (1615) to St. Martins in the Fields (1628), although at least four sons died young.63 At court, Hearne entered service as a bass violist in May 1608, filling a redundant bagpiper’s place, but was soon listed with the violinists. He had appeared in The Haddington Masque in February as a Cyclops, beating time with a hammer for the four masque dances, and had devised the first two of them. There must have been something special about this young man of around twenty-​two years old for a place to have been found for him in the tightly controlled establishment of instrumentalists. In 1609 he was the choreographer of the new anti-​masque entries for The Masque of Queens, and

“The Revellers Are Entering”    123 worked on Oberon of 1611 and The Lords’ Masque of 1613. In 1610 he was paid £10 by the Earl of Salisbury for coaching his son for the revels of the all-​female masque Tethys’ Festival. The records show that he went to Paris in 1611 with letters: it is likely that he was sent to investigate the French ballet scene in preparation for the expected weddings of Henry and Elizabeth. In 1612, he was also part of the music establishment of Henry, Prince of Wales, who was actively involved in masque innovation. In August 1612, Prince Henry hosted a splendid banquet in a summer house at his new residence of Woodstock, at the climax of the annual royal progress, normally an event for the Privy Council to welcome the king back to official business. In 1612, the gathering included Queen Anne and Princess Elizabeth. Payments recorded for the Prince’s Privy Purse cover the preparation and transportation of instruments to Woodstock and the fee for Hearne.64 The strenuous efforts of the prince to ensure the state and magnificence of the occasion in the exceptionally hot weather were seen as a trigger to his fatal illness. What was Hearne’s role? I suggest that the anonymous manuscript of a banquet entertainment Egerton Ms 2623, no. 13 f.20, is the script for the event.65 Despite other identifications, the speech of The Country’s Genius and song by Orpheus introducing the service matches the situation at Woodstock, August 1612, well: the heat, the court at the door, the evocation of James’s peace and plenty, produce from the mountains of his princedom of Wales, but above all the address to Mars and the Queen of Love, referencing Henry and Elizabeth, whose marriage to Frederick Elector Palatine was imminent. The banquet courses are served by the seasons in reverse order, announced in a speech by Winter, then songs by Orpheus: Winter for meat, Autumn for pies, Summer for fruits, and Spring for water to rinse the hands. Once the tables are cleared, an entertainment of dancing ensues. Winter introduces Christmas Gamboles in “a single Anticke” of acrobatic dancing on a bench; Autumn an “Anticke of drunkards”; Summer “a country dance of heymakers or reapers”; and Spring “a morrice dance.” Finally, Genius returns to invite all the company to recreation or rest: having both space and musicians, the court would surely commence dancing. The four dance entries could be seen as proto-​anti-​masques, at a time when professional dancing at court was not fully accepted. The first two antic dances are novel, requiring choreography by someone with a gift for comedy. The country dance resembles that presented in The Tempest masque: the reapers need pairing with nymphs as partners, and the morris dance proved popular in The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn and The Two Noble Kinsmen of 1613. These antic dances, prototypes of anti-​masques, fit with Henry’s interest in the court masque and his contribution to the forthcoming nuptial festivities. They also show a transition from dances of the fantasy figures of witches and satyrs to the dances expressing human conditions and characters of the 1613 anti-​masques. At this stage it is evident that although Hearne was a teacher of dance, he was not allocated to any individual member of the royal family. James I had been expanding the staff of dancing masters by appointing other men to serve Prince Henry, Princess Elizabeth, and Prince Charles, alongside the principal master Thomas Cardell, who had been dancing master to Queen Elizabeth. By 1622 Hearne occupied the most prestigious and highest-​paid place among the musical staff, receiving £140 a year, having succeeded

124   Anne Daye to that of Cardell, a reversion offered in 1616. That this place continued to belong to the teacher of royal women was affirmed when Hearne died in 1640 and George Turgis succeeded him.66 Why was Hearne given the best place, at a time when there were no royal women to coach? I suggest that Hearne was valued as an inventive and successful choreographer of anti-​masque dances, continuing to work until the disbanding of the court in 1640.67 So much for Hearne’s court career, but what about the backstory? Why did he manage to get a place at court in 1608, lacking notable music skills and without being assigned as tutor to one of the royal family? By using the scraps of evidence available, we might flesh out his earlier career, as an archaeologist identifies a bowl from shards of pottery. Named as the creator of the first masque dance of Haddington, Hearne organized the courtiers’ descent “in an oblique motion,” something a little different from a regular masque entry, and may have also devised the novel dance of cupids, and even the pyrrhic dance of Hymenaei, all dances that are irregular or “antic.”68 Did Hearne’s career commence on the public stage, showing a talent for invention that went beyond the common social dancing of the day? For example, I suggest there were links between elements of Haddington, Queens, and Marston’s The Wonder of Women or The Tragedy of Sophonisba, performed by Blackfriars Boys in 1605. Jonson had amicable relations with Marston at this time, and courtiers attended plays at this private theater.69 On the wedding night between Sophonisba and Massimissa, a dance of four cupids is performed, “antiquely attired” and “to a fantastic measure.” This is likely to be the first draft of the “subtle capricious dance to as odd a measure” later performed by twelve boys in the Haddington masque. Erictho, the fury-​ witch of Sophonisba, is referenced by Jonson in his notes on the Dame, leader of the hags in Queens, while Erictho’s necrophiliac practices in the play may have inspired the torch formed from a dead man’s arm borne by the Dame in the anti-​masque. The twelve hags of the masque emerge from a hell’s mouth, just as Erictho and others emerge from a cave vault in the play. Marston’s motif of female Good Fame is also a mainspring of the Masque of Queen’s symbolism. Could Hearne have been involved in staging the dance and action of Sophonisba, at age nineteen? If we extend this proposal further, then Hearne may have started in the business as a Blackfriars Boy, having joined in 1600 at age fourteen. Such affiliation would have given the young Hearne training in dance and music, and extensive experience in the masque elements featured by the Blackfriars company, working with Jonson, Middleton, Marston, and Chapman. Embarking on adult status, Hearne’s special skills might then have been used by Middleton and Shakespeare in arranging and performing the dances for Timon in 1607. A connection with Jonson could have led to employment in the masques of 1607–​1608, followed by a swift promotion to the court payroll. On the one hand, the blend of main masque and anti-​masque elements found in The Tempest and the Vision Scene of Henry VIII indicates a deviser familiar with the court masque as a whole, while on the other hand, the transfer of anti-​masque dances to plays indicates an agent connected to the public stage. It could follow that the presence of Hearne, an inventive dancer and deviser working for the stage, created the opportunity for an experiment with professional expressive dancing at court, leading to the

“The Revellers Are Entering”    125 anti-​masque. I propose that Hearne was the individual driving new developments, and a valued collaborator with Shakespeare and the King’s Men. In scrutinizing Shakespeare’s use of masque dancing in the plays, alongside the practice of his contemporaries, it is apparent that he took a lead by incorporating the court dance genre into his plots. Using the Tudor masque and continental mascarade, he set up situations for social encounters in which love intrigues could be enhanced and complicated by the masked protagonists. He employed a staging maneuver in which masked couples came forward in turn, during the evolutions of the figured measure, so the audience could share their intimate conversations—​ a device that was subsequently copied by other dramatists. However, this elementary social dancing could have been devised by the players themselves. A notable change came when Shakespeare collaborated with Middleton for the erotic dancing and lute-​playing Amazons of Timon of Athens, requiring a dance specialist to choreograph a novel, character-​led entry for six accomplished youths with the relevant expertise. While the new Stuart court introduced innovations in dance and stage machinery for masques, Shakespeare was again prompt in incorporating the new expressive dances of character and action of the anti-​ masque into his plots. Indeed, the chronological pattern suggests that experimentation on the public stage also fed into avant-​garde dancing on the court theater stage. In the mute expression of her psychological condition, the personages of Katherine’s Vision in All Is True are a further radical step by Shakespeare in conveying significant meaning through dance. Across this whole process from 1594 to 1613, the occurrence of dancing, and its music, increased in the plays, probably being more prominent than the extant texts (or modern productions) indicate. Willing to collaborate, Shakespeare led the field in enriching the spoken drama with telling episodes of danced expression.

Notes 1. “Revel” or “a dancing” was the term used for a ball, a word that came into use from 1620 from the French le bal, with le ballet referring to theatrical dance. 2. Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (London: Macmillan, 1981); David Bevington, “The Tempest and the Jacobean Court Masque,” in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, eds. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 218–​243; John G. Demaray, Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness: The Tempest and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998); Janette Dillon, “From Revels to Revelation: Shakespeare and the Mask,” in Shakespeare Survey 60: Theatres for Shakespeare, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 58–​71; James Knowles, “Insubstantial Pageants: The Tempest and Masquing Culture,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, eds. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 108–​125. 3. Anne Daye, “The Jacobean Masque within the Masque Context: A Dance Perspective,” unpublished thesis, University of Surrey/​Roehampton, 2008.

126   Anne Daye 4. All references and quotations are from William Shakespeare, The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 5. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 1–​17; Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also Jeremy Barlow, “Dance in the Plays,” in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, eds. Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition 2015), 402–​404. An analysis of the specifics of court dancing is made in Anne Daye, “Dancing for King and Country: The Jacobean Court Dancer,” in Kings and Commoners: Dances of Display for Court, City and Country, ed. David Parsons. (DHDS Conference Proceedings, 2009),  5–​11. 6. The term “vernacular” refers to dance forms known only to the British Isles. “Matachin” dances belong to a wider European group of professional comic or virtuosic dances wielding swords, flaming torches, or other objects. The moresca dances were a wide variety of pantomimic dances by professionals, whereas the English morris by the sixteenth century was a team dance by men, occasionally including women, in towns and villages, associated with calendar festivals, and including solo jigs. 7. The only reference to a professional writer attending a court masque is that of Jonson being thrown out of the masque of 1604. Ian Donaldson, “Jonson, Benjamin (1572–​1637),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., September 2013, http://​www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​15116, accessed October 24, 2016. 8. Martin Wiggins, British Drama 1533–​1642:  A Catalogue, Vol. 3 (2013), 1590–​1597, and Vol. 4 (2014), 1598–​1602 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press). It is generally stated that Shakespeare ceased to act on stage from 1603; see Ernst Honigman, “Shakespeare’s Life,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, eds. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–​12. 9. Jean Fuzier and Patricia Dorval, “Forms of Metadramatic Insertions in Renaissance English Drama 1580–​1642,” in The Show Within:  Dramatic and Other Insets. English Renaissance Drama (1550–​ 1642), ed. Francois Laroque (Montpellier:  Publications d’ Université Paul–​Valéry, 1990), 461–​468. 10. A rather loose definition of “masque” is common in the literature. For example, the entry of Hymen in 5.4 of As You Like It is often called “The Masque of Hymen,” but there are no maskers or dances here. Hymen’s entry may have been inspired by a nuptial masque, with formal speech and song, but it is not a masque per se. 11. I am grateful to Martin Wiggins for his generosity in advising on dates for plays in forthcoming editions of British Drama, not available at the time of writing. All dates up to and including 1608 have been checked with entries in volumes 1–​5. 12. Seán Jennett, Beloved Son Félix: The Journal of Félix Platter (London: Muller, 1961). 13. In Scotland 1561, le Marquis d’Elboeuf, young uncle of Mary Queen of Scots and part of her escort to Scotland from France, caused offense by going around the streets of Edinburgh in disguise, forcing his way into houses, in the French mascarade tradition. He and his Scottish companions caused a riot, such that the civic and religious authorities demanded that he be brought to trial, to the deep embarrassment of Mary; Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of Scotland and English Princesses 3 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1852), 279–​281 (based on letter from Randolph, the English ambassador to Cecil). A lawsuit involved masquers attempting to enter Lady Willoughby’s house in Chester, 1583 (Wiggins 2, item 738). Both incidents took place in the Christmas season.

“The Revellers Are Entering”    127 14. Edmund Kerchever Chambers, The Medieval Stage 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 394. 15. Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 99. 16. Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare 1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), 269–​270, 290–​295. The sequence of sources all present the action as taking place during a torch dance, in which a partner is chosen by the light of the torch, a form not found in England, but known in Italy as ballo della torcia and in France as branle de la torche. 17. Andrew J. Sabol, “The Original Music for the French King’s Masque in Love’s Labour’s Lost,” in Shakespeare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions, ed. John M. Mucciolo (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1996), 207–​223. 18. The term “measure” can mean “dance” of any kind, a section of a dance in relation to its music, and a specific group of dances recorded in several manuscripts. The latter are short choreographies set to specific tunes, based on the almain, pavan, and courante of France, but vernacular to England, danced at court and at the Inns of Court. These measures are the only dance genre for several couples dancing ensemble, indicating the likeliest form for these scenes. Transcriptions and discussion of the measures are published in David R. Wilson, “Dancing in the Inns of Court,” in Historical Dance, ed. Anne Cottis, 2, no. 5 (1998): 3–​16; Ian Payne, The Almain in Britain c. 1549–​c. 1675: A Dance Manual from Manuscript Sources (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2003). Daye, A. and Thorp, J. “English Measures Old and New: Dulwich College MS. XCIV/​f.28,” in Historical Dance, vol. 4/​3 2018,  27–​40. 19. Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare 4 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 478–​481. 20. These companies comprised boys and youths under adult management. Their playing could be a side venture to a main duty as choristers. They gave plays in private and more expensive venues (Paul’s Boys in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral; Blackfriars Boys in a hall of the Blackfriars precinct), and less frequently than the adult companies. In addition to renowned musical and dance skills, a convention of innocence allowed the boy players to deal with more scandalous material than the adults. 21. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Playing Companies (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1996), 337–​365. 22. Gottfried von Bulöw, “Diary of the Journey of Philip Julius, Duke of Stettin-​Pomerania, through England in the Year of 1602,” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 4 (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), 1–​67. 23. The increasing interpolation of dances and masques is noted by Reavley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–​1608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Gurr, The Shakespearean Playing Companies, 348; Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 252; Irwin Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse (New York: New York University Press, 1966), 233, 281. Gair (85, 123, 142) also analyzes the dance skills of individuals. 24. Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare 6 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 254. 25. Anthony Dawson and Gretchen Minton, eds, Timon of Athens, Arden 3 (London: Cengage Learning, 2008) 1–​10; Gary Taylor and Andrew J. Sabol, “Middleton, Music, and Dance,” in Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 130.

128   Anne Daye 26. The Amazonians Masque: BL Add Ms 10444, 35v–​35r, 86v–​87r; transcribed by Andrew J. Sabol, Four Hundred Songs and Dances from the Stuart Masque (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1982) no. 124. 27. A good example is found in Le Ballet de Monseigneur le Duc de Vandosme (1610) in which the sorceress Alcine with twelve nymphs heads a dancing procession playing lutes; later, six Turks entered dancing while playing on violins; Paul Lacroix, Ballets et Mascarades de Cour de Henri III à Louis XIV 1 (Geneva: Gay, 1868), 201, 342. 28. Daye, “The Jacobean Masque within the Masque Context: A Dance Perspective,” 220–​222. 29. Daye, “The Jacobean Masque within the Masque Context: A Dance Perspective,” 97–​101, 363–​374. 30. Ben Jonson, Hymenaei, 671–​ 672. All quotations from Jonson’s masques are from Bevington, David, Butler, Martin & Donaldson, Ian (eds.), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Essex Anticke Masque: BL Add Ms 10444, 42r, 92r, transcribed by Sabol, Four Hundred Songs and Dances from the Stuart Masque, no. 145. The first three strains have great drive, shifting in and out of fast and moderate duple time, closing with a fourth strain in galliard meter for an energetic virile finish. 31. The sequence in Pericles of the presentation of imprese, before the tournament, the dance in armor, followed by the social revel with the ladies, could be considered as a deconstructed masque with the knights’ helmets functioning as vizards. 32. Jonson, The Haddington Masque and The Masque of Beauty, 263–​264; 241. 33. Daye, “The Jacobean Masque within the Masque Context: A Dance Perspective,” 109–​165; Anne Daye, “The Role of Le Balet Comique in Forging the Stuart Masque,” Dance Research 32, no. 2 (2014): 144–​207. 34. The first witches dance: BL Add Ms 10444, 21r, 74v; the second Witches dance: 21v, 75r, transcribed in Sabol, Four Hundred Songs and Dances from the Stuart Masque, nos. 76, 77. 35. Jonson, The Masque of Queens, 317. 36. Gurr, The Shakespearean Playing Companies, 356. 37. Version by Daye of Spanish text translated in Sabol, Four Hundred Songs and Dances from the Stuart Masque, 544, and in Peter Walls, Music in the Courtly Masque, 1604–​1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 310. 38. Jonson, Oberon; Andrew Ashbee, Records of English Court Music 4 (Snodland: Ashbee, 1991), 32–​33; Charles H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, eds, Ben Jonson 10 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 520–​521; The Satyres Masque BL Add Ms. 10444, 31r, 82v transcribed in Sabol, Four Hundred Songs and Dances from the Stuart Masque, no. 107. 39. The drawing by Jones of two naked satyrs, often reproduced as if it were a costume design, for 1611 is misleading. At this stage, no special designs were drafted for anti-​masque performers. The main function of his costume designs was to seek the approval of the royal and noble wearers. Anti-​masque costume designs are more in evidence later, as the status of the entries went up with greater acceptance. 40. John Pitcher, ed., The Winter’s Tale, Arden 3 (London: Methuen, 2010), 394. 41. Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque:  Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006), 203; Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare 8 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 127. 42. A seminal discussion of the relationship between this play and masque practice is found in Steven Orgel, ed., The Tempest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 43–​50; 173–​179. See also Keith Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987);

“The Revellers Are Entering”    129 David Bevington, “The Tempest and the Jacobean Court Masque,” in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, eds. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 218–​243; Virginia M. Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, eds, The Tempest (London:  The Arden Shakespeare, 2011); D. Lindley, ed., The Tempest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 43. Thomas Campion, The Lords’ Masque, ed. I. A. Shapiro, in A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, eds. T. J. B. Spencer and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 95–​123. 44. Samuel Daniel, Tethys’ Festival, in Court Masques, ed. David Lindley (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1995), 54–​65; three costume designs by Inigo Jones in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court 1 (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973), nos. 53, 54, 55. 45. Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriar’s Playhouse: Its History and Design. (London: Peter Owen, 1966), 414–​416; Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre (London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987),  78–​79. 46. Lindley, The Tempest, 6. 47. Richard Vennar, The Right Way to Heaven 1601)  in Elizabeth Goldring, Faith Eales, Elizabeth Clarke, and Jayne Elisabeth Arche, eds., John Nichol’s Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I:  A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) vol. 4, p. 139. Vennar was sufficiently infamous in the London theatrical world for his publication to be known. Audience members may have grasped an allusion to both Katherine and Elizabeth as pious queens. 48. Brissenden notes, with skepticism, that Malone in 1821 and Lawrence in 1930 suggested that the stage directions were not by Shakespeare (Shakespeare and the Dance, note 12, 126). Lawrence’s hint at a choreographer in action went unheeded in the correspondence of the day in The Times Literary Supplement, December 18, 1930. 49. The scenes of state ceremonial mounted with many people in processions:  the trial of Queen Katherine, the coronation of Ann Boleyn, and the christening of Princess Elizabeth. The eyewitness account by Wootton, as well as noting the fire, talks of “many extraordinary Circumstances of Pomp and Majesty, even to the matting of the stage,” quoted in Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), 235. The dancing stages of masques were covered with green baize matting, also. 50. Daye, “Graced with Measures: Dance as an International Language in the Masques of 1613,” in The Palatine Wedding of 1613: Protestant Alliance and Court Festival, eds. Sara Smart and Mara R. Wade (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag, 2013), 289–​318. Also relevant are Jerzy Limon and Agnieszka Zukowska on the Chapman masque (319–​338) and Ann Kronbergs on The Tempest court performance (339–​352). 51. Vaughan and Vaughan, The Tempest,  71–​72. 52. Lindley, D. (ed.) The Tempest (Cambridge UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2013), 28, notes that the anti-​masque was not a fixed element at this time. Daniel pointedly states that Tethys’ Festival of 1610 was performed entirely by persons of good worth. The masque of 1612 Love Restored had only one entry of court gentlemen as masquers. 53. George Chapman, The Memorable Masque, in Court Masques, ed. Lindley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 74–​91; Francis Beaumont, The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, ed. Philip Edwards, in A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, eds. Spencer and Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 125–​148; Grays inne Masque BL Add. Ms 10444, fols 44r & 93r–​94v), transcribed by Sabol, Four Hundred Songs

130   Anne Daye and Dances from the Stuart Masque (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1982), no. 152; Graies Inne Maske in Margaret Dean-​Smith, ed., Playford’s English Dancing Master 1651: Facsimile Reprint (London: Schott, 1957), 87. 54. Lois Potter, “The Two Noble Kinsmen:  Spectacle and Narrative,” in The Show Within: Dramatic and Other Insets. English Renaissance Drama (1550–​1642), ed. Laroque (Montpellier:  Publications d’ Université Paul-​Valéry, 1990), 240. The full team of six couples are as follows: the masque name first, the play name second, if different; asterisks identify the mute performers: May Lord /​Lord of May May Lady /​Lady Bright* Servingman* Chambermaid* An Host /​Mine Host Hostess /​Fat Spouse* Countryman or Shepherd /​Clown Country Wench* (not mentioned in play) He-​Fool /​Fool She-​Fool (probably Gaoler’s Daughter) He-​Baboon /​Bavian* She-​Baboon* (not mentioned in play) 55. John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing 1458–​1750 (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1999), 279–​282. 56. The textual history of Macbeth and the performative language of the witches are discussed in Emma Smith, Macbeth: Language and Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). The text, music, and dance correlations of the anti-​masque of witches, also the European and Scottish sources for the covens of witches rather than the solitary English witch, are argued in Daye, “The Jacobean Masque within the Masque Context: A Dance Perspective,” 125–​ 126; 134–​135; 148–​154. 57. Herbert Berry, “Greene, Thomas (bap.  1573, d.  1612),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., May 2008, http://​www. oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​67760, accessed June 23, 2016. 58. Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 76–​94. 59. Daye, “The Jacobean Masque within the Masque Context: A Dance Perspective,” 336–​343. 60. Ashbee, Records of English Court Music 4 (Snodland, UK: Ashbee, 1991), 33. 61. T. Orbison, “The Middle Temple Documents Relating to James Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace,” in Malone Society Collections 12 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 71. 62. Jonson alone gives him a first name of Hierome; he is otherwise called Jeremy. I have used the spelling of his surname adopted by Andrew Ashbee and David Lasocki, A Biographical Dictionary of English Court Musicians 1485–​1714 1 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), 556–​ 557 (a summary of his career), but Herne and Heron also occur. A  common name in England at the time, he is unlikely to be a Frenchman, as suggested in Ashbee and Lasocki, reiterated by Lindley, David, The Haddington Masque in Bevington, David, Butler, Martin & Donaldson, Ian (eds.), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 270, n.283. 63. Baptismal record for Jeremie Herne, father William: St. Mary’s Parish, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, October 9, 1586; Jeremie Heron will:  Prerogative Court of Canterbury PROB 11/​185/​82. The three London parishes in which the baptisms of sons are recorded show a good match with Herne’s likely career. St. Dunstan’s in the East, Idol Lane off Lower Thames Street, is close to London Bridge for access to the Globe, and near Blackfriars; St. Dunstan’s in the West, corner of Fleet Street and Fetter Lane, remains close to Blackfriars and nearer the Inns of Court, and an easy walk to Whitehall. St. Martin in the Fields was closer again to the palace at Whitehall, including Scotland Yard for the office of Inigo Jones, and was

“The Revellers Are Entering”    131 known as the royal church for christenings, including that of Charles II in 1630. The generous court salary plus extra fees would result in prosperity for a sensible man. 64. Ashbee, Records of English Court Music 4 (Snodland, UK:  Ashbee, 1991), 212–​213, 215; Thomas Birch, The Life of Henry Prince of Wales (Dublin: Faulkner, 1760), 251–​252; Nichols, The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Entries of James the First 2 (London, 1828), 460. 65. The manuscript was first printed as “Mask of the Four Seasons,” in Peter Cunningham and John Payne Collier, Inigo Jones:  A Life of the Architect (London:  Shakespeare Society, 1848), 143–​148. The allocation to an event of 1612 was dismissed and a fresh allocation given as “The Chirk Castle Entertainment of 1634” in Cedric C. Brown, Milton Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1977): 76–​86. A banquet entertainment is very dated for 1634, and the dance entries also very primitive compared to the sophistication of theater dance of the time. Prince Henry’s Woodstock entertainment of 1612 has been overlooked hitherto as a possible occasion for the piece; the manuscript may have been re-​used at Chirk in 1634 66. Anne of Denmark having ceased dancing in 1611 then died in 1619, while Princess Elizabeth left home in 1613. 67. The argument and evidence for this is presented in Daye, “The Jacobean Masque within the Masque Context: A Dance Perspective.” 68. “Antic” as a description of a dance implies gestural or pantomimic action, for comic, grotesque, or character effect. There may have been a few mute performers ca. 1600 called “antics.” A few stage directions indicate this, as in Robert Greene’s James IV, 4: “Enter three Antics, who dance around and take Slipper with them.” 69. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, eds., The Tragedy of Sophonisba in Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 33–​84; Rosalind Miles, Ben Jonson: His Life and Works (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 99.

Bibliography Bevington, David, and Peter Holbrook. The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Clegg, Roger, and Lucie Skeaping. Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs: Musical Comedy on the Shakespearean Stage. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2014. Dutton, Richard. Shakespeare, Court Dramatist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Es, Bart van. Shakespeare in Company. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gair, Reavley. The Children of Paul’s:  The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–​ 1608. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Playing Companies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Ravelhofer, Barbara. The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Streitberger, W. R. The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth I’s Court Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Chapter 5

We Are All   Ma de The Socioeconomics of The Two Noble Kinsmen’s Anti-​Masque Morris Dance John R. Ziegler

By the early seventeenth century, morris dancing had accrued a long and complex, if often murky, socioeconomic history extending from the rural to the royal. This chapter first considers that history and context, particularly as it intersects with the appeal to social mobility deployed by onstage masques and their dances. It then examines the original courtly performance context and subsequent reuse on the commercial stage of the anti-​masque morris dance in John Fletcher and William Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, attempting to untangle the implications of middling characters, especially the Jailer’s Daughter, performing this particular morris before an aristocratic onstage “audience” while creating a version of an elite event for the offstage audience. The chapter’s final section concludes that the play’s repurposing of the anti-​masque morris produces an unresolved tension between the theater’s attempts to exploit elite entertainments while simultaneously claiming preeminence for its own performers and performances. The morris dance in The Two Noble Kinsmen (ca. 1613–​1614, printed 1634), performed by the King’s Men at the Blackfriars in 1613 or early 1614, was itself originally part of an anti-​masque, directly borrowing and restaging a portion of a court entertainment.1 Dance was central to any masque, and representations of masques in commercial plays always included at least one dance as well. Masques featured different genres of dancing for the professionals in the anti-​masque, the courtiers in the main masque, and the courtiers and audience members during the revels. The revels, which concluded a masque, consisted of impromptu social dancing that might last several hours.2 Anti-​masques, in contrast, were carefully planned and choreographed. While, with exceptions, the courtiers’ dances, including the revels, avoided overly animated movements as undignified, the professional dancers of the anti-​masque faced no such restrictions.3 Anti-​masques trafficked in disorder, and anti-​masque dances, spectacular rather than social, showcased correspondingly lively, energetic movements and music.

134   John R. Ziegler Shakespeare incorporates masquing into three of his early plays. Love’s Labour’s Lost (1596) contains an aborted masque: masquers enter, but the ladies who are present turn their backs and refuse to dance. Romeo and Juliet (1595) and Much Ado about Nothing (1598) both feature revels, though neither specifies a type of dance. Subsequently, a gap of around a decade occurs in Shakespeare’s use of masque dancing in his plays, a period during which other playwrights, such as John Marston, George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Middleton, employed masque dances in plays. Shakespeare returns to using masque dancing in a quartet of plays written at the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century. The first, Timon of Athens, was likely written between 1607 and 1610, perhaps cowritten with Middleton, and arguably never performed. The Tempest (1610) calls its masque dance a “country footing” of nymphs and shepherds (4.1.138), and was later performed—​like The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, from which The Two Noble Kinsmen directly borrows its own scene of rustic dance—​ during the wedding festivities of King James’s daughter, Lady Elizabeth, and Frederick, Elector Palatine.4 All Is True, or Henry VIII (1612–​1613), also includes masque dancers dressed as shepherds, and Shakespeare composed both it and The Two Noble Kinsmen with Fletcher, the man who would succeed Shakespeare as the leading writer of the King’s Men (see also Daye, Chapter 4 in this volume, for discussion of Shakespearean masques).

Morris, Spectacle, and Marketing Mobility The Two Noble Kinsmen is unique among Shakespeare’s representations of masques for two reasons. First, it is the only one to draw directly from a real masque, a tactic to enhance the marketability inherent in his other uses of masque dance. Second, perhaps as a result of deriving from a real masque performance, it is the only of his plays to specify by name a type of dance within an onstage masque.5 The specified dance, a morris, over its history carried a range of socioeconomic associations, as discussed in the following. In comparison, Middleton, in No Wit/​Help like a Woman’s (1611?), Middleton and William Rowley, in The World Tossed at Tennis (ca. 1620), and Dekker, in The Sun’s Darling (1624), like Shakespeare and Fletcher, incorporated elements from actual masques, but none of their texts specifies a particular dance. The action proper of The Two Noble Kinsmen begins with a bit of spectacle: a wedding procession for Theseus, Duke of Athens, and his bride, the Amazonian queen Hippolyta. Hymen, bearing a torch, and a boy, singing and strewing flowers, are accompanied by nymphs and attendants and lead the bride and groom and Emilia, sister to Hippolyta, in a procession. Significantly, later in the play, these same aristocrats—​Theseus, Hippolyta, and Emilia—​make up the audience to a second piece of spectacle:  a morris dance conceived by a schoolmaster and performed by a group, led by a mad jailer’s daughter,

We Are All Made    135 of what contemporaries would have called the “middling sort.” The “middling sort” referred to the “swarming world of petty tradesmen spawned by the commercial and manufacturing expansion of the seventeenth century and . . . could also embrace the commercial farmers who were their rural counterpart.”6 Though performed by characters of the middling sort, this dance originally took place in a royal context. The Two Noble Kinsmen’s morris is a version of the dance that occurs in the second of two anti-​masques in Francis Beaumont’s The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, which was created as part of the nuptial celebration of Lady Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine, and was performed, after a postponement, on February 20, 1613, in the Banqueting House at Whitehall.7 Both the reuse of the anti-​masque dance and its role within the play illuminate early modern theater’s sometimes contradictory attempts at commodification. Recycling a court entertainment constituted an attempt to profit from associations with an elite experience, something to which access was restricted by rank and social standing, by making a version of such experience available in the commercial marketplace (see also Clegg, Chapter 3 in this volume, on the jig’s blurring of stage and reality). Dance was “an organising principle of the masque genre, almost a microcosm of the larger form,” and thus an integral part of representing such elite performance onstage.8 At the same time that stage plays traded on these representations, they needed to assert the desirability, even the superiority, of their own entertainment product. These contradictions create and reveal tensions around the social status of The Two Noble Kinsmen’s morris, as well as around the broader issue of the transformation of elite into commercial entertainment. Little evidence remains of what English morris dancing, the first known mention of which occurs in 1458, actually looked like in the seventeenth century.9 Even the origin of its name remains the subject of competing theories; however, some consistent features can be discerned. Morris was, as John Forrest puts it, a “spectacular” rather than a “social” dance, “designed as a showpiece for audience members who were quite separate from the dancers.”10 Dancers would likely have “executed figures with rhythmic stepping, and coordinated or exaggerated arm gestures,” and “all clues point to vigorous leaping and capering interspersed with skipping and stepping.”11 In The Two Noble Kinsmen, the male dancers are told to “sweetly, by a figure, trace and turn,” the women to “swim with your bodies” and “now and then a favour and a frisk,” and the dancer dressed as a baboon to “tumble with audacity and manhood” (3.5.17–​18, 25, 27, 33).12 Bells worn on the legs; special coats, sometimes with flowing, jagged sleeves, and sometimes recorded as being painted or spangled; and “napkins” held or pinned to the coats or other clothing appear to have been standard morris accoutrements (See Figure 3.2).13 Although Will Kempe writes in 1600 of a woman “with napking on her armes” as using “the olde fashion,” the female dancers in Two Noble Kinsmen are asked where their “ribbons” are before the morris begins (3.5.25).14 The bells, napkins or ribbons, and sleeves would have emphasized any rhythmic or exaggerated gestures by the dancers, whose accompaniment is most often mentioned as the pipe and tabor.15 Records suggest that morris was commonly performed by relatively small groups of fewer than ten dancers, which habitually included a fool, a lady, who eventually became identified with Maid Marian, and, eventually, a hobby

136   John R. Ziegler horse.16 However, Kempe’s dancing the morris from London to Norwich suggests that it did not depend on group choreography to be recognizable as morris, to the extent that it could be performed solo, by either a man or a woman, and without “an obvious beginning or end.”17 The earliest records of morris dancing show it occurring most often in royal venues in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, becoming more common in urban and then church venues by the mid-​sixteenth century, and finally occurring most often in village and rural venues by the seventeenth century.18 The number of recorded morris events hit its peak around 1600, when it also began to appear in commercial stage plays and court entertainments, such as Ben Jonson’s 1603 entertainment for Queen Anne and, perhaps, his 1609 Masque of Queenes.19 In offering the reused morris as a point of contact with the aristocracy, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play was selling, in part, the opportunity to experience a specific, well-​ known royal recreation. The play’s opening wedding procession, which is interrupted by petitioners to Theseus, recalls the original nuptial context of Beaumont’s anti-​masque morris. The morris itself, moved to a new context, in the theater, and within the play, contrasts the solemn royal procession that is interrupted at the start of Kinsmen both in tone and in achieving its purpose, which is to bring recognition and success to its participants. These contrasts echo the tensions regarding status and access arising from commercializing elite entertainment, and in the play, the Jailer’s Daughter further embodies such tensions, functioning as a point of convergence for the social and romantic desires of both the audience and the characters. London in the seventeenth century was in the midst of incredibly rapid growth in population and wealth, which in turn loosened the traditional barriers to social mobility.20 This new atmosphere of socioeconomic possibility created interest in the signs and mechanisms of social status, a desire that was directed across lines of rank. In order to better market their product to London audiences who wanted to see the elite or elite entertainments, playwrights sometimes reused or adapted actual court masques. The realism, and the appeal to playhouse audiences, would have been increased if the playwrights’ work included writing actual masques.21 For instance, Thomas Middleton composed both commercial plays and masques (The Masque of Cupids in 1613 and The Masque of Heroes in 1619). As mentioned, his play No Wit/​Help like a Woman’s (1611?) and his and William Rowley’s play The World Tossed at Tennis (ca. 1620) both include masques, and his direct connection to masque production might have lent a further layer of insider “realism” to their recreation of private space on the public stage. In the case of Kinsmen, that connection is less direct, but the fact that Beaumont, writer of The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, was Fletcher’s constant collaborator may have had a similar effect. This realism particularly appealed to private theater audiences such as those at the Blackfriars, who were more likely to have or to desire upward mobility. Situations in which an embedded masque was originally performed at or was intended for court highlighted the liminality of the stage space, its recreation of restricted elite experience and space in a commercial space that was open to anyone who could pay. The spaces and experiences of the elite and of those below them socially were bridged by

We Are All Made    137 playwrights’ associations with court entertainments; players’ experiences acting in both types of space; the gallants in private theaters sitting on the stage and straddling the line between actual and fictional audience; and the potential presence of some spectators who had been present at the recycled masque’s original performance. Such otherwise unavailable points of contact were attractive to those who attended the more fashionable theaters and had the potential to be upwardly mobile. Consequently, the presence or absence of these points of contact would significantly affect audience reception, but the net effect was the promise of a resurrection of the court performance that allowed playhouse spectators to imagine themselves as its elite audience.

Court Morris, Commercial Stage If a performance such as the morris from The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn moved from the court to the commercial theater, especially if a hall at court had been its first home, it brought with it the cachet of having entertained the highest strata of society.22 In this way, it participated in what Paul Yachnin calls the “populuxe theatre,” which sold relatively inexpensive, popular versions of cultural goods. Since they were, in effect, the resident entertainers at the court and also owners of a large public playhouse, Shakespeare and the players were able to insert themselves into the system of rank and to capitalize on the desirability of the language, conduct, dress, literature, and pastimes of the nobility.23

Any subsequent stagings of courtly performances in the commercial theaters would have added, for anyone aware or made aware of such facts, an extra layer of voyeurism to the appeal of seeing what the elite see: that of seeing what the elite verifiably had seen. As Suzanne Gossett puts it, the audience “thus basked in the reflective glory, feeling that they were in touch with spectacular, aristocratic entertainment.”24 Beyond this, though, using actual masques—​trying to bring back the original night—​signaled a new mode of representation, one that tried to reproduce reality (in this case, of the original elite entertainment). It resulted in a theater that was less illusionistic and more mimetic, and that traded on the allure not merely of emulation but of the thing itself. In order best to understand the appeal of The Two Noble Kinsmen’s morris as a “populuxe” commodity, it will be useful first to discuss the aristocratic event from which Shakespeare and Fletcher borrow, including its material conditions and its status. In the case of The Masque of the Inner Temple, the recitations and dancing inside Whitehall were only part of the performance. The preface to the printed version of the masque records that “the masquers, with their attendants and divers others, gallant young gentlemen of both houses, as their convoy, set forth from Winchester House, which was the rendezvous, towards the court.” This “convoy” proceeded by water “in great

138   John R. Ziegler triumph. The gentlemen masquers being placed by themselves in the King’s barge with the rich furniture of state, and adorned with a great number of lights placed in such order as might make the best show” (ll. 16–​22).25 Adding to the spectacle was “a multitude of barges and galleys, with all variety of loud music, and several peals of ordnance. And led by two admirals” (ll. 23–​25). On its way to the enclosed elite space of Whitehall, this event ostentatiously (and loudly) announced itself to the eyes, ears, and status consciousness of the public at large. In this, it allies itself in its wide availability not only with the commercial stage, but also, and more closely, with civic spectacles like the mayoral pageants. Of course, the “show” withdrew into private, regulated space upon arriving at its destination, a movement perhaps symbolic of status, which Beaumont stresses: “Of this show his Majesty was graciously pleased to take view, with the Prince, the Count Palatine and the Lady Elizabeth their Highnesses, at the windows of his privy gallery upon the water, till their landing, which was at the privy stairs” (ll. 26–​29). The repetition of the “privy” nature of the royal spaces underscores both the private and therefore privileged viewpoint of the king (his privy gallery) and the privileged status of the point of access to his space (the privy stairs).26 Ultimately, however, the opulent and no doubt costly procession culminated not in the performance of the masque proper but in a postponement. A space is at least partly constructed by those occupying it, and by that measure, the masquing hall was still under construction: “The hall was by that time filled with company of very good fashion, but yet so as a very great number of principal ladies and other noble persons were not yet come in, whereby it was foreseen that the room would be so scanted as might have been inconvenient” (ll. 31–​34). It is as much who occupies the room as the location of the space itself that renders it suitable for a courtly entertainment, and since the proper proportion of “noble persons,” particularly the potentially erotic presence of the “principal ladies,” had not yet been attained, the space had not yet achieved suitability. The “room” itself would be scanted, or diminished, by the lack of the right elite occupants. John Chamberlain gives another account of the postponement in a letter dated February 18, 1613: “But by what ill planet it fell out I know not, they [the performers] came home as they went without doing anything, the reason whereof I cannot learn yet thoroughly, but only that the Hall was so full that it was not possible to avoid it or make room for them, besides that most of the ladies were in the galleries to see them land and could not get in.”27 His formulation echoes that of Beaumont: there is no lack of spectators. In fact, this event was so extraordinarily attractive that there would appear to have been no room even for the masquers themselves, despite that, as Chamberlain adds, “there was a course taken and so notified, that no Lady or gentlewoman should be admitted to any of these sights with a farthingale, which was to gain the more room [ . . . ]. And yet there were more scaffolds and more provision made for room than ever I saw.”28 So, the issue is not too few audience members, but too few of the necessary audience members, the desirable persons who legitimized the status of the space and the event. Chamberlain, unlike Beaumont, describes a hurdle to performance concerning the most desirable person of all. Aside from the absence of the ladies, “the worst of all was that the King was so wearied and sleepy with sitting up almost two whole nights before that he had no

We Are All Made    139 edge to it.”29 Chamberlain worried that the resulting postponement would be the ruin of the performance, since “the grace of their masque is quite gone when their apparel hath been already showed and their devices vented.”30 Nevertheless, however much lack of novelty might be worrisome, a hall without the proper audience members could actually stop the performance. When the performance of The Masque of the Inner Temple did go ahead on the Saturday following the Shrove Tuesday of the procession, it included two anti-​masques. The first anti-​masque encompasses four dances, separated by dialogue spoken by the presenters, Mercury and Iris. The first dance is performed by Naiads, who are joined in the second dance by Hyads. Cupids join both groups for the third dance, and a set of living statues rounds out the ensemble for the final dance. The second anti-​masque consists of “all the rural company, /​Which deck the May-​games with their country sports,” or, as the argument of the masque puts it, “a confusion or commixture of all such persons as are natural and proper for country sports” (ll. 226–​227, 69–​70). This “confusion” of lower-​status personages takes on an ambiguous status while they are inside the masquing space. On the one hand, while it is true that the players in the anti-​masque are merely representing the lowest classes, they would still have been of a lower class than the spectators; but they also would have been there at the invitation of the nobility and partly under its control as they “rush[ed] in, dance[d]‌ their measure, and as rudely depart[ed]” (ll. 229–​230). On the other hand, it is the lower classes who control the success of the event as a whole: the elite cannot hold their elite event without these rude professional dancers, their cooperation, and their performative capabilities. Those who performed the rural dance included “A Pedant, May Lord, May Lady, Servingman, Chambermaid, A Country Clown, or Shepherd, Country Wench, An Host, Hostess, A He-​Baboon, She-​Baboon, A He-​Fool, [and a] She-​Fool, ushering them in” (ll. 231–​237). Evidently, it was very well received, for the printed text claims that “the perpetual laughter and applause was above the music” (ll. 241–​242). In an interesting inversion of the voyeurism in which embedded masques trafficked, the description of the anti-​masque’s success turns on its realism, almost as if the elite were observing representations of country-​folk in their natural habitat. The characters are “appareled to the life” and “the music was extremely well fitted, having such a spirit of country jollity as can hardly be imagined” (ll. 238–​241). The dance itself “was of the same strain, and the dancers, or rather actors, expressed every one their part so naturally and aptly, as when a man’s eye was caught with the one, and then passed on to the other, he could not satisfy himself which did best” (ll. 243–​246). The second anti-​masque is positioned in its printed version as presenting an opportunity to observe “all such persons as are natural and proper for country sports” (a group that apparently includes baboons and mad people) acting “naturally,” in the same way that embedded masques were positioned as presenting an opportunity to observe the elite—​both as represented in the fictional, onstage audience and as possible paying customers in the theater audience—​in a situation such as watching the second anti-​masque dance of The Masque of the Inner Temple. Chamberlain worried that a lack of novelty caused by the aborted performance would result in a hostile reception at court of the restaging. In the world of the commercial

140   John R. Ziegler theater, however, standards for novelty were less stringent. Indeed, for those patrons who wished to emulate their betters, seeing behaviors performed more than once would be both attractive and beneficial. It was before such patrons, in the Blackfriars, where the second anti-​masque dance next appeared. In the second act of The Two Noble Kinsmen, the banished Arcite comes across “four COUNTRY[MEN],” who are discussing the impending “maying” (2.3.24.1, 37).31 Presided over by mock officials “known variously as the Summer Lord and Lady, the May Lord and Lady, or King and Queen of May,” May games involved a variety of entertainments, including displays by guns and pikemen; pageants; in urban areas, a procession to gather greenery from the woods with which to decorate the town; and “dancing in the streets.”32 As part of the celebration, participants would “set up a maypole (or bower or other decorated area) to be the scene of feasting and dancing.”33 Though there is little evidence that the maypole itself was the focus of morris dancing, the morris was consistently associated with May games in rural areas by the beginning of the sixteenth century and in urban areas by its end.34 Kinsmen’s Second Countryman notes that the success of their upcoming dance depends upon “the dainty dominie, the schoolmaster,” the counterpart of the Pedant who tops the list of characters in Beaumont’s anti-​masque (2.3.41). When it comes time for the Countrymen’s May Day performance, the Schoolmaster too heads up the list of participants: “Enter [Gerald] a SCHOOLMASTER, [five] COUNTRYMEN, [one of whom is dressed as a] BABION, [five] Wenches, and [Timothy,] a TABORER” (3.5.0.1). Though less specific in its directions for pairings and seemingly short one baboon, the dance is clearly intended to restage the anti-​masque of country folk in The Masque of the Inner Temple, with Theseus, as ruler of Athens, standing in for King James as the authority figure to whom the performance is directed.35 The seating of the “Ladies” with Theseus, along with the Third Countryman’s earlier exhortation, “And, sweet companions, let’s rehearse, by any means, before the ladies see us” (2.3.57–​58), recalls the late entrance of the ladies in the printed text of the masque, offering an in-​joke to those members of the audience who, by one means or another, would have been aware of the circumstances of the masque’s postponement. Finally, the Schoolmaster’s prefatory explanation, which recalls similar speeches in many court masques or the printed plots that were sometimes distributed, offers another parallel between the “maying” and the anti-​masque.36 He calls the performers “a merry rout, or else a rabble, /​Or company, or, by a figure, chorus, /​That fore thy dignity will dance a morris” (3.5.108–​110). His description, which itself reproduces a sort of rabble of labels or categories, closely recalls the printed masque’s “confusion or commixture.” Later in his explanation, he enumerates some of the particular dancers in the morris: himself, “the Lord of May and Lady bright,” the “Chambermaid and Servingman,” “mine Host /​And his fat Spouse,” “the beest-​ eating Clown,” “the Fool,” and the “babion with long tail and eke long tool, /​Cum multis aliis that make a dance” (3.5.124–​135). The only differences between the dancers here and those in The Masque of the Inner Temple are the absence of the She-​Baboon and the She-​Fool. The Country Wench who is paired with the Clown in the anti-​masque can be assumed to be one of the multis aliis, the Friz or Maudline or little Luce or bouncing Barbey or freckled Nell who is mentioned during preparations for the morris. The place

We Are All Made    141 of the She-​Fool is supplied by the Jailer’s Daughter, who has been driven mad by her love for Palamon. She also supplies the novelty that both Chamberlain’s letter and the printed text of Beaumont’s masque tell us is important to elite audiences. Beaumont describes the dancing Statues of the first anti-​masque as “very graceful besides the novelty,” and the dancers of the second are “not of one kind or livery (because that had been so much in use heretofore)” (l. 214, 49). Similarly, upon seeing the Jailer’s Daughter, The Third Countryman immediately announces that this “dainty madwoman” will “do the rarest gambols” (3.5.73, 76). The form of the dance as a whole may have provided additional novelty: John Forrest notes that references to mixed couples performing morris appeared at the end of the seventeenth century, and he hypothesizes both that this was the result of morris adapting “ideas from the ‘new’ country dances” and that the morris in The Two Noble Kinsmen represents “new trends in morris dancing,” a current if “short-​lived fashion.”37 The novelty of both anti-​masques was evidently sufficiently impressive to its courtly audience, for the printed text notes, “It pleased his Majesty to call for it again at the end, as he did likewise for the first anti-​masque, but one of the [dancing] Statues by that time was undressed” (ll. 246–​48). Anti-​masques had only come into use in 1608, so they would have been fashionable elements in commercial performances anyway, and including one known to have been well received by the King could have made an even more attractive selling point, especially as part of a promise to reproduce reality for private theater audiences. There is no reason not to think, given the predilection for highlighting place of performance and audience reaction on the title pages of printed plays, that the inclusion of a dance that had received royal approbation might even have been part of a playbill.38 Within the play-​text itself, if the onstage audience is meant to model the proper response for the offstage audience, then the elite characters’ praise of and monetary reward for the “excellent dance” and the Schoolmaster’s cry to the dancers, “Come, we are all made,” reproduce the recorded court response to the anti-​ masque and imply that the theater audience could, and even should, have a similar experience (3.5.150, 159).39 Further, various elements of the production of this embedded masque dance could have been marketed as providing a more authentic and thus more intensely voyeuristic experience. In addition to the obvious reuse of the actual court entertainment, there was the connection to the original event offered by the partnership between Beaumont and Fletcher. That Fletcher, as the adapter of the masque to the stage, had a long-​standing professional relationship with, and thus access to, Beaumont, the original writer of the masque, would have been known by at least some.40 Their relationship would have provided, if nothing else, authenticity by association. Another link between the stage and the court lies in the music. Robert Johnson, composer to the King’s Men, is known to have supplied the music for at least one court masque.41 Though it is not known if he did the same for The Masque of the Inner Temple, it would be more logical than coincidental if he had, considering the other professional interrelationships at play. In addition, given the use of professional players for speaking parts in masques, there may have been a partial and possibly (almost) complete overlap between those who performed at the court and those who performed the same measures on the stage.

142   John R. Ziegler For example, the Servant’s remark in The Winter’s Tale that of the twelve dancing satyrs, “One three of them, by their own report, sir, hath danced before the King” is thought to refer to performers in Jonson’s Masque of Oberon (4.4.323–​324).42 Audiences thus could have seen not only the actual dance that the King and his invitees saw, but also the original dancers reenact it to the original music. An overlap in costume is less certain than an overlap in performers but no less significant. Players acquired cast-​off court clothing, sometimes even through the market for stolen costumes and props.43 As Andrew Gurr notes, “Apparel and playbooks were the company’s two most vital resources,” and there was plenty of opportunity for players to come by elite clothing by above-​board channels.44 Gurr points to Thomas Platter’s 1599 comment that it was common for “eminent lords or knights at their decease to bequeath and leave almost the best of their clothes to their serving men, which it is unseemly for the latter to wear, so that they offer them then for sale for a small sum to the actors.”45 There is also evidence from as early as the reign of Edward VI that used costumes and props were often used to pay players for court performances and that the Yeoman in the Revels Office also rented them out to supplement his income. The 1572 complaint of Thomas Giles, a haberdasher “who havynge apparel to lett & canott so cheplye lett the same as hyr hyghnes maskes to be lett,” testifies both to the longevity of the focus on novelty and the circulation of masquing costumes outside of their original environment.46 He asserts that “the yeman of the queens Magestyes revelles dothe vsuallye lett to hyer her sayde hyghnes maskes to the grett hurt spoylle & dyscredyt of the same /​to all sort of parsons that will hyer the same.”47 Unsurprisingly, given the emphasis on novelty in both The Masque of the Inner Temple and The Two Noble Kinsmen, the window for being considered serviceable was fairly short; costumes were expected to be worn only once for performances at court, and once, as Giles puts it, “the glosse & bewtye of the same garments ys lost & canott sowell serve to to [sic] be often allteryde & to be shewyde before hyr hyghnes,” they might find their way to an acting company, whether as a form of payment or via the open market.48 Some of Giles’s “wereres /​who for the most part be of the meanest sort of mene” would surely have been players, since it is doubtful that the truly meanest sort would possess the disposable funds to rent such clothing.49 He indicates the extent of the trade in masquing costumes by appending a partial list of the “grett number lent” and grumbling that “yet there hathe byn no redresse of the same /​by reson that the sayd yeman havynge alloen the costodye of the garmentes /​dothe lend the same at hys plesuer.”50 The circulation of used clothing means that real actors could have been wearing not just actual masquing costumes, but the actual masquing costumes that they wore for the original performance of the anti-​masque at court, resulting in a kind of perfect storm of voyeuristic verisimilitude to present to an audience. Barbara Ravelhofer argues that the “oddly incomplete character of some masque bills suggests that grotesque [anti-​ masque] costumes were procured from several sources,” which she says could have included theatrical stock, costumes provided by the Revels Office, or leftovers from previous court productions.51 Renting reveling apparel still offered an extra means of income by the time that embedded masques came on the stage early in the seventeenth

We Are All Made    143 century. Edward Kirkham, who occupied the post of Yeoman of the Revels from the 1580s through 1616, was likely permitted to rent out costumes and properties as part of his position.52 Kirkham was also for a time one of the managers of the Chapel Children, also known as the Children of Blackfriars and the Children of the Queen’s Revels. This troupe, in its various permutations between 1600 and 1610, staged at least ten plays with embedded masques.53 There were other factors at play, of course, but a direct conduit of properties from the Revels Office cannot have been unimportant in the decision to include so many representations of elite entertainments. The troupe was eventually replaced at the Blackfriars by none other than the King’s Men, and one might ask whether they took over any of the theatrical supply lines along with the theater itself. However, the inclusion of “authentic” elements from a masque in a commercial production does not mean that the performance, its elements, or the range of audience experience does not change with the movement from elite hall to playhouse. Douglas Bruster notes that The Two Noble Kinsmen was written and performed during a period of transition in English theater, a period when the rural or folk was disappearing from the stage and was being replaced by the courtly and urban.54 Within this shift toward a focus on the courtly, Kinsmen’s anti-​masque dance occupies a midpoint between promotion of and resistance to its royal original. Clare McManus identifies the differences between “idealised dancing courtier” and the “non-​courtly other” embodied in the The Masque of the Inner Temple’s juxtaposition of “elite and proletarian dance forms” as “based primarily on class difference.”55 The original anti-​masque exoticizes if not outright satirizes the rural characters whom it brings out to perform, presenting a parody of May games and asserting the separation between country and court. Bruster observes that the rural “undoubtedly held associations of the past” and of backwardness for seventeenth-​century London audiences, and The Masque of the Inner Temple sets up the morris as a grotesque, old-​fashioned, comedic opposite to the Olympian games of the courtly main masque, to which Olympian Knights are called after having taken their ladies out to dance.56 While the dancers’ entrance in the Two Noble Kinsmen in order of rank does signal what Iyengar identifies as each character’s distance from civilization, its morris deflects much of the original anti-​masque’s satire, confining a good deal of it to the Schoolmaster. In addition, it introduces a series of references designed to appeal to any citizen present in the Blackfriars audience. The Schoolmaster has asked a tanner’s daughter to participate in the dance, the Second Countryman dances “for the weavers,” a seamstress’s daughter is the missing dancer replaced by the Jailer’s Daughter, and the Fourth Countryman observes that “the credit of our town lay[s]‌on” the success of the whole (2.3.49, 3.5.57). The specification of the various trades involved in the morris and its association with the reputation of the town evoke the civic performances put on by the guilds. Civic performances would have been more personally familiar to many in a commercial audience and also would have provided yet another flattering connection between the stage and the court via the play’s association of them with the masque form. Bruster calls the morris dark and even menacing, noting that the Jailer’s Daughter does not speak to Theseus and comparing her to Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.57 At the same time, however, her status

144   John R. Ziegler as an audience figure puts some positive spin on the morris. Bruster reads her obsession with numbers as symbolically allying her with the audience. It “locates her character in a quotidian, ledger-​centered sphere; full of numbers, her speech is the language of reckoning, of the shop and tavern tallies,” and it “establishes her as an audience figure within the play—​someone, like us, impressed by the powerful figures of the main plot.”58 I would go further, substituting “the middling sort” for “us.” The middling sort, besides being those coupled most closely with the “ledger-​centered sphere,” have not only the potential for upward mobility, but also the desire to witness the status-​linked behaviors to which they aspire. In this respect, the participation of the Jailer’s Daughter in the morris is less fulfilling to her own obsession with the powerful than it is fulfilling to the audience members who wish to attend or participate in an elite entertainment. The vicarious fulfillment of the desire to emulate the powerful depends on the complicated status of the morris. Because it is also a court anti-​masque, it is not coded simply as rural or common. The tension between its two contexts as a dance event, between rejecting and relying on the courtly for its appeal, is fundamental here to the dynamics of the morris as a theatrical commodity. If the court parodically appropriated the folk dance for the anti-​masque, then as the stage reappropriated the dance for its own purposes, it weakened the core of parody and reclaimed the morris for the public arena; but by making the morris an embedded masque, the stage also applied to it a new sheen of court association.59 With the dance’s recontextualization, its elite approval shifts from laughter at the impersonation of a rural outsider to Theseus’s acknowledgment and reward of skillful performance and entertainment value. If the Jailer’s Daughter offers a pattern by which the audience is supposed to desire the nobles, as Bruster says, then the staging of the morris before Theseus onstage and its extra-​theatrical pedigree and intersections with the court make it in some ways the most authentically noble thing in the play. And, if the play ultimately deals in the “meaninglessness at the core of ceremonial distinction” and “works to subvert the notions of identification and distinction so essential to masque writing and interpreting,” then it is surely significant that when we last see the Wooer and the Jailer’s Daughter, he is still impersonating Palamon and she remains mad over her unrequited love for the knight.60 While the Jailer later says that “she’s well restored /​And to be married shortly,” the audience sees neither this restoration nor the Wooer’s abandonment of his false identity (5.6.28–​29). The noble object of the Jailer’s Daughter’s desire is “authentically” at the very best a citizen, but is allowed to remain, in a way, as nobility, and he is rewarded for it by sexual access to the woman who sees him that way. His advancement must have been gratifying to anyone with any hope of one day watching a dancing Baboon with King James, rather than with Theseus. At the same time that the morris dance appeals to the idea of social advancement, its success within the play makes an argument for the skill both of the middling sort and the players who act them. If it reclaims this particular morris for the public arena, it also does so specifically for the commercial stage, thereby asserting the bodily skill of the players and the impressiveness of the commercial theater. During a masque, because of the amount of available space, if nothing else, it is “unlikely that all members of the audience were expected to dance.”61 Instead, the revels at a masque “were a show-​case

We Are All Made    145 for the best dancers at court, performing under the close scrutiny of the ruling elite,” and they included “improvisatory forms” such as galliards and corantos, in which individual couples might show off “steps, jumps, or turns” practiced in private or invented on the spot.62 One oft-​cited incident involved the Marquis of Buckingham appeasing an angry King James at the masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue when he “ ‘sprang forward, cutting a score of lofty and minute capers.”63 The morris in The Two Noble Kinsmen translates this type of display to the stage. The players impress both onstage and offstage audiences with their dancing, which, again, was suitable to entertain the actual king at an important royal event. But even for those unaware of the previous, courtly context of the morris, its success within the narrative and the laudatory reaction of the onstage aristocrats make the case for the value of the theater to its paying patrons. And if the improvisatory nature of the performance by the Jailer’s Daughter—​and presumably that of her partner—​appears antithetical to the ritualized atmosphere of a court masque, it surely is akin to the individual displays of dancing skill that occurred once the scripted portion of a masque concluded and the line between audience and performer vanished. That the morris dance’s success depends primarily upon the Jailer’s Daughter adds a gendered element to the tension between emulation of the elite and praise of middling sort, one that privileges dance—​associated with her and with the theater—​over Palamon and Arcite’s masculine, elite method of expressing desire through combat (see also Shaw, Chapter 7 in this volume, on swordplay and dancing).64 In the same year that marked the end of female performers in court masques during James’s reign, Two Noble Kinsmen connects theater and female sexuality from the very first line of the Prologue, which asserts, “New plays and maidenheads are near akin” (Prologue 1).65 The desirability of a new play and of the virginity of the Jailer’s Daughter overlap, and she collapses both of these modes of desire within herself: her dancing body performs for an audience, and she will lose her maidenhead to the Wooer, who himself amalgamates the middling and the elite.66 However, she is not merely an erotic object, but also an erotic agent. She experiences—​doubtless in a way recognizable to some audience members—​a desire that crosses socioeconomic boundaries. Her desire focuses on one aristocratic individual. However, as an assertion of both female sexuality and cross-​class desire, these feelings are thus doubly disruptive; therefore, the male characters (the Jailer, the Doctor, the Wooer) work to contain them. The Jailer’s Daughter knows that the socioeconomic distance between her and her love object is too great, that to “marry him is hopeless” (2.4.4). “He will never affect me,” she correctly observes; “I am base, /​ . . . /​And he a prince” (2.4.2–​4). Just as it is impossible for both Palamon and Arcite to fulfill their desire for the aristocratic Emilia because of their competing claims to her and their exile by Theseus, it is impossible for the Jailer’s Daughter to fulfill her desire because of rank and status. However, even though her father and the Doctor finally redirect her ultimate desire by marrying her off to the Wooer, the morris dance provides an earlier outlet for her disruptive feelings. This expression, while threatening, is also more productive within the play than the corresponding male expression. The madness of the Jailer’s Daughter is of course spurred by her spurned affections, and the Schoolmaster tells his troupe,

146   John R. Ziegler before she arrives, “Break comely out before him [Theseus], like true lovers” (3.5.19). Ravelhofer asserts that dance was “predominantly choreographed and written by men, but also [was] a medium which opened, within certain limits, a public arena for female expression.”67 The Jailer’s daughter surpasses these usual limits:  she not only saves the performance intended for the Duke, jeopardized by a missing dancer, but also takes control over it, responding, “I’ll lead” to the Second Countryman’s “Come, lass, let’s trip it” (3.5.89, 90; see also Williams, Chapter 10 in this volume). Afterward, the Schoolmaster specifically praises the “wenches” for having “danced rarely” and, beyond winning accolades and remuneration from the onstage audience of aristocrats, the morris secures the group an engagement for an annual holiday performance for the Duke.68 Later, the Jailer’s Daughter also imagines female dance as political intervention. The Wooer reports that she imagines bringing one hundred maids in love to “dance an antic fore the Duke /​And beg his [Palamon’s] pardon” (4.1.75–​76). Following the morris, Theseus and his party continue on their way and come upon Palamon and Arcite, who are both fighting and violating their sentence of exile. A few moments before they are discovered, Arcite asks Palamon, “You are not mad?” linking him thereby with the Jailer’s Daughter (3.6.122). Earlier in the play, while imprisoned, Palamon also had threatened the Jailer to “make ye a new morris” by shaking his chains all night (2.2.276). Ultimately, however, his and Arcite’s sexual desires are channeled not into dance but into mortal combat that results in Arcite’s death after he wins but is subsequently crushed by his own panicked horse (also described as at first “dancing, as ‘twere, to th’ music /​His own hooves made”) (5.6.59–​60). The Jailer’s Daughter’s status-​ inappropriate desire leads to creative expression, which in turn leads to socially productive performance, while the royally dictated physical expression of Palamon and Arcite’s status-​appropriate desires damage the social fabric, destroying the “brave life” of an aristocratic warrior (5.5.4). Notably, Emilia, who praises the former, refuses to “taint” her eye by watching the latter, and objects, “It is enough my hearing shall be punished” (5.5.9, 7).

The Morris as Contradictory Commodity As an audience member, then, Emilia rejects an elite mode of physical display and endorses a middling mode. However, the middling morris that she endorses is itself borrowed from a courtly entertainment (written and partly performed by middling sorts in its original, extra-​textual context). These contradictions produce tensions around the social coding of the anti-​masque dance in The Two Noble Kinsmen and, by extension, expose similar tensions around moving such elite material into the commercial space of the theater. These forces find their most concrete form within the play when sexualized in the person of the Jailer’s Daughter, conflating social and romantic desires,

We Are All Made    147 those of the audience and those of the characters. In the final act, the Jailer’s Daughter says that Palamon can “dance the morris twenty mile an hour,” but in this scene, the Palamon actually present is the Wooer in the “habit” of Palamon, embodying this collapsing of the middling and the elite (5.4.50, s.d.). Elsewhere expressed in the image of “a proud lady and a proud city wife howl[ing] together,” damned for lasciviousness, such overlap evokes the complex attitude on display toward the play’s repurposed anti-​ masque (4.3.43–​44). In The Two Noble Kinsmen’s use of a courtly entertainment, the only direct reuse of a named masque dance in the Shakespearian canon, we see an example of the theater’s simultaneously competing and complementary impulses to market fantasies of elite association and upward mobility, while also selling its own superiority and making its own claim for status. Examining this dynamic better illuminates the role that the morris played in theatrical responses to the profoundly shifting socioeconomic landscape of early modern London. This consideration also points to avenues for further investigation into the complex functions and social significance of masque dances within plays, inquiries that can only enrich our understanding of Shakespeare, his theater, and their relationship to changing systems of rank and status.

Notes 1. A revival performance probably occurred at court in 1619. 2. See Anne Daye, “‘Youthful Revels, Masks, and Courtly Sights’: An Introductory Study of the Revels within the Stuart Masque,” Historical Dance 3, no. 4 (1996): 5–​22, 11. 3. See Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque:  Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): loc. 868 and 820. (All references are to location numbers in the Kindle edition.) 4. All references to William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), 3047–​3107. 5. Scholars have made strong arguments for the likely reuse in The Winter’s Tale (1611) of an anti-​masque dance from Ben Jonson’s Oberon (1611), but the play itself specifies only a dance of satyrs. 6. Keith Wrightson, “Estates, Degrees, and Sorts in Tudor and Stuart England,” History Today (January 1987): 22. 7. See also Philip J. Finkelpearl, Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 206–​211, for The Masque of the Inner Temple as promoting the militant Protestant political program of the popular Prince Henry, who died before the wedding in November 1612. 8. Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court (1590–​1619) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 19. 9. John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing, 1458–​1750 (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1999), 47. 10. Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 281. 11. Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 285. 12. All references to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), 3195–​3278.

148   John R. Ziegler 13. See, for example, Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 239 for a mention of bells in Kempe’s Nine Daies Wonder; 242–​243 for a description from a 1617 play that mentions coats, bells, and napkins together; 135–​137 for the sleeves of morris coats; 158–​166 for some records of church expenditures on morris coats; and 285 for the connection between bells, napkins, and movement. See also 262 for the costs of bells and ribbons and Forrest’s index for a more comprehensive guide to his discussions of these elements. 14. Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 239. 15. See, for example, Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 239–​241, 243–​244, 262–​264. 16. Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 106–​107 for examples of records specifying eight dancers; 147, 156–​170, and 275–​276 for Maid Marian; 72, 162, 170, 234, 275–​276 for the fool; 119–​120, 134–​135, 231, 242–​244, and 282–​285 for the hobby horse; and 160 for an example of a company consisting of a lady, a fool, and four dancers. 17. Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 238–​240. 18. Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 30. Forrest does note that the evidence for this is fragmentary and may reflect, for example, the sources that happened to survive rather than the historical reality (33). See also John Cutting, History and the Morris Dance (Alton, UK: Dance Books, 2005), 103 for the possibility that morris was popular in wealthy Anglo-​ Gallic households in the mid-​fifteenth century. 19. See Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 173 for a graph of morris events and Cutting, History and the Morris Dance, 117 and 90–​92 for morris’s move to the stage and discussion of morris in Jonson’s court entertainments. 20. See, for example, Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–​ 1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1992), 13, 213; Karen Newman, Cultural Capitals:  Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2007), 3; and Keith Wrightson, English Society: 1580–​1680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 28. 21. See also Heather Anne Hirschfeld, Joint Enterprises:  Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 63. 22. The Prologue of Kinsmen adds the claim that the entire play, based on Chaucer, “has a noble breeder, and a pure” (l. 10). 23. Paul Yachnin, “Reversal of Fortune: Shakespeare, Middleton, and the Puritans,” ELH 70, no. 3 (2003): 764–​765. For more on the “populuxe,” see also Paul Yachnin, “‘The Perfection of Ten’: Populuxe Art and Artisanal Value in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2005): 306–​327. For the theater, brothels, and the desirability of elite clothing, see Cristine M. Varholy, “‘Rich like a Lady’: Cross-​Class Dressing in the Brothels and Theaters of Early Modern London,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2008): 4–​ 34. For the theater and the desirability of masquing spaces, see John R. Ziegler, “‘The Hall must not be pestred’: Embedded Masques, Space, and Dramatized Desire,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 26 (2013): 97–​119. 24. Suzanne Gossett, “Masque Influence on the Dramaturgy of Beaumont and Fletcher,” Modern Philology 69, no. 3 (1972): 199. Gossett restricts her comment to the “select audience in the private theater” (199), but the upwardly mobile, those who wished that they were, and even the elite themselves did not exclusively attend indoor playhouses. As his diary and account books attest, Sir Humphrey Mildmay, a country gentleman, primarily attended the Blackfriars but also went to plays at the Cockpit, Globe, and Red Bull between 1633 and 1652, as well as both plays and masques at court. For detailed accounts

We Are All Made    149 of Mildmay’s theatrical visits, see Gerald Eades Bentley, “The Diary of a Caroline Theatergoer,” Modern Philology 35, no. 1 (1937): 61–​72, and Philip L. Ralph, “References to the Drama in the Mildmay Diary,” Modern Language Notes 55, no. 8 (1940): 589–​591. 25. All references to Beaumont, Francis, The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, Gray’s Inn and the Inner Temple, in A Book of Masques: In Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, ed. Philip Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 26. See Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007) for the architectural practice of installing screens or viewing holes for the powerful, allowing them to observe without being observed (for example, in churches or halls). Also, see specifically Chapter 10 on galleries and Chapter 4 on the various categories of holes and their implications for privacy. Orlin often uses “private” to mean being alone, while I use it to make a distinction between more and less publicly accessible spaces, but the difference is in many ways merely one of degrees. Mary Thomas Crane, “Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England,” JEMCS 9, no. 1 (2009): 4–​22 falls somewhere between, arguing that true privacy—​whether as solitude or illicit activity with another—​was most frequently had outdoors. 27. John Chamberlain, The Chamberlain Letters: A Selection of the Letters of John Chamberlain Concerning Life in England from 1597 to 1626, ed. Elizabeth McClure Thomson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965), 75. 28. Chamberlain, Chamberlain Letters,  75–​76. 29. Chamberlain, Chamberlain Letters, 75. 30. Chamberlain, Chamberlain Letters. 31. That the “maying” is mentioned first in 2.3, and then again in 2.5 and 3.1, though it does not occur until 3.5, suggests some intention to build up to an important theatrical moment. The play’s addition of speaking parts for the dancers certainly implies expansion of a popular or well-​known piece of stage business. 32. Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 145, 129. 33. Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 132. 34. Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 130–​134. 35. There is a possible discrepancy between the Countrymen’s assumption that Theseus will see their dance (“the tanner’s daughter [ . . . ] must see the Duke, and she must dance too” and Theseus’s apparent surprise at coming upon the performers in the woods (“This way the stag took. [ . . . ] What have we here?” [2.3.44–​45, 3.5.96, 98]). On the other hand, perhaps a chance meeting is the best hope for the Countrymen of gaining access to Theseus’s company and they have merely prepared against it. 36. Some scholars make arguments for larger structural correspondences as well. See Noel R. Blincoe, “The Analogous Qualities of The Two Noble Kinsmen and Masque of the Inner Temple and Grey’s Inn,” Notes and Queries ns 43, no. 2 (1996): 168–​171 for the “three basic movements” of Kinsmen as parallel to the three sections of The Masque of the Inner Temple; John P. Cutts, “Shakespeare’s Song and Masque Hand in The Two Noble Kinsmen,” English Miscellany 18 (1967): 55–​85 for the masque-​like opening and closing of the play; Allardyce Nicoll, Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage (New York: Beaufort, 1938), 142 for its masque-​like effects; Hugh Richmond, “Performance as Criticism:  The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in Shakespeare, Fletcher, and the Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Charles Frey (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 173–​174 for its masque-​like attributes and formal counterpoints in the manner of Beaumont’s masque; and Christopher J. Cobb, The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare: Text and Theatrical Technique (Newark: University

150   John R. Ziegler of Delaware Press, 2007) for the wedding procession in terms of “theatrical spectacle” and genre. Northrop Frye, “Romance as Masque,” in Shakespeare’s Romances Reconsidered, eds. Carol McGuiness Kay and Henry E. Jacobs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), says that romance, including The Two Noble Kinsmen, “approximates the complete polarity of the anti-​masque and masque” and so calls romance “a democratized version” of the masque, “a people’s masque, as it were” (60). Additionally, see Sujata Iyengar, “Moorish Dancing in The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism and Reviews (MRDE) 20 (2007):  85–​107 for parallels between Kinsmen and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 37. Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, 279–​280. 38. Though no playbills survive, Tiffany Stern, “‘On each Wall and Corner Poast’: Playbill, Title-​Pages, and Advertising in Early Modern London,” ELR 36, no. 1 (2006): 57–​89 argues that title-​pages, which were also posted about London as advertisements, might tell us much about what they looked like. 39. Hippolyta says that she was “[n]‌ever so pleased” and Emilia that it was “an excellent dance, /​And for a preface, I never heard a better” (3.6.149–​151). Their reactions call to mind a sincere counterpoint to the elite mockery of Bottom’s show in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 40. Sarah P. Sutherland, Masques in Jacobean Tragedy (New  York:  AMS, 1983), notes that Beaumont likely also wrote the embedded masque in the very popular Maid’s Tragedy and clearly “kept abreast of Ben Jonson’s contribution to the genre” (63), creating further connections between the worlds of playhouse and masquing hall. 41. Cutts, “Shakespeare’s Song,” 60. 42. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et  al. (New  York:  Norton, 1997), 2873–​ 2964. See Ashley H. Thorndike, “Influence of the Court-​Masques on the Drama, 1608–​15,” PMLA 15, no. 1 (1900): 114–​120 for an early argument that remains generally accepted by editors. 43. See Peter Stallybrass, “Properties in Clothes: The Materials of the Renaissance Theatre,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, eds. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 188; Natasha Korda, “Women’s Theatrical Properties,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, eds. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 210–​218; and Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 238. 44. Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 194. 45. Quoted in Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 194. 46. Thomas Giles, “A Complaint of Thomas Gylles against the Yeoman of the Revells,” in Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Albert Feuillerat (1908; reprint, Louvain, Belgium: A. Uystpruyst, 1963), 409. 47. Giles, “A Complaint.” 48. Giles, “A Complaint.” 49. Giles, “A Complaint.” 50. Giles, “A Complaint.” One solution he proposes is to disassemble the clothing until it needs to be reassembled in a new way for a new show. 51. Ravelhofer, Early Stuart Masque, loc. 1635–​1640. 52. See Will Fisher, “Staging the Beard:  Masculinity in Early Modern English culture,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, eds. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 239.

We Are All Made    151 53. The Gentleman Usher is a probable attribution. Other of the troupe’s plays with embedded masques are The Widow’s Tears, A  Woman Is a Weathercock, Cynthia’s Revels, Sir Giles Goosecap, The Dutch Courtesan, Your Five Gallants, The Contention and Tragedy of Byron, The Coxcomb, and The Insatiate Countess, all performed during Kirkham’s tenure as Yeoman. For a complete list of the known repertoire of the troupe, see Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and Their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), Appendix C. 54. Douglas Bruster, “The Jailer’s Daughter and the Politics of Madwomen’s Language,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46, no. 3 (1995), 277. 55. McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage, 31. 56. Bruster, “Jailer’s Daughter,” 291. 57. Bruster, “Jailer’s Daughter,” 290. 58. Bruster, “Jailer’s Daughter,” 282. Richard Abrams, “The Two Noble Kinsmen as Bourgeois Drama,” in Shakespeare, Fletcher, and the Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Charles Frey (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989) sees all of the central characters in the play as representatives of the striving bourgeoisie, “relocate[s]‌the spirit of bourgeois London in the world of the dramatis personae,” and reads the balance sheet as structuring the entire play (145). 59. Many court dances were in fact adapted from what were referred to as country dances, however much they did or did not reflect actual rural dance practices, but without the sense of satire imbued by inclusion in an anti-​masque. Ravelhofer notes that “it has been suggested that country dance publications from the mid-​seventeenth century and later reflect the performance practices in early Stuart masques” and that country dances “were taught in dancing schools and . . . the repertoire was acceptable for aristocratic and even royal performers” (Early Stuart Masque, loc. 550, 566). 60. Hirschfeld, Joint Enterprises, 79, 77. The Doctor takes the part of Arcite to the Wooer’s Palamon. 61. Daye, “Youthful Revels,” 16. 62. Daye, “Youthful Revels,” 17–​18. 63. Daye, “Youthful Revels,” 18. 64. Elite masculine dance, according to McManus, is itself a form of “competitive display” that was “an attribute of the ideal warrior-​statesman” (Women on the Renaissance Stage, 47). 65. McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage, 164. 66. Emilia is also a desired virgin, but she observes rather than performs. 67. Ravelhofer, Early Stuart Masque, loc. 1371. 68. The Schoolmaster’s epilogue promises that if they are afforded a maypole, “Ere the year run out, /​We’ll make thee laugh, and all this rout” (3.6.1487–​1488). Pirithous gives them money “to paint your pole withal” (3.6.153).

Bibliography Astington, John H. English Court Theatre, 1558–​1642. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cutting, John. History and the Morris Dance. Alton, UK: Dance Books, 2005.

152   John R. Ziegler Dawson, Anthony B., and Paul Yachnin. The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Forrest, John. The History of Morris Dancing, 1458–​1750. Cambridge: John Clarke, 1999. Frey, Charles, ed. Shakespeare, Fletcher, and the Two Noble Kinsmen. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. McManus, Clare. Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court (1590–​1619). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Ravelhofer, Barbara. The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Chapter 6

T h e Merchan t of V e n ice’ s Missing Mas qu e Absence, Touch, and Religious Residues Lizzie Leopold

In Act II, Scene V, of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Bassanio, a Venetian lord, prepares to host a masque. Shylock the Jew reluctantly decides to attend, as does his daughter Jessica, unbeknownst to him, disguised as a boy and appointed “torch-​bearer” (2.4.39)1 by her secret, Christian lover, Lorenzo. But the trade winds change unexpectedly and Bassanio’s ship is to sail that very evening, cancelling the masked ball. Although this masqued scene is never realized, written, or staged, I  posit that its mention is enough reason to interrogate its possibility. Through a Derridean decentering of presence, bringing together the extensive literature on Elizabethan masques, early modern understandings of touch and dance, and a deep interrogation of religious tensions, as played out and understood throughout The Merchant of Venice, the masque’s textual absence is at once made an important, albeit impossible, presence. These intersecting texts create a web of social ideologies that clearly describe the early modern moment from which The Merchant of Venice emerges. Planning for and then cancelling a gathering of these feuding parties, wherein religious difference and its gendered, classed connotations as experienced through dance was the primary friction, begs an intervention. In his article “Lorenzo’s ‘Infidel’: The Staging of Difference in The Merchant of Venice,” Paul Gaudet writes that the play does not provide automatic or unambiguous correspondence between verbal structures and meaning:  “There are numerous gaps or holes or indeterminate moments that allow variant possibilities, but simultaneously require filling in or resolution in performance.”2 The Merchant of Venice’s missing masque will be read as one of those holes; although this hole is not resolved theatrically in performance, it is resolved theoretically and interdisciplinarily, bringing together Shakespeare’s text with the inextricability of theories and discourses on dance, touch, and the early modern body.

154   Lizzie Leopold In considering the significant integration of a dance in many of Shakespeare’s plays, it is my aim to introduce dance and performance studies scholarship and methodologies to the existing Merchant of Venice literature. This intertwining of religious concern with choreographic consideration, as it occurs throughout the play, creates an opportunity to consider absence (the unrealized masque) as an integral part of the play text. Performance, dance included, has long been engulfed in a conversation about its own disappearance, most notably begun by scholar Peggy Phelan in her seminal text Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. With Phelan’s assertion that disappearance is a part of performance’s ontology,3 textual absence does not necessarily predicate the unchoreographed; rather, The Merchant of Venice’s missing masque is disappeared, its ghosted presence in Bassanio’s invitation enough reason to interrogate its theoretical, and previous or possible, existence. Shakespeare’s teased masque scene seems to support Phelan’s idea that ephemerality is ontological to dance. What is unwritten is still a powerful choreography—​the absence itself working to organize bodies in space, separated by religious and gendered difference. Of course, as Anthony Brennan argues in Onstage and Offstage Worlds in Shakespeare’s Plays, Shakespeare frequently evoked images of offstage action, writing his plays in order to meet logistical and dramatic needs. Brennan writes, Often, because of the complex strands of his plots and the crowded details of the interactions between many characters, Shakespeare has not only to report events that cannot easily be staged but also to choose from his sources which events to make the active substance of his scenes, which events to transmit by incidental report, which events to omit altogether, and what characters and actions to add to make up for deficiencies he perceived in his sources.4

Most famously, this offstage action includes Ophelia’s report of Hamlet’s appearance and Falstaff ’s death. While The Merchant of Venice’s masque is a strategic omission and is not evoked as happening offstage, it similarly serves the dramaturgical necessities and theatrical logistics of the production. A masque scene is an expensive proposition, and, as I argue in the coming pages, its mention was sufficient to evoke the danced images that beget the play’s dramatization of religious tensions. Similarly ubiquitous in the Shakespearean cannon, masquerade scenes appear in many other works, including Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, The Tragedy of King Lear, and more. The frequent use of the masquerade device to address gendered, social roles only makes the Merchant of Venice omission more striking. Furthermore, my interest in the cancelled masque is not without scholarly support. The third edition of the Arden publication of The Merchant of Venice offers two separate footnotes that indicate the important possibility of this omission. The first mention of the masque is Lorenzo’s “Go, gentlemen, /​Will you prepare you for this masque tonight?” (2.4.21–​22). John Drakakis, Arden’s editor, notes that the 1926 Cambridge edition, edited by John Dover Wilson, posits these lines as evidence of cutting a previously inscribed masque scene.5 Dover Wilson notes the opening lines of this scene: “Nay, we will slink away in supper-​time,

The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque    155 /​Disguise us at my lodging, and return /​All in an hour” (2.4.1–​3). He reads the broken ending line, “All in an hour,” as a suggestion that “a passage about a masque has been cut,” and reads the men’s slinking away as it appears in Much Ado about Nothing, Henry VIII, and Love’s Labour’s Lost, as a device for the revelers to exit the stage and prepare for the impending masque scene.6 The Arden edition additionally cites M. M. Mahood’s speculation in the New Cambridge Shakespeare series that the cancellation of the masque (“Fie, fie, Gratiano. Where are all the rest? /​’Tis nine o’clock; our friends all stay for you. /​No masque tonight, the wind is come about” [2.6.61–​63]) was an authorial revision of a fuller masque scene that was once in its place.7 Mahood writes, “It may well be that Shakespeare wrote one of the masquing scenes that he excelled at before he realized that the Jessica episode was thereby made too lengthy, and that he then substituted for it the nine lines that conclude 2.6.”8 As Brennan argues, Shakespeare often wrote with practical considerations in mind; thus, the cancelled masque also helps move the plot along more swiftly.9 This dramatic tool evokes the omitted scene in the collective minds of the audience without having to stage the large-​scale, populous, elaborately costumed event. Whether or not these additional speculations strengthen my own, they certainly indicate the need to acknowledge the possibility of a masque scene, a possibility supported by methodologies employed by Shakespeare scholar Alan Brissenden in his text Shakespeare and the Dance. Brissenden’s text argues for dance as an important element of many Shakespearean plays, as a recurrent symbol of harmony and concord.10 He situates Much Ado about Nothing and Love’s Labour’s Lost at two ends of the spectrum, the former with more dance than any other play in the canon, and the latter with no actual dancing yet much talk of it.11 Of dance in Love’s Labour’s Lost he writes, “Shakespeare approaches it cautiously, even flirtatiously, using the idea of the dance and specifically avoiding the dance itself [ . . . ]. Even though there is no dancing in the play except that perhaps at the very end, the idea of dancing underlies the surface of the text.”12 In this instance, dance becomes a comedic trope in metaphor and highlights the play’s thematic investment in the unfinished, the broken, and the incomplete.13 Similarly, I argue that the teased masque in The Merchant of Venice is a metaphor for the recurrent theme of disguise and deception, mask for masque. With gendered disguise and religious conversion at the center of the plot, The Merchant of Venice uses dance to highlight the impossibility of touch between opposing factions, touch inextricably tied to the choreography of an Elizabethan masque. “Underlying the surface of the text,”14 this missing masque scene haunts one of Shakespeare’s darkest comedies. While themes of religious conversion and the resulting frictions between Jewish and Christian factions have been explored at length in existing literature, I believe that the possibility of a masquerade opens up conversations about the relationship of these frictions to touch, an implicit part of dancing at an Elizabethan masked ball. The masque’s conspicuous absence also introduces performance theory and dance studies’ theorizations of presence, absence, and the relationships between bodies and texts to a field of study—​Shakespearean literature—​dominated by a hierarchical focus on the latter. As Brissenden writes, the idea of dancing may underlie Shakespeare’s prose even when it is not described or mentioned outright. Furthermore, the following scholars

156   Lizzie Leopold will complicate the textual relationship and ontological distinction between “the idea of dancing” and dancing itself. With an attention to Peggy Phelan’s theories, performance scholar André Lepecki brings together Jacques Derrida’s notions of “traces”15 with a richly historicized understanding of the relationship of the body to the text in an essay entitled “Inscribing Dance,” included in Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, an anthology edited by Lepecki. In his essay, Lepecki interrogates the historical and contemporary relationship of dance and dance theorizing to the act of writing, or documenting, the danced event. Thus, he asks deeply pointed questions about the assumptive relationships between the presence of the dancing body, as realized in the text, and the text itself as a means of conjuring, or forcing, presence. The chronology of these events is loosened; does dance precede its documentation, or does the inscription beget the dance event, as its presence is predicated on “traces” left behind? In the translator’s preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak explains that trace “is the mark of the absence of a presence, always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience.”16 She also explains that the word’s French meaning carries strong associations to “track, [or] footprint,”17 a particularly potent connection for the embodied, choreographic concerns herein. Lepecki summarizes: The late eighteenth century sets up conditions of possibility for an understanding of movement isomorphic with an understanding of presence as invisible, elusive—​ presence as condemnation to disappearance. This fleeting presence as that which will not stay put has informed the framing of dance’s visibility ever since—​dance’s constitution of itself as a force-​field of absence-​presence, a field charged with a lament verging on mourning.18

Thus, identifying Derridean traces of a masque in Shakespeare’s four-​hundred-​year-​ old play reveals footprints, unearthing choreographic intention as powerfully enduring choreography. Theorizing the masque in this manner, it is unwarranted to mourn the perceived ontological ephemerality of a dance that has endured more than four centuries, hidden beneath the surface of Shakespeare’s text. The Merchant of Venice’s masque is an example of “dance as performance of absence-​ presence,”19 its brief textual mention invoking its status as already disappeared. Furthermore, this absent masquerade scene suggests a particular relationship of dance to the text, a relationship that undoes an assumptive relationship between choreography and visuality, as well as disturbing a chronological relationship between the document and the dance event. The dance does not need to be seen (or staged) to be realized, and does not need to be written to be documented. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare’s prose becomes the choreographic trace, thus suggesting the masque, as both literary and embodied expression, as absence-​presence. The text and the dance are mutually and simultaneously constitutive in their like absence; the unwritten masque scene is realized through its absence. And while the trace always refers to more traces, Lepecki argues that “theories of dance (and performance in general) free themselves

The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque    157 from the visual attachment that has traditionally accompanied them.”20 Through this theoretical framework, he continues, “dance studies no longer have to serve the eye alone.”21 Reading into the textual gap, Shakespeare’s missing masque also suggests that dance studies are not only realized when written. Where Derrida says, “We would have to choose then, between writing and dance,”22 I suggest that this is an impossibility, as the two are nearly impossible to decipher from one another, especially in their presence-​ absence. Synthesizing Derrida’s “displacement of presence from center of philosophy”23 with Phelan and a decentering of visuality as the necessary precursor for a dance studies intervention, Lepecki lays the groundwork for an interrogation of a Shakespearean masque never corporeally realized. While not allowing the play characters to dance, Shakespeare does not write their escape from choreography. The written text and the moving body are inextricably intertwined in indecipherable chronologies and invisible visibilities.

The Merchant and the Masque Written between 1596 and 1598 and appearing in the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, The Merchant of Venice is arguably among the playwright’s most controversial works. 24 The play, an oddly categorized comedy, tells the story of Venetian merchant Antonio and his ill-​f ated pact with moneylender Shylock the Jew, leveraged against a pound of his own “fair flesh, to be cut off and taken /​ In what part of your body pleaseth me” (1.3.149–​50). Antonio seeks to borrow funds, on behalf of friend Bassanio, against his currently sailing fleet of ships. Bassiano wishes to wed Portia; Lorenzo wishes to wed Jessica; Gratiano wishes to wed Nerissa. In the midst of these fraught courtships, Antonio’s fleet is lost, his debt is called in, and a trial ensues to decide the legality of Antonio’s corporeal debt to Shylock. The women, disguised as men, help to sway the court and spare Antonio’s life, while Shylock is punished for the morbid terms of the contract. The play ends with Shylock’s conversion to Christianity, forced by the court, and Jessica’s willing conversion, as a term of her marriage to Lorenzo, her father’s estate bequeathed to the new couple as an additional punishment for his illegal lending practices. Antonio’s ships are finally saved, and the three Christian couples rejoice in their collective good fortune. Debates about the play’s anti-​S emitism, with scholars firmly divided on the topic, continue to keep The Merchant of Venice alive onstage and in scholarly arenas. 25 The character of Shylock the Jew has been variously labeled as comic villain, tragic protagonist, and troubled scapegoat. By attempting to forbid his daughter’s union to Lorenzo and her attendance at the cancelled masque, I add unintentional choreographer to this list of descriptors. Scholar James Shapiro writes of intersecting constructions of English and Jewish identity during Shakespeare’s lifetime in

158   Lizzie Leopold order to update The Merchant of Venice’s religiously fixated secondary scholarship from theological citation to early modern English contextualization. 26 Following Shapiro’s lead, early modern understandings of the body and dance become integral contributors to the already rich literature surrounding this fraught Shakespearean masterwork. Before proceeding any further, it is important to assert that dance, music, and touch were integral parts of the implied masque, although they are not mentioned by name in the play. The Oxford English Dictionary offers multiple definitions for “masque,” including dramatic court performances, masked persons, and masked balls. The later definition is most germane to this chapter, as it refers to a participatory event as would have taken place in The Merchant of Venice, as opposed to a formal and private court performance. The definition reads, “An entertainment in which masked participants dance; a masquerade, a masked ball.”27 Dancing was always accompanied by music. Music prompted the dance steps and kept unison time, an integral part of the event. Jessica’s final line in the play further illuminates the inextricability of dance and music, as well as revealing her own anxieties about her dancing body: “I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (5.1.69). If music begets dancing in the Elizabethan masque, Jessica’s line implies an unease with the musicians’ call to action; her ears ask that which her body is not wont to do. This admission is met by Lorenzo’s speech that anyone who is not moved (and we can read “moved” as both emotionally and physically, as in dancing) by music is not to be trusted. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are as dull as night And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music. (5.1.83–​88)

Sixteenth-​century French cleric turned dance historian Thoinot Arbeau writes in his 1588 collection of early court dances, “Dancing depends on music because, without the virtue of rhythm, dancing would be meaningless and confused, so much so that it is necessary that the gestures of the limbs should keep time with the musical instruments and not the foot speak of one thing and the music of another.”28 Theatrical productions and dancing were similarly intertwined; a good Shakespearean actor was expected to also be an accomplished dancer.29 These musically motivated dances were always also performances of classed embodiment through the disciplined execution of choreographed routines, the attendees belonging to the exclusive spaces of these events through their ability to dance. Arbeau considered these dances to be “an essential part of the education of every well-​bred young man.”30 These social dance routines, as described in the coming pages, included strict choreographies of proximity, and the touching of hands was well integrated into the direction. While not every Renaissance

The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque    159 dance called for close contact, throughout an Elizabethan masque participants would have often touched palms with fellow revelers while dancing the partnered and group routines documented by Arbeau, John Playford, and many others. Arbeau writes sensuously of the relationship between dance and touch: “And there is more to it than this, for dancing, is practised to reveal whether lovers are in good healthy and sound of limb, after which they are permitted to kiss their mistresses in order that they may touch and savour one another. . . .”31 Thus, it is safe to assume that the missing masque would have included music, movement, and touch, intertwined in a moment of mutually constitutive social and societal conformity. Although Barbara Ravelhofer’s extensive description of the early modern masque, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music,32 does not mention a literal mask, the etymological relation of the two words begs an intervention. The Oxford English Dictionary does offer an additional definition of masque as “a masked person; a person wearing a mask,”33 as well as the definition of mask as “a covering worn on or held in front of the face for disguise, esp. made of velvet, silk, etc., and concealing the whole face or upper part of it (except the eyes), worn at balls and masques.”34 It additionally offers a more figurative meaning, “a pretence, a front, an outward show intended to deceive.” 35 In this volume, Anne Daye’s Chapter  4, “ ‘The Revellers Are Entering’:  Shakespeare and Masquing Practice in Tudor and Stuart England,” pays particular attention to the vizards worn by masque participants. 36 Daye describes the intersecting and overlapping practices of staged Shakespearean masques and the evolving masque as “social revel.”37 With this, she carefully describes the centrality of costume and masked facial covering to the masque event. For Shakespeare, the vizard was often used as a plot device, disguising characters in order to gain entrance to the masque or to stage dialogue between dancing partners that otherwise would have been impossible. 38 This “fantastic, [and] less realistic” 39 employment of the prop simply exaggerated the “realistic settings for sociable courtship encounters”40 that the real-​l ife masque provided. With The Merchant of Venice’s thematic focus on cultural and religious prejudices, tensions compounded by the visual ambiguity of religion and the oft used cross-​ dressing as disguise, introducing the masque/​mask holds a certain irony and potency. Lorenzo’s “Will you prepare you for this masque tonight?” (2.4.22) takes on a whole new meaning, a meta-​theatrical meaning in which he asks the audience if they are prepared for the confusion of outward appearances with inward selves that is about to ensue. This doubled meaning for mask—​an outward show intended to deceive—​resonates with Jessica’s cross-​dressing torchbearer disguise, a conceit to be discussed in more detail in the coming pages, as well as with Portia’s casket plot. Before Bassanio chooses a casket, in hopes of winning Portia’s heart, he speaks: “So may the outward shows be least themselves, /​The world is still deceived with ornament” (3.2.73–​74). Outsides mask interior truths, distracting with fine metals and fancy adornment. The masque, masks, and moving bodies meet in the absence-​presence of the invisibly choreographed Merchant of Venice.

160   Lizzie Leopold

Dancing Treatises and Cultural Choreographies John Playford’s The English Dancing Master, originally published in 1651, provides limited insight into both the particular steps performed during this time period and the sociopolitical implications of these steps.41 While scholar Keith Whitlock describes the royalist values and critiques implicit in The English Dancing Master’s foreword and even imbedded in the dances’ titles,42 Playford offers little detail about the actual steps and their execution—​a testament to the vexed relationship between movement and its notation. Of course, Playford’s effort was not singular, as many Renaissance dancing masters translated their work onto paper, including Fabritio Caroso and Cesare Negri of Italy. And while it is not the project of this chapter to offer a comprehensive reading of these numerous dance treatises, a short reading of Playford’s The English Dancing Master will clarify the actual dance steps of this period, as well as the ideologies written into their documentation. With an introductory paragraph addressed “To the Ingenious Reader,” and not the dancer or the musician, the subsequent pages list approximately 150 specific choreographies of dances performed around the time of its publication. With whimsical titles like “If All The World Were Paper,” “Maid in the Mood,” and “Jenny, Come Tye My Cravat,” each page of Playford’s text begins with the musical score, and underneath these staffs are written descriptions of the steps as they correspond to the musical measures. The choreographic descriptions are difficult to translate back into steps, but it is impossible to fault Playford for these shortcomings. More than three hundred years after its publication, dance notation is still struggling to achieve the universality and success of musical notation.43 In many ways, the pages of The English Dancing Master exemplify and amplify the ephemeral nature of the dance steps by juxtaposing them with the musical score, a score that today’s musicians could successfully recreate. With that in mind, 150 choreographic examples, albeit in nonstandardized notation languages, are more than sufficient to identify the trends throughout. Dance number 148, aptly named “The Mask,”44 illustrative of many of the included dances, is described for four performers, two female and two male. Equal numbers of men and women dancers are consistent throughout the treatise. Playford describes floor patterns: The first man goes above the first woman and into the second woman’s place. The second woman trades places with the second man and the second man travels into the first woman’s place. Then all four turn. After these spatial descriptors, the choreographic action is revealed.45 “All four hands across half round, then fall back and hands across half round . . . four meet and jump, and clap hands, then take hands half around, and so cast off, then lead down and the other lead up.”46 The description goes on. What I wish to focus on is Playford’s attentiveness to the hands. While he does not take care to tell what the eyes do, where to look, or how the legs should shape, he is consistently describing the relationship between the dancing bodies, especially regarding the hands—​when to touch another person. A dance entitled “If All the World Were

The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque    161 Paper” begins similarly: “Hands all, and meet. Back again.”47 This policing of proximity and touch between bodies is most resonant with The Merchant of Venice’s imagined masque. But Playford’s treatise offers more than simply dance documentation; through a choreographic close reading of his treatise, an oft used dance studies methodology, each notated work reveals ideologies of early modern England and the bodies that inhabited it. Seventeenth-​century English physician and philosopher John Bulwer wrote extensively about the body’s ability to communicate through gesture and movement. In a post-​Tower-​of-​Babel age of shattered human linguistic unity, he insisted—​through his writings—​that human expression demanded motion and that the principal sites of this expression were the head and the hands.48 Following this biblical collapse of a universal language,49 he subsequently felt that body language, as we have come to call it today, was more “Noble and necessarie”50 than spoken and written language. Connecting directly with Playford’s dance descriptions and The Merchant of Venice’s masque is Bulwer’s 1644 treatise, Chirologia; or the Naturall Language of the Hand. Bulwer “proposes to show us that their [hands] range of expressiveness is actually greater than that of words,”51 proceeding with an exhaustive list of what we do with our hands—​take acquaintance, confess ourselves deceived by a mistake, manifest our love, entertain, imprecate, and so on. Scholar Steven Greenblatt, in his essay “Toward a Universal Language of Motion:  Reflections of a Seventeenth-​Century Muscle Man,” identifies two potential complications for Bulwer’s theorizations of a natural language of the body: “the demon of involuntary or nonsignificant movement” and “the demon of culture.”52 To the latter point, he explains that “like any other language, determined by the varied and changing customs of people,”53 the hands are rarely pure of cultural influence. Indeed, both Shakespeare and Playford understood this “demon” well; while the body and its hands may have the ability to speak naturally, early modern English culture determined moral, religious, gendered, and classed boundaries for these bodily expressions. Bulwer himself, while longing for the body’s natural state, acknowledged the precarity (or even impossibility) of an unadulterated embodied self. He writes, “Take heede, that while your Hand endeavours to accomplish the acts of Rhetoricall pronounciation, you lose not modestie, and the morall and civill verrves, nor the authroritie of a grave and honest man.”54 And, of course, as evidenced by the storied careers of Renaissance and early modern dancing masters (and the dense treatises they left behind), dance is a movement language deeply invested in corporeal training, learning and performing a particular (not natural) embodied self in order to be read as noble, educated, and elegant. Lorenzo would do well to heed Bulwer’s warning, acquiescing to early modern moral and religious codes that would forbid him from taking Jessica’s hand in a dance all too easily read as a statement. With an in-​depth look at themes of hands in various early modern contexts, scholars Anne Sophie Refskou and Laura Søvsø Thomasen continue to engage with Bulwer’s extensive and enduring texts. Referencing religious imagery, scientific illustrations, and various manuals of the day, Refskou and Thomasen highlight the ways in which touching and pointing, as functions of the hand, “may illuminate wider epistemological discourses”

162   Lizzie Leopold of the period.55 I, of course, would add dancing to their list of handed actions. They propose that early modern understandings and renderings of the hand provide crucial evidence for the hand as a “cross-​section where outward and inward movements of human perception, cognition, emotion and bodily expression meet.”56 Bulwer himself writes similarly: “Gestures of the Hand must be prepar’d in the Mind, together with the inward speech, that precedes the outward expression.”57 The field of dance studies has long been invested in gesture as an extension of dance, with an attention to minor movements and their communicative possibilities and embodied/​imbedded cultural ideologies.58 It is at the intersection of gesture, dance, and touch that the hands of Jessica and Lorenzo might meet—​conflating rhetorical gesture with early modern masque movements to unfix physical bodies and bodies of the text. Playford’s choreographic notations call for clapping, clasping, and meeting of hands, all fraught with the touching that Refskou and Thomasen read as powerfully representative of early modern interiority. The meeting of hands both bridges and polices distance between gendered and religiously ascribed bodies. With gesture, as put forward by Bulwer himself, as a cross-​disciplinary semiotic tool, The Merchant of Venice speaks through these minor movements of a missing masque. With the written documentation and circulation of dances becoming increasingly prominent during the time of The English Dancing Master’s debut, dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster writes of the etymological connection between choreography, its writing (as in graph), and subsequent circulation. She chronicles how early dance-​masters and dance treatises traveled across countries and continents as colonizing forces, choreographing distant populations into courtly movements, controlled bodies, and imperialist ideologies that “could even assist in the colonial expansion from Europe and England into the rest of the world.”59 These early imperial choreographic networks were politically motivated and propagated colonial ideologies through the body and through dance. With this in mind, the work of Jewish Renaissance dancing masters, documented extensively by scholar Barbara Sparti, is of particular interest. Gugleilmo Ebreo, or William the Jew of Pesaro, wrote nine dance treatises in his lifetime—​seven of which survive today.60 Information about the relationship between Ebreo’s profession and his religion is particularly relevant to this project, imagining a Shakespearian audience’s reaction to Lorenzo and Jessica’s potential partnering. Reading Ebreo’s work alongside the sixteenth-​century decrees that supported the Roman Catholic Church’s orders to limit relations between Jews and Christians, dancing is revealed as a particularly contested arena of religious and social interaction.61 Jewish clergy, likewise, enacted rules to limit danced contact between opposing religious factions. Yet Sparti makes a compelling case for Renaissance dance practices as a space often shared between opposing religious factions. The curriculums of dancing schools, both Jewish and Christian, were shared, and Ebreo served both populations, with “Jewish dancing-​masters a firm presence in the courts and cities of early modern Italy.”62 These contradictions between communal dancing and divisive religious practices pushed Ebreo’s eventual conversion to Christianity at the behest of a patron. Sparti provocatively suggests that Ebreo and his Jewish colleagues chose dancing-​master as profession because of the dearth of occupations available to Jews during this time.63 It seems that concerns about embodied

The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque    163 movement and religious affiliation were deeply entrenched in early modern culture when Shakespeare wrote his play. Furthermore, The Merchant of Venice is set in Ebreo’s home country of Italy, a frequent Shakespearean location. The widespread influence of Italian literature and culture on Elizabethan England is well documented in Michele Marrapodi’s Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance:  Appropriation, Transformation, Opposition.64 Thus, it is not difficult to imagine Italian dance practices also permeating Shakespearean stages. Considering the writing of Playford, Bulwer, and their contemporaries, Jessica and Lorenzo’s bodies could dance together at the proposed masque, but would they be culturally obligated to do otherwise, with these cultural pressures arising from religious difference? Their hands would inevitably meet in choreographed routine and the legibility of their love would be exposed, and Jessica’s cross-​dressing disguise adds a layer of complication to this proposed event. But despite Jessica’s gendered disguise, the two would often brush shoulders and meet palms throughout the interweaving of bodies in the large group dances that Playford describes. While these dances were populated by heterosexual pairings, they were performed in large group settings with many ensemble movements and thus were the occasion for choreographed same-​sex encounters. For example, the first dance described in the opening pages of The English Dancing Master reads, “Take all hands and go around, back again—​All the men go in and meet in the middle and back again.”65 A subsequent dance only one page later, entitled “Mill-​Field,” has as its third direction, “The two men take hands.”66 Thus, even if Jessica danced a male role in the proposed masque, she would have still had occasion to dance with and beside Lorenzo, clasping hands along the way. Playford’s copious notations not only described the dances themselves, but in the very act of writing down the dance, he asserted a place for the moving body within a highly policed hierarchy of modernity that exalted the written word—​a hierarchy directly challenged by Bulwer. My reading of Shakespeare’s omitted masque from The Merchant of Venice’s text highlights this continued clash between the textual and the embodied as legible and enduring modes of communication. The meeting of religiously loaded palms, Jessica’s to Lorenzo’s, was a choreography too intimate to be realized so early in the play. Dramaturgically, Shakespeare saved this climatic coming together for the final marriage scene. The choreographic dictates of the play continue to keep bodies in proximal distance but out of arm’s reach. In his writing, Shakespeare’s hands, although naturally linguistic and capable, were culturally tied.

Religious Residues and Danced Conversion Keith Whitlock’s reading of The English Dancing Master begins to describe the polarizing effect of dance during these transitional times, as masques evolved from highly

164   Lizzie Leopold regulated court entertainments and came to be seen on the commercial stage and in private homes, as in Bassanio’s gathering. With the masque firmly positioned in the court, it worked to reinforce conservative, aristocratic, and monarchic worldviews, legitimating social order as divinely determined and permanent. Taking the masque outside of these highly regulated scenarios made room for the “revels” and the immoralities of participatory and energetic social dancing.67 This kind of dancing was often seen as a manifestation of disorderly behavior and a lack of physical control, inevitably leading to excessive eating and/​or drinking and illicit or unruly sex.68 Many advised against dancing too energetically in public for fear that the body would sweat, an offensively corporeal result of this noble and graceful action.69 The participatory nature of this new masque was also problematic. Where earlier masques were performances for the court, enthusiasm for the spectacle soon erased delineations between observing and doing. Notably, in 1532, Anne Boleyn led the first recorded masque in which women took out the lords to dance with them. As Walter Sorell says, “This ‘commoning’ between masquers and spectators was one of the highlights of these spectacles.”70 The way in which this communal dancing ignored class and gender boundaries, as indicated by the Boleyn anecdote, opens up the possibility that The Merchant of Venice’s masque would additionally transgress religious boundaries in having Jews and Christians share not only a meal, but also a dance. England had attempted to expel all Jews in 1290 through the “Edict of Expulsion,” a culminating event after years of persecution, and despite their eventual return,71 the thirteenth century gave rise to the concept of an immutable Jewish race, constructed in religious, class, somatic, hereditary, and gendered terms.72 The continued friction between Jews and Christians is laced throughout the dance discourse of the time. Many Christian authors felt that dancing was a pagan activity akin to the worship of idols.73 Furthermore, the pervasive Christian warning against the flesh did not work in support of these new masqued practices.74 On the other hand, it is important to point out that Orthodox Judaism was similarly unenthused about these new social dances and their surroundings. Barbara Sparti has unearthed Hebrew manuscripts dating back to the thirteenth century that forbade members of the opposite sex to dance with each other at balls.75 Elizabeth Harvey’s book Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture points out these parallels: “Scripture is a touchstone for prohibitions against touching and for the establishment of the conditions of contact. Touch became an integral part of the rhetoric of civility, purity, and entitlement used by the ancient Israelites in outlining social practices and building their exclusive community.”76 Additionally, Protestant moralists felt that dancing was a blatant misspend of time and misdirection of energy, supposedly engendering social and political harm to those engaged.77 It seems all religious zealots at the time shared a common mistrust of this new form of social and physical interaction. So how would religions that worked so diligently to police bodily contact between their own members feel about the dancing of Jessica and Lorenzo? The answer, both within The Merchant of Venice and among its audiences, is not only religious but also gendered. Shylock’s speech in forbidding his daughter from attending the masque supports many of the previously made points.

The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque    165 What, are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica, Lock up my doors, and when you hear the drum And the vile squealing of the wry-​necked fife, Clamber not you up to the casements then, Nor thrust your head into the public street To gaze on Christian fools with varnished faces; But stop my house’s ears—​I mean my casements—​ Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter My sober house. (2.5.28–​36)

The sound of the music is a signifier for the beginning of the masque and he tells Jessica to barricade herself inside and not to gaze upon the “Christian fools.” Not only does Shylock mark the revelry as Christian through the description of the other attendees, I  posit that there is a doubled reading attributable to the word “house.” The Oxford English Dictionary’s second definition defines house as “a place of worship, originally considered as the abode of God, or a god; a temple, a church.”78 Shylock marks both his literal home, where he commands Jessica to stay, and his more figurative Jewish house of worship, where one can also read his command to Jessica’s permanent residence. The masque will tarnish both his daughter’s reputation and his religion’s. Janet Adelman’s book Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in the Merchant of Venice argues that conversion is at the forefront of the play’s discomfort with religion: “the suspicion that troubling Jewish ‘residue’ remained in Jewish converts to Christianity was at least as old as the 13th century.”79 Because there are arguably no visible markers of Judaism,80 save circumcision, to distinguish Jewish from Christian, and deciphering the sincerity of conversion is a near impossibility, subsequently the fear of an inextricably Jewish corporeality emerged. Borrowing this concept of “Jewish residue,” I return to The Merchant of Venice’s hypothetical masque. At the point in the play in which the masque is to take place, Jessica has not yet converted to Christianity in order to marry Lorenzo and to sever her familial relationship with her father. Therefore, the idea of contagious touch is particularly resonant. Early modern understandings of touch, as Elizabeth Harvey writes, dealt with the porous nature or permeability of skin: “The body’s fleshy envelope was imaged to be so fragile and permeable that it seemed to provide very little protection against incursion by a panoply of ‘evil’ enemy agents.”81 The sense of touch was difficult to locate on the body, as the other senses were easily housed in locatable organs. Touch was the most somatically diffuse of the senses.82 Dancing may induce sweating and the touching of sweating bodies was morally and pathogenically repudiated. Could Jessica’s Jewishness have been “caught” by her dancing partners? The final extenuating factor in this query is that leading up to the masque, Jessica is dressed as a boy in order to elude her father. Returning to the question of gendered religious roles, Shapiro explains that Jewish women were more easily converted to Christianity than men because women as a gender were more obedient, subservient, and suggestible, and their bodies were unmarked by circumcision.83

166   Lizzie Leopold Subsequently, one must ask if Jessica’s religiosity was altered, or conversely exaggerated, by her own cross-​dressing, gendered transformation. If she danced as a woman, she may have caught Christianity, but by dancing as a boy she was a carrier for “Jewish residue.” Scholar Lindsay Kaplan argues that in this transgendered moment Jessica does “threaten the subordination upon which her successful conversion rests.”84 She must be a woman to convert successfully, and Christian, in religious agreement with her partners, to dance safely. But further investigation into Jessica’s cross-​dressing reveals that it is more important and complex than a simple gender disguise. Kaplan, having asserted that Jessica’s torch-​bearer garb threatens her successful conversion, describes Jessica’s embarrassment about being seen dressed as a boy: “Jessica’s discomfort appears odd; no one else seems to care that she is dressed as a boy, as it is only part of the disguise necessary for her escape.”85 Orthodox Judaism’s strict laws about women’s clothing offer insight into this scene. Long, loose skirts cover women’s legs, but never trousers; trousers are too descriptive and revealing of the woman’s shape.86 Donning this subversive outfit and thus breaking Jewish laws of modest dress, Jessica complicates the impending religious conversion as a term of her marriage to Lorenzo; her religious identity is unfixed prior to the formal, ritual act of conversion. Jessica’s torchbearer costume threatens to convert her from Judaism in the very act of wearing men’s clothing, thus explaining her discomfort: “I am glad ’tis night, you do not look on me, /​For I am much ashamed of my exchange” (2.6.34–​35). I posit that “exchange” is both woman for boy and Jew for Christian. A second important policing of Jewish women is the rules surrounding male touch. Women of Orthodox Judaism are not permitted to touch any man that is not a father, brother, or husband. This Jewish law, as derived from the book of Leviticus, is called Negiah, the Hebrew word for “touch.” With this in mind, the possibility of Jessica’s participatory dancing, compounded by her converted attire, could be read as another willful act of conversion. By dancing with Lorenzo, touching him, she is either declaring him her husband, the only man other than Shylock that her religion permits her touch, or declaring herself un-​Jewish. Dancing at Bassanio’s masque with anyone other than Shylock would bring Jessica’s Jewish obedience into question. Either way, her costume and her actions serve as a kind of self-​fashioned conversion from Judaism. With this in mind, it is easier to speculate that Shakespeare’s plot device, planning the masque only to cancel it, was in favor of the more dramatic conversion scene later in the play. The tantalizing threat of having these feuding parties gather for a masque was sufficiently subversive, while not actualizing Jessica’s conversion too early on in the plot.

On Stage and in Conclusion It is impossible to pose these questions without acknowledging the layer that staged theatricality brings to this equation. The role of Jessica would be played by a boy,

The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque    167 playing a woman, dressed again as a boy. Whatever gendered and religious residues this actor corporeally carried were inextricably added to the confusion. Shapiro writes that it is impossible to know whether Elizabethan audiences at a performance of The Merchant of Venice left the theater believing or doubting the conversion of Jessica and/​ or Shylock.87 It is equally impossible to know if they believed the religions or genders of these characters to be tied to the bodies of the actors who played the roles, successfully blending the doubled-​selves into one body, as theater always hopes to do. Shapiro’s question would be more applicable if it asked, not about a theatrical suspension of belief, but about how these questions reflected lived beliefs separate from but explicated by the staged production. Without much insistence, one can imagine The Merchant of Venice’s masque as a strained gathering and its mere mention a provocation for an early modern audience. Religious tensions would be overshadowed by Shylock and Antonio’s bond of flesh, among other complicated relations. But the prescribed steps of the Elizabethan masque would dictate how to move and who and when to touch, forcing bodily interaction between these religious polarities. Dance, although textually absent, plays an important and prominent role in The Merchant of Venice’s problematizing of religious conversion, how it is actualized and acted upon. Playford’s description of hands holding and leading, read with Bulwer’s investment in the natural language of hands, may be both purely choreographic and wildly indicative of porous, impassioned bodies sharing sweaty palms and religious residues.

Notes 1. All citations to The Merchant of Venice are to The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., eds. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells, unless otherwise specified. Subsequent citations will appear in text by scene, act, and line. 2. Paul Gaudet, “Lorenzo’s ‘Infidel’: The Staging of Difference in The Merchant of Venice,” Theatre Journal 38, no. 3 (1986): 277. 3. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 146. 4. Anthony Brennan, Onstage and Offstage:  Worlds in Shakesepare’s Plays (New  York: Routledge, 1989), 3. 5. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis (London:  The Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 248. 6. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 137. 7. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis, 261. 8. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. M. M. Mahood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897), 184. 9. Anthony Brennan, Onstage and Offstage Worlds in Shakespeare’s Plays (New  York: Routledge, 1989), 3. 10. Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), 109.

168   Lizzie Leopold 11. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 110. 12. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance,  35–​38. 13. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 35. 14. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 38. 15. For more on this, see Gayatri Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” in Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), xxvii–​cxi. 16. Derrida, Of Grammatology, xxxvii. 17. Derrida, Of Grammatology, xxxiv. 18. André Lepecki, ed., Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 129. 19. Lepecki, Of the Presence of the Body, 130. 20. Lepecki, Of the Presence of the Body, 132. 21. Lepecki, Of the Presence of the Body, 132. 22. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 29. 23. Lepecki, Of the Presence of the Body, 133. 24. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis, 1. 25. For more on this debate, see (both sides): Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Intervention of the Human (New  York:  The Berkley Publishing Group, 1998) and Martin D. Yaffe, Shylock and the Jewish Question (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 26. James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Routledge, 1993). 27. “masque, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2016, Oxford University Press, http://​ www.oed.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/​view/​Entry/​114656?rskey=3iMicb&result =1&isAdvanced=false#eid. 28. Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesography: 16th-​Century French Dance from Court to Countryside (New York: Dover, 1967), 23. 29. Walter Sorell, “Shakespeare and the Dance,” Shakespeare Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1957): 367. 30. Mary Stewart Evans, “Preface to the First Edition,” in Orchesography: 16th-​Century French Dance from Court to Countryside by Thoinot Arbeau (New  York:  Dover Publications, 1967), 6. 31. Arbeau, Orchesography, 12. 32. Ravelhofer, Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 33. “masque, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2016. 34. “masque, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2016. 35. “masque, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2016. 36. Anne Daye, “ ‘The Revellers Are Entering’: Shakespeare and Masquing Practice in Tudor and Stuart England,” Chapter 4 in this volume. 37. Daye, Chapter 4 in this volume. 38. Daye, Chapter 4 in this volume. 39. Daye, Chapter 4 in this volume. 40. Daye, Chapter 4 in this volume. 41. Despite the fifty-​year gap between the publications of The Merchant of Venice and Playford’s The English Dancing Master, it is accepted that Playford’s effort was a retrospective, spanning the previous half-​century of revolutions and change in manners and social

The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque    169 life. See Keith Whitlock, “John Playford’s the English Dancing Master 1650/​1 as Cultural Politics,” Folk Music Journal 7, no. 5 (1999): 548. 42. Whitlock, “John Playford’s the English Dancing Master 1650/​1 as Cultural Politics,” 566. 43. While dance notation systems, including Labanotation and Benesh Movement Notation, have been developed and implemented in the last century to document dance on paper, they have not achieved the level of translatability and universality of musical notation. These dance notation systems are highly specialized skills, expensive to implement and learn. Furthermore, with the introduction of portable and affordable video recording, many choreographers and dancers prefer this digital technology—​ leaving graphic descriptions of dance a secondary method of preservation. 44. John Playford, The English Dancing Master, or Directions for Dancing Country Dances (London, 1651). 45. Playford, The English Dancing Master. 46. Playford, The English Dancing Master. 47. Playford, The English Dancing Master. 48. Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Universal Language of Motion:  Reflections on a Seventeenth-​ Century Muscle Man,” in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Foster (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 27. 49. Bulwer describes the story of the Tower of Babel to argue for a scattered humankind, fragmenting language and unified communicative abilities. For more see Foster, Choreographing Emphathy, 26. 50. Greenblatt, “Towards a Universal Language of Motion,” 27. 51. Greenblatt, “Towards a Universal Language of Motion,” 27. 52. Greenblatt, “Towards a Universal Language of Motion,” 29–​30. 53. Greenblatt, “Towards a Universal Language of Motion,” 30. 54. John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand and Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoric, 1644, Early English Books Online, http://​eebo.chadwyck.com/​search/​ full_​rec?SOURCE=pgimages.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=V52266 June 2016. 55. Anne Sophie Refskou and Laura Søvsø Thomasen, “Handling the Theme of Hands in Early Modern Cross-​over Contexts,” Early Modern Culture Online 5 (2014): 31. 56. Refskou and Thomasen, “Handling the Theme of Hands,” 33. 57. Bulwer, Chirologia. 58. For more on gesture, see Giorgio Agamben’s “Notes on Gesture” in his Means Without End:  Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and Carrie Noland’s introductory essay in Migrations of Gesture, eds. Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness, xi–​xxvii (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 59. Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy:  Kinesthesia in Performance (New  York: Routledge, 2011), 31. 60. Barbara Sparti, “Jewish Dancing-​ Masters and ‘Jewish Dance’ in Renaissance Italy: Guglielmo Ebreo and Beyond,” in Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, ed. Judith Brin Ingber (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 235. 61. Sparti, “Jewish Dancing-​Masters,” 242. 62. Sparti, “Jewish Dancing-​Masters,” 246. 63. Sparti, “Jewish Dancing-​Masters,” 246. 64. Michele Marrapodi, Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance:  Appropriation, Transformation, Opposition (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1.

170   Lizzie Leopold 65. John Playford, The English Dancing Master, or Directions for Dancing Country Dances (London, 1651). 66. Playford, The English Dancing Master. 67. Whitlock, “John Playford’s the English Dancing Master,” 555. 68. Jennifer Nevile, ed., Dance, Spectacle and the Body Politick, 1250–​1750 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 285. 69. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 8. 70. Sorell, “Shakespeare and the Dance,” 374. 71. See James Shapiro’s Shakespeare and the Jews: “The Jews were readmitted into England by Cromwell in 1656” (55). 72. M. Lindsay Kaplan, “Jessica’s Mother: Medieval Constructions of Jewish Race and Gender in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2007): 2. 73. Nevile, Dance, Spectacle and the Body Politick, 284. 74. Nevile, Dance, Spectacle and the Body Politick, 285. 75. Sparti, “Jewish Dancing-​Masters,” 240. 76. Elizabeth Harvey, ed., Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 144–​145. 77. Mary Pennino-​ Baskerville, “Terpsichore Reviled:  Antidance Tracts in Elizabethan England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 22, no. 3 (1991): 476. 78. “house, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, March 2012, Oxford University Press, http://​ www.oed.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/​view/​Entry/​88886?rskey=BBugT7&resul t=1#eid. 79. Janet Adelman, Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in the Merchant of Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 5. 80. To see more on the perceived physical differences of Jews, see Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews. 81. Harvey, Sensible Flesh, 23. 82. Harvey, Sensible Flesh, 1. 83. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 131. 84. Kaplan, “Jessica’s Mother,” 29. 85. Kaplan, “Jessica’s Mother,” 29. 86. Orthodox Jewish dress codes are derived from an idea of modesty and humility that comes from the Hebrew term tzniut. This term describes both a character of modesty and the group of laws that delineate and restrict conduct between the sexes. This includes rules for modest dress. For more on the dress codes written into the Torah and throughout Rabbinic literature, see Pesach Eliyahu Falk, Modesty: An Adornment for Life (Nanuet, NY: Philipp Feldheim, 1998) and Yehuda Henkin, Understanding Tzniut: Modern Controversies in the Jewish Community (Jerusalem: Urim, 2008). 87. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 165.

Bibliography Arbeau, Thoinot. Orchesography:  16th-​Century French Dance from Court to Countryside. New York: Dover, 1967. Bulwer, John. Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand and Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoric, 1644. Early English Books Online. Web http://​eebo.chadwyck.com/​ search/​full_​rec?SOURCE=pgimages.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=V52266 June 2016.

The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque    171 Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1978. Lampert, Lisa. Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Nevile, Jennifer, ed. Dance, Spectacle and the Body Politick, 1250–​1750. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Playford, John. The English Dancing Master, or Directions for Dancing Country Dances. London, 1651. Sparti, Barbara. “Jewish Dancing-​Masters and ‘Jewish Dance’ in Renaissance Italy: Guglielmo Ebreo and Beyond.” In Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, edited by Judith Brin Ingber, 235–​250. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011.

Chapter 7

Shakespea re ’ s Dancing B odi e s The Case of Romeo Brandon Shaw

You have dancing shoes With nimble soles: I have a soul of lead So stakes me to the ground I cannot move. (Romeo and Juliet 1.4.14–​16)1

Romeo’s soul/​sole of lead contrasts immobility with nimble dancing feet. Moreover, the preceding lines index central themes of dance in Shakespeare’s social and theatrical milieu: humoral understandings of the body, early modern taxonomy and parts–​whole relations, and the life-​enhancing and preserving significance of fast footwork (particularly among men).2 The first section of this chapter considers two accounts, which are to some extent compatible with one another, of moods, emotions, expression, actions, and deliberation. The humoral model carries back to the Hellenistic writings of Hippocrates and Galen, and this approach is brought into dialogue with the increasing significance for the roles of organs and body parts before and during the Shakespearean age. Next, against these visceral vicissitudes, early modern dance and conduct manuals prescribed nobility, aristocracy, and those aspiring to improve their stations in life with strict external composure. Identified by a spine that is straight, yet somehow gracefully at ease, the dancing body is the culmination of early modern disciplining. Yet, the next section argues, within the prescribed rectitude and geometric prisms, early modern dance practice evinces minute writhing within the corsets and askance glances that contest with the idealistic image of dance as the paragon of English manners or cosmic unity. In fact, the realities of dance—​with its fierce competition, potential for advancement or humiliation, and reliance upon quick feet, athleticism, and knowledge of one’s partner—​invite

174   Brandon Shaw comparisons to its sibling art, swordplay. The dancing body is quickly converted to a deadly body, as Romeo illustrates. The case of Romeo, whose body undergoes three transmogrifications in the course of the drama, is exemplary of Shakespearean bodies.

Humors and Disorganization During the Shakespearean era, medical texts in the Hippocratic-​Galenic tradition, conduct manuals, and the dramatic works and dance manuals informed by them, generally accepted the following: bodies contained four humors: blood, produced by the liver; phlegm, by the brain (and lungs); yellow bile, by the spleen; and black bile, by the gall bladder. The four humors had their corresponding temperaments: an excess of blood marked one as “sanguine,” phlegm as “phlegmatic,” yellow bile as “choleric,” and black bile as “melancholic.”3 While these imbalances could be assessed visually, the sense of touch was implemented to ascertain the balance of hot and cold or dry and moist.4 Health was attained and sustained through balancing these four humors, and medical treatises addressing dance thus indicated why dancing helped to keep the humors in balance or to work toward balancing them. Alessandro Arcangeli has pointed out that the speed and physical rigor appropriate to some dances (and the galliard is frequently mentioned) are sources of conflict for physicians; those who warn against physical assertion’s tendency to misbalance the humors as well as those in favor of rigorous exercise as an effective means of balancing the humors often agree upon the more immediate effect, though not the lasting implications, of dance. Even among the former camp, mindfully pedestrian dances such as the pavane are considered to provide the same benefits as a walk, while the performative aspects encourage balance, uprightness of the spine, and whole-​body participation in the movement.5 Multiple characters within Romeo and Juliet mention the salubrious effects of dance, which is consistently associated with vigor, lightness, and brightness. But as a preliminary foil to this dancing body-​in-​love, audiences first encounter Romeo as a textbook example of love-​melancholy. Trading upon Galenic medical understandings of love-​ melancholy treated by contemporary medical texts such as Timothy Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie (1586), Romeo’s father describes his behavior thus: Many a morning hath he there been seen, With tears augmenting the fresh morning dew. Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs; But all so soon as the all-​cheering sun Should in the furthest east begin to draw The shady curtains from Aurora’s bed, Away from the light steals home my heavy son, And private in his chamber pens himself, Shuts up his windows, locks far daylight out

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies    175 And makes himself an artificial night: Black and portentous must this humour prove, Unless good counsel may the cause remove. (1.1.124–​135)

By indexing moisture, proclivity for darkness and aversion to light, and—​most importantly for present interests—​heaviness, Lord Montague invokes the thought penned in Bright’s Treatise, at times nearly verbatim. Montague not only echoes Bright’s diagnosis, but follows the text’s prescription in advising that Romeo should seek out “comfort of [his] friends.”6 Benvolio seeks to provide the “good counsel” and enacts Bright’s suggestions that “the melancholick is to be persuaded the subject of that he liketh is not so lovely,” or alternatively, “other delights [may be] brought in in steed, and more highly commended.” As a last resort, Bright recommends that some other passion “from other extremity, as of anger,” supplant the former melancholy “as one pinne is driven out with another.”7 Even though firmly footed in a humoral understanding of human psychology, Bright first advises that ratiocinative discourse be attempted before a competing passion before reverting to a language of passions and “pinnes.” In close parallel with Bright’s “pinnes” and enlisting an imagery where weight, not cognition, determines choice, Benvolio suggests that the eyes are not only implicated, but uniquely decisive, in the act of falling in and out of love: Tut, you saw her [Rosaline] fair, none else being by, Herself poised with herself in either eye: But in that crystal scales let there be weigh’d Your lady’s love against some other maid That I will show you shining at this feast, And she shall scant show well that now shows best. (1.2.94–​101)

In his visco-​dynamic metaphor, the “crystal scales” suggest that the eyes act as a balancing scale in the court of love. Shakespeare transmogrifies the ocular fluid, called the “crystalline humor” by Galen.8 Akin to Bright’s forcing out one passion with another, Benvolio suggests that a substitute infection will supplant the contamination due to Rosaline’s residence there: “Take thou some new infection to thy eye, /​And the rank poison of the old will die” (1.2.49–​50). While the long-​term efficacy of Benvolio’s and Bright’s suggested cures are dubious, the proposed antidote is effective: Romeo’s obsession with Juliet does dislodge the infection caused by his unrequited infatuation with Rosaline. The heavy humor that impeded Romeo’s movement will be vanquished by his love for Juliet.9 Romeo’s soles of lead are symptomatic of his soul of lead. And while stately dances such as the pavane and many basse dances are compatible with a moving melancholy, dance in Romeo and Juliet is generally a much more vigorous activity. Fortunately, the Shakespearean age was an era of transmutation just as much as transformation.10 Within one act, we witness Romeo’s feet sublimate from lead to air and transform into winged creatures, and the mere sight of Juliet dancing catalyzes the transmutation.

176   Brandon Shaw While the phenomenon of love at first sight is certainly not unique to Shakespearean works, the episode where Romeo first sees Juliet enriches the poetic trope with a medically, theologically, and philosophically informed understanding not only of sight, but particularly of the eyes themselves, in catalyzing the full-​bodied state of love. As a foil to the humor-​dominated male protagonists—​for example, love-​melancholic Romeo and the fiery Tybalt—​Juliet is either more ratiocinative or at least can reproduce the discourse where thinking and (feigned) obeisance to parental authority master the eye. Regarding the prospect of Paris, she tells her mother, “I’ll look to like, and if my looking liking move; But no more deep will I endart mine eye /​Than your consent gives strength to make it fly” (1.4.97–​99). The eye’s ineluctable command regarding falling in love and, we shall see, the near autonomy of feet in dancing catalyze system-​wide, mercurial transformations in the body. Both are used to mitigate against the symptoms of love-​melancholy, and the dramatic functions and poetic vocabulary pertaining to these eyes and feet connote popular understandings of their ameliorative properties. While there is little indication of what precisely is being danced when Romeo is first visually struck by Juliet, I would like to focus upon the cathartic function, in both the dramatic and especially biological senses, of Romeo as the torchbearer and Juliet as the apogee of light during the scene. Romeo evokes a traditional role of the torchbearer as one who would not dance, but who instead functions as an escort noted by heaviness and sobriety. Romeo’s words, “I’ll be a candle-​holder and look on” (1.4.36), serve as a stage direction for his inaction, which is a foil to parallels between dance and liveliness through the play and also some contemporary social practices, both local and foreign, involving masques and torchbearers.11 The dialogue suggests that there are dramatic advantages to using a choreography such as the Torch or Candlestick Branle (Branle de la Torche), as described by Thoinot Arbeau in his 1589 manual Orchésographie.12 During this dance, a male may select a female partner and, at the conclusion of the first short dance, pass the torch to her. The female, bearing the torch, may then select her new (male) partner, and so on. First, one section of Arbeau’s Torch Branle requires the female to select her male partner, which parallels Juliet’s calculated, radical, ire-​evoking election of Romeo over Paris.13 Second, the Torch Branle requires a candle-​or torchbearing male to select and escort a female, who then holds the candle herself. Such a rotation among partners and passing of the torch has some bearing upon the comparisons drawn between Juliet and other women. Juliet teaches “the torches to burn bright” (1.5.44), and hers is the beauty that tips the crystal scales of Romeo’s eyes: The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand, And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand. Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night. (1.5.45–​54)

Less symbolic but equally expressive of transformation are the contemporary medical understandings of the body’s humors in relation to heat and coolness. As Gail Kern

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies    177 Paster points out, the heat and vapors produced by flames were thought to increase bodily humoral fluidity and dispel lethargy.14 Perhaps still holding the torch, Romeo is warmed by its flame on the one side while his contact with Juliet stirs him inwardly, dispelling his melancholy, bringing color to his pallor and lightness to his gait. From visual and thermal stimulation, Romeo’s heavy soul and leaden soles become light and vivacious. Yet it is also significant—​and indicative of the hybrid psychological discourses of volition, decision-​making, and expression—​that Romeo here enlists his eye with an imperative, “forswear,” to contradict the former assertions of his heart. Benvolio, Romeo, and later Friar John (2.3.67–​68) acknowledge the eye as source and locus of Romeo’s erotic affliction. Indeed, this parted-​out volitional network is in keeping with dominant medical thought at the time. Romeo’s assertion that his heart had (falsely) loved confirms Paster’s assertion: “Humoral physiology ascribes to the workings of the internal organs an aspect of agency, purposiveness, and plenitude to which the subject’s own will is often decidedly irrelevant.”15 David Hillman has provided an excellent case for how it is that the guts in Shakespeare’s dramas implement such brain-​and heart-​overriding executive orders in his Shakespeare’s Entrails: “Shakespeare’s plays, poised on the brink of, and heralding, profound historical changes, appear to allocate to the body’s interior a decisive place in the comprehension of subjectivity—​even as they question and problematise this notion.”16 While Paster and Hillman focus upon internal organs, I  suggest that external organs, such as eyes, and parts, including feet, are no less capable of influencing or even commandeering the entire body in much of Shakespeare’s work. Romeo’s heart disagrees not only with his will, but is called upon by the eyes to disagree with itself and renounce its former vow. A text far more infallible than medical treatises provides grounding for the body whose feet may or may not dance and whose eyes and heart may differ. In the Christian Bible, Christ teaches, “If thy ryght eye offende thee, plucke it out, and cast it from thee. For better it is vnto thee, that one of thy members perishe, the that thy whole body should be cast into hell.”17 Christ treats body parts (here the eye, and the hand in the next verse) as if they possess their own volition for which they may be reprimanded. As Carla Mazzio demonstrates, St. James likewise treats the tongue as an autonomous organ: “Euen so the tongue is a litle member also, & boasteth great thynges. Beholde how great a matter a litle fire kindleth. And the tongue is fyre, euen a worlde of wickednesse. So is the tongue set among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fyre the course of nature, & it is set on fyre of hell.”18 If there is a “brain in the gut,” as Hillman argues, there is equally a brain in the eye, tongue, hand, and of course the foot, in accordance with biblical bodies.19 Like other body parts and organs, dancing limbs require specific disciplining and instruction. Arms are noted for their functional necessity in partnered dance and for their expressive qualities, but they pose threats of excessive gesturing, wild movement, and the danger of association with manual labor. Throughout the extant dance manuals, arms are employed for gestures (e.g., kissing the

178   Brandon Shaw hand), accompanying the partner, and occasional adjustments of clothing and accoutrements, including, for men, the sword. While controversial, it can be argued that extant early modern dance manuals express little regard, if not some contempt, for arm movement. Quite explicit in his judgment, Fabritio Caroso warns that a female dancing Il Piantone “should never move either hand about more than usual as she dances, as is the custom and unseemly behaviour of many (for they resemble peasants scattering seed at sowing time).”20 Arbeau’s Orchésographie ambiguously advises to keep “hands at your sides, neither hanging limp as if dead, nor moving nervously.”21 Arbeau’s Branle of Haut Barrois however does describe movement of the “shoulders and arms.” Yet, rather than a mark of sophistication for its employment of the upper extremities, Arbeau informs us that the Haut Barrois is a branle “danced by lackeys and serving wenches, and sometimes by young men and damsels of gentle birth in a masquerade, disguised as peasants and shepherds.”22 Arbeau’s Maltese Branle, where dancers dress in Turkish costume, and the Washerwoman’s Branle both mention gesticulations in the arms, and it is easy to conceive of the action being reserved for antipathy toward the nonprivileged gender, races, and classes.23 The Official Branle requires that the men lift the women by the waist, but Capriol finds the upper body workout loathsome: “it seems to me very tiresome.”24 Arbeau’s Dancing Master gives somewhat more detailed instruction for how to support a woman by holding her beneath the busk with his right hand in the scandalous lavolta so she may hold down her petticoat with her left hand “lest the swirling air should catch them and reveal her chemise or bare thigh.”25 Thus, in Arbeau’s text, use of the upper extremities is variously connected with the lower classes, non-​European and non-​C hristian ethnic groups, and potentially scandalous dance maneuvers. Contemporary scholarship and Renaissance dance re-​ enactors affirm a division between the vivacity of the feet and the sedate, stately upper body. In her performance notes to Caroso’s text, Julia Sutton writes, “Arms are carried simply. They may move gently and unobtrusively in low range, always remaining long and graceful, and resulting from an erect carriage. Hands are relaxed, palms generally facing the sides. Arms may move away from the body only as a result of the size of the farthingale.”26 We are left with the impression of horizontally bifurcated bodies with nimble feet that are somewhat estranged from the disaffected torsos they bear. Fortunately, according to all extant dance manuals and anecdotal evidence, feet are up to the challenge of carrying the body. Arbeau’s Orchésographie provides a daunting number of variations on footwork. The Dance Master tempts Capriol toward the “infinity of varieties” of ways to divide a beat with footwork: “Good dancers who are agile and lively can make whatever rearrangements seem desirable to them.”27 Cesare Negri and Livio Lupi da Caravaggio archive a number of variations on the Canary, providing evidence that their nonprofessional readers were capable of executing difficult footwork and possessed undeniable athleticism.28 It is no wonder, then, that Romeo’s assertion that he has no soles for dancing should have such weight.

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies    179

Visuality and Rectitude The partnership between the eye and dancing feet dramatizes sociopolitical realities for early modern London’s royal court and upper-​class gatherings. Skiles Howard summarizes the atmosphere thus: The movements of courtly dancing were an important component of aristocratic self-​fashioning that simultaneously transfigured the subject and positioned him or her within a social hierarchy. A physical practice whose elements were invested with meaning, dancing was both an emblem of social aspiration and a means for its realization, a manifestation of social anxiety, and a way to address it. In England, bodily structures replicated social shapes: the upward training of the dancing body mirrored a concern with upward mobility, its enclosure paralleled enclosures of property, the segmentation of the dancing place was a miniature likeness of the mapping of the realm, and the expansion of the dancer’s control at the center of the hall a micrometonym of the centralized state.29

More than an expression of desire or emotion, courtly and urban social dance in Shakespeare’s time was a visible rendering of individual character and social belonging. On the basis of perceiving this character through dancing and general deportment, one may have concluded upon another’s suitability within a given class or as a marital partner. Proper bearing on the dance floor denoted good breeding, and carrying that eloquence and rectitude off the floor produced an affected comportment that was an embodied affirmation of social elitism.30 Manuals of bodily conduct—​ including treatises on rhetoric, manners, conversation, and dance—​praised the straight spine and frontal orientation of the chest and face, contributing to Adriana Cavarero’s concept of l’uomo retto (“the upright man”).31 The early modern re-​reading of classical rhetorical authors, including Demosthenes, Cicero, and Quintilian, developed an appreciation of the significance and even theatricality of rhetorical delivery just as much as their distaste for excessive gestures.32 So, like the visual signification of status through clothing materials as dictated by sumptuary laws, nobility and courtly attendees should be set apart by the qualities of their movement in both quotidian and dancerly arenas. Where neither nature nor nurture was sufficient, technology took over. Sartorial inventions aimed toward women, including the busk, bodice, corset, and whalebone, served not only to enforce vertical rectitude but to inhibit duplicitous twisting.33 Like humoral composition, status was not static. One could, as Shakespeare did, buy nobility, and one could also lose the status. Dance likewise provided an opportunity for change in social standing and rank, for better or worse. An eminent example from Shakespeare’s environs is the “tall and proportionable” Christopher Hatton, who commanded the dance floor as he “came to the court [ . . . ] by the

180   Brandon Shaw galliard” (Queen Elizabeth’s favorite dance).34 Ben Jonson chronicles Hatton’s success in The Satyr: They came to see and be seen And though they dance before the Queen There’s none of these doth hope to come by Wealth to build another Holmby [i.e., the large estate Hatton eventually built].35

Queen Elizabeth’s obsession with dance legitimized the art, while at the same time capitalizing on a concept of visuality where character is expressed bodily. Yet while dancing could lead to the promotion from bodyguard to knight to lord chancellor, as in the case of Hatton, even nobility threatened to have indecorous aspects of their characters revealed through their dancing. Celebrated and discreetly critiqued for her indecorously high, Italian-​styled leaps and known to frequently dance mornings and evenings well into her fifties, Elizabeth defied the demure, earth-​bound qualities that authors of dance treatises demanded of women. Following upon Henry VIII’s heels, she also rejected the sedate, somber dances expected of nobility at court, herself championing the rustic speed and infinite variety of the galliard. Her obsession, taking the shape of revels or balls often several nights a week, was a source of constant scandal for the Virgin Queen, fomenting rumors and considerable interrogation of her eponymous chastity. But more surprising is that the Queen was apparently the butt of reproach by an anonymous painter from France—​a nation whose nobility’s affection for dance Margaret M.  McGowan has rightly identified as an “obsession.”36 The painting titled Queen Elizabeth I Dancing with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (Figure 7.1) is taken to be an incendiary image indicting the “Virgin” Queen as she engaged in the most scandalous dance of the day, the volta.37 Such activity was a point of attack by dance-​loathing Puritans, whose output of anti-​dance tracts ironically serves as an archive of dance practices at the time, as well as a relic of religion-​based fantasy, suppression, and projection (see Winerock, Chapter 1 in this volume). Dance in Elizabethan London allowed great social and political mobility, in both directions. Masterful dancing could allow an unknown such as Hatton access to Queen Elizabeth’s inner circle, and improper dancing could provide grounds for precipitous scandal. Thus, in a scenario that could have occurred just as easily in a late sixteenth-​ century London private home as on its theatrical stages, although Romeo stands out as he “that would not dance,” his posture and demeanor even while walking leads a critic as biased as Capulet to attest that Romeo is “portly” (i.e., well comported) and known “to be a virtuous and well-​govern’d youth” (1.5.67–​68). Acquiring such bearing was the result of careful study of conduct manuals and fastidious discipline by tutors, and such self-​governing was recognized by similarly trained elites. Juliet’s own compliment, that Romeo kisses “by the book” (1.5.111) implies that he has not only studied, but absorbed, embodied, and mastered manuals of aristocratic lovemaking. Performing the studied in a manner that appeared natural, carefree, and portraying innate grace, however, was due to the elusive quality of sprezzatura.

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies    181

Figure 7.1.  Queen Elizabeth I Dancing with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Artist unknown (possibly Marcus Gheeraerts), ca. 1580. By kind permission of Viscount De L’Isle from his private collection at Penshurst Place, Kent, England.

Dancing between the Lines Dance manuals advise a golden mean between extremes: manly vigor lying between laziness and circus gymnastics, peppering of individuality between unimaginative adherence to simple beats and an awareness of infinite diversity that threatens structure and order, grace between lifeless imitation and immodest flamboyance, and sprezzatura between—​or encompassing—​rigid adherence and indifference to choreography.38 A work that quickly spread beyond its intended audience of Italian nobility, The Book of the Courtier (1528, translated into English by 1561) pronounces Baldassare Castiglione’s evasive notion of sprezzatura, fittingly defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “studied nonchalance.”39 Castiglione admonishes his readers “to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”40 A performative quality akin to Robert Ferris Thompson’s aesthetic of the cool, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow states, and Joseph Roach’s “it,” sprezzatura is a state or style of characterized by complexity, virtuosity, and nonchalance.41 Not only do early modern dancing bodies house warring parts, but they are also divided at the waist. To maintain the contending demands of sprezzatura, stateliness, and

182   Brandon Shaw vigor, pedagogical and sometimes sartorial efforts colluded to discipline the upper body into a disaffected regality largely unaffected by the feet rumbling below. While the feet may prance or thunder and legs launch the body aloft, movement did not stir the pelvis or migrate northward. Barbara Ravelhofer writes, During such pyrotechnics, the upper body was kept straight; sparing instruction revealed how to turn the torso, as in swaggering shoulder movements. Arms received little attention: they were usually supposed to hang relaxed on the sides while the feet were showing off a firework of complicated steps. This, it was hoped, made the performer look casual, a moving image of sprezzatura.42

A straight back and frontal orientation, though potentially boring, are praised as a depiction of forthrightness.43 Following classical models, early modern bodily discourses reserve twisting the body as an allowance for grotesque necessities—​for example, picking one’s nose, sneezing, or yawning.44 Dance manuals targeting nobility and social climbers encourage an awareness that one is being watched by a room of spectators, thus the forward and outward orientation of the face and torso are encouraged even when dancing with a partner. In his description of dancing a branle within a basse dance, Arbeau, for example, discourages directly gazing upon the partner and grants the man only a “discreetly tender sidelong glance at the damsel,” while the woman should maintain “eyes lowered save to case an occasional glance of virginal modesty at the onlookers.”45 Yet even the morally and aesthetically conservative Arbeau also encourages a torsion that is discouraged in the manuals of conduct, instructing his (male) student, Capriole, to pivot his body and “[glance] modestly the while at spectators” to both sides while performing.46 He is, in effect, supposed to work the room and excite his “damsel.” Against a simple notion of symmetry, Arbeau states that a standing position where one “foot rests at an oblique angle would appear to me the most beautiful, because we observe in ancient medals and statues that figures resting upon one foot are more artistic and pleasing.”47 Italian dance manuscripts give instructions for a vertical rising and sinking (ondeggiare or aeire) and horizontal opposition (maniera) that might produce a contraposto torsion, resulting in a contoured shading (ombreggiato).48 So while some Renaissance dance authors encourage an impossibly stiff gait, forward-​pointing gait—​walking forward in a perfectly straight line and “keeping the body straight from the chest to the eyes, always looking straight ahead [ . . . ] without swaying side to side as some people do”—​we should recognize that “some people” thrived between the lines.49 The acknowledgment and accentuation of the opposition between the sides of the body and its concomitant bodily tension correspond with the rise and fall and rhythm of one’s gait; sprezzatura beckons for a calm strut—​what Caroso called pavoneggiare or “peacocking”—​between the extremes of wooden rectitude and formless swagger.50 While written instructions for such movement qualities are sparse and the terminology inconsistent, many do corroborate to present the dancing body as embracing torsion and opposition tending toward the plastic arts’ figura serpentinata but out of step with conduct manuals.

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies    183 As another hint at a diremption between the bodily etiquette inculcated by conduct manuals and the liminality afforded by the dance space, Arbeau’s compulsion to mention how a woman should look at her partner implies that others did not always exhibit “virginal modesty.” Similarly, Arbeau’s moralizing admonishment of la volta—​morally suspect, as the lift could reveal a knee or even thigh, medically dangerous as the spinning induces dizziness—​curiously provides instructions including advice that can only be gained through personal experience with the dance. So while Arbeau’s warning that a woman’s not holding down her petticoat could “reveal her chemise or bare thigh” can be taken as an admonition, it likewise serves to instruct in a method of garnering attention and may serve as patriarchal flash-​advertisement for dance in general.51 There is sufficient evidence to maintain that dance in Shakespeare’s time was not a stiff, chaste, unproblematically wholesome affair—​certainly not in the rural areas, cities, or theatrical stages, but also not among the courtly balletomanes. The resounding popularity of social dance in Shakespeare’s time, sensitive readings of dance manuals and anti-​dance tracts, and certainly contemporary re-​enactments of Renaissance dance contribute considerable contrary evidence to imaginings of these social dances as dull or ethically simple. As in Romeo and Juliet, social dancing off the stage was a means of perceiving the character of potential marital partners through their movement, but also availing oneself of small lassitude within the forward-​facing rectitude that would allow one to express interest and survey the qualities of one’s partner. A dancing body should look like a body-​in-​love. Romeo’s plotting and amplification of the sexually charged atmosphere of the dance should not be read as anomalous in this case.

Dancing and Swordplay I take dancing and skill at arms to be brothers. (Iuan de Esquivel Navarros, Discursos sobre el arte del Dançado, 1642)52

Early modern elites, and those aspiring to join their ranks, were expected to be adept in the dancing and swordplay. There is general consensus that nobility and gentry did not consider these arts as contradictory, but rather as complementary. The previous sections demonstrate how the dance floor was a site for competitive male showmanship, and the light footwork cultivated in dancing portends lightning-​fast lunges and evasions in swordplay that can be life sustaining or deadly.53 Throughout the remainder of the play, Romeo’s happiness and self-​preservation depend quite literally upon his light-​footedness. Romeo’s first action in Act Two is to jump over a wall: “With love’s light wings did I o’er-​perch these walls; /​For stony limits cannot hold love out” (2.2.66). Fresh from his tryst with Juliet, Romeo encounters Mercutio and Benvolio, who mark his transformed humor. Freed from his dependence on clunky, clumping oxymorons (1.1.175–​180). Romeo bests even Mercutio in Scene Four’s

184   Brandon Shaw sharp-​witted locker-​room banter. Again, shoes are the talk, but Romeo speaks not of a sole of lead, but rather boasts, “Why, then is my pump well flowered” (2.4.60). Romeo and Mercutio’s punning around wearing through the sole of the pump is consistent with the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the pump as “[a]‌light, usually heelless or low-​heeled shoe, originally often of delicate material and colour, having no fastening but kept on the foot by its close fit.”54 The light and nimble “single sole” (2.4.62) of the pump stands in clear contrast to the leaden soles Romeo had laid claim to earlier. This is not a sole that “stakes [one] to the ground” (1.4.16), but one that allows for sprightly dancing. Romeo’s bounding body-​in-​love certainly contrasts with the lovesick melancholic Mercutio and Benvolio had last seen at the masque. Thus Mercutio is certainly justified in his earlier fear that Romeo is not “a man to encounter Tybalt” (2.4.16–​17) and in contrasting Romeo’s sluggishness with Tybalt’s lethal, unequivocally dancerly, and internationally informed swordplay. As Holmer has demonstrated, verbiage surrounding Tybalt’s swordplay evinces training in the Italian school of rapier popularized in England by the Italian sword master, Vincentio Saviolo.55 This popular, lethal training in the rapier would be attacked in print with George Silver’s Paradoxes of Defence (1599), which was intent upon demonstrating the superiority of the English cutting sword, but there is no reason to think that xenophobic vitriol against foreign influences into manly arts had to wait until his text. Mercutio invokes terpsichorean (and musical) vocabulary when describing how Tybalt fights: “He fights as /​you sing prick-​song, keeps time, distance, and proportion” (2.4.20–​ 22).56 This association of proportion and dance, as well as his later reference to Tybalt’s fighting “by the book of arithmetic” (3.1.89–​90), evokes the Spanish school with its upright posture and petite footwork.57 Again, according to Silver, “[t]‌his is the manner of Spanish fight, they stand as brave as they can with their bodies straight upright, narrow spaced, with their feet continually moving, as if they were in a dance.”58 While the physical actions and physique of dancing and fencing are at times nearly identical, there are important distinctions to be made regarding the humoral composition of the dancer and fighter in Romeo and Juliet. Both depend upon swift movement, and this alacrity is granted by (1) red choler within the martial (as exemplified by Tybalt), or (2) the lightness marked by an absence of black bile or melancholy (in the case of Romeo after meeting Juliet), as well as (3) well-​trained feet. Shakespeare’s body-​ at-​war, as exemplified by Tybalt, is permeated by his steaming gall, whereas the lover in Romeo and Juliet is marked rather by the absence of humor or a certain buoyancy after having just been relieved of melancholy. Saviolo warns would-​be swashbucklers, “And sometimes men [ . . . ] suffer themselues to bee carried awaie and ouermastered too much with choler and rage [ . . . ] take heede that you suffer not your selfe to bee blinded and carried awaie with rage and furie.”59 The emotions and humors animating the wrathful fighter according to Saviolo—​“choler,” “rage,” and “furie”—​align perfectly with Shakespeare’s characterization of Tybalt, who is “all as hot” (3.1.159), of “willful choler” (1.5.90) and “bitt’rest gall” (1.5.93), and possesses an “unruly spleen” (3.1.156). This heat characteristic of enraged fighters is acknowledged as an embarrassing potential of dance. Dancing manuals and rules of conduct of the period take pains to address

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies    185 the thermal aspect of dancing and its socially unfortunate effect of producing sweat.60 Capulet expresses his intimate awareness of such caloric and perhaps olfactory effects when he interrupts the dance party he initiated to call for the torches to be extinguished because the dancing had caused the room to become “too hot” (1.5.28). Dancerly lightness of foot is only the first quality enabling Romeo to survive even one exchange with Tybalt. In this fight, spectators encounter a kind of battle between the body ignited by love, and trained for dance and love, and the body honed for fighting and hatred. While, as Benvolio reports, Romeo’s fighting was “like lightening” (3.1.171), Romeo is inferior to Tybalt in training and experience.61 The wall-​jumping lightness brought about by his elation regarding Juliet and his replacing his soles of lead with silky pumps could endow him with the requisite agility, which is augmented by his enraged spleen. The next factors that allow Romeo to defeat Tybalt can be attributed to a dramatization of prejudice that foreign sword pedagogy is hindered by its attempts to produce a science and, oddly, a tacit false parallel drawn between dance and swordplay attributable to Tybalt. First, Tybalt is representative of the highly geometrical approach to swordplay considered at odds with English nationalism, especially as voiced by George Silver. Vincentio Saviolo, whose rapier-​based sword work was anathema to Silver, is an adherent of the Italian school, initiated in large part by Camillo Agrippa. Although not a master of arms, but rather applying his expertise in engineering to the sword, Agrippa’s Trattato Di Scientia d’ Arme, con un Dialogo di Filosofia (Treatise on the Science of Arms with Philosophical Dialogue, 1553) revolutionized sword work in its use of the longer rapier and its systematic obeisance to geometric principles. Figure 7.2 illustrates Agrippa’s geometrical dissection of the lunge, which is a particularly relevant movement, as he argued that this straight attack has numerous advantages over the slices of English sword work.62 The use of the increasingly long rapier and practical geometry reached is apogee with the Spanish school, “La Verdadera Destreza” (“the true art”), founded by Jerónimo Sánchez de Carranza and presented in his La philosophía de las armas (1582), where the upright stance Silver mentions in the preceding is favored. Mercutio echoes and amplifies Silver’s arguments against and sentiment toward these bookish, non-​English approaches, but these voices are certainly not alone. Antonio Francesco Lucini’s caricature (Figure 7.3) of this geometromania provides a visual critique, as well as insight for that directoral dilemma: How does Romeo kill Tybalt? Lucini’s point seems to be that the geometric visual aids in swordwork may not lead the student to a paradox as paralyzing as Zeno’s, but the officious science is no less stultifying and stupifying. Lines of displacement are represented as spiderwebs, implying a mathematically induced paralysis, and the posterior trajectory leaves no doubt as to what he regards to be the source of the sword masters’ bookish effluvium. A historically informed performance of Tybalt could play him as constrained by geometry—​a pristine sense of line and necessity—​practiced in the gridded exactitude proposed by fencing manuals. Tybalt can be stymied by his knowledge, and lethally encumbered by a notion of what is likely, given a properly trained opponent, and allowable in a duel. Romeo is then a surprising combatant for Tybalt in three ways. First, Romeo’s humoral transformation has changed him from an easy, leaden target to a sprightly,

Figure 7.2.  Camillo Agrippa, Trattato Di Scientia d’ Arme, con un Dialogo di Filosofia (1553). Source: http://​www.northernrenaissance.org/​the-​number-​of-​motion-​camillo-​agrippas-​geometrical-​fencing-​and-​the-​ enumeration-​of-​the-​body/​

Figure 7.3.  Antonio Francesc Lucini, Compendio dell-​armi de Caramogi (1627). With permission by Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvinside.

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies    187 adroit performer. Second, as Mercutio’s mockery implies, Tybalt’s foreign-​inflected swordsmanship, though deadly, is still inferior to battle-​won English sword work expounded by patriots like George Silver. But finally, Tybalt draws a false connection between dancing and combat. Tybalt’s training places him within the pedagogy of sword work whose structure and strictures can be inhibitive if the opponent is not operating according to the practiced codes. Tybalt is dancing with a partner who does not know the steps, whose notion of rhythm, propriety, and exchange may be diametrically opposed to his own.63 It is the illusion of a similarity between swordplay and dancing that, according to Anglo, proved fatal to the neat geometric approach: [The mathematical approaches to fencing] completely misunderstood the real nature of the movements they sought to notate. They regarded fencing as a kind of dance, whereas it is something fundamentally different. In a dance, movements are at least susceptible to planning [ . . . ]. Fencers, by contrast, seek to deceive and surprise each other. The one thing they do not want is to collaborate with the opponent or do anything which might be anticipated.64

Ironically, Tybalt thinks he is dancing, while Romeo is primed to kill. Poised between conflicting physiologies—​that is, of an engineer’s geometry applied to the body and boiling red humor that defies calming counsel of reason—​Romeo evinces the domination of the passions over scientific calculation.

Dance, Transformation, and Transmutation in Shakespearean Tragedy Following Romeo’s melancholic and erotically elated bodies, we encounter this thin division between love and hate, and the seamless crossover skills between dancing and fencing. After Mercutio is killed, Romeo reflects upon his perceived emasculation: “O sweet Juliet, /​Thy beauty hath made me effeminate /​And in my temper soften’d valour’s steel!” (3.2.112–​114). The metallurgic image suggests that the fire of love weakens steel as it sublates lead into air. The play continues to educate its audience in the containment of opposites within each other, and demonstrates the mere breath separating life and death, light and darkness, happiness and tragedy, and love and hate. The principle is reflected and refined in Friar Laurence’s soliloquy, where homeopathic technique, not only a plant’s inherent properties, may render baneful poison or salutary medicine: Oh, mickle is the powerful grace that lies In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities.

188   Brandon Shaw For naught so vile that on the earth doth live But to the earth some special good doth give; Nor aught so good but, strained from that fair use, Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse. Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime by action dignified. (2.3.15–​22)

Similarly, Saviolo instructs would-​be swordsmen that, while many humans are like venomous plants due to their “naturall corruption,” others can be made “good & profitable” through “continual culture & yearly renouation.”65 (Proper instruction can pacify even the most violent temperaments, and even “portly” [1.5.67] young men like Romeo can become killers.) In concluding the chapter, I  would like to bring this body—​jerked about by warring parts, temperamental due to its humors, and bifurcated insofar as it is trained in dance—​into contact with Alan Brissenden’s reading of dance in Romeo and Juliet in his Shakespeare and the Dance. There, Brissenden treats Romeo’s refusal to dance and ushering Juliet away from the dance floor when “the measure [is] done” (1.5.48) as symbolic of the dislocation of the “star-​crossed lovers” (Prologue 6) from the cosmic order. He cites a long tradition, including Lucian’s On Dance and Jon Davies’s Orchestra, of A Poem of Daucing (1596), connecting the orderliness, multiplicity, and diversity within dance as a microcosmic reflection of the rotation of the heavens. Along with the ironic comparison of heavenly orderliness and earthly vicissitude, Brissenden finds that the lights of the heavens correspond to uses of light and darkness within Romeo and Juliet, and suggests that a “ballo de torchio” is being danced.66 Romeo and Juliet stand in the shadows of the dancing torches; as two who do not dance, they tread against the rotation of the heavenly lights and cower from the societal illumination. Their embrace of and by the shadows betrays their penchant for the tragic and portends their deaths.67 Shakespeare plays with the ambiguity of the word light, which can refer not only to visual hue (as Brissenden focuses on), but also weight.68 While Romeo does not dance in a narrow sense within the play, and is thereby external to the harmonious machinations of the celestial and social spheres, his love for Juliet bestows him with a body free of heavy humors and nearly lighter than air. The lightness of dance not only ironically contrasts with the darkness of death, but also with its gravity and earthliness. That is, dancing is not only a metaphor for celestial and earthly harmony or a euphemistic portrayal of sexual intercourse. It is also lightness without rancor, vigor without violence. Dancing bodies in Shakespeare exist outside of these associations of decadence and bellicosity, but they are easily converted. Dance is not to be seen as a sublimation of violent passions into more socially acceptable movement. It is an alternative to using one’s agility for killing.69 Additionally, dance offers an intermediary between the two extremes of physical combat and lovemaking, between tragedy and romance. We arrive, then, at a different reading of dance within Romeo and Juliet, and perhaps for other plays within Shakespeare’s corpus. We witness Romeo’s unweighted body scale walls and defy and defeat bloodthirsty villains. His earlier sluggishness manifests as a

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies    189 refusal of corporeal pleasures, such as eating and dancing. This dancing body is at home within tragedy, comedy, and romance. Thus jigs following performances of tragedies might be seen less as comic relief in the sense of a diversion, but as relief in how they provide contrast and thereby dimensions of realism to tragic bodily encounters. Audiences see, hear, and feel the vibration of the foot—​the receptacle of heavy love-​melancholy, the very image of love’s lightness, and the source of deadly footwork—​as the distillation of the body-​in-​love as well as the body-​in-​hate.

Acknowledgments My thanks to Lynsey McCulloch, members of the Shakespeare and Dance roundtable at the 2016 World Shakespeare Congress, and the anonymous reviewer of this chapter for their invaluable attention, support, and recommendations.

Notes 1. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Peter Holland (New  York:  Penguin Press 2000). All subsequent quotations from Shakespeare’s works are from this edition unless otherwise specified. 2. I  use the term “early modern” to cover the periods between 1400 and 1700 instead of “Renaissance,” a moniker denigrating the previous (Medieval or Dark) period and culminating in the following (Enlightenment). By Shakespearean age or era, I  follow Andrew Gurr’s titular chronological circumscription of his The Shakespearean Stage 1574–​ 1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2001). In keeping with the use of recreators and dance historians, I call the dances addressed in this chapter “Renaissance dance.” I do not include ballet du cour or baroque dance within the term “Renaissance dance,” although they do fall within the Renaissance era. 3. Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 104–​106. 4. See Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New  York:  Zone Books, 2002), on the significance of touch in pulse-​taking within the Hippocratic-​Galenic tradition. His “The Forgotten Fear of Excrement,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 3 (2008): 413–​ 442, argues against a systematic view of humors in the early modern period, against the equality of the humors, and points out that excess humors and their residues were believed to add an unhealthy heaviness to the body (among other detriments). Foucault’s reading of early modern French medical and psychiatric texts, particularly before the Classical period, is relevant and certainly relevant to English medicine in the period; Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage, 1994). 5. Alessandro Arcangeli, “Dance and Health:  The Renaissance Physicians’ View,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 18, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 3–​30. 6. Timothie Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie. Containing the Causes Thereof, & Reasons of the Strange Effects It Worketh in Our Minds and Bodies: With the Physicke Cure, and

190   Brandon Shaw Spirituall Consolation for Such as Haue Thereto Adioyned an Afflicted Conscience . . . By T. Bright Doctor of Physicke. Imprinted at London: By Thomas Vautrollier, dwelling in the Black-​Friers,  125. 7. Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 125–​126. 8. As Oliver Darrigol points out, contradictory functions were attributed to the crystalline fluid among theorists and physicians throughout the early modern period. See A History of Optics from Greek Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012). 9. Castiglione’s medically infused description of the eye’s ineluctable contribution to love and its command of the heart provides a divergent account: “Because those vital spirits that come forth from the eyes, being generated near the heart, enter in through other eyes (at which they are aimed as an arrow at a target) and penetrate naturally to the heart as if it were their proper abode, and, mingling with those other spirits there and with the very subtle kind of blood which these have in them, they infect the blood near the heart to which they have come, and warm it, and make it like themselves and ready to receive the impression of that image which they have brought with them”; Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London, 1561), 198. 10. That is, a psycho-​biological-​humoral transmutation from one persona to another can be juxtaposed with the transformation in social recognition and status based upon conscious choice and education, as described in Stephen Orgel, Renaissance Self-​Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 11. Torchbearers are known to have been part of the accompanying entourage in Italian masques of the early sixteenth century. The practice is visually rendered with children or dwarves in England in a ca. 1596 painting of Sir Henry Unton’s life (see Anne Daye, “Torchbearers in the English Masque,” Early Music 26, no. 2 [1998]: 246–​262). Unton had been ambassador to France under Henri IV, which is just one notable account of how French courtly dances might have crossed to the English court. In 1599, Negri’s “Ballato fatto da sei cavalieri” (“Dance done by six cavaliers”) features a more active role for male torchbearers and also has a choreography for six women (see Pamela Jones, “Spectacle in Milan: Cesare Negri’s Torch Dances,” Early Music 14 [1986]: 182–​196). On masquing practices contemporary with Shakespeare, see, in this volume, Daye (Chapter 4), Ziegler (Chapter 5), and Leopold (Chapter 6). See also Emily Winerock, “‘We’ll measure them a measure, and be gone’:  Renaissance Dance Practices and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,” Borrowers and Lenders:  The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 10, no. 2 (Spring 2017), http://​www.borrowers.uga.edu/​783478/​show. For contemporary historically minded versions of dance scenes in Romeo and Juliet, see the preceding and Linda McJannet, “‘A hall, a hall! Give room, and foot it, girls’: Realizing the Dance Scene in Romeo and Juliet on Film,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 10, no. 2 (Spring 2017), http://​www.borrowers.uga.edu/​783440/​show. 12. Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesography: 16th-​Century French Dance from Court to Countryside, trans. Mary S. Evans, ed. Julia Sutton (New  York:  Dover, 1967), 161–​163. Originally published in Paris in 1589, it is expected that some of the Orchesography’s choreographies were in circulation in England shortly thereafter. It should be noted that Arbeau’s choreographies are not presented as original to him, and it stands to reason that several versions of Torch Branles were already being danced throughout Europe. There is significant evidence of the presence of both French and Italian dances in England during Shakespeare’s time. A notebook found in South Derbyshire called the Gresley manuscript

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies    191 (ca. 1500)  indexes ninety-​one dances and provides some description for twenty-​six of them. Nevile writes that the English versions of the dances are “an amalgam of French and Italian elements forged with distinctive English characteristics to create a ‘new’ style”; Jennifer Nevile, “Dance in early Tudor England:  An Italian connection?” Early Music 26, no. 2 (1998): 231–​244, at 231. See also Jennifer Nevile, “Dance Steps and Music in the Gresley Manuscript,” Historical Dance 3, no. 6 (1999): 2–​19, and Skiles Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998),  5–​6. 13. See my “Effacing and Declassification in the Archive of Shakespeare’s and MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliets,” Dance Research Journal 49, no. 2 (August 2017):  62–​ 78. The Lyonnaise is another dance in Arbeau’s text allowing for the woman to choose a partner (Orchesography, 77–​78). 14. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed:  Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 9. 15. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 10. 16. David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails:  Belief, Skepticism and the Interior of the Body (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 53. 17. Matthew 5:29, The Geneva Bible (Geneva: 1560). 18. James 3:5–​6. The Geneva Bible. Carla Mazzio, “Sins of the Tongue,” in The Body in Parts:  Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Carla Mazzo and David Hillman (New York: Routledge, 1997), 56. 19. Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails, 17. 20. Fabritio Caroso, Courtly Dance of the Renaissance: A New Translation and Edition of the Nobilta Di Dame, trans. and ed. Julia Sutton (New York: Dover, 1995), 149. 21. Arbeau, Orchesography, 118–​119. 22. Arbeau, Orchesography, 136. 23. Arbeau, Orchesography, 153–​157. 24. Arbeau, Orchesography, 174. 25. Arbeau, Orchesography, 121. 26. Caroso, Courtly Dance of the Renaissance, 370 and 25. See also Mark Franko, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography (c. 1416–​1589) (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1986), 46–​47. Ballet-​master Jean-​Georges Noverre would later (1760) criticize what we would call baroque dance and Feuillet’s foot-​oriented notation method:  “[I]‌t indicates with exactitude the movements of the feet only, and if it shows us the movements of the arms, it orders neither the positions nor the contours they should have. Again, it shows us neither the attitudes of the body nor its effacements, nor the oppositions of the head, nor the different situations, noble and easy, necessary to each part” (Letters on Dancing and Ballet (Alton: Dance Books, 2004), 133). 27. Arbeau, Orchesography, 107 and 66–​ 67. See Yvonne G.  Kendall, “Ornamentation and Improvisation in Sixteenth-​ Century Dancing,” Jennifer Nevile, “Disorder in Order:  Improvisation in Italian Choreographed Dances of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” and Barbara Sparti, “Improvisation and Embellishment in Popular and Art Dances in Fifteenth-​& Sixteenth-​Century Italy,” in Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Timothy McGee (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2003). 28. Anne Daye, “Skill and Invention in the Ballroom,” Historical Dance 2, no. 6 (1991): 12–​15. 29. Howard, Politics of Courtly Dancing, 23.

192   Brandon Shaw 30. Jennifer Nevile, “The Early Dance Manuals and the Structure of Ballet,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marion Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 13. 31. The European worship of static verticality gradually came to be reflected in its conceptualization of ethics and nationalism just as much as its aesthetics. See Adriana Cavarero, Inclinations:  A Critique of Rectitude (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2016), and Georges Vigarello, “The Upward Training of the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part II, eds. Michael Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 148–​199. Evidently the anatomical relationship between spinal and moral rectitude was unclear enough that Charlotte Brontë needed to explain her use of the term: “A pretty-​ looking . . . young man, apparently constructed without a backbone. . . . I don’t allude to his corporal spine . . . but to his character” (Let. 13 October in Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London, 1857) I. xii. 299, cited in The Oxford English Dictionary). See the chapter, “Orientational Metaphors” in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1980),  14–​21. 32. Although focused on fifteenth-​ century Italy, Jennifer Nevile’s chapter “Eloquent Movement—​Eloquent Prose,” from The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-​Century Italy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005) is relevant here also. See also Daniel Tangri, “Demosthenes in the Renaissance: A Case Study on the Origins and Development of Scholarship on Athenian Oratory,” Viator 37 (2006): 545–​582. 33. On female rectitude, see Zirka Z. Filipczak, “Poses and Passions:  Mona Lisa’s ‘Closely Folded’ Hands,” in Reading the Early Modern Passions:  Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, eds. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd Wilson (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 87–​88. Filipczack argues that a tilted neck for women could connote “gracefulness and gentleness” (87), though it is important to differentiate this from tilt or inclination from twisting. Vigarello’s “The Upward Training of the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility” traces the parallel use of manuals and sartorial devices until the eventual technologies of immobile contraptions and corrective machinery into the eighteenth century, predominantly intended for women. 34. Robert Naunton, Memoirs of Robert Cary, Earl of Monmouth, Written by Himself and Fragmenta Regalia:  Being a History of Queen Elizabeth’s Favourites (Edinburgh:  James Ballantyne, 1808), 248. 35. Cited in Bella Mirabella, “‘In the sight of all’: Queen Elizabeth and the Dance of Diplomacy,” Early Theatre 15, no. 1 (2012): 65–​68, at 65. Regarding Elizabeth’s athleticism and jumping, see Ravelhofer, “Dancing at the Court of Queen Elizabeth,” in Queen Elizabeth I: Past and Present (19), ed. Christa Jansohn (Münster: LIT Verlag Münster, 2004), 101–​116, at 108–​110. 36. Margaret M. McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 37. David Boyden, The History of Violin Playing from its Origins to 1761 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1965). 38. Franko, The Dancing Body, 49. 39. Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier:  The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (University Park: Penn State Press, 1996).

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies    193 40. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (New York: Norton, 2002), 32. 41. Robert Ferris Thompson, Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-​Atlantic Art and Music (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2011); Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: Harper Collins, 1996); Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 42. Ravelhofer, “Dancing at the Court of Queen Elizabeth,” 107. Against the claim of “sparing instruction,” consult Franko, The Dancing Body. 43. Franko, The Dancing Body,  44–​47. 44. Franko, The Dancing Body,  52–​53. 45. Arbeau, Orchesography, 55, 59. 46. Arbeau, Orchesography, 55. Regarding Arbeau’s conservatism and militarism, see Kate van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 222. 47. Arbeau, Orchesography, 83. 48. Franko, The Dancing Body, 57–​66; Howard, Politics of Courtly Dancing, 16. 49. Arbeau, Orchesography, 118–​119. François De Lauze, Apologie de la Danse by F. De Lauze 1623: A Treatise of Instruction in Dancing and Deportment, ed. and trans. Joan Wildeblood (London: Frederick Muller, 1952), 98. 50. See Sutton in Caroso, Courtly Dance of the Renaissance, 103, 343, and 371. 51. Arbeau, Orchesography, 121. 52. Cited in McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance, 266. 53. Dance master Cesare Negri names two contemporaries who were masters of both dance and fencing (see Patri J.  Pugliese, “Parallels between Fencing and Dancing in Late Sixteenth Century Treatises,” from the Raymond J.  Lord Collection of Historical Combat Treatises, http://​www.umass.edu/​renaissance/​lord/​pdfs/​Parallels.pdf, 1, accessed December 1, 2017). 54. “pump, n.2.” Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press), http://​www. oed.com.ejournals.um.edu.mt/​view/​Entry/​154516?rskey=dVFAXi&result=2, accessed December 10, 2016. 55. The foreign Italian technique and reliance upon the rapier is derided by George Silver, whose jibing in his 1599 Paradoxes of Defence seems to echo Mercutio: “Now, o you Italian teachers of Defense, where are your Stocatas, Imbrocatas, Mandritas, Puntas & Puynta reversas, Stramisons, Passatas, Carricados, Amazzas, & Incartas . . . ?” (Silver, Three Elizabethan fencing manuals, 553; cited in Joan Ozark Holmer, “‘Draw, if you be Men’: Saviolo’s Significance for Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45, no. 2 [Summer 1994]: 163–​189, 165). Mercutio’s portending “ ‘Alla stoccata’ carries it away” (3.1.67) is fulfilled in that the stoccata, “a thrust that reaches the enemy under the sword, hand, or dagger [ . . . ]” (Holmer, “Draw, if you be Men,” 169), is the move that necessitates Mercutio’s being literally carried away. Mercutio questions Romeo, “Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm” (3.1.101–​ 102; see Holmer, 169. As Mondschein points out in his Introduction to Agrippa’s text, George Silver criticized the space needed for Agrippa’s system with the close quarters of an ambush or battlefield. Thus the claim of “stoccata,” sounding similar to steccato, “the palisaded area where the duel would take place,” could also be a mockery of foppish dueling culture versus the soldier’s actuality; Mondschein in Camillo Agrippa, Fencing: A Renaissance Treatise, ed. Ken Mondschein (New York: Italica, 2009), xli. 56. As Holmer points out, Saviolo mentions the “prick” of the rapier twice in his manual (252 and 269; cited in Holmer, “Draw, if you be Men,” 172). See also Agrippa, Fencing, xxv–​xxvi.

194   Brandon Shaw 57. Adolph L. Soens, “Tybalt’s Spanish Fencing in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1969): 121–​127. 58. Silver, Paradoxes of Defense, 14; cited in Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 66. 59. Saviolo, Vincentio Sauiolo his Practise in Two Bookes. The First Intreating of the Vse of the Rapier and Dagger. The Second, of Honor and Honorable Quarrels. Both interlaced with sundrie pleasant discourses, not vnfit for all gentlemen and captaines that professe armes. (London: Thomas Scarlet and Joan Orwin, 1595), 238–​239. 60. Caroso, for example, forbids men from allowing others to see the sweat on their headbands (Courtly Dance, 96). See also Arcangeli, “Dance and Health,” and Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy:  Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2011), 94. 61. Benvolio also reflects Mercutio’s disdain of Tybalt’s enthrallment to Italian technique (1.1.100–​103; Holmer, “Draw, if you be Men,” 167). 62. According to Anglo, the geometric attempt reached its apogee in the work of Narváez, whose Libro de las grandezas de la espada (1600) was so dependent upon the geometric method that it marks the Destrezas “fossiliz[ation]” and “apogee” (The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe, 71, 82). 63. The discrepancy between practiced interchanges in contemporary martial arts schools and real-​world altercations is addressed in Rory Miller, Meditations on Violence:  A Comparison of Martial Arts Training and Real World Violence (Wolfeboro, NH: YMAA Publications, 2008). 64. Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe, 90. Orden traces these lines across bodily disciplines during the seventeenth century:  “Like a colossal stage machine, geometry imposed circles upon the bodies of fencers, squares and triangles and chains upon the choreography of ballets, and detailed linear hierarchies on the order of royal processions” (Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, 67). 65. Saviolo, Vincentio Sauiolo his Practise, 454; Holmer, “Draw if you be men,” 180). 66. Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981), 65. 67. See also Günter Berghaus, “Neoplatonic and Pythagorean Notions of World Harmony and Unity and Their Influence on Renaissance Dance Theory,” Dance Research 10, no. 2 (1992): 43–​70. 68. A third connotation is sexual promiscuity. Juliet, for example, is concerned that Romeo might “think [her] haviour light” (2.2.99) if she does not veil her passion for him. 69. Louis XIV in his Lettres Patentes establishing the Académie Royale de Danse (1661): “Although the Art of Dance has always been recognized as one of the most honorable and necessary methods to train the body, and furthermore as the primary and most natural basis for all sorts of Exercises, including that of bearing arms, consequently it is one of the most advantageous and useful to our Nobility, as well as others who have the honor of approaching Us, not only in time of War for our Armies, but even in Peacetime while we enjoy the diversion of our court Ballets”; Maureen Needham, “Louis XIV and the Académie Royale de Danse—​A Commentary and Translation,” Dance Chronicle 20, no. 2 (1997): 173–​190,  180.

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies    195

Bibliography Anglo, Sydney. The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe. New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2000. Cavarero, Adriana. Inclinations:  A Critique of Rectitude. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2016. Hillman, David. Shakespeare’s Entrails:  Belief, Skepticism and the Interior of the Body. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Hoeniger, F. David. Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992. Kuriyama, Shigehisa. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Mazzo, Carla, and David Hillman, eds. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Chapter 8

Dancing wit h Pe rdi ta The Choreography of Lost Time in The Winter’s Tale Steven Swarbrick

When you do dance, I wish you A wave o’ th’ sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so. (The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.140–​42)1

Florizel’s image of Perdita as a “A wave” cresting “o’ th’ sea,” or as a dancer suspended in mid-​motion (“move still”), gives Shakespeare’s play about loss and perdition its central choreographic conceit: time dancing. Time, who appears allegorically in the play’s middle as Time, dances throughout Shakespeare’s play in different guises—​and this despite the fact that Shakespeare’s play is centrally about questions of death and hibernation. From the loss of Polixenes and Leontes’ childhood love, to the loss of Perdita, who is the material embodiment of Leontes’ disavowed friendship, to the death of Hermione, loss accumulates in Shakespeare’s play as a series of unaccounted and unaccountable “Nothing[s]‌.” And yet, time “move[s] still” inside these periods of loss and cessation, as Hermione’s living statue, a figure of suspended animation, represents. This chapter argues that The Winter’s Tale foregrounds time’s dance as an animating condition of life’s individuation. I  adapt the term “individuation” from Gilbert Simondon, who puts forth the simple premise that individuals, whether subjects or objects, individuate or emerge through processual relations: they come to be.2 Rather than portray time as a linear unfolding from life to death, or from self to self, Shakespeare portrays time’s dance as an active assemblage of bodies, elements, and things, each of them acting in concert across temporal strata in the making of any given moment. In this untimely choreography, subject and object, inside and outside, past and present do not stand dialectically opposed; rather, they emerge in relation. From the perspective of process, time is not “lost” because it never belongs. Time tarries with the negative of lost

198   Steven Swarbrick time (the “Nothing,” in Florizel’s words) by unfolding multiple, incommensurable strata of space-​time within the space of delay. Drawing on recent developments in dance theory, as well as on related developments in disability and ecological studies, this chapter sets out to choreograph lost time as a relation of composition between bodies, temporalities, and environments. As Erin Manning writes, “Each foray into [dance] involves the generating of a field that is constituted by all the pastnesses and futurities that compose it.”3 Each coming-​together (com-​position) of dance comes together in relation to “pastnesses and futurities” that are not yet settled or determined (not yet lost or on the horizon), but are still in germ. By examining the relation between time and dance as one of individuation and composition rather than contradiction, my goal is not to analogize time and dance, but rather to show that the essence of dance in Shakespeare’s play is time.

Dancing Through Theory Although contemporary dance theory can be accused of (ab)using dance in a hypothetical and abstracted sense (Dance), as a way to give flesh to a variety of philosophical concepts (Time, Becoming, Individuation), there is no reason to think that a writer such as Shakespeare would have shared this disembodied view.4 In the Neoplatonic and Pythagorean tradition of Renaissance dance theory, for example, the movement of the dancer not only reflected the movements of the celestial orbs; more concretely, the dancer was thought to move with the harmony of the spheres: both dancer and dance, body and cosmos, took part in the same celestial choreography.5 Likewise, taking us to a more terrestrial plane, early modern dance scholar Jennifer Nevile has shown that both dancer and cosmos moved with the patterns, geometrical figures, and still and perambulatory designs of the English garden.6 Rarely do we think of gardens as having movement, much less choreographed movement, beyond the natural trajectories of growth and decay. And yet, according to Nevile, “the principles which underlaid the design of grand gardens in Europe also underlaid the construction of choreographies.”7 Nevile writes, Both garden design and choreography are concerned with manipulating, controlling, and ordering space. Dance can be seen as the creation of patterns in space: patterns which form and reform, and trace out shapes in the air and on the ground. Formal gardens can also be viewed as the creation of patterns on the ground: their shapes are static, but they still present changing images as viewers stroll from section to section, and new shapes open up before them.8

Both the court culture of the dance and the horticulture of the garden were, Nevile argues, kinetic arts. And this was so because the garden, as an expression of two cultures—​the natural “culture” created by God and the artificial culture created by

Dancing with Perdita    199 human beings—​echoed in its labyrinthine regularity the order and proportion of the universe, which privileged “measure, symmetry, geometrical forms, straight lines, the construction of the whole out of small compartments, and the creation of enclosed spaces with clear boundaries.”9 Within this formalized context—​at once historical, natural, and cosmological—​Florizel’s wish, “that you might ever do /​Nothing but that, move still, still so,” can be read as both an allusion to and re-​enactment of the choreographed space of the English garden, which the natural setting of the play reflects. Not only does Florizel’s name have its origin in the word for flower, but his wish, too, which he addresses to Perdita, whom he also calls “Flora,” evokes the stillness and perambulatory movement that Nevile attributes to the garden-​spectator dynamic. I offer these initial material-​historical examples of Renaissance dance theory for two reasons:  first, as previously mentioned, as a reminder that early modern dance practices carried specific meanings, connotations, and forms, which we elide all too easily in the turn to capital Dance Theory; second, as a way of suggesting that what makes Shakespeare’s work of critical importance to dance studies, both past and present, is its deviation from the norms of unity, world harmony, proportion, and geometric symmetry. Take Perdita, for example: the image of Perdita cresting over the sea makes reference to an entire repertoire of images drawn from the annals of dance history in which beautiful woman still the spectator’s wandering gaze. One of the most famous of these images is Sandro Botticelli’s painting, Birth of Venus (ca. 1486). In it, we encounter Venus rising from the sea. She appears naked, aloft a seashell that is driven by the wind-​god, Zephyrus, who bears Venus to the shore above a turbulent sea. Soft, flocculent foam whirls beneath her feet as cascades of roses shower her from above. To the right, a nymph dressed in billowing draperies moves to receive Venus. Limning the edges of Venus’s naked body, the nymph extends a purple cloak that has been embroidered, as if to match the surrounding scenery, with the flowers and foliage of Spring. In the center of the image is Venus, naked and serene. To the left and right of her are two symmetrical poses. Yet amidst these poses a disequilibrium of forces courses throughout the picture, tearing the figures from the ideality of their poses and exposing them to a movement that dissolves the very edges of their bodies. Writing on this inversion of movement and form in the literary and visual culture of the Quattrocento, the German art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg (who is best known for his research on the transmission of classical representation in Western culture) describes the nymph figure in Birth of Venus not as a stable entity or iconographic reproduction, but as an assemblage of moving, interacting parts.10 From billowing garments to loosened hair, Warburg asserts that the so-​called secondary attributes or accidents take on a supplementary relationship to bodily substance in Botticelli’s painting, framing the contours of the body while at the same time displacing that body into a play of ecstatic forces.11 Such fearful symmetry, Warburg suggests, is born from the painting’s movement, a movement that is not just external but also internal to the figuration of the painting’s mythological bodies.12 The nymph’s body ripples out into the billows of her clothing; the pleats of her dress ramify the contours

200   Steven Swarbrick of her flesh; her mantle catches the curls of the wind that courses through Venus’s hair; and the flowers embroidered on her clothes sprout forth as though they were woven from the lineaments of the garden. Far from reproducing stable iconographic figures, what the painting gives us to see is the movement of figuration itself. In a note drafted in September 1890, Warburg extends this movement to the body of the spectator. He writes, To attribute motion to a figure that is not moving, it is necessary to reawaken in oneself a series of experienced images following one from the other—​not a single image: a loss of calm contemplation [ . . . ]. With clothing in motion, every part of the contour is seen as the trace of a person moving forward whom one is following step-​by-​step.13

The “loss of calm contemplation” that Warburg invokes suggests an almost hallucinatory exchange between subject and object in the perception of the image. In the case of Botticelli’s nymph, it is not enough to trace her movements at a distance; one has to surrender to “following [her] step-​by-​step.” The spectator in Warburg’s analysis follows the female image as if in a trance, becoming as much object as subject in relation to her ecstatic movement. Between them, what transpires is not an identification or visualization, but rather an involution—​seer and seen, image and spectator, encounter and mingle. One could say they dance. Drawing on Warburg’s analysis of the movement-​image (or Pathosformel, an image charged with affect and vitality), Giorgio Agamben repeats Florizel’s central observation concerning the relation between time and dance, asking, “How can an image charge itself with time? How are time and images related?”14 Turning to the figure of the nymph, “a being whose form punctually coincides with its matter and whose origin is indissoluble from its becoming,” Agamben suggests that “every image virtually anticipates its future development and remembers its former gestures.”15 The image, though seemingly still, moves with the very “life of images,” Agamben says, since the image itself contracts the history of its past and future relations. Agamben writes, When [ . . . ] the iconographic theme has been recomposed and the images seem to come to rest, they have actually charged themselves with time, almost to the point of exploding. Precisely this kairological saturation imbues them with a sort of tremor that in turn constitutes their particular aura.16

This is precisely the paradoxical relation between stillness and motion identified by Shakespeare’s Florizel: the image of Perdita dancing does not expire in the word “still”; rather, stillness, or the interval or pause between movements, folds within itself an untimely sense of becoming that, being overfull, is without origin or end. To “still,” in this sense of the verb, means to charge time “to the point of exploding.” This is why Agamben writes that “[t]‌he true locus of the dancer is not the body and its movements but the image as a ‘Medusa’s head,’ as a pause that is not immobile but simultaneously charged

Dancing with Perdita    201 with memory and dynamic energy.”17 What fascinates Florizel is how the being of the dancer can emerge from a state of becoming in which being and “Nothing” are coeval. Florizel’s wish, “that you might ever do /​Nothing but that, move still, still so,” highlights the essential paradox of time in Shakespeare’s play:  that movement eventuates from nonmovement, life from nonlife, and sentience from insentience. Perdita, whose name means “lost,” moves within the space of “Nothing”—​indeed is born from the multiplication of “nothing” (as I will show later)—​with the startling consequence that life moves not just toward death but from it as well. The life of the human subject, no less than the dancer, emerges from this primordial “Nothing,” but it is a nothing that is nonetheless necessary for life’s flourishing. Just as the image or “Medusa’s head,” for Agamben, brings the “kairological saturation” (that is, the now time of qualitative action and decision, kairos, as contrasted with the chronological and sequential time of chronos in Greek tragedy) of the dance to the point of bursting, so the image of life as a “wave” cresting over the sea registers life’s paradoxical movement as it halts and contracts while leaping forward. Each instant of life crystallizes a multi-​vectored milieu. This milieu, according to Erin Manning, “is never ‘between’ constituted selves: the associated milieu is the resonant field of individuation, active always in concert with the becomings it engenders.”18 The catalyst of individuation is affect: “Affective attunement is another mode of immanent relation where the relation radically precedes the purported unity of the self.”19 Through affect, which for Manning works on the body at a pre-​individual level, “the unity of the self ” gives way to series of micro-​movements and displacements, thus triggering further differentiation. Dance foregrounds this process of differentiation: “in the dancing, what we experience is a lived extraction from the plane of immanence that is total movement, leaving us in the vibration of what is beyond the predetermined body.”20 To dance, in other words, is to move with. Indeed, as I will show in the next section, Shakespeare “crips” the idea of spatial and temporal unity by adopting a disability aesthetic at odds with the Pythagorean and Neoplatonic tradition of universal harmony on the one hand, and natural order on the other. Renaissance scholars such as Nevile, whom I cited earlier, usefully excavate the choreographic as an expression of the “Renaissance mind,” therefore providing the groundwork for considering, with insight from disability studies, also disharmony, disunity, and embodied difference as positive expressions of that same choreographic “mind.”21 Such examples typically fall outside the norms of bodily representation. And yet, as disability theorist and early modern scholar Sujata Iyengar argues, Shakespeare often “presents able-​bodiedness, health, and happiness”—​terms that map easily onto Pythagorean (if not strictly early modern) ideals of unity, harmony, and perfection—​“as contested terms,” leaving the ultimate value of dance in suspense in his plays.22 Or to put this again in Manning’s words, Shakespeare’s treatment of dance “is not reducible to the poles of the event” (i.e., self–​other, unity–​disunity). Instead, “[i]‌t happens in their interval and is co-​constitutive of a becoming that always exceeds their ‘selves.’ ”23 Through time, in other words, selves become extended in space and form recognizable outlines, but these outlines are always etched by affects, relations, and prehistories that preexist the self. The self, then, never being fully individualized, finds itself suspended

202   Steven Swarbrick in an ambient milieu of relations, like a yolk suspended in an egg’s albumen. Such suspended animation is precisely what Perdita’s dance gives us to see: both an image of becoming that points us back to relation, and an image of “Nothing” that nonetheless produces queer births. Florizel’s “Nothing” haunts Shakespeare’s entire play. It is thus necessary to account for the annihilating force of this autumnal refrain as it empties life of its force and vitality, turning time to winter. Agamben notes that “[t]‌he images that constitute our memory tend incessantly to rigidify into spectres in the course of their (collective and individual) historical transmission.”24 “The task,” Agamben writes, “is to bring them back to life. Images are alive, but, because they are made of time and memory, their life is always-​already Nachleben (posthumous life or afterlife); it is always-​already threatened and in the process of taking on a spectral form.”25 Over the course of Shakespeare’s play, Hermione’s stone statue will come to represent the rigidification of time in both concrete and spectral form. Prior to that, however, the play foregrounds a different image of time related to dance and disability; this image challenges the presumed unity and linearity of temporal subjects. And because it will prove crucial to the play’s stony ending, it is this second sense of time that I turn to next.

Time’s Crutches: Cracked Eggs and Untimely Births They that went on crutches ere he was born desire yet their life to see him a man. (The Winter’s Tale, 1.1.39–​40)

Disability theorists Robert McRuer and Alison Kafer define “crip time” as the suspension of heteronormative and ablest narratives of progression in which time unfolds in a linear, unerring, and steadfast motion away from the past and toward the future. 26 The “crip” in “crip time” thus refers to the various ways that thinking with disability can suspend time’s linearity, or what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism.”27 Instead of each present of experience giving birth to an identical present, crip time suspends the present moment by pointing to the nonlinearity of the suspended middle, where relations of ability and disability, movement and nonmovement, coincide and give shape to the body’s becoming. In other words, “crip time,” disability theory’s name for the “lost” middle, inhabits every supposed unity. Time is not a succession of independent and selfsame “nows.” Time is relational and interdependent. From a crip perspective, time does not proceed in distinct stages; it grows from the middle, where multiple layers or strata of space-​time inflect the present moment. Lost time, in this sense, is never lost and never regained. It is always in germ.

Dancing with Perdita    203 The Winter’s Tale captures this sense of “crip time” by linking time in the play to the body of disability; as the play unfolds, however, the negative association between disability and loss gives way to an alternative sense of time in which disability and dance play a generative role. In the opening pages, Archidamus, a lord of Bohemia, says to his counterpart from Sicilia, Camillo, You have an unspeakable comfort of your young prince Mamillius: it is a gentleman of the greatest promise that ever came into my note. (1.1.34–​36)

To which Camillo responds: I very well agree with you in the hopes of him; it is a gallant child; one that, indeed, physics the subject, makes old hearts fresh. They that went on crutches ere he was born desire yet their life to see him a man. (1.1.37–​41)

Mamillius, child of Leontes, who is King of Sicilia, is a figure of unspeakability in the play: his “promise” and “note” derive from what is “unspeakable” about his past; likewise his “comfort”—​an “unspeakable comfort”—​is a comfort only in the limited sense that he cannot speak of the “nothing” from which he came. This “nothing,” which we have already encountered in the image of Perdita, appears in a number of guises throughout the play: it first appears in the name Mamillius, which is a play on the Latin mammilia or mamma, a breast or dug; as a reference to early infancy, Mamillius’s name registers the definition of infans, meaning “unable to speak”; second, his name refers to maternal origins—​origins that, as the play develops, are shunned and repudiated as sinful “temptations.” Last but not least, Mamillius embodies the absent prehistory of the play’s central drama:  the “unspeakable” love between Leontes and Polixenes. As Camillo explains, Sicilia cannot show himself overkind to Bohemia. They were train’d together in their childhoods; and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection, which cannot choose but branch now. (1.1.21–​24)

“Sicilia cannot”: a familiar pattern in The Winter’s Tale is the doubling of action and negation. Here, Leontes “cannot show” his “affection” for Polixenes both because that affection is exceedingly great and because it is barred by the laws of heteronormativity and primogeniture. As Polixenes says to Leontes not too much later, “like a cipher /​ . . . I multiply /​With one ‘We thank you’ many thousands more /​That go before it,” indicating with this “cipher” both the inexpressibility of his passion, which can be multiplied indefinitely, and the obverse: the impossibility of putting into speech the love that they share. This twinning of action and negation continues from “Sicilia cannot” to the following line: “and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection, which cannot choose but branch now.” Between the two senses of “cannot” (action/​negation), the second predominates: the “affection” between Leontes and Polixenes still grows like a

204   Steven Swarbrick tree “rooted” long ago; but this “branch” also signals difference and division, a “now” suspended between what was (which is “unspeakable”) and what is. This “branch” represents not only new growth or the “promise” of the present (i.e., Mamillius), but also the “separation” and loss that was necessary for its emergence. As Camillo relates, “Since their more mature dignities and royal necessities made separation of their society, their [Leontes and Polixenes’] encounters (though not personal) hath been royally attorney’d with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies, that they have seem’d to be together, though absent” (1.1.24–​29). As Camillo and Archidamus continue, the language of this absence multiplies: there is, we are told, “great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia”; since their separation, they “shook hands, as over a vast; and embrac’d as it were from the ends of oppos’d winds.” Mamillius represents the outcome of this “separation,” a queer birth within negation. Not only is he the product of Leontes’ “royal necessities,” including marriage and reproduction; he is the product of Leontes’ lost and disavowed “affection.” But after rehearsing the tale of the kings’ separation, Camillo turns to an image of disability to illustrate the delay between loss and fulfillment, embodied by Mamillius. The latter “physics the subject” and “makes old hearts fresh” by bringing to life the “promise” of time regained; his face, “[t]‌hey say,” is a “copy” of Leontes’, suggesting that while division and separation have stalled the king’s image of boyhood “affection,” Mamillius represents a new start. As for the period of delay between loss and restoration, Camillo figures this time as one of death and impairment. “They that went on crutches ere he,” Mamillius, “was born desire yet their life”—​but a life that is little more than a living death, according to Camillo. When Archidamus asks, “Would they else be content to die?” Camillo responds in the affirmative: “Yes; if there were no other excuse why should desire to live” (1.1.42–​44). Disability, here, is rendered as a delay, a kind of suspended animation between life and death. Moreover, disability marks the interval between birth and rebirth: even after Mamillius was “born,” they “that went on crutches” desired to see him reborn as a “man.” The adverb “yet” prefigures Florizel’s eventual use of “still” in “move still, still so,” insofar as “yet” captures the time of suspended animation, implying both continuation (they “desire yet their life”) and discontinuation or negation in the sense of “no longer”: “they desire yet their life,” which is no life at all. Finally, the word “crutch” is a variant of “crotch,” derived from the Middle English croche, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, could refer to (1) a forked instrument used for agriculture, (2) “the bifurcation of the human body where the legs join the trunk,” or (3) “the fork of a tree or bough, where it divides into limbs or branches” (OED, “crotch,” n.). As a figure of “crip time,” of a time that is (à la Shakespeare’s Hamlet) out of joint, the image of “crutches” doubles and repeats the previous image of a branching tree, further replicating the sense of difference, separation, and fracture that characterizes the space of delay between the kings’ lost boyhood “affection” and its future renewal in the image of Mamillius. Interestingly, while the body of disability is used pejoratively as a figure of winter, that is, of life in death, the “[t]‌hey” to whom Camillo refers encircles all those who inhabit the play. In other words, the “crip time” figured by Camillo applies as much to Leontes

Dancing with Perdita    205 and the people of his court as to the physically disabled. Time’s “crutches” does not distinguish between able-​bodied and non-​able-​bodied; it recasts even the so-​called normative time of futurity and reproduction (figured as a child) as forked or cripped. Against the “sovereignty model of temporality” as theorized by Jonathan Gil Harris, which assumes a direct line of development from past to present, Shakespeare mobilizes “crip time” as a way of questioning not only the pejorative nature of disability, but also the negativity associated with time’s middle, represented as a fork or crutch.28 He does so by figuring “crip time” not as a relation of presence versus absence, but as a relation of co-​ composition, in which multiple speeds, affects, and potentials intersect in the making of each “now.” In this latter sense, disability marks not the cessation of all movement, but rather the paradoxical movement discussed earlier in relation to dance, in which the being of the dancer emerges from a multiplicity of speeds and forces that go beyond the bounded individual. Time’s dance is profoundly relational. So, too, time conceived as “crip time” is profoundly interdependent. Whereas Leontes, working from a sovereignty model of time, would reduce time’s “crutches,” or the interval dividing each present, to “nothing,” Shakespeare uses the idea of crip time to show that the interval separating each moment, not to mention each individual, is overfull. Just as Perdita’s dance emerges from “Nothing,” so, too, with Leontes. He references time’s dance in the following: Too hot, too hot! To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods. I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances, But not for joy; not joy. This entertainment May a free face put on, derive a liberty From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom, And well become the agent; ’t may-​I grant. But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers, As now they are, and making practic’d smiles, As in a looking-​glass; and then to sigh, as ’twere The mort o’ th’ deer-​O, that is entertainment My bosom likes not, nor my brows! Mamillius, Art thou my boy? (1.2.108–​118)

Leontes’ question to Mamillius hangs on the interrogative “Art,” which doubles as a question about the artifice he sees (or that he believes he sees) around him, including “paddling palms and pinching fingers,” and “practic’d smiles” between Polixenes and Hermione. Are these merely the expressions of courtly custom, innocent flirtations between Polixenes (his childhood friend) and Hermione (his wife), or do they hide something deeper and more sinister? Leontes’ question, “Art thou my boy?” reveals that he can no longer differentiate between the artifice of the court and the truth of his own feelings. Kathryn Bond Stockton, for instance, reads Leontes’ jealousy as a sign that “he is unconsciously projecting his feelings for Polixenes onto Hermione—​making his own heat for Polixenes supposedly hers (‘Too hot, too hot!’).”29 Not only that, “he has ordered Hermione, in her words, to echo strongly his own pleadings; hence, Herimone’s words

206   Steven Swarbrick speak his. Hermione’s supposed lust for Polixenes is nothing but his own.”30 This reading highlights yet another possible interpretation of the “Art” in Leontes’ question: that the infidelity he perceives is the product of his own invention; it is as much a child of his own “Art” as Mamillius his son. Stockton’s provocative reading of Leontes’ disavowed feelings for Polixenes finds support in Polixenes’ own retelling of their childhood past. Spurred by Hermione (who is compelled by Leontes) to recount their childhood “affection,” Polixenes responds: We were as twinn’d lambs that did firsk I’ th’ sun, And bleat the one at th’ other. What we chang’d Was innocence for innocence; we knew not The doctrine of ill-​doing, nor dream’d That any did. Had we pursu’d that life, And our weak spirits ne’er been higher rear’d With stronger blood, we should have answer’d heaven Boldly, “Not guilty”; the imposition clear’d, Hereditary ours. (1.2.67–​74)

Echoing Camillo’s abbreviated account at the start of the play, Polixenes’ tale of pastoral “innocence” and boyhood “affection” ends in separation and division. “Your precious self had then not cross’d the eyes /​Of my young playfellow,” Polixenes says to Hermione, suggesting that she was the “crutch” or cause of their eventual separation, the “fault” that ended their wish to be “boy eternal” (1.2.78–​79, 85). I have already suggested that Mamillius embodies the loss and rebirth of this “unspeakable” boyhood romance. Strangely, queerly, he is the product of Leontes and Polixenes’ lost love. When, however, Leontes projects this disavowed love onto Hermione, their “cross’d” history wells to the surface, calling into question Leontes’ sovereign sense of time. In asking Mamillius, “Art thou my boy?” he acknowledges not only his jealousy, imagining himself to be cuckolded by Hermione (yet another connotation of “crutch” as synonym for “forked”); he also calls into question the “[h]‌ereditary” unity of time as that which proceeds from present to present, or from self to self, without delay or detour. He says to Mamillius: Why, that’s my bawcock. What? [hast] smutch’d thy nose? They say it is a copy out of mine.  . . .  Art thou my calf? (1.2.121–​122, 127)

And again: Thou want’st a rough pash and the shoots that I have, To be full like me; yet they say we are Almost as like as eggs. (1.2.128–​130)

Dancing with Perdita    207 Desiring to straighten time and to put an end to “tremor cordis,” the troubling motion that sets his heart to dance (“my heart dances”), Leontes tries to stabilize his self-​image by seeking its reflection in Mamillius. As the King observes, “They say it [Mamillius’s nose] is a copy of my own.” Leontes’ remark is meant to dispel suspicion (his own) about his son’s origin; what’s more, the language of origin and “copy” draws the reader’s attention back to a hereditary language free from the “mingling bloods” that call that origin into question. If Mamillius is his “copy,” “[a]‌lmost as like as eggs,” then nothing can stand in Leontes way as author and source—​not even Polixenes. And yet “nothing” does interfere with Leontes’ vision. Despite his insistence that Mamillius is his offspring, his patent and “copy,” this does not prevent Leontes from imagining other copies or simulacra at the source, exclaiming: “No, in good earnest, /​How sometimes nature will betray its folly!” (1.2.151–​151). Although Leontes projects his love for Polixenes onto Hermione, this does not prevent his past feelings from welling to the surface. The dance that overtakes Leontes’ heart—​what he calls his “tremor cordis”—​is yet another figure of disability used to represent a time that is out of joint, in which negated affects continue to act on the present moment, in effect “cripping” the straight time, or the sovereign time, that Leontes seeks to maintain. As Leontes’ “heart dances,” time gives way to “unspeakable” feelings; as a result, Leontes begins to communicate with “dreams” that are at once real (they destabilize Leontes’ self-​image) and “unreal” (because they are projected onto Hermione, they become the product of his own “art”). Echoing Erin Manning’s definition of dance as an event fed by pre-​individual affects, affects that “have not yet succumbed to the promise of linear time, living instead in the active topology of space-​times of experience”—​ such as Polixenes’ “boy eternal”—​“that many adults spend their lifetimes resisting,” Leontes registers his heart’s “tremor” as a dance triggered by wayward “Affection.”31 He apostrophizes: Affection! Thy intention stabs the centre. Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicat’st with dreams (how can this be?), With what’s unreal thou co-​active art, And fellow’st nothing. (1.2.138–​142)

Just as Perdita, earlier, moved in and from the “Nothing” described by Florizel, recasting our vision of lost time as an active becoming, so Leontes moves with the intensity (“intention”) that “stabs” his heart’s “centre,” provoking it to dance in relation “with dreams,” “[w]‌ith what’s unreal,” and with the play’s refrain of “nothing.” Dance, that “co-​active art,” unfixes past, present, and future from their linear movement, bringing to the fore actual and virtual relations that exceed the present. Overcome with (e)motion, Leontes’ heart moves with space-​times that run contrary to the “[h]ereditary” line of reproduction, origin and “copy”; rather than being at the center of time’s movement, Leontes’ “centre” gives way to a dancing that “[c]ommunicat’st” co-​actively from time’s suspended middle—​time’s crutch. Within this co-​active topology, relation is key; in fact,

208   Steven Swarbrick it’s Leontes’ relation to “nothing”—​to those things that are “unspeakable” but that “move still” (like Perdita) within the space of loss, such as his homoerotic feelings for Polixenes—​that drive the play’s central drama. As Leontes’ absorption by his heart’s “Affection” worsens, he begins to multiply the “nothing” in a manner akin to Polixenes, who, “like a cipher,” had previously multiplied “[w]‌ith one ‘we thank you’ many thousands more.” The difference is that Leontes, unlike Polixenes, multiplies the “nothing” as a vehicle for his own projected desire, with the result that the world outside Leontes’ mind is eliminated. Unable to reconcile his heart’s dance with the wish for self-​unity, he projects his “dreams” outward, finding everywhere around him the “nothing” of his own art: Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip?  . . .  Is this nothing? Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing. (1.2.284–​295)

Of course, as Marjorie Garber writes, these nothings are “nothing,” merely the superficialities and customary manners of the court.32 And yet as Leontes invents these nothings ex nihilo, they take on more than mere rhetorical force; they become real. After accusing Hermione of making him into a cuckold, that is, “a forked one!” (note the allusion again to time’s “crutches,” to the forks and branches signaled at the beginning of the play), Leontes imprisons Hermione; from prison, she bears an untimely birth: “She is,” says Emilia, “before her time, deliver’d” (2.2.22). Paulina continues: “A boy?” (2.2.23). To which Emilia responds, echoing Camillo’s comments about Mamillius: A daughter, and a goodly babe, Lusty and like to live. The Queen receives Much comfort in’t; says, “My poor prisoner, I am innocent as you.” (2.2.24–​27)

Born a prisoner, Perdita proves a “comfort” to Hermione because she, like Mamillius, represents the potential for rebirth, in the dual sense of innocence from sin and freedom from bondage. A near repetition of the “unspeakable comfort” said of Mamillius, she also represents the contradictory ideas of freedom and captivity, and life and death. Her emergence is untimely, not only in the strict sense that she is born prematurely, but also in the more theoretical sense that she is born from “nothing.” All the nothings that lead up to Hermione’s imprisonment; all the nothings that separate Leontes from Polixenes and result in their “royal necessities,” such as marriage and reproduction; all the nothings that emerge from time’s “crutches” and co-​assemble in Leontes’ “co-​active”

Dancing with Perdita    209 dance, contribute to Perdita’s untimely birth, that is, to her generation and transformation from nothing. Perdita, as we saw in the last section, is a figure for time’s movement within intervals of seeming inactivity. Her dance, which moves from “Nothing,” is a lasting embodiment of that “Affection” and heart’s dance that Leontes, since childhood, has had to deny. When Leontes hears of Hermione’s (supposed) death, following soon after the death of Mamillius, the language of origin and copy, like egg for like egg, begins to crack open. Arriving just after the scene in which Leontes imagines a poisonous spider hidden in his cup and states, “if one present /​Th’ abhorr’d ingredient to [one’s] eye, make known /​How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides, /​With violent hefts,” the news of Hermione’s death cracks the hearts of those who knew her: “Woe the while! /​O, cut my lace, lest my heart, cracking it, /​Break too!” shouts Paulina (3.2.173–​174). The idea of selves as discreet, bounded individuals, “eggs” as identical as they are repeatable, gives way in this moment to a cracked sense of self in which relation and affective porousness exceed the boundaries of the individual. Here, once again, “Affection” erodes the heart’s walls and causes the heart to dance. Earlier in the play, Camillo says to Leontes: “I cannot /​Believe this crack to be in my dread mistress” (1.2.321–​322). Whereas Leontes confides in Camillo his plot to expose Hermione’s flaw, explaining that though “thou hast the one half of my heart; /​Do’t not, thou split’st thine own,” his attempt to suture his own split-​self by projecting it onto Hermione results in her undoing (1.2.349–​350). By seeking to escape time’s “crutches,” the idea that time is always more than one, always more variegated and cracked than a linear sense of time would have us believe, Leontes confuses the assemblage of his relations as something negative rather than positive. The result is a winter’s tale in which life itself is reduced to nothing. Or, so it would seem. By the end of the play, we learn that Paulina has in fact transformed Hermione into a statue made of stone, her life suspended in mineral repose. And yet, despite appearances, this statue still moves within the space of her “absence.” Hermione, like Perdita (who is named for what is “lost for ever”), defies the logic of contradiction—​of absence and presence—​by mixing human time scales with nonhuman durations. The result is a paradoxical image in which life and death, human and stone, spectator and object, co-​compose in suspended animation. Suspended with and by inhuman materialities, Hermione triggers untoward (e)motions; she shows that even stone can dance.

It Still Moves: Stony Matter and the Dance of Medusa Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed Thou art Hermione. (The Winter’s Tale, 5.3.24–​25)

210   Steven Swarbrick Wracked by melancholy and “saint-​like sorrow,” Leontes reappears in Act 5 unable to “forget /​The blemishes” he attributed to Hermione, and the consequent “wrong [he] did [him] self ” (5.1.7–​9). “So much” was this “wrong,” Leontes remarks, that “heirless it hath made my kingdom, and /​Destroy’d the sweet’st companion that e’er man /​Bred his hopes out of ” (5.1.9–​ 12). Earlier in this chapter I suggested that Leontes envisions time through a heteronormative lens of reproduction: the future, imagined as a child, unfolds from the present, just as a copy pays homage to its original. By the end of the play, Leontes still clings to a “[h]‌ereditary” model of temporality akin to the “sovereignty model” elaborated by Harris, whereby each bounded present or individual gives birth to the next, without recognizing the myriad material actors and temporalities that co-​mingle in the emergence of each second. One such material actor is Hermione, who Leontes (though mournful) still recognizes as a mere material support or matrix for his “kingdom” and “his hopes.” He might feel sorrow for her loss, but this sorrow is as much a symptom of his own fidelity to a sovereignty model of time that does not recognize the (ongoing) dance of multiple partners. Hermione, Leontes believes, is lost (cue melancholy), yet the future demands an heir. It cannot not demand an heir. The conclusion to The Winter’s Tale problematizes this demand. Just as the crip in “crip time” challenges the association between disability and loss, as discussed in the previous section, so the emergence of stony matter in the final act challenges the association between stillness and death. Even before we lay eyes on Hermione’s statue, which has been secreted away until the play’s final action, we witness the return of “the most peerless piece of earth,” Leontes’ daughter, Perdita, who is an echo of Mamillius, that “Jewel of children” (5.1.94, 116). Together with Florizel, son of Polixenes, they resemble “a lost couple, that,” in Leontes words, “twixt heaven and earth /​Might thus have stood, begetting wonder” (5.1.132–​133). And indeed, as peerless pieces of the earth, Perdita and Florizel do strike wonder; as one Lord puts it: “I speak amazedly, and it becomes /​My marvel and my message” (5.1.187–​188). To be amazed means to be “put out of one’s wits; to stun or stupefy,” to be rendered as senseless as stone (OED “amaze,” v.). The reappearance of Perdita, Florizel, and Polixenes stuns Leontes and his company, making each of them as mazy, as stone-​ like, as the earth with which they are metaphorically compared. What’s important for my purposes is the significance of this stony amazement for the play’s concern with time. “To dwell in a Stone Age,” writes medievalist and ecocritic Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “is to inhabit a time that, like the slow glide of tectonic plates or the sedimentation of geological strata, hardly seems to move.” Cohen continues: To dwell in the grip of stone is to be fastened in history and place, rock bottom of a ladder of progress. Such petrified primitivism is what we place upon others, whether living or dead. . . . Disdained, abjected, quietly racialized, the Stone Age is what we have left behind. Except, of course, we have not. (emphasis mine)33

Stone is often a synonym for cold, unfeeling, inert matter. Consequently, stone often bears the metaphorical weight of history’s losses; it is a metaphor for all that is bygone, primitive, and rigid. Clearly Agamben has this stony vocabulary in mind when, in theorizing dance, he refers to time’s dance—​or the interval between movements—​as a “Medusa’s head,” a

Dancing with Perdita    211 pause that crystallizes or indeed mineralizes a dancer’s movement and transforms the viewer in turn. As “a peerless piece of earth,” Perdita not only stands for lost time; she also embodies the various strata that, in a geological vein, preserve that loss for future generations. As such, she has the power, like Medusa, to turn the viewer into stone, to make him feel the weight of history in all its heft in his very bones (bones being one reminder that the boundary between mineral and flesh is porous). As Agamben writes, images tend to petrify in time, making it the task of the viewer “to bring them back to life.” Unfortunately, Agamben adopts a highly gendered division of labor in imagining this life giving activity. Like Leontes, he imagines the male viewer as a progenitor of living figures; woman, by contrast, represents the petrified image, the matrix, but not the agent, of life. Although Agamben goes far in theorizing time’s dance as a blending of movement and cessation, “as a pause that is not immobile but simultaneously charged with memory and dynamic energy,” he resorts in the end to a familiar chain of associations, equating woman-​matter-​stone with ahistoricity and lifelessness, and man-​spectator-​human with agency and dynamism.34 Cohen, by contrast, presents a picture of stony matter that is rich with the lively relationality that Manning associates with dance specifically, and time more generally. “Because of its exceptional durability,” Cohen writes, [S]‌tone is time’s most tangible conveyor [ . . . ]. Stone conjures spans that transient humans cannot witness and yet are called upon, anxiously, to narrate. We crave apocalypse and its oblivions because they suit our small historical frames: there is comfort in the tidy closure they yield [ . . . ]. Stone’s stories, though, are more intimate, affective, and creative than such stark differences in endurance imply.35

To be sure, The Winter’s Tale teases with apocalyptic time frames, presenting us with a King whose image of untimely perdurance clashes with the logic of perdition. Leontes adopts the melancholic’s attitude toward time as both rupture and loss, whereas Hermione and Perdita figure time as a slow, inhuman concrescence—​an earthly movement that moves still within the space of loss. “Lost time” for Leontes makes sense only as an index of human reproduction; to imagine time scales beyond the individual and its copy is to open up to a world of becoming in which the transient individual is but one inflexion of a much livelier and untimely dance. Enter Hermione’s statue. True to the play’s thematics of loss and redemption, Hermione’s statue has been absconded from sight until the play’s final denouement. Introduced as “the Queen’s picture,” a copy of Hermione carved from stone, the statue surpasses any other likeness, either living or dead: “As she liv’d peerless,” Paulina says, “So her dead likeness, I do well believe, /​Excels what ever yet you look’d upon” (5.2.173–​ 174, 5.3.14–​16). Amazed by this statue, which is “so lively mock’d as ever /​Still sleep mock’d death,” Leontes grows heavy with shame as he, senseless with wonder, stands stonier than stone itself (5.3.19–​20). Leontes says, I am asham’d; does not the stone rebuke me For being more stone than it? O royal piece,

212   Steven Swarbrick There’s magic in thy majesty, which has My evils conjur’d to remembrance, and From thy admiring daughter took the spirits, Standing like stone with thee. (5.3.37–​42)

Earlier I discussed “crip time” as a disabling “crack” within the logic of identity, sovereignty, and succession; often figured pejoratively as a period of loss and cessation, “crip time” does not settle neatly into ablest categories of (straight) time and (solo) progression, but rather explodes those categories in moments of intense feeling, vitiating the present moment while setting hearts, bodies, and minds in motion. The “crip” does not desist but rather insists through time, co-​assembling bodies through time’s many-​ vectored dance. Hermione’s stony matter is the last, and perhaps most provocative, instance of time’s dance. A Medusa’s head, her stony physique not only capture’s Agamben’s sense of the petrified image, of history reduced to inert form; it also transfixes her onlookers (Leontes and Perdita) by turning them to stone (“Standing like stone with thee”). And yet Shakespeare’s stone is not exactly Agamben’s; although Hermione, like Perdita, bears the weight of Leontes’ “nothings,” and is herself a figure for “nothing,” we learn she has been active—​still growing—​within this period of suspense. Leontes remarks: “But yet, Paulina, /​Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing /​So aged as this seems” (5.3.27–​29). So much the more our carver’s excellence [Paulina responds], Which lets go by some sixteen years, and makes her As she liv’d now. (5.3.30–​32)

Leontes’ statement, “nothing /​So aged as this,” reveals once more his bafflement that something can come from “nothing.” However, Paulina’s reply does not suggest that Hermione’s wrinkles emerged ex nihilo; rather, she attests to the slow movement of time’s “carver,” that is, to the co-​temporal art of stone’s becoming, and to inhuman durations not circumscribable by human sight. As Leontes familiarizes himself with Hermione’s transformed visage, the stoniness that overcame him also begins to change. Leontes awakens to the feeling of suppressed (e)motion. Whereas Paulina, in concert with Polixenes, says to Leontes, “If I had thought the sight of my poor image /​Would thus have wrought you (for the stone is mine), /​ I’ld not have show’d it. /​ . . . No longer shall you gaze on’t, lest your fancy /​May think anon it moves,” Leontes, instead, rebuffs their (half-​hearted) efforts to calm his emotion. Hermione’s stone statue—​a figure of hibernation and mutation—​triggers once again the “tremor cordis” that, at the start of the play, collapsed past and present in one “co-​active art.” The difference this time is that Leontes welcomes its disturbance. He states: The fixture of her eye has motion in’t, As we are mock’d with art.  . . . 

Dancing with Perdita    213 O sweet Paulina, Make me to think so twenty years together! No settled sense of the world can match The pleasure of that madness. (5.3.67–​68, 70–​73)

The paradox of “fixture” containing “motion” returns us at last to the image of Perdita dancing. I began this chapter by asserting that the relation of time to dance is more than just analogy; instead, time captures the very essence of dance, as theorists such as Agamben and Manning propose, just as dance brings into focus certain peculiarities of time. Although The Winter’s Tale uses a number of figures to represent time’s oddities—​ including subjects on “crutches” and a statue of living stone—​it is the image of Perdita dancing that provides the grammar of those images and, in the end, makes sense of the coexistence of “fixture” and “motion”—​a kind of sense-​making that, as Leontes rightly observes, “No settled sense of the world can match.” Like the dancer-​spectator relation theorized by Warburg and Agamben, Leontes loses his sense of place in the world; no longer simply a being in the world, Leontes moves with it, and in doing so gives himself over to a different “sense of the world.” This is a world in which “twenty years” occupy the same middle. Here the middle is not merely the space between loss and renewal, birth and rebirth, or self and self; it is the space of relation from which bodies, affects, and selves emerge. Whereas previously Leontes rejected relation as “nothing”—​or worse: a madness resulting from Hermione’s infidelity—​here he embraces the “pleasure” of that “madness” and seeks it in full. When Paulina says, “I am sorry, sir, I have thus far stirr’d you; /​but I could afflict you farther,” Leontes responds, “Do, Paulina; /​For this affliction has a taste as sweet /​As any cordial comfort” (5.3.74–​77). What were once held separate—​“unspeakable comforts” (time as reproduction) and “tremor cordis” (time as nonreproductive assemblage)—​are now linked: “cordial comfort.” The dance of Medusa imagined in the play’s final scene recapitulates the language of “fixture” and “motion” introduced by Perdita. It’s an image of dance in which animacy and suspension commingle, and in which time is no less dynamic for being hibernal.

Notes 1. All quotations from The Winter’s Tale are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., eds. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 2. For an overview of Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, see Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. Thomas LaMarre (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 3. Erin Manning, Always More Than One:  Individuation’s Dance (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2013), 22. 4. For an incisive critique of poststructuralist and deconstructive readings of dance as “text,” see Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographies of Gender,” Signs 24, no. 1 (1998): 1–​33. Foster focuses her argument on an interview with Jacques Derrida, “Choreographies,” in which dance “serves as a signifier for the kind of agile, contingent action that

214   Steven Swarbrick Derrida estimates is necessary for the ongoing struggle of feminist politics” (21). Although this definition of dance as “epiphanic evanescence” accords with a certain high modernist idea of art as the refusal of history and tradition, Foster points out that Derrida’s version of dance bears “no choreographic substance”:  “It merely happens in the blink of an eye, as quickly as the dance changes places [ . . . ]. Consequently, feminist politics can only oscillate between the essentials of biological, sexual identity and the mad leaps that might position women momentarily in a different place” (21–​22). Notably, Foster’s analysis does not dismiss the anarchic play of deconstructive readings outright; rather, she looks to specific choreographic practices by women “in which dance serves as both subject and interpretive framework for dance’s relationship to cultural theory” (23). For a more recent entry in the annals of dance theory that takes dance as both subject and interpretive framework, see Jacques Rancière’s fascinating discussion of Loïe Fuller’s “serpentine dance” in Aisthesis:  Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013), 93–​109. While Rancière’s argument is distinctly anti-​modernist insofar as it claims that aesthetic “works only create ruptures by condensing features of regimes of perception and thought that precede them, and are formed elsewhere”—​a point that Rancière’s book illustrates nicely by taking the reader to a particular, historically laden event or “scene” in each chapter—​he, too, elides somewhat the history of Loïe Fuller’s gendered choreography by focusing on its evanescence: “This new art comes from a new body, relieved of the weight of its flesh, reduced to a play of lines and tones, whirling in space,” Rancière writes (xii, 94). Indeed, despite Rancière’s insistence on Fuller’s historical novelty, the language he uses to render her dance is (at least) as old as Shakespeare. Notice, in the following, the echo of Florizel’s description of Perdita, not to mention Warburg’s description of Venus: “Her apparition thus follows the appearance of light itself. . . . Mallarmé used to call these forms and elementary relations of forms ‘aspects,’ which he readily metaphorized as the folds and unfolding of a fan, swaying hair, or the foam on the crest of a wave” (98, emphasis mine). 5. On the Pythagorean concept of kosmos and world harmony, see Günter Berghaus, “Neoplatonic and Pythagorean Notions of World Harmony and Unity and Their Influence on Renaissance Dance Theory,” Dance Research:  The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 10, no. 2 (Autumn 1992): 43–​70. 6. Jennifer Nevile, “Dance and the Garden: Moving and Static Choreography in Renaissance Europe,” Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 805–​836. 7. Nevile, “Dance and the Garden,” 806. 8. Nevile, “Dance and the Garden,” 806. 9. Nevile, “Dance and the Garden,” 806. 10. See Aby Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 89–​156. 11. On the relation of bodily substance to parts without a whole, see Brandon Shaw’s interpretation of “love-​melancholy” in Chapter  7 in this volume. Drawing on humoral understandings of the body, including Gail Kern Paster’s Deleuzian notion of the early modern “body without organs,” Shaw claims that “external organs . . . and parts . . . are no less capable of influencing or commandeering the entire body,” especially when that body is besieged by nomadic affects of love and melancholy, as is the case in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Dancing with Perdita    215 12. See Philippe-​Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 67–​91. 13. Quoted in Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion,  83–​84. 14. Giorgio Agamben, Nymphs, trans. Amanda Minervini (London:  Seagull Books, 2013), 6. 15. Agamben, Nymphs, 4. 16. Agamben, Nymphs, 4. 17. Agamben, Nymphs, 10. 18. Manning, Always More Than One, 2. 19. Manning, Always More Than One, 7. 20. Manning, Always More Than One, 15. 21. Indeed, as Roger Clegg argues in Chapter 3 of this volume, Renaissance “dances functioned in different ways. Dancing that concluded the plot of the play might symbolize harmony, restore character roles or hierarchy, and offer closure to the dramatic plot; however, the type of dance may lay challenge to collective order” (emphasis mine). In the case of the jig, for example, Clegg explains that “the [theater] company’s clowns . . . could, through ambivalent or critical laughter, lay challenge to the notion of social harmony, reinscribe hierarchy, and disrupt any sense of closure.” 22. Sujata Iyengar, “Introduction: Shakespeare’s ‘Discourse of Disability,’” in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. Sujata Iyengar (New  York:  Routledge, 2015), 13. 23. Manning, Always More Than One, 8. 24. Agamben, Nymphs, 19. 25. Agamben, Nymphs, 20. 26. On “crip” as a multifaceted cultural signifier, see Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New  York:  New  York University Press, 2006). On “crip” as a nonlinear dimension of time, see Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). For an analysis of disability that directly addresses its relevance to artistic performance, including dance, see Petra Kuppers, Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (New York: Routledge, 2004). 27. See Lee Edelman, No Future:  Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2004). 28. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 2. 29. Kathryn Bond Stockton, “Lost, or ‘Exit, Pursued by a Bear’:  Causing Queer Children on Shakespeare’s TV,” in Shakesqueer:  A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 424. 30. Stockton, “Lost, or ‘Exit, Pursued by a Bear’: Causing Queer Children on Shakespeare’s TV,” 424. 31. Manning, Always More Than One, 16. 32. Garber writes, “The manifest irony here is that all these nothings are nothing. They have no significance, and represent only Leontes’ own projection.” See Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 835. 33. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone:  An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 197. 34. Agamben, Nymphs, 10. 35. Cohen, Stone, 85.

216   Steven Swarbrick

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Nymphs. Translated by Amanda Minervini. London:  Seagull Books, 2013. Berghaus, Günter. “Neoplatonic and Pythagorean Notions of World Harmony and Unity and Their Influence on Renaissance Dance Theory.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 10, no. 2 (Autumn 1992): 43–​70. Brissenden, Alan. “Jacobean Tragedy and the Dance.” Huntington Library Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Autumn 1981): 249–​262. Manning, Erin. Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Nevile, Jennifer. “Dance and the Garden:  Moving and Static Choreography in Renaissance Europe.” Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 805–​836. Rancière, Jacques. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Translated by Zakir Paul. London: Verso, 2013. Ravelhofer, Barbara. “Middleton and Dance.” In The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, edited by Gary Taylor and Thomas Henley, 130–​147. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2012.

Chapter 9

“The Wisd om of You r Feet ” Dance and Rhetoric on the Shakespearean Stage Florence Hazrat

In Ben Jonson’s 1618 masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, Daedalus the maze-​builder steps into a choreographic pause with a song, enjoining the performers to let their dances be [b]‌ut measur’d, and so numerous too, as men may read each act you doo. And when they see ye Graces meet, admire ye wisdom of your feet. For Dauncing is an exercise not only shews ye mouers wit, but maketh ye beholder wise, as he hath powre to rise to it.1

Daedalus draws on familiar early modern metaphors of dance as language whose structures imitate (and thereby communicate) ideas of proportion. He also offers an intriguing twist, emphasizing that it is not only the dancers but also, crucially, the spectators who partake of complex concepts expressed in communal movement. They perceive the dancers’ (virtuous) intentions through specific motions of feet, both actual and poetic. The dancers become what they dance, but somehow the onlookers also become what they watch the dancers become. Jonson, here, hits on a curious nexus of rhetoric, dance, mental concepts, and a performer–​spectator relationship that permeates Renaissance drama. Dance featured in not only exclusive courtly masques, but also public playhouses, both indoor and outdoor. As much as music and staged swordfights, dance was an event offered by drama which both increased its entertainment value and engaged with issues not out of place in Daedalus’s song. This chapter examines moments

218   Florence Hazrat of dance in Shakespeare’s late Elizabethan plays, and the ways in which they are often accompanied by particularly heightened rhetorical language. The convergence of a different kind of movement and a different kind of speech confers specialness upon the situations in question: when language passes into poetry, and movement into dance, spectators are called upon to attend closely to the turns of both words and bodies. Patterns spoken and patterns embodied occur together in key encounters on the stage, negotiating social and individual identities, questions of plot, and the experiences of actors and theater-​goers. Cognition (i.e., thought) in the theater is “happening” through verbal and nonverbal means, uniquely full in terms of multimedia sense perception. Shakespeare activates heightened linguistic and somatic structures that, mutually reinforcing each other, help anchor and explore thought and feeling. Rather than pursuing the metaphorical implications of dance as a language, this chapter will focus on the knowledge and practice of early modern dancing as it inflects, and is inflected by, formal devices of rhetoric such as rhyme, and lyrical kinds such as the sonnet. Explorations of dance and its spectatorship from the sixteenth century will be set alongside current research on embodiment and empathy in cognitive science, suggesting new areas and methods of interdisciplinary inquiry while retaining a certain critical skepticism. Can literary criticism and dance studies benefit from the tentative findings of brain research, or does a lab situation reduce the experience of plays to colors on a screen? Can charges of reductionism ignite a productive dialogue on the circumstances in which experiments are conducted?2 And what can all of this tell us about the experience of dance and rhetoric in a Shakespeare play? This chapter will contextualize the two spheres of communication in early modern culture that are dance and rhetoric, and feed these preliminaries back into dance on the stage. Sensitive to thorny practical and bibliographical conditions, it will examine three plays, As You Like It, Much Ado about Nothing, and Romeo and Juliet, for their attempts to move through motion, even as they delight and instruct at the same time.

Dance and Rhetoric in Early Modern Culture: Suspicion and Solemnity Dance, among the oldest forms of art, is always a social and public act. Its communal ritualistic nature distinguishes it from “merely” physical activities whose urge toward the creation of togetherness is less pronounced. Shared and organized bodily movement produces bonding both in those who perform and those who watch, a key concept to which the discussion will return in terms of dance, rhetoric, and courtship: dance spectatorship is not a passive reception, but rather is “studied for action,” although that action consists of a mentalized empathetic reaching rather than actual deeds. As activity done with and for others, dance is subject to culture-​specific systems of codes and conventions, establishing and challenging relations between dancers, as well as dancers

“The Wisdom of Your Feet”    219 and onlookers, through prescribed signification of, for instance, gender and social class. In her seminal work on the Stuart masque, Barbara Ravelhofer sketches these movement codes, but also argues for a liberty offered by precisely those codes, offering space for creativity and individuality.3 Sondra Fraleigh stresses the transformative agency of dance, as well as its ability to transcend the discreteness of the individual: “we create ourselves in our dance and experience ourselves in the dance of others,” an affirmation anticipated by Jonson in the introductory quotation.4 Formalized dances had pan-​European currency, and also crossed the social divide between “popular” or “country” and “elite,” occupying a paradoxical position of both enabling and undermining distinction. Conflicting attitudes toward dance, as well as rhetoric and music, perpetuate themselves throughout sixteenth-​century discourse, finding expression in drama and other cultural productions of the time: dance and rhetoric were precariously perched between saint and sinner through their commitment to formalized regularity, combined with their power to persuade. They could be understood either as recreation of divine order, or as incitement to lies and lust. Are we drawn to patterned words and movements because we apprehend and admire the cosmic harmony of which they partake? Or are we merely led by sensual delight at the geometrical beauty of sounds and steps? Dance and rhetoric owed the suspiciousness with which they were treated to their command over the passions, swaying human behavior and influencing through seemingly superficial qualities of eloquence and bodily attractiveness. Moving bodies and words move us, prompting thought and action. Polemical pamphlets such as John Northbrooke’s 1577 Treatise against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes shrilly denounce the harmful potential of such activities to stir up to “concupiscence” not only by doing but even by “beholding.”5 “Beholding” dance, however, could also be beneficial, provided the spectators “rise to it”: in his 1531 Boke named the Govenor, Sir Thomas Elyot defends dance’s respectability not only as exercise, but also as imparter of virtue, like Jonson stressing the importance of witnessing and reflecting on that witnessing to nurse ethical growth: the hole description of this vertue prudence may be founden out and wel perceyued, as wel by the daunsers, as by them whyche standynge by, wylle be dylygente beholders and markers, hauynge first myn instruction surely grauen in the table of their remembrance.6

It is particularly prudence that Elyot singles out as the quality obtained through performing and watching dance; its capacity to anticipate the future wisely through an awareness of past and present maps perfectly onto the spatiotemporal art of dancing, with its linear steps forward and backward, and its circular turns.7 The honor or reverence, a little initial bow, teaches patience and the well-​weighing of actions prior to their execution. The subsequent movements Elyot describes are steps to each side, both slow and fast, which “maye be welle resembled to the braule in daunsynge”8 (i.e., the branle’s balanced swaying to and fro). This dual dynamic between speed and direction fosters maturity, as Elyot affirms in words distinctly reminiscent of Erasmus’s notions of

220   Florence Hazrat verbal copia: “Maturitie is a mean betwene two extremities, wherin nothynge lacketh or excedeth.”9 Kinesthetic abundance offers alternative routes to the knowledge and practice of moral virtues that are not based on word or text, but on a nonlinguistic communication of narrative, that is, “dyttie, histories.”10 Although Elyot writes in terms of representation (“resembled”), he is emphatic about the synchronization between virtue (initiated in the mind), its physical expression through the body, and indeed the active participation of discerning observers. Particularly owing to the transference of the danced virtue across space to the static onlooker, dance becomes a cognitively full, visual-​aural-​kinesthetic emblem, especially suited to the ethical project of humanism. Virtue, as well as thought, is communicable through the patterned movement of dance, Elyot continues:  “In euery of the sayd daunses, there was a concinnitie of meuing the foote and body, expressyng some pleasant or profitable affectes or motions of the mynde.”11 The “concinnitie,” or skillfully wrought congruence between the synecdoche-​ like foot and body, figure forth the thoughts and passions of the mind. This passage follows a description of specifically theatrical dances of antiquity, divided into genre, and contemporary equivalents, including the “base daunses, bargenettes, pauyons, turgions, and roundes.” One of the major dance treatises of the Renaissance, Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchésographie (1588) crystallizes perceptions of dance as rhetoric that instructs in virtue: la danse est un espece de Rhetorique muette, par laquelle l’Orateur peult, par ses mouvements, sans parler un seul mot, se faire entendre et persuader aux spectateurs, qu’il est gaillard digne d’estre loué, aymé et chery.12

Dance is not only a medium of communication like language, it is more specifically a particularly structured expression (“Rhetorique”) that is public and, like oratory, seeks to persuade. This kind of persuasion is intimately intertwined with the virtue of both the dancer-​speaker, and the onlooker-​listener, and what passes between them. The exploration of Arbeau’s linkage of dance, formal speech, persuasion, and ethics lies at the heart of this chapter. The lively mid-​Tudor court environment of which Thomas Elyot was writing anticipates dance’s power to engage with genre, plot, mental concepts, and an explorative relationship between spectators and actors that would flourish a half-​ century later on the stage of the public playhouses.

“They Dance”: Putting Dance into Words Before the invention of the relatively recent technologies of sonic and visual recording, dance, music, and the spoken word were supremely ephemeral arts, vanishing the very moment they came into being. Their destruction, in a way, enables their creation in the

“The Wisdom of Your Feet”    221 first place, but while music and language can be preserved in the symbolic form of notation and writing, dance thwarts attempts at fixing and holding. Auxiliary media like wordish descriptions and drawing of footsteps can only recreate dance ever so far. The handful of dance manuals composed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, therefore, rather occupy the position of memory prompter than actual primer, although manuals by, for example, Fabritio Caroso offer detailed step discussions.13 Individual dance steps, body postures, and gestures, as well as their combinations into entire dances, were verbalized and often printed with a tune, which helped to jog the memory of those who knew the movements all along, having learned from actual teachers beforehand. Words quickly become comically inept at encompassing dance, as satirized by John Marston in The Malcontent (1603). Guerrino reminds the company how to dance a branle: t’is but two singles on the left, two on the right, three doubles forward, a traverse of six round: do this twice, three singles side, galliard trick of twenty, corranto pace; a figure of eight, three singles broken down, come up, meet two doubles, fall back, and then honour.14

To this obfuscating volley of dance jargon, Aurelia replies with adequate exasperation, “O Dedalus! thy maze, I have quite forgot it.” Mazy movement becomes even more confusing when translated into the less germane medium of verbal language. The absurdity of Guerrino’s thick hedge of words suggests, then, that movement and words were naturally unsuitable to express the respective other, but as seen in Elyot’s musings on the body’s ability to communicate stories and moral virtues, dance not only can represent but can be thought; analogously, words can dance in a nonmetaphorical way, that is, interlock with dance when both occur together. Rather than being about the other, the coincidence of dance and rhetorically rich language in early modern plays creates a subtle and sophisticated moment of mutual articulation as well as questioning. In the plays under consideration in the following, structured language and dance spark each other, that is, dance is occasioned by poetic form, and poetry finds room to be formal through dance. Owing to the relative lack of stage directions in Shakespeare’s plays, it is the dramatic context and particularly language and form that aid in the reconstruction of possible dance performances. Implicit references such as communal festivities, and an emphasis on rhetorically marked language, open up a potential for dance that the scarcity of explicit stage directions may not make allowance for. Irrespective of bibliographical state and theatrical kind, the handful of pointers toward dance merely propose a matter-​of-​ fact statement such as “Music. Dance” in Henry VIII.15 Neither masque-​inspired plays like The Tempest nor the habits of scribes and typesetters show a specific impact in terms of detail and frequency of stage directions relating to dance.16 Evidence is, therefore, not exact, necessitating an approach that is sensitive to nontextual clues and the contingency of material and performative conditions. “[T]‌he historian,” Christopher Marsh adds, “must execute an ambitious leap of the imagination in order to understand

222   Florence Hazrat the prominent and often controversial place occupied by dance within early modern culture.”17 That leap of the imagination is enabled by the language and its rhetorical form that accompanied dance: in her Cognition in the Globe, Evelyn Tribble examines Shakespeare’s use of language for indications of bodily movement, and comes to the conclusion that it is a “gesture-​potentiated language.” This includes not only actual references to movement in both stage directions and the dialogue itself, but also rhetorical figures like rhymes and repetitions that offer the possibility to move to them and accentuate them bodily.18 Rhetoric becomes a stage direction, coordinating space and the physical relationship between actors with an agency to initiate and complicate action. At the same time, rhetoric is activated by movement, realizing the potential of dance to encourage cognition, to think and speak in certain ways. Given the situation within any one play, it is, therefore, legitimate to assume movement and dance, even though these are often not specified. It is also legitimate and productive to speculate what kind of dances would have occurred through informed opinion. That the prompting of “dance” in the stage direction was enough is evidence of the universal familiarity with dance kinds and their social and cultural connotations, allowing the actors to match dance to circumstance according to suitability, confirming or purposefully challenging spectators’ assumptions. That pointers to dance are sparse thus does not suggest its incidental nature on the early modern stage, but rather points toward the reverse, that is, a ubiquity and profound involvement in the dramatic fabric. As Tribble writes, “dialogue and stage movement can potentiate space, turn it from neutral to highly localized and laden with significances.”19 Cueing each other, rhetoric and dance are purple patches of performance, and are conceptualized as producing each other. Specific forms of poetry or music equate to a certain number, kind, and speed of steps, as touched upon by Thomas Morley in his 1597 Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music: After euery pauan we vsually set a galliard (that is, a kind of musicke made out of the other) causing it go by a measure, which the learned cal trochaieam rationem, consisting of a long and short stroke successiuelie, for as the foote trochaeus consisteth of one sillable of two times, and another of one time, so is the first of these two strokes double to the latter: the first beeing in time of a semibrefe, and the latter of a minime.20

Morley maps the terms and concepts originating from Latin versification, such as the length of syllables in metrical feet, onto the tempo of music and the dance matching it. He is careful to explain further that music and “dittie” cohere, pointing toward a trinity of word, sound, and movement. Whatever poetic feet are doing, then, it is also what real feet do at the same time. In Much Ado about Nothing, Beatrice describes such collapse between the boundaries of the verbal and the physical in likening courtship to a series of dances. Expecting Hero to be courted by the Prince in the following masked dance, Beatrice sketches the process of wooing in terms of dance movements and their early modern connotations:

“The Wisdom of Your Feet”    223 The fault will be in the music, cousin, if you be not wooed in good time. If the Prince be too important, tell him there is measure in everything, and so dance out the answer. For heare me Hero: wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-​pace: the first suite is hot and hasty like a Scotch jig and full as fantastical; the wedding mannerly modest as a measure full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance and, with his bad legs, falls into the cinque-​pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave. (2.1.63–​73)

Beatrice’s dancing prose and prose of dance draw attention to themselves through her clever and humorous use of rhetoric, structured around duple and triple rhythms: her first proposition links up the process of courting, wedding, and marriage to three respective dances in a dense correlative line, each dance matching up with each stage of a relationship.21 She then unrolls this assumption in three subsequent clauses standing in the same correlation to her first proposition, but doubling the internal parallelism by adding two sets of two descriptive adjectives and nouns. These are bound together by alliteration (e.g., “hot and hasty”), and embrace the respective dances left and right, for instance, “mannerly modest” and “state and ancientry,” between which is sandwiched the “measure.” The last dance, though, explodes the extremely structured formulations of the jig and measure by resisting such foreseeable and certain pattern. The temporal adverb “then” initiates a rapid slide of looser expression, imitating Beatrice’s point about the speed with which couples repent after the wedding. Social and cultural connotations attached to dance styles interpenetrate a rhetorical style that reinforces them, while simultaneously poking fun at them. The absence of stage directions here is not inhibiting, but rather opens the possibility for improvisation by the actor: Beatrice may really have “dance[d]‌out the answer,” intimating each dance with a few characteristic steps. This curious metaphor suggests a special kind of communication that works through both the body and the word: by answering through dance, Beatrice offers Hero the opportunity to speak and yet, perhaps, remain inconclusive about whether she accepts a possible proposal at all. A danced yes (or no) is and is not the same as a spoken one. As will become clear only after the dancing, Claudio will slip into this doubt left open during the coupled dance and become Hero’s bridegroom instead of the Prince. The figurative language of the passage as a whole is grounded in the experience and actual practice of dance, rather than inherited concepts about it, such as the dance of planets creating cosmic music. Beatrice’s metaphor of wooing as dance, here, is intriguingly schematic in nature and effect, more formal than figurative, and literally embodied by the actor’s dancing. Rather than participating in patriarchal gender relationships, this vignette is a dance about dance, and rhetoric about rhetoric; it is also about a cross-​over, showing us how to think about dance through rhetoric and vice versa.22 Like Elyot, Beatrice acknowledges dance’s capacity to represent, enact, and be social behaviors and processes like mating. “Measure,” the frequent synonym for any kind of dance, is indeed “in everything.” An actual measure follows on the heels of Beatrice’s sly subversion of the supposed straightforwardness of what any individual dance means to those who dance and those

224   Florence Hazrat who attend: the men grouped around Don Pedro, arriving in Messina from the battlefield, come to the evening festivities in disguise and hope that answers to their questions and desires will be physically realized, as prescribed by the familiar dances. The going, however, is less smooth than they expect, as the ladies prove recalcitrant and teasing rather than submissive. The encounter between the men and the women is divided into four sections, with a short dialogue between four couples, starting with Don Pedro and Hero, followed by Balthasar and Margaret, Ursula and Antonio, and eventually Beatrice and Benedick. The first three are of roughly the same length, while the last extends into twice the number of lines. The majority of each dialogue is stichomythic, putting a premium on questions and quick-​witted repartees, mostly by the ladies. Even the otherwise less vocal Hero participates in the playful banter with her partner, the Prince. The stage directions in both quarto and folio tag music and dance onto the quadruple exchange, rather than specifying it before the speeches (Q1600: “Dance/​exeunt”; F1623: “Exeunt/​ Musicke for the dance”). This makes less dramaturgical sense, especially in the folio sequence where the couples exit prior to music. It seems more effective to make the dance coincide with the speeches, syncing movement and formalized dialogue, each underlining the other. A relatively slow dance like a pavan would lend itself to the scene, as it is possible to converse and perform its figures simultaneously. Beatrice’s last line suggests a conscious coordination of tit-​for-​tat responses with a bodily expression of, for instance, changing direction: “if they [the leading couple] lead to any ill, I will leave them at the next turning” (2.1.145–​146). Her injunction to the masked Benedick that they “must follow the leaders” shows their participation in the dance whose choreography they are distorting by lagging behind. As a couple dance in formation, the pavan offers enough privacy to talk, potentially letting each couple move forward on the stage as they speak, but also inserting them into the bigger whole of the moving group. The spectators, too, continually refocus attention on the whole and its parts as they experience words and intentional movement occurring together in sophisticated interdependence. The compact parceling of the dialogue sequence, however, does not distract from the women’s ability to transcend cultural associations toward dancing and wooing, even when royally performed: Don Pedro’s stab at poetry, also giving away his identity (“My visor is Philemon’s roof; /​Within the house is Jove,” 2.1.88–​89), is punctuated by Hero’s deflating matter-​of-​factness (“Why then your visor should be thatch’d,” 2.1.90). Even the Prince’s final rhyme, linking back to “Jove” (“Speak low, if you speak love,” 2.1.91), only closes off the first dialogue, but does not set a meeker tone for those following suit. Dancing not only enables wooing, it is wooing; as Elyot happily puts it, “by the joining of a man and a woman in dancing may be signified matrimony.”23 Keeping time together in movement becomes a symbol of marriage, or rather is already a kind of marriage as hands link in front of witnesses as if given in an actual ceremony. Benedick exploits this ambiguity of dance being and not being matrimony when he encourages all to a prenuptial dance after the miraculous resuscitation of Hero in the last act: “Come, come, we are friends, lets haue a dance ere we are maried, that we may lighten our own hearts, and our wiues heeles.” Leonato, however, is not amused, attempting to postpone the

“The Wisdom of Your Feet”    225 quasi-​marriage merry-​making until after its official sealing, which is also after the play, but Benedick’s adamant push for “musicke” even overrules a messenger’s slightly discordant news that Don John has been captured, reminding us that evil has been avoided only narrowly. Apparently, dance is much needed at the end of Much Ado, throwing up questions of intention and interest. It is much needed both for the characters and the somewhat unlikely plot twist of Hero’s resurrection, as well as the spectators who witness Claudio reel from love, to jealousy, hatred, grief, resignation to marry another woman, and rekindled love within a matter of scenes. Dance is a good persuader within and without the play-​world.

Persuasive Moves: Empathy toward Rhetoric and Dance Dance signals matrimony and, therefore, the proper ending of a comedy.24 The sense of an ending in Much Ado about Nothing becomes more palatable through the final visually harmonious dance. The last scene of As You Like It, too, requires the spectators to awaken their faith, particularly at the sudden appearance of Hymen, the classical God of Marriage, in a hitherto unmagical play.25 With the authoritative exclamation “Peace ho! I bar confusion” (5.4.123), Hymen cuts the Gordian knot tied by Rosalynd in her male costume by forcibly pairing off couples who belong together according to early modern ideologies of heteronormativity and social rank. The characters’ incomplete knowl­ edge of each other’s respective identities jostles with the spectators’ superior awareness, creating multiple confusing ironies on-​and offstage of what cannot be and yet is, such as the love of the shepherdess Phoebe (played by a boy) for a woman, Rosalynd, under the guise of Ganymede (also played by a boy). Hymen attempts to dissolve these ironies through matching the four sets of lovers up correctly: “Here’s eight that must take hands, /​To join in Hymen’s bands” (5.4.126–​127). The harmony of rhymes, though, comes not entirely without perpetuating the play’s puns on truth and feigning; Hymen himself is aware of the thinness of the illusion of clarity he seeks to impose, adding another line that qualifies the previous ones: the lovers will take hands “[i]‌f truth holds true contents” (5.4.128). Belief and doubt hinge on the seemingly inconspicuous conditional conjunction “if,” which, though a mere two letters, manages to encapsulate the play’s entire theatrical games of gender and disguise. “If ” is both, neither, and either, as we like it. Depending on our mental shuttling between a boy-​actor playing a girl who plays a boy playing a girl, “if ” can be many things to many people, helping to hold these multiple levels of possibilities in check. Psychology has long been interested in brain states that seem contradictory and mutually exclusive: “cognitive dissonance” occurs when conflicting desires, opinions, or experiences clash, often resulting in irrational choices in order to avoid the cognitively stressful situation. The Aesopian fable of the fox who declares those grapes too sour that are hanging too high for him aptly illustrates

226   Florence Hazrat the common mental phenomenon. Indeed, any kind of evaluative thought involves a certain level of cognitive dissonance, which needs to be tolerated in order to make informed decisions, rather than decisions based on the avoidance of discomfort at all cost. Hymen is sensitive to the strangeness of the situation, that is, of his own sudden appearance, as well as his task to override the complicated dynamics of desire toward which the play has driven. He therefore offers music as mitigation: Whiles a wedlock hymn we sing, Feed yourselves with questioning: That reason wonder may diminish How thus we met, and these things finish. (5.4.135–​138)

Research on music and cognitive science has shown the powerful effects that music possesses in helping to negotiate and reduce cognitive dissonance. Researchers adapted a classic experiment from child psychology in which children were forbidden to play with a highly desirable toy while being left alone. All children obeyed and even devalued the toy in subsequent play sessions during which they were again allowed to play with it. The dissonance between desirability and interdiction, then, created an artificial decrease in eagerness for the toy, a circumstance that was reduced when classical music played in the background during the “alone-​sessions,” after which the children were allowed to play with all toys, happily doing so.26 Quite why this is the case is not yet clear, but the end of As You Like It shows Shakespeare being acutely aware of the occurrence. The patterns created by dance and rhetoric, as much as music, I suggest, aid in a robust response to what is, yet what cannot be. Music’s effect of dissipating cognitive anxiety in multiple contradictory states has not yet been tested in terms of dance or rhetoric, but it is attractive to think that literature anticipates scientific research in the coincidence of structured sound, language, and movement. Hymen pairs off the “correct” couples not only through deictic pointers that can be borne out in actual gesture, but also in the certainty of an anaphoric poetic scheme: You and you no cross shall part. You and you are heart in heart: You to his love must accord, Or have a woman to your lord. You and you, are sure together, As the winter to foul weather. (5.4.129–​134)

Rhetorical and visual coupling precedes “measures” encouraged by the exiled Duke. Dancing also helps to mediate the cognitive dissonance resulting from the deus ex machina device that untangles “wrong” desires, such as between Orlando and Ganymede, or Rosalynd and Phoebe. The couples dance out the “if ” that has permeated the ending, demonstrating how grammatical as well as physical structures are capacious enough to suspend (im)possibilities, and even inter-​and disruptions like Jaques’s refusal to join.

“The Wisdom of Your Feet”    227 His purely mentalized approach to knowledge withdraws from flexible reactions to challenging situations into literalness and avoidance (“what you would haue, Ile stay to know, at your abandon’d caue” [5.4.189–​90]) while the final dancing “rites” allow for Shakespeare’s complex explorations of gender and theatrical cross-​dressing to be valid all at the same time. In his excellent monograph on music in Shakespeare’s plays, David Lindley writes how dance in As You Like It and other comedies should be a generic, straightforward closural gesture, but becomes fraught owing to the strained, patched-​up quality of the endings.27 It is true that a certain anxiety emerges from the previously described dissonance, but it is dance, music, and rhetoric—​visual, aural, and verbal structures—​that foster a more malleable, relaxed habit of experiencing contradictory states and situations. Performing dance takes pressure off the perhaps strained plot, as well as the actors caught in the same. Watching dance also allows spectators to understand the scene as wonder, a response encouraged by Hymen, without cancelling out past experience. Dance is particularly powerful in creating the possibility for strong interaction between the dancers and spectators:  patterned movement is one of the “mediating structures” described by Evelyn Tribble and John Sutton “which transform [the dancers’] cognitive tasks and processes.”28 The multimedia nature of dance, including the integration of one’s own and others’ movement, changing spatial perception, coordination to sound, and perhaps even to words, creates a fully embodied and embedded experience, for actors as well as beholders. An embracing of the conjunction between mind and body in perception and intellection occurred when philosophy saw a phenomenological turn at the end of the nineteenth century by thinkers like Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-​Ponty. Cognition—​the activity of thought—​is not only happening together with sense perception through the body: there is no cognition without perception. Indeed, cognition is a form of perception, and vice versa. Dualist notions of the body and the mind have therefore long been challenged, but a certain reluctance to take into account further factors of influence on cognition characterizes the currently booming field of cognitive science: embodied cognition seeks to adjust assumptions that detach the cognizing subject from its environment.29 Additionally, studies of embedded or situated cognition take into account the surroundings of the thinker, arguing that it is artifacts and circumstances that enable a certain kind of thought. Depending on the world and things around us, with their respective affordances at our disposal, cognition happens in an interactive exchange by and with them. Tools for navigation, for instance, both provoke a certain kind of thought and are simultaneously an expression of thought that adapts tools to its environment. Computer scientist William Clancy writes that [w]‌e cannot locate meaning in the text, life in the cell, the person in the body, knowl­ edge in the brain, a memory in a neuron. Rather, these are all active, dynamic processes, existing only in interactive behaviours of cultural, social, biological, and physical environment systems.30

228   Florence Hazrat The self reaches into the world, and vice versa. In terms of situated cognition occurring in early modern drama, Evelyn Tribble considers material objects like plots, and social systems like the apprenticeship of the boy actors.31 The creation and experience of theater is more conditioned on material things and ways of organizing theater than one might assume when confronted with only a text. The embodied embedded cognition of the actors during dance is also valid for the spectators, focusing on dance’s ability as an agent for bonding and empathy. The convergence of patterned language, music, and dance at the end of As You Like It nurtures an expansive state of mind that, though critical, is capable of encompassing mutually exclusive circumstances in a “state of multifarious cognition.”32 Various forms of knowl­ edge are simultaneously and interchangeably valid, suggesting the emergence of a “continuity of mind” as articulated by Michael Spivey, wherein consciousness does not lineally enter from one bounded state of being into the next, but rather moves between fuzzy-​edged zones of potentiality.33 Various recent publications have explored how literary criticism can work together with research originating in cognitive science, putting a particular spotlight on cognition that is embodied, embedded, and communal. Bruce McConachie’s Theatre and Mind infuses theater-​specific activities like role-​playing with cognitive theories like conceptual blending (two entities becoming a new one), arguing for a new understanding of theatrical processes via scientific findings while safeguarding their integrity. Focusing on the communal framework of drama, Naomi Rokotnitz’s Trusting Performance, for instance, engages with studies from cognitive science concerned with intersubjectivity, and the collective embodied process of identity formation.34 The spectators’ trust and empathy toward each other, for example, is being exercised when attending a play through the dynamics of situated cognition, which takes into account the space in which something is experienced. Through its interactive inclusive nature, which taps several media, theater is uniquely equipped to test assumptions and findings from science in an actual lived environment. Charges of reductionism and lack of expertise in the other’s respective area have been leveled at the interdisciplinary work between literary analysis and cognitive science. The problems inherent in engaging these fields together should not, however, prevent inquiry in itself, but rather should be embraced as a challenge that belongs to the very activity of criticism itself. A cognitive approach to literature does not “apply” research from science to texts as if it were a conceptual theory among the spectrum of twentieth-​ century theories. It is careful about simplistic mapping of one onto the other, and rather tries to explore the possibilities of what literature might have to say to cognitive science in return, particularly what questions it might have to ask.35 In the same way that cognitive science is opening itself up to the contingency of embedded thought whose testing becomes difficult outside the lab, so does literature realize biological givens that interact with culture, both feeding off and back into each other. Amy Cook offers a graceful formulation of this process of mutual curiosity in her portmanteau word “neuroplay,” which is “the movement between meanings; it is message and reception together.”36 Precisely this “movement between meaning” constitutes the cognitive shimmering when dissonance is tolerated. Analogously, it is perhaps not altogether coincidental

“The Wisdom of Your Feet”    229 that dance is the art of movement, creating a fluctuating zone of meeting for words, sounds, sights, and, crucially, constant changes of and between these. What happens to and within onlookers has already interested early modern thinkers, as we have seen in the case of Thomas Elyot and John Northbrooke. Current research into the neurocognition of dance will show, retrospectively, how Renaissance assumptions about body changes caused by watching dance might not have been so misplaced after all. In her chapter “Neural Mechanism for Seeing Dance,” Beatriz Calvo-​Merino scrutinizes the implications of the discovery of mirror-​neurons for dance spectatorship:  in the 1990s, cognitive scientist Giacomo Rizzolatti noticed a certain kind of brain circuitry dispersed across several cortical areas that were activated when monkeys so much as perceived others doing a task like grasping.37 This research has been confirmed in relation to humans.38 Neurons are usually highly specific in terms of their role within the information-​exchange system of the brain, but these have been shown to possess both visual and motor properties for encoding the information pertaining to both activities at the same time.39 Among others, the somatosensory complex was activated, an area in the parietal lobe of the brain that coordinates proprioception, that is, the image of our own body, our virtual reality that tells us, for instance, where we are and where we move in space relative to the things around us. The watched action is truly felt in the body via the mind, but it is also perceptible in the muscles: a secondary effect of the activation of mirror neurons lies in an increase of motor potential in the respective muscles (e.g., of the arms and hands in relation to grasping), accompanied by a simultaneous suppression to realize that potential (else we would all be imitating each other without control). The appropriately termed mirror neurons, therefore, create a mental and physical kinesthetic imitation of an action that is being watched, a simulation of the action experienced by our mind-​body as if we were truly executing that very action ourselves, which is even amplified once that action is familiar to us. A beautiful vignette of Queen Elizabeth, for instance, offers a glimpse into such workings: the French ambassador De Maisse reports in 1597 that Elizabeth, by then beyond 60 years of age, “in her youth [ . . . ] danced very well, and composed measures and music, and had played them herself, and danced them. [. . . W]hen her Maids dance, she follows the cadence with her head, hand, and foot.”40 Queen Elizabeth imitates observed movements; imitation, of course, lies also at the heart of what theater is and does—​a safe (or not so safe) run-​through of thoughts, motions, and emotions as if they were real. Mirror neurons are, then, at the junction of culture and biology, as well as of interpersonal connection: the relationship between the doer and the onlooker is not merely “monkey see, monkey do,” but triggers complex translations of mind reading that draw on higher mental functions.41 The direction of imitation is not unilateral from the perceived to the perceiver, but reverses itself when the perceiver gauges the thought behind the action. As discussed by Calvo-​Merino, research has shown that the brain does not possess mirror neurons for any and every kind of motor act. Rather, that act needs to involve some kind of intentionality and motivation that requires goal-​directed planning, just like dancing. Imitating the action in ourselves, we project outward and back, anticipating the next action of the perceived

230   Florence Hazrat object. Estimating its mind and emotion, we adjust our own responses accordingly, synchronizing our behavior and emotions to what we think it is thinking, an activity of guessing the future through the past and present, reminiscent of the virtue of prudence that Elyot believed was fostered by dancing. Predicting, based on a mirror neuronal process, creates strong bonding and identification with who and what are being watched. Dance is thought made visible, translated into a shape that the spectator can experience, making movement intrinsic to cognition.42 Early modern defenders and defamers of dance had a case in point, arguing that the “beholders” become (like) the doers in isomorphic body-​mind coordination. The very real material state of our consciousness is plastic, and is vulnerable to be acted upon physiologically by another body. Cognitive scientist Vittorio Gallese postulates the key role of mirror neurons for mind-​reading abilities:  mapping the actions of another onto our own motor and sensory system, we experience kinesthetic empathy.43 On-​and offstage early modern dancers moved in order to move, and persuaded through wordless communication. Even if one is tempted to prefer giving attention to the bonding between performers through their coordinated movement, the more interesting and elusive dynamic lies between performers and watchers as explored by Shakespeare.44 As You Like It and Much Ado about Nothing exploit dance’s power to persuade and evoke empathy in the beholders, encouraging them to tolerate conflict and contradiction, rather than resolving it.

A Pattern of Their Love: Dancing Lyrical Forms The violent clashing of opposition (though maybe not contradiction) governs Romeo and Juliet, letting the two families explode against each other in hatred and love, youth and age. The Folio’s chorus, sandwiched between the lovers’ first two meetings, explicitly flags “extremities” tempered by “extreme sweet” (Act 2), when the two snatch a secret hour. “Extreme sweet,” however, is less a tempering than another excessive veering in the opposite direction, pulling the play from scenes of love to scenes of violence in rapid breathless alternation. It is Romeo and Juliet’s first encounter during a dance that offers a delicately balanced, all-​too-​fragile alternative to the extremes borne out in the surrounding acts, or as John Long writes, “music and dance perform a rhetorical and symbolic function aimed at increasing dramatic irony.”45 How can the ephemeral nonviolent activity of dancing provide a subtle but powerful counterweight to the multiple killings in the latter half of the play? And how do the lovers’ words and movements as they dance work together to highlight this quietly poised moment? I will suggest that the rhetorical form of the couple’s language plays a crucial role in choreographing their dance into a coordinated whole of patterned creation and cognition that evokes empathy in the spectators, who are persuaded to feel good will toward the lovers by their words and actions.

“The Wisdom of Your Feet”    231 When Romeo and company gate-​crash the Capulet party in friendly disguise, he falls in love with Juliet by watching her dance after refusing his friends’ invitation to dance, claiming a “leaden” sole/​soul owing to his prior love melancholy. Most critics have taken this as a clear indication that neither does Romeo himself dance, nor do Romeo and Juliet dance together at any point during the festivities. McGuire, Brissenden, Sorell, and Lindley refuse the possibility of the couple dancing before or during their first conversation, a tradition perpetuated by the two prominent film versions by Franco Zeffirelli (1968) and Baz Luhrmann (1996) in which the lovers detach themselves from the crowd and speak their first dialogue hidden behind a column.46 Only Long leaves the issue open, suggesting that Romeo might have stepped into a measure in order to be able to address Juliet, visibly stepping out of his former obsession with Rosalyne into the perfection of real love, signified by the harmonious dance. While it is not clear whether the couple would have danced, it makes perfect sense for them to participate in the possibly slow and stately measure and its cultural associations of wooing and serious love. The utter lack of stage directions in the 1597 quarto should not be considered proof of the contrary, since the context of the festivity, as well as the sheer dramaturgical effectiveness of having Romeo and Juliet dance, strongly point toward a great likelihood of an improvised dance. Both the second quarto of 1599 and the First Folio mention “Musick playes and they dance” at the beginning of the scene, just between old Capulet’s welcome and his gentle mockery of dance-​reluctant ladies.47 Juliet’s attempt to discover Romeo’s name leads her to identify him to the Nurse as “he that [ . . . ] would not dance” (1.5.132) in all three bibliographical versions. She does, however, then qualify her characterization in the 1599 quarto and the Folio, evading the Nurse’s request to repeat her words by specifying that she merely repeated a “rhyme” (l.143) acquired from a dance partner just then. That “rhyme” could certainly refer to the sonnet that Romeo and Juliet speak and, potentially, dance out: romeo: If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this; For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss. Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer. Romeo: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do; They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake. Romeo: Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take. Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged. Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took. Romeo: Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again. (1.5.93–​109)

232   Florence Hazrat Romeo and Juliet’s first exchange is poured into a Shakespearean sonnet with its four quatrains and final couplet. The lines are gracefully and nearly evenly distributed among Romeo and Juliet in a way that intelligently avoids direct symmetry: the first quatrain belongs wholly to Romeo, the second wholly to Juliet, the third sequences is an exchange between both (l.8 spoken by Romeo, l.9 by Juliet, ll.10–​11 again by Romeo). The final couplet that is spoken by both of them beautifully rounds off the sonnet, only to launch into the beginning of a next, connecting the couplet to the new quatrain by letting Romeo continue to speak the last line of the first lyric, and the first line of the second (“Then move not [ . . . ] purged”). The Nurse, though, interrupts the sonnet in the making, perhaps proleptically cutting the lovers off from fulfilling the verse form that was culturally most strongly attached to lovers. The new quatrain rhymes as interlace between Romeo and Juliet, who share the fourth line in consummate balance, much as they share in the moment of death at the end of the play. It is highly likely that the actors will have danced as they were speaking the lines, realizing and highlighting the formal qualities of the poetry with body movement and gestures. Rhyming and turn-​taking of lines may have been visually and kinesthetically emphasized by turns, leaps, or steps away or toward each other. In his essay “How Marking in Dance Constitutes Thinking with the Body,” David Kirsh explains how dancers memorize dance sequences by minimizing the movement into economical, only half-​executed choreographic phrases.48 They reduce the cognitive load by compressing some of the information into the imploded versions of full-​blown movements. In Romeo and Juliet’s dance scene, something similar happens as schematic and aurally rich verse converges with mutually reinforcing, patterned body movement. The actors remember and think through moving and speaking, clarifying, for instance, the graceful rhyme exchanges for the spectators. Knowing about the family allegiances of the two lovers, spectators hold in suspense their awareness of the lethal dramatic irony as the couple dances out the love lyric. We extend our empathy as they trace the attractive aural harmonies of the sonnet, as well as the regular, trustworthy steps of a stately measure. The dance in Romeo and Juliet exemplifies how pattern—​in movement as in words—​persuades, and encompasses conflict without eradicating it. In this chapter, I have proposed to consider the coincidence of dance and highlighted rhetoric on the Shakespearean stage. Research from cognitive science into negotiating cognitive dissonance and the actor–​spectator relationship have informed some of the explorations, staking out new territory for further inquiry into the research of the neurocognition of dance. In his elusive poem “Among School Children,” William Butler Yeats muses on the inseparability between a thing, a process, and its maker: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, /​How can we know the dancer from the dance?”49 Empirical experience means knowing the dancer, following his or her individual steps. Aesthetic experience is apprehending the dance as a whole, and yet neither exists without the other. Their separation, Yeats suggests in his rhetorical question, is not the point; it is about the mental integration of multiple aspects when witnessing dance. Cognition arises from this oscillation between the conceptual and physical aspect of the body’s structured movement through space, amplified and nuanced by simultaneous words and music. Early modern dramatic dance situates itself in this liminal position,

“The Wisdom of Your Feet”    233 exploring and exploiting the multimedia event that is dance on the stage. Both Yeats and Shakespeare intimate that we cannot—​indeed, should not—​know dancer from dance. And so, similarly, we cannot tell the dancer from ourselves—​not quite, anyway.

Notes 1. Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 106. 2. For a nuanced balancing of the possibilities and trap falls of a literary cognitive approach, see Lisa Zunshine, “What Is Cognitive Studies?” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2010), 1–​33. 3. Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque, 100–​106. 4. Sondra Horton Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics (Pittburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 51. 5. John Northbrooke, A Treatise against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes (London, 1843, first printed 1577). 6. Thomas Elyot, Boke named the Govenor (London, 1883, first printed 1531), 240. 7. See John Major, “The Moralization of the Dance in Elyot’s Governour,” Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958): 27–​36. 8. Elyot, Boke named the Govenor, 242. 9. Elyot, Boke named the Govenor, 244. Erasmus, De copia (Paris, 1512). 10. Elyot, Boke named the Govenor, 224. For a historical overview of the equation between the dancing body in courtly ballet and language, text, or narrative, see Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 15–​31. 11. Elyot, Boke named the Govenor, 231. 12. “Dance is a kind of mute rhetoric through which the Orator can, by his movements, without uttering a single word, make himself understood and persuade spectators that he is spirited [gaillard] and worthy of being praised, loved and cherished.” Thoinot Arbeau, Orchésographie, quoted with accompanying translation in Mark Franko, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography (c. 1416–​1589) (Birmingham: Summa, 1986), 14. 13. Continental manuals include Fabritio Caroso’s Il Ballarino (1581), and Orchésographie (1589) by Jehan Tabourot, published under the pseudonym of Thoinot Arbeau. It took around seventy years for an English equivalent to appear: The English Dancing Master, by John Playford (1651). 14. John Marston in David Kay, ed., The Malcontent (London, 2007; first printed 1604), 2.2.4–​10. 15. William Shakespeare, Henry VIII, in Richard Proudfoot and others, eds., The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (1998; reprinted 2014), 2.4.76. All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are taken from here and cited throughout. 16. On the making of the first folio, see, for example, Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio: The Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 17. Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 328. 18. Evelyn B. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 105. 19. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe,  34–​35.

234   Florence Hazrat 20. Thomas Morley, Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (London, 1597). 21. On correlative verse, see Roland Greene et al., eds., The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 307. For a detailed exploration of this scene, see Nona Monahan, Chapter 2 in this volume. 22. For a gendered reading of the speech, see Harry Berger, Jr., “Against the Sink-​ a-​ Pace: Sexual and Family Politics In Much Ado About Nothing,” Shakespeare Quarterly 33, no. 3 (Autumn 1982): 302–​313. 23. Elyot, Boke named the Govenor, 233. 24. See Anne Barton, “As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare’s ‘Sense of an Ending,’” in Essays Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 25. For a discussion of danced masques and courtship, see Anne Daye, Chapter  4 in this volume. 26. Nobuo Masataka and Leonid Perlovsky, “The Efficacy of Musical Emotions Provoked by Mozart’s Music for the Reconciliation of Cognitive Dissonance,” Scientific Reports 2, no. 694 (2012). 27. David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 132. 28. Evelyn B.  Tribble and John Sutton, introduction to “Dances with Science” in Affective Performance and Cognitive Science:  Body, Brain and Being, ed. Nicola Shaughnessy (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 35. 29. On embodied and embedded cognition, see, for instance, Andy Clarke, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), and William J. Clancy, Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 30. William J. Clancy, Simulation and Its Discontents (Boston: MIT Press, 2009), 28. 31. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 111–​150. 32. Bruce Smith, “Afterword: Senses of an Ending,” in Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England, eds. Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 216. 33. Michael Spivey, The Continuity of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3–​29. 34. Bruce McConachie, Theatre and Mind (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Naomi Rokotnitz, Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 35. For sensitive recent engagement with cognitive science, see Raphael Lyne, Memory and Intertextuality in Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); and The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 36. Amy Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay:  Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 37. Beatriz Calvo-​Merino, “Neural Mechanisms for Seeing Dance,” in The Neurocognition of Dance: Mind, Movement and Motor Skills, eds. Bettina Bläsing, Martin Puttke, and Thomas Schack (New York: Psychology Press, 2010), 153–​176. For a fascinating take on touch and mirror neurons, see Raphael Lyne, “The Shakespearean Grasp,” Cambridge Quarterly 42, no. 1 (2013): 38–​61. 38. Valeria Gazzola and Christian Keysers, “The Observation and Execution of Actions Share Motor and Somatosensory Voxels in All Tested Subjects: Single-​Subject Analyses of Unsmoothed fMRI Data,” Cerebral Cortex 19, no. 6 (2009): 1239–​1255.

“The Wisdom of Your Feet”    235 39. Calvo-​Merion, “Neural Mechanisms for Seeing Dance,” 157. 40. André Hurault and Sieur de Maisse, A Journal of All That Was Accomplished by Monsieur de Maisse, Ambassador in Endland [  .  .  .  ] Anno Domini 1597, trans. from the French and ed. with an introduction by G. B. Harrison and R. A Jones (London, 1931), 95. 41. See Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 4 2. For a discussion on gesture in early modern thought, see Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion:  Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark:  University of Delaware Press, 1985). 43. See David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 5 (May 2007):  197–​203, Columbia University Academic Commons, http://​hdl.handle.net/​10022/​AC:P:8652, accessed June 17, 2016. For a critical perspective, see Alfonso Caramazza, Stefano Anzellotti, Lukas Strnad, and Angelika Lingnau, “Embodied Cognition and Mirror Neurons:  A Critical Assessment,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 37 (2014): 1–​15. 44. Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque, 64. 45. John H. Long, Shakespeare’s Use of Music:  The Histories and Tragedies (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1971), 40. 46. Walter Sorell, “Shakespeare and the Dance,” Shakespeare Quarterly 8, no. 3 (Summer 1957):  367–​ 384; Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:  Humanities Press, 1981); Philip McGuire, “On the Dancing in Romeo and Juliet,” Renaissance and Reformation /​Renaissance Et Réforme, New Series /​Nouvelle Série, 5, no. 2 (1981): 87–​97; Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 130. 47. For the differing stage directions in the play’s versions, see William Shakespeare, The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet, ed. Lukas Erne (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2007), note to lines 98–​99, 68. 48. David Kirsh, “How Marking in Dance Constitutes Thinking with the Body,” in The External Mind:  Perspectives on Semiosis, Distribution and Situation in Cognition, eds. Riccardo Fusaroli, Tommaso Granelli, and Claudio Paolucci, special issue, Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici 112–​113 (2011): 183–​214. 49. William Butler Yeats, “Among Schoolchildren,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 1, ed. Richard Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1983), 221.

Bibliography Astington, John. “Actors and the Body: Meta-​theatrical Rhetoric in Shakespeare.” Gesture 6, no. 2 (2006): 241–​259. Bläsing, Bettina, Martin Puttke, and Thomas Schack, eds. The Neurocognition of Dance: Mind, Movement and Motor Skills. New York: Psychology Press, 2010. Cikigil, Necla. “Renaissance Dance Patterns in Shakespeare’s Italian Plays:  An Analysis of Dialogues.” Studies in Theatre and Performance 26, no. 3 (2006): 263–​272. Clarke, Andy. Supersizing the Mind:  Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Cook, Amy. Shakespearean Neuroplay:  Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

236   Florence Hazrat Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. Dance and the Lived Body:  A Descriptive Aesthetics. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987. Garsten, Bryan. Saving Persuasion:  A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Grafton, Scott, and Emily Cross. “Dance and the Brain.” In Learning, Arts, and the Brain, edited by Carolyn Asbury and Barbara Rich, 61–​69. New York: Dana Press, 2008. Johnson, Mark. The Meaning of the Body:  Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Kirsh, David. “How Marking in Dance Constitutes Thinking with the Body.” In The External Mind. Perspectives on Semiosis, Distribution and Situation in Cognition, edited by Riccardo Fusaroli, Tommaso Granelli, and Claudio Paolucci. Special issue, Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici 112–​113 (2011): 183–​214. Lindley, David. Shakespeare and Music. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Major, John M. “The Moralization of the Dance in Elyot’s Governour.” Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958): 27–​36. Marsh, Christopher. Music and Society in Early Modern England. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010. McConachie, Bruce. Evolution, Cognition, and Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. McConachie, Bruce. Theatre and Mind. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. McConachie, Bruce, and F. Elizabeth Hart, eds. Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn. London: Routledge, 2006. Noice, H., and T. Noice. “Learning Dialogue with and without Movement.” Memory and Cognition 29, no. 6 (2001): 820–​827. Ravelhofer, Barbara. The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Rokotnitz, Naomi. Trusting Performance:  A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Shaughnessy, Nicola, ed. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Tribble, Evelyn B. Cognition in the Globe:  Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. White, Gareth. Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Zunshine, Lisa, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2015.

Chapter 10

[They  Da nc e ] Collaborative Authorship and Dance in Macbeth Seth Stewart Williams

Who wrote Shakespeare’s dances, and in what sense can we call even the dances in his own plays “Shakespearean”? In the 1960s and 1970s, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault pointed to the limits of reading literature for the intentions of a unitary author, suggesting that both the meaning of texts as well as the very concept of authorship itself are produced by complex interactions between a range of agents, especially readers.1 For several decades, early modern theater studies has in turn often cautioned against backdating recent conceptions of authorship to a period when dramatic production was often highly collaborative, and when a team of playwrights often contributed to a single script.2 And yet the concept of choreographic authorship in an era before the word “choreographer” even existed, and the extent to which collaborating playwrights contributed to dance scenes, both remain under-​theorized, in part because sparse stage directions—​ for example, a mere “[they dance]”—​might easily be taken to suggest that playwrights were minimally invested in the details of choreography, or that dance proved expendable to the discursive objectives of a play. By tracing the textual evolution of the witch dances in The Tragedy of Macbeth across the seventeenth century, and contributions to the play by Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and William Davenant, I aim to show that playwrights were more directly invested, and dance scenes more integral, than might sometimes be supposed. My use of “dance scenes” here shows the extent to which choreographic and literary production interpenetrate: dances are not merely housed in the stage directions that call for them, but also in the dialogue that discusses and shapes them, such that dance as an object of analysis is not separable into strictly corporeal or verbal elements. This chapter furthers the conversation in early modern studies concerning the interrelation of embodied performance and material texts by focusing attention on dance, and likewise tests the extent to which understandings of choreography in dance studies might account for the models of dramatic production at work during the rise of England’s commercial theater,

238   Seth Stewart Williams when choreographers were in some cases called “composers,” a topic to which I return in an epilogue.3 In seeking to recuperate the role of playwrights as choreographers, I  also seek to show that dance scenes had a habit of becoming one of the most radically collaborative sites of textual production. As a result, this chapter also points toward a straightforward but underappreciated fact: that dance scenes are frequently the textual feature at the heart of critical debates regarding the attribution of plays. In early modern England, any of a play’s constitutive units—​including its skeletal plot, subplots, individual scenes, characters, and songs—​might be authored by separate or collaborating authors, as was the case in at least a third of Shakespeare’s plays. A given playbook, moreover, bears not only the marks of its initial writers, but also those of a recursive spiral of subsequent collaborators who continuously altered it: managers, players, revisers, censors, publishers, print house compositors, spectators, and readers. Jeffrey Masten has rightly warned that attempts to code-​break this collaborative chain often “insist upon a precise individuation of agents at every stage of textual production, in ways that are often strikingly anachronistic.”4 But if such code-​breaking rarely affirms the autonomy of a given agent, the attempt nevertheless clarifies the material and ideological ecologies of collaboration. In the following I will briefly note the theatrical conditions in which dances were developed, and then offer readings of two plays that have featured in influential studies of early modern theatrical production: Richard Brome’s The Court Beggar (1640) and especially Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613–​1614), which treats dance as not only multiply but promiscuously authored. Where these two plays disclose a highly collaborative form of synchronic choreographic production, the ensuing discussion of Macbeth looks at how successive playwrights collaborate across time. Each playwright expands upon the dance material in the version of the play preceding him, but as I show, this sequential enhancement of the play’s choreographic dimensions is partly conditioned by textual material, by what characters say about dance and movement. I argue that as Shakespeare, Middleton, and Davenant retain and expand the play’s witch dances, they engage in a series of transtemporal collaborations: an initial idea gains in force and complexity as each playwright must reckon with the textualizations of dance that precede him, even as he seeks to accommodate the play’s dances to the demonological, theatrical, and scientific beliefs particular to his day. If early modern playwrights often collaborated by participating in a synchronic circulation of textual material, Macbeth’s witch dances evince a diachronic model of textual circulation, one in which dance in particular demanded that playwrights revisit and reconceive the textual material of antecedent authors. In what follows I hew to widely accepted views of Macbeth’s textual history, but acknowledge that no such history is truly tidy; indeed, this chapter is meant as a reminder that dance scenes have a peculiar habit of leaving textual histories in a state of disarray. I use the names of individual playwrights in a capacious sense, signaling not only individual authors but also the unknown collaborators who worked in their orbit. While my focus here prioritizes continuities between the written and the performed, it does

[They Dance]   239 so with full acknowledgment of the multitude of ways in which dance also subverts the documents that seek to shape it. If attributing dance scenes is a particularly fraught dilemma for textual historians, that tension finds an uncanny counterpart within the fictional world of early modern plays. I argue that plays frequently stage dance as a cultural product whose authorship is contested, and do so in order to foreground broader thematic tensions concerning questions of origins and accountability—​dances with multiple authors frequently emblematize social ills whose sources are likewise multiple. Thus in Macbeth, Hecate and her witches devise and debate the specifics of danced spells that transpire both on-​and offstage, and neither Macbeth nor the play’s viewers can ever be certain about the extent to which the witches are the authors—​more properly, the choreographers—​of Scotland’s political misfortunes. By jointly treating questions of choreographic authorship as they occur within a play and at the level of its text, I seek to suggest that whenever “they” dance in the stage directions of early modern drama, that plural pronoun is under a remarkable degree of both thematic and textual strain.

Making Dance in Early Modern Theater While the commercial practices of early modern theater varied between companies and over time, companies frequently performed multiple dances in different plays across a given week, and those plays often returned to active repertory weeks, months, and years after their initial run.5 Rehearsing dance was among the more demanding aspects of mounting a production since, as Tiffany Stern points out, unlike spoken lines—​which actors often rehearsed on their own from personalized part-​scrolls—​“group moments” like dance necessitated collective rehearsal.6 This quick-​paced production environment required tools to differentiate and continuously remount numerous dances while minimizing rehearsal time. While some theatrical documents indicate that companies approached this dilemma by recycling dances across multiple productions with minimal alteration, other documents point toward an interest in preserving individuated choreographies. The latter case may be seen in the backstage plot to the lost play Dead Man’s Fortune (ca. 1591), likely performed by the Admiral’s or Pembroke’s Men.7 Backstage plots, manuscripts that were often pinned up for the benefit of prompters and players, briefly summarize the entrances, exits, and props necessary to execute a scene.8 Of all such plots surviving from early modernity, the longest single entry in any of them is the (still brief) description of a fairy dance in the plot of Dead Man’s Fortune, evidence of the attention and material resources devoted to reproducing dances that were suited to the needs of a specific play.9 While the play’s full story may only be conjectured, the plot’s

240   Seth Stewart Williams most substantial entry calls for a dance in which three fairies rescue two characters, Algerius and Tesephon, from imprisonment and beheading: [ . . . ] then after that the musicke plaies & ther Enters 3 an tique faires dancynge on after a nother the firste takes the sworde from the ex ecutioner & sendes him a waye the other caryes a waie the blocke & the third sends a waie the ofycers & unbindes allgeryus & tesephon & as they entred so they departe.

While most action in this backstage plot merely summarizes entrances and exits, the attention lavished on this dance suggests that its repeatability was integral to advancing the play’s dramatic action. It serves a practical need by clearing the stage of properties, but also introduces an apparent shift in affect by doing so in a wondrous manner. Since backstage plots were distinguished by an economy of words, these seemingly sparse dance instructions look comparatively complex in their stipulation that the dancers come in one after another; that they dance in a specifically “antic,” or strange, manner; that they separate to perform different tasks; and that they rejoin to exit in the same manner as they had entered. In addition to the comparative richness of these dance instructions, two textual details indicate that this dance was a durable component of Dead Man’s Fortune: they are a scribal reproduction of another copy, and a subsequent annotator of this copy left them intact, even while altering other aspects of the production. If backstage plots facilitate the iteration of specific and sometimes stable choreographies, how were dances devised in the first place, and by whom? In some instances, single figures like dancing masters, star players, and playwrights could influence choreographic content. The three dancing masters granted patents in 1574, and the many French dancing masters who immigrated across the seventeenth century, had a broad impact on English theatrical culture, teaching step sequences that could be inserted or adjusted to fit the needs of a given play.10 In other instances, players who specialized in dancing likely played an outsized role. William Kemp, a chief comic actor in Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, exerted such an influence over onstage dance trends that he even shaped offstage dance trends: at least two social dance tunes were in some publications named for him.11 Martin Wiggins has even suggested that one of Kemp’s danced jigs, Singing Simpkin (ca. 1595), may have supplied the conceit for the farcical cuckolding that takes place in Act III of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (ca. 1597).12 While cuckolding plots were ubiquitous in early modernity, Simpkin is as proximal an influence upon the Chamberlain’s Men as may be discerned, suggesting that in some cases, dramatic narrative conventions derived in part from choreographic conventions. Further evidence for cross-​pollination between jigs and plays comes in Roger Clegg’s Chapter 3 in this volume, which shows that jigs stood

[They Dance]   241 in complex and varying relation to a company’s broader afternoon program, sometimes following plays. In numerous instances, playwrights specified the details of a dance that they saw as integral to their conception of a play, making its occurrence central to plotting concerns, specifying genres of dance, and sometimes attending to nuances of execution. Perhaps the most stunning instance of such investment may be discerned in manuscript variations to the dance of statues that occurs in Act V of Thomas Middleton’s political allegory, A Game at Chess (1624). The details of this scene, in which the “Black House” of the Spanish court stages a spectacular dance to sway the “White Knight” Prince Charles to the Catholic faith, varies across all eight of the play’s substantial textual witnesses. In the third quarto and Lansdowne manuscripts, for example, the statues “move in a daunce” while one of the play’s villains, the Black Knight, attempts to persuade the Prince through choreographic analysis:  he reads the dance’s clockwise circling as a “happie Omen” of divine approbation for Charles’s alignment with the Spanish crown.13 But in the autograph Trinity manuscript, Middleton removed the dance entirely, along with the Black Knight’s analysis, perhaps because it was a presentation copy too far removed from the nuances of live performance.14 Thus one manuscript produced by a scribe under Middleton’s supervision places dance at the center of the play’s climactic spectacle, while another manuscript revised by the author for reading excises the dance altogether. Such variations across editions reveal a playwright who paid as much attention to the signifying details of dance as he did to those of dialogue. A more complicated picture—​one that involves a spectrum of collaborative and autonomous processes—​emerges when we consider where plays themselves situate choreographic authority. Many plays disperse authorship of dance across the collective social body of its participants, as when morris roles are subject to group debate in William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton (1621).15 In Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592), even audience members prompt dancers in how they ought to execute their roles.16 Such “meta-​choreographic” scenes are not rare: early modern plays stage scenes of dance rehearsal about as often as they stage scenes of dance performance. A related set of meta-​dramatic scenes, in which plays depict the process of writing and rehearsing plays, have long been a staple of theater history and literary criticism that seek to understand how early modernity conceived the making of theater. Such meta-​dramatic scenes are at the center of Masten’s work on collaborative authorship and Stern’s work on the rehearsal process, and I would like to return to two plays discussed by Masten and Stern in order to consider not what those plays tell us about the authorship of words, but rather about the choreography of bodies. One of Stern’s important claims in Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan is that after writing a play, some playwrights sought, with varying degrees of success, to shape the execution of their lines, and that this was a one-​on-​one process, typically preceding group rehearsal.17 However, she reads the meta-​dramatic masque rehearsal in Brome’s The Court Beggar as evidence of the inverse: that players also rejected guidance from playwrights. In The Court Beggar, one group of social climbers has been commissioned to devise a masque that will expose the pretensions of another, a set of shady con men.

242   Seth Stewart Williams Stern points out that as they plan the masque, one performer refuses the “authorial tuition” of the masque’s poet.18 In this reading, the masque’s text has a single author whose control of his text is circumscribed by the process of rehearsal and performance. But if we read a few lines further in the same scene, a precisely inverse picture emerges concerning choreographic tuition, since the masquers not only cede choreographic control to a single character, but also welcome his “instruction” in the execution of the dance—​ authoring a dance and rehearsing it are one and the same process.19 Embracing this role, the character Dainty tells the others, “I’le make the Dance, and give you all the footing,” and insists that he needs a fifth dancer in order to realize his vision.20 If we consider the specific objective of this dance—​it will expose the con men, who will be watching from the audience, by stripping off their false garments —​we realize that Dainty is particularly suited to “make the Dance” on account of his former occupation as a pickpocket. Authorship matters in this case because Dainty, who “dances daintily,” can extend his extant kinetic expertise in manual deftness to another corporeal medium, dance.21 As a result of consolidating choreographic authority within the play’s diegesis, The Court Beggar also consolidates it extradiegetically, employing some of the play’s most detailed stage directions to choreograph the process of composing choreography. One stage direction calls for a character who cannot rehearse without “Looking on his feete,” and another calls for the dance to be rehearsed to the tune of “Sellingers round, or the like.”22 Thus the same set of production values informs the internal world of the play as well as the play’s script: both leave the delivery of lines to the whim of fictional masquers and actual players, while carefully shaping the rehearsal of dance steps. If Stern has shown that the “authorial tuition” of a playwright rarely extended to collective rehearsal, the same scene in The Court Beggar demonstrates that collective rehearsal was the very phase when choreographers could, at least in some cases, exert consequential control over the scripting of dance.

The Two Noble Kinsmen and Choreographic Promiscuity Where Brome consolidates choreographic authority both diegetically and extradiegetically, the morris dance in The Two Noble Kinsmen does the opposite, dispersing authorial claims beyond a seemingly singular choreographer to a promiscuously multiple set of dance-​makers; and here, too, that process unfolds both within the play’s fictional world and in the play’s actual conditions of production. Masten has used Kinsmen to show that early modern plays often use the language of sexual reproduction to explain the process of collaborative textual creation.23 The sexual dynamics at work in the play’s morris dance, however, suggest that dance is yet more promiscuously authored than text, and suggests as much in order to flag the troubling chain of events that drives one character, the Jailer’s Daughter, mad.

[They Dance]   243 Masten has shown that the play’s prologue figures the play as a maidenhead jointly pursued by two collaborating authors—​Fletcher and Shakespeare—​a figuration that echoes the play’s main plot, in which Palamon and Arcite’s pursuit of the same woman, Emilia, tests their homoerotic friendship.24 Meanwhile, in one of the subplots, a group of locals gather to prepare a morris dance in hope of remuneration from Duke Theseus. Masten treats the morris dance as a microcosm of the play’s thematic exploration of sexual and textual collaboration, noting that when the morris rehearsal begins, its organizers realize that they are one woman short. Masten sees the resulting excess of male partners as yet another instance in which the play stages the dilemma of sexual superfluity.25 But Shakespeare and Fletcher not only introduce the problem of a surplus of men—​ they also solve it, and the manner in which they rectify the dance’s gender asymmetry disperses choreographic authorship beyond its immediate participants. At first glance, the morris has a single, comically authoritative author: the schoolmaster Gerald, who calls himself the dance’s “rectifier” (3.5.112).26 Gerald’s model of authorship, as fastidious as one would expect from a pedant, conceives of choreography as allied with rhetorical prowess: in a pun about the dance’s floor pattern, he suggests that since he speaks “by a figure,” that is, through rhetorical tropes, the dancers ought to “by a figure trace, and turn” (3.5.3, 16). When the dancers realize they are one woman short, all seems lost until a character from another subplot appears: the Jailer’s Daughter, driven mad because, after she had freed Palamon from her father’s prison upon a promise of his love, he jilted her in favor of Emilia. One of the dancers believes that the Jailer’s Daughter’s disordered body will make her a perfect substitute morris-​dancer, that “she’ll do the rarest gambols” (3.5.74–​75). But the Jailer’s Daughter proves an authorial challenge to Gerald, since when he instructs her partner to “lead her in,” she contravenes their plan by insisting “I’ll lead” (3.5.90–​92). Her participation thus alters the intentions of two men: Gerald, who would choreograph her; and her partner, who would guide her. In fact, a third man—​Palamon—​bears further responsibility for authoring her mad “gambols.” Morris dances often staged salaciously promiscuous encounters between its characters, and the Jailer’s Daughter proves an apt participant because her madness is the byproduct of Palamon’s promiscuous deception, a point that Shakespeare and Fletcher repeatedly underscore. When Palamon was first forced into the manacles from which the Jailer’s Daughter will free him, he threatened her father that he would “shake ’em so ye shall not sleep, /​I’ll make ye a new morris” (2.2.275–​76). What ensues is a set of counterpositions between literal and figurative morris bells: in the following scene, dancers gather the “tackle,” or bells, for their rehearsal; in the next, Palamon manipulates the Jailer’s Daughter into supplying him with a file to saw though his manacles; after he flees, she ends up inducted into the morris rehearsal. Palamon’s actual freedom from figurative morris bells thus leads to her figurative enslavement in actual morris bells. It is unsurprising that in the play’s final act, the delusional Jailer’s Daughter remembers Palamon in sexually charged language as able to out-​gallop a hobby horse since he could “dance the morris twenty mile an hour” (5.2.51). The question of who authors the movements of her disordered body in the morris is part of the play’s broader meditation

244   Seth Stewart Williams on sexual ethics and their consequence: Are her movements the product of a deceitful lover, of a woman opting to pursue a love that she herself knows to be “hopeless,” or of a pedant who can only see her acute distress as financially advantageous (2.4.4)? In resolving the surface problem of sexual superfluity by introducing a substitute female dancer, the play creates a new problem of authorial superfluity, since the movements of the Jailer’s Daughter’s body are also the product of multiple men, both present and absent. If Kinsmen explores questions of culpability through a morris dance whose choreographic authorship is contested, a second set of authorial tensions surround the real-​world production of that dance, tensions that hinge on the question of whether Kinsmen imported its morris dance from a masque, Francis Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn (1613). As Anne Daye shows in Chapter 4 in this volume, some masque choreographies may have been “transferred wholesale” to commercial plays, for which playwrights like Shakespeare would “devise a pretext congruous with the plot” (117). The economic pressures that often rewarded efficiency in theatrical production undoubtedly encouraged companies to recycle and borrow material in this manner; and yet, even if we were to assume a fairly seamless transfer of choreographies from masques to plays, we ought to wonder whether they remained the same dance. One implication of Daye’s Chapter 4 is that playwrights sometimes altered text in order to accommodate choreographic borrowings—​further evidence that, like Kemp’s jig about cuckolding, dance sometimes structured dramatic action. And yet the inverse is also true: dance steps, even when borrowed intact, would signify to substant­ ially different ends when surrounded by the dialogue, dramatic action, and thematic trajectories of a new play. The Kinsmen morris, while often assumed to be the product of a direct transfer from Beaumont’s masque, shows just how much exchange between venues and plays altered the hermeneutic scope, and likely the choreographic details, of extant dances. While scholars have often, and not unreasonably, asserted that in crafting the morris in Kinsmen, the King’s Men “reused,” “transferred,” or “reproduced” the morris in Beaumont’s masque, the plot context of the morris in that masque differs so totally from the morris in Kinsmen that speculation about what was transplanted, and how it signified, must be carefully qualified.27 The “importation” view seems to originate in Littledale’s 1876 edition of Kinsmen, and has often served as one important point of evidence in dating the two productions as roughly contemporaneous—​theater history, that is, has in part rested on a theory of choreographic transmission. And yet there is no evidence for a straightforward transference beyond the partial correspondence of dance roles in the two published scripts: the morrises in both Beaumont’s masque and in Kinsmen discard the traditional morris characters (fool, hobby horse, and Maid Marian) in favor of outlandish couples like a He-​and She-​Baboon.28 In fact, Kinsmen calls for a somewhat different set of dancers than those listed in Beaumont’s masque, inserting not only the Jailer’s Daughter and apparently omitting the “Shee Baboone,” but adding an ambiguous note that these characters dance “cum multis aliis” (with many others) (3.5.136).

[They Dance]   245 Further, the morris in Beaumont’s masque is part of a dance battle between gods, while in Kinsmen it participates in a multi-​ scene counterposition of plots that foregrounds Palamon’s sexual ethics. Even were we to assume that the steps from the masque recur unchanged in Kinsmen, the substantially different dramatic ends completely alter the meaning of those steps—​a reminder of the extent to which dialogue shapes the hermeneutic scope of dance, and that ontologically speaking, “dance” cannot be strictly circumscribed to bodily movement. Further, the “importation” view implicates Beaumont and his collaborators as additional authors of the Kinsmen dance scene. Even if we were to reject the “importation” theory, the similarity between the two morris dances has nevertheless occasioned a frequent and persistent dispersion of authorial control to another set of collaborators: editors, who often flesh out Fletcher and Shakespeare’s stage directions by inserting the text of Beaumont’s masque into editions of Kinsmen inside editorial brackets, sometimes unattributed.29 Whatever we might think about the likelihood of players importing morris tropes from masque to play, it is unambiguously the case that generations of editors have imported the text of Beaumont’s dance to editions of the Fletcher and Shakespeare play. As a result, it is Beaumont’s text that often returns to embodied action in modern productions of Kinsmen that stage the dance. Whatever approach a given edition takes, the morris dance in Kinsmen is one of the scenes most likely to incite discussion about authorship, a textual artifact whose complex filiation involves imagined roles for Fletcher, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and their editors. If Masten has shown us that the specter of homosocial coupling subtends the play’s main plot and its model of textual production, something yet more promiscuous subtends the play’s morris dance and its model of corporeal production.

Macbeth as Transtemporal Collaboration The Two Noble Kinsmen and The Court Beggar show us that in the internal world of plays, dances are attributed to authors in ways consequential for broader thematic and ideological interests; they show us, too, that dance scenes were among the most ambiguously collaborative portions of a play-​text, the study of which frequently complicates arguments regarding authorial intention or attribution. How, then, does dance intersect with the fictional significance and real-​world practice of collaborative authorship when a play was repeatedly revived and adapted over time? The witch dances in Macbeth offer a particularly rich archive for exploring such a question, since this is the portion of the play that most attracted the intervention of successive playwrights as each made novel contributions to the play, preserving extant dances while adding new ones in response to cultural shifts in performance conventions and popular beliefs about witchcraft. This form of dramatic collaboration shows that playwrights both retain and elaborate upon what precedes them. While actual choreographies may not have survived across every

246   Seth Stewart Williams production, the textual artifacts that shape them—​stage directions and dialogue—​did. Macbeth’s witch dances thus grow diachronically in length and number with each revival, and grow synchronically as each successive production expands a textual phenomenon (a mere direction that “witches dance”) into a corporeal phenomenon. Text even conditioned the gendering of that danced expansion: Stephen Orgel has noted that after the Restoration created a space for women players, the witches in Macbeth nevertheless continued to be performed by men.30 This is perhaps in part because Macbeth himself comments that their beards “forbid” him “to interpret” that they are women—​a phrase that subsequent male collaborators took as equally forbidding where the gender of casting was concerned.31 Witch dances thus resemble what Jonathan Gil Harris has termed a “polychronic” object, an artifact “neither quite synchronic nor diachronic” that “smudges the boundaries dividing the present ‘moment’ from other times.”32 The dances in Macbeth produce a related temporal smudging since each successive playwright and choreographer develops dances that exist alongside and are influenced by the dances preceding him. These dances are also conceptually polytemporal within the fictional world of the play, since Macbeth leaves pointedly unresolved the question of whether danced spells produce or predict the future. In addition to this polychronicity, Macbeth’s witch dances are also, as we will see below, definitionally polyspatial. In demonologies, witch dances are repeatedly linked to a broader reputation for supernatural “transportation” across landscapes, and a means by which witches author human misfortune remotely through danced sabbaths. The successive versions of Macbeth intensify this association of witch dance with spatial reach, suggesting that any individual witch dance is but one metonymic instance of a larger dance that is always transpiring elsewhere, shaping events in defiance of place and time. The textual history of Macbeth’s witch dances places its playwrights in a similar position, collaborating in defiance of time and place. Studies of collaboration often prioritize forms of proximal interaction between playwrights, like shared living quarters.33 But the witch dances in Macbeth invite speculation about how prior playwrights—​like the play’s witches—​author bodily action remotely. In order to emphasize that this collaboration across time involved the coordination of specific textual artifacts with corporeal practices, in the following I will mostly cite early modern editions in order to direct attention at the material nuances that influenced choreographic production in the seventeenth century.

Shakespeare, Demonologies, and “Weyward” Choreography When Shakespeare shaped a brief dance at scene I.iii for Macbeth’s initial meeting with the witches, he capitalized on an interest in witches spurred by recently published demonologies, including one by England’s new king, James I; but Shakespeare

[They Dance]   247 especially capitalized on a new prominence accorded to dance in late sixteenth-​century demonologies.34 While fifteenth-​ century discussion of witchcraft, for example in Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum (1486), had paid scant attention to dancing, influential sixteenth-​century demonologies, like Jean Bodin’s De la Démonomanie des Sorciers (1580) and Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), increasingly posit dance as a key transaction in the economy of demonic magic. Scot’s Discoverie, perhaps the most popular demonology in England, attempted to refute superstitions about witches, but in the process also recorded and popularized them. It reports that at “magicall assemblies, the Witches never faile to danse,” describes one such dance as resembling a volta with brooms held aloft, and notes the belief that when witches complete a dance at their sabbath, the devil “supplieth their wants of powders and roots.”35 Demonologies repeatedly emphasize backward and inverted forms of motion and posit dance as a corporeal means by which witches’ sabbaths invert Church ritual.36 Giovanni D’Anania, for example, says that witches “trace dances thoroughly unlike ours,” in that “they bound contrariwise, bodies bent forward, and their head not forward but backward.”37 This triple antithesis of direction, posture, and gaze makes witch bodies invert anatomical logic as surely as they invert proper liturgy. Demonologies also associate dance with witches’ broader proclivity for deviant travel, “transportations” that allowed them to cross vast distances in defiance of logic. Scot devotes two chapters to reports of their various transportations, and like other demonologies says that witches often transport through the air in order that they might participate in the sabbath dance.38 Dance was so conceptually linked to witches that Francesco Guazzo called it the “weightiest proof ” of witchcraft, since it left a circular track in the turf where witches had been.39 The inquisitor Silvestro Mazzolini even allowed witnesses to re-​enact in court the “backward” dances they had seen a witch do, calling dance a form of evidence that “no expert could deny.”40 These demonologies thus portray disordered dancing as endemic to the very idea of congregating witches. One of Shakespeare’s distinctive changes to his source material, in crafting three “weird sisters” out of the three “fairies” mentioned in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of Scotland and England (1577), was to make his witches dance. As Macbeth enters, the witches accompany their movement with a chant that describes it: “The weyward Sisters, hand in hand, /​Posters of the Sea and Land, /​Thus do goe, about, about.”41 Whatever the actual movements of this dance, the pervasive trope of retrograde motion in demonologies offers a model that likely influenced Macbeth’s staging. A host of important readings of the play have hinged on the homophony of “weyward” here, a word whose semantic field ranged from the prophetic “weyard” to the subversive “wayward.” As our survey of demonological tracts has suggested, witch dances were instrumentally “weyard” (that is, supernaturally empowered) precisely because they moved in ways that were “wayward” (that is, perverse and “away” from norms), as indicated in the accounts of inverted dances in D’Anania and Mazzolini. For many critics, the word’s semantic instability is bound up with the witches’ broader transgressivity, enabling Macbeth’s own “wayward history within dialogues about race” and epitomizing the “verbal vagrancy” inherent to how early modern language signified.42 But in assessing the interpretive

248   Seth Stewart Williams possibilities afforded by this orthographic crux, we might note that it occurs as a lyric accompanying dance, and that the witches’ bodies thus offer a corporeal gloss, one that extends the restless polysemy of “weyward” to the several forms of disordered motion evoked by witch dancing. The witches’ lyrics evoke their reputation for wayward transportations and assert that the dance “winds up” the weyard charm that will ambiguously intrude on the play’s subsequent action; that is, their dancing bodies link wayward movement with weyard objectives. As they rotate “about, about” with hands linked, they refer to themselves as “Posters of the Sea and Land,” able to cross even nautical distances with speed. These lyrics even proffer the disordered motions of their dance as a metonym for their untoward transportation, substituting present spectacle for unseen travel and making their bodies the common denominator of both. In addition, the waywardness of their dance is instrumentally weyard in that executing it means “the Charme’s wound up” and they are able to predict or influence Macbeth’s fate.43 This spell is effective because it adheres to a specific choreography, one in which the witches alter the direction of the circle three times in recognition of its three participants: “Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,/​And thrice againe to make up nine.” Choreographic form thus derives from the dance’s collaborative production. The uncertain extent to which the witches permeate the rest of the play’s action, as instigators of or scapegoats for Macbeth’s own multiplication of deviance, originates in this enigmatic dance and its companion spectacle, the witches’ vanishing. Is this a real charm, or a suggestive show? Are the witches bodily authors or proleptic readers of Macbeth’s actions? The question haunts Macbeth, and especially Macbeth’s early audiences, in part because Shakespeare raises it with a dance. In his two encounters with the witches, Macbeth always first sees them dancing and is then left gawking at their disappearance. Stephen Greenblatt observes that the witches are “most suggestively present when we cannot see them,” but this ominous absence is conditioned by a spectacular presence, and draws upon a demonological tradition in which witches absented themselves from human affairs in order to shape those affairs through dance.44

Middleton and Synchronic Migration Where Shakespeare’s witch dance presents a familiar cultural figure in newly kinetic terms, a new set of witch dances added at some point during the following decade upholds the play’s extant thematic investments while contending with a new multi-​ genre fad for scenes of dancing witches. The new “magicall assemblies” inserted at III.v and IV.i heighten connections between dance and transportation, and induct the witches’ boss, Hecate, into the danced action. In shaping these scenes, the adaptors interpolated aspects of the witch dance in Middleton’s tragicomedy The Witch (ca. 1609), and were perhaps partly inspired by the witch dances “made” by Jeremy Hearne for Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens (1609).45 While critics are generally comfortable attributing these changes to Middleton, and to treating the Macbeth additions as deriving from

[They Dance]   249 The Witch, it is not an entirely clear matter, and speculation about the chronological relationship between an imagined series of foul papers and fair copies leaves authorial contributions only partly discernable.46 The textual history of Macbeth, like the meteorological and political atmosphere of the play’s Scotland, leaves the foul indistinguishable from the fair. What is clear is that the inclusion of dances from Middleton’s The Witch foregrounds questions of authorship in two distinct ways: consolidating choreographic control under Hecate in the fictional world of the play, but conspicuously dispersing authorship—​for early modern spectators and textual scholars alike—​at the level of the play-​text. Middleton’s contribution to the play is most conspicuous in the dance songs that Macbeth imports from The Witch, including only their first lines as a cue to the performers.47 As with the morris dance in Kinsmen, these dance songs serve entirely new plotting objectives in Macbeth, as indicated by the dialogue added, removed, and altered in order to accommodate the dances to their new context. For example, in accounting for a shift in genre from tragicomedy to tragedy, Middleton left behind the comic puns and malapropisms that surround the dance songs in The Witch in order to make the dances suitable for a more ominous sabbath. The song “Come away, Hecate,” which says that even when flying witches “sing and dance,” serves no significant purpose in the plot of The Witch.48 But in scene III.v of Macbeth it follows Hecate’s announcement that the other witches have allowed Macbeth to become a “wayward Sonne” who has strayed from their plans.49 To correct this and regain control, she says that she will fly to the moon in order to prepare “Magicke slights” that will draw Macbeth into “Confusion,” after which the song “Come away, Hecate” commences. Far from a mere divertissement, in Macbeth this airborne ballet now dramatizes preparations for a larger dance spectacle that will seek to ensnare Macbeth. A similar contextual shift frames the song “Black Spirits.” In The Witch the danced charm executed to this song facilitates a murder already planned, while in scene IV.i of Macbeth it summons apparitions that lead Macbeth to plan a new murder. In a faint but notable alteration for Macbeth, Hecate’s introduction of the song characterizes her authority over the magical assembly as specifically choreographic in nature. In The Witch, Hecate merely urges the other witches to “stir” the cauldron, after which they sing and dance (5.2.62). But in Macbeth she enters and, in a reference to round dances, commands the witches to go “about” the cauldron “like Elves and Fairies in a Ring.”50 Like Shakespeare’s cauldron dance at I.iii, this song’s chorus describes the dance’s circular motion as intrinsic to its magical effects: going “around around about” is a means to “all good keep out” (4.1.49–​50). Since spells in Macbeth depend in part on fidelity to necromantic choreographies, it is no surprise that Middleton presents Hecate’s authority as “contriver of all harmes” through the assertion of choreographic control.51 The altered introduction to the song, which replaces an injunction to stir with one to dance, not only characterizes Hecate’s influence on Macbeth as a choreographic intervention, but also renders Middleton’s influence on Macbeth as a chiefly choreographic intervention. If the dances in The Witch help to portray haggling, partly comical witches of limited influence, the dances in Macbeth help to portray witches who are unsettlingly

250   Seth Stewart Williams empowered. These shifts between genres and dramatic contexts qualify any supposition that witch dances circulated between masques, tragicomedies, and tragedies unaltered: commensurate shifts in the movement vocabularies of the dances were likely enjoined by Middleton’s repurposing of his original material. The scene’s final dance also serves news ends in Macbeth, reinforcing the emphasis on danced flight, first articulated in “Black Spirits,” in order to make dance and transportation conceptually linked. In The Witch this dance is done to “show reverence to yon peeping moon,” but in Macbeth the “Antique round” is designed to astonish Macbeth with “the best of our delights,” a sight that continues to haunt him (5.2.63).52 It haunts him in part because Macbeth specifies that the witches vanish into the air at the dance’s conclusion. In The Witch, they “Dance and Ext,” but in Macbeth they “Dance, and vanish,” and Macbeth offers a curse: “Infected be the Ayre whereon they ride” (5.2.87).53 Whether this vanishing involved a flying apparatus or some form of danced disappearance, the staging physically enacts the conceptual link so often found in demonologies between the motions of dance and supernatural flight. Since the witches’ song has previously characterized flight as the site of airborne dancing, their vanishing marks less the end of the dance than its dislocation. Emboldened by the effects of the witches’ danced spell and astonished at the atmospheric dispersion of their antic round, Macbeth resolves to turn his own murderous “thoughts” into “Acts.”54

Davenant and Moving Shapes By the time Davenant got his hands on these dances for a circa 1664 production, he recorded a shift in staging technology by having the witches not take to the air but descend into the ground, his new stage direction specifying that they “Dance and Vanish. the cave sinks.”55 Macbeth no longer curses the “Ayre whereon they ride,” but the “Earth in which they sunk.” In his adaptation of this dance scene, Davenant grounds the witches to an end: in an earlier dance song, he had itemized all the frightening landscapes where they dance. That dance is surrounded by a wholly new scene that ostentatiously amplifies the sense that witches author human misfortune through polyspatial dance, and challenges audiences to confront such a view at a moment when witchcraft featured prominently in new scientific debates. While Christopher Spencer has shown that Davenant’s version likely bears some traces of Caroline productions, nearly every alteration was, if not instigated by, retained and modified by Davenant and his collaborators as part of a broad project to reconceive Shakespeare’s plays for the Restoration stage.56 Early manuscript copies—​the Yale MS (likely a scribal copy of Davenant’s papers), and an autograph copy of the dance song, “Let’s have a dance upon the Heath”—​suggest that Davenant was to some extent directly involved in the play’s song and dance material.57 Indeed, Davenant attended not only to some details of the dances’ staging, but crafted dialogue that integrated the dances into the play’s new plotting and thematic concerns. And yet the dance songs for this version, which dominated the stage for a century, also proved a site of

[They Dance]   251 radical collaborative flux. They implicate two credited choreographers (Luke Channell and Josias Priest), four composers, and, because the tunes and lyrics shift across numerous print and manuscript miscellanies from the 1660s onward, a host of printers and readers.58 The same dance songs continued to evolve across the eighteenth century.59 The dances for the Restoration Macbeth thus exemplify transtemporal collaboration: a single author responds to and elaborates upon the textual material about dance from pre–​Civil War productions, even as he crafts his own extravagant additions; in turn, those alterations provoke subsequent contributions from a wide range of direct and indirect collaborators. As a result, none of the play’s dances is ever wholly extricable from or attributable to a single compositional moment. Restoration interest in the corporeality of witches had two components, both evoked by Davenant’s changes. First, earlier rhetoric that characterized witch dances as embodied inversions of church liturgy had endured. For example, the anonymous 1673 Pleasant Treatise of Witches, published the same year as the first edition of Davenant’s adaptation, noted that when dancing, witches are “strange, and wonderful, as well as diabolical, for turning themselves back to back; they take one another by the arms and raise each other from the ground, then shake their heads to and fro like Anticks, & turn themselves as if they were mad.”60 This description not only involves an inversion of standard dance partnering by having the witches dance back-​to-​back, but also suggests that congregating to dance is the reason that witches keep “aiery Vehicles” to transport them.61 Second, over the very years that the Duke’s Company mounted and continued to revive Macbeth, witchcraft featured prominently in debates at the Royal Society of London and in print concerning the materiality of spirits and the mechanics of their influence upon the human mind. As Stuart Clark has shown, even the “leading exponents of the new style of natural philosophy . . . went out of their way to emphasize the reality of witchcraft.”62 Thus while Richard Kroll, Stephen Orgel, and Spencer have shown that Davenant’s adaptation is highly attuned to the Restoration political landscape, Davenant’s treatment of witch dances indicates that it was also attuned to, or at least likely to be perceived in light of, the Restoration scientific landscape.63 Davenant melds these two components—​enduring interest in witch dance, and new questions about the material mechanics of witchcraft—​in an entirely new dance scene in which the Macduffs, fleeing Inverness after Duncan’s murder, encounter the dancing witches and question the reliability of optical evidence after so strange a sight. The lyrics about and reactions to dancing in this scene, which occur in different form across three substantial textual witnesses (a 1673 quarto, 1674 quarto, and the Yale MS), indicate that Davenant, and the prompters and players who contributed to these documents, saw Macbeth’s dances as much more than dispensable morsels of spectacle. When the scene begins, shortly before the witches enter, one of Lady Macduff ’s maids frames the scopic stakes of the encounter by remarking that she fears the approach of “dreadful shapes.”64 Before the Macduffs spot them, the witches discuss a nebulously causal relationship between Macbeth’s murder of Duncan and their own dancing, alternately implying that their dance causes misfortune and that their dance registers an increase of power as a result of misfortune. Hoping that “many more murders must this one ensue,”

252   Seth Stewart Williams the first witch makes a proposal, “now let’s dance,” to which the others agree.65 In the chant that follows, they first imply that Duncan’s death might merit a special kind of dancing: “when cattel die, about we go, /​What then, when Monarchs perish, should we do?”66 They answer this question, as the Macduffs first see them, in the form of a song-​and-​ dance number whose lyrics place regicide on a spectrum of ill doings and suggest that witch dancing might underlie any human misfortune. As they begin to dance, they sing “Let’s have a dance upon the heath, /​We gain more life by Duncan’s death,” suggesting that the vigor of their dancing serves as an index of human suffering. As they continue, they catalogue all the eerie places where witches “sometimes dance” (from an “old mill” to the “Fens and Furs”), and list the ominous sounds that can serve as accompaniment to a witch dance (from the “clack” of machinery, to the “night-​Raven’s dismal voice”).67 Thus their song, a meta-​narrative that explains the very thing they are doing, suggests that witch dancing subtends multiple sites of human dread, and frames their present dancing as one instance of a frequent and multilocational practice.68 It is also a dance that unfolds in a perpetually asynchronous “sometime,” a word whose constant repetition extends the dance into uncertain temporalities. After the Macduffs witness this dance about dancing, the 1674 quarto and Yale MS seem to double down on the spectacle, calling for a second “dance of witches,” apparently to instrumental music.69 The Macduffs’ skeptical reaction to these dances, in language that resonates with contemporary scientific debates, discounts the possibility of a mechanistic explanation for the reality of witchcraft. When Macduff converses with the witches in a display of unconcern, they predict that “saving thy bloud will cause it to be shed”—​words that foretell Macbeth’s murder of Macduff ’s family after he flees to England.70 Lady Macduff immediately rejects the prophecy on the grounds that “[t]‌heir words are like /​Their shape; nothing but fiction.” The emphasis on the witches’ “shape” echoes not only her maid’s fear of “dreadfull shapes,” but also (in another Davenant insertion) Lady Macbeth’s earlier insistence that the witches are spirits “in the shape of women.”71 Davenant’s linguistic emphasis on bodily “shape,” and the credulity or disbelief it engenders, is complemented by the play’s emphasis upon the kinetic construction of those shapes. In this Macbeth, witch bodies are on ceaselessly danced display, such that the play, like demonologies, constructs “shape” not through static poses but through actively produced inversionary contortions. While the witches’ meta-​narratorial song explicitly posits this dancing as evidence of supernatural abilities, Lady Macduff suggests that it evinces the precise opposite: their theatrically constructed bodily “shape” means that their “words” are a false prophecy. Lady Macduff ’s position—​that witch “shapes” have no substantial reality—​accords with a strain of skepticism voiced by the cleric and physicist John Webster, for whom visions of witches are largely hallucinations, “melancholiae figmenta,” and who insists that the more outlandish the apparition, the greater the certainty that it is an “assimilation made in mens fancies” and proof against any “real existence in those forms or shapes.”72 Webster several times lists the supposition that witches fly “to places far distant, to dance” among the superstitions most “void of truth.”73 Countering such

[They Dance]   253 objections was Joseph Glanvill, who insists that demonic spirits influence mortal minds through “invisible intellectual Agents,” which the “improvement of microscopical observations will discover.”74 The view that minds and demonic spirits are materially interactive is the very one that Macduff seems to voice when he discounts the witches’ words, since he says that accepting their reality “[w]‌ill make our minds the Registers of Hell.”75 But while the witches’ abnormal “shapes” prompt the Macduffs to dismiss their prophetic “words,” the weird spectacle seems to have the inverse effect on Macbeth. In Davenant’s version of the play, when Macbeth first sees the witches dance he opts to “think upon” the “strange prediction in as strange a manner /​Deliver’d.”76 Davenant thus makes dancing even more central to the representation of witchcraft in his adaptation, not only because his script calls for additional dances, and not only because he makes one of those dances self-​reflexively about dancing, but because he heightens the evidentiary stakes of their dancing at a moment when the corporeality of witches was a topic of pointed public debate.

Epilogue: Choreographers as Composers Davenant invested similar attention to choreographic detail in his other transtemporal collaborations with Shakespeare, for example his adaptation of Kinsmen, which he rechristened The Rivals (1668). In this version, he radically alters the play’s morris dance, removing the role of Gerald the “rectifier,” and jettisoning the baboons and other strange couples in order to replace them with the very stock characters that the original production had conspicuously avoided. Most tellingly, Davenant has the countrymen block the Jailer’s Daughter (renamed Celania) from participating in the dance, on the grounds that “[t]‌ho’ we are about a morrice, ’tis no mad morrice.”77 Instead of thematizing the play’s sexual tensions by representing choreography as promiscuously authored, The Rivals reverts to a nostalgic form of the morris in which choreography arises more autochthonously from its participants by hewing to tradition. And yet this “traditional” morris was quite likely professionally engineered, since during the Restoration, Davenant increasingly relied both on players who specialized in dance as well as upon specialists who “composed” choreography. The Yale MS of Macbeth contains one hint that its witch dances were notably elaborate:  immediately after the instrumental “dance of witches” comes a stage direction, “Enter Witches,” which indicates that the performers of the dance were not the same as those who must re-​enter to deliver the prophecy that follows.78 This division of labor required additional collaborators. The makers of the play’s dances, Channell and Priest, were among these, and it is fitting that they emerge as credited “composers” in one of the same pieces of evidence that allows us to attribute the Restoration Macbeth to Davenant: records later published by the prompter for the Duke’s Company, John Downes. Downes lists

254   Seth Stewart Williams Macbeth among the “Old Stock Plays” revived in the 1671 season, and notes that not only was this production “alter’d by Sir William Davenant” but that it had “all the Singing and Dancing in it,” the latter of which were “compos’d” by “Mr. Channell and Mr. Joseph Preist.”79 Channell and Priest’s collaboration here (whether on the same or on entirely different dances in the production) soon gave way to a substantial career for Priest on his own, whose witch dances seem to have had a special influence on English choreographic trends. The Restoration craze for witch dances continued through Priest’s collaboration with Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell on the dances for another set of “wayward sisters” in Dido and Aeneas (ca. 1687).80 The popularity of witch dances speaks to their marked influence on the development of the “grotesque,” or character-​based, theatrical style, which was often employed for comic and socially transgressive characters, and which distorted the principles of “balletic” dancing in favor of exaggerated, acrobatic motion.81 The emphasis in demonologies on the inverted dancing of witches made Macbeth an opportune theatrical text for innovating upon one hallmark of the grotesque style: inwardly rotated, “false” positions of the limbs.82 John Weaver attests to the place of witch dancing in both Priest’s career and in the development of a British grotesque tradition in his 1712 Essay toward an History of Dancing, which celebrates Priest as the “greatest Master” of “Grotesque Dancing,” and which casts his ability to craft suitable movement vocabularies for “Sailors, Clowns, Chimney-​sweepers, Witches, and such like” in nativist distinction to the “gross Errors of the French Masters,” who allegedly reused a “Chaos of Steps, which they indifferently apply’d” without regard to character-​type.83 In this chapter I  have argued that simple stage directions, and the dialogue into which they extend, were a site of radical and often transtemporal collaboration between multiple playwrights and players alike. In closing I would like to dwell on the fact that Downes refers to Channell and Priest as having “compos’d” the dances, and how this might further our understanding of how early modern England conceived choreographic authorship during the very decades when it emerged as a specialization on the commercial stage. Indeed, several seventeenth-​century texts refer to what we now call choreographers as “composers,” for example Thomas Bray’s 1699 collection of social and theatrical country dances, which reliably refers not to tunes but to dances as having been “compos’d” by the stage’s noted choreographers, including Priest.84 This lexical quirk enriches our view of how early modernity conceived the process of making dances, and of its relation to textual arts. In Susan Foster’s recent work on the ideologies that underpinned the emergence of the term “choreography” in the eighteenth century, she emphasizes the role of notation technologies that situated the body in geometric space and “stipulated foundational units out of which all movement was derived.”85 In Mark Franko’s seminal work on court ballets in France, he notes that choreography emerged through a “dance-​text differential” that saw dance alternately modeling itself upon or seeking subversive emancipation from textual modes of signification.86 Foster and Franko thus point toward conceptions of choreography that depend upon the atomization of constitutive units and upon a recursive extrication of the corporeal from the verbal.

[They Dance]   255 The use of “composition” in reference to Priest’s witch dances, and to other early modern dances, points toward a somewhat different conception temporally prior and geographically adjacent to the models diagnosed by Foster and Franko:  dance steps atomized and reconstituted through the verbal phenomena of a play-​text. This is because in early modernity, the word “composer” (from componere, a putting-​together) was broadly associated with any practice in which agents mixed and matched parts to make a whole, from the writing of plays and tunes to the setting of movable type.87 We can see such a model at work in Weaver’s History when he lauds choreographies that adjust dance steps to suit different ethnic and class character-​types, instructing that in crafting such dances, “the Composer ought to have regard to the Plot.”88 This suggests that when viewed as choreographic constructs, “character” comprised novel arrangements of familiar “foundational units,” whose proper recombination involved attending to a production’s “plot.” As Stern’s work has emphasized, “plot” often signified a material document used by playing companies, the “plot-​scenario” that mapped out how collaborating playwrights would fulfill their respective portions of a play. 89 If we take Weaver’s injunction in this sense, it suggests a new place for the choreographer as yet another collaborator who consulted this document. If we take his injunction in the more familiar sense, it points to a less emancipated choreographer, one whose recomposition of steps took its cue from the inflections of ethnicity and class in preexisting dialogue. In either case, it is a testament to the fact that in early modern English plays, dance was textual in a profoundly material sense, such that even Shakespeare’s written hand could exert an oblique influence on the movement of Priest’s feet.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Textual Strategies:  Perspective in Post-​ Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 141–​160; Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 49–​55. 2. Major studies and collections that probe the idea of authorship in early modernity from a range of perspectives include: D. A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000); Peter Holland, ed., Shakespeare Survey 67 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2014); Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai, eds., Shakespeare and Textual Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-​Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 3. For a concise survey of how dance studies has delineated understandings of choreography, followed by a substantial contribution to that discussion, see Susan Leigh Foster,

256   Seth Stewart Williams Choreographing Empathy:  Kinesthesia in Performance (London:  Routledge, 2011), 2–​6, 15–​72. Major studies and collections on the intersection of performance and text in early modern drama include:  Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, eds., From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book 1480–​1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Stern, Documents of Performance; Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice:  Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, eds. Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare Performance Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 4. Jeffrey Masten, “Pressing Subjects; Or, the Secret Lives of Shakespeare’s Compositors,” in Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, eds. Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy J. Vickers (New York: Routledge, 1997), 97. 5. For more on the performance and rehearsal practices in the early modern repertory system, see, for example, Roslyn Lander Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company 1594–​1613 (Fayetteville:  University of Arkansas Press, 1991), 20–​40; Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001), 29–​33, 56–​63; and Stern, Rehearsals from Shakespeare to Sheridan, 46–​123. 6. Stern, Rehearsals, 77. 7. The performance dates of the lost play are uncertain. For a summary of the case for the preceding date and company attribution, see Martin Wiggins, ed., with Catherine Richardson, British Drama, 1533–​1642:  A Catalogue, Vol. 3:  1590–​1597 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 63–​ 64. Further background information on this plot may be found in Scott McMillin, “The Plots of The Dead Man’s Fortune and 2 Seven Deadly Sins: Inferences for Theater Historians,” Studies in Bibliography 26 (1973): 235–​243. 8. On the backstage plot as a performance document, in contrast to plot scenarios and pre-​ plots, see Stern, Documents of Performance, 207–​209. 9. British Library, Add. MS 10449 fol. 1, reproduced in Appendix II to Walter W. Greg ed., Henslowe Papers:  Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe’s Diary (London:  A. H. Bullen, 1907), 135. 10. On the patents, see John Ward, “Apropos ‘The olde measures,’” Records of Early English Drama 18, no. 1 (1993):  6–​ 7; on French dancing masters, see Barbara Ravelhofer, “Introduction,” to B. de Montagut, Louange de la Danse: In Praise of Dance (Cambridge:  Renaissance Texts from Manuscripts, 2000); for a study of the French dancing master as a stock character in city comedies, see Jean E. Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598–​1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 162–​208. 11. These were the tunes known in some places as “Kemp’s Morris” and “Kemp’s Jig,” on which see John Ward, “The Morris Tune,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 39, no. 2 (1986):  309–​310, as well as the discussion of the Lyna manuscript in Pieter Dirksen, “Orlando Gibbons’s Keyboard Music: The Continental Perspective,” in Networks of Music and Culture in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Rochelle Taylor and David J. Smith (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 159; “Kemp’s Jig” was so termed in John Playford, The English Dancing Master (London, 1651), Early English Books Online (hereafter EEBO), British Library copy, sig. E1r. 12. Wiggins, British Drama vol. 3, 399. 13. Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess (London, 1625), EEBO, Huntington Library copy, sig. H3v; British Library MS Lansdowne 690, 85.

[They Dance]   257 14. Trinity College Cambridge MS O.2.66, fol. 40v. 15. Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton, ed. Arthur Kinney (New York: Norton, 1998), 3.1.36–​97. 16. Ronald B. McKerrow, ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. 3 (London: A. H. Bullen, 1905), 239–​240. 17. Stern, Rehearsal, 70. 18. Stern, Rehearsal,  68–​69. 19. Richard Brome, The Court Beggar, Octavo Text, ed. M. O’Connor, Richard Brome Online (http://​www.hrionline.ac.uk/​brome), 5.1.2620. 20. Brome, The Court Beggar, 5.1.2560–​2561. 21. Brome, The Court Beggar, 5.1.2523. 22. Brome, The Court Beggar, 5.1.2583–​2591. 23. Masten, Textual Intercourse,  49–​62. 24. Masten, Textual Intercourse,  56–​62. 25. Masten, Textual Intercourse, 49. 26. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan, eds., The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 2016). All subsequent quotations from Shakespeare’s work are taken from this edition, unless otherwise specified. 27. See, for example, Sandra Clark, “The Two Noble Kinsmen: Shakespeare’s Final Phase: The Two Noble Kinsmen in its Context,” in Late Shakespeare, 1608–​1613, eds. Andrew J. Power and Rory Loughnane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 131; Gary Taylor, Andrew J. Sabol, John Jowett, and Lizz Ketterer, “Middleton, Music, and Dance,” in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), 130; Enid Welsford, The Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 284. Even John Forrest, the most astute reader of early modern morris dances, cites the Beaumont morris as evidence of a dance that made the “transition from masque to public stage,” in John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing, 1458–​1750 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 221. 28. Further, as Littledale himself pointed out, Beaumont’s masque is not the only one upon which the Kinsmen morris seems to draw, since it also shares some features with George Chapman’s Memorable Masque of the Inner Temple and Lincoln’s Inn (1613). Harold Littledale, ed., The Two Noble Kinsmen (London: New Shakespeare Society, 1876), 144–​145. For the characters in Beaumont’s version, see Fredson Bowers, ed., The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, Vol. 1 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1966), 133. 29. This is evident, for example, in the second edition of The Norton Shakespeare, which, following the 1986 Oxford University Press edition, inserts material from Beaumont’s masque within “editorial” brackets without crediting Beaumont, a choice undone in the third edition. See Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus, eds., The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2008), 3.4.138ff.; and The Norton Shakespeare, 3.5.138ff. 30. Stephen Orgel, “Macbeth and the Antic Round,” in Shakespeare Survey 52, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 152. 31. William Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), EEBO, Folger Shakespeare Library copy, sig. ll6v.

258   Seth Stewart Williams 32. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009): 123–​124. 33. See, for example, the discussion of shared beds in Masten, Textual Intercourse,  3–​6. 34. James I, Daemonologie, in Form of a Dialogue (Edinburgh, 1597). 35. Reginald Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft (London, 1584), EEBO, Huntington Library copy, sigs. E5v, E6r. 36. On witches’ sabbaths as inversions of the liturgy, see, for example, Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 13–​15. 37. “. . . choreas a nostris penitus absimiles ducunt . . . retrocendo saliunt: terga dando inclinant, caputq. non ante, sed retrò.” Giovanni Lorenzo D’Anania, De Natura Daemonum (Venice, 1589), sigs. K2r–​K2v. See also Paolo Grillando, Tractatus Duo: Unus de Sortilegiis D. Pauli Grillandi Castellionis (Frankfurt, 1592), sigs. H4r–​H4v. 38. Scot, Discoverie, Book 5, Chapters  7–​8; regarding witches transporting in order to dance, Scot reports that to “appear in their assemblies . . . the devil delivereth them a staffe, to convey them thither invisibly through the air; and that then they fall a dancing,” sig. F3r. 39. Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum. The Montague Summers Edition, trans. E. A. Ashwin (New York: Dover, 1988), 45. 40. “nullus sapiens negare posit.” Silvestro Mazzolini, De Strigimagarum Demonumque Mirandis, Libri Tres (Rome, 1575), 137. 41. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, sig. ll6v. 42. Scott L. Newstock and Ayanna Thompson, eds., Weyward Macbeth:  Intersections of Race and Performance (New  York:  Palgrave, 2010), 8; Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44, no. 3 (1993): 264, 266. 43. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, sig. ll6v. 44. Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare Bewitched,” in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, eds. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 34. 45. Stephen Orgel, ed., Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 134. 46. For one take on the relationship between the plays, see Taylor and Lavagnino, eds., Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, 382–​383, 690–​692. 47. On the textual stability and performative iterability of these songs, see the discussion of their manuscript copies in Gary Taylor and Andrew J. Sabol, with John Jowett and Liz Ketterer, “Middleton, Music, and Dance,” in Taylor and Lavagnino, eds., Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, 154–​161. 48. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, eds., Thomas Middleton:  The Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1186, 3.5.59–​61. All subsequent quotations from Middleton are taken from this edition. 49. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, sig. mm6r. 50. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, sig. mm6v. 51. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, sig. mm6r. 52. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, sig. mm6v. 53. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, sigs. mm6v, nn1r. 54. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, sig. nn1r.

[They Dance]   259 55. William Davenant, Macbeth a tragaedy: with all the alterations, amendments, additions, and new songs (London, 1674), EEBO, University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign copy, sig. G4r. 56. Christopher Spencer, Davenant’s “Macbeth” and the Yale Manuscript:  An Edition, with a Discussion of the Relation of Davenant’s Text to Shakespeare’s (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1961), 56–​65. For more on the performance history of Macbeth in the Restoration, see Barbara Murray, Restoration Shakespeare:  Viewing the Voice (London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 50–​62. 57. On the Yale MS, see Spencer, Yale Manuscript, 37–​54. For a facsimile of Davenant’s copy of the song, made prior to its cataloguing by the Folger Library, see item 1238 in Percy John Dobell, The Literature of the Restoration (London: P. J. & A. E. Dobell, 1918), 94. 58. See Arthur H. Scouten, “The Premiere of Davenant’s Adaptation of Macbeth,” in Shakespeare and Dramatic Tradition: Essays in Honor of S. F. Johnson, ed. W. R. Elton and William B. Long (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 286–​293. 59. See, for example, the new verse included in William Shakespeare, The historical tragedy of Macbeth (Edinburgh, 1753), Eighteenth Century Collections Online, sig. E2r. 60. Anonymous, A Pleasant Treatise of Witches (London:  for C.  Wilkinson, 1673), EEBO, Huntington Library copy, sig. B3v. 61. Anonymous, A Pleasant Treatise of Witches, sig. B4r. 62. Clark, Thinking with Demons, 296. See also Thomas Harmon Jobe, “The Devil in Restoration Science: The Glanvill-​Webster Witchcraft Debate,” Isis 72, no. 3 (1981): 342–​356. 63. Orgel, “Antic Round,” 151–​153; Richard Kroll, “Emblem and Empiricism in Davenant’s Macbeth,” English Literary History 57, no. 4 (1990): 835–​864; Spencer, The Yale Manuscript, 2–​3. For more on Davenant’s engagement with natural philosophy, see John Shanahan, “The Dryden-​Davenant Tempest, Wonder Production, and the State of Natural Science,” The Eighteenth Century 54, no. 1 (2013): 91–​118. 64. Davenant, Macbeth, sig. D1r. 65. Davenant, Macbeth, sigs D1v–​D2r. 66. Davenant, Macbeth, sig. D2r. 67. Davenant, Macbeth, sig. D2r. 68. In crafting the song’s catalogue of dance sites, Davenant draws on a convention whose first prominent occurrence is a song in Jonson’s Masque, which lists all the locations that witches frequent. See Orgel, Masques, 124. 69. Davenant, Macbeth, sig. D2v, and Spencer, Yale Manuscript, 106. 70. Davenant, Macbeth, sig. D2v. 71. Davenant, Macbeth, sig. B2r. 72. John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (London, 1677), EEBO, British Library copy, sigs. E4v, O2v. 73. Webster, Supposed Witchcraft, sigs. K2v, Gg3r. 74. Joseph Glanvill, A Philosophical Endeavour towards the Defence of the Being of Witches and Apparitions (London, 1666), EEBO, British Library copy, sigs. B4v–​C1r. 75. Davenant, Macbeth, sig. D2v. 76. Davenant, Macbeth, sig. C4r. 77. William Davenant, The Rivals (London, 1668), EEBO, Huntington Library copy, sig. F1v. 78. Spencer, Yale Manuscript, 106. The 1674 quarto, in a variant that signals its possible derivation from a promptbook subsequent to the Yale MS, even specifies the number of players who re-​enter. See Davenant, Macbeth, sig. D2v.

260   Seth Stewart Williams 79. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, or, an Historical Review of the Stage from 1660–​1720. A Facsimile Reprint of the Rare Original of 1708 (London: J. W. Jarvis & Son, 1886), sigs. C8v–​D1r. As Jennifer Thorpe has detailed, Priest’s name was inconsistently reported. See Jennifer Thorpe, “Dancing in Late 17th-​Century London: Priestly Muddles,” Early Music 26, no. 2 (1998): 198–​210. For Priest’s credits in music and dance notations, see Thorpe, “Priestly Muddles,” 205–​207. 80. Nahum Tate, An Opera Perform’d at Mr. Josiah Priest’s Boarding-​ School at Chelsey (London, 1689). 81. For a wide-​ranging discussion of the grotesque style, especially in its later forms, see, for example, Rebecca Harris-​Warwick and Bruce Alan Brown, eds., The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-​Century Stage: Gennaro Magri and His World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). 82. On false positions, see Raoul Auger Feuillet, Choregraphie: ou l’Art de décrire la dance par caractères, figures et signes démonstratifs (Paris, 1701), Gallica, copy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Arsenal, 4–​S–​4592, 26–​27; and Genaro Magri, Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Dancing, trans. Mary Skeaping (London: Dance Books, 1988), 64. 83. John Weaver, An Essay toward an History of Dancing (London: Jacob Tonson, 1712), sigs. M5r–​M6r. There is some ambiguity as to whether Weaver praises Priest for his achievement in grotesque or in “historical” dancing, but since the latter is in any case discussed as a subcategory of the former, I’ve opted for “grotesque.” 84. Thomas Bray, Country dances being a composition entirely new (London, 1699), EEBO, British Library copy. Bray consistently refers to dances by Priest and others as “compos’d,” the first of which occurs at sig. F1v. Likewise, the theologian Christopher Ness, in one of his treatises on comets, makes passing reference to a French ballet that he describes as “composed with much curiosity.” Christopher Ness, A Philosophical and Divine Discourse Blazoning upon This Blazing Star Divided into Three Parts (London, 1681), EEBO, Bodleian Library copy, sig. C3v. 85. Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 33. 86. Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4. 87. See The Oxford English Dictionary Online, n., senses 1.a–​b., 2, 5. For an account of the playwright as the crafter of a patchwork, see Stern, Documents of Performance,  1–​4. 88. Weaver, History of Dancing, sigs. B8v–​C1r. 89. Stern, Documents of Performance,  8–​34.

Bibliography Franko, Mark. Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Holland, Peter, and Stephen Orgel, eds. From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 Kidnie, Margaret Jane, and Sonia Massai, eds. Shakespeare and Textual Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Masten, Jeffrey. Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Chapter 11

Dancing w i t h t h e Archi v e Early Dance for Shakespearean Adaptation Evelyn O’Malley

Single, single, double. Single, single, double. Left together, right together, left, right, left together. And up and down, and up and down, and up, stay up, stay up, come down. Wave crests and melts, small wave melts down, and up, a higher wave comes down.1

“[The pavane] can be learned in approximately ten seconds. How to dance it is the important thing; and this may take years to learn.”2 I first heard Peggy Dixon’s mythical pedagogical statement uttered by Darren Royston, a captivating teacher and artistic director of Nonsuch History and Dance, at a summer school in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, in 2010. My body ached to know what Dixon meant for a long time afterward. Two years later, working on an intertextual adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Ben Jonson’s Oberon, The Fairy Prince for the Northcott Theatre at the University of Exeter, Dixon’s words—​or was it Royston’s voice?—​continued to perplex. I was working with a group of students who had constructed the basic steps to a pavane utilizing the French dancing master Thoinot Arbeau’s sixteenth-​century Orchesography and Dixon’s twentieth-​century collection of Elizabethan dances.3 The pavane was to be adapted and danced as part of the devised performance.4 As we advanced, retreated, and moved about the room, I still wondered what Dixon had meant. Should the dance be less disjointed, less plonky, less stilted? Can you move so that your feet meet just as they pass through the step? So that they kiss the floor gently as you step away again? So that the movement is continuous, like waves rolling on a steady sea? And will we know it, see it, feel it, when we get it “right”? And if we do get it right, everybody together, at the very same moment, and in just the right place, what will happen? Will we access and embody an imagined Shakespearean world, opening up time, transcending place and

262   Evelyn O’Malley corporeality?5 And how might we then begin to go about “adapting” what is already an adaptation anyway, to adapt a play and a masque that are themselves adapted from earlier sources? In her twentieth-​century collections of early modern dances, drawing on fifteenth-​ and sixteenth-​century dancing manuals from Italy, Burgundy, and France, Dixon explains that the 1980s saw a growing fashion for “the real thing,” however much the real thing was always “a little elusive.”6 Emily Winerock and Nona Monahin point out that—​although relatively few early modern sources from England contain information on dance footwork—​the numerous dance references in English poetry, plays, and other textual sources from the period make it relatively safe to assume correspondence between the extensive dance descriptions in the European manuals and those danced in England.7 Dixon’s quest after a quality of movement that might take years to acquire is further articulated by Mark Franko’s The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography (1986). Franko takes an intertextual approach to the same dance manuals, theorizing “a systematic and generalizable perspective on movement quality within choreographic descriptions” that distinguishes between “pedestrian and glorious uses of the body.”8 Two of the fifteenth-​century Italian sources on the measure, for instance, use metaphor to articulate desirable qualities of rise and fall in dance that contrast with the stilted outcome of constructing footwork from a book, as encountered earlier. Domenico da Piacenza instructs that to dance a “fantasmata” in a measure, “one gives an instant’s pause as though having seen the Medusa’s head, as says the poet: that is to say that, having made the movement, one is in that instant as though turned to stone, and in the next instant takes wing like the falcon.”9 Antonio Cornazano asks dancers to “employ the smoothness with which a gondola passes, pushed along by little waves when the sea is tranquil, as is her nature. These little waves lift one gradually and lower one precipitously, always following the basis and cause of measure which is hesitation overcome by promptness.”10 I begin with my encounter with Dixon through Royston and draw attention to Dixon and Franko’s contrasting methodologies to highlight how our embodied and imagined routes into the physical practice and scholarly study of the dances of Shakespeare’s day are always already processes of adaptation, contingent upon encounters, attachments, and contemporary positionalities. The differences between Dixon and Franko’s approaches to Renaissance dance also offer a reminder of the ongoing and overlapping processes of theory and practice. This chapter therefore utilizes the process of adapting The Winter’s Tale and Oberon as a case study to reflect on what early modern dancing can offer contemporary adapters of Shakespeare’s plays. It begins by identifying the historical, intertextual conversation that was the impetus for the adaptation. Next, it proposes dancing with the archive as the methodology for devising Stone No More. These sections are followed by an analysis of anti-​masque and masque proper elements in Stone No More that observe tensions and generative spaces between reconstruction and adaptation. The chapter concludes by setting the tensions identified during the process of adaptation into relief against the debates around original practices and Shakespearean performance.

Dancing with the Archive    263

The Winter’s Tale and Oberon, The Fairy Prince Oberon, The Fairy Prince was performed at the Banqueting House in Whitehall on January 1, 1611, for Henry, Prince of Wales, who appeared as a principal dancer in the masque. Oberon is primarily influenced by classical satyr plays, with David Lindley identifying Virgil’s Eclogues, Casaubon’s De satyrica, Giraldi’s De deis gentium, Conti’s Mythologiae, and Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae as sources in Jonson’s marginal notes.11 The Winter’s Tale was performed at the Globe later in May of the same year. Shakespeare’s main source for the play was Robert Greene’s pamphlet Pandosto or the Triumph of Time, published in 1588, in addition to the Pygmalion story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.12 The sheep-​shearing scene in the fourth act of The Winter’s Tale—​of particular importance to this chapter because it is where the dances are located—​expands upon a suggestion in Pandosto that Fawnia, who corresponds with Shakespeare’s Perdita, was “mistress of the feast” at a gathering of farmer’s daughters.13 Oberon calls for multiple dances, and The Winter’s Tale calls for two, although neither playwright describes any choreography in detail. As previous chapters in this Handbook have highlighted, however, this apparent lack of information is far from meaning that dance was not important for Shakespeare or Jonson.14 Although the 1616 folio for Oberon includes relatively extensive stage directions and marginalia from Jonson, the text provides only one part of what Barbara Ravelhofer imagines would have taken the form of “a multimedia spectacle of transition which embraced human and animal performers, architecture, music, text, costumes and dances.”15 Inigo Jones’s perspectival set designs and costume sketches help to fill in some of the gaps when attempting to visualize the spectacle of the masque as performed at Whitehall.16 Monetary records show that dancing masters Nicholas Confesse, Hierome Hearne, and Thomas Giles prepared dances with Prince Henry for the six weeks leading up to the performance, indicating that choreography received considerable attention as part of the masque preparations.17 Likely surviving melodies for the dances in Oberon, by Robert Johnson and Alphonso Ferrabosco, are documented in Peter Walls’s comprehensive study of Music in the English Courtly Masque, which confidently ascribes “The Satyrs’ Masque” to Johnson.18 Of the performance itself, an extensive eyewitness account from William Thrumbull is illuminating on dance. Thrumbull describes a number of the early dances, details the sequence of the masque proper dances, and lists who danced with whom; among the most noteworthy in attendance, [t]‌he prince then took the queen to dance, the Earl of Southampton the princess, and each of the rest his lady. They danced an English dance resembling a pavane. When the queen returned to her place the prince took her for a coranta, which was continued by others, and then the gallarda began, which was something to see and

264   Evelyn O’Malley admire. The prince took the queen for a third time for le branles de Poitou, followed by eleven others of the masque.19

There have been a number of attempts to reconstruct dances from Oberon in the twentieth century. A video recording of Case Western Reserve University’s 1993 theatrical reconstruction of Oberon, with choreography by Ken Pierce, puts into practice much of the available research into dance, music, and scenography. Anne Daye also makes a convincing offer of what the dance steps for “The Satyrs’ Masque” may have looked like in conjunction with the eight strains of Johnson’s musical setting.20 Philip Pickett, with musicians at the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe, offers a speculative but historically informed musical reconstruction of Oberon. These subsequent sources offer invaluable interpretive aesthetic resources to the practitioner-​adapter looking at dance in Oberon.21 We know less about the dances for the original production of The Winter’s Tale. The 1623 folio stage directions indicate only that the two dances happen:  “Here a dance of shepherds and shepherdesses” and “Here a dance of twelve satyrs” (4.4).22 Dramaturgically, the dance of shepherds and shepherdesses functions to offer Florizel, disguised as Doricles, and Perdita an opportunity to dance together. As they dance, Polixenes, also in disguise, engages in a conversation with the Shepherd, commenting that Perdita dances “featly” (4.4.166). The shepherds and shepherdesses’ dance would likely have been a folk dance, drawing on rural fertility rites. It would also have appeared more harmonious than the chaotic satyrs’ dance that follows. Alan Brissenden suggests that it was likely to have been a “branle” or circle dance, steps for which he takes from Arbeau, although there is no known musical setting for the dance.23 While Barbara Ravelhofer rightly cautions against an overreliance on Arbeau as a masque dance source, given that there is no evidence to suggest that Orchesography was translated into English during the early modern period, his work remains an important practical and pedagogical tool, as many of the previous chapters have demonstrated. In particular, in a practical performance context, not only are Arbeau’s descriptions of footwork easily translatable into movement to music, but Orchesography is presented as a dialogue that reads like a theatrical script, making it engaging for performance practitioners and students.24 Structurally, Brissenden observes that the occurrence of the satyrs’ dance after the branle in The Winter’s Tale reverses the more traditional sequence for a masque—​where anti-​masque is followed by masque—​by placing the orderly shepherds and shepherdesses’ dance first, and following their dance with the disorderly satyrs.25 The overarching masque structure of progress toward harmony is still broadly recognizable in the dramaturgy for The Winter’s Tale as a whole: disorder characterizes the first part of the play as Leontes’ actions lead to the deaths of Hermione, Mamillius, and Antigonus; order is restored when the stone statue of Hermione (whose name infers harmony) returns to life. There are a few more textual clues about the dance of twelve “saultiers” dressed as satyrs in The Winter’s Tale.26 A Servant anticipates their performance as a “dance which the wenches say is a gallimaufry of gambols, because they are not in’t. But they themselves are o’th’ mind, if it be not too rough for some that know little but bowling, it will

Dancing with the Archive    265 please plentifully” (4.4.305–​308). The Servant also proclaims that the dancers’ reputation precedes them: “One three of them, by their own report, sir, hath danced before the King, and not the worst of the three but jumps twelve foot and a half by th’square” (4.4.313–​315). From what the Servant has to say about the dance, we can garner that the dance of the twelve satyrs called for energetic, disordered leaping and that the tone of the dance was “rough” rather than refined. Historically, this reference to Jonson’s masque, which also features dancing satyrs, has assisted with dating The Winter’s Tale in the same year as Oberon and, more pleasurably, is a clue that leads a trail from one play to another, prompting guesswork and conjecture among historians and practitioners alike in the spaces between the written texts. Might Shakespeare have seen Oberon performed at Banqueting House? Was the infamous bear, who pursues Antigonus to his offstage death on the Bohemian coast in The Winter’s Tale, perhaps inspired by one of the two white polar bear cubs who drew Oberon’s chariot, ushering in the formal masque proper in Oberon—​if indeed these were “real” bears and not performers dressed in animal furs?27 Might some of the same dancers who performed as satyrs for Prince Henry also have danced in Shakespeare’s play on the other side of the river Thames at the Globe later that year? Or did Shakespeare simply reference the elite courtly entertainment—​relatively recent in cultural memory—​with the dancing satyrs in The Winter’s Tale, to elicit a quick laugh from a different kind of theater audience? In Chapter 4 of this Handbook, Anne Daye goes so far as to argue that the satyrs’ dance was transferred “wholesale” from Oberon to The Winter’s Tale.28 Compounding the novelty of the appearance of the dance from Oberon in Shakespeare’s play is that there is no spoken text accompanying the satyrs’ dance in The Winter’s Tale, unlike the shepherds and shepherdesses’ dance, where dialogue continues during the dancing. This suggests that Shakespeare anticipated that Globe audiences would receive the dance as an entertaining diversion in its own right, rather than its functioning as a plot device.

Dancing with the Archive: Stone No More Originally envisioned as a conversation between The Winter’s Tale and Oberon, Stone No More was a practice-​as-​research performance created to explore this famous moment of dance intertextuality. Performances took place at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter, in May 2012 as part of a festival of Shakespearean adaptations and again at the Arts on the Move Festival at Poltimore House, Exeter, in June 2013. The title of the devised piece alluded to Paulina’s line addressed to the statue of Hermione in the final scene of The Winter’s Tale: “Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more” (5.3.99). It also referenced immersive theater company Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, an adaptation of Macbeth, to align itself with a lineage of fragmented Shakespearean adaptations.29 Although adaptation is a contested idea, what Stone No More aspired to do resonated with Daniel Fischlin

266   Evelyn O’Malley and Mark Fortier’s description of adapted works that “through verbal and theatrical devices, radically alter the shape and significance of another work so as to invoke that work and yet be different from it—​so that any adaptation is, and is not, Shakespeare.”30 The overarching research question sought to investigate the adaptive possibilities that could be generated for Shakespeare’s plays by beginning with the dances of the early modern period. A secondary goal was to create an adaptation that would make sense to a spectator with no prior knowledge of the two source texts, while at the same time performing some of the unwritten aspects of the intertextual conversation for those who were familiar with the sources. Stone No More therefore echoed its sources—​to paraphrase Fischlin and Fortier—​to “be” and “not be” Shakespeare or Jonson, masque or play, finding its own coherence in the spirit of the inquiry undertaken through practice. The intertextual assemblage of partial and fragmentary primary sources outlined in the preceding was the springboard for the adaptation, which also drew on the subsequent interpretive instruction books, articles, and recordings of attempted reconstructions dating from the mid-​to late twentieth century and into the twenty-​first. Working with some of what is known of the original dances, music, written texts, and scenography for Oberon and The Winter’s Tale, Stone No More set out to reimagine the progression from chaos to harmony in both works, encountering and exploring tensions at the boundaries of reconstruction and adaptation, of what enacts intertextuality, and what is, what eludes, and what exceeds the archive. The fragments with which Stone No More was assembled included the texts by Shakespeare and Jonson, music by Johnson and Ferrabosco, images by Jones, and European dance texts from the period, as well as interpretations, analyses, reconstructions, and speculative intertextual documents produced in reception. The sources were never imagined as perfect archive; instead, we aimed to amalgamate a sense of how the conversation between the two texts has played out over time, aspiring to dance in the spaces between knowledge and documentation. While an emphasis on historical reconstruction can be read alongside narratives of “authenticity” or “original” practices in Shakespeare, my suggestion is that early dance can invigorate Shakespearean adaptations and open up adaptive possibilities in an alternative context, by refiguring fragments and dancing with the archive. What I mean by “dancing with the archive” is to envision a Shakespearean adaptation created through a particular kind of engagement with historical sources. This includes both the tangible archive, consisting of surviving sources from the early modern period and subsequent interpretations of these sources, as well as what Diana Taylor calls the “repertoire”: those ephemeral, intangible, and unrecorded performances that belong to cultural practices but that are not written down or documented in the same way.31 The choice of verb, “to dance,” implies expressive movement and privileges embodied practices over written or spoken text. “To dance with” is chosen purposely instead of “to engage in a dialogue with,” or “to speak to.” Dancing “with” an archive is not the same as adapting “from” an archive, where raw materials are utilized as a resource from which new performances are forged. Rather, in dancing with the archive, adaptation can be the autotelic outcome of the “with.” Such a process resonates with the bodily “will to archive,” leading to a “will to re-​enact” that André Lepecki identifies in certain modern

Dancing with the Archive    267 dance re-​enactments, where the “will to archive” refers to a “capacity to identify in past work still non-​exhausted creative fields of ‘impalpable possibilities,’ ” which precedes a “will to re-​enact,” understood as “a privileged mode to effectuate or actualize a work’s immanent field of inventiveness and creativity.”32 The process of adaptation I propose, however, differs in the respect that the dance begins with neither a will to memorialize nor a will to re-​enact but, more simply, with a will to dance with what is already there. However much some degree of bodily archiving and re-​enactment might be inevitable products of this process of adaptation, they are not the aim. What follows is a brief analysis of selected aspects of the devised adaptation, showing how dancing with the archive underpinned the piece that emerged through the devising process. Dance was utilized in four ways in the devised piece: as a storytelling device; as performances of “dances” arising diegetically from within the storytelling; as dance music underscoring the adaptation; and, finally, as an opportunity for audience participation. Daye argues “that dance was the principal art form and the defining organisational feature of the masque.”33 Not dissimilarly, Belinda Quirey gives weight to dance as underpinning the feeling of Shakespeare’s plays, arguing that they pulse with the rhythms of early modern courtly dances. Quirey proposes that the pavane is “the rhythm that one can feel behind Shakespeare’s Tragedies, just as the Galliard is the rhythm that comes springing through his Comedies.”34 The analyses of Stone No More in the following integrate textual and musical references, outlining the premise of the adaptation and demonstrating how dance was the “organizing feature” of the new work created.

Anti-​masque The working narrative for Stone No More was that the satyrs from Oberon engaged in a meta-​theatrical retelling of The Winter’s Tale as they awaited sight of Hermione, refracting Jonson’s satyrs who anticipate Prince Henry as Oberon. Stone No More broadly adhered to masque form, moving from a chaotic anti-​masque toward an ordered masque proper, with Oberon used to frame The Winter’s Tale. The cast included ten performers—​ five female and five male—​all of whom played musical instruments as satyrs when not “performing” roles within the Shakespeare narrative.35 These instruments included violin, guitar, clarinet, soprano and alto saxophone, flute, and drums, reflecting the early modern instruments played in Oberon: violins, hautboys, singers, lutes, cornets and percussive instruments.36 Casting the performers as satyr-​storytellers sought to make manifest David Lindley’s argument that Jonson’s satyrs in Oberon represent a development of the earlier unruly anti-​masque figures he created, in that these new satyrs “are not represented as evils to be expelled, but as childish mischief-​makers who are capable of reformation and integration into the world of the masque itself.”37 In retelling the story of The Winter’s Tale as anti-​masque and dancing the masque proper, Stone No More’s satyrs suggested a capacity for traversing both worlds, beginning to challenge the binary of harmony and chaos.

268   Evelyn O’Malley Stone No More commenced like Oberon, with the stage setting utilizing wooden stepladders to invoke the jagged rocks of Inigo Jones’s “Scene of Rocks.”38 Small tables for onstage audience members reflected the early modern playhouse in which The Winter’s Tale was presented, and some audience members were seated at these tables as “gallants”—​there to see and to be seen.39 A single satyr played “The First of Princes” by Robert Johnson on a flute.40 Another satyr tiptoed in behind her and called out, “Oh, wake you then! Come away; /​Times be short are made for play” (10–​11). At her command, the remaining satyrs entered to galliard music by Anthony Holborne, improvising with Jonson’s stage direction: “At this they came running forth severally from diverse parts of the rock, leaping and making antic action and gestures, to the number of ten; some of them speaking, some admiring” (26–​28). Daye notes that the First Sylvan’s suggestion that the satyrs “go frisk about and dance” (169) in Oberon encapsulates “the common cue to a divertissement of dancing: ‘while we wait, let’s dance!’ ”41 In Stone No More, Paulina encouraged the satyrs to dance with the same premise, instigating a dumb-​show performance of The Winter’s Tale underscored by galliard music from Oberon: “The time is worth the use on’t” (3.1.14).42 This opening section of Stone No More’s anti-​masque featured no dance for dance’s sake. The first choreography presented as “a dance” was the satyrs’ dance that lies at the heart of the intertextual conversation between The Winter’s Tale and Oberon. Musically, the dance of the satyrs in Stone No More was an adaptation of the musical setting for Johnson’s “The Satyrs’ Masque,” played with jazz rhythms on alto-​saxophone and keyboard and devised in conjunction with the adapted dance.43 Choreographically, the performers took as a starting point Daye’s comprehensive outline for a possible dance setting to the eight different strains of Johnson’s music. Daye is well worth repeating at length here on the satyrs’ dance, not only because her guidelines are so compelling as choreography for Oberon, but also because she offers a way into imagining what the dance may have looked like when it was repeated in The Winter’s Tale at the Globe. While there is no indication of “figures or formations” for the satyrs’ dance in any of the sources, Daye ventures that number of dancers on stage suggest that the dance may have been performed in couples.44 She proposes that the first strain indicates that the dance began in duple time, utilizing country-​dance steps, and that “comic gesture” may have disrupted the country dancing in the second strain.45 For the third strain, she envisions “cinq pas galliards (the brisk travelling version of the galliard),” followed in the fourth by steps in duple time, indicating the “frisky leaping nature of the satyr.”46 The fifth strain could have taken the form of a galliard, danced at a slower pace than the cinquepace galliards. Movement for the sixth and seventh strains—​played twice as fast as typical social dances of the period—​would have depicted the satyrs’ “swift motion” that Jonson describes in his stage directions.47 Finally, Daye argues that the final strain repeats the faster galliards, but suggests that in Oberon, they were interrupted mid-​leap “to comic effect” by Silenus and a cockcrow.48 Even equipped with Daye’s guidelines, however, there is a need for interpretation in the translation of written instructions on a page into embodied movement. Stone No More’s performers had Daye’s ideas on paper, which they read in conjunction

Dancing with the Archive    269 with some of the textual sources on galliards as part of their preparatory work for the devising process, such as those in Arbeau and the Inns of Court Manuscripts outlined in Monahin’s Chapter 2 in this volume.49 They also sought to improvise with Jonson’s stage direction for the dance in Oberon: “The song ended, they fell suddenly into an antic dance, full of gesture and swift motion, and continued it till the crowing of the cock; at which they were interrupted by Silenus” (205–​206). The process of dancing with the archive was what occurred in the studio as the performers hovered between the attempt to reconstruct early modern dances and to devise new work. The performers attempted to dance their responses to these multiple and varying texts as an adaptation, rather than reconstructing Daye’s choreography exactingly. Having spent initial sessions interpreting instructions by dancing with scraps of photocopied paper literally in hand, the performers began to set aside the paperwork. As the process progressed, they responded instead to their memories of Jonson’s stage direction, Shakespeare’s Servant’s anticipatory commentary, Daye’s historical interpretation of “The Satyrs’ Masque” from a contemporary vantage point, the text and images on galliards in Arbeau, and their Shakespearean characters for the Bohemia sheep-​shearing scene. Photocopies of these written texts were quickly set aside as the performers took turns to improvise movement and music. The images of Capriol lasted longest as reference points because they were visible from the studio dance floor. As the performers “adapted” the “originals,” they retained their individual physical habits of movement and adopted satyr characteristics and quirks, testing the dance rhythms on their contemporary bodies. The result was a range of physical qualities born out of the same set of dance instructions, danced to the adapted music. The footwork for the dancing satyrs in the final piece began with a double step forward ending with a hop, which resembled a slower version of the almain dances that Dover Wilson gathers in the Inns of Court Manuscripts.50 The satyrs advanced in a row toward the audience, rather than in the couples as Daye suggests, and the structured synchronicity of this configuration in performance, drawing attention to itself as “a dance” in the adaptation, elicited laughter from the audience. In the later strains, the satyrs went on to improvise dance to the galliard rhythms played with jazz beats, partnering with members of the audience. As the tempo of the music accelerated, they became more and more frenzied, leaving their partners to return to their seats in the audience. The dance ended with the interruption from Polixenes, emulating the interruption from Silenus and the cockcrow that Daye identifies in Oberon. The galliard was visually unrecognizable as a dance in the final footwork adopted for the dance of the satyrs, but the galliard rhythms remained present in the music and movements, as the organizing feature of the dramaturgy running through the adaptation. In dancing with the archive, there was no moment when “reconstructing” the dances ceased and when “adapting” them began. The adapted dances performed a kinetic past–​present relationship, with time leaking in multiple directions through considered, playful movements. This nonlinear dance time accords with Steven Swarbrick’s analysis of Perdita’s dance that “move[s]‌still” in The Winter’s Tale, where dance time is a dynamic commingling of “animacy and suspension,” where time is “always more variegated and cracked than a linear sense of time would have us believe.”51

270   Evelyn O’Malley The dance of the satyrs in The Winter’s Tale ends without scripted comment from any of the onstage characters. This significance is compounded because Polixenes and the Shepherd converse aloud during the previous dance and there is no dialogue written to accompany the satyrs’ dance. Following the stage direction “Here a dance of twelves satyrs” (4.4) the scene carries on without reference to the dance. After the dance, Polixenes speaks first to the Shepherd, “O, father, you’ll know more of that hereafter” (4.4.319) and then to Camillo, “Is it not too far gone? ’Tis time to part them” (4.4.320). Shakespeare leaves the presumably breathless dancing satyrs on stage without scripted praise. Of course, it is entirely possible that applause for the dance—​as a celebrity turn—​ would have taken place within the unwritten space around the stage direction, and that until the audience ceased applauding, the play would have ground to a halt. Putting into practice Daye’s suggestion that “The Satyrs’ Masque” from Oberon was transferred without changes into The Winter’s Tale, in Stone No More Polixenes interrupted the satyrs’ dance mid-​leap, reflecting Daye’s suggestion that Oberon’s satyrs are interrupted before they finish the dance. In doing so, Polixenes generated significant laugher as the exhausted satyrs were denied their bow. It is hard to imagine no similarly significant response from the Globe audience when the original dance took place. In Stone No More laughter from the audience continued with the satyrs until Polixenes unmasked himself, intensifying the scene’s abrupt tonal shift. The festive atmosphere dissipated as he shouted at Florizel and threw Perdita to the floor. If the same dance was indeed performed in Oberon and was inserted into The Winter’s Tale—​as Daye’s Chapter 4 in this volume suggests it was—​is it possible that Shakespeare’s lines for Polixenes mirrored the abrupt ending of the dance, with a view to prompting a similar response from audiences in 1611? This historical hypothesis—​just one “impalpable possibility” as proposed by Lepeki—​was uncovered by dancing with the archive to devise a new piece of theater.52

Masque Proper A masque proper followed Stone No More’s anti-​masque, merging the meta-​theatrical retelling of The Winter’s Tale with the Oberon framing. After the sheep-​shearing, Florizal and Perdita fled Bohemia, and the satyrs rearranged the jagged rock staging to reflect Inigo Jones’s drawings for “Scene of a Palace,” revealing Hermione’s statue center stage.53 Paulina commanded, “Music; awake her; strike!” (5.3.98) and Perdita sang from Oberon: “Nor yet, nor yet, O you in this night blesst, Must you have will or hope to rest” (323–​324). Hermione breathed into life, singing the rest of the song in harmony with Perdita.54 Song and dance conveyed the reconciliation as the performers transitioned back into their storyteller roles. Hermione led a processional pavane while singing a version of “Oh Yet, how early, and before her time” (358) with Paulina and Perdita, adapted from Pickett’s Oberon reconstruction.55 The pavane was danced rubato to the melodic phrasing of the song, beginning as the impression of an improvised

Dancing with the Archive    271 pavane from the actors spread about the stage, and becoming visible as a more recognizable version of the dance as the song progressed. With regard to the spatial configurations of the dances in Oberon, Ravelhofer surmises that Jones’s set designs must have influenced dancers’ positions and that “geometric formations could have provided an attractive base material to construct more complicated formal masque proper dances,” to appeal to spectators looking down on the dance from above.56 The “palace” staging echoing Jones’s drawings in Stone No More necessitated that the processional patterns for the pavane fanned outward toward the sides of the stage, framing the statue at the center, and likewise influenced by the domed ceilings of Jones’s Oberon drawings, the dancers circled one another in pairs.57 The galliards that followed the pavane were danced in geometric figures adapted from country dances taken from John Playford’s 1651 edition of The English Dancing Master to sustain aesthetic interest for those watching in the Northcott Theatre’s raked auditorium.58 Danced to the Oberon galliard melodies by Holborne, these dances now resembled early modern galliards more closely than the movements in the satyrs’ dance. Galliard music continued quietly as Hermione spoke Phosphorus’s concluding lines from Oberon: “To rest, to rest! The herald of the day, /​Bright Phosphorus, commands you hence. Obey” (345–​346). As she spoke, the dancers progressed from the galliards into a volta. Arbeau is memorably scathing on the indecorousness of the volta. He cautions Capriol as follows: “I leave it to you to judge whether it is a becoming thing for a young girl to take long strides and separation of the legs, and whether in this la volta both honour and health are not involved and at stake.”59 Whether the vehemence of Arbeau’s warning suggests real disdain for the popular dance or whether the advice is provided tongue-​in-​cheek, he wastes time giving instructions for the volta if he really wishes for it not be performed (see Shaw, Chapter 7 in this volume). The volta transitioned into contemporary dance movements, which transitioned in turn into participatory “revels,” where audience members were invited to join a chain dance and ultimately freestyle participatory dancing on the stage to end the piece. This sequence aimed less to affirm teleological progress in movement practices than it sought to demonstrate continuity in the possibilities for kinesthetic pleasure within social dancing. Franko argues that the politics of the masque structure would have been clear to an “erudite” court audience, who would have been cognizant of “the literary and philosophical allusions subtending a court ballet’s tenuous structure and action.”60 Early modern audiences for Oberon would have understood the ideological implications of the journey toward cosmological harmony in the masque proper, with Oberon played by their Jacobean monarch-​to-​be. Obviously, this kind of politics was lost on Stone No More’s audiences, who were far from sharing the historical sensibilities of a masque audience, let  alone from encountering the conditions or effects of the originals as recreations. Stone No More’s masque proper dances did, however, aim to perform a more capacious understanding of women’s experience of dance as part of the adaptation. While Ravelhofer observes that many accounts of early modern dances tend to present dancing women as restricted passive subjects, operating within the same overbearing patriarchy that influenced their lives in other spheres, she also posits that the embodied,

272   Evelyn O’Malley kinetic experience of dancing challenges reductive understandings of women’s experience arrived at through too narrow a focus on textual sources—​especially when the sources consulted are admonitory treatises condemning practices that make these writings necessary in the first place.61 The thrust of her argument is that the physical experience of dancing “contradicts the image of courtly dancing as strictly disciplinary exercise and straight path to absolutism, paved by ever more prescriptive dancing masters.”62 In accordance with her critique, some of the ways in which early modern dances have been performed and taught in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries—​with reference to the conduct literatures of the period—​also reinforce this sense of historical impotence. For contemporary audiences who would not appreciate the intellectual, philosophical, theological, cosmological, and political significance of the masque dances, the adaptation sought instead to offer a presentist and transhistorical provocation on women’s experience and dancing, where the sensibilities of the contemporary performers ultimately shaped the twenty-​first century outcome—​as they do in all adaptations. In Hermione’s descent from the podium to lead the masque proper, she determined the rhythm and timing of the other dancers’ movements with her singing. The kinetic pleasures of dancing were visibly evident as the dances progressed, even within the structures of choreographed figures. Some of the performers fancied, somewhat playfully, that early modern clothing might have enabled higher jumps in the volta, aside from the physical discomfort and restrictions that may have outweighed this pleasure in different settings. Conversely, when it came to the freestyle improvisation with the audience members on stage at the end of the piece—​the participatory revels—​many indicated that they felt less comfortable than they had when dancing the early modern dances—​their bodies newly vulnerable and now subject to another kind of twenty-​ first-​century patriarchal gaze. While certain narratives of progress may benefit from imagining a restrictive past hurtling forward to a more liberated, emancipated future, rehearsing the passive female subject in dances for Shakespeare may prove restrictive and ultimately more distant from the actual early modern practices that Ravelhofer identifies than is immediately apparent. Although the dancing pleasures performed within the adaptation resonated only with what Lauren Berlant calls “lateral agency,” where agency is “an act of maintenance, not making,” the spaces for sideways maneuver were uncovered in the adaptive process by taking seriously the initial attempt to dance with the archive.63 On a separate note, the pleasures derived from dancing in the masque proper cannot be separated from the fact that Stone No More’s performers included no “trained” dancers, although all were experienced devisers and had some experience in physical theater practices. Having an absence of historically-​ideal dancing bodies to emulate was empowering to a cast of performers with varied levels of experience and confidence in a contemporary context. Even if there was once an ideal “galliard body,” the considerable historical distance from the textual sources afforded the contemporary performers an opportunity to dance with the archive without aspiring to an unobtainable body type or accurate visual images of idealized movements. Arbeau’s images of dancers, with

Dancing with the Archive    273 implausible woodcut physicalities, brightened the history without making the contemporary dancers feel inadequate (whether or not an early modern person transported to 2012 would have critiqued their dancing as inadequate). Although more useful pedagogically than revelatory on the subjects of early modern dance, Shakespeare, or Jonson, the absence of a visual or moving image of the ideal dancer’s body from the archive facilitated a playful and creative point of entry for the contemporary performers into dancing with the archive to generate the adaptation.

Early Dance and Shakespearean Adaptation Situating the collaboratively devised piece within a lineage of late twentieth-​and early twenty-​first-​century modern and postmodern Shakespearean adaptation, the creative impulse behind Stone No More was all fiction, part fantasy, drawing on and delighting in these tantalizing, alluring gaps and glimpses into a period of theater history that continues to fascinate and provoke speculation. Stone No More took the reference made in one work to another as its intertextual stimulus, and, playing with the written texts, the surviving music, and the little we know of the dances of the period, attempted to dance chaos and harmony with the archive. The final piece performed, although rooted in theater history, was neither a wholly speculative reconstruction nor an entirely new piece of performance, but rather a playful attempt to dance with the past, relishing what we may never know and playing in the lacunae. While reconstruction and re-​enactment practices in early dance resonate with the narratives of “authenticity” and “original” practices in Shakespearean staging, the dances of the early modern period offer another way to think about adapting Shakespeare in an alternative, embodied context. These findings have resonances within the tensions that surfaced in squabbles over “original practices” when Shakespeare’s Globe—​that apotheosis of twentieth-​century Shakespearean reconstructions—​opened on London’s South Bank in 1996, and are well-​documented and well-​worn territory. Might proximity to “Shakespeare’s day” be achieved by antiquarian practitioners most earnest in a quest to painstakingly research and reconstruct theatrical conventions—​seeking “clues” as to how to stage the plays within the written texts—​or did those who adapted the plays for contemporary audiences get closer to the “spirit” of the originals?64 Indeed, Robert Sarlòs categorizes these divergent approaches as those of “ ‘third Globe’-​ers [ . . . ] so intent on specific dimensions that they lose sight of the spirit [of the originals]” versus practitioners who were “seeking latter-​day equivalents rather than reconstructions.”65 At the heart of this tension is often perceived to be a question about what gets closest to the “spirit” of the originals: Are efforts better directed at piecing together historical practices, or adapting the originals altogether to fulfill a presentist agenda? In dance studies, Helen Thomas describes similar polarities in “two different views of reconstruction, the one

274   Evelyn O’Malley ‘authentic’ to the original work, the other ‘interpretative’ of the spirit of the work.”66 These are unnecessary binaries, of course, although in practice—​in both theater and in dance contexts—​both positions have sometimes been apparent. This is especially the case where Shakespeare is concerned. The assumption on both sides tends to be that the “spirit” of the originals is always desirable, sidestepping the kinds of cultural materialist concerns around historicity, ideology, and identity politics with which Shakespearean scholarship is now long familiar. Margaret Jane Kidnie’s influential Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation contradicts any position that advocates for fixed early modern originals, although Kidnie is writing about plays rather than dances. She argues for thinking about the received texts for Shakespeare’s plays as unreliable, partial, and necessarily adaptive, performative “processes”: Kidnie explains, “a play, for all that it carries the rhetorical and ideological force of an enduring stability, is not an object at all, but rather a dynamic process that evolves over time in response to the needs and sensibilities of its users.”67 Kidnie’s conception of an early modern play—​a historically distant literary artifact—​as a “process” can be easily extended to early modern dances; what counts as “original” or “adaptation” is also constantly shifting according to new criteria, always emergent and contingent upon its reception in time and space.68 In spite of the “nostalgic impulse” that André Lepecki sees in a continued pursuit of both the spirit and the choreography of original dances through reconstructive practices and of the provocation from Dixon that began this chapter—​that it might take years to really learn to dance the pavane—​the proposition that dance is best understood as a process is not news.69 Whatever limited archival records of early modern dances exist are, like playtexts, partial and open to interpretation, also altered through performance. Dance scholars have longer and, perhaps, better understood that written records of dances are always already adaptive because any form of notation refers to physical movements that are not the same as a written text. Franko’s argument for the term “construction” over “reconstruction,” attesting to the futility of attempts to re-​realize historical movements accurately, has been widely adopted in dance scholarship.70 But whether or how individual practitioners construct different “editions” of the pavane, galliard, or the volta—​ as Ravelhofer points out, different “interpretive schools” of early dance have generated their own “house” styles—​among dance historians and practitioners, there has always been more acknowledgment of early modern dances as processes, passed between bodies, practiced and performed, existing in parallel to and sometimes in conversation with any tangible archive.71 The high cultural value placed on Shakespeare as “literature” perhaps explains why the claim for a play as a process seems harder to swallow, despite the literary text also offering only a written and therefore partial record of performance as it might have been enacted and encountered, live, as part of a lively and atmospheric theatrical event. Sarah Brown, Robert Lublin, and Lynsey McCulloch observe that “as the Western Canon has expanded to include a range of voices that were previously excluded, one would expect the prevalence and importance of 400-​ year-​ old plays to diminish 72 making room for other works.” But as adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays continue in

Dancing with the Archive    275 multifarious afterlives, it seems worthwhile to look also to the physical dance practices of the period—​fragments from the archive and the repertoire—​when approaching the playtexts for adaptation. As Stone No More suggested, the practice of early dance might be instructive for adapters of Shakespeare’s plays because of its relative absence from and simultaneous relation to the archive, and because the repertoire might be engaged physically through the embodied experience of movement and dance, however much some of this is imaginative and creative work. More space for dancing might remind adapters of Shakespeare’s plays that the plays are not stable either, but rather are processes, and that there are embodied knowledges of performance that cannot be found in literary texts. Joe Falocco defends the often-​derided attempts of purists staging early modern theater during the twentieth century, arguing that “[r]‌ather than indulging in archaism for its own sake, they looked backward in a progressive attempt to address the challenges of the twentieth century.”73 His position has some sympathies with what Franko refers to as “reinvention” in historical dance practices.74 For Franko, reinvention is about “seeing the new in the old” rather than “the old in the new.”75 It is a radical process in that it eschews the nostalgic, archaeological desire to construct an original work and looks instead around the work’s original context to see what might be progressive within it. In Franko’s words, reinvention fixates on “precise stylistic aspects of a lost original work and [is] guided by the reinterpretation of a period’s most characteristic aesthetic preoccupations”: reinvented choreography “actively rethinks historical sources” and it “sacrifices the reproduction of a work to the replication of its most powerful intended effects.”76 The masque dances in Stone No More came close to what Franko terms “reinvention”—​especially where they revealed that the old may not have been entirely as restrictive as some accounts make it out to be—​but they did not achieve the kind of “radicality” Franko describes in terms of the masque’s political effects. Rather than reinventing its sources, Stone No More aimed to dance “with” them, to dance the Shakespeare with the dances of his time and to create an adaptation. Dancing “with” is perhaps less outwardly ambitious than “reinvention,” but it can be nuanced and revealing nevertheless because it offers an opportunity for an autotelic adaptation that at once performs and discloses its temporary, provisional, and unfinished nature. It is also less outcome-​focused than “invention.” My suggestion is that dancing with the archive might offer a performative and generative methodology with which Shakespeare can be adapted, blurring distinctions between the archive and the repertoire, as refigured fragments and playfully interpreted scraps. Dancing with the archive does not seek to reconstruct a repertoire, but rather to bring it into focus. This process can activate the repertoire in surprising ways, speaking to residual attachments to and reverence for Shakespeare’s texts or dances as fixed or sacrosanct. While adaptation always exists in relation to its sources, this process is not quite the result of a “will to archive” leading to the “will to re-​enact” that André Lepecki describes, nor a “reinvented” work, such as Mark Franko describes—​although it may well bring about some of the results they seek. In dancing with the archive, rather than dismissing purists’ approaches as eccentric or antiquated, the initial pursuit of constructing “the real thing,” the recuperation of a repertoire, is a serious endeavor. This is not because adaptations of Shakespeare might

276   Evelyn O’Malley aspire to an authenticity that legitimizes the practices, but because the adaptive process of dancing with the archive might highlight the provisionality and temporary nature of all attempts at re-​enactment, reconstruction, reinvention, and construction. Adaptation as a form of dancing with the archive is a process too, despite my shaky efforts to “realize” aspects of Stone No More in writing here. The adaptation comes from the earnest attempt to partner with the archive and dance with the past.

Notes 1. These phrases are lifted from rehearsal notes for Stone No More, arising from language used to accompany the movement of the pavane around the room, author’s notes, June 12, 2012. 2. Peggy Dixon, Nonsuch: Early Dance: Dances from the Courts of Europe 12th–​19th Century, Vols. III–​IV, Elizabethan Dances incl. Playford Country Dances (London: Nonsuch History and Dance, 1986), 36. 3. Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesography, ed. Julia Sutton, trans. Mary Stewart Evans (New York: Dover, 1967 [1589]). 4. Dixon, Dances from the Court,  36–​38. 5. See Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains:  Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011), 10, for a discussion of re-​enactors who seek to “trip the transitivity of time. . . . [Presupposing that if] they repeat an event just so, getting the details as close as possible to fidelity, they will have touched time and time will have recurred” [emphasis in original]. 6. Dixon, Dances from the Courts, 2.  There is a useful and comprehensive list of Dance Treatises, Manuscripts, Modern Editions, and Translations in Jennifer Nevile, Dance, Spectacle and the Body Politik, 1250–​1750 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). See also Nona Monahin’s Chapter 2 in this volume, which adds to the European sources used by Dixon with a list of more recently uncovered manuscripts. Monahin’s chapter also offers historiographical accounts of the dance steps mentioned here, including the measure, cinquepace, galliard, and pavane. Although Stone No More referred to a particular conversation from 1611, the period covered in terms of the sources consulted is broadly “early modern,” and includes fifteenth-​and sixteenth-​century dance sources. Dixon’s main source for “Elizabethan” dance is Arbeau, and she offers a separate volume on Caroso and Negri. Dixon’s use of “Elizabethan” only covers one aspect of Shakespeare’s time, as The Winter’s Tale and Oberon are Jacobean. Nevile (2008) uses “Renaissance” to refer to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 7. Cf. Winerock, Chapter 1, and Monahin, Chapter 2, in this volume. 8. Mark Franko, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography (c. 1416–​1589) (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1986), 3–​4. 9. Cornazano and Domenico in Franko, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography, 63–​ 64 (emphasis in original). 10. Cornazano and Domenico in Franko, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography, 63–​ 64 (emphasis in original). 11. For more on Oberon’s sources, see David Lindley’s introduction to Ben Jonson, Oberon, The Fairy Prince, ed. David Lindley, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson,

Dancing with the Archive    277 Vol. 3, 1606–​1611, eds. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). All references to Oberon in this chapter are from Lindley’s edition. 12. See Terri Bourus’s introduction in The Oxford Shakespeare:  The Complete Works, Modern Critical Edition, eds. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2217–​2218; J. H. P. Pafford’s 1963 edition for The Arden Shakespeare, xxxiii–​xxxvii; and John Pitcher’s introduction to the Arden Third Series 2010 edition of The Winter’s Tale, 7–​10. Simon Forman’s eyewitness account of The Winter’s Tale, seen at the Globe on May 15, 1611, is reproduced in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare:  A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1930), Vol. 2, 340–​341. 13. J. H. P. Pafford’s edition of The Winter’s Tale (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1963), xxx, compares Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale, observing the similarities between many of the characters. 14. Emily Winerock proposes that Shakespeare has less dance knowledge than some of his contemporaries in “Staging Dance in English Renaissance Plays,” Paper presented at the SDHS 2011 Proceedings:  Thirty-​fourth Annual Conference, York University and University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, 2011. See also Anne Daye’s Chapter  4 in this volume, which suggests that Master Jeremy (Hierome) Hearne’s collaboration with Shakespeare and the King’s Men enabled him to incorporate dance into his later plays. Cf. also Winerock’s Chapter 1 in this volume. 15. Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006), 204. 16. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theater of the Stuart Court, Vol. 1 (London; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973). 17. Peter Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque 1604–​1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 314–​315. 18. Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque, 308–​324. 19. William Thrumbull is thought to have been a Spanish ambassador. His eyewitness account of Oberon is reproduced in full in Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, 205–​206. 20. Anne Daye, “The Jacobean Antimasque within the Masque Context: A Dance Perspective” (PhD diss., Roehampton University, 2008), 202–​204. 21. Ken Pierce, Oberon, The Faery Prince: A Masque of Prince Henries, 1611 (Case Western Reserve University, 1993), DVD; Philip Pickett et al., Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Oberon, with musicians of the Globe (© 1997 by Philips), CD. 22. All references and quotations are from William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Modern Critical Edition, eds. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 23. Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981),  90–​91. 24. Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006),  50–​51. 25. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 93. 26. Juan Christian Pellicer, “Shakespeare’s ‘Saltiers’/​Satyrs in The Winter’s Tale and Virgil’s Saltantis Satyros,” Notes and Queries 54, no. 3 (2007):  303–​ 304. Pellicer discusses Shakespeare’s choice of “saultiers” over “satyrs” and argues that “[r]‌ather than simply an illiterate blunder reflecting on the Servant’s character, ‘saltiers’ seems more likely a comically

278   Evelyn O’Malley Latinate title, perhaps also a pseudo-​Gallicism, its intended primary sense ‘dancers’ rather than ‘leapers’ ” (304). 27. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 90–​ 91; Barbara Ravelhofer, “Beasts of Recreation:  Henslowe’s White Bears,” English Literary Renaissance 32 (2002):  305–​308. Philip Henslowe was in possession of white bears at the time of The Winter’s Tale and Oberon, which is behind speculations that live bears might have performed in either production. See also Anne Daye’s Chapter 4 in this volume, which expresses skepticism about the “real” bear theory in favor of a “common-​sense” approach to dangerous animals on stage. 28. See Anne Daye’s Chapter 4 in this volume. 29. Sleep No More, Punchdrunk, directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle. 530 West 27th Street, New York, NY, March 7, 2011. 30. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, Adaptations of Shakespeare: An Anthology of Plays from the 17th Century to the Present (London: Routledge, 2000), 4. 31. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2007), 16–​33. 32. André Lepecki, “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-​Enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2010): 28–​48, at 31 and 46. 33. Daye, “The Jacobean Antimasque within the Masque Context,” 3. 34. Belinda Quirey, May I Have the Pleasure? The Story of Popular Dancing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1976), 43. 35. The performers who devised the original production of Stone No More were Jonathan Daly, David Johnson, Annaliese Friend, Jake Francis, Danielle Hurley, Jessie O’Toole, Dan Smith, Michael Gear-​Smith, Samantha Taylor, and Nora Williams. 36. Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, 205, list the musical instruments in Oberon, based on financial records of the masque. 37. Jonson, Oberon, 714. 38. Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, 210–​211. 39. For a discussion of “gallants” on the stage at the Globe, see Sarah Dustagheer, “Acoustic and Visual Practices indoors,” in Moving Shakespeare Indoors, eds. Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-​Cooper (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 146. 40. Pickett, Oberon, Track 21. 41. Daye, “The Jacobean Antimasque within the Masque Context,” 199. 42. Pickett, Oberon, Tracks 8 and 10. 43. Pickett, Oberon, Track 17; and Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque, 318–​319. 44. Daye, “The Jacobean Antimasque within the Masque Context,” 202. 45. Daye, “The Jacobean Antimasque within the Masque Context,” 202. 46. Daye, “The Jacobean Antimasque within the Masque Context,” 202 (emphasis in original). 47. Daye, “The Jacobean Antimasque within the Masque Context,” 203. 48. Daye, “The Jacobean Antimasque within the Masque Context,” 203. 49. Cf. Nona Monahin, Chapter 2 in this volume. 50. Daye, A Lively Shape of Dauncing, 48–​49; Dixon, Dances from the Courts, 73; Wilson, “Dancing in the Inns,” 3–​4. 51. Cf. Steven Swarbrick, Chapter 8 in this volume. 52. Lepecki, “The Body as Archive,” 31, 46. 53. Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, 212–​217.

Dancing with the Archive    279 54. Pickett, Oberon, Track 24. 55. Pickett, Oberon, Track 27. 56. Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque, 43, 81. 57. Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque, 89. 58. John Playford, The Dancing-​Master, or, Plaine and easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances with the Tune to each Dance (Bath: Dance Books, 1984 [1651]). 59. Arbeau, Orchesography, 121. 60. Mark Franko, “Repeatability, Reconstruction and Beyond,” Theatre Journal 41, no. 1 (1989), 56. 61. Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque, 119. 62. Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque, 99. 63. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, (Durham, NC; London:  Duke University Press, 2011), 100. 64. Patrick Tucker, Secrets of Acting Shakespeare:  The Original Approach (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 14. 65. Robert K. Sarlòs, “Performance Reconstruction: The Vital Link between Past and Future,” in Interpreting the Theatrical Past:  Essays in the Historiography of Performance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 203. 66. Helen Thomas, The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory (Basingstoke, UK; New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 123. 67. Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London; New York: Routledge, 2009), 2 (emphasis in original). 68. Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation,  8–​11. 69. Lepecki, “The Body as Archive,” 40. 70. Mark Franko, Dance as Text:  Ideologies of the Baroque Body, 2nd ed. (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2015). 71. Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque, 100. 72. Sarah Brown, Robert Lublin, and Lynsey McCulloch, eds., Reinventing the Renaissance:  Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance (Basingstoke, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1. 73. Joe Falocco, Reimagining Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 1. 74. Franko, “Repeatability, Reconstruction and Beyond,” 58. 75. Franko, “Repeatability, Reconstruction and Beyond,” 58. 76. Franko, “Repeatability, Reconstruction and Beyond,” 58, 60.

Bibliography Brown, Sarah, Robert Lublin, and Lynsey McCulloch, eds. Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance. Basingstoke, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Falocco, Joe. Reimagining Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010. Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier. Adaptations of Shakespeare: An Anthology of Plays from the 17th Century to the Present. London: Routledge, 2000.

280   Evelyn O’Malley Franko, Mark. “Repeatability, Reconstruction and Beyond.” Theatre Journal 41, no. 1 (1989): 56–​74. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London; New  York: Routledge, 2009. Lepecki, André. “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-​Enact and the Afterlives of Dances.” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2010): 28–​48. Ravelhofer, Barbara. The Early Stuart Masque. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Pa rt   I I

SHA K E SP E A R E AS   DA N C E

I n trodu c t i on to Part II Shakespeare as Dance Margaret Jane Kidnie

Dancing Shakespeare’s Plays A collection of essays on Shakespeare and dance, or Shakespeare as dance, intervenes in rich ways on conversations happening in performance studies. Dance shifts to one extreme the synergy that typically exists onstage in Shakespeare performance between dialogue and movement, offering an opportunity to reflect on how these components contribute to the shaping of meaning. Introducing movement that might seem to tamper with the meaning of the words in Shakespearean performance remains a potentially incendiary creative strategy. This perception of an ongoing contest or tension between Shakespeare’s words and actors’ movements was given unexpected voice during Emma Rice’s much-​anticipated 2016 Midsummer Night’s Dream, her first production as artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London, England. Moonshine, dressed as an astronaut during the mechanicals’ botched dramatics and carrying a white helium-​filled balloon on a stick, “floated” downstage center to the chords of the opening theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey to explain that “[t]‌his balloon the hornéd moon presents; myself the man in the moon do seem to be.” When Theseus quips that “she should be the man on the moon, not the man in the moon,” Moonshine tries, and fails, to recover her delivery, finally storming toward him in frustration: “It’s a visual concept—​is that so hard to understand? Why is everybody so obsessed with text?!” The sudden directness with which Moonshine challenged criticism by one “spectator” of the supposed license of theatrical performance raised a welcome laugh on the night I saw Rice’s Dream. But is “everybody” so obsessed with text? This might seem a particularly loaded question after Rice’s controversial departure from the Globe in 2017, but my curiosity is real. A number of chapters in this section on “adaptation,” especially those written from the perspective of dance practitioners, freely engage with Shakespeare as a kind of creative collaborator, and with his plays as works in process. Evelyn O’Malley,

284   Margaret Jane Kidnie who studies early modern dance through a “practice-​as-​research” methodology, evocatively describes her work as “dancing with the archive” in Chapter  11, while James Hewison, who performed in the 1993 production of L.O.V.E. (revived with a new cast in 2012), explains in Chapter 23 that this devised piece was less a reading of Shakespeare’s work, than “a doing through it”. Other contributors to Part II on “Shakespeare as Dance” privilege not the first, but the second, of the two nouns in this phrase, researching the Shakespearean performance archives in order to trace the emergence of the choreographer, for example, in twentieth-​century musical theater (Ray Miller, Chapter 13), or to identify changing trends shaping the theatrical appropriation of intercultural movement (Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman, Chapter 22). The idea (and language) of adaptation is never far, however, from such analyses of Shakespeare as dance, and the tension between language, movement, and “legitimacy” is an issue to which a number of chapters in Part II explicitly return. How has the transposition of words to movement been effected in the past? Can a “wordless medium,” to borrow Iris Julia Bührle’s characterization of dance in Chapter 16, capture Shakespeare’s works on stage? As Sheila T. Cavanagh notes in Chapter 25, Washington, D.C.’s award-​ winning Synetic Theater was critically mauled by The Wall Street Journal and Fox News in 2015 (apparently sight unseen) for even attempting to perform Shakespeare’s plays through dance. So incomprehensible to James Bovard was the company’s substitution of movement for words that his engagement with the production was limited to satire: “The latest Shakespearean fashion, at least in the Washington area, is to invite people to a feast of language and serve nothing but grunts, grimaces, and grins—​with a few gyrations thrown in for dessert.” Bovard’s tone suggests a confidence that many of his readers will likewise consider dance and Shakespeare unusual bedfellows—​Shakespeare without words, put simply, is no longer Shakespeare. And indeed Shakespeare’s drama is often celebrated as a specifically literary achievement. Dance, by contrast, relies heavily on movement and music, minimizing stage dialogue (as in a Synetic production) or even dispensing with it altogether (as in ballet). This polarized opposition between dance and drama, however, offers a caricature of Shakespeare’s plays, reducing them to “words, words, words.” As with any caricature, the sitter remains recognizable, but its features are grossly exaggerated in a certain direction for rhetorical effect. We might recalibrate the relationship between “dance” and “Shakespeare” in order to create space for consideration of danced Shakespeare as a form that cannot be unproblematically hived off (as adaptation?) from “real” Shakespeare. One comes to know a play through exposure to it. Such exposure might take the shape of theater-​going and/​or reading, but it might also include, or even be limited to, commonplace encounters with Shakespeare’s plays in the form of classroom lessons, literary allusion, advertising, or photographs. Every subsequent experience of a play is measured against ideas of it that have already formed in one’s mind, and one continues to alter—​or alternatively, and remembering James Bovard’s comments in the preceding, one refuses to alter—​one’s conception of it. To the extent that a later experience corresponds to one’s existing ideas of the play—​or one is willing to alter an existing perception in order to accommodate new

Introduction to Part II    285 information—​subsequent encounters with the play, whether onstage or in book form, seem genuine, authentic. “Adaptation” is the term we reserve to mark those instances that fail to capture one’s idea of the play, or something essential to it. This process, of course, is highly and necessarily subjective. A Shakespeare play, because it survives as an immaterial idea that bridges text and performance, can only be known contextually. This explains how printed editions of Othello, for example, can vary so substantially in terms of their layout, format, scene and act breaks, spelling and punctuation, and even in terms of the very words that are reproduced as the text, and yet all be accepted unproblematically as copies of Othello. Copies of different editions (in early modern England, copies even within the same edition) vary in a multiplicity of ways. They can be recognized as “the same,” however, if each of them corresponds—​well enough—​to a particular reader’s idea of the work. This process is likewise true of staged performance. The circulation of a play as performance and as text affords in each case comparable, but distinct, challenges and opportunities. The integration of words and movement is a dynamic that Shakespeare frequently manipulates. “Take this from this,” Polonius declares, “if this be otherwise.”1 The phrase is obscure in all three early texts of Hamlet. The obscurity rarely presents itself in performance, however, since the actor has the opportunity to gesture to specific objects onstage (often his head and body) to differentiate “this” from “this.” There are also silences, such as Isabella’s lack of (or perhaps just unspoken?) reply to the Duke’s offer of marriage at the end of Measure for Measure, that are variously filled in performance through movement. And of course there is onstage dancing, when movement takes over almost entirely from dialogue—​one thinks, for example, of the sheep-​shearing scene in The Winter’s Tale, the Capulet ball in Romeo and Juliet, or the closing moments of Much Ado about Nothing. Most movement in performance, however, remains unscripted. There is no particular need for movement, for example, immediately following Viola’s elegiac description of her father’s daughter as “patience on a monument” and prior to her brisk inquiry, “Sir, shall I to this lady?” (2.4.113, 121). And yet some modern productions have allowed for an awkwardness in this sudden shift in tone and conversational direction by introducing a kiss—​or even just a telling lean—​between Orsino and his pageboy.2 Lynsey McCulloch helpfully comments elsewhere that ballets “remind us of the importance of non-​verbal communication in Renaissance drama.”3 Performance is premised on audiences watching bodies move (or remain still) as a crucial part of a play’s meaning-​ making, and individual performances are filled with such choices, small and large. Staging Shakespeare as dance might therefore be understood as a shift away from the intrinsic mediums of classical drama—​text and performance—​and so as a form of adaptation, or perhaps translation (or if one watches Fox News, even travesty) of classical drama. Alternatively, and perhaps depending on the staging, one might take the view that danced Shakespeare offers a difference of degree, and not substance. Dance takes the ever-​shifting balance between dialogue and movement that always pertains to Shakespeare’s plays in performance, and pushes it to an extreme. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, some contributors to Part II hesitate to describe the stagings under discussion as straightforward adaptations. There is a recurrent perception that in at least

286   Margaret Jane Kidnie some of these cases, dance manages to capture, rather than modify, the play. Elizabeth Klett, for example, in Chapter 18 considers the scene of Claudius’s confession as staged in Stephen Mills’s Hamlet for Ballet Austin. The performer, trapped in “the same glass tube in which the murder of Old Hamlet played out earlier,” whirls, falls against the walls, and pounds his fists on the glass, unable to escape. For Klett, the choreographer’s patterning of the movement and space powerfully conveys a brother’s guilt; as she puts it, Claudius remains “trapped in the place where he committed the murder, both spatially and emotionally”. This complexity of action, as Klett acknowledges, “goes beyond what is happening in the text,” but it simultaneously communicates something defining about a character who comes to realize by the end of the prayer scene that he is in effect trapped by his own ambition: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. /​Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (3.3.97–​98). The chapters in Part II constitute a project of recovery and analysis, engaging and helping to define further the conceptual language with which one interprets the relationship between Shakespeare and danced performance.

Notes 1. Hamlet, 2.2.157. All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from the Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2008). 2. At this moment in the 1991 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Twelfth Night (dir. Griff Rhys Jones), Terence Hillyer’s Orsino kissed Sylvestra Le Touzel’s Cesario; at the Stratford Festival of Canada in 2012 (dir. Des McAnuff), Mike Shara’s Orsino leaned toward his Cesario before seeming to catch himself. 3. Lynsey McCulloch, “‘Here’s that shall make you dance’:  Movement and Meaning in Bern:  Ballett’s Julia und Romeo,” in Reinventing the Renaissance:  Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance, eds. Sarah Annes Brown, Robert I. Lublin, and Lynsey McCulloch (Basingstoke, UK:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 255–​268,  263.

Chapter 12

Shak espeare, Mode rni sm, and Da nc e Susan Jones

Experimental dance in the twentieth century frequently focused on formal abstraction, rather than the transmission of narrative, plot, and character. Likewise the treatment of Shakespeare in chamber-​length dance works during this period accommodated a modernist aesthetic, where innovative (frequently nonballetic) movement vocabularies expressed the idea of dance as an autonomous form in and of itself. Shakespeare plays inspired a number of such “modernist” works, but they tended to reveal predominantly structural and thematic relations present in the plays, as opposed to delineating “story” per se. Thus the reception of Shakespeare in certain modernist one-​ act works of pure dance, where the “essence” of the play is presented without recourse to text, rather than in film or opera, poses the specific question of how to treat the play when words are altogether absent. Not all danced adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in the twentieth century conform to this aesthetic. Many are associated with two-​or three-​act works in which the narrative offers the basis for an extended story ballet. Ballets by Lavrovsky, Cranko, and MacMillan, discussed elsewhere in this volume, tend to follow the teleology of the original storyline or to reinforce the post-​romantic inflections of narrative ballet, with a focus on individual character or romance plotting. Yet a number of shorter, attenuated versions and one-​act dance treatments of the twentieth century delivered distinctively modernist conceptualizations of the dramas. These revealed an experimental aesthetics privileging economy of form, narrative dislocation, invocation of mood and compression of action, an emphasis on formal choreographic design, and psychological and interior presentation of character, expressed through the medium of stylistically innovative modes of movement.1 Perhaps because of the associations between dance and drama in the work of exponents of Ausdruckstanz (expressionist dance) and Tanztheater (dance theater), and the pervasive impact of psychoanalysis on modernist aesthetics generally, several ballets from the first half of the century were influenced by expressionism in dance, drama, and film, and expressionism continues to color even the most recent

288   Susan Jones interpretations in the twenty-​first century. Among the many psychological treatments of Shakespeare in dance we can include Tatiana Gsovsky’s one-​act Hamlet, with its German expressionist influences, composed in different versions during the early 1950s.2 Later in the century, Hamlet survives in works where compression of the action drives the experimental form—​as in John Neumeier’s Hamlet: Connotations (1976), and in Kim Brandstrup’s Antic (1993), which focuses on Hamlet’s relationship to his mother. Less well-​known works follow the popular emphasis on psychoanalysis in the period, and as Mark Franko has shown, Martha Graham’s Eye of Anguish (1950), an intensely subjective version of King Lear, which Graham choreographed for Eric Hawkins, offers an experimental biographical and psychoanalytical perspective on the choreographer’s personal relationships.3 Economy of form also marked danced versions of the comedies and romances. Two early versions of Twelfth Night include Antony Tudor’s Cross Garter’d (1931) and Andrée Howard’s ballet of 1942 in two acts. Frederick Ashton’s The Dream (1964) uses conventional ballet technique and style, but displays “modernist” economy in its formal and spatial design and choreographic interpretation of physical comedy. The Tempest lends itself to postmodern interdisciplinarity and to more extended works of dance, as in Glenn Tetley’s 1979 version with spoken narration, and moving into the twenty-​first century, Crystal Pite’s Tempest Replica (2011), an extended work with mixed media and complex sound design, reflecting aspects of early expressionist dance. Moments of Christopher Wheeldon’s full-​length The Winter’s Tale (2014), such as the group work for the chorus in Act I, which responds, as in Greek drama, to the action, also revisit early twentieth-​century expressionist styles. This chapter, however, will focus on three twentieth-​century works that illustrate the development of narrative minimalism and the preoccupations of a distinctively modernist aesthetics in the choreography of the mid-​century period. These are the one-​act “modern classics”:  Robert Helpmann’s Hamlet (1942); and José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949), an interpretation of Othello. Finally, the less well-​known Limón and Pauline Koner’s Barren Sceptre (1960) shows the most drastically minimalist contraction of dramatic form in a “chamber” piece consisting of a single pas de deux, or duet, based on Macbeth. The three pieces explored in the following represent the contemporary focus on choreography as an art in and of itself, one that explores its own formal and aesthetic properties aside from ballet’s conventional association with other art forms such as literature, music, or opera. Robert Helpmann’s wartime Hamlet (1942), which uses to some extent a conventional ballet vocabulary, is delivered in an expressivist register that marks the mid-​twentieth-​century British focus on dance-​drama and interpretation of literary works. José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949) presents the psychological interiority of Shakespearean character through the language of modern dance vocabulary. Limón’s formal distillation of Othello into a courtly pavane, danced as a pas de quatre of the two main couples—​Othello and Desdemona, and Iago and Emilia—​celebrates the development of Limón’s modern dance technique as a medium for intense psychological expression. Limón and Pauline Koner’s Barren Sceptre (1960) reduces the psychological

Shakespeare, Modernism, and Dance    289 disturbance generated by overweening ambition in Macbeth to pure physical form in an extended modernist pas de deux. By focusing on three short versions of Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, this chapter shows the intersection between Shakespearean tragedy and modernist dance aesthetics at a fundamental stage of modern dance’s development and, as is particularly evident in works of dance-​drama of the period (including works by Graham, Antony Tudor, and Andrée Howard), a psychoanalytic turn in modernism. Hamlet, The Moor’s Pavane, and Barren Sceptre all follow in the wake of the many discussions of Freudian influences on modernist aesthetics. All three ballets appropriately explore the conscious and unconscious motivations that Shakespeare presents in the plays, all three lending themselves to psychoanalytic interpretation and an exploration of the emotional impetus of the principal characters. Yet these ballets also examine, more tellingly than is often acknowledged, modernism’s focus on abstraction and formalism. They respond to burgeoning contemporary literary theoretical discussions of the period and to Shakespeare’s structuring of the tragedies as expression, not simply of character (in the nineteenth-​century understanding of psychological realism), but as a more formal expression of political and philosophical skepticism. The discussion will therefore ultimately consider the extent to which Shakespeare’s treatment of skepticism intersects with twentieth-​century choreographic experimentation in modernist dance. Both Helpmann and Limón appear on the surface to focus solely on character and emotional drives. But they also, in quite distinctive ways, suggest how Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists are caught up in a world without foundations. All three dance pieces reveal, in compressed and often symbolic form, the highly skeptical questioning of foundational truth in the political context of the plays. Illustrating to some extent the tenets of Montaignean skepticism, in which foundations are constituted by customs and laws, the plays show how foundation is duty—​usually the duty and responsibility of the king or the leader.4 But in these three tragedies, Shakespeare grapples with situations in which there is no justification for action based on foundational knowledge of the law, or for the exercise of duty. For example, the eponymous characters of Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth—​plays that inspire the dance pieces treated in this discussion—​are offered no alternative to foundational knowledge; in fact, ambition, hasty judgment, desire, jealousy, and corruption become the driving forces of their actions. In the absence of justification based on knowledge of duty and law, the frame of reference for the main protagonists focuses entirely on their experiences of equivocation or indecision, which, on their own terms, are inevitably unsustainable and lead to implosion psychologically and politically. Furthermore, the imagination is the locus of that destabilization. Albeit in very different ways, each play nevertheless suggests that the law is restored in the closures of political harmony. The ballets, however, illustrate a slightly different form of skepticism. As in the plays, the focus is on the (self-​)destructive power of imagination and introspection, but the formal construction of the dance pieces reveals, through the spatial configuration of figures on stage, a highly modernist skepticism that is represented visually as an “aesthetics” of implosion, leaving the action open-​ended, without the consolation of political resolution or

290   Susan Jones harmonic closure. The structural form of the pieces and the formal patterning of figures drive the modernist aesthetics of these dance pieces. In Hamlet, Helpmann manipulates choral scenes, setting them against the movement of individuals and juxtaposing them with his suggestion of the physical doubling of Gertrude and Ophelia. Limón uses the pavane, showing how the equilibrium of power relations, tightly held in play by the symmetrical forms of the courtly dance, implodes as individual emotional desires and anxieties destabilize the harmony of the quartet form. The pas de deux of Barren Sceptre likewise represents a form of psychological, social, and political breakdown—​paradoxically, as the unification of the two figures, but where one entity fails to hold. The unity increasingly breaks down, suggesting a self fragmented by its individual isolation (Limón’s Moor is isolated and in Barren Sceptre the male protagonist is left alone onstage at the end). All three choreographers signal the deconstruction of the formalized patterns of conventional modes of movement. Moreover, dance’s ontological status as an expression of the body operating beyond the limits of language or text makes it an appropriate form through which to reveal the tragedies’ epistemological problems and their very ambivalence about language’s ability to unlock knowable truths. The relationship between formalist aesthetics and skeptical modes of interpretation drives the impetus of the work in each case, and these modernist dance versions of Shakespeare work well as interpretations of Shakespeare’s skeptical strategies concerning the issue of language. As a nonlinguistic form of communication, dance’s openness to individual interpretation is frequently emphasized in modern dance forms, especially in the idea that modern dance does not necessarily conform to a system of signs, or semiotic interpretation. All three danced versions of the tragedies focus on the ambivalent interpretation and misunderstanding of signs, symbolically represented by Hamlet’s father’s ghost, or the Gravedigger’s skull in the Helpmann piece; the use of the handkerchief as the overriding symbol of the Moor’s internal conflict; and Limón and Koner’s use of mimetic gestures, hands held aloft symbolizing the crown, along with the transformation of human into animal forms as danced representations of nonhuman desires. Nevertheless, very different aspects of modernist choreography emerge from the danced versions of these three tragedies, and the discussions that follow reflect the distinctive innovations of each case. Thus the exploration of Hamlet will focus on Helpmann’s specific invocation of dance-​drama, of the psychological narrative revealed through the emphasis on the disposition of figures and the staging of dramatic action as dance. The account of The Moor’s Pavane focuses on the transformation of character into formal choreographic patterning, while the experimental treatment of the two dancing bodies in Barren Sceptre shows the nuanced choreographic language of a highly experimental physical expression of interiority.

Robert Helpmann’s Hamlet (1942) The endurance of Hamlet as subject for “pared-​down” choreographic form is a particularly prominent feature of Shakespearean dance adaptation in this period. Long before

Shakespeare, Modernism, and Dance    291 Helpmann tackled Hamlet, Bronislawa Nijinska cast herself in the lead role in her radical interrogation of gender roles in a one-​act Hamlet (1934) (female interpretations of Hamlet in the play include Sarah Bernhardt’s in 1899, and in Sarah Frankcom’s 2014 production of the play, Maxine Peake took the lead role). Significantly, Nijinska’s reflections in 1937 on the making of her ballet (whose aeronautical references and an airplane envisaged as part of the set deliberately positioned her version as contemporary) suggest a prevailing shift in modernist dance away from strictly linear narrative toward succinct poetic/​musical forms and an emphasis on the choreographer’s subjective input: Hamlet is not a return to the use in the ballet of a form of literary libretto . . . Hamlet is a symphonic poem inspired by Shakespeare’s tragedy. Hamlet is what is created in my choreographic imagination by the action and interaction of Shakespeare’s tragedy.5

Nijinska’s remarks offer an appropriate epigraph to later twentieth-​century danced interpretations of Hamlet. The subjective equivocation of the play’s main protagonist is often considered to be notably compatible with a twentieth-​century tone, and in the danced adaptations of this period the complex narrative aspect of the play is subsumed in favor of an often symbolic reworking of its psychological, as well as politically skeptical, essences. Robert Helpmann’s Hamlet may be termed “modernist” from the perspective of its formal reduction, which enabled the choreographer to focus on psychological themes through the choreography of the body and the disposition of figures on stage. Helpmann economized on the cast list (losing Horatio), but revealed the possibility of doppelgänger relationships, and used a chorus to symbolize many of the internal responses and dialogue of the original. The ballet premièred on May 19, 1942, and was danced by Sadler’s Wells Ballet at the New Theatre, London, with music by Tchaikovsky (Fantaisie Overture) and designs by Leslie Hurry. The lead roles were taken by Helpmann himself and Margot Fonteyn as Ophelia. Over a half-​century later, during a retrospective symposium on Helpmann’s work held at the Royal Ballet School, London, on October 27, 2013, discussions of the contextual background to the ballet Hamlet revealed how Helpmann’s choreographic work provided a useful study for his role as an actor, when he later took the lead in Shakespeare’s actual play in London productions of 1944 and 1948.6 Helpmann’s familiarity with the text and his abilities as an actor gave him the experience to manipulate the play in ways that bring out its suitability for danced expression and its reflection of a contemporary moment. Created during wartime, Hamlet’s conflicts and procrastinations over matters of duty and identity offer an appropriate point of reflection for a beleaguered public confronting privations in London. The Sadler’s Wells Company, much reduced in male personnel, remained in London and performed during the Blitz. Hamlet appeared at the New Theatre as part of a program entertaining the London public, sustained in part by the war effort and sense of national duty on the part of the dancers. But Helpmann did not belabor any overt contemporary political parallels in his version of Hamlet, with the play’s gesturing to the issue of the prince’s national duty and

292   Susan Jones responsibilities. Helpmann rather made a number of striking alterations to the structure and narrative action of the play in order to reveal its essence as material for a twenty-​ minute danced psycho-​drama accessible to a modern audience. First, as Dyneley Hussey remarked in 1942, Helpmann plays with generic form as the curtain rises when the tragedy is over and the body of Hamlet is being carried away by the bearers. The onstage action “comes in the form of a dream that comes after Hamlet has shuffled off,” giving it that “peculiar fluidity and inward logic of a dream.” The presence of Hamlet as an observer of his own life, a conflicted figure who remains distanced from the action even when participating in its drama, allows Helpmann to create what Hussey describes as “tragic pantomime” or “an essay,” but does so “without employing the external dramatic style of its inward tragic meaning.”7 Hussey is clear that this reframing of the play does not diminish the ballet’s power. The dream vehicle is appropriate in several ways. The ballet’s structure announces itself as a “version” of Hamlet, distinct from a straightforward representation of the play. It allows for “poetic license” without departing from the essential tone of the play, but also provides a tight, economic form. The choreography evokes all the principal features of the play without its extended textual development. Helpmann’s Hamlet, representing above all the Hamlet of the soliloquies, reviews the main events of his life at the moment of his death. Thus as onlooker and participant he drifts into and out of the action in a condition that Shakespeare’s Hamlet reveals through dialogue and monologue at many different moments throughout the play. Hamlet’s “distanced” relationship to the action in the ballet, his voyeuristic perspective, combined with a sense of distracted participation, conveys throughout the ballet the Shakespearean quality of a divided consciousness. Helpmann’s version of the tragedy is produced through the self-​revelation of character, of the suppressed emotional turmoil provoking an intersection between inability to act and acting rashly, frequently expressed dramaturgically in the ballet as Hamlet’s isolation, when he is set apart, illuminated by a spotlight downstage center, taking stock of his life. The style of choreography, design, music, production values, and structural disposition of figures on stage all prompted lively contemporary commentary. In addition to Dyneley Hussey, Audrey Williamson and Mary Clarke are among the most astute contemporary observers of the ballet, who give a full sense of the formal detail and contemporary significance of the influence on the work of expressionist dance and drama, and in particular the innovative use of a chorus, which responds (as in Greek tragedy) to individuals’ actions. Alert to T. S. Eliot’s contemporary “rewriting” of Greek drama in Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and other plays, Helpmann would later direct Murder at the Old Vic (1953), with Robert Donat as the Archbishop, in a production that was noted for Helpmann’s skilled “choreography” of the chorus. In the ballet Hamlet, Helpmann had already learned to offset the introspective solos of the troubled protagonist with the sweep of a chorus of courtiers appearing at strategic moments to watch the action. Contemporary critics also emphasized the work’s evocation of a Freudian dream narrative. Williamson identifies the Shakespearean textual source:

Shakespeare, Modernism, and Dance    293 By taking his cue from “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come” [3.1.73], and building the entire ballet on the distorted memories of the dying Hamlet, Helpmann has given himself absolute freedom in which to create a purely balletic vision of the theme [ . . . ]. It is, in fact, a critical commentary on Shakespeare’s play and as such something quite new in ballet.8

The sense of self-​reflexivity of Helpmann’s approach—​the idea that his ballet’s aesthetic and thematic structures could offer a theoretical intertext for Shakespeare’s play—​ poses a radical critique and important positioning of dance as an autonomous art form contributing to modernist aesthetics. Clarke likewise succinctly describes the overall genre and action, but in specifically visual terms, claiming that the ballet illustrates “the main events as they might have flashed through the brain of the dying Hamlet, a wild accumulated pageant of the past.”9 She emphasizes, with convincing precision, the surrealist visual effect of Hurry’s set, with its associations of psychological disturbance, which looms over the tiny figures on stage (Hurry’s design is somewhat reminiscent of the style of Salvador Dalí’s set for Léonide Massine’s 1941 Labyrinth). She observes that Helpmann wanted for his setting “a decadent palace invested with the brooding sense of its imminent destruction.” Clarke continues, “the great architectural mass of [Hurry’s] setting was surmounted by an enormous avenging figure with a drawn and flaming sword.” She remarks on the “hot colours,” which “produced an effect of almost overpowering concentration and intensity.”10 Nevertheless, she argues that the piece presented an intimate study of interiority, and that Helpmann had created a “ballet for a small theatre” in which the figure of Hamlet dominated. Clarke also gestures to the expressionist choreographic style, quoting in her article an address Helpmann had made to the Royal Academy of Dancing in 1942 in which the choreographer declared “ ‘I . . . tried to adjust the conventional mime of the Classical Schools and combine it with the movement, thereby evolving a type of mimetic movement which should be more understandable to a modern audience.’ ”11 Both Williamson and Clarke suggest the innovative breakthroughs in dance’s relationships to contemporary choreographic aesthetics and to literary intertexts. Williamson also suggests the ballet’s historic value as dance drama, and its place in a modernist context: The dance in Hamlet is, in fact, an individual development of Noverre and Fokine, that sought to replace brilliance of footwork and conventional gesture by expressiveness of the whole body, to make ballet, in Noverre’s words, “speak to the soul through the eyes.” Fokine dispensed with stylised mime [and] . . . in Hamlet the dividing line between mime and dance has disappeared. Hamlet is no more a mimed play than The Green Table or Dante Sonata . . . and must be performed by trained dancers who can express themselves emotionally as well as technically.12

Her review provides valuable choreographic description, details that can be confirmed by watching the 1964 rehearsal video (with Rudolph Nureyev as Hamlet),

294   Susan Jones which, although poor in quality, gives us an indication of important spatial forms and relationships.13 Today the ballet may seem overly focused on “mime” rather than danced expression, and the costumes give the ballet a fairly conventional, early seventeenth-​ century “period” feel. But Williamson’s remarks were made in 1943, and her reflections, one year after the première, give a sense of how innovative Helpmann’s choreographic style appeared in Britain at the time. In fact, Williamson had already written about the ballet in Theatre World, shortly after its first performance in 1942. In this review Williamson describes faithfully the most imaginative choreographic passages and cites detailed instances of choreographic expression in Helpmann’s handling of character: The Gravedigger-​Yorick character is brilliantly used to point Hamlet’s morbid obsession with mortality; his rolling of the skull, and macabre return at Hamlet’s death, are fine touches. There are superb details—​Hamlet sensing the Ghost’s presence and being drawn backwards to him by a kind of recalcitrant fascination; the Ghost pouring his tale into Hamlet’s ear as Claudius poured the poison into his own.14

Williamson also praises Helpmann’s choreographic representation of Ophelia’s madness: “her linked fingers and movement of arms and shoulders poignantly expressing her wandering mind,” set against “the plaintive phrases of the wood-​wind.” And she identifies particularly dramatic use of physical vocabulary in Hamlet’s “terrific crawl forwards to the footlights, his hands pounding the floor.”15 Most significantly, Williamson remarks on the relationship between Hamlet and the women of his life—​especially in his effective use of a “doubling” of Gertrude and Ophelia. She praises “the tender and beautifully devised pas de deux with Ophelia” but also “the passing and repassing of the Queen and Ophelia,” which, she writes, “sharply brings out the way in which Hamlet’s feeling for Ophelia is poisoned by his disillusion with his mother.” She develops this theme further, noting a tiny but significant detail—​ “Hamlet’s comparison of the hands of Ophelia and the Queen, inextricably confused in his brain”—​and comments that this doubling “never fails balletically,” especially in “an unforgettable moment” of Hamlet’s self-​revelation, expressed in his face “when the Queen kisses him before the duel.” As an audience, we glimpse in a single moment Hamlet’s “isolation and need for affection.”16 In fact Helpmann anticipates one of the few productions in which Gertrude and Ophelia are literally “doubled,” with Helen Mirren playing both roles in 1970. Williamson thus gestures to the psychological focus of Helpmann’s treatment, and to Freud’s first speculation about Hamlet in a footnote to his analysis of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). She observes that “one may disagree, from the text, with the inclusion of the Oedipus complex, but balletically Helpmann has suggested it with extraordinary insight. This nightmare emphasis on the subconscious suggests infinite choreographic possibilities; it is, in fact, the most . . . revealing aspect of the ballet.”17 Here Williamson identifies the contemporary interest in psychoanalysis as influencing Helpmann’s choices, but she also shows how the dance-​drama stands in a distinctive relationship to Shakespeare from most adaptations—​here is a form

Shakespeare, Modernism, and Dance    295 that fashions an autonomous ballet out of Shakespearean material (in the manner of Nijinska’s engagement with “choreographic imagination”), rather than one that presents a straightforward reiteration of the story.

José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949) José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane, subtitled “Variations on the Theme of Othello” premièred on August 17, 1949, at the American Dance Festival in New London, Connecticut. The work was set to music by Henry Purcell (arranged by Simon Sadoff), with costumes by Pauline Lawrence. Of the three works discussed here, this work has been the most enduring, and is still performed today in the repertoire of many dance companies. Limón’s treatment of Othello is perhaps the most controlled modernist treatment of Shakespeare, as he employs a modern dance vocabulary carefully constructed within a tight framework based on the idea of a courtly pavane, which is handled with precision and economy (a quasi-​“early modern feel” is reflected also in the music and costumes). Unlike Helpmann, Limón does not use a chorus, but creates an even sparser structure, with the ballet delivered by only four characters whose interactions distill the essence of the play’s content. The work universalizes the idea of the play Othello since the characters are unnamed and instead are given figurative titles. In the program notes to the first performance of the Pavane in 1949, Limón wrote, “I know how hard I had tried not to make a ‘dance version’ of Shakespeare’s ‘Othello.’ I had worked with all will and conscience to find a form which might prove valid and pertinent in terms of dance. I did not wish to infringe, nor paraphrase.”18 Othello is simply represented in the program as the Moor (created by José Limón); Iago as the Moor’s Friend (Lucas Hoving); Emilia as the Friend’s Wife (Pauline Koner); Desdemona as the Moor’s Wife (Betty Jones). The depersonalizing effect of naming the characters and their relationships thus focuses audience response primarily on the way in which Limón’s choreography shows, in abstraction, the dramatization of recognizable psychological states, rather than individual characters. Unadorned by mimetic gesture, except for the most minimal suggestiveness (such as whispering in the ear), Limón evokes emotional expression of mood and temperament entirely through the danced movements of the whole body and the spatial arrangement of characters. For example, at times the Moor’s insecurity, anxiety, and jealousy are conveyed by an intense contraction of the upper body, while the Moor’s Friend suggests his internal conflicts of ambition, resentment, and conniving as he executes a weighty, deep plié in second position, at the same time appearing to participate fully in the gracious courteousy of exchange in the pavane. Each character signifies an emotional and psychological conflict symbolically through embodied form and movement. The piece begins as a quartet for the four figures as they execute a stately dance, and the whole work consists of a series of passages of dance in which the characters move

296   Susan Jones in and out of this basic structure to perform solos, duets, pas de trois, and then resume again the ostensibly unifying form of the court dance. The deft handling of movement patterns expresses the bare narrative essentials of the play, but by establishing the pavane as the central formal mechanism of the work, Limón foregrounds the emotional disharmonies and misunderstandings emanating from within a tightly organized and repressed social structure. The closure of the dance piece focuses on a tableau in which the Moor’s murder of Desdemona is not dramatized, but where at the last minute the Moor’s Friend and His Wife reveal a tableau of the body of the Moor’s dead wife. Limón thus emphasizes the ultimate breakup of the social form as the implication of responsibility for the crime falls on both the Moor and the two onlookers. Instead of the relatively formal political harmony provided by the play’s closure, Limón’s version associates personal tragedy with social/​political breakdown from which there is no recovery. One of the most revealing testimonies concerning the piece’s creation can be found in a transcription of an interview between Naomi Hindlin and Lucas Hoving (the original Iago figure).19 Hoving explains the importance of the entire cast’s input and the collaborative process necessary for this ballet because Limón was participating in the piece. Each dancer contributed to individual movement passages, and, according to Hoving, the choreographer/​dancer Doris Humphrey (and long-​term friend/​collaborator of Limón), who was present at rehearsals, played an important advisory role in establishing fundamental moments in the work. Hoving outlines the relationship between the Shakespeare text to the creation of the choreography: “We read the book . . . but both José and I are the kind of people [who] worked through our bodies, really. In fact Doris [Humphrey] probably talked more about some of the aspects of the piece than José did.” The choreography emerged from Limón through a process of “showing” rather than “telling.” Hoving observes: “José could talk about anything, but not about his dancing . . . I looked at him first: what kind of thing does he want, and how does he use his body, his weight. Then he let me do it. And then he looked at me again and tried to make the adjustment. [But] there was actually very little talking about the book with José . . . Doris was the one who talked and analyzed.”20 Nevertheless, Hoving is clear that the structure, choreographic material, and conception of the work originated with Limón: “The form was pretty well choreographed by José. It’s incredibly cleanly structured. The nuances, the inner energies or the projections and all that [were] much [from the dancers] ourselves. All four of us, we found our way and occasionally, occasionally Doris would say something. José was in it so he never saw it.”21 Interestingly, Hoving also emphasizes the importance of acting training, in a variety of dramaturgical forms, as part of the original dancers’ equipment. He suggests that his own experience of Stanislawski, Limón’s familiarity with the Noh theater, and Pauline Koner’s knowledge of Jewish theater contributed to the dramatic success of the original production. Hoving constantly reaffirms the importance of understanding the breathing patterns, weight, timing, and rhythm associated with each phrase, and he offers valuable insight into Humphrey’s role in advising on the closure of the piece. Hoving recounts how Limón had problems with the ending but that “at the very last moment, Doris made the end.”22 He later describes his own part as the Iago figure in this ending:

Shakespeare, Modernism, and Dance    297 [For] the final thing when Koner [Emilia figure] and I cover up the movement (of Desdemona’s murder), and I then let (Emilia) go and say, “Look. There it is.” I’m very restrained. I had to be low-​keyed for the piece, but my motivation there was really almost madness.23

That ending was, however, open to interpretation, and Hoving also shows how over the years different performers have given different accents to the final scene. Hoving’s remarks illustrate how the dancers’ physical nuances of interpretation themselves repeat the very equivocation about language and psychological states found in the play’s unanswerable questions about motivation.

José Limón’s and Pauline Koner’s Barren Sceptre (1960) Limón and Koner’s collaboration on a danced interpretation of Macbeth is perhaps the most radical of these three works. The choreographers stripped down the cast list to two to make a minimalist duet using contemporary dance vocabulary and presented an abstract study of a state of mind affected by driving ambition and the psychically corrosive nature and effects of an obsessive appetite for power. A film of a full rehearsal of the piece, danced by Limón and Koner to music by Gunther Schuller, was made in 1960 by Dwight Godwin at Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut.24 In the film the performance is preceded by a revealing conversation between Limón and Koner in which they discuss the creation of the piece. They emphasize that this is not a straight adaptation of the text, but, as in The Moor’s Pavane, “a choreographic scene,” a mid-​ century reflection on the tyrannical usurpation of power in various recent and contemporary wartime and postwar political contexts. The dance encapsulates “the essence, or core of the play,” which they see as an exploration of obsession with power, an examination of the mind of a tyrant. They take their inspiration from the lines “Stars, hide your fires, /​Let not light see my black and deep desires” (1.4.50–​51). Thus the focus is on Macbeth’s psychological drives; it is not on a simple reduction of a play to the actions of two characters—​Macbeth/​Lady Macbeth—​but rather an expression of a single interior state and the corruption that is both self-​generated and leading to self-​annihilation. In the same way that Limón had treated Othello, here he universalizes the character of Macbeth—​both Limón and Koner represent internal aspects of a single obsession that always ends in self-​destruction. Koner therefore symbolizes the prophecies of the witches, personifying conscience, rather than suggesting a realistic character. Both figures represent the “quality of ambition” that makes people desire power at any price.25 Limón and Koner recount how they focused on animal and bird imagery to suggest Macbeth’s dehumanization: the dehumanized condition of the unscrupulous, the brutality required to satisfy lust for power. Moreover, their interpretation gives no straightforward expression of gender distinctions. Instead, the bifurcation of Macbeth into

298   Susan Jones male and female roles reveals the complete identification of the two (their bodies join as one “creature”). Both dressed in minimal black leotard/​tights, the costumes unify the pair as one entity. Limón begins center stage, head bowed. He raises his head, looks around, and as Koner’s arms appear from behind him (she is hidden behind his standing figure), initially wrapping them around Limon’s torso, he begins to move—​her body attaching itself to his in a graphic duet in which she becomes part of his very being. Each figure performs separate solos at different times throughout the piece, but the unspoken thread of understanding between the two persists in the mirroring of each other’s movement, often in uncanny repetitions of gesture and image. The minimalist set design (not credited on the film) facilitates interpretation of the piece, but is also integrated into the action rather than offering a background. A column of black cloth hanging upstage center represents Macbeth’s state of mind through the visual repetition of a single entity, a façade masking duplicity and deceit. The two figures appear from and disappear behind this column. A white, flimsy, ragged-​edged perforated cloth also hanging upstage is lowered halfway through the action to suggest Banquo’s ghostly presence, and a massive cloak, first worn by Macbeth following Konor’s solo, is manipulated by both figures to indicate Macbeth’s assumption to the throne and the subsumption of the Koner figure into the regal body of the king. These materials are skilfully maneuvered by both figures, becoming part of their bodily movement at different points. The overall effect indicates the theme of transformation of Macbeth into the monstrous figure whose conscience corrodes itself through the exercise of unspeakable, inhuman desires, ultimately leading to his isolation and self-​destruction.

Verbal Skepticism and the Corporeal Of the three ballets explored in the preceding, Barren Sceptre in many ways offers the most compelling example of the skeptical turn in modernist dance interpretations of Shakespeare. To conclude this discussion I therefore turn to Stanley Cavell’s reading of the play Macbeth in tandem with a further examination of Limón and Koner’s work. Cavell’s essay helps us to understand why Barren Sceptre works so well in the context of modern readings of Shakespeare’s skepticism. Cavell claims that Shakespearean tragedy is the working out of a response to skepticism.26 In a review of Cavell’s book, David Schalkwyk wrote that for Cavell, “Macbeth is equally a play shot through with the metaphysical necessities of language, especially as they strike Wittgenstein and Derrida.”27 Cavell’s philosophical treatment of the tragedies frequently draws on Wittgenstein’s perspective on language and, in particular, Wittgenstein’s private language argument, which fundamentally views language as a social agreement. In Wittgenstein’s account in the Philosophical Investigations (1953), the proposition that language can be a form of private communication is, to him, simply incoherent. Schalkwyk claims that “[i]‌n general philosophical terms Cavell shows the iterability of language at work in the role

Shakespeare, Modernism, and Dance    299 of prophecy in the play, while his analysis of the paradoxical closeness and distance of Macbeth and his wife (in what he calls ‘mind reading’) focuses on the shared nature of words.”28 Yet Cavell most interestingly leaves open the possibility of a critique of language itself in his interpretation of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s marriage, in which he discusses the idea of “words as mind-​reading.” He claims, Uttering words as mind-​reading is represented in the language of this marriage, in which each of the pair says what the other already knows or has already said; or does not say something the other does not say, either assuming the other knows, or keeping a pledge of silence. They exemplify exchanges of words that are not exchanges, that represent a kind of negation of conversation.29

What is clear from Cavell’s perspective is that the sharing of words may be silently communicated in some way, but nevertheless the endpoint is an utterance, even if it is one that appears disjointed and lacking the flow of conversation. But what if the communication occurs entirely without words? The silent evocation of gesture and movement in dance would thus seem to provide an expression of the nonlinguistic features of this reading of the play. Limón and Koner’s pas de deux forcefully engenders this negation in a literal sense, by the absence of words, but also in the physical expression of two “creatures” that virtually exist as one without the necessity of a shared verbal exchange. Cavell claims that in Macbeth “words may . . . it seems, be something like potions: ‘Hie thee hither, /​That I may pour my spirits in thine ear’ ” (1.5.25–​26).30 For Cavell, Lady Macbeth “recurrently seems . . . a phantasm glancing in these words; some more literal or imagined posture in which she invades him with her essence.”31 Cavell here deliberately shifts the focus from “her words” into the idea of “her essence” as the “potion” invading her husband. This encapsulates the very crux of Limon and Koner’s adaptation—​they provide a key to the “mind-​reading” going on in the play (and one might extend this interpretation by suggesting that in some ways Macbeth is also “mind-​reading” his own internal conversations). They demonstrate the use of the entire physical body in communication. They show physically the insinuation of one body into another; they illustrate the eroticism of this “essence,” this lust for power, as a physical/​psychological experience without any recourse to words at all. By using an expressivist movement vocabulary that paradoxically reveals emotional internalization rather than histrionic outward gesture, they achieve something that Shakespeare’s play recognizes as a form of communication beyond language. Koner’s posture throughout the danced piece conveys her physical enclosure of, and infiltration of, Macbeth’s physical presence, as well as his mental state when, wrapping herself around his entire body with close, predatory movements, she becomes part of his body rather than separate from it. The dance achieves something that the verbal text of the play cannot do so easily; Koner conveys a far greater sense that her being is “Macbeth,” and her figure constitutes the pervasive corruption of the mind throughout the physical form of the body, rather than the active machinations of the woman on the man. As Koner runs offstage before Limón’s final solo, one senses that she does not simply represent the death of Lady

300   Susan Jones Macbeth at this moment, but rather marks the completion of that invasion of Macbeth “with her essence,” as Cavell identifies her role early in the play. Limón and Koner (and to some extent Cavell) do not present Macbeth’s corruption as exclusively caused by goading on the part of a femme fatale—​the cause is not simply Lady Macbeth, as she builds on Macbeth’s susceptibility to the witches’ prophecies. Their “sharing of words, as if by magic” has a functional purpose, representing a state of mind triggered by a singular and unquenchable thirst for power.32 Cavell explains the many silences/​lack of explanation and dialogue between Macbeth and his wife as a form of “mind-​reading” between the couple. Cavell’s skeptical interpretation, read alongside the “choreographic scene” of Limón and Koner, helps us to understand not simply the inexpressible desire of ambition, but also the ways in which the text of the play conveys an awareness of the gaps and interstices between words and the limitations of language in the acquisition of knowledge. Paradoxically, the understanding silently shared between the consciousnesses of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, as the ballet strikingly illustrates, corrodes the psyche and destroys the individual, resulting in the annihilation of self through its monstrous imaginings. Limón and Koner’s treatment of the play provides one of the most interesting commentaries on the skeptical view of language that emerges in the text of the play Macbeth.

Conclusion Helpmann’s Hamlet, Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane, and Limón and Koner’s Barren Sceptre illustrate distinctive ways in which Shakespearean tragedy has inspired the development of modernist aesthetics in dance. Economy of form and distillation of narrative mark all three works, and all three focus on the interiority and essence of human character and drives. Yet these ballets also reveal how modern dance has often rejected linear storytelling and representation of action, reflecting a predominant theme of twentieth-​century choreography in which dance emerges as a nonreferential, autonomous art form. These pieces also gesture to individually modernist styles of staging and visual interpretation, casting light on aesthetic influences such as expressionism, symbolism, surrealism, and formalism. Helpmann’s conception for his Hamlet is inflected by references to surrealism and psychoanalysis, with the ballet’s focus on the mesmeric extravagance of setting and structuring of the ballet as dream-​narrative, while his movement vocabulary draws on expressionist dance and theater. In The Moor’s Pavane, Limón’s tighter focus on the geometry of the pavane intensifies the emotional essence of the characters’ interactions, paradoxically through its sparing abstraction. Its emphasis on danced expression through the body and use of spatial form as expression of political implosion gives the piece an aesthetic autonomy that both interprets and is distinct from conventional “adaptations” of Shakespeare. And in Barren Sceptre, Limón and Koner’s choreography daringly embraces the twentieth-​century literary focus on

Shakespeare, Modernism, and Dance    301 the inadequacy of words as communication. Shakespeare’s tragedies reflect a skeptical tradition that might arguably be interpreted as an antecedent of modernism’s disillusionment with language, while Limón and Koner find in Macbeth the potential for the dancing body’s wordless interpretation of tyranny and obsession with power. Of the three pieces, this duet transmits the most radical interpretation of Shakespearean tragedy as modernist dance form.

Notes 1. For further discussion on modernism and dance in a literary context, see Susan Jones, Literature, Modernism, and Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. Max Busch, ed., Tatjana Gsovsky Choreographin und Tanzpädagogin (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2005), 101. Gsovsky’s Hamlet was performed in the Teatro Colón Buenos Aires, 1951; in Berlin, 1953; and in Stuttgart, 1954. 3. Mark Franko, Martha Graham in Love and War: The Life in the Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 4. On Montaignian skepticism, see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), and John Cox, Seeming Knowledge:  Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2011). 5. Bronislawa Nijinska, “Reflections on the Creation of Les Biches and Hamlet,” Dancing Times 27 (February 1937): 618 [617–​620]. 6. Jan Parry, “The Many Faces of Robert Helpmann Symposium—​London,” DanceTabs (December 1, 2013), http://​dancetabs.com/​2013/​12/​the-​many-​faces-​of-​robert-​helpmann-​ symposium-​london/​. 7. Dyneley Hussey, “Hamlet,” press-​cutting, May 19, 1942 (unacknowledged source), scrapbook, Nadia Nerina Collection, Box 6, Hamlet, 1938–​1945, Archive of the Royal Opera House, London. 8. Audrey Williamson, “Shakespearean Ballet,” Dancing Times (June 1943): 406–​407. 9. Mary Clarke, “Ballet in Wartime Part III:  The Dramatic Ballets of Robert Helpmann,” Dancing Times (May 1990): 795 [794–​797]. Clarke bases her text on her memories of the 1942 production at the New Theatre, London. 10. Clarke, “Ballet in Wartime Part III,” 795. 11. Clarke, “Ballet in Wartime Part III,” 795. 12. Williamson, “Shakespearean Ballet,” 407. 13. Robert Helpmann, Hamlet (choreography 1942), video recording, presented by the Royal Ballet, music by Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, imprint 1964, Rudolph Nureyev Collection. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, *MGZIA 4-​4041 RNC. 14. Audrey Williamson, “Robert Helpmann as Choreographer:  A Study of Comus and Hamlet,” Theatre World (September 1942): 20 [19–​20]. 15. Williamson, “Robert Helpmann as Choreographer,” 19. 16. Williamson, “Robert Helpmann as Choreographer,” 20. 17. Williamson, “Robert Helpmann as Choreographer,” 19–​20. 18. José Limón, José Limón:  An Unfinished Memoir, ed. Lynn Garafola (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 119.

302   Susan Jones 19. Naomi Hindlin and Lucas Hoving, “Interview:  The Moor’s Pavane,” Dance Research Journal 24, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 13–​26. 20. Hindlin and Hoving, “Interview: The Moor’s Pavane,” 14. 21. Hindlin and Hoving, “Interview: The Moor’s Pavane,” 19. 22. Hindlin and Hoving, “Interview: The Moor’s Pavane,” 16. 23. Hindlin and Hoving, “Interview: The Moor’s Pavane,” 19. 24. José Limón and Pauline Koner, Barren Sceptre (1960), including discussion with Limón and Koner, filmed by Dwight Godwin, July 1960, Connecticut College, New London, New York Public Library for Performing Arts, *MGZHB 12-​1274. 25. Limón and Koner, discussion, Dwight Godwin film (1960), New York Public Library for Performing Arts. 26. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 27. David Schalkwyk, Review, “Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge,” Early Theatre 8, no. 1 (2005): 250. 28. Schalkwyk, Review, 250. 29. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 238. 30. We may be reminded of Cavell’s skeptical reading of the receipt of knowledge in Hamlet, and his emphasis on “the burden of proof ” associated with “pouring poison in the ear” of the King in the play-​within-​the play. Cavell asks whether we can we be sure it happened this way and pursues the possibility that Hamlet is inventing the episode (Disowning Knowledge, 179–​180). 31. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 237. 32. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 237.

Bibliography Brandstetter, Gabriele. Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-​gardes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Foster, Susan. Reading Dancing:  Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. Berkeley: University of California Dance, 1986. Franko, Mark. Martha Graham in Love and War:  The Life in the Work. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012. Goellner, Ellen, and Jacquelin Shea Murphy, eds. Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Jones, Susan. Literature, Modernism, and Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Chapter 13

Dan ce in the Broa dway Music als of Sha ke spe a re Balanchine, Holm, and Robbins Ray Miller

Dance on the Broadway musical theater stage from the mid-​1930s through the 1950s was going through a seismic change from what it had been from the fin de siècle period to the beginning of the Great Depression. Precision drill teams, comic acrobatic entertainers, soft shoe song and dance men and women, large production numbers, and the clever incorporation of popular social dance forms dominated the Broadway stage in the early part of the twentieth century but, with the influx of concert dance choreographers from the ballet and modern dance stage, there was an inevitable influence on how dance was to be seen on the musical theater stage. Dance directors gave way to choreographers. One-​trick-​pony performers were replaced with technically trained dancers, and these dancers were expected to substitute stoic, plastique facial expressions with a genuine ability to act. Composers, lyricists, and librettists were working more closely with directors as well as choreographers to interrogate texts so that the final product would have not only a stronger cohesiveness, but also more depth and substance. It is no accident that for some, they turned to the plays of Shakespeare as a source for narrative material as well as dramaturgical inspiration in learning how to develop a more nuanced and refined theatrical language for musical theater. This chapter will examine the work of three of the choreographers who contributed to this development. The Broadway musical has had a long fascination with Shakespearean drama. One of the earliest examples comes from the 1903 musical, Mr. Bluebeard, starring one of America’s most cherished clown actors, Eddie Foy, who introduced the well-​received song, “Hamlet Was a Melancholy Dane.”1 This little taste of Shakespearean parody would resurface five years later when Foy starred in a successful production of Mr. Hamlet of Broadway (1908), in which the character he played, a circus performer, was unceremoniously forced to play the role of Hamlet when the original actor took ill. In addition to his comic and singing abilities, Eddie Foy was recognized for his individualistic and eccentric

304   Ray Miller style of dance. It was the exaggeration of the limbs of his body and his acrobatic skills that allowed him to create humorous individual routines known as “legomania.” But while there had long been dancers, singers, actors, and comedians satirizing or parodying popular characters or scenes from Shakespeare’s plays on the minstrel stage and in vaudeville, revues, and musical comedies, it was not until a Russian-​born classically trained ballet choreographer stepped into the American musical theater milieu that it became possible to bring together the American musical’s need for invention with its attraction to the poetic sensibilities and clarity of Shakespeare’s plays. George Balanchine’s The Boys from Syracuse was a perfect first vehicle to seriously explore taking a text by Shakespeare and finding how that might be transformed into a musical comedy.

Balanchine on Broadway Stephen Greenblatt theorizes that “the dream of restoration haunted Shakespeare throughout his life,” but it is Shakespeare’s prolonging of that moment of restoration through narrow slips due to mistaken identities, the quick and abruptly shifting pace of the storyline, and incisive repartee in the dialogue that haunts George Abbott and Lorenz Hart, harkening them back to the early modern playwright centuries later.2 As the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays, Comedy of Errors provides more opportunities to add songs and dances in order to elaborate or to push the story along without having to drop or sacrifice the basic narrative of the play. But even if “song and dance” takes on the comedic functions of heightening dramatic tension and prolonging restoration, the effect of the postponement and conflicting discourses is only to make the comedic resolution the more satisfying. Barton observes that Shakespeare “seems to have been wedded to the idea that happy endings must, to carry conviction, be won from a serious confrontation with mortality, violence, and time.”3 Balanchine’s choreographic contributions to The Boys from Syracuse provide just such a confrontation. In producing The Boys from Syracuse, Abbott’s book and Hart’s lyrics were able to transpose Shakespeare’s language into the American vernacular, but the combination of George Balanchine’s choreography with Richard Rodgers’s music created a visual and aural experience that captured the effervescence of Comedy of Errors for a Depression-​ era American public. The team of Rodgers and Hart had collaborated since their college days and throughout the 1920s and 1930s. They were eclectic in their output and wrote for vaudeville, revues, and musical comedy; by the end of their prolific collaboration, they had written nearly thirty shows and over 500 songs. Rodgers’s talent for increasingly sophisticated and yet popular and accessible compositions was matched by lyricist Hart, who was often called “the Shakespeare Hart” for his delicate rhymes, poetic allusions, and sharp satire. Rodgers and Hart approached George Abbott to direct and to write the book. Following their collaboration in On Your Toes (1936), Babes in Arms (1937), and I Married an Angel (1938), George Balanchine was invited to choreograph for the fourth time with Rodgers and Hart.

Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare    305 Balanchine’s involvement in the production was consistent with a movement of concert dancers and choreographers testing the waters of musical theater. What used to be the preserve of tap dancers, ballroom acts, social dance forms, and specialty acts was upended by Balanchine’s contemporaries in the 1930s, including Albertina Rasch, Charles Weidman, José Limon, and Fred Astaire, who were experimenting with their various approaches to dance on the musical theater stage. By the late 1930s, with the unique collaboration between Rodgers, Hart, and Abbott, the invitation to the recently emigrated Balanchine to join the team was propitious for musical theater dance. While Balanchine was ultimately responsible for the choreography for The Boys from Syracuse, he was in fact assisted in his work with the tap dancing components by David Jones and Duke McHale.4 Musical historian Frances Teague noted one example in which Balanchine created a dance in the show “for a ballerina en pointe and two tap dancers.”5 While some critics felt that Balanchine did not break any new ground choreographically with Boys from Syracuse, as he had for example in the 1936 On Your Toes when he audaciously combined jazz and tap dance with ballet in the famous “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” dance production number that closes the show, historian Dawn Lillie Horwitz observed that by the time this musical was produced, “most reviewers expected them [the dances] to be integrated into the overall production.”6 Musical theater historian Ethan Mordden succinctly summarizes the characteristics of what was then perceived as “modernist” approaches to choreography in many musical theater productions of this decade by noting that “it involved the ensemble rather than a few soloists, it had a theme or was at least ‘expressing’ something, and, most importantly, it was more ‘artistic’ than hoofing yet more ‘fun’ than ballet.”7 Critic Brooks Atkinson elaborated: Nor is the dancing a clever afterthought. George Balanchine has designed and staged it. In Betty Bruce and Heidi Vosseler, he has a pair of dancers who are extraordinarily skillful and who can translate the revelry of a musical rumpus into dainty beauty. Particularly at the close of the first act, Balanchine has found a way of turning the dancing into the theme of the comedy and orchestrating it in the composition of the scene. Not to put too solemn a face on it, the dancing is wholly captivating.8

Thus, while preserving that comedic function of postponing via “song and dance,” Balanchine does not present a choreographic aside so much as an embodiment of the fundamental antagonisms. While there are many excellent examples in which Balanchine was able to effectively integrate dance into this musical, there are two that might best illustrate his approach. Abbott had created a new character for this musical, the Sorcerer, which allowed Balanchine to create “dream ballets” that could illustrate or extend character and plot lines in the show. For example, in one scene, the Sorcerer is able to conjure a scene in dance in which Dromio of Ephesus is able “to see” a mirror image of his twin, Dromio of Syracuse. Irene Dash writes, “Their movements dramatize the mirror quality of the men’s actions. When the dance ends with one Dromio leaving the stage, neither is aware that he has actually seen his twin.”9 In this way, Balanchine was able to demonstrate the

306   Ray Miller emotional longing of one brother for the other, and Abbott was able to foreshadow the denouement of the show. In another choreography, Balanchine created a pas de trois for Antiphone of Ephesus with the Courtesan and his Wife. The difference between and the attraction of each of these women for this man is reflected not only in the costuming, but also in the fact that one tap dances while the other performs ballet. Dash writes, Often all three bodies interweave, then separate, with the male dancer accompanying first one and then the other. . . . The dance courageously combined tap, ballet, and adagio. Labelled “sensuous” and “beautiful” by some critics but “controversial” by others, it translates the language of the musical into a visual experience for the audience . . . but also gives an impressionistic interpretation of what is happening onstage.10

This back-​and-​forth between the vernacular American tap dancer or the African-​ based jazz dancer and the European ballerina was a common theme throughout much of Balanchine’s choreographic oeuvre. In many ways, he was able to incorporate the vibrancy, the energy, and the athleticism of American dance with the innovative classicism inherited from his European balletic background. Balanchine becomes a kind of “stand-​in” for the male dancer in this dance by accompanying each in their own stylistic movement vocabulary, while at the same time trying to find how he fits in between these two theatrically interesting forms of dance. Consequently, Balanchine was able to experiment on the Broadway stage and in Hollywood film with these varied movement vocabularies as independent yet juxtaposed styles of dance. By the time he left the commercial stage for his full-​time commitment to the concert stage, he had incorporated these very different ways of moving into a modern neoclassicism that was Balanchine’s unique aesthetic. In Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage, Frances Teague argues, “[A]‌show like The Boys from Syracuse makes use of a Shakespearean play’s shell—​the plot line and central characters, dispenses with the language and structure, and seeks to make a distinctively contemporary point . . . without either the encumbrance of being ‘faithful’ to or the aim of mocking a text.”11 Balanchine’s choreography for this musical is not a prosaic retelling of Shakespeare’s play through the reinvention of Abbott’s script, but rather it becomes another vehicle or means of poetic association and suggestibility that employs dance and movement as a way in which to respond to Shakespeare’s use of rhythm, pacing, and tempo. It is not meant to be a one-​for-​one correlation, but rather “a response” of one artist to another’s creation, across generations and media. Opening on November 23, 1938, The Boys from Syracuse ran for a respectable  236 performances. With this familiar and established production team, Rodgers and Hart had offered yet another Broadway musical comedy in what was becoming a familiar and commercially successful pattern. It is then perhaps curious that The Boys from Syracuse proved to be the last collaboration between Balanchine and the musical comedy writing team of Rogers and Hart. Within these four productions, Balanchine not only began a career as a musical theater choreographer on Broadway and in Hollywood films, but he also

Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare    307 made several significant contributions to Broadway dance. In the first place, he successfully integrated various genres of dance in his choreographies. He pulled from tap, jazz, ballroom, and social dance, and used ballet as the conduit by which to meld this together in a consistent style appropriate for the show. Second, by insisting that his credit in the program be listed as “choreography by” rather than the traditional “dances directed by” signature, Balanchine signaled a change in attitude regarding the importance of dancing in musical theater production. The function of dance was changing from serving a utilitarian purpose to simply entertain or to “bring down the house,” to generating a genuine collaborative spirit with the other elements of musical theater production: music, text, scenography, and dance. Third, his insistence on technical proficiency reinforced the ideals of his predecessors like Bobby Connolly and Albertina Rasch. Balanchine’s raising the bar for technique not only offered the choreographer a wide movement palette from which to create a dance, but it also generated a sharp clarity in performance that engaged the audience kinesthetically, intellectually, and aesthetically. Dance critic Edwin Denby assessed Balanchine’s contribution with the following observation: “Balanchine’s Broadway choreography does not falsify ballet as most musicals do on the grounds that adulteration is the first principle of showmanship. Balanchine’s numbers are simplified ballet, but of the purest water.”12 Finally, by incorporating various dance styles within one unified approach to choreography, Balanchine contributed to and encouraged the development of the versatility of the musical theater dancer. Dance critic and historian Sally Banes points out that “Balanchine’s love for tapdancing shaped his choreographic style in the most fundamental way, generating a consistent emphasis on multiple, complex steps and intricate, syncopated rhythms, with a relatively understated port de bras that at the same time allowed for a flexible torso.”13 Balanchine’s borrowing and fusing should not be regarded as unproblematic, however. Brenda Dixon Gottschild and other dance scholars have analyzed the Africanist aesthetic appropriated by Balanchine’s approach to movement and to ballet in particular.14 He had a voracious appetite for all kinds of dance. He came into his own as a choreographer at the height of the modernist era and he, along with his composer colleague Stravinsky, had a deep affinity for jazz music and for jazz dance. Initially, when he immigrated to the United States, it was with the idea of developing a fully integrated ballet company with black and white dancers. According to Gottschild, “the roundedness and rhythmic sense that he inherited from the Georgian (Russian) folk dance tradition was the open door that allowed him to embrace the Africanist rhythmic landscape of his adopted homeland.”15 It was that combination of a strong traditional classical approach to movement with the visceral challenge imposed by his exposure to these new forms that allowed him to push for a new approach to musical theater dance choreography and vocabulary. In Boys from Syracuse, Balanchine was able to continue the effort that was initially begun with On Your Toes with the most critically celebrated artists in musical theater of the time—​Rodgers, Hart, and Abbott. Coming on the eve of war and still in the midst of a long economic depression, Balanchine and his collaborators accepted the challenge of employing Shakespeare’s play as a vehicle for the creationand re-​creation of a more substantial musical theater production.

308   Ray Miller

Hanya Holm and Kiss Me, Kate If Boys from Syracuse is recognized as a success for Rodgers and Hart and their collaborators, then Kiss Me, Kate, opening on December 30, 1948, and running for 1,077 performances (making it the third musical to cross the 1,000-​performance threshold), can certainly be described as a phenomenon. This backstage musical about a group of performers putting on a production of The Taming of the Shrew in Baltimore placed the emphasis not on the experience of new love, but in the struggle between married couples in post-​Depression and postwar American society. Bella and Samuel Spewack’s book crafted the ups and downs in the relationship between the production’s director and lead actor, Fred Graham (Petruchio), with his former wife and leading lady, Lilli Vanessi (Katherine). They also added a secondary romance between Lois Lane (Bianca) and her wayward gambling boyfriend, Bill. All of this is played out during this fictional theater company’s production of The Taming of the Shrew and their backstage antics while on the road in Baltimore. Awarded in 1949 with the Antoinette Perry Award for the best musical play, its incredible popularity was extended to an international level. Much of the credit for that went to the long-​time Broadway composer Cole Porter, who wrote the music and the lyrics to this musical, which produced such well-​known songs as the one that actually opened the show, “Another Op’nin, Another Show,” the ballad “So in Love,” the Act 2 opening, “Too Darn Hot,” and the comic “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” among many others. But musical theater historian Abe Laufe recognized Holm’s contribution to the success of this musical when he wrote, Among the further attributes that gave Kiss Me, Kate its popular appeal was the choreography by Hanya Holm, ranging from vigorous tap routines by specialty dancers Fred Davis and Eddie Sledge, two nimble solos by Harold Lang and colorful ensemble numbers by the attractive chorus line.16

Furthermore, Holm’s success in 1948 is surprising for two additional reasons. While she had established herself as a serious modern dance choreographer and teacher, she had had only two previous choreographic assignments for musicals before Kiss Me, Kate—​choreographing “The Eccentricities of Davey Crockett” in experimental musical Ballet Ballads with music by Jerome Moross and lyrics by John LaTouche, and The Insect Comedy. By comparison, these were small projects that were closer to her concert work, while Kiss Me, Kate was her first large-​scale Broadway musical. The second reason has to do with her controversial partnership with German Ausdruckstanz (expressionistic dance) pioneer Mary Wigman.17 The central principles and qualities of Ausdruckstanz—​ including an exploration of unconscious, socially unconscionable passions and desires and a neglect of the high kicks, pencil turns, and jazz-​inflected rhythms—​could not be further from the aesthetic that was coming to dominate Broadway. Yet Holms managed

Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare    309 to meld these seemingly disparate worlds with success, and this was no doubt in part due to her drawing upon an additional element of her training under Wigman: that of the movement choirs. Intended to choreograph masses of individuals with very little dance training, techniques from movement choirs provided a flow, sense of ease, and confidence even to bodies unfamiliar with choreography.18 Critic William Hawkins noted that Holm had adapted some of her previous training in German dance to the American musical theater stage. He observed, “Hanya Holm’s dances are individual and effervescent, demanding great skill without her ever suggesting a muscle flexing contest. They have the rare gift of making each dancer look as if he had a purpose in what he does.”19 Such an aptitude for choreographing for large, diversely trained groups is evident in the opening of Act 2. Cole Porter’s “Too Darn Hot” demands sexy and sensual movement of both singers and dancers. The scene takes place in the alleyway outside the theater, where it is dimly lit and searing hot. The script provides a brief yet clear description of the mood and setting for this dance: During the number, the DANCERS and SINGERS saunter out in twos and threes, drinking pop and Cokes out of bottles and lighting an occasional cigarette. They are all in Shrew costumes, but the men have opened up their jackets, and the women have tucked their purple-​and-​cerise chiffon skirts into their waistbands as high as they’ll go. They fan themselves with Woolworth fans and pieces of newspaper. At a certain point of the number, BILL comes out for a quiet smoke, tosses cigarette away, and joins PAUL and his friends in a spirited jazz session into which the DANCERS throw themselves with Bacchanalian zest. We must assume that it’s never too hot to dance.20

With this opening number, Holm engages her dancers in a style of jazz dance reminiscent of Jack Cole. The dance was unique as well because it was danced by black and white performers—​a rarity on the Broadway stage of that period. New York Herald Tribune dance critic Walter Terry wrote, In “Too Darn Hot,” Fred David and Eddie Sledge danced a rousing specialty number in which they were ultimately joined by Mr. Lang, who turned his technical skills full force and brought down the house. For background in this scene, Miss Holm devised some non-​intruding but atmospherically effective jitterbug passages for the ensemble.21

Holm’s training also introduced a new awareness of space to musical theater. Observing this innovative approach to space on the musical theater stage, Moulton further noted that [i]‌t might be said that where other choreographers placed the dancers in space, Holm uses space as an active element in the dance. This was especially true of the tango-​like “So in love.” Holm filled the stage in continuous swirling movement using only eight women and one man. Each dancer defined many small arcs with the arms, the legs,

310   Ray Miller and the torso. These in turn combined with the arcs defined by the other dancers to describe larger circles. In turn, these circles became larger and filled the stage space, and still increasingly seemed to involve the entire theatre. This spectator felt that he had been involved in a long continuing spiral in space. The dance was designed not for the audience to view, but rather in which to participate. The effect was empathetic as well as visual.22

Holm consciously manipulated the dynamics of the dance so that the audience would experience a vibrant, visceral kinesthetic response that was spectacular at the level of both the individual and the group en masse. One of the most unassuming yet important dances in the musical was the waltz that the two leads, Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessi, share in the scene early in the show when they are reminiscing about when they had initially fallen in love. The bantering dialogue between them transitions into the song, “Wunderbar.” Dash recalls, “As the principals dance a waltz, first upstaging one another then eventually dancing in unison and singing, ‘Wunderbar, wunderbar /​there’s our favorite star above, /​What bright shining star /​Like our love it’s wunderbar,’ they kiss.”23 Holm’s choreography exhibited a wide range of styles, and she conscientiously worked to integrate the dance into the fabric of the musical. Her biographer, Walter Sorell, noted, There was no great ballet number as such in the show but there was dancing almost everywhere, all of it firmly integrated with the purpose of achieving a total theatrical impression. The dancing became the impetus and driving element of this musical and provided the means for transitions in pace, mood, and style. The range of the dance forms used was impressive. It embraced classic ballet, modern dance, jitterbug, soft-​shoe, acrobatics, court, and folk dances.24

Holm integrated both German and American forms of dance; within the American forms, she appropriated Black American dance forms for the Broadway stage. As musical theater historian Ethan Mordden notes, “Kate is the most relentlessly danced show since On the Town, with full out spots after six numbers, plus a ‘Rose Dance’ and a pavanne, covering everything from ballet to jitterbug. Choreographer Hanya Holm may have held fifty-​one percent of the production.”25 John Martin, the leading early voice of American modern dance criticism, also bestowed his approval on Holm’s work in Kiss Me, Kate. He noted that Holm was able to retain “the taste, the formal integrity and the respect for the movement of the human body which belong to the concert stage, without in the least disturbing the equanimity of the paying customer.”26 Further elaborating on her ability to subsume the dance to the requirements of the musical, he wrote, The choreography is at all times completely of a texture of the show. Nowhere from the rise of the first curtain to the fall of the last, is there a characteristic Holm movement; she has apparently not been tempted in the least to superimpose herself upon

Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare    311 the production but has given her attention wholly to bringing out and pointing up what is inherent in it.27

Holm, like Balanchine, was intrigued by the uniquely Black American vernacular form of tap dance and, where Balanchine worked to integrate that with classical ballet, she worked to integrate that with a modern dance sensibility. Moulton described Holm’s pathway thus: She remoulded the tap dance to fit her own ideas of space and form. Rather than deemphasizing the stamping feet, the speed, and the introverted space as the ballet-​ tap combinations had, she re-​emphasized them. She used three Negro dancers, whose orientation had obviously been in the nineteen thirties. She did not change their steps, but expanded them in triangular formations with the emphasis shifting with lightning-​like clarity from one dancer to another. What had been syncopation was now intricately organized sound. [ . . . ] It was not a tap dance in the style of the nineteen-​thirties, but rather a modern dance that had used this material as a point of departure. The dance caught the essence of tap dancing without being a tap dance. In true nineteen-​thirty style, the dance “brought down the house.”28

Holm studied, and appropriated from, additional American dance forms as well. In Kiss Me, Kate alone there are examples of jazz dance, tap dance, and the jitterbug. In addition, she incorporated other dance and movement forms such as Renaissance court dance, acrobatics, and folk dancing. Holm’s work on Kiss Me, Kate is significant in terms of the history and development of musical theater dance in three key contributions. The first is Holm’s use of space. Musical theater choreography up to this time often worked within a two-​dimensional design. When a dance would open itself up to three dimensions, it was often characterized by parallel or diagonal lines. Holm’s work in this musical encouraged the development of the awareness of space and a more active aspect to choreography. Informed by her training with movement choirs and shaped by the needs of the musical theater stage, Holm’s use of space was still sensuous, rather than like a precision drill, in its organization. Holm aimed to have her audience respond to the individuality of her dancers, rather than stamping them with a unified look, as represented by the Rockettes, for example. Second, rather than superimpose a particular technical base on the dancers, she strove to incorporate their individual talents within her choreographic design. The sources for choreographic ideas were not solely limited to the imagination of the choreographer, but came from the choreographer’s collaboration with the dancers and the text. As choreographer Alwin Nikolais pointed out to her biographer, “When Hanya was working on a particular subject she would frequently ask the dancers to improvise on the subject and she would spot the interesting aspects the individual dancer might come up with. Once recognizing these aspects, she would hold onto them, remake them, or develop them from that point into her choreography.”29 Finally, she refrained from stamping the choreography with “signature” movement and, instead, she chose to develop the movement vocabulary from the context of the show itself. This self-​effacing

312   Ray Miller approach to musical theater choreography would become her signature, although it was seldom recognized as such by her contemporaries. John Martin, however, was appreciative of this technique, and wrote of Holm: “She is no prima donna choreographer who builds up her own numbers and then tries to drape the rest of the show around them; what she does grows simply and logically out of the situation, the characters, the atmosphere of the piece, and as a consequence, they are rich in style and individuality. They are also rich in invention and in formal design.”30 Holm’s involvement with musical theater continued after the success of Kiss Me, Kate. 31 She went on to choreograph Cole Porter’s next musical, Out of This World (1950), and a unique off-​Broadway musical, The Golden Apple (1954). With her choreography in two later Broadway hits, My Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot (1960), her legacy and reputation as a significant and important musical theater choreographer was solidified.

Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story By the standards of the 1930s, The Boys from Syracuse was a success. Kiss Me, Kate’s run of 1,077 performances was phenomenal both in terms of its popularity and in its incorporation and hybridization of dance styles and choreographic techniques new to Broadway. Nonetheless, even Kate’s success is modest by today’s standards when compared to The Phantom of the Opera (1986, with nearly 12,000 performances), Chicago (1996, the longest-​running American musical on the Broadway stage), and The Lion King (1997, currently with over 7,000 performances). Rocketing past Kate’s initial success, West Side Story, based on Romeo and Juliet, is often referred to as a landmark musical, and with good reason. Opening on September 26, 1957, West Side Story had a significant 732-​performance run. Originally conceived, directed, and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, West Side Story had a stellar combination of collaborators, with Leonard Bernstein composing the music, Stephen Sondheim providing the lyrics, Arthur Laurents writing the book, and Oliver Smith creating the set design. Robbins and Smith both won Tony Awards for their contributions to the show, and Rita Moreno became a break-​out star for her portrayal of Anita.32 It would see several revivals, including the famous fiftieth-​anniversary production in 2007, directed by the writer, Arthur Laurents, with the unique contribution of Lin-​Manuel Miranda33 translating and revising some of the dialogue and lyrics for the Sharks into Spanish.34 In the late 1940s, Robbins conceived the idea of a retelling of the Romeo and Juliet play by placing it within the context of a conflict between an Irish Catholic family and a Jewish family during the Easter-​Passover season and locating it in the lower East Side of Manhattan. He brought in Leonard Bernstein to write the music and Arthur Laurents to write the script. Originally entitled East Side Story, composition

Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare    313 commenced on the heels of World War II and reflected the mounting racial and ethnic intolerance pointed toward Jewish-​American artists. However, after completing a draft of the project, it became clear to these collaborators that the theme was already overworked by other successful plays at the time.35 With the prominence in American media during the mid-​1950s about the rise in gangs in the United States, however, they agreed to revisit the project and to update it. They relocated it to Manhattan’s Upper West Side and created the now familiar gangs of Puerto Rican immigrants known as the Sharks (the Capulets) and their generic American gang nemesis, the Jets (the Montagues). West Side Story breaks with notable Broadway conventions. From the very beginning of the show, it was clear that there would be no large cast opening production number. Instead, snippets of narrative were suggested in mime, gesture, sound effects, dance, and discordant sound inserted into jazz. Atmospherics dominated over the necessity of plot. Dance critic and historian, Deborah Jowitt describes this in detail: The first sound after the curtain rises on the Jets hanging out is a finger snap. As the snaps accumulate, the audience understands not just the guys’ nothing-​to-​ do, looking-​for-​trouble mood but also their solidarity. [ . . . ] In this turf war, bravado, stealth, fear, playfulness, and anger meet in combat, revealed in actions that shrug their way into dance and as quickly drop back into everyday behavior. A walk becomes a saunter, acquires a bounce, becomes an easy-​going chassé or a soft-​edged turn in the air. By the time you notice that the two groups of boys are dancing, you’ve understood the restless animosity that powers that movement, and it becomes as interesting as the steps. By the time the Jets sing their song of unity, you know the premise as well as you would after Shakespeare’s brawling between Montagues and Capulets in Verona’s piazza.36

As we are introduced to the lovers, their attraction to each other accentuates the rising tempo of the show with the unbridled expression of their feelings. For Romeo, it begins with O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear—​ Beauty too rich for use, for earth’s too dear! [ . . . ] Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night. (1.5.45–​48, 53–​54)

And for his counterpart, Tony, in West Side Story, it comes out in song and music and unencumbered, awkward gesture when he sings the song “Maria”: Maria! I’ve just met a girl named Maria,

314   Ray Miller And suddenly that name Will never be the same To me. Maria! I’ve just kissed a girl named Maria And suddenly I’ve found How wonderful a sound Can be!37

For Romeo and for Tony, their adolescent sense of urgency at finding the inadequacy of words to express these overwhelming feelings disrupts syntax and alters the staging. Romeo tosses himself between words of heaviness that give way to ecstatic flight. Tony is engrossed in the ongoing repetition of her name, repeated over and over, but inflected differently each time. The staging supports their heavenly aspiration. For Romeo, “it seems she hangs upon the cheek of night” from a balcony window. From the ground below, he must mount the lattice of her home, climbing, slipping, falling, until he arrives at her balcony. For Tony, he hides in the shadows of an urban alleyway and upon seeing Maria and hearing her voice, he urgently scales the fire escape ladder, all the while trying not be make unnecessary noise on its metallic surface. Shakespeare and Laurents/​S ondheim have predetermined the choreography for each scene—​not the exact steps or manner, but what Laban would call the effort qualities of the human body as it gives shape and meaning to the words. “In West Side Story, there is no dance portion to the show; it is all dance, all movement. Robbins blurs the line between dance and dramatic action, so that it is hard to say where one ends and the other begins,” writes historian Robert Emmet Long.38 For Robbins, dance generally, and certainly on the musical theater stage, needed to be motivated by some aspect of character, plot, or significant atmospherics. As biographer Joan Peyser notes, “Whenever Robbins was faced with choreographing a dance for this work, he would always ask, ‘What’s it about?’ . . . Originally the heavily instrumental prologue had lyrics; then the lyrics were thrown out and the music was made to convey precisely what it did through Robbins’s masterful use of movement.”39 This notion was shared with his collaborators. Author Robert Emmet Long recounts how Laurents had taken a long time to write an opening sequence in which the Jets were introduced to the audience in the safety of their clubhouse; yet, when they interrogated what the function or purpose for that scene was, they defaulted to the now famous danced opening prologue. According to Long, the effort and editing was collaborative. He recalls Robbins’s synopsis: The idea of our enterprise [ . . . ] was to make the poetry of the piece come out of our best efforts as serious artists; that was the major thrust.”40 Robbins used dance, movement, and gesture to move seamlessly back and forth between the gangs and the individual. In the famous “Dance in the Gym,” for example,

Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare    315 the character of Glad Hand, a thirtyish nerdy but well-​intentioned school official, attempts to bring the two gangs together by playing a circular walking game that would allow for different boys from one gang to pair off with the girls from the other gang. When the music stops, however, the boys and the girls quickly pair off “with their own kind” and begin a competitive dance between the jitterbug sounds and movements of the Jets with the Latin sounds and movements of the Sharks. The decision to buck authority leads the two gangs suddenly into the “Mambo” section, and here we find the most vital and, in many ways, most Hispanic sections of the score. Bernstein’s instrumentation, including bongos, cowbells, and trumpets, takes it inspiration from Latin jazz. The interpolated cries of “Mambo” by the two gangs are a direct descendant of the flamenco tradition in which dancers are urged on by their enthusiastic onlookers. A cuadro flamenco is a kind of dance party in which soloists take turns entertaining each other in semicircular groups. In fact, this is exactly what Robbins’s dancers do; each gang form a semicircle around their own dance performers, who try to outdo the other “team.”41 The music retards as Tony and Maria see each other for the first time. While the gang members dance in slow motion, they approach each other center stage and innocently introduce each other with the simplest of lines. While Robbins “choreographs” their gentle looks, Tony and Maria’s offering and taking of each other’s hands is accompanied by a soft cha-​cha rhythm performed in the style of a jewelry-​box minuet. It is their kiss that breaks the spell and brings Bernardo and the gangs rushing to stop this from going any further. In the second act, Robbins returns to this technique when Tony and Maria take the lead and create a soft pastel-​like world in simple lyrical movement. It is the world that they want to live in, and they invite members from each gang to join them, which they do in this song, “Somewhere.” Unfortunately, the set for the cityscape and the ghosts of the two dead boys interrupt this idyllic world; the frenzy and uncertainty of the real world impinge on their dream world, and they are returned to a discordant and precarious environment—​one that is full of the unexpected and violence. This movement of the set was a part of the larger choreographic approach to the show that Robbins had worked to accomplish with the set designer, Oliver Smith, and his long-​time collaborator, the lighting designer Jean Rosenthal. They had worked hard to create an “abstract nonliteral interpretation of the cityscape.”42 The sets and the lighting were conceived to give Robbins as wide a palette as possible to incorporate cinematic juxtapositions of set pieces with performers so that one scene could easily transition to the next. Robbins choreographs all of the visual elements of the production—​the moving human body, sets, and lights—​and joins them with music and text to accelerate the energy of the production and to focus on the demands of the scene. One particularly striking juxtaposition is the back-​to-​back movement from the “Cool scene,” in which the Jets are nervously anticipating what will happen when

316   Ray Miller Bernardo and the Sharks show up, and the following “Rumble scene.” In the first, Robbins and Laurents start this danced scene with quick accentuated dialogue: RIFF . . . You wanna live? You play it cool. Music starts. ACTION I wanna get even! RIFF Get Cool. A-​RAB I wanna bust! RIFF Bust cool. BABY JOHN I wanna go! RIFF Go Cool!43 Riff sings a few more lines of encouragement to his gang, and they slip into a dance that is at first accented with simple yet forceful turns, a leap into the air, a fall to the ground, and then punctuated with gestures of wild-​eye looks, a fist slamming into the palm of another hand, a stomping of the feet. The dance begins in fits and starts in which Robbins might create a short ballet chassé combination with a quote from the jitterbug. A unison combination breaks up into lines of bodies running askew. Sharp diagonal crosses are met with multiple turns—​some jazz-​like in terms of the angularity of the limbs, while others more familiar from classical ballet. What may start out as simple pedestrian movement, such as striking one’s fist into the palm of the other hand, explodes into a highly stylized, deeply resonating expression of the emotion behind that gesture. In this manner, Robbins moves from a literal interpretation of gesture to a multilayered movement phrase that invites more varied ways for the audience to engage with that action. The shifting movement vocabularies that he employs from one phrase to the next broadens the language of musical theater dance and thus expands its communicative potential with the eclectic audience that attends this form of theater. There is a palpable nervousness and anxiousness that sits on top of their fear and bravado. Toward the end, the music recedes and the movement become quieter, with contained interruptions at times with small nervous ticks. The Jets leave the area more unified and now ready to meet their rivals. In the “Rumble scene” that concludes Act 1 and leaves Riff dead at the hands of Bernardo, and Bernardo dead at the hands of Tony, there is a tautness from the very beginning. “It is nightfall. The almost-​silhouetted gangs come in from separate sides: climbing over the

Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare    317 fences or crawling through holes in the walls. There is silence as they fan out on opposite sides of the cleared space.”44 Then, suddenly, there are loud taunts and jeers being flung back and forth and the dialogue between the principals is lean, sharp, mean, and directed. Everything happens so fast. There is an inevitability that words must end and it is time for action. From the time Riff throws the first punch at Bernardo, a rapidly accelerating intensity brings out each man’s knife. An ongoing and repetitive taunting by Bernarda toward Tony calls him out: “Are you chicken?” “He is chicken.” “Yellow-​bellied chicken.” This is the reverse of what we see between Romeo and Tybalt. In Chapter 7 of this volume, Brandon Shaw argues that Tybalt is trained in the swordplay associated with the Italian school popularized by Vincentio Saviolo. In this style, there are clear guidelines regarding how to carry the body, how to attack and recoil with the sword, and how to engage with footwork. In that regard, Tony is similar to Tybalt. He expects to engage in a “fair” fistfight. There are rules to be followed. There is a sense of integrity that he values and presumes without realizing, of course, that the rules have changed in the short time that he has stepped away from the gang. Bernardo is more like Romeo in the sense that he is not tied to martial convention. He has an objective and he strives in whatever way possible to achieve that objective. As Shaw succinctly points out, “. . . Tybalt thinks he is dancing, while Romeo is primed to kill.”45 For Tony, the goal is to stop the rumble; for Bernardo, it is a question of honor. Robbins cleverly stages the fight so that it is never static or predicable. He plays back and forth between movement that is “realistic” in the sense that there is a push, or shove, or a strike with the knife toward the opponent, and a turn or somersault or jump that is more recognizable from dance. This back and forth between movement vocabularies creates a blurring of reality supported by Bernstein’s strong, percussive music and the ad libs from the other gang members. By the time it ends, there is a free-​for-​all brawl, and the choreography becomes an extended three-​dimensional, kinesthetic Jackson Pollock painting. With the sound of the police sirens, it dissipates as quickly as it had begun, and we are left with two young men lying dead in the alley and “a distant clock begins to boom.”46 This ending of Act 1 prefigures the ending of Act 2, when Tony is shot by Chico and a distraught Maria waves a gun toward the members of both gangs and the adults. Robbins’s meticulousness to detail can be best illustrated in the manner in which he staged the final scene of the musical. Biographer Amanda Vaill writes, He did the simplest thing possible. With the two figures of the lifeless Tony and the mourning Maria center stage and everyone else in the wings, he called the others onstage one by one, using their character names, and froze them in a tableau that remained essentially unchanged through Maria’s monologue (“You all killed him!”). Only then—​as the orchestra came up under the silence—​did he let both Jets and Sharks move forward to lift Tony’s body like Hamlet’s and bear it off stage with Maria following behind. “Remember the order you came out in,” Jerry told them and never touched the scene again.47

Following this simple yet poignant staging, the final line in the script reads, “The adults—​Doc, Schrank, Krupke, Glad Hand—​are left bowed, alone, useless.”48 This staging corresponds in intensity to the pathos and sadness inherent in the Prince’s final lines in Romeo and Juliet.

318   Ray Miller Capulet! Montague! See what a scourge is laid upon your hate. That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love. And I for winking at your discords too Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punish’d. (5.3.291–​295)

In these two plays, there is an immediacy and intensity to the relationships of the young lovers of Romeo and Juliet, and Tony and Maria in West Side Story. Once there is an acknowledgment of “true love” and a recognition of one’s self in the eyes of the other, time rushes forward and demands fulfillment. Robbins was able to capture this by combining danced movement and intense directed gesture with the vibrant urgency of Bernstein’s music. At the top of Bernstein’s copy of Romeo and Juliet, he wrote in large letters: “An out and out plea for racial tolerance.”49 But, in both the play and the musical, the writers are demanding tolerance now, rather than waiting years or decades. Many critics and others viewed this musical at the time as “a musical fusing the timely subject of juvenile delinquency with the classic story of the two young lovers in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ ”50 Yet, this is a perception devoid of the rich complexity of this musical. For Robbins and Bernstein, the personal and the social were entwined. Theater historian John Bush Jones acknowledges that the creators of this musical share a dark vision of the naïve plausibility that individual idealistic lovers can overcome obstacles within their social milieux. The musical ends with a triple homicide and the near gang rape of Anita by one of the gangs. He points out that the creators seriously question whether the American Dream is truly available for all to obtain. He concludes his analysis with the observation that the librettist, Laurents, “replaced Shakespeare’s reliance on chance and circumstance with largely character-​motivated actions that ultimately doom the young lovers.”51 There had been previous musicals with serious subject matter, like Pal Joey starring Gene Kelly, or Agnes de Mille’s “Civil War Ballet” in Bloomer Girl, that attempted to mitigate its dark approach with visually engaging dance and choreography, but the audiences at the time would not accept these early attempts. With West Side Story, it may have a combination of the right musical at the right time in terms of America starting to remove its rose-​colored glasses in favor of a more serious or at least cynical self-​critique, and the increasingly higher level for choreography on the musical theater stage, resulting from the high expectations of concert dance choreographers. The volatility of the play was noted by other critics as well. Preeminent theater critic Walter Kerr begins his review:  “the radioactive fallout from ‘West Side Story’ must still be descending on Broadway this morning. Director, choreographer, and idea-​ man Jerome Robbins has put together, and then blasted apart, the most savage, restless, electrifying dance patterns we’ve been exposed to in a dozen seasons.”52 Brooks Atkinson was both startled and admiring in his assessment following the opening night of West Side Story at New Century Theatre: Although the material is horrifying, the workmanship is admirable. [ . . . ] Pooling imagination and virtuosity, they have written a profoundly moving show that is as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving. [ . . . ] Using music and movement they have given Mr. Laurents’ story passion and depth and some glimpses

Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare    319 of unattainable glory. They have pitched into it with personal conviction as well as the skill of accomplished craftsmen.53

But the “workmanship” capable of overcoming the “horrifying” qualities attached to “city jungles” is due to a concerted embrace of excessiveness and a trend-​breaking denial of dramatic realism. He concludes with the following observation:  “The hostility and suspicion between the gangs, the glory of the rumble, the devastating climax— ​Mr. Robbins has found the patterns of movement that express these parts of the story.”54 For Atkinson, the staccato hipster-​like lingo of the adolescent gang members’ speech patterns is complemented by the choreographic and movement choices imposed on the performers by Robbins. Having studied at the Actors Studio, Robbins incorporated much of the Stanislavskian approach advocated by fellow members like Elia Kazan and Bobby Lewis. Similar to Kazan’s activities with Marlon Brando in film or Bobby Lewis’s staged version of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Robbins incorporated Stanislavskian methods into the American musical theater stage. Movement could at times be privileged over that of the comparatively simple delivery of lines. Finding the through line for a scene and connecting that to the emotional arch of a character required a keen attention to detail in terms of the use of gesture and staged movement. Robbins brought that attention to emotional arc into the rehearsal process, and he demanded not only high technical proficiency from the performers, but also a psychological understanding of character that would inform movement, voice, and musical choice. What Atkinson points to is the unique ability of dance to personify in kinesthetic terms the troublesome experience of adolescents in love, in conflict, and in search for identity and a “place to belong.” So often, language abandons them, and they resort to music and dance to express the inexpressible. Much has been written on the language in Shakespeare’s plays, but what Robbins was able to convey is what Shakespeare alludes to: the urgency with which young people experience their transition to adulthood in fits and starts. Two months after the opening, Arthur Laurents wrote concerning why he was attracted to this musical: “It is the desire (almost a passion with me) to lower the curtain on the flatness of naturalism and to raise it on the incandescence of theatricalism or lyricism.”55 His sense of the American audience of the time was that they would often prefer the literal—​the photograph to the painting, the familiar to the unexpected. Laurents and his colleagues wanted to challenge themselves and the audience. He continues, But the easiest way for audiences to journey the farthest from conventional reproductions of naturalism to the unconventional illusions of the theatricality is to introduce music, song and dance. [ . . . ] The dialogue and costumes are based in reality, as are the problems, the characters, the emotions. But the treatment is impressionistic, theatrical, un-​photographic.56

By stepping away from the Stanislavskian realism that dominated much of the Broadway stage at the time, they created their own “elevated language” of sound, movement, and design that would stand up to the source on which they based their musical.

320   Ray Miller John Martin concluded his review of the New York dance season for that year with this assessment of West Side Story with mixed praise: Jerome Robbins’ “West Side Story,” whatever one may think of its specific merits, is of high importance for the simple reason that it is, perhaps for the first time, a completely choreographic Broadway musical. Since it is a box-​office success, it may well point the way to a whole new approach to Broadway musicals. Certainly, that is devoutly to be hoped, for Broadway’s dancing in general has slumped to a new low.57

There is certainly no love lost between the popular appeal of musical theater and the aesthetic taste of Martin. Nonetheless, as his reviews of both Holm’s and Robbins’s choreographies suggest, even he had to admit that this popular art form had successfully incorporated a quality on equal footing with concert dance. His appraisal was mirrored by New York Herald Tribune critic Walter Terry: “The great wonder of West Side Story is that realistic action flows into dancing and out of it again without a hitch or break, just as speech swells or snarls its way into poetry and song.”58 Robbins not only set a high bar for the quality of musical theater dance, but more important, his contribution of integrating dance and movement into the very narrative fabric of the musical was visionary in terms of a direction that later choreographer-​directors like Bob Fosse, Michael Bennet, Tommy Tune, Susan Marshall, Andy Blankenbuelhler, and others would follow. West Side Story is often referred to as a landmark musical for many reasons—​its extraordinary choreographic design, its initiation of the triple threat performer who can sing and dance and act, and its tackling of difficult subject matter by giving voice to a gritty and dangerous world in which many of its adolescents found themselves. But it is that, and more. Jerome Robbins offers this assessment: I don’t like to theorize about how or if the show changed future musicals. For me what was important about West Side Story was our aspiration. I wanted to find out at that time how far we, as “long-​haired artists,” could go in bringing our crafts and talents to a musical. Why did we have to do it separately and elsewhere? Why did Lenny have to write an opera, Arthur a play, me a ballet? Why couldn’t we, in aspiration, try to bring our deepest talents together to the commercial theatre in this? work? That was the true gesture of the show.59

Robbins hits on one of the fundamental creative aspects of musical theater production, which distinguishes it from other forms of theatrical production primarily based upon the work of the playwright. Directors, designers, and others will often describe their relationship to the playwright as “serving the needs of the play.” And, of course, when the playwright is Shakespeare, that relationship may be gratefully acknowledged. But, in musical theater, as Laurents points out, it is the combination of collaborative artists—​in this case, the composer, the librettist, the lyricist, the designers, and of course, the conception and execution of the directorial and choreographic design of Jerome Robbins himself that created this entity—​that could indeed realize fine art aspirations within the context of a popular art medium.60 Dash best pinpoints its achievement when she observes that “[t]‌he adaptors have achieved their aim: to create an American tragedy with the tools formerly reserved

Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare    321 for comedy. Dance, music, language, and body movement combine to propel the story forward. Here is a work that evokes not only pity and fear, but also empathy and admiration.”61

Conclusion When we examine the progression from The Boys from Syracuse to Kiss Me, Kate, we can appreciate how the choreographer from the classical ballet world and the choreographer from the modern dance tradition were able to bring their expertise from the concert stage onto the musical theater stage. Advancing technique, tying the dance to character development and plot advancement, and introducing a more nuanced and sophisticated approach to the moving of the human body in space all contributed to elevating musical theater choreography. Fundamentally, however, all of these factors legitimized the role of dance in the very conception of a musical theater piece. It was no longer something that could be added on as an entertaining afterthought—​bring on the girls, give us a big production number, line everyone up in a linear fashion, and do some leg kicks. Expectations surrounding the appropriation of Shakespeare as source material demanded more than superficial vaudevillian clown antics. Working with the writers and composers and looking closely at the source material and how it was to be adapted was critical for Balanchine, Holm, and Robbins, and that serious engagement with material was reflected in how they created the dances for the shows in which they were involved. Each was recognized as an accomplished concert dance choreographer. They knew how to respect the poetic potential inherent in the human body moving through space. They deeply valued the power of the spoken word in Shakespeare’s theater. They, along with their collaborators, strove to bring these highly refined sensibilities together in order to create a vibrant, exciting, and meaningful theatrical experience for the audiences of their time and for the contemporary audience of today.

Notes 1. When this production traveled from its Broadway run to Chicago, it was performed in the now infamous Iroquois Theatre fire in which a defective spotlight had caught some of the scenery on fire. Soon, the theater was ablaze and Eddie Foy remained onstage until the last minute, trying to assuage the audience from panicking. Unfortunately, despite his efforts and those of others, over six hundred people lost their lives. 2. Steven Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 81. 3. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells, eds., The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 81. All subsequent quotations from Shakespeare’s works are from this edition unless otherwise specified. 4. It was not unusual for Balanchine to seek out American dancers and choreographers to learn about American forms of dance, from jazz and tap to popular social dances, before completing his choreography for a stage musical or Hollywood film.

322   Ray Miller 5. Frances Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006), 118. 6. Dawn Lille Horwitz, “Balanchine on Broadway,” unpublished. 7. Ethan Mordden, Sing for Your Supper:  The Broadway Musical in the 1930s (New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 195. 8. Brooks Atkinson, “The Play in Review:  The Boys from Syracuse,” New  York Times, November 24, 1938, 36, https://​timesmachine.nytimes.com/​timesmachine/​1938/​11/​24/​ issue.html. 9. Irene Dash, Shakespeare and the American Musical (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2010), 33. 10. Dash, Shakespeare and the American Musical, 34. 11. Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage, 111. 12. Edwin Denby, Looking at the Dance (New York: Horizon Press, 1968), 393. 13. Sally Banes, Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (Hanover, NH:  Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 55. 14. See Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT:  Praeger, 1996); Veve A. Clark and Sara E. Johnson, eds., Kaiso! Writings by and about Katherine Dunham (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); Banes, Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism; and Constance Valis Hill, “Cabin in the Sky:  Dunham and Balanchine’s Ballet (Afro) Americana,” Discourses in Dance 3, no. 1 (2002): 59–71. 15. Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, 63. These sources offer interesting material related not only specifically to Balanchine, but also to broader issues of collaboration, cross-​cultural influence, and appropriation. 16. Abe Laufe, Broadway’s Greatest Musicals (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1977), 119. 17. Susan Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon:  The Dances of Mary Wigman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Claudia Gitelman and Marianne Marianne, “Dance, Business, and Politics: Letters from Mary Wigman to Hanya Holm, 1930–​1971,” Dance Chronicle 20, no. 1 (1997): 1–​21. 18. Mary Anne Santos Newhall, “Uniform Bodies:  Mass Movement and Modern Totalitarianism.” Dance Research Journal 34, no. 1 (2002): 27–​50. 19. William Hawkins, New York World-​Telegram, December 31, 1948. 20. Stanley Richards, ed., Ten Great Musicals of the American Theatre (Radnor, PA: Chilton Book, 1973), 319. 21. Walter Terry, I Was There: Selected Dance Reviews and Articles 1936–​1976 (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1978), 226. 22. Robert D. Moulton, “Choreography in Musical Comedy and Revue on the New York Stage from 1925 through 1950” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1957), 170–​171. 23. Dash, Shakespeare and the American Musical, 59. 24. Walter Sorell, Hanya Holm:  The Biography of an Artist (Middleton, CT:  Wesleyan, 1979), 112. 25. Ethan Mordden, Beautiful Mornin’: The Broadway Musical in the 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 256. 26. John Martin, New York Times, January 9, 1949, section II, 1. 27. Martin, New York Times, 1. 28. Moulton, “Choreography in Musical Comedy and Revue,” 172. 29. Sorell, Hanya Holm: The Biography of an Artist, 165. 30. Cited in Sorell, Hanya Holm: The Biography of an Artist, 117.

Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare    323 31. Kiss Me, Kate was the first musical to have its dances scored in Labanotation and copyrighted. See Anthea Kraut’s excellent discussion about this in her book, Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (New York: Oxford, 2015). 32. When the show was made into a film in 1961, it was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and received ten of those, including Best Picture; Jerome Robbins shared the Best Director award with Robert Wise. 33. Lin Manuel-​Miranda also wrote the book, lyrics, and music for the current Broadway hit musical Hamilton: An American Musical. He also performed in the title role. 34. This was an attempt by Arthur Laurents, the original librettist and now director for this updated version of the musical, to equalize the shared responsibility for the tragic events in the musical between the two gangs. In the original, the scale was tipped in favor of the Jets, the “good” gang, against the Sharks, the “bad” gang. 35. It is interesting to note that in the winter of 1955, Will Herberg, a sociologist by training, published Protestant, Catholic, Jew:  An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), in which he introduced the idea of the triple melting pot in which he articulates the shared values of these three religious traditions on the development of shared American values in its political and social sphere. What started off as a simple tripartite understanding of American identity in the 1950s has become far more nuanced and complex as the American musical adapts to a contemporary understanding of national identity. See Raymond Knapp’s The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2006) and John Bush Jones’s Our Musicals, Ourselves:  A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Lebanon, NJ:  Brandeis University Press, 2003) for a more in-​depth discussion and analysis of this topic. 36. Deborah Jowitt, Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 279. 37. Arthur Laurents, Romeo and Juliet West Side Story, music by Leonard Bernstein; lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins (New York: Dell, 1972), 158. 38. Robert Emmet Long, Broadway the Golden Years:  Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-​Directors 1940 to the Present (New York: Continuum, 2001), 110. 39. Joan Peyser, Bernstein: A Biography (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987), 241. 40. Robert Emmet Long, Broadway the Golden Years, 102–​103. 41. Elizabeth A. Wells, West Side Story:  Cultural Perspectives on an American Musical (Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, 2011), 125–​126. 42. Amanda Vaill, Somewhere:  The Life of Jerome Robbins (New  York:  Broadway Books, 2006), 276. 43. Laurents, Romeo and Juliet West Side Story, 173–​174. 44. Laurents, Romeo and Juliet West Side Story, 190. 45. Brandon Shaw, Chapter 7 of this volume. 46. Laurents, Romeo and Juliet West Side Story, 193. 47. Vaill, Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, 285. 48. Laurents, Romeo and Juliet West Side Story, 224. 49. “Bernstein’s Inspiration from Romeo and Juliet,” http://​www.westsidestory.com/​archives_​ journal.php, accessed December 7, 2016. 50. Louis Calta, New  York Times, September 26, 1957, http://​timesmachine.nytimes.com/​ timesmachine/​1957/​09/​26/​issue.html. 51. Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre, 194. 52. “West Side Story,” New  York Herald Tribune, September 27, 1957, cited at http://​www. westsidestory.com/​archives_​herald2.php.

324   Ray Miller 53. Brooks Atkinson, “Theatre: The Jungles of the City,” New York Times, September 27, 1957, 14, http://​timesmachine.nytimes.com/​timesmachine/​1957/​09/​27/​issue.html 54. Atkinson, “Theatre: The Jungles of the City,” 14. 55. Arthur Laurents, “Musical Adventure,” New  York Times, November 3, 1957, 137 https://​ timesmachine.nytimes.com/​timesmachine/​1957/​11/​03/​issue.html. 56. Laurents, “Musical Adventure,” 1957. 57. John Martin, “The Dance: 1957,” New York Times, December 29, 1957, http://​timesmachine. nytimes.com/​timesmachine/​1957/​12/​29/​90879069.html?pageNumber=60. 58. Terry, I Was There, 326. 59. Christine Conrad, Jerome Robbins: That Broadway Man That Ballet Man (London: Booth-​ Clibborn Editions, 2000), 151. 60. Laurents, Romeo and Juliet West Side Story, 139. 61. Dash, Shakespeare and the American Musical, 121.

Bibliography Dash, Irene G. Shakespeare and the American Musical. Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2010. Gilvey, John Anthony. Before the Parade Passes By: Gower Champion and the Glorious American Musical. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005. Jowitt, Deborah. Jerome Robbins:  His Life, His Theater, His Dance. New  York:  Simon & Schuster, 2004. Laurents, Arthur. Mainly on Directing: Gypsy, West Side Story, and Other Musicals. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Long, Robert Emmet. Broadway the Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-​ Directors 1940 to the Present. New York: Continuum, 2001. Symonds, Dominic, and Taylor, Millie, eds. Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Vaughan, Alden T., and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Wells, Elizabeth A. West Side Story: Cultural Perspectives on an American Musical. Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, 2011.

Partial Listing of Broadway and Off-​ Broadway Musicals Based on the Plays of Shakespeare Mr. Hamlet of Broadway based on Hamlet Opened December 23, 1908, at the Casino Theatre (Broadway) Choreographer: none cited

Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare    325 The Boys from Syracuse based on The Comedy of Errors Opened November 23, 1938, at the Alvin Theatre (Broadway) Choreographer: George Balanchine Swingin’ the Dream based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream Opened November 29, 1939, at the Center Theatre (Rockefeller Center) Choreographer: Agnes de Mille with additional choreography by Bill Bailey for himself and Herbert White for the Lindy Hoppers Kiss Me, Kate based on The Taming of the Shrew Opened December 30, 1948, at the New Century Theatre (Broadway) Choreographer: Hanya Holm West Side Story based on The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet Opened September 26, 1957, at the Winter Garden Theatre (Broadway) Choreographer and Director: Jerome Robbins As You Like It Opened October 27, 1965, at the Theater de Lys (off-​Broadway) Choreographer: Joe Nelson Babes in the Wood based on Midsummer Night’s Dream Opened December 28, 1964, at the Orpheum Theatre (off-​Broadway) Choreographer: Ralph Beaumont Love and Let Love based on Twelfth Night Opened January 3, 1968, at the Sheridan Square Playhouse (off-​Broadway) Choreographer: Rhoda Levine Your Own Thing based on Twelfth Night Opened January 13, 1968, at the Orpheum Theatre (off-​Broadway) Choreographer: [Staged by] Donald Driver Sensations based on The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet Opened October 25, 1970, at the Theater Four (off-​Broadway) Choreographer: none cited The Two Gentlemen of Verona Opened December 1, 1971, at the St. James Theatre Choreographer: Jean Erdmann

326   Ray Miller Pop based on The Tragedy of King Lear Opened April 3, 1974, at the Players Theatre Choreographer: Ron Spencer Rockabye Hamlet based on Hamlet Opened February 17, 1976, at the Minskoff Theatre (Broadway) Choreographer: Gower Champion with Tony Stevens Dreamstuff based on The Tempest Opened April 2, 1976, at the WPA Theatre (off-​Broadway) Choreographer: Lynne Gannaway Music Is based on Twelfth Night Opened December 20, 1976, at the St. James Theatre (Broadway) Choreographer: Patricia Birch Oh, Brother based on The Comedy of Errors Opened November 10, 1981, at the ANTA Playhouse Return to the Forbidden Planet based on The Tempest Opened October 13, 1991, at the Variety Arts Playhouse (off-​Broadway) Choreographer and Music Director: Marvin Laird Play On! based on Twelfth Night Opened March 20, 1997, at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre (Broadway) Choreographer: Mercedes Ellington The Lion King based on Hamlet Opened November 13, 1997, at the New Amsterdam Theatre (Broadway) Choreographer: Garth Fagan The Bomb-​itty of Errors based on The Comedy of Errors Opened December 12, 1999, at 45 Bleecker (off-​Broadway) Choreographer: n/​a The Donkey Show based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream Opened August 18, 1999, at Club El Flamingo (off-​Broadway) Choreographer: Maria Torres These Paper Bullets! based on Much Ado about Nothing Opened November 20, 2015, at the Linda Gross Theatre (off-​Broadway) Choreographer: Kevin Williamson

Chapter 14

“ T hou Art Tra nsl at e d ” Affinity, Emulation, and Translation in George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Amy Rodgers

Poems cannot be translated, they can only be transposed, which is always awkward.1 —​Arthur Schopenhauer It really is impossible to dance Shakespeare. He is a poet.2 —​George Balanchine

I begin in the place where the tributaries of language and movement begin their inexorable flow into the depths of inexactitude—​the place of translation. In addressing translation’s difficulties, the philosopher and choreographer exhibit markedly different attitudes toward navigating this voyage. In his philosophical essay “On Language and Words,” Schopenhauer seems somewhat adrift in the grayslick, lamenting the difficulty of fathoming and articulating the historical and cultural distances extant in the poetry of other times and places. Conversely, in the program notes for his first full-​length narrative ballet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Balanchine seems insouciantly buoyant, as if waving from the side of the QE2 before embarking on a transatlantic voyage.3 Such disparity occurs even at the level of phrasing: whereas Schopenhauer feels the need to define what “can” occur in the place of translation (transposition), as if to provide a compass for those who attempt the translation of poetry, Balanchine offers only the audacious adjective “impossible,” even as the curtains rise on his version one of Shakespeare’s most lyrical plays. That Schopenhauer and Balanchine trade in different currencies may explain the divergence in their affective responses to the work of translation. Whereas linguistic translation demands a certain degree of fidelity to the “original,” kinesthetic translation does not. Thus freed from the constraints of exactitude, Balanchine feels no real responsibility to Shakespeare’s original “text”; indeed, he is more constrained by

328   Amy Rodgers Felix Mendelssohn’s score. But despite the difference in sign systems, Balanchine still considers his Dream a translation rather than an adaptation, for no one, particularly a ballet choreographer who often works with narrative in one form or another, would say that adaptation was “impossible.”4 Indeed, like Schopenhauer, Balanchine locates the impossibility of danced Shakespeare in the problem of language—​specifically, the futility of finding a dance vocabulary that can stand in for Shakespeare’s poetry. Considered in this light, Balanchine’s point of view aligns with Schopenhauer’s, except that whereas Schopenhauer provides an alternative, Balanchine leaves this space blank. Perhaps, as suggested, he is simply being puckish, or perhaps he cannot find the proper term for an alternative, given that no lexicon for poetry-​to-​movement translation exists. This chapter considers what might be gleaned from considering Balanchine’s Dream as a translation, rather than an adaptation, of Shakespeare’s play.5 At first glance, “adaptation,” the term used for most ballets based on narrative sources, seems a better fit. Although both translation and adaptation share a number of qualities, such as a degree of reliance on an “original,” and a movement toward revising cultural and/​or historical particulars for contemporary readers and audiences, they are not the same. Most obviously, translation is a linguistic project, whereas adaptation most often designates a process whereby the adapter transfers the original to another medium. While opinions differ on how much leeway translators can or should take, most theorists agree that translation owes a sense of fidelity to the original’s language and spirit. Adaptation, on the other hand, often retains only the faintest traces of its source material; in addition, adaptation can demonstrate these vestiges through linguistic, visual, or thematic registers. When measured against these particulars, one might well argue that Balanchine’s Dream should stay where it clearly belongs—​in the unwieldy but endlessly capacious category of adaptation. My project here, however, is not a taxonomic one. Instead, I wish to consider translation as a mode of production rather than the artistic work created via that action; in Marxist terminology, translation is the labor that produces a new commodity (albeit one that possesses a very particular kind of cultural fetish—​in this case, the mark of the Great Man or genius). And, while not a Marxist analysis, this chapter claims that like Marxist labor, translation, as I use it here, is often deeply imbricated with creative labor’s invisibility and erasure. On the one hand, this effacement can allow the translator to perform a kind of sprezzatura, the kind seen in Balanchine’s tossing off of “impossible.” On the other, it testifies to the impossibility of accurately articulating what, exactly, constitutes the work of translation. Indeed, one can understand translation primarily as an act of creative erasure, one in which the translator must figure out “what” in the original requires utterance, a difficulty aptly articulated by Walter Benjamin: “But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work . . . the unfathomable, the mysterious, the ‘poetic,’ something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet?”6 That the translator must wear numerous hats—​polyglot, historian, poet, and pioneer of the vertiginously uneven terrain of signification—​helps explain Schopenhauer’s trepidation, or Ortega y Gasset’s ranking of translation as among the few human tasks that “are impossible in their very essence.”7 Despite the numerous

“Thou Art Translated”    329 artists and theorists who deem it so, translation cannot actually be “impossible,” as translations abound, and few are as abundant as those of Shakespeare’s works. Rather, for Schopenhauer, Balanchine, and Ortega y Gasset, the impossibility lies in finding an adequate lexicon for describing both the work of translation and how to accomplish it. Like a linguistic return of the repressed, the very problem that confounds translators—​ the inability to communicate across languages and cultures with precision—​recurs in an inability to articulate the very undertaking they attempt. Where language fails, movement may succeed. Narrative dance (in this case, Balanchine’s Dream) provides new perspectives on the “what” of translation, as it moves the focus from the strictly linguistic sphere (such as the interlingual translation of a written work), or even from language-​based performance translation (such as the metamorphosis undergone by written script when performed with actors on a stage). As Alan Brissenden points out, in moving from a language-​based art (drama) to a movement based-​one (dance), “the boundaries of the text are stretched and pulled in all sorts of directions,” first by libretto and score, and second by choreography.8 Rather than emphasize the difference between the Shakespearean text and the Shakespeare-​based dance, however, I focus on communicative mechanisms such as tempo or timing, cadence or rhythm, and structure (both narrative and syntactic) that both share. Through an analysis of these analogous structures, I first consider how Balanchine’s translation of Shakespeare’s play allows for a reconsideration of the relationship between the two as more consanguineous than most critics have imagined.9 In particular, I reconsider the much-​maligned second act of Balanchine’s production, which steps out of Shakespeare’s narrative and into “pure dancing,” as the more significant in terms of translation, as it relies heavily on certain thematic structures extant in the play, as well as its formal, prosodic architecture. Second, and more provisionally, I gesture toward what and how dance might contribute to translation theory, particularly with regard to Shakespeare. Henrietta Bannerman has argued that dance is structured like a language,10 and while I would agree with this statement, I am less interested here in determining parallel structures between dance vocabularies and linguistic ones and more interested in looking at how dance illuminates other ways that “texts” come to create meaning. As The Guardian’s dance critic Judith Mackrell points out, “[Movement] can present only the most generalised of facts, the most obvious of symbols, the most stereotypical of narratives. It can’t analyse, it can’t argue, it can’t contextualize.”11 While Balanchine’s ballet stands as a clear counterargument to these charges, the very things that dance cannot communicate with precision sharpen its alternative affective strategies, or, as Mackrell goes on to say, “the lack of specificity in dance is also a source of its power and provocation.”12 I contend that this murky realm of ambiguity can shed new light on the relationship between Balanchine’s ballet and Shakespeare’s play, dance and Shakespeare, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream more generally. A few clarifications: first, Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, most accurately, a triangulation of (at least) three artistic mediums—​Shakespeare’s dramatic writing, Mendelssohn’s musical score, and Balanchine’s choreography. For the most

330   Amy Rodgers part, this chapter focuses only on the cross-​currents of influence between Shakespeare’s play and Balanchine’s ballet, in order to explore how language-​based media can be translated through movement-​based expression. While Mendelssohn’s score’s influence on Balanchine’s rendering of Dream cannot be underestimated, Balanchine’s ballet is actually a compilation of Mendelssohn’s score and myriad selections from his other works, as Mendelssohn’s Dream was not long enough for the full-​length ballet that Balanchine planned.13 As one biographer states, “It was the nearest [Balanchine] ever came to composing the music for a whole ballet himself,” and the choreographer claimed it took him nearly twenty years to compile the score.14 Second, while my argument here does not hinge on one particular theory of translation, I work more with hermeneutic approaches than instrumental ones. Whereas instrumental methods privilege fidelity to (hence reproduction of) the source material, the hermeneutic model, as defined by Lawrence Venuti, “treats translation as an interpretation of the source text whose form, meaning, and effect are seen as variable, subject to inevitable transformation during the translating process.”15 Despite the differences in the two approaches, both take linguistic translation as their predominant focus; I explore how the hermeneutic method helps elucidate the process of translation across media.

Tempo and Rhythm What is most difficult to translate from one language into another is the tempo of its style.16 —​Freidrich Nietzsche

Shakespeare’s Dream begins on a question of tempo, or more precisely, a difference of opinion on time’s speed. For the conquering, ardent bridegroom, Theseus, the four days’ time until his nuptials seem unbearably long, and he blames the heavenly spheres themselves for lagging: “how slow /​This old moon wanes!” (1.13).17 For the conquered bride, time moves quickly enough, perhaps even too quickly: “Four days will quickly steep themselves in night, /​Four nights will quickly dream away the time” (1.1.7–​8). By the conclusion of Act 4, however, it would seem that Theseus’s preferred tempo has triumphed, as the eternity of the “four days’ time” has passed seemingly in a single night. When Theseus finds the lovers asleep in the woods, harmoniously reunited (or, in the case of Demetrius, reoriented), he re-​establishes the mortal time frame. Having given Hermia until the “next new moon” (the four days to which he refers at the play’s opening) to make her choice between Demetrius and the nunnery, Theseus exclaims over the lovers’ sleeping forms, “is this not the day /​That Hermia should give answer of her choice?” (4.1.132–​133). That fairy time and mortal time do not align in Dream should hardly surprise; Shakespeare’s most fantastical green world18 also includes botanical hallucinogens, human/​animal hybrids, and interspecies desire. However, the play’s tempo follows an

“Thou Art Translated”    331 almost reverse symphonic structure (brisk [sonata-​allegro], slow [adagio], medium [minuet or scherzo], and fast [rondo]) in that it begins and ends with more measured, formal scenes (with the exception of the mechanicals’ scene at 1.2) that bookend the rapid, staccato pace of three forest acts. More significant in creating tempo is the multiplicity of its verse structure; indeed, Dream represents one of Shakespeare’s most prosodically diverse plays. On the whole, this heterogeneity has been discussed in connection with the play’s characters; while Shakespeare commonly uses blank verse for aristocratic characters and prose for “commoners,” Dream exhibits a more exacting schema. While the top brass all speak in blank verse, Theseus and Hippolyta’s language carries more gravitas, while Oberon and Titania’s breathe fantasy and lyricality. Upon entering the forest, the couples’ blank verse converts to rhymed couplets, emphasizing their enslavement to juvenile fantasies of love and the quarrels that accompany them. Puck and the other fairies speak in a mixture of rhymed tetrameter and pentameter, but Puck’s speech includes numerous trochaic lines and a spectacular jangle of tetrameter, trimeter, and dimeter lines when he finally puts all the lovers to sleep. While the mechanicals primarily speak in prose, in the final act’s play-​within-​a-​play they speak in rhymed pentameter lines and the courtiers speak in prose. The play’s prosodic structure emphasizes the dramatic action’s patterns in tempo (moderate/​fast/​moderate) in that the first and fifth act alternate between pentameter and prose (with the exception of Act 5, Scene 2, bride-​bed “blessing scene” conducted by Oberon, Titania, and Puck),19 while the middle three acts contain multiple metric variants. In addition, the forest acts (2–​4, and particularly Act 3) contain noticeable uses of repetitive and/​or punctuating rhetorical devices, such as stichomythia (dialogue consisting of alternating single lines), anaphora (the repetition of words or phrases in successive lines), and andiaplosis (the use of the final word of a preceding clause to begin the subsequent one), all of which serve to accelerate the middle of the play’s pacing. While Balanchine’s Dream begins in the space of the forest rather than the court, the ballet closely follows the comedy’s pacing. The dancing begins about a quarter of the way through Mendelssohn’s Overture, on the fairies’ theme. Despite the allegro vivace tempo (and the presence of a large number of small children dressed as fireflies), the opening possesses a kind of stately formality. In part, Balanchine achieves this effect by having the children’s corps do most of their movements at half-​time. As they run about the stage in circular patterns, they raise their arms up to a “V” and lower them back to their sides. With the exception of the opening, where they cross the stage in quick jetés and move their arms rapidly, the children raise and lower their arms every two counts, establishing a visual pattern that emphasizes a more stately tempo and mood. A similar timing pattern occurs for the adult dancers (a series of four “butterflies,” a lead butterfly, and Puck), in which they begin with rapid, petit allegro, steps, but soon after their entrance, their steps become more moderately paced and executed at half-​time. There are other ways that Balanchine mirrors the formality of Shakespeare’s opening. Unlike Frederick Ashton’s The Dream, which begins in the same place musically, Balanchine takes longer to delve into the play’s narrative20 and spends most of opening scene establishing the forest realm through a series of highly structured

332   Amy Rodgers movement patterns for those onstage. Butterflies and fireflies form two parallel groups (the adults upstage right, the children downstage left) to frame Puck’s entrance and opening dance. Upon completing it, Puck runs to the lead butterfly, and offers her his hand on bended knee. He then proceeds to lead her and her fairies-​in-​ waiting around in a semicircular procession, a version of which is found in nearly every court scene in classical ballet. Soon after, Oberon enters from upstage left with his retinue, and butterflies and fireflies scurry dutifully behind him, forming a phalanx and emphasizing the forest hierarchy. Whereas Ashton establishes the conflict between Oberon and Titania over the changeling boy through a playful, danced exchange, Balanchine has Titania (with full retinue) enter from the opposite side of the stage. She and Oberon exchange formal greetings and engage in their dispute solely through mime. Positioned as if they were conducting a formal parley, Oberon and Titania create a kind of tableau here (an effect heightened by the fact that they repeat the entire scene a second time at a faster tempo), emphasizing forms of convention and ceremony more commonly associated with the court than the forest. Balanchine’s green world may be wild, but like all things in classical ballet, it has a clear structural order and well-​entrenched hierarchy. In this case, despite the change in setting, it allows the ballet to retain something of the play’s opening tempo and procedural tone set by its focus on marriage rituals and the legal issues surrounding betrothal. While Balanchine’s Dream accelerates with less alacrity than Shakespeare’s, it still builds toward a climatic center. Scenes in Titania’s bower and Oberon’s kingdom serve more as dance opportunities than narrative necessities; however, additions such as Puck’s attempt to steal the changeling child from Titania’s bower and the two evocative solos for the female lovers (particularly Hermia’s stunning “lost in the woods” dance) keep the pace accelerating despite the multiple interludes. Whereas Shakespeare impels Dream’s pacing via language and stage action, Balanchine does so by increasing both the number and pace of the various characters’ entrances and exits. In one of the ballet’s most brilliant comic moments, Balanchine seems to mimic Shakespeare’s use of stichomythia via movement. With Lysander under the spell of the “love-​in-​idleness” flower and in hot pursuit of Helena, Balanchine constructs a series of exits and entrances for the lovers that take the form of call-​and-​response dialogue. After a brief (and somewhat violent) pas de deux between Helena and Lysander, Helena wrenches away from him, staring at him in disbelief. Lysander reaches plaintively in her direction, arms outstretched and palms up. Helena responds with a disgusted, downward-​slashing, “ugh, go away” movement and runs offstage. As she leaves, Hermia comes up behind Lysander, and makes the same pleading gesture he has just extended toward Helena. Lysander turns and responds with the “go away” movement. Covering her eyes in despair, Hermia starts to run offstage as Demetrius runs past her, catching her attention and making her turn around. He mimes “here I  am,” and Hermia dismisses him with the disgusted swoosh. Immediately after, Helena reappears onstage, runs up to Demetrius, and practically encircles him with the supplicating

“Thou Art Translated”    333 motion; without pause, he gives her the wave-​off. This entire sequence occurs in ten seconds of stage time, its velocity serving to heighten the comedic pitch and spur the action’s pacing. Shakespeare also pushes Dream’s pace and adds to its ataxia at its midpoint (Acts 3.1–​3.3) by intermingling forest and mortal creatures indiscriminately and bookending 3.2’s longer, more stately blank verse exchanges between Helena and Hermia with the rapid-​fire dialogue and high silliness of 3.1 and 3.3 (Bottom’s transformation and the swordplay-​chasing hysteria/​falling asleep of the lovers). The play’s midpoint follows an allegro-​moderato-​allegro linguistic pattern that helps heighten its uncanny, breathless feeling and, via counterpoint, suggests the more tenebrous and poignant side of the play’s narrative. Set off by the light-​footed speech rhythms of 3.1 and 3.3, Helena’s heartfelt expression of her friendship with Hermia shines with an incandescent depth that tempers the madcap pacing for a moment and reminds the audience that, even if the lover’s romantic tangle is righted, certain ephemeral yet constitutive bonds will be sundered forever: “We, Hermia, like two artificial gods /​Have with our needles created both one flower, /​Both warbling of one song, both in one key. /​As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds /​Had been incorporate” (3.2.204–​209). Helena’s speech also marks the point where the lovers stop speaking in rhymed couplets and return to blank verse, another alteration that slows the scene’s rhythm and gives it greater weight. With the lovers’ return to rhymed couplets in the subsequent scene (3.3), an “eye of the storm” effect occurs, one that provides a center for the play’s centripetal momentum. Although Balanchine’s Dream cannot execute this rhythmic patterning via speech, it follows a similar tempo via a different narrative path. The ballet’s comic and poignant centerpiece, Bottom’s transformation and Titania and Bottom’s pas de deux, is flanked by Hermia’s desperate “lost in the woods” solo and Hippolyta’s bellicose entrance.21 While following an obverse tonal pattern (dark/​light/​dark) to that found in Shakespeare’s play (light/​dark/​light), Balanchine’s Dream parallels the play’s rhythmic structure. Hermia’s solo, danced to the turbulent, swirling Intermezzo, is quick and anxious; Hippolyta’s (set to the Overture to Mendelssohn’s Walpurgisnacht) propulsive and menacing. Situated between them and choreographed to Mendelssohn’s most transcendent adagio in Dream (the same music Ashton uses for Oberon and Titania’s reconciliation), Titania and Bottom’s pas de deux covers the terrain between ridiculous and sublime. Completely ludicrous moments, such as Bottom breaking the fourth wall to stare pleadingly at the audience for guidance regarding what to do with the lovely creature swooning in his arms, interlace with genuinely touching ones, such as Titania’s tender coaxing of her beloved with a sheaf of tasty wheat. Both rhythmically and structurally, however, their pas de deux serves a similar function to Helena’s monologue, in that it offers a complex emotional cynosure that serves to remind the audience that the forest’s chaotic universe is tethered, however provisionally, to the mortal world’s fragile and often irrational emotional structures, even as it transcends other, seemingly insurmountable metaphysical ones, such as time.

334   Amy Rodgers

Structure and Thematics The radical generosity of the translator . . . concentrates to a philosophically dramatic degree the human bias towards seeing the world as symbolic, as constituted of relations in which “this” can stand for “that,” and must in fact be able to do so if there are to be meanings and structures.22 —​George Steiner

While scholars agree that Shakespeare drew from numerous sources to construct Dream’s plot,23 one influence that has yet to be mentioned is Plato’s Symposium. Rather than providing source material for the play’s narrative, the Symposium offers insight into the play’s structural logic, in that Dream is constructed along a principle that Plato calls “the double nature.” A dialogue on the nature of eros, the Symposium takes place at a dinner party held at the home of Athens’s leading tragic poet, Agathon. Each of the distinguished guests presents his exegesis upon (or encomium to) eros; the show-​stopper comes when the comedic dramatist Aristophanes presents his offering via mythological parable: First you must learn what Human Nature was in the beginning and what has happened to it since because long ago our nature was not what it is now, but very different. There were three kinds of human beings, that’s my first point—​not two as there are now, male and female. In addition to these, there was a third, a combination of those two; its name survives, though the kind itself has vanished. At that time, you see, the word “androgynous” really meant something; a form made up of male and female elements, that now there’s nothing but the word, and that’s used as an insult. My second point is that the shape of each human being was completely round, with back and sides in a circle; they had four hands each, as many legs as hands, and two faces, exactly alike, on a rounded neck. Between the two faces, which were on opposite sides, was one head with four ears. There were two sets of sexual organs, and everything else was the way you’d imagine it from what I’ve told you. They walked upright, as we do now, whatever direction they wanted. And when they set out to run fast, they thrust out all their eight limbs . . . and spun rapidly, the way gymnasts do cartwheels. . . . In strength and power, therefore, they were terrible, and they had great ambitions. They made an attempt on the gods. . . . 24

As punishment for their arrogance, Zeus splits them into halves, rendering them physically compromised and emotionally disabled: “Each of us, then, is a ‘matching half ’ of a human whole . . . and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him.”25 While this form of self-​realization plays an obvious role in Dream’s narrative, the circular image Aristophanes uses to articulate “completeness” also forms the foundation of the play’s architecture. Indeed, Dream could be seen as hanging on a spherical armature—​orb-​like, where most major components have their corresponding (or complementary) entities. Rhymed couplets abound, as do repeated and/​or echoing words

“Thou Art Translated”    335 and phrases. Civilized Athens has its undomesticated wilderness, Theseus has his Hippolyta, Hermia her Lysander, Helena (eventually) her Demetrius, Oberon reclaims his Titania, night has its day, conflict has resolution, dream merges with reality. The unyielding judicial world that begins the play has its joyful, Bakhtinian expression in the theatrical interlude that ends it. But whereas Shakespeare’s play contains characters that complicate these parallels (for example, Egeus, Puck, the changeling boy, Bottom, and the rustics), Balanchine’s rendition fully embraces a relentless momentum toward an integrity articulated through the unity of opposites. Although Balanchine claimed to have had an affinity for Dream since performing in it as a child, one can surmise that the play’s symmetrical logic drew him to it. Choreographically speaking, Balanchine loved few things more than patterns: crystalline, symmetrical, kaleidoscopic. One gets as much (if not more) from seeing many of Balanchine’s works from the cheap seats as from the orchestra, and his unique ability to create emotionally illuminating and eloquent works via “plotless” or abstract ballets hinged, in large part, on his ability to manipulate patterns encompassing stage space, dancing bodies, and emptiness. While amply resourced with elaborate sets and stage machinery, Balanchine’s Dream is no exception; in many ways, its symmetry eclipses even that of Shakespeare’s play. Certainly, the rule of “double nature” functions more exactingly in the ballet. Puck dances with the Butterfly, and they perform the opening “call” that brings Oberon to their forest gathering together. Oberon and Titania occupy distinct spaces, demarcated partly by lighting and set (Oberon’s grove is bathed in violet-​ blue shadow and chiaroscuro lighting; Titania’s bower shimmers in rose and gold and has a giant cockle-​shell throne as its centerpiece) and partly by retinue: Oberon rules the firefly-​children and butterflies, and Titania reigns over a full complement of twelve fairy maidens. Bottom finds both a choreographic and typological polarity in Balanchine’s addition of Titania’s Cavalier, a near-​allegorical representation of chivalry who fills the role of Titania’s partner—​the setting for her brilliance—​during the first bower scene. Unlike Ashton’s Dream, where Titania and Oberon’s reconciliation constitutes the longest pas de deux in the ballet by far, Balanchine’s version never has them dance together as a couple. Rather, Titania’s partners consist of her Cavalier (an entity without a character, history, or name, rendered purely through dance) and Bottom (a “character” or nondancing role, who embodies Dream’s most robust character). While Titania’s two partners can be read as the expression of her dual subjectivity—​incandescent, regal cipher and irrepressible, sensual goddess—​they also intensify Dream’s fascination with love’s polarities: chaste devotion and bestial lust. Doubleness also permeates the play’s physical and ideological levels, however. Most obviously, the city/​forest binary exists as both opposing forces to and distorted mirrors of one another. Equally significant is the parallel between the judicial demesne of the play’s opening, where the case of Hermia’s betrothal is played out, and the concluding wedding entertainment put on for the newlyweds’ pleasure. The structural corollary between these episodes begins at the level of placement, as neither one actually introduces nor concludes the play; they are instead bookended by the shorter interludes of the Theseus’s and Hippolyta’s Act I discussion of their wedding and the concluding

336   Amy Rodgers bride-​bed blessing conferred by Oberon, Titania, and Puck. Ideologically, the grim patriarchal theater that adjudicates Hermia’s possible fortunes (marry Demetrius or either “die the death or . . . abjure /​For ever the society of men” [1.1.65–​66]) finds its “other half ” in the ludic, amateur one that renders Pyramus and Thisbe comedic fare. Both scenarios feature defiant daughters and star-​crossed lovers; both require the liminal, even magical space of the forest/​stage to cause the tragic trajectory to swerve toward comedic resolution. And, both the lovers’ disentanglement and the bungled play require (or at least receive) Theseus’s imprimatur: he overrides Egeus’s patriarchal authority (“Egeus, I will overbear your will; /​For in the temple, by and by, with us /​These couples shall eternally be knit” [4.1.177–​170]) and provides the players with a patronly benediction: “No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse” (5.1.342–​343). The three primary arenas in which Shakespeare’s Dream plays out (judicial, natural, theatrical) are articulated differently in Balanchine’s version. Much as the ballet condenses the play’s plot into a single act, it also refigures the play’s three primary microcosms as a duality rather than a trinity, in that only the natural (forest) and aristocratic (court) are represented. The play’s manifold social tensions give way to the ballet’s aesthetic ones—​forest and court are not so much distinct metaphysical and ideological entities that exist as both reflection and antipode of each other as two distinct but deeply imbricated communicative balletic modes—​narrative and neoclassical. It is difficult to say whether Balanchine’s “court” more resembles the legislative seat of Theseus’s power in which the play begins or the aristocratic space of leisure in which it ends; my own view is that it is an amalgam of the two. Considered through an aesthetic lens, the ballet’s second act reinforces a kind of geographical system or “law” in its reliance on symmetrical and formal patterns as a means of creating aesthetic meaning. In addition, it echoes the class designations referenced throughout the play, but in Balanchine’s Dream, these deeply entrenched social hierarchies become imbricated with professional ones. Unlike the first act, where schoolchildren, corps dancers, and principals intermingle in a relatively egalitarian fashion, the second act keeps everyone in their proper place. The three primary “wedding” couples (Hippolyta/​Theseus, Hermia/​Lysander, and Helena/​Demetrius), roles usually danced by company soloists and principals, lead eighteen female and eight male corps dancers, who provide the introduction and framing for the leads and form filigreed patterns that emphasize trios. As the processional “Wedding March” concludes (the corps dancers kneel as the three lead couples weave through them, graciously inclining their heads in acknowledgment) the corps forms two vertical lines at stage right and left and the principal couples pose far downstage in a horizontal line and facing away from the audience. Suddenly, six new couples enter for the divertissement—​a fifteen-​minute “ballet within a ballet,” with three full movements and consisting of pure dance. Set to selections from Mendelssohn’s String Symphony No. 9, and led by a lead couple (commonly performed by two of the company’s highest-​ranking dancers), this plotless, characterless interlude has been seen by some critics as unnecessary, even dull.26 Whereas Jennifer Homans claims that Balanchine “knew he couldn’t convey in dance what Shakespeare’s ‘mechanicals’ achieve in their play-​within-​a-​play,”27 I am less convinced that he had any interest in attempting

“Thou Art Translated”    337 a dance version of the mechanicals’ play. Structurally and aesthetically, the second act is a perfect miniature of Balanchine’s most glorious non-​narrative classical masterpieces, such as Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 (1941), Symphony in C (1947), and Allegro Brillante (1956). In creating a second act that offers an homage to ballet’s expressive potential and affective potency, Balanchine actually parallels Shakespeare’s tribute to his own medium—​the theater—​in a far more profound way than if he had tried to render Dream’s final act via dance. Even critics who find fault with Balanchine’s second act, however, agree that its central pas de deux attains a level of transcendence equal to any of Shakespeare’s most sublime passages. Danced by the divertissement’s lead couple, the ballet’s only featured dancers without a character designation, the pas de deux has long drawn critics to speculate how, precisely, Balanchine imagined its connection to Shakespeare’s play. Alastair Macauley links the pas to Theseus’s meditation on the powers of imagination (“And as imagination bodies forth /​The form of things unknown, the poet’s pen /​Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing /​A local habitation and a name” [5.1.114–​117]), and Homans to Bottom’s convoluted take on Paul’s 1 Corinthians 2.9 (“The eye of man has not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was” (4.1.207–​210).28 However, it seems equally indebted to Demetrius’s musing on love after he awakens from his night in the forest: But, my good lord, I wot not by what power But by some power it is—​my love to Hermia, Melted as the snow, seems to me now As the remembrance of some idle gaud Which in my childhood I did dote upon; And all the faith, the virtue of my heart, The object and pleasure of mine eye, Is only Helena. (4.1.162–​169)

Articulated through blank verse instead of the rhymed couplets he uses for the play’s majority, this passage testifies to Demetrius’s newfound awareness of the gulf that divides juvenile and mature love. Comparing his former adoration of Hermia to the insubstantial snow and foolish childhood playthings, Demetrius shifts his discourse from talk of love and possession to that of “faith and virtue.” Furthermore, unlike Hermia, whom Demetrius imagined an entity outside of him that he desired to attain, Helena here is articulated as an entity that already constitutes essential parts of his being: “And all the faith, the virtue of my heart.” If the play ultimately spends little time on articulating mature love, it remains the telos toward which it aspires. It is also the concept upon which Balanchine draws to construct the second act pas. Beginning with the couple facing each other at center stage (the man facing upstage in tendu effacé derrière, his right arm folded across his chest so that his right hand touches his left shoulder; the woman facing downstage and in tendu croisé derrière, her arms raised slightly at her sides and

338   Amy Rodgers head tilted slightly away from her partner), the pas de deux’s opening offers only a hint of intimacy to come, as the dancers’ opening pose conveys demure modesty and a touch of bashfulness. This effect is heightened by Mendelssohn’s adagio for the String Symphony No. 9, which evokes a sense of delicate, evanescent awakening. Step sequences, such as the diagonal of subtle lifts for the woman in which she does three sets of petit cabrioles en avant traveling forward and two cabrioles derrière traveling back the other way, suggests marriage’s longer (if idealized) trajectory, one immortalized in a phrase from the traditional Christian wedding vows: “for better and for worse; for richer and poorer, ’til death do us part.” Other steps, such as a long, partnered arabesque promenade in which the dancers change points of contact (or holds) numerous times hints at life’s vicissitudes, which hopefully their bond will help them weather. Like the play (and the ballet’s first act), the pas contains numerous parallelisms: almost every movement sequence repeats, with small alterations; for example, the traveling diagonal sequence appears again in the pas de deux’s second half, but this time, the ballerina bourrées under her partner’s arms as they take hands overhead and is lifted backward (only once this time) in a low temps de fleche. An echo of the couple’s opening pose occurs at the midpoint, but this time both dancers stand upstage left on the diagonal, facing away from the audience. Unlike the opening, they do not face each other, but stand side by side in tendu effacé derrière, their back arms lowered and their hands touching, their front arms reaching upward toward empyrean heights. And, in what is perhaps a symbolic echo of the three wedding couples, the central pas triangulates three versions of the opening pose—​one at the beginning, one at the middle, and one at the end. If the first incarnation shows the couple in their first, halting steps toward intimacy and the second their growing affinity, the final pose suggests love fully-​f ledged. In the pas de deux’s final moments, the ballerina développés into a supported arabesque, then tips forward slowly, until, at an impossible angle, she turns and faces her partner, who lowers her slowly backward and lunges so that she reclines over his bent left leg and wraps partially around his body. It is on this pose that the pas de deux ends, with the two dancers intertwined so that the lines of their bodies are nearly indistinguishable. Less sensual than divine, the final pose physically invokes a conclusion similar to the one that Demetrius reaches: love fully fledged is less about finding one’s other half than about the slow, patient intertwining of two individuals into one life. Whereas Shakespeare’s play ends with the married couples exiting to their respective wedding nights and therefore at the threshold of their lives together, Balanchine’s ballet traces afterimages of the idealized union the comedy promises—​a utopian future far more readily expressed by dance than drama. If, as Walter Benjamin claims, “a translation issues from the original—​not so much from its life as from its afterlife,”29 then Balanchine’s Dream provides a compelling example: not only does the ballet continue and extend the play’s historical legacy, it also expands upon one Dream’s most significant metaphysical and affective concerns, ones whose meaning spills over language’s—​e ven Shakespeare’s language’s—​b oundaries.

“Thou Art Translated”    339

Shakespeare without Words At the beginning of translation is the word.30 —​Jacques Derrida

One of the more widespread anecdotes about Balanchine and Dream involves his claim to know the play by heart in Russian.31 Regardless of the veracity of this tale, Balanchine likely first encountered the play in its Russian translation, and there is no mention in any account that he ever read the play in English. One might ask whether much of my analysis of the affinities between Shakespeare’s and Balanchine’s Dream might not depend on the translation that Balanchine knew and internalized. And indeed, as I claimed at the beginning of the chapter, the translator’s labor here undergoes near-​ complete erasure—​no record of the translation Balanchine read and loved exists, and none of his biographers mentions it. That crucial intercessor’s work, a source that may have had as significant an influence as Mendelssohn’s score in creating Balanchine’s Shakespeare ballet, remains unknown. That Balanchine’s first experience with Shakespeare’s play came via translation carries a particular significance for this chapter beyond providing a conveniently coincidental place to land. For, regardless of the varied perspectives on translation—​what it is, how it should be accomplished, and for whom—​only a small minority extend its purview beyond the linguistic realm; as Derrida states, in an ironic paraphrase of the Johannine gospel’s first line, “At the beginning of translation is the word.” Even among those few who do suggest that translation might include forms of expression that transgress strictly linguistic boundaries, such as Roman Jakobson, who introduces the concept of “intersemiotic translation,”32 few scholars have delved deeply into how the transfer from linguistic sign systems to nonlinguistic and nonverbal sign systems might function. After all, Balanchine’s ballet constitutes a paradigmatic example of multiphase intersemiotic translation; first, in that Mendelssohn renders Shakespeare’s play through musical signs; then, Balanchine narrates Mendelssohn’s (and Shakespeare’s) art through the language of classical ballet. Studies of how these intersemiotic translations are accomplished (formal studies of pattern and syntax; speech, musical, and kinetic rhythms, and the semiotics of movement) seem one of the brave new worlds not only of translation studies, but also of dance scholarship, a field still much neglected by the academy. What then is gained by considering Balanchine’s ballet as translation (rather than an adaptation) of Shakespeare’s play? My argument here has claimed that translation offers a valuable hermeneutic for better understanding the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and the ballets based on them. First, whereas adaptation studies tend to focus on the “genius” of the adapter (whether stage directors, film directors, or even Shakespeare himself), translation asks us to think more about how a given work travels through history, or what Benjamin calls its “afterlife.” Specifically, translation calls for a detailed study of what elements of the “original” work are sustained in its retellings and which

340   Amy Rodgers are altered to account for changing cultural, historical, or, as is the case in this chapter, aesthetic contexts. Second, as a hermeneutic, translation looks beyond an assessment of similarities and difference between the original and its progeny. Assuming a deep affinity between an original and its offshoots, translation calls for a more patient and penetrating inquiry into what, how, and why any given work responds to and takes from its progenitor. In the case of Shakespeare and dance, it calls for looking past narrative coherence and exactitude (something dance can never deliver as fully as language can) to discover and articulate what dance can and does do for Shakespeare’s works and their extensive and prolific afterlives.

Notes 1. Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Language and Words,” in Theories of Translation:  An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, eds. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 33. 2. George Balanchine, New York City Ballet Playbill, 1973. 3. The ballet premiered in 1966; this note was for the 1973 production. 4. Balanchine choreographed only a few full-​length narrative ballets in his career:  The Nutcracker (1954), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962), Don Quixote (1965), and Coppelia (1974). However, he made numerous ballets loosely based on classical mythology and biblical, folk, and literary narrative, such as Apollo, Orpheus, Prodigal Son, The Firebird, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, and Noah and the Flood. 5. “Translation” is hardly de rigeur in adaptation studies’ current parlance, in large part because the term implies (some might say privileges) an original entity upon which subsequent linguistic incarnations are based. My own use of the term here seeks to challenge that order, if not in terms of genesis (that is, certainly Shakespeare’s play precedes Balanchine’s ballet), in terms of influence. 6. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, trans. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 69–​70. 7. José Ortega y Gasset, “The Misery and Splendor of Translation,” in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, eds. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 93. 8. Alan Brissenden, “Shakespeare and Dance:  Dissolving Boundaries,” in Shakespeare Without Boundaries: Essays in Honor of Dieter Miehl, eds. Christa Jansohn, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Stanley Wells (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 96. 9. For example, in his review of the ballet’s premiere, New York Times critic John Martin noted, “If the body of the work is Shakespearean in its essentials, its tone is not.” In a 1966 review, critic Clive Barnes claims that “Balanchine has not ignored Shakespeare, merely bypassed him.” More recently, Alastair Macaulay has said that Balanchine’s ballet “was often pushing away from Shakespeare,” and dance history scholar Jennifer Homans mentions the ballet’s opening as “a sharp departure from Shakespeare’s play.” Later, in response to the ballet’s second act, Homans states that “we can feel Balanchine straining against Shakespeare’s consummate skill.” See John Martin, “A Gala Premiere: Balanchine’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Is Full of Originality and Invention,” New  York Times, January 18, 1962; Clive Barnes, “Balanchine’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’: Love Allegory Passes by Shakespeare,”

“Thou Art Translated”    341 New York Times, April 9, 1966; Alastair Macaulay, “New York City Ballet: With Heartfelt Pas de Deux, in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ ” New York Times, June 3, 2015, https://​ www.nytimes.com/​2015/​06/​04/​arts/​dance/​review-​new-​york-​city-​ballet-​with-​heartfelt-​ pas-​de-​deux-​in-​a-​midsummer-​nights-​dream.html, accessed December 31, 2015; Jennifer Homans, “In Balanchine’s Beautiful Forest,” The New York Review of Books, March 4, 2015, https://​www.nybooks.com/​articles/​2015/​03/​05/​balanchines-​beautiful-​forest/​, accessed December 31, 2015. 10. Henrietta Bannerman, “Is Dance a Language: Movement, Meaning, and Communication,” Dance Research 32, no. 1 (2014): 65. 11. Judith Mackrell, “The Power to Provoke,” The Guardian (London, UK) June 4, 2004, http://​ www.theguardian.com/​stage/​2004/​jun/​05/​dance.music, accessed January 13, 2016. Also quoted in Bannerman, “Is Dance a Language.” 12. Mackrell, “The Power to Provoke.” 13. Balanchine augmented Mendelssohn’s 1843 score with the overtures to Son and Stranger (1829), The Beautiful Melusine (1835), The First Walpurgis Nacht (1843), Athalie (1854), as well as music from the String Symphony No. 9 in C Minor (1823). 14. Richard Buckle, George Balanchine, Ballet Master (New York: Random House, 1988), 220. 15. Lawrence Venuti, “Genealogies of Translation Theory:  Jerome” boundary 2 37, no. 3 (2010): 5. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Helen Zimmer (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 41. 17. All quotes from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream taken from The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd. ed., eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). 18. This term was coined by Northrop Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 182–​184. 19. The blessing sequence’s rhyme scheme alternates between abab tetrameter lines and rhymed tetrameter couplets. In terms of its speaking order, it follows a palindromic structure: Puck speaks the first and final (fifth) sequences (if one includes the Epilogue); Oberon speaks the second and penultimate (fourth) ones; and Titania’s blessing occupies the medial (or third) position. 20. For example, Ashton has Oberon enter thirty seconds into the dancing, whereas Balanchine has about five minutes of dancing before Oberon enters. Subsequently, Oberon and Titania’s quarrel over the changeling child also occurs noticeably later than Ashton’s portrayal of the same. 21. In a major narrative detour from Shakespeare’s play, Hippolyta is not captured by Theseus; instead, he encounters her hunting in the forest, and proposes to her on bended knee. 22. George Steiner, After Babel:  Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1975), 296. 23. In the Norton Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt cites Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, and Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, 1039); Anne Barton, in The Riverside Shakespeare, also mentions Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Apuleius’s comedy The Golden Ass. See The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 251. 24. The Symposium, trans. and eds. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis; Cambridge: Hackett, 1989), 25–​26. 25. The Symposium.

342   Amy Rodgers 26. For example, a New York Times critic apparently found the divertissement, with the exception of the central pas, “monotonous,” and Homans calls the second act “a letdown.” See Buckle, George Balanchine, 224, and Homans, “In Balanchine’s Beautiful Forest,” n.p. 27. Homans, “In Balanchine’s Beautiful Forest,” n.p. 28. Macaulay, “New York City Ballet,” and Homans, “In Balanchine’s Beautiful Forest,” n.p. 29. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 71. 30. Jacques Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 370. 31. Both Homans and Buckle offer a version of this story. See also Susan Reiter, “Balanchine and Ashton Take Shakespeare’s ‘Midsummer’ to the Dance,” Backstage, June 1, 2012, https://​w ww.backstage.com/​advice-​for-​actors/​dancers/​balanchine-​and-​ashton-​take-​ shakespeares-​midsummer-​to-​the-​dance/​, accessed January 29, 2016. 32. Roman Jakobson, “On the Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in On Translation, ed. Robert Brower (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 232.

Bibliography Bannerman, Henrietta. “Is Dance a Language: Movement, Meaning, and Communication.” Dance Research 32, no. 1 (2014): 65. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Hannah Arendt. New  York:  Schocken Books, 1968. Brissenden, Alan. “Shakespeare and Dance: Dissolving Boundaries.” In Shakespeare Without Boundaries: Essays in Honor of Dieter Miehl, edited by Christa Jansohn, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Stanley Wells, 92–​106. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011. Buckle, Richard. George Balanchine, Ballet Master. New York: Random House, 1988. Garis, Robert. Following Balanchine. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1995. Levine, Laura. “Balanchine and Titania:  Love and the Elision of History in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production 65 (2013): 110–​120. Schulte, Rainer, and John Biguenet. Theories of Translation:  An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Taper, Bernard. Balanchine. New York; London: Harper & Row, 1960.

Chapter 15

“ Hildings and Ha rl ots ” Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet Lynsey McCulloch

We must have you dance.1 When a ballet succeeds in exploring literary material, rather than just defining it in dance form, it’s because the choreographer has re-​created the material.2

On February 9, 1965, the premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s full-​length dance adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to a score by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev took place at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Performed by the Royal Ballet and starring its celebrated principals—​Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev—​the production was met with forty-​three curtain calls and was hailed by critics as a milestone for MacMillan as a choreographer.3 It was filmed by Paul Czinner in 1966 with the original cast—​the first of several films of the work—​and remains a mainstay of the Royal Ballet’s repertoire, in addition to being performed by major dance companies around the world, including American Ballet Theatre, the Royal Swedish Ballet, the Ballet of La Scala, Milan, and the National Ballet of Japan. Its enduring success is all the more remarkable when one considers the sheer number of dance works based on the same play. The first dance adaptation of Romeo and Juliet was (purportedly) Eusebio Luzzi’s 1785 production, performed in Venice. Many more productions followed, and the love story became a popular choice from Shakespeare’s canon for dance companies in the twentieth century. Major choreographers—​including Leonid Lavrovsky, Frederick Ashton, John Cranko, John Neumeier, and Mark Morris—​adapted the play, with varying degrees of success. But even the most successful of these works struggles to match the reputation and public approval of MacMillan’s 1965 Romeo and Juliet. It is, one might argue, the archetypal Shakespearean ballet.

344   Lynsey McCulloch Based on this iconicity, MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet would seem to be the ideal model for examining a successful synthesis of Shakespeare and dance. However, a straightforward mapping of the text onto the dance work, in which we look for incontrovertible evidence of the play’s influence, cannot do this translation process justice. In using Shakespeare’s drama as the template—​identifying what MacMillan retains from the source-​text and what he discards—​we inevitably make the assumption that the play is more important to the discussion than the ballet. More useful in this context is a closer look at MacMillan’s additions to the world of the play, additions with no apparent basis or equivalence in the text. It may feel counterintuitive, particularly to the literary critic, to adopt an approach that neglects the Shakespearean source material, but it is perhaps the only method capable of challenging the dominance of the text within scholarship and producing an honest appraisal of adaptive work. This chapter uses the figures of the three harlots in MacMillan’s ballet—​characters that do not appear in Shakespeare’s play—​to explore the real, practical, and pragmatic business of adaptation. The harlots, typically represented by soloists or first soloists within the ballet companies, appear prominently in the work’s ensemble scenes. As non-​Shakespearean characters, they embody the gap between the source-​text and MacMillan’s translation. This is a gap worth examining, offering an insight into the creative afterlife of a Shakespearean text and the infidelities that constitute—​I would argue—​the success of any adaptation. The fact that MacMillan did not “invent” the figures of the three harlots—​they appeared earlier in John Cranko’s production of Romeo and Juliet—​ need not diminish the exercise; in fact, it only emphasizes the importance of these three characters. Why MacMillan followed Cranko’s lead in this addition and how he adapted the figures for his own purposes are key questions here. By focusing on the three harlots, we can consider issues of authenticity, originality, and the autonomy of the choreographer. This approach also helps us to identify the process at work within the translation of text into movement, a process that challenges any sense of a simple transfer of narrative or character. By approaching the play—​and its ballet adaptation—​laterally, it is possible to enlarge our view of the two works and to recognize the misconceptions they are routinely subject to. MacMillan’s three harlots, despite being absent from Shakespeare’s play, teach us how to reassess it. First appearing in a section of the ballet score labeled by Prokofiev as “The Street Awakens,” the harlots inhabit Verona’s public spaces and animate them. They draw our attention, not to the play’s romantic intimacy, but to its earthy radicalism. As they redirect our gaze and revise our understanding of the play, the three harlots also illuminate the works of their choreographer. Certainly, this is an abstruse approach. Not only does it refuse to accept Shakespeare’s play as MacMillan’s principal reference point, but it also overlooks the source of the ballet’s success, namely its series of memorable pas de deux. Instead, it focuses on the ensemble scenes in which MacMillan’s three harlots appear; but, in doing so, it may offer an unanticipated way back into the text. Entering the play through its choreographic lineage deepens our understanding of a script often neglected by prominent literary

“Hildings and Harlots”    345 critics. Romeo and Juliet has historically not inspired the same level of literary criticism as Shakespeare’s other tragedies. Naomi Conn Liebler considers this lack of scholarly attention: Even critical neglect can seem a kind of commentary:  in the twentieth century several important critics were not moved to write about this play:  A. C.  Bradley, Stanley Cavell, Jan Kott, T. S. Eliot, Kenneth Burke, Bertolt Brecht, and we are left to wonder why.4

Critics have rather been moved to sneer, I would suggest, at the play’s popularity with the public and its status as love story. Dance writers have been no less critical. Clive Barnes’s remark that “Romeo and Juliet is a natural for ballet” because it is “well enough known for people not to have to worry about the details”5 suggests that the play is suitable for translation into a movement vocabulary only capable of accommodating a linear plot and a universal theme. Unwittingly perhaps, it is a remark guaranteed to undermine both the literary and the dance work. Despite the assumed thematic universality and resultant popular appeal of Shakespeare, Kenneth MacMillan produced Romeo and Juliet not as a conduit for Shakespeare’s message, but as a reflection of his own choreographic concerns. Dance and music critic Andrew Porter, writing for the New Yorker in 1973, speaks of the “words just below the surface of the dance” in MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. The following discussion challenges this notion of the play as a firm foundation for the ballet and looks instead to disentangle the adaptation from the source. It is an approach that values correlation—​what these two associated but independent works tell us about each other and about themselves—​over causation, and the privileging of source material over adaptive creations.

Adaptation versus Source The first evidence we have of Kenneth MacMillan’s nonreliance on the Shakespearean source for Romeo and Juliet is the ballet’s disregard for narrative detail. The complexities of Juliet’s feigned death and the failed effort to inform Romeo of her intentions are passed over. While one might attribute MacMillan’s cavalier attitude here to the play’s ubiquity within English-​speaking culture, as Clive Barnes does, I would suggest that MacMillan is instead producing a version of the plot in which these details are irrelevant and theater-​goers’ prior knowledge of the play unnecessary. Indeed, MacMillan’s larger body of work hints at the use of literature and literary lives as initial inspiration often followed by a pronounced departure from the source material. His 1978 work for the Stuttgart Ballet—​My Brother, My Sisters—​was originally prompted by MacMillan’s interest in the lives of the Brontë family; it became an abstracted and disturbingly psychological study of childhood rivalry, incest, and fratricide. As MacMillan said himself of the work in an interview with John Higgins for The Times, “I read something,

346   Lynsey McCulloch see something, forget it and then after an interval—​four years in this case—​it turns up again and is transformed into dance.”6 The transformation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into dance—​unlike MacMillan’s response to the lives of Branwell Brontë and his sisters—​retains the play’s basic narrative, but the choreographer’s disrespect for the plot’s intricacies points to a similar autonomy of vision. Of course, Sergei Prokofiev’s music dictates much of the ballet’s action. It functions, one could argue, as both score and libretto. But there remains room for creative maneuver—​the three harlots, for example, are not specified in Prokofiev’s score—​and MacMillan makes the most of the space between text, score, and ballet.7 While MacMillan simplifies the plot of the play and removes several named servant figures from the action, he simultaneously adds the character of Rosaline—​never seen, but passionately eulogized by Romeo in Shakespeare’s drama—​and the figures of the three harlots to the ballet. The first choreography set to Prokofiev’s score, by Leonid Lavrovsky for the Kirov and Bolshoi Ballets in 1940 and 1946, respectively, produced marketplace scenes in line with the composer’s colorful ensemble sequences. These were, as Julie Sanders observes, “realized through familiar folkloric tunes—​waltzes, minuets, tarantellas and gavottes”8 and they neatly conformed to the balletic tradition of divertissements—​dances separate from the work’s principal narrative and often embracing a national, or folkloric, flavor. As ballet developed during the twentieth century and embraced naturalism in some quarters, the desire to differentiate characters—​ even among the corps de ballet—​became more pronounced. The three harlots are evidence of this trend and allow MacMillan to develop Lavrovsky’s rather generic ensemble work. They also reflect, as Brandon Shaw maintains, MacMillan’s eagerness “to bring realism to the stage to counter the Royal Ballet’s long engagement with what he considered fantastic plots and affected expressions of a limited emotional palate.”9 The harlots take part in the ballet’s marketplace scenes, interacting most markedly with Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio. Performed by Royal Ballet soloists with a gift for character acting, the harlots stand out immediately as they sit languidly on the stairs at the back of Nicholas Georgiadis’s set among the bustle of Italian street life. They take the lead in several group dances for Verona’s townspeople, but clearly have an antagonistic relationship with the women of the community and can be seen touting for business from traders and passersby. In his depiction of the town square, MacMillan looks not to Shakespeare directly, but to Franco Zeffirelli and his 1960 production of Romeo and Juliet for the Old Vic. MacMillan’s biographer Jann Parry notes his appropriation of a passing wedding celebration from Zeffirelli’s work and, more generally, MacMillan’s ballet echoes the Italian director’s representation of the energetic but edgy civic community that forms the backdrop to the lovers’ demise.10 Macmillan was not only indebted to Franco Zeffirelli for the verisimilitude of his ensemble scenes; he was also heavily influenced by the ballet adaptation of Romeo and Juliet mounted by John Cranko in Venice for the company of La Scala in 1958 and subsequently revised in 1962 for the Stuttgart Ballet. A  former colleague and friend of MacMillan, Cranko created the roles of the three harlots presumably as a means of enlivening the ballet’s several crowd scenes. MacMillan’s adoption of the harlot

“Hildings and Harlots”    347 figures may seem derivative and indeed threatens to derail this chapter’s discussion of MacMillan’s creative autonomy, but it is important to recognize the iterative nature of ballet. Not unlike Shakespeare himself, choreographers build openly upon the work of others. Cranko, and before him Lavrovsky, became an important reference point for MacMillan—​perhaps more important than Shakespeare, especially when one considers the early modern dramatist’s own borrowings from Arthur Brooke’s 1562 The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, itself an English translation of a French translation of an Italian novella.11 Lavrovksy himself looked toward full-​length and non-​Shakespearean classical ballet for inspiration. His townswomen are distinctly Spanish in terms of their balletic style—​with hands on hips, heeled stamps, arched backs, steps with deep lunges, and tambourines played above their heads. In this, they perform stock choreography from the character dances of classical ballets such as Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov’s The Nutcracker (1892), which includes a Spanish dance among its other national dances. Although the Spanish influence recedes in the subsequent adaptations of Cranko and MacMillan, the use of character dance remains. The three harlots, like the rest of Verona’s townswomen, wear heeled pumps rather than pointe shoes. The folk dance steps they perform indicate the influence of classical ballet tradition on Cranko and MacMillan. In this, ballet history is shown to be just as important as literary history. MacMillan’s employment of Cranko’s three harlots points also to their usefulness. In practical terms, the harlots provide roles for three of a ballet company’s soloists. Cranko and MacMillan both realize the character of Rosaline for the same reason.12 The number of female characters that appear in Shakespeare’s play is not sufficient for a full-​length ballet intent on adequately utilizing a company’s dancers. The harlots also have a dramatic function. For Jann Parry, MacMillan followed Cranko in “resorting to three hard-​ working harlots to animate the crowd scenes in the piazza.”13 Certainly, the harlots invigorate the long ensemble sequences in Prokofiev’s score. Although Romeo is prominent in these scenes—​reflecting the play’s treatment of the family feud as played out on the streets of Verona—​Juliet is absent, and the composer appears to favor the public expression of tension in the play over the domestic anxiety of the Capulet household. These extended street scenes necessitate a great deal of work from the choreographer. The three harlots are useful in this regard. But they do more, I would argue, than simply animate the scenes in which they appear. And, although MacMillan borrows these figures from Cranko’s earlier ballet, he does not leave them unchanged. While the harlots in Cranko’s version interact with Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio, the choreographer does not fully exploit the opportunities for pairing the three prostitutes with the three friends. In MacMillan’s adaptation, it is clear to the audience that Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio each have a favored harlot, and vice versa. This not only creates opportunities for duets but it also allows for the development of meaningful relationships between the male and female characters. The harlots actively and dispassionately seek business from the townsmen, but they have what seem to be companionate relations with Romeo and his friends. The choreographer is not overly sentimental, however. While Cranko initially dilutes the true nature of the harlots’ trade by presenting them as busy

348   Lynsey McCulloch hostesses—​providing alcohol to the townsmen—​MacMillan identifies the women immediately as prostitutes. They enter the first street scene slowly, posing lazily with legs splayed open, attracting the attention of the men (including Romeo and friends) and the ire of the townswomen. The more detailed characterization of MacMillan’s harlots, in contrast to Cranko’s characters, does not just contribute to the ballet’s naturalistic effects. The harlots perform an important narrative function. In representing Verona’s townswomen as petty and jealous—​openly attacking the three harlots—​MacMillan demonstrates his distaste for respectable femininity. In spite of the commercial imperative of their work, the harlots are seen to care for Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio. This is established by the harlots’ physically intimate but often nonsexualized interaction with the three men. When Tybalt enters to treat one of the harlots roughly, it becomes clear that the ballet favors the Montagues over the Capulets—​an allegiance the play does not necessarily support in its depiction of “[t]‌wo households, both alike in dignity” (Prologue, 1). The harlots guide the audience in this allegiance and also direct spectators’ attention to any action of significance. They are themselves, as outsiders and figures absent from the original source, engaged spectators of the ballet’s main plot; their total absorption in the action enables them to act as proxies for the audience. In the fight scene between Mercutio and Tybalt, the three harlots can be clearly seen to lead the townspeople across the stage behind the figures of the two men in a choreographed shadowing of the swordfight. Their support for Mercutio also consolidates our sympathy for the character. MacMillan is here using non-​Shakespearean characters in narrative roles. His preference for the Montagues over the Capulets could be said to simplify the plot for its audience—​dividing the two parties into (roughly speaking) good and evil—​but the mistreatment of the harlots by the Capulet family, in tandem with Juliet’s forced marriage, suggests that MacMillan has something more interesting to say about gender relations in Shakespeare’s Verona. Shakespeare’s play may not condemn the Capulets explicitly for their behavior toward women, but MacMillan’s ballet does.

Sexuality and the Ballet It seems clear that MacMillan’s additions to the world of the play reflect agendas beyond Shakespeare. These include the needs of the company, balletic tradition, theatrical fashion of the 1960s, and burgeoning gender politics. But, while the harlots may have no equivalents within the text, they do reflect its concerns and conventions. The play’s sexual discourse is one area in which these figures embody Shakespeare’s ideas, if not his characters. Mercutio’s bawdy rhetoric finds a home in the harlots; witness his response to Romeo’s melancholy appearance and his commentary on Romeo’s poetic love for Rosaline: Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench—​marry, she had a better love to berhyme her—​Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a

“Hildings and Harlots”    349 gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a grey eye or so, but not to the purpose. (2.3.36–​41)

Compared to Rosaline, the great women of myth and history are—​for Romeo—​mere sluts. The two sexually derogatory terms used by Mercutio to describe Helen (of Troy) and Hero (of Sestos)—​“hildings” and “harlots”—​were words that in this period became more closely associated with women. They had historically been used to denote vagabonds or other worthless individuals—​ not necessarily promiscuous—​ of 14 either gender. This etymological shift, from approximately the fifteenth century onward, toward a focus on female sexual behaviour and its association with criminality, is perhaps significant. Shakespeare uses the two terms in reference to both men and women—​Leontes labels Polixenes the “harlot King” (2.3.4) in The Winter’s Tale—​but the occurrences of female hildings and harlots outnumber the male within his oeuvre. Certainly Romeo and Juliet, often via Mercutio’s explicit allusions to prostitution, but also in male reactions to Juliet’s waywardness, seems concerned more by feminine immorality than male. MacMillan’s ballet would seem to reinforce this pronounced focus on women’s sexual depravity and social rebellion. It even appears to match the play’s simultaneous criticism and enjoyment of female sexuality. If the language of immoral behavior was becoming less nuanced and more pointed in Shakespeare’s lifetime, the appearance of MacMillan’s harlots since the 1960s has also become more obvious. The original costume designs for the harlots by Nicholas Georgiadis identify the characters as divergent from the norm. They wear brighter colors than the muted townswomen—​the lead harlot, partnered with Romeo, wears gold, while the others sport a light pink and a deeper pink. The designs also utilize bold geometric patterns, with black wool appliqued onto white silk, enabling the harlots to stand out from the crowd. Most interestingly, the neckline of each dress—​made with gauze—​displays precious gems and coins. Despite the affectionate relations they have with Romeo and friends, the harlots are commercial creatures; they wear the profits of their trade. Hair is always a firm signifier of character in ballet tradition and, unlike the townswomen with their locks neatly tied back and covered, the harlots wear theirs loose. Immediately identifiable as these harlots are, the characters’ costumes have, since the original production, been revised to further stress their involvement in prostitution. Georgiadis redesigned the production twice. The Royal Ballet’s current production sees the harlots in plusher, velvet-​effect and deeply colored costumes. The wigs they wear are curlier and fuller, their makeup gaudy. The harlots have become clichés. As dance critic Luke Jennings remarks, “There’s a long-​standing tradition in ballet that all prostitutes have frizzy hair, love their work and kiss on the mouth.”15 One of the Royal Ballet’s more recent story-​ballets, Liam Scarlett’s 2016 Frankenstein, also incorporates this type of prostitute, as Victor and his fellow medical students cavort in a tavern with women of the night. The scene has no equivalent in Mary Shelley’s novel, and Roslyn Sulcas, reviewing the ballet for The New York Times, was exasperated enough to write, “There are prostitutes in curly-​hair wigs, enthusiastically lifting their skirts. (Just once, oh

350   Lynsey McCulloch league of choreographers, could a ballet prostitute have sleek hair and look bored on the job?)”16 Dancer and choreographer Alicia Alonso’s 2003 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet for the National Ballet of Cuba, Shakespeare y sus mascaras, o Romeo y Julieta (Shakespeare and His Masks), appears to address the reductive representation of prostitutes within ballet history. Shakespeare himself becomes a character in Alonso’s version, selling masks of various sorts to the Veronese townspeople. The opening market scene is similar to Kenneth MacMillan’s and also includes prostitute figures. But there is a significant difference in their representation. Donna Woodford describes the scene: Shakespeare sold masks, and all around him vendors sold flowers, bread, and cloth. Acrobats performed, and Romeo, Benvolio, and Mercucio moved about the crowd, interacting with the others, until Teobaldo (Tybalt) entered, accompanied by another Capuleto and a prostitute, who, caught in a skirmish between the men, was inadvertently killed. Her sudden death at the end of such a festive scene reintroduced the ideas of violence and tragedy into the play, demonstrated that the feud between the two families has affected all levels of society, and foreshadowed the many deaths that would follow. She was carried offstage and covered with Shakespeare’s cloak, the mask of tragedy still lying beside her.17

In Alonso’s imagination, Verona’s prostitutes are vulnerable, disposable women. Woodford is certainly right to say that Alonso’s harlot represents the ballet’s generic identity; the character of Shakespeare had earlier sold the mask of tragedy to this ill-​ fated prostitute. But I would suggest that, in this rare adaptation of the play by a female choreographer, the harlot’s role is not purely allegorical. She also represents, in some sense, the reality of her profession and reflects the more clichéd portrayal of prostitution within many ballet works. The harlots created by Cranko, and consolidated by MacMillan, became the template for ballet courtesans thereafter. Subsequent adaptations of Romeo and Juliet—​ Derek Deane for English National Ballet, Ben Stevenson for the Houston Ballet, Alexei Ratmansky for the National Ballet of Canada—​retained these additions to a greater or lesser degree and helped give rise to the kind of affectionate ridicule we hear from Luke Jennings and Roslyn Sulcas and the type of critical revisions we see from Alicia Alonso. But Cranko and MacMillan were themselves responding to a much older tradition of prostitution within ballet—​one in which the dancers did not perform as courtesans but were in fact courtesans themselves. In the nineteenth century, prominent ballet companies in France and Russia encouraged the patronage of female dancers by male theater-​goers. MacMillan himself makes reference to this tradition in his 1971 three-​act version of Anastasia, the story of Anna Anderson’s claim to be the only survivor of the massacre of the Russian royal family in 1918. The second act contains a virtuoso dance for the character of Mathilde Kchessinska, the real-​life Russian ballerina who was also the mistress of Tsar Nicholas II. Judith Lynne Hanna describes how, in France, “female dancers on the public stage were thought to be part of the demimonde or echelons of

“Hildings and Harlots”    351 prostitution.”18 How widespread these activities were is unclear, but all dancers were subject to such rumors. Their close association with prostitution was partly based on their professional status; like prostitutes, they were working women in societies in which women did not typically work. Literary scholar Molly Engelhardt discusses these dancers’ “real-​life mobility in and between the ranks of debutantes and prostitutes, aristocrats and dressmakers,”19 but it is clear also that dancers and prostitutes are aligned by virtue of their bodily exposure. As Felicia McCarren confirms in her 1998 Dance Pathologies, [I]‌f one specific element of the dance reinforces the ballet’s close theoretical association with prostitution—​here I am speaking not of the dancer but of the art of ballet itself—​it would be its public visibility.20

For McCarren, ballet as a medium—​rather than individual dancers—​is implicated in a wider culture of prostitution predicated on spectacle and the gaze. The penury that required dancers in the nineteenth century to court patrons and fall into prostitution has subsided, but the sheer number of prostitute roles within ballets performed today ensures that female dancers are more than familiar with theatrical harlotry. Former Royal Ballet principal dancer Deborah Bull comments on her own career: Aside from an apparently unavoidable tendency to be cast as the second female lead, I  had another recurring theme throughout my dancing career:  being cast as the whore. If there was a lady of the night, a tart, a harlot or a prostitute to be played, you can bet I was up there doing it.21

In the hierarchy of principal dancers at the Royal Ballet in the 1990s, Bull would have given way to ballerinas such as Darcey Bussell and Viviana Durante. She may not see a connection between her position as second lead in the Royal Ballet and her expertise in prostitute roles, but I would suggest that the kind of breathless virtuosity and brazen visibility that characterize harlot parts force dancers into playing another role, that of ambitious ballerina. The social climbing of MacMillan’s three harlots—​they reject the ordinary townsmen for sons of the town’s aristocracy—​is made to reflect the dancers’ own aspirations. The visibility inherent in prostitution, as outlined by McCarren, is the lifeblood of these ballet dancers; they need to be seen and seen often to advance within the company. Two of MacMillan’s original harlots, Monica Mason and Deanne Bergsma, were promoted to principal in the years following their soloist work in Romeo and Juliet. Shakespearean Marjorie Garber, in researching ballet adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, was surprised by the extent to which internal politics within ballet companies affects dance’s ability to represent literary works: It might be imagined that one way of “universalizing” the love story in the play would have been through its translation into ballet, since without the specificity of words, and with the presumptive requirement that the dancers be young, lithe, and visually

352   Lynsey McCulloch beautiful, the particulars of the plot would almost directly yield to the embodied ideology of young love. But, as it turns out, the ballet versions of Romeo and Juliet were often star vehicles, and the performers, at least at the beginning, far from young, at least in dance-​world terms.22

Garber is clearly referring here to Margot Fonteyn’s assumption of the role of Juliet in Kenneth MacMillan’s adaptation at the age of forty-​five. Fonteyn danced alongside Rudolf Nureyev in the ballet’s first performances, despite MacMillan creating the roles of the lovers on the twenty-​five-​year-​old Lynn Seymour and her regular partner, Christopher Gable. Fonteyn had, you could argue, earned the right to play Juliet as first lead. Age-​appropriate casting in the London theaters was still overruled by experience in many cases; Peggy Ashcroft, for example, played Katharina in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1960 The Taming of the Shrew at the age of fifty-​two, opposite a young Peter O’Toole. Garber’s image of a Romeo and Juliet essentialized by ballet may underestimate dance’s capacity for complex ideas, but she is correct to suggest that company hierarchy often dictated the balletic vision. In this context, the spectacle of the organization’s aspiring dancers portraying prostitutes raises serious questions about ballet’s gender politics. If we accept that the sheer number of prostitute roles within ballet is problematic, we may be forced to lay much of the blame at the door of Kenneth MacMillan. Romeo and Juliet’s harlots are not isolated examples within his works. In addition to Anastasia’s portrayal of Tsar Nicholas’s ballerina mistress Mathilde Kchessinska, MacMillan’s 1974 Manon contains multiple prostitute roles—​as well as the title role of courtesan Manon Lescaut from the Abbé Prévost’s 1731 novel—​and his 1978 Mayerling stages a tavern scene in which Crown Prince Rudolf drinks and dances with his mistress, Mitzi Caspar, and her fellow whores. In fact, the majority of MacMillan’s full-​length ballets contain prostitute roles. And yet, even the earliest of these—​Romeo and Juliet—​shows signs of progressive thinking with regard to prostitution and the female dancer. The harlots, despite their dependence on men for money, form a close unit. The paired dancing they perform with Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio has a patent equality to it—​with mirrored steps. The harlots can even be said to lead these duets on occasion; instead of the traditional pas de deux in which the male dancer positions the ballerina to her best advantage, MacMillan allows the harlots to take on the male role. They frequently support the male dancer as he performs various steps. The harlots also display a refreshingly irreverent attitude toward classical ballet, often falling out of balletic poses mid-​step into more natural movement. MacMillan only breaks up the trio in their final scene; when Mercutio dies, his favored harlot leaves the stage in grief, never to return. These choreographic decisions—​coupled with the prominence that Juliet has within the ballet and the contribution that Lynn Seymour made to the work—​suggest that MacMillan’s attachment to the harlot figure within his ballets is not based on any desire to objectify the female form. The redesign of the harlots’ costumes and the regular revivals of the work at the Royal Ballet since 1965 may have served to diminish the characters, rendering them more grotesque and more comical than they were in the original staging. The three

“Hildings and Harlots”    353 harlots may also be far from a realistic portrayal of prostitution on MacMillan’s part, but he was demonstrably interested in female sexuality throughout his career. His decision to co-​opt the three harlots from Cranko’s adaptation was not only based on their usefulness as characters capable of animating the ballet’s street scenes. MacMillan utilizes the figures as narrative devices, as meta-​theatrical symbols of ballet’s checkered history and as representatives of his own social concerns. MacMillan’s final ballet before his death, The Judas Tree (1992), encapsulated these concerns. The work is an allegory of the biblical account of the betrayal of Jesus by Judas—​set in contemporary London at the construction of Canary Wharf Tower—​and it presents that betrayal as the effect of jealousy. A veiled female figure appears among the construction workers. Unveiled, she dances and provokes the men, her style not dissimilar to that of harlot figures throughout MacMillan’s career. But this is in no way a comedic representation. The woman’s preference for the Jesus figure over Judas (the Foreman) leads to her gang rape and murder, the lynching of Jesus, and the eventual suicide of Judas. At the end of the work, the dancer representing “Mary” returns to the stage, once again shrouded. Inhabiting the ambiguous space between the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, the work’s lone female character seems to represent all women. As Clement Crisp puts it, she embodies “the multiple and unchanging identities of womankind as mother, beloved, available flesh and consoling virgin.”23 The website of the MacMillan Estate also points to the woman’s multiform existence: The woman cannot be defiled, broken or killed. She is not a person but an unquenchable force: the soul, the Madonna, perhaps the female side of themselves that men deny at their peril. She alone remains at the end as a witness of their fallibility.24

Although these numerous identities are founded rather narrowly on women’s relationships with men, the concept of the female as witness to male aggression is one that MacMillan returns to again and again.25 In his Romeo and Juliet, the harlots’ roles as engaged spectators of the city’s “ancient grudge” (Prologue, 3)  form one of these examples, and MacMillan’s request to the audience that they identify with whores is a courageous move. He joins the small number of choreographers who, to borrow the words of Alan Brissenden, “use Shakespeare as a springboard for ideas rather than simply as a source for a story.”26

Challenging Petrarchism It seems clear that MacMillan uses the figures of the three harlots as vehicles for his own creative agenda. But, as Mercutio’s reference to “hildings and harlots” (2.3.39) suggests, they are not entirely absence from Shakespeare’s text, even if they do not appear in the dramatis personae. The play’s Petrarchan elements—​aspects of the work that respond formally and discursively to the Italian Renaissance poet and his prodigious influence

354   Lynsey McCulloch on English literary aesthetics—​provide us with an opportunity to set the imagined harlots against Romeo and Juliet’s dominant mode. This is a Petrarchan mode, adhering to the sonnet form and—​by association—​poetic cliché. It is a mode in which, to quote Shakespearean Ralph Berry, the characters “speak in quotation.”27 It is also a mode that would seem entirely oppositional to harlotry. For some Shakespeare specialists, the play’s Petrarchism renders it apposite for translation into dance. In Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies, Nicholas Brooke identifies a useful overlap between the artificiality of Shakespeare’s play and the formality of classical dance. In discussing what he sees as the lack of emotional commitment on the part of the writer to a play like Titus Andronicus, often cited as a piece of cold and overly formalized writing, he says, This is even more true of Romeo, which in many ways seems to be a formal exercise in romantic tragedy, given the kind of overt formality of structure and verse which rather suggests the order of a stately dance; it is not perhaps surprising that this quality in Shakespeare’s play has encouraged the production of a number of ballets in the past hundred years—​it is probably, in fact, more often seen on the stage nowadays as a ballet than as a play.28

Writing in 1968, Brooke’s comment that the ballet may have overtaken the play in popularity can be directly attributed—​I would suggest—​to the success of MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. But Brooke’s belief that dance can only represent the play’s “formal patterning”29 suggests that he never saw the ballet himself. Dance can certainly be stately, and Prokofiev’s well-​known “Dance of the Knights” for the Capulet ball attests—​with its marching beat and formal, walking dance—​to this stateliness. But it is only one mode available to the composer and choreographer. For dance critic Alastair Macaulay, the score may capture one aspect of the play’s formality—​Brooke’s “stately dance”—​but it overlooks another element, namely the text’s self-​conscious literary complexity:  “Prokofiev seriously misinterprets Shakespeare’s characters—​the prime characteristic of the play’s hero and heroine is their highly educated cleverness, their love of poetic intricacy and paradox.”30 This may be true—​ Prokofiev’s musical lovers do feel anodyne compared to their literary counterparts—​but the concentration of both literary and dance critics on the play’s elevated, formal features at the expense of its prosaic parts does the text and its adaptations no justice. Romeo and Juliet has a vulgar underbelly. MacMillan’s three harlots represent it. Romeo and Juliet is, in fact, neatly balanced between Petrarchan and anti-​ Petrarchan sentiment. Ralph Berry helpfully expresses Romeo and Juliet’s seamier side: The gravest critical error concerning Romeo and Juliet is to assume that the play, more or less, identifies itself with the lovers; and the violence of Mercutio’s commentary is on record to remind us of the counterforce whereby the ultimate poise is achieved.31

The harlots, associated with the discourse of Mercutio more than any other character, join him in what Berry terms the anti-​Petrarchan “resistance movement.”32 They also

“Hildings and Harlots”    355 echo Mercutio’s use of prose, in stark contrast to the balletic equivalent of poetry—​pointe work and pas de deux. The harlots, with their relative freedom of expression and movement, promote an easy physicality. By the end of the play, and the ballet, even the young lovers wish to exit the world of poetic cliché and embrace the kind of somatic practice that the harlots embody. Shakespearean Judith Haber plots the play’s “clear progression from the verbal to the physical” and describes how “[w]‌hile those around them ramble on endlessly, the young lovers attempt to exit from words into action.”33 The ballet, too—​although it exists almost entirely in the realm of the physical—​charts a movement from formal dance to more primal movement. When Romeo discovers the apparently dead Juliet in the Capulet tomb, he dances with her prone body in what many see as a disturbing pas de deux. It is worth noting that Prokofiev’s decision to give his first iteration of the ballet a happy ending, in which Romeo and Juliet are reunited, was based partly on distaste at the prospect of such a macabre duet: “The reasons which forced us to this barbarism were purely choreographic; the living people can dance, the dying won’t dance lying down.”34 Prokofiev later reverted to Shakespeare’s tragic ending. Tasked with choreographing such a spectacle, MacMillan contorts the vocabulary of classical ballet. Although the ballerina remains brazenly on pointe, she repeatedly falls to the floor, unable the defy gravity in the fashion that ballet dancers are best known for. MacMillan’s decision to depart from traditional balletic form at the end of the work can be contrasted with Shakespeare’s more conventional closure to the play. In the source-​text, redemption takes the form of reconciliation, as the Capulet and Montague families agree to end their feud and memorialize the lovers in golden statuary. MacMillan exacerbates the work’s tragic reality by omitting this scene from the ballet adaptation. Leonid Lavrovsky’s choreography for the original staging of Prokofiev’s score retains the reconciliation and shows Juliet draped upon Romeo but, in MacMillan’s version, the curtains fall on the dead bodies of the lovers, reaching toward one another but not quite touching. For Christopher Gable, on whom MacMillan created the role of Romeo, the message of the story is clear, and bleak: “So they die apart, not touching. Two beautiful young lives have been totally wasted. Nothing’s been achieved, nothing’s better, and they’re not united. They’re just dead. Just two dead things.”35 Although the dance work departs from the finale of Shakespeare’s play, it still mirrors the move from the abstract to the all too real within the drama. As literary critic Gayle Whittier comments, “the inherited Petrarchan word becomes English flesh by declining from lyric freedom to tragic fact.”36 Romeo and Juliet, to quote Judith Haber, “escape love by the Petrarchan book not by denying it, but by literalizing it.”37 They pay for their defiance with death, as does Mercutio. But this realization of poetic conceits need not be morbid. Rosalie Colie takes pleasure from Shakespeare’s sense of literary play: Romeo and Juliet makes some marvelous technical manipulations. One of the most pleasurable, for me, of Shakespeare’s many talents is his “unmetaphoring” of literary devices, his sinking of the conventions back into what, he somehow persuades us, is “reality,” his trick of making a verbal convention part of the scene, the action, or the psychology of the play itself.38

356   Lynsey McCulloch Shakespeare uses stagecraft to realize abstract ideas—​ideas that typically exist in two dimensions on the printed page. Dance, in its physicality and freedom from language, takes this process one stage further, and the three harlots—​in addition to their other functions—​represent ballet’s ability to extend and elaborate on the literary text.

Notes 1. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, in The Oxford Shakespeare:  The Complete Works, 2nd ed., eds. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005), 1.4.13. All subsequent quotations from Shakespeare’s works are from this edition unless otherwise specified. 2. Arlene Croce, “Royal Jitters,” in Writing in the Dark, Dancing in “The New  Yorker” (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982). 3. Jann Parry, Different Drummer: The Life of Kenneth MacMillan (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 292–​293. 4. Naomi Conn Liebler, “The Critical Backstory,” in Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader, ed. Julia Reinhard Lupton (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 21. 5. Clive Barnes, Edward Downes, Karoly Kope, and Siegmund Levarie, “Shakespeare in Opera and Ballet,” in Staging Shakespeare: Seminars on Production Problems, ed. Glenn Loney (New York: Garland, 1990), 215. 6. John Higgins, interview with Kenneth MacMillan, The Times, May 17, 1978. 7. For further discussion of the complex relations between text, music, and movement within dance adaptations of literary works, see Lynsey McCulloch, “Shakespeare and Dance,” Literature Compass 13, no. 2 (2016): 75. 8. Julie Sanders, Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 68. 9. Brandon Shaw, “Effacing Rebellion and Righting the Slanted: Declassifying the Archive of MacMillan’s (1965) and Shakespeare’s (1597) Romeo and Juliets,” Dance Research Journal 49, no. 2 (2017): 65. 10. Parry, Different Drummer, 281. Parry also remarks upon MacMillan’s use of extras to create further color and life in these carnivalesque scenes. 11. For a full discussion of Shakespeare’s sources, see Jill Levenson’s introduction to her 2000 Oxford edition of the play. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Jill L. Levenson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2–​15. 12. I am grateful to one of this volume’s anonymous readers for the suggestion that Rosaline’s bodily presence within ballet versions of the play is also based on dance’s difficulty in conveying reported characters. 13. Parry, Different Drummer, 281. 14. Oxford English Dictionary, accessed November 1, 2016, http://​www.oed.com. 15. Luke Jennings, “Romeo and Juliet Review:  Teenage Kicks from Rojo and Acosta,” The Observer, June 14, 2014, https://​www.theguardian.com/​stage/​2014/​jun/​15/​romeo-​and-​ juliet-​rojo-​acosta-​review-​royal-​albert-​hall, accessed November 1, 2016. 16. Roslyn Sulcas, “Review:  ‘Frankenstein,’ at Royal Ballet, Complete with Dissection,” New York Times, May 9, 2016, http://​www.nytimes.com/​2016/​05/​09/​arts/​dance/​review-​ frankenstein-​at-​royal-​ballet-​complete-​with-​dissection.html, accessed November 1, 2016.

“Hildings and Harlots”    357 17. Donna C. Woodford, “Shakespeare y Sus Mascaras, o Romeo y Julieta (review),” Shakespeare Bulletin 24, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 114. See also Donna Woodford-​Gormley, “In Fair Havana, Where We Lay Our Scene: Romeo and Juliet in Cuba,” in Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage, eds. Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia (Burlington, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 201–​212. 18. Judith Lynne Hanna, Dance, Sex, and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance, and Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 124. 19. Molly Engelhardt, Dancing out of Line: Ballrooms, Ballets, and Mobility in Victorian Fiction and Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 21. 20. Felicia McCarren, Dance Pathologies:  Performance, Poetics, Medicine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 76–​77. 21. Deborah Bull and Luke Jennings, The Faber Pocket Guide to Ballet (London: Faber and Faber, 2004). 22. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 44. 23. Clement Crisp, “Into the Labyrinth: Kenneth MacMillan and His Ballets,” Dance Research 25, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 194. 24. The MacMillan Estate, “The Judas Tree,” Kenneth MacMillan:  Choreographer, http://​ www.kennethmacmillan.com/​ballets/​all-​works/​1977-​1992/​the-​judas-​tree.html, accessed November 1, 2016. 25. For dance critic Luke Jennings, reviewing the Royal Ballet’s 2017 revival of The Judas Tree, the work’s sexual violence, as allegory, is problematic: “to present misogyny and gang-​ rape on stage and then explain it away as symbolic, as metaphysical rather than physical, is disingenuous. The Judas Tree makes voyeurs of us all.” While I recognize the work’s capacity for misogyny and the discomfort it might produce in the spectator, Jennings may here underestimate the physicality of the ballet in performance and its ability to challenge MacMillan’s own metaphysical underpinning of it. See “The Judas Tree Review: Genius Marred by Misogyny,” The Observer, October 29, 2017, https://​www.theguardian.com/​ stage/​2017/​o ct/​29/​t he-​judas-​tree-​kenneth-​macmillan-​royal-​ballet-​observer-​review, accessed December 19, 2017. 26. Alan Brissenden, “Dancing Shakespeare in Australia,” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 8, no. 23 (2011): 69. 27. Ralph Berry, The Shakespearean Metaphor:  Studies in Language and Form (London: Macmillan, 1978), 40. 28. Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (1968; repr., Abingdon, UK:  Routledge, 2005), 81. 29. Brooke, Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies, 87. 30. Alastair Macaulay, “A Peace on Both Your Houses: Lovers Alive and Well,” New York Times, July 7, 2008, http://​www.nytimes.com/​2008/​07/​07/​arts/​dance/​07rome.html, accessed November 1, 2016. 31. Berry, The Shakespearean Metaphor, 42. 32. Berry, The Shakespearean Metaphor, 40. One of the anonymous readers to this volume also pointed out the harlots’ kinship with the Capulet servants, Sampson and Gregory, and the possibility that the harlots, to some extent, replace these figures in the translation from play to ballet. Not only do Sampson and Gregory deal in bawdy puns, reflecting the harlots’ earthy sexuality, but they also draw our attention to the play’s interest in movement, specifically antithetical images of static motion: “A dog of that house shall move me to stand” (1.1.10). See Lynsey McCulloch, “‘Here’s that shall make you dance’: Movement and

358   Lynsey McCulloch Meaning in Bern: Ballett’s Julia und Romeo,” in Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance, eds. Sarah Annes Brown, Robert I. Lublin and Lynsey McCulloch (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 255–​268. 33. Judith Haber, Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 52. 34. Quoted in Nelly Kravetz, “Prokofiev and Sherman: The First Soviet Production of Romeo and Juliet,” Three Oranges Journal 8 (2004): 18. 35. Quoted in Parry, Different Drummer, 283. 36. Gaye Whittier, “The Sonnet’s Body and the Body Sonnetized in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 27. 37. Haber, Desire and Dramatic Form,  52–​53. 38. Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1974), 145.

Bibliography Berry, Ralph. The Shakespearean Metaphor:  Studies in Language and Form. London: Macmillan, 1978. Brissenden, Alan. “Dancing Shakespeare in Australia.” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 8, no. 23 (2011): 56–​70. Brooke, Nicholas. Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2005. Colie, Rosalie. Shakespeare’s Living Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. Crisp, Clement. “Into the Labyrinth: Kenneth MacMillan and His Ballets.” Dance Research 25, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 188–​195. Haber, Judith. Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Isenberg, Nancy. “Accommodating Shakespeare to Ballet:  John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet (Venice, 1958).” In Shifting the Scene:  Shakespeare in European Culture, edited by Ladina Bezzola Lambert and Balz Engler, 129–​139. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. McCulloch, Lynsey. “‘Here’s that shall make you dance’:  Movement and Meaning in Bern:Ballett’s Julia und Romeo.” In Reinventing the Renaissance:  Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance, edited by Sarah Annes Brown, Robert I. Lublin, and Lynsey McCulloch, 255–​268. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Parry, Jann. Different Drummer:  The Life of Kenneth MacMillan. London:  Faber and Faber, 2009. Shaw, Brandon. “Effacing Rebellion and Righting the Slanted: Declassifying the Archive of MacMillan’s (1965) and Shakespeare’s (1597) Romeo and Juliets.” Dance Research Journal 49, no. 2 (2017): 62–​78. Woodford-​Gormley, Donna. “In Fair Havana, Where We Lay Our Scene: Romeo and Juliet in Cuba.” In Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage, edited by Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia, 201–​212. Burlington, UK: Ashgate, 2008.

Chapter 16

Shakespeare Ba l l ets i n Germa ny From Jean-​Georges Noverre to John Neumeier Iris Julia Bührle

William Shakespeare has inspired more ballets than any other writer in the history of dance. This chapter deals with Shakespeare’s reception on the German ballet stage from the eighteenth century to the present day.1 During this period, choreographers continuously developed the movement vocabulary of dance and found new ways to transpose Shakespeare’s works into ballets. One of the most innovative creators of literature ballets in the twentieth century was John Cranko, whose ballet The Taming of the Shrew (1969) will be studied at length in this chapter. Cranko influenced choreographers such as Kenneth MacMillan and John Neumeier; both artists expanded the possibilities of dance and contributed to the evolution of the story-​ballet. Two brief case studies of Neumeier’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1977) and Othello (1985) demonstrate how he adapted and interpreted Shakespeare’s works.2 According to several sources, the first ballet based on a Shakespeare play was created in Germany: Jean-​Georges Noverre’s Cleopatra,3 which was premiered at the court of Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg in Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart in 1765. Noverre’s name is closely linked to the emergence of ballet as an independent art form in the second half of the eighteenth century and to the birth of the dramatic pantomime ballet, which would become known as the ballet d’action. Noverre’s fame as a ballet reformer is chiefly based on his Letters on Dancing and Ballets, which he published in 1760 and dedicated to Karl Eugen.4 According to Noverre, ballets should become self-​contained works within operas and have the same structure as plays. The dancing and pantomime had to be expressive and move an audience.5 Noverre thought that tragedies were the most appropriate sources for ballet plots, since they contained particularly noble situations and strong passions.6 However, he was often criticized for the extensive programs he wrote, which were needed to understand his ballets.

360   Iris Julia Bührle Little explanation was probably required for his Cleopatra, a divertissement without an elaborate plot, which was performed after the third act of Niccolò Jommelli’s opera Demophoon. Noverre’s libretto closely follows Plutarch’s description of Dellius’s encounter with Cleopatra, her journey to Sicily, her first meeting with Antony, and the grand banquet she gives in his honor. However, Noverre’s account of these events is less detailed than Plutarch’s. The ballet seems to have been a magnificent display of elaborate scenery and costumes, as Noverre’s Antony is completely overwhelmed by Cleopatra’s wealth and beauty.7 Alan Brissenden has argued that “there is nothing to indicate that this was derived from Shakespeare’s play.”8 In fact, the scenes that constitute Noverre’s ballet do not occur in Shakespeare’s play; they precede its action and are in part related by Enobarbus. However, there are several hints that Noverre was aware of Shakespeare’s play and that it might have been an inspiration for his ballet. In 1755, the ballet master was invited to London by his friend David Garrick, who allegedly called him the “Shakespeare of the dance.”9 Noverre, who spent much time in England from 1755 to 1757, probably heard of Garrick’s production of Antony and Cleopatra in 1759. One of the next Shakespeare-​ inspired ballets, a version of Macbeth, was staged at the King’s Theatre in London in 1785 by Noverre’s pupil Charles Le Picq, who danced with him in Stuttgart. The same year, Eusebio Luzzi created his Juliet and Romeo in Venice, which is often referred to as the first known ballet on Shakespeare’s most frequently choreographed play.10 It was followed three years later, in the same city, by Francesco Clerico’s Hamlet.

From Noverre to Cranko Noverre’s complex adaptations of tragedies were only partly successful, and many ballet masters, including Noverre himself, eventually turned to subjects that were easier to express through dance. There are relatively few Shakespeare-​inspired ballets throughout the nineteenth century, and most of them—​for instance, two versions of The Tempest which were premiered at the Paris Opera in 1834 and 1889—​were rather loosely related to the source.11 In Germany, no significant Shakespeare ballets seem to have been created between 1765 (if Noverre’s ballet was indeed inspired by Shakespeare) and the mid-​twentieth century, even though many renowned ballet masters worked at the numerous German courts during the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, Ausdruckstanz (expressionist dance) emerged in opposition to classical ballet. One of the first choreographers to revive ballet in Germany in the twentieth century was Tatiana Gsovsky. She created a number of works based on Shakespeare, such as The Lovers of Verona (Leipzig, 1942, to music by Leo Spies), Romeo and Juliet (Deutsche Staatsoper East Berlin, 1948, to Sergei Prokofiev’s score), Hamlet (which was originally planned in East Berlin, first premiered in Buenos Aires in 1951, and then was performed in West Berlin in 1953), and The Moor of Venice (Städtische Oper West Berlin, 1956).12

Shakespeare Ballets in Germany    361 Horst Koegler calls her the first key figure of ballet in postwar Germany before the arrival of John Cranko,13 and he states that for twenty years, her role in German ballet was comparable to that of Diaghilev in Russian ballet. Koegler credits Gsovsky with her own, particularly “German” style, which he defines as an “adventurously bold blend of classic-​academic elements, expressionistic gestures, plastic and sculptural poses, acrobatic contortions and purely decorative ornamentation.” According to Koegler, her style rather scared critics like him, who were then dazzled by the elegance and virtuosity of Russian, French, and American Ballet.14 Her works are no longer performed and for the most part have been forgotten today. A number of other choreographers created Shakespeare ballets, such as Victor Gsovsky (Hamlet, Munich, 1950), Yvonne Georgi (The Moor of Venice, Hannover, 1956), Erich Walter (Romeo and Juliet, Wuppertal, 1959), Peter van Dyk (Romeo and Juliet, Hamburg, 1961), Heinz Rosen (The Moor of Venice, Munich, 1962), Lilo Gruber (Romeo and Juliet, East Berlin, 1963), and Emmy Köhler-​Richter (Romeo and Juliet, Leipzig, 1963).

John Cranko and the Emergence of the “Literature Ballet” In 1961, the South-​African-​born choreographer John Cranko moved from London to Germany to become the director of the Stuttgart Ballet. During the twelve years from his arrival to his untimely death, he created numerous short pieces and three full-​length works that breathed new life into the form of the story-​ballet: Romeo and Juliet (1962), Onegin (1965, new version in 1967), and The Taming of the Shrew (1969). John Cranko’s seminal position in the history of ballet has thus far been almost ignored by dance scholars. Dance histories tend to briefly mention that Cranko created several evening-​length story-​ballets and breathed new life into postwar German ballet.15 Hardly anyone dwells on Cranko’s role as a reformer of the literature ballet, stylistic innovator, and mentor and inspiration for a number of emerging choreographers. Thus, for instance, John Neumeier, Uwe Scholz, Jiří Kylián, and William Forsythe joined Cranko’s Stuttgart Ballet as dancers, created their first choreographies for the company, and subsequently became eminent ballet directors in Germany and abroad. In 1964, Cranko stated, It is my firm intention to arrive at a point where every other ballet premiere in Stuttgart is an evening-​length work. The difficulty is that essentially we still have not overcome the Petipa formula. Diaghilev circumvented it by developing the type of the short ballet and by forming its most diverse shapes and varieties which are still practiced today and have been raised to great perfection. . . . Today the task consists in introducing a synthesis of these diverse forms and types into the evening-​length story ballet. This task has not been accomplished so far; all

362   Iris Julia Bührle recent story ballets still correspond more or less to the Petipa formula—​including Cinderella, Undine, and my own Prince of the Pagodas. In a three-​act ballet, the evo­lution and countertheme of a character can of course be designed and executed in much greater depth.16

His aim was to “try and find that thing which movement says and no other art can find.”17 Cranko’s pieces marked the birth of a new genre of ballets that were characterized, among other things, by their subtle transposition of the literary source.18 Cranko did not want to “exploit” works of literature in order to create occasions for virtuosic dancing, as was the custom during the nineteenth century—​one might think, for instance, of ballets like Marius Petipa’s Don Quixote after Cervantes and Le Corsaire after Byron, which are only vaguely related to the sources that inspired them. He tried instead to adapt the structure of his ballets to the subject and to transpose what he perceived as the essence of the works of literature into his wordless medium. Cranko also endeavored to represent an action through choreographic means, instead of relying on complex mime, plot synopses, or the audience’s familiarity with the literary source. Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick state, “Cranko dispensed almost entirely with formal mime as a storytelling device. With a nod to the British music-​hall tradition, he developed a gestural vocabulary that had the emotional impact, as well as the precision, of a verbal language. There was never any doubt about what his characters were up to.”19 Cranko’s choice of subject for his first evening-​length ballet in Stuttgart was certainly sparked by the Bolshoi Ballet’s tour to London in 1956, during which he saw Leonid Lavrovsky’s 1940 Romeo and Juliet, a drambalet set to Sergei Prokofiev’s score.20 Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet was his first major success in Stuttgart,21 and it strongly inspired Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 version for the Royal Ballet, discussed in Chapter 15 of this volume. Even though the structure of Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet was similar to Lavrovsky’s, Cranko shifted the focus from the social framework to the lovers’ individual tragedy. Instead of the speedy death of the couple, which is followed by the re­conciliation of the feuding families, Cranko’s adaptation finishes with the double suicide. Thus, the choreographer clearly departs from Shakespeare’s ending: in the play, the fate of the lovers is commented on by a rational figure of authority and serves the restoration of political harmony. The absence of a distancing frame leads to a stronger emotional identification with the main characters, which frequently occurs in ballet. In Cranko’s work, Juliet slowly bleeds to death to the calm final bars of Prokofiev’s score, while she rocks Romeo’s dead body in her arms. This gesture, which repeats that of Juliet’s mother after her daughter’s feigned death, is an example of the numerous mirrors and leitmotifs that are crucial in Cranko’s dramaturgy and that contribute to the coherence of his ballets. The mirror images signal not only parallels between situations, but also the evolution of characters and their relationships. Juliet and her mother both see the (seemingly) deceased as the only joy in their lives—​Juliet’s mother mourns: But one thing to rejoice and solace in And cruel Death hath catched it from my sight. (4.4.78–​79)22

Shakespeare Ballets in Germany    363 When Juliet sees Romeo alive for the last time, she mourns that with him life itself is leaving her (3.5.41). In the bedroom pas de deux, Cranko repeats several movements from the balcony scene, but the mood of the music and choreography has changed from rapture to sadness. In both pas de deux, for instance, Romeo kneels in front of Juliet while she tenderly embraces him with one arm and lifts the other arm toward the sky. The first time, Cranko’s Juliet seems to thank the stars for her newfound love, whereas in the bedroom pas de deux, she apparently implores them to save him.

John Cranko’s The Taming of the Shrew Seven years after Romeo and Juliet, Cranko set himself the ambitious task of creating a ballet based on The Taming of the Shrew (Figure 16.1). Shakespeare’s play appealed to Cranko because of its visual elements,23 and physical action does indeed play a major role in this work, which often comes close to farce. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s comedy circles around matchmaking and love, and it includes several weddings that create “natural” situations for dancing. However, Shakespeare’s Shrew also features major difficulties for choreographers. Language is one of both Katherine’s and Petruccio’s greatest weapons, for instance in their verbal duels. Petruccio tries to dominate Katherine by shortening her name to “Kate” against her will and by pretending to understand the opposite of what she actually says. This is part of his strategy, which he reveals before their first encounter:

Figure 16.1.  Katherine and Petruccio’s first encounter, Act 1 Sue Jin Kang as Katherine and Filip Barankiewicz as Petruccio in John Cranko’s The Taming of the Shrew. Photo: © Bernd Weissbrod, courtesy Stuttgart Ballet.

364   Iris Julia Bührle If she do bid me pack, I’ll give her thanks As though she bid me stay by her a week. (2.1.177–​178)

Even though he never actually silences her, he manages to erase her voice: when she flatly rejects him during their first encounter, Petruccio convinces his male audience without much difficulty that she really means the opposite. Her transformation from a shrew into an obedient wife first becomes apparent in her language, when she accepts Petruccio’s denial of the truth by calling the sun the moon and greeting an old man as a youthful maid. Ironically, people only listen to her—​and take her word at face value—​ in her final speech, which marks a complete reversal of her initial rebellious language. Laurie Maguire writes about this scene, in which Katherine gains approval and applause from all the present men: But it is surely a Pyrrhic victory for Katherine if her freedom of speech as a woman is dependent on male cues and party-​line patriarchal content. She can achieve what she wants only by appearing to do what her husband wants. She can be who she is only by not being who she is. What profits it a woman if she gain a voice but lose her identity?24

It might be assumed that in order to make her voice heard, Katherine play-​acts in the last scene. The ambiguity of the characters’ behavior, their complex motives, and their psychological evolution throughout the play make them difficult protagonists for a ballet. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, Cranko had no preexisting music for The Taming of the Shrew. He therefore asked Kurt-​Heinz Stolze to compose a score based on Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas for keyboard that would fit his scenario. It includes themes for each protagonist and repetitions indicating parallels between situations.25 As in Romeo and Juliet and Onegin, Cranko avoided breaks between scenes for set changes. He attempted to create an uninterrupted flow of action that recalls films, but also the theater in Shakespeare’s time. The sets by Elizabeth Dalton were modeled on the Globe Theatre. They have a lower lever and an upper “balcony” level, and they allow rapid changes of scenery.26 Cranko also avoided divertissements that would stop the action: even during the two weddings, which are traditionally an opportunity for lengthy displays of “pure” dance, most of the dances make the plot advance or characterize a protagonist or situation. Cranko’s focus on psychology and the evolution of characters, which is already apparent in Romeo and Juliet, is developed even further in his subsequent ballets Onegin and The Taming of the Shrew. Both works revolve around multifaceted individuals who are very different from the rather stereotypical princes, pirates, and peasants in nineteenth-​century (and many later) ballets. Cranko realized Noverre’s ideal, according to which dance should be expressive and represent complex plots in a comprehensible and moving way, and the style, sets, and costumes should be adapted to the subject. Cranko tried to give meaning to movements, which he considered to be a choreographer’s most difficult task.27 His movement language is based on classical ballet

Shakespeare Ballets in Germany    365 vocabulary, but it also includes elements from contemporary dance, “natural” body language, and, in the case of Shrew, martial arts. Although his dancers needed to be highly virtuosic, Cranko did not showcase technique for its own sake. Thus, the breathtaking triple tours en l’air that Petruccio performs during his wedding underline the exube­ rance of his personality.28 The perilous lifts that are characteristic of Cranko’s style take on various meanings according to the situation: when Petruccio lets Katherine hover above his head in the first pas de deux, for example, she briefly loses her independence and capacity to direct her own movements, but she also becomes weightless and soars to heights that had formerly been unknown to her. Like Shakespeare, Cranko mixes elements of farce with psychological realism. He does not portray Katherine as a comic stereotype of a shrew who is aggressive and do­minant for no reason, but rather as a strong character whose impatient behavior is caused by the shallow people around her and the norms she is supposed to correspond to. Her outbursts always have a motive. In the first scene, Bianca’s three suitors appear at night under Baptista’s balcony in order to play a serenade for their beloved. The noise created by their rivaling instruments infuriates Katherine, who runs onto the balcony to empty a chamber pot on their heads. Her subsequent solo, in which she confronts the suitors and a group of neighbors who were roused by the uproar, breaks with several ballet conventions. With angular and abrupt movements, Katherine jumps at her opponents and seems to attack them with her fingernails as if they were claws, which evokes the play’s cat-​Kate pun. Her knees are frequently bent, she does not rise on pointe very often, and puts more weight on her heels; therefore, her dancing in this scene also has an earthbound quality that brings it closer to more contemporary dance styles. Nancy Isenberg points out how Cranko’s Katherine differs from earlier conceptions of the ballerina, thus echoing the evolution of women’s position in society in the 1960s.29 Katherine’s solo, the first in the ballet, reverses the traditional scheme of the ballerina who enters after everyone else and dances a brilliant variation, for instance in The Sleeping Beauty, where the princess greets her four suitors with utmost grace and gravity-​defying lightness. Katherine’s nocturnal appearance on the balcony also ironically recalls that of a dreamy Juliet at the end of the first act of Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet seven years earlier; both roles were created for Marcia Haydée. Each of the main protagonists is characterized by a solo in the first act. Bianca’s fluid and lyrical dance with her suitors’ love tokens—​a fan, a glove, and a rose—​corresponds more closely to the style that is traditionally assigned to the leading ballerina. She seems flattered to be the object of the suitors’ attention, but yet uncertain whom to choose since she shows no preference for any of the presents. As Katherine happens to witness this scene, she furiously beats her sister with the love tokens, which indicates that she is either angry about Bianca’s vanity or jealous of her success. In the play, Bianca suspects Katherine of “envy” (2.1.18) when her older sister asks her whom of her suitors she loves best, and Katherine expresses the fear that as an unmarried older sister, she will have to “dance barefoot on her wedding day” (2.1.33). She also resents her father’s preference for Bianca. In the ballet, Katherine might also be annoyed because she sees through the hollowness of the suitors, who are no match for her in the preceding scene. When Baptista

366   Iris Julia Bührle rescues his younger daughter, Bianca sticks out her tongue to Katherine, which already foreshadows her “shrewish” behavior at her wedding. In Cranko’s ballet, all three suitors compete for Bianca’s affection, instead of using their wealth to win Baptista’s approval. They all put on masks and disguise themselves as teachers for Bianca. Instead of languages or mathematics—​difficult subjects for a ballet stage—​they teach singing (Gremio), the lute (Hortensio), and dancing (Lucentio). Even though they all appear slightly ridiculous, Gremio is clearly the most comic character in the ballet. He is dressed in canary yellow with feathers on his head, suffers from a nerve-​ racking cold, and frequently gets entangled in his clothes, such as his overlong scarf and excessively large and ornate coat. In his solo as a singing teacher, the sounds he produces are shrill and false, and Katherine eventually silences him by stuffing a rolled-​up music sheet into his mouth. Cranko makes it obvious that the clumsy Gremio does not qualify as a suitor to the graceful Bianca.30 As in Shakespeare, Hortensio plays the lute, and Katherine “br[eaks] the lute” (2.1.148) to him by smashing it on his head onstage, since ballet knows no reported actions. In his quick solo, he invents various eccentric ways of playing his instrument and finishes on his knees like a rock star with his guitar. Hortensio clearly cares more about showing off his artistic genius than about Bianca. He does not want to share the instrument with her, and whirls his lute around so passionately that he nearly hits her with it. As in the play, she is assertive in this scene and roundly rejects both suitors’ advances. Lucentio immediately distinguishes himself from his rivals, both by his elegant movement style, which matches that of his beloved, and by his engagement with Bianca. Instead of merely demonstrating his skill as a dancing master, he shows her movements that she can repeat and helps her when her feet get entangled. His solo quickly turns into a pas de deux.31 As in the play, the other suitors watch him jealously, and they try to interfere when he kisses Bianca. The last major protagonist to appear in the ballet is Petruccio. He makes a spectacular, drunken appearance on the terrace of a tavern where Bianca’s admirers attend to their injuries after their first confrontation with Katherine. His powerful solo, ebullience, and devil-​may-​care behavior mark him as an adventurer; he forms a stark contrast to the three whining, plotting young men who passively look on as two prostitutes disrobe Petruccio and dance off with all his belongings. Similarly to Katherine, his solo is more earthbound than that of a male lead in classical ballet, and he is less upright, vertical, and controlled—​Petruccio is drunk, repeatedly rolls on the floor, and his balances appear rather precarious. The suitors end up benefiting from the situation since they find in Petruccio a man to rid them of Katherine by offering him the clothes and money he desperately needs in his delicate situation. Therefore it is Bianca’s admirers, not Petruccio, who appear as opportunists when the wedding is arranged. Money seems a less important incentive than in the play: it is chiefly the harlots who appear as fortune-​hunters, and the “marriage market,” which plays an important role in Shakespeare—​Bianca is discussed like cattle to be sold to the highest bidder, potential suitors for the “flawed” Katherine are

Shakespeare Ballets in Germany    367 attracted through a substantial dowry, and Petruccio declares that he would marry anyone as long as his bride is sufficiently rich—​is not directly referred to. In the ballet, Lucentio, Hortensio, and Gremio give their purses to the destitute Petruccio, but when they describe Katherine to him in mime, they “mention” neither her wealth nor her rebellious character, but only her beauty. Similarly, money plays no visible role in the marriage plot surrounding Bianca, and there is no financial wager at stake in the “obedience contest” at her wedding. Characteristically for Cranko, the pas de deux form the centerpieces of his choreo­ graphy and reveal his interpretation of the literary source. His capacity to visualize the evolution of complex characters and their relationships in the course of a ballet or even a pas de deux is one of Cranko’s most remarkable contributions to the history of dance. The protagonists also evolve from one pas de deux to the next; these are often linked by slightly modified leitmotifs in the music and choreography. Cranko’s The Taming of the Shrew can be seen as a ballet about two authentic characters who discover themselves and each other in a world inhabited by superficial people and ruled by social conventions.32 Their relationship is acted out in three main pas de deux. Cranko stated that Katherine has the upper hand in their first confrontation and Petruccio in the second. The third pas de deux takes place when they have found a mutual understanding and have reached equality.33 The first encounter between Katherine and Petruccio (Figure 16.2) in the play is very difficult to transpose into a nonverbal art, since it is a subtle linguistic duel full of puns and wordplay. To merely “translate” the verbal into a physical fight creates the danger of grossness and unequal chances for the male and female combatant. Cranko therefore added movements from martial arts, which allow Katherine to throw Petruccio to the floor. Cranko’s Petruccio does not respond with unfair physical violence, but with a mix of force and gentleness (Figure 16.3). When Katherine boxes his ears right after his boisterous entrance, Petruccio reacts with courtesy, and he later bows to her when she expects an attack. In Shakespeare’s play, courteous reactions to verbal assaults form part of Petruccio’s wooing strategy; thus, he says to himself: Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plain She sings as sweetly as a nightingale. (2.1.170–​171)

As in Shakespeare, the opponents immediately respond to each other’s actions in the ballet, and every movement triggers a reaction from the partner. Margaret Jane Kidnie writes about Katherine and Petruccio’s first encounter in the play that the extended passage of stichomythia [ . . . ] creates an effect of emotional intensity and intimacy at the very moment the characters are engaged in a combat of words. This competitive style of dialogue, a type of verbal tennis, reproduces the physicality and muscular energy of improvised performance as spectators mark how each rejoinder becomes in turn the raw material out of which the next rejoinder is constructed.

368   Iris Julia Bührle

Figure 16.2.  Katherine and Petruccio fight during their first pas de deux, Act 1 Sue Jin Kang as Katherine and Filip Barankiewicz as Petruccio in John Cranko’s The Taming of the Shrew. Photo: © Bernd Weissbrod, courtesy Stuttgart Ballet.

She continues, “the scene’s unspoken physical business—​the actors’ proximity, and how often and in what manner they touch each other—​will shape an audience’s perception of the shifting power relations between the characters.”34 In the ballet, the changing nature of the protagonists’ physical interaction becomes the center of attention and reveals the evolution of their relationship. Instead of being a duet during which the action pauses, the pas de deux turns into a wordless dialogue.35 In the course of the scene, Katherine becomes visibly intrigued by Petruccio’s unusual behavior and softens toward him. He eventually lets her hover above his head in a pose that recalls Albrecht lifting the spirit of his beloved in Giselle.36 At the end of the pas de deux, Katherine willingly remains

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Figure 16.3.  Petruccio woos Katherine with gentleness during their first pas de deux, Act 1 Sue Jin Kang as Katherine and Filip Barankiewicz as Petruccio in John Cranko’s The Taming of the Shrew. Photo: © Bernd Weissbrod, courtesy Stuttgart Ballet.

in his arms and seems partly won over. This is Cranko’s answer to the question of why Shakespeare’s Katherine appears to consent to the marriage with Petruccio—​albeit only by her silence—​even though she angrily rejected him moments earlier. The second pas de deux in the ballet follows Katherine’s exhausting ride to her new home, the dinner during which Petruccio does not give her the chance to eat a single bite, and her first night on a freezing kitchen floor. Unlike in Shakespeare’s play, Petruccio has slept in a comfortable bed and comes in eating. Katherine’s exasperation grows as her husband plays several tricks on her and pretends to be wounded, to which she reacts with genuine concern. She continues to fight him, but not with her former strength,

370   Iris Julia Bührle and Petruccio pushes and drags her around like a lifeless doll; this evokes her complaint in the play that Petruccio wants “to make a puppet” of her (4.3.103). A transformation similar to that during their first encounter occurs in the course of the scene:  when Petruccio affectionately stretches out his hands toward her, she voluntarily starts dancing with him. As she takes control over their pas de deux, she also gains command over her movements and her style becomes more rounded. She eventually sits on his shoulder and then floats through the air with an arched back, a lift that makes the couple look like a ship in full sail. The last pas de deux after Bianca’s wedding expresses harmony and mutual understanding. The spouses continue to play games and pretend to attack each other, but all hostility has dissolved. Katherine jumps repeatedly into Petruccio’s arms, and he raises and throws her high above his head, an experience she now seems to thoroughly enjoy. As in Romeo and Juliet and Onegin, Cranko uses musical and choreographic mirrors and leitmotifs in The Taming of the Shrew. During the first pas de deux, for instance, Petruccio kisses Katherine twice against her will, but her furious riposte the first time is followed by a softer attack the second time, which shows her changed attitude toward him. After this first encounter, Petruccio imperiously stamps his foot, a gesture he later repeats in the “obedience contest” at Bianca’s wedding. In the courtship scene, Katherine reacts by absentmindedly walking toward Petruccio, who kneels before her and kisses her hand. When she notices that she is watched by her family, she immediately withdraws her hand, which might indicate a desire to hide her feelings.37 In the second act, on the contrary, she deliberately walks toward Petruccio and kneels before him under the astonished gaze of her family. She might again be putting on a performance for them, this time pretending to be tamed. Group scenes also reflect each other: thus, Cranko uses the same music for the chaotic uproar caused by Katherine in the beginning and by Petruccio at his wedding, which highlights the rebellious character of both main protagonists. Like many theater and film directors and in accord with the ballet genre’s tendency to avoid distancing frames, Cranko does not represent the Christopher Sly induction from Shakespeare’s play. However, Cranko’s ballet contains various disguise plots and performances within the performance, some of which are not in the source. The elimination of the frame, the disguise of all three suitors, and the introduction of the prostitutes, who fulfill various functions in the ballet,38 allowed Cranko to simplify the action and get rid of several characters, such as the protagonists of the induction, Hortensio’s widow, and Lucentio’s servants and father. In order to pair off the other two suitors, Cranko invented a carnival during which Lucentio deceives Hortensio and Gremio into marrying the two prostitutes with the help of a pair of masks, cloaks, and their love tokens from the first act. All three women, including Bianca, disguise themselves and play-​act in order to realize Lucentio’s plan. This mirrors the disguise of their three future husbands in the first act. Nancy Isenberg links Cranko’s ballet to Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque. She points out that Cranko’s carnival does not strengthen the existing order, but rather

Shakespeare Ballets in Germany    371 promotes social integration; in his ballet, prostitutes play a powerful role and eventually become wives. Thus, Isenberg argues, “Cranko introduces their ‘liberated’ status into the domestic sphere.”39 Several scenes in the ballet are staged as spectacles, and Katherine and Petruccio are often the object of an audience’s astonished gaze. Katherine’s unexpected appearance on the balcony is an unpleasant coup de theatre for Bianca’s appalled suitors, and she subsequently makes a spectacle of herself in the midst of the railing neighbors. Petruccio performs a dashing entrance solo and then acts out a scene with the two prostitutes. The robbery is witnessed by Bianca’s suitors and the innkeeper who, like an audience in a theater, watch without interfering. Since every important element in the plot has to be visualized in a ballet, Katherine’s wedding takes place on stage. Cranko maintained its farcical character and spiced the scene with some of his most outrageous humor. Katherine is dressed up in the unfamiliar costume of a bride and beats the bystanders with a flower. The guests react with laughter to Katherine’s seemingly inappropriate role and keep giggling like in a comedy, which once again gives her good reason to be angry. Her rather ungraceful gait and rough behavior imply that she does not feel very comfortable playing the part of the bride. Petruccio’s ill-​costumed appearance is highly theatrical: he is apparently drunk and equipped with bizarre props, including a dead rabbit, which he offers to Katherine. After kissing two female dancers on the cheek, he performs an exuberant solo, which is watched by the amazed wedding guests and a furious Katherine. As in the play, Petruccio misbehaves scandalously toward the priest, whom Cranko depicts as a ludicrous figure. In the ballet, however, Katherine also treats the priest disrespectfully, which again highlights the similarity of their characters. They both defy social conventions, including the one to cast a respectable figure at one’s own wedding. Since Cranko diminishes the importance of the money theme, Petruccio is depicted as neither a fortune hunter nor an opportunist, but—​like Katherine—​as a free spirit who is tempted by the challenge of coping with her. Petruccio’s wife-​taming strategy is particularly playful: as he enters his home shortly before Katherine’s arrival, he asks his servants to behave strangely, makes them adopt absurd ways of walking, and furnishes them with props, such as a false hump. One servant hides under the table and pulls her plate away from her as she tries to seize it. Petruccio himself pretends to suffer from heat and extinguishes the fire in the freezing room, delays Katherine’s meal by theatrically saying grace, and eventually prevents her from eating altogether by bursting into a feigned fit of anger, during which he throws food around and knocks over the table. In spite of Petruccio’s rudeness, the ballet contains various signs that Katherine is rather pleased to have found a man at her level. She smilingly remains in his arms after their first pas de deux, proudly leaves with her husband after he has overthrown all the other wedding guests like a bunch of domino stones, and seems to reach an understanding with him at the end of their second pas de deux. Katherine’s playful nature is

372   Iris Julia Bührle fueled by Petruccio’s company, and her behavior when the couple rides back to Bianca’s wedding on a wooden horse could be seen as one of their numerous games. Provoked by Petruccio, Katherine pretends to mistake a peasant for a fountain, an “error” that is easier to visualize than Petruccio’s manipulation of Katherine’s language in the play. In Shakespeare’s Shrew, Katherine’s creatively exaggerated language during the journey to Bianca’s wedding and in her final speech goes far beyond dutiful obedience, which allows the interpretation that she might merely be play-​acting. Laurie Maguire writes about the play: In the ridiculous sun-​moon scene, Petruccio is not asking Katherine to submit but to play: to join with him in a game of playfully transforming reality. At this point Katherine not only enters into the world of play but goes one better through exaggeration [ . . . ]. We are now prepared for the same tone of teasing exaggeration in Katherine’s 45-​line speech of submission in act 5.40

In the final scenes of Cranko’s ballet, both main protagonists seem to be performing. They do not arrive at Baptista’s house in “mean habiliments” (4.3.168), but dressed in highly theatrical and strikingly ornate clothes. They subsequently act a scene of good manners, which is the opposite of their explosive and shocking entrances in the first act. Thus, not only is Katherine’s former behavior reversed, but also that of her husband, and they both continue to astonish their audience. The following scene reveals that Katherine has by no means been broken. Instead of lecturing the other wives with an impressive show of submission, she storms out to the music of her first shrewish solo in Act 1, seizes the other women with her initial assertiveness, and casts them on the floor. She then bows graciously to Petruccio, to the theatrical beat of the cymbal. Katherine does not put her hand under her husband’s foot as she suggests in the play, but she lays her head on his proffered hand (Figure 16.4), an affectionate rather than submissive gesture, which is later repeated in private in their last pas de deux. With mere looks, which have lost nothing of their awe-​inspiring severity, she scares the other wives into imitating her gesture. The two main protagonists subsequently take off their heavy theatrical costumes to dance their last lyrical pas de deux. Although Petruccio’s behavior never seems genuinely threatening and the ballet ends with what appears to be a harmonious union of equals, some unease and ambiguity remains—​as in most performances or adaptations of the play. After the premiere, the critic Jochen Schmidt wrote, “apart from Romeo and Juliet, there is probably no literature ballet which brings so much of its literary source into the new work—​both in terms of quantity and quality—​and which tells its story so coherently and logically.”41 Hartmut Regitz stated that Cranko “works with his Shakespeare according to the requirements of the new medium, he does not stick to the word, but he modifies, eliminates and adds elements where it seems important and necessary to him.”42 Cranko’s Taming of the Shrew is an example of a ballet that deeply engages with the literary source and its main themes, but instead of slavishly adhering to the action in

Shakespeare Ballets in Germany    373

Figure 16.4.  Katherine and Petruccio’s last harmonious pas de deux, Act 3 Sue Jin Kang as Katherine and Filip Barankiewicz as Petruccio in John Cranko’s The Taming of the Shrew. Photo: © Bernd Weissbrod, courtesy Stuttgart Ballet.

the play, the choreographer offers his own interpretation of it. In his work, which circles around the evolution of the main protagonists and their relationship, he portrays Katherine and Petruccio as two strong, authentic characters who genuinely fall in love during the course of the ballet. The medium of dance allows Cranko to show Katherine’s apparent transformation in a way that language could not; thus, for instance, we lite­ rally see how Petruccio makes a puppet of his wife. Moreover, the ballet reveals potential meanings of the text that can go unnoticed, such as the possibility of interpreting the main couple’s behavior as highly theatrical.

374   Iris Julia Bührle

John Neumeier and the “New Hamburg Ballet Dramaturgy” John Neumeier, who went to Germany in 1963 to join Cranko’s company and subsequently became the director of the Hamburg Ballet and one of the most productive choreographers of literature ballets worldwide, stated about Cranko’s 1965 ballet Onegin in an interview, This Onegin is a classic of modern ballet. It is a truly important story ballet which does not follow the traditional form of the nineteenth century, but finds its own structure. That was a novelty in Cranko’s day, a new way of illustrating dramatic situations through dance. Later on, choreographers also explored other paths. Initially, however, this was a completely innovative structure for ballets.43

In another interview, Neumeier explained, Firstly, [Cranko] has a form of ballet dramaturgy which is astonishingly simple and clear. Secondly, it is about his pas de deux. They are choreographed in such a way that the characters change during the pas de deux. That is new. [ . . . ] In John Cranko’s works, the pas de deux is not celebrated, but it is actually the close-​up which leads to a development in the ballet. That is very important. [ . . . ] Cranko manages to achieve clarity of the action.44

Some of Neumeier’s early story-​ballets are strongly inspired by Cranko’s style—​for instance, his 1978 Lady of the Camellias, which he created in Stuttgart for Cranko’s muse Marcia Haydée. In the course of his long career, he increasingly moved away from Cranko’s clarity to a complex style with interrelated layers of action. Ballets such as his 2003 Death in Venice engage deeply with the source, visualize underlying elements in it, and are difficult to fully understand in all their facets at first viewing. His works have admiringly and disparagingly been labeled as “meta-​literary”45 and “danced secondary literature.”46 Unlike Cranko, Neumeier spent his entire choreographic career in Germany, and he has developed a unique genre of story-​ballet that does not exist anywhere else. He has created ballets inspired by or set to many masterpieces of German literature and music, from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passion of Saint Matthew. His complex, intellectual, and at the same time psychological and emotional style became so “un-​American” in the course of his career that his works have been skeptically received in his home country, the United States. The derogatory term “Eurotrash,” used by American critics, hit Neumeier’s works more categorically than those of his British colleagues John Cranko and Kenneth MacMillan. Neumeier’s multilayered and psychological story-​ballets have seemed incomprehensible to many American critics, for whom Balanchine’s cool, elegant, and mostly plotless works constitute an important

Shakespeare Ballets in Germany    375 yardstick. Even though Neumeier is influenced by and quotes Balanchine, for instance in his Midsummer Night’s Dream, his aesthetic and priorities are very far from that of the Saint Petersburg–​born pioneer of American ballet. Shakespeare has been Neumeier’s most frequent literary source of inspiration: after his first full-​length ballet, Romeo and Juliet (Frankfurt, 1971, new version for the Hamburg Ballet, 1981), he choreographed Hamlet-​Connotations (New York, 1976; new version entitled The Hamlet Case for the Stuttgart Ballet, 1976), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Hamburg, 1977), Ariel (Hamburg, 1977), Amleth (Copenhagen, 1985; new version entitled Hamlet for the Hamburg Ballet, 1997), Othello (Hamburg, 1985), As You Like It (Hamburg, 1985), and VIVALDI or What You Will (Hamburg, 1996). The ballet critic Horst Koegler compared Neumeier’s impact on ballet to that of Lessing on the theater and coined the term “New Hamburg ballet dramaturgy.”47 Two short case studies of a comedy and a tragedy shall give us some idea of the ways in which Neumeier tackled his complex Shakespearean sources.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s most frequently choreographed comedy,48 inspired a number of major creators of ballets, such as Marius Petipa, Mikhail Fokine, George Balanchine, and Frederick Ashton. In his adaptation, John Neumeier remained close to Shakespeare’s action; he put special emphasis on psychology and the play’s comic side. Neumeier’s ballet takes place in two settings, Theseus’s palace and the fairy wood, which are peopled by three groups of protagonists: courtiers, fairies, and mechanicals. The settings and groups are distinguished visually—​through their movement style and speed, lighting, sets, and costumes—​as well as acoustically, through the music. Neumeier uses Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy for Theseus and his courtiers, György Ligeti for the fairies, and street organ music for the mechanicals. However, the mythical world in Theseus’s palace and the fairy world in the wood are paralleled and interrelated, rather than completely separate. Neumeier highlights their connection by casting Theseus and Oberon, Hippolyta and Titania, and Philostrate and Puck with the same dancers and by creating a similar movement vocabulary for the doubled figures.49 As in Shakespeare’s play, there are several spectacles within the performance. In the ballet, the invisible Puck watches both the confused lovers and the clumsy mechanicals with great delight, which visualizes his lines in the play: Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be! (3.2.114–​115)50

Similarly, Oberon laughs at the “sweet sight” (4.1.45) of Titania’s infatuation with Bottom. The mechanicals dance “Pyramus and Thisbe” in front of Theseus and his courtiers, who are sitting on chairs on the stage. As in Shakespeare, the performance

376   Iris Julia Bührle within the performance reflects the turbulent confusion that precedes the happy outcome for the watching couples. Neumeier blurs the boundaries between dream and reality even more than Shakespeare does in the play. Protagonists repeatedly fall asleep on stage and wake up in a world in which nothing is as it was before. Neumeier represents the events in the fairy world as a dream of Hippolyta, but he adds another frame by making Titania wake up at the very end of the ballet. It therefore remains uncertain whether the whole ballet is Hippolyta’s or Titania’s dream, or whether the reigning couples lead a double life.51 Like Cranko did in his ballets, Neumeier characterizes all his protagonists, their relationships, and their evolution through their movement vocabulary. If in Shakespeare, the lovers might seem rather interchangeable,52 Neumeier clearly differentiates them: the stylistic similarities between Demetrius and Helena, and between Hermia and Lysander, indicate that they belong together, even though they may not be aware of it themselves. The seemingly “natural” couples are broken up or brought together by the magic flower that Theseus initially offers to his bride and which appears throughout the ballet. The lyrical Lysander starts courting the rather ungraceful Helena; the glittering Titania, who usually thrones weightlessly above the heads of her fellow creatures or floats regally on a bed made of male fairies, descends to the ground and adores a coarse ass-​eared mechanical. In the end, order is restored and all the formerly hesitant or reluctant lovers are happily married. Even the initial discord between Oberon and Titania, which is expressed through sharp angles, kicks, perilous lifts, and some physical fighting in slow motion during their first encounter, dissolves into a harmonious pas de deux with a final entwined lift. Neumeier engages intensely with the play’s humorous side, especially in his portrayal of the lovers, Puck, and the mechanicals. Helena and—​to a lesser extent—​Demetrius are comic characters from the start, and the encounters of the four lovers in the wood consist of hasty flights and pursuits, convoluted lifts, throwing and dragging movements, ungentle falls, and entangled limbs. Puck, who transforms himself into the blind Cupid by putting on Helena’s glasses, creates such confusion with his magic flower that the furious Oberon thrashes his bottom. As the ruddy mechanicals irrupt into the wood, their angular, halting movements, which reflect the jerky mechanism of their street organ, contrast comically with the elegant sculptures and floating, organic groupings of the delicate fairies.53 The performance of the mechanicals at the triple wedding is as unwillingly grotesque as in the play. Thus, Neumeier creates a humorous interlude in the traditional wedding divertissement.

Othello Shakespeare’s Othello has been another popular subject with choreographers since the early nineteenth century. Probably the most famous ballet inspired by the tragedy today is José Limón’s long pas de quatre The Moor’s Pavane from 1949. In this work, the action of the play is condensed into some twenty minutes (compare Chapter 12 by Susan Jones in

Shakespeare Ballets in Germany    377 this volume). Neumeier, on the contrary, chose to represent almost the entire action and to focus on the psyche and the development of the characters and their relationships. His 1985 Othello is staged as a conflict between the exterior world, which is driven by war and governed by appearances—​Iago’s world—​and Desdemona’s world of interiority, peace, and affection. Othello is torn between these spheres and briefly surrenders to Iago’s worldview, before his suicide marks his definitive return to Desdemona’s world. From the beginning, Neumeier contrasts these worlds as Othello and Desdemona slowly walk toward each other in the midst of aggressive, shouting, half-​naked soldiers whom they do not seem to perceive. Neumeier again uses various composers to create different atmospheres:  the scenes of war and discord and Othello’s descent into despair are often accompanied by Alfred Schnittke, whereas Desdemona’s and Othello’s bedroom pas de deux in Act 1 and the end of Act 2 are set to Arvo Pärt. Neumeier also includes medieval and early modern songs and music by the Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos. Leitmotifs, mirrors, and visions abound in Neumeier’s Othello. The choreographer invents doppelgänger figures for both Othello and Desdemona that only exist in their imagination:  an almost naked black man with a red mask, and a very white, lightly dressed young woman who looks as if she had stepped out of a Botticelli painting. The doppelgängers embody the stereotypes attached to Othello and Desdemona in Shakespeare’s play. They also represent Othello and Desdemona’s fascinating and threatening image of their respective partner. The black figure could initially be interpreted as an embodiment of Othello’s tales that seduce Desdemona. In the course of the ballet, Othello loses his self-​control, and his movement style momentarily comes closer to that of the stereotypical savage. At the same time, he starts to interpret his vision as a warning, and he increasingly identifies Desdemona with the image of a loose Venetian woman. This shift in Othello’s perception is brought about chiefly by Iago’s skillful manipulation of appearances. Iago eventually becomes the “choreographer” of the ballet’s ending. He first manages to unsettle Othello by performing a violent “moresca” with soldiers, which features a white woman and a black man. Iago subsequently engineers various situations to give Othello the impression that his wife is unfaithful, and he supplies his interpretation of the choreography by whispering in Othello’s ear. He also physically manipulates Othello’s movements and conjures up visions in his head, for instance that of a bacchanalian orgy in which Desdemona and Cassio take part. Due to Iago’s insinuations, Othello abandons his upright, vertical position and loses command over his movements, which recalls his temporary loss of linguistic flourish in the play.54 This enables Iago to mistreat Othello, as he previously mistreated his wife. Cassio equally becomes the ensign’s puppet as Iago breaks his discipline and makes him participate in an orgy with soldiers and Bianca, whom Neumeier depicts as a prostitute. It is only at the very end that Iago loses control over his most obedient creature, Emilia, which causes his downfall. Neumeier visualizes the loving relationship between Othello and Desdemona by creating a harmonious bedroom pas de deux for them which has no equivalent in the play. This scene, during which the handkerchief is passed from Othello to Desdemona,

378   Iris Julia Bührle constitutes a moment of peace and tenderness that the couple is never granted in Shakespeare. If Shakespeare chooses to leave it ambiguous whether and when the lovers consummate their marriage, Neumeier’s juxtaposition of two parallel duos—​the love pas de deux and a lengthy duo just before the murder—​visualizes the evolution of their relationship. The last pas de deux contains gestures from the bedroom scene, as well as instants of tenderness and echoes of their former love. Desdemona repeatedly attempts to recreate the movements of their intimate duo and to find the Othello she thought she knew. The moments before and after the murder are remarkably slow and emotionally intense. After a brief initial struggle and weakening attempts to escape from Othello, Desdemona eventually seems to accept her death as an act of loving sacrifice. Similarly to the end of the love pas de deux, Othello holds Desdemona by the neck and looks into her face while he rocks her body from side to side. In the final pas de deux, however, she tilts her head backward and allows Othello to press on her throat with his thumbs. The murder, which is staged with little visible violence, therefore echoes the loving embrace of the first.55 Othello’s attitude in the final scene is more emotional than that of Shakespeare’s protagonist, who appears to focus only on himself, even in his last speech. He says, [ . . . ] Then you must speak Of one that loved not wisely but too well, Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe; [ . . . ] (5.2.352–​357)

This speech, in which Othello returns to his initial grandiloquent style, implies that he is really more concerned about what posterity might make of him than deeply shaken by the loss of Desdemona. In the ballet, on the contrary, all Othello can do after the murder is sit still and stare at what he has done—​his feelings are expressed through silent immobility. Unlike Shakespeare’s Othello, who kills himself with a dagger, a weapon used in war and fighting, Neumeier’s protagonist strangles himself with the handkerchief. By dying in a similar way to Desdemona through the instrument that not only caused his murder of her, but also stands for the bond between the couple, he tries to atone for his deed and ultimately chooses the world of peace and his wife. However, Neumeier claims that the main theme of his Othello is the impossibility of truly knowing another human being,56 and it remains doubtful whether Othello and Desdemona really understand each other at any point in the ballet. In both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Othello, Neumeier does not try to “translate” words into movements literally, an endeavor that would inevitably result in a pale copy of the original, but he chooses themes that strike him as essential and finds ways to express them in his own medium. Neumeier also highlights underlying themes in the plays and interprets the sources in his own way, for instance by adding another frame

Shakespeare Ballets in Germany    379 to the action in Midsummer Night’s Dream which questions the reality of the Theseus plot, or by personifying Othello and Desdemona’s erroneous images of each other and placing them at the core of the couple’s estrangement.

Other Shakespeare-​Inspired Dance Works During the second half of the twentieth century, Tanztheater was born in opposition to classical ballet. Even though this genre rarely aimed at adapting literary sources, a number of Tanztheater pieces contain allusions to works of literature. In 1979, for example, Pina Bausch created He takes her by the hand and leads her into the castle, the others follow, a choreography inspired by Macbeth. This work for four dancers, five actors, and a singer included film sequences.57 In many Tanztheater pieces, which are often hybrid mixtures of different genres, the text is only one of several sources of inspiration. As in the numerous ballets in which literary plots are used as an excuse to create situations for virtuosic dancing, the text constitutes a raw material that the choreographer handles very freely, but in a rather poststructuralist sense. Topical issues are seen through the prism of a literary text in a way that could be compared to plays such as Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine.58 Johann Kresnik, who worked in various theaters in West Germany, chose Shakespearean titles for several works of his violent and highly political “choreographic theater,” but they were very loosely related to their sources. After his Romeo and Juliet (Bremen, 1975), in which, according to the ballet critic Jochen Schmidt, “Shakespeare’s plot is abandoned,”59 he created a sanguinary Macbeth (Heidelberg, 1988), followed by King Lear (Bremen, 1991)60 and a violent Othello (Stuttgart, 1995).61 In East Germany, Tom Schilling adapted several works of literature at the Komische Oper in Berlin. In 1969, he staged The Moor of Venice there, a new version of a work he had choreographed in Leipzig in 1958.62 He created a ballet entitled Romeo and Juliet (1972) in which Romeo was a poor fisherman and the lovers were separated by class differences. Schilling’s A New Midsummer Night’s Dream (1981) was set in a modern-​ day socialist city, and the action bore only faint resemblance to that of Shakespeare’s play.63 Shakespeare has remained very popular with choreographers in Germany over the last few decades. Among those who have repeatedly turned to Shakespearean sources in the twenty-​first century, one might mention, for instance, Jörg Mannes (The Tempest, Munich, 2007; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hannover, 2010; Twelfth Night, Hannover, 2015; Henry VIII, Hannover, 2017), Xin Peng Wang (Romeo and Juliet—​birth of longing, Dortmund, 2007; H.A.M.L.E.T.—​the birth of the rage, Dortmund, 2010)  and Kevin O’Day (Hamlet, Stuttgart, 2008; Romeo and Juliet, Mannheim, 2011; Othello, Mannheim, 2013; 2 gents, Mannheim, 2015).

380   Iris Julia Bührle Among the relatively large number of Shakespeare-​ inspired ballets created in Germany throughout the history of dance, only a few have survived for more than several seasons and entered the repertoire of companies other than the one they were created for. Even though various factors influence the life span of a ballet, one can say that Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew and Neumeier’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Othello, which continue to be shown in different companies worldwide, have a very “Shakespearean” quality to them: although the characters and situations and their evolution are clearly defined, they remain open to different interpretations. Shakespeare was a master in creating ambiguity and complex characters whose motivations were not quite clear. Scholars like Emma Smith have pointed out that no singular meaning can be derived from the texts of the plays, and that they continuously need to be interpreted by directors and actors.64 The same applies to some Shakespeare-​inspired ballets: the choreography does not always provide clear answers, and generations of dancers have found new interpretations of their roles in Cranko and Neumeier’s ballets. Watching these works repeatedly is always a fresh experience that reveals different aspects of the ballet, just like new productions or adaptations of the play can highlight facets that might go unnoticed in other performances. Therefore it is not necessarily deplorable that many Shakespeare ballets are short-​ lived: ballet is essentially an ephemeral art form that keeps recreating itself in novel interpretations by young dancers and choreographers who engage with the rich sources in new and inspiring ways.

Notes 1. I thank the Leverhulme Trust for funding my research for this chapter. 2. My discussion of Cranko’s ballet The Taming of the Shrew is based on numerous performances I watched in Stuttgart and Birmingham, as well as the 1971 TV recording of the ballet with Marcia Haydée and Richard Cragun in the main roles. My analysis of Neumeier’s ballet A Midsummer Night’s Dream draws on performances I  saw in Paris and Hamburg; moreover, I  watched various recordings of the ballet at the Deutsches Tanzfilminstitut Bremen. As for Othello, my memory of several performances in Stuttgart was complemented by the 1989 TV recording of the ballet with Gigi Hyatt as Desdemona and Gamal Gouda as Othello. 3. The ballet, which is usually erroneously referred to as Antony and Cleopatra, is the earliest work mentioned in the entry “Shakespeare ballets” in the Oxford Dictionary of Dance, with the indication “Stuttgart or Ludwigsburg, after 1761.” Debra Craine and Judith Mackrell, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). In a program for the Paris Opera, Josseline Le Bourhis writes that Noverre was the first choreographer to tackle a work by Shakespeare in his 1765 Antony and Cleopatra. See Josseline Le Bourhis, “Shakespeare et la danse,” in Program, ‘Le songe d’une nuit d’été’, John Neumeier (Paris: Opéra National de Paris, 2001), 23. 4. Jean Georges Noverre, Lettres sur la danse, et sur les ballets, par M. Noverre, maître des ballets de son Altesse sérénissime monseigneur le duc de Wurtemberg, & ci-​devant des théatres de Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Londres, &c. (Lyon: Aimé Delaroche, 1760). For an annotated

Shakespeare Ballets in Germany    381 English edition of the Lettres, see Michael Burden and Jennifer Thorp, eds., The Works of Monsieur Noverre Translated from the French: Noverre, His Circle, and the English Lettres sur la danse (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2014). 5. Cf. Jean-​Georges Noverre, “An Essay on the Art of Dancing,” in The Works of Monsieur Noverre, 257: “the Art of Dancing has in itself, all that is necessary to speak the best language, but [ . . . ] it is not enough to be acquainted only with its alphabet. Let the man of genius put the letters together, form the words, and from these produce regular sentences; the art shall no longer be mute, but speak with true energy, and the Ballets will share with the best dramatic pieces, the peculiar advantage of exciting the tenderest feelings; nay, of receiving the tribute of a tear; whilst, in a less serious style, this art will please, entertain, and charm the spectators. Dancing, thus enobled by the expression of sentiment, and under the direction of a man of true genius, will, in time, obtain the praises, which the enlightened world bestows on poetry and painting, and become entitled to the rewards with which the latter are daily honored.” 6. Jean-​Georges Noverre, “An Essay,” 257. 7. Noverre in Niccolò Jommelli and Pietro Metastasio, Demofoonte (Stuttgart:  Cotta,  1765). 8. Alan Brissenden, “Shakespeare and Dance:  Dissolving Boundaries,” in Shakespeare without Boundaries: Essays in Honor of Dieter Mehl, eds. Christa Jansohn, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Stanley Wells (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 93. 9. Craine and Mackrell, Oxford Dictionary of Dance, entry “Noverre, Jean Georges.” 10. Cf. for example Brissenden, “Shakespeare and Dance,” 74. However, the Shakespearean inspiration of this ballet is difficult to prove, since the story circulated in various versions in Italy at the time. Moreover, there was already a ballet called Juliet and Romeo in 1784. It was premiered in Padua with choreography by Filippo Beretti. The libretti of the two versions are very similar, and they deviate rather significantly from Shakespeare’s play. Neither the 1784 nor the 1785 libretto mentions any literary source. They can be found in Giovanni Bertati, La Nitteti (Padova: per li Conzatti a S. Lorenzo, 1784), and Giuseppe Giordani, Le spose ricuperate (Venice: Modesto Fenzo, 1785). 11. La tempête, ou l’île des génies, libretto by Adolphe Nourrit, choreography by Jean Coralli, music by Jean-​Madeleine Schneitzhoeffer, Paris, Académie Royale de Musique, September 10, 1834, and La Tempête, libretto by Jules Barbier, choreography by Joseph Hansen, music by Ambroise Thomas, Paris, Théâtre National de l’Opéra, June 26, 1889. 12. For detailed information on Gsovsky’s works, see Max Busch, ed., Tatiana Gsovsky: Choreographin und Tanzpädagogin (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2005). 13. Horst Koegler, “Zwanzig Jahre zu früh:  anstelle eines Nachrufs,” in Tatiana Gsovsky, 279. 14. Koegler, “Zwanzig Jahre,” 278. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 15. For instance, Jack Anderson, Ballet And Modern Dance: A Concise History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book, 1992), 216; Marie-​Françoise Christout, Le ballet occidental: naissance et métamorphoses, XVIe–XXe siècles (Paris:  Desjonquères, 1995), 188; Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp, Ballet:  An Illustrated History (London:  Hamilton, 1992), 203; Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: a History of Ballet (London: Granta, 2011), 440. 16. Quoted in Horst Koegler, ed., Ballett 1973: Chronik und Bilanz des Ballettjahres (Seelze: Friedrich, 1973), 37. 17. New York Public Library, *MGZTL 4-​143, interview John Cranko with John Gruen, audio recording, May 31, 1973.

382   Iris Julia Bührle 18. In my PhD thesis, I have defined this genre at length and called it “literature ballet.” See Iris Julia Bührle, Literatur und Tanz: die choreographische Adaptation literarischer Werke in Deutschland und Frankreich vom 18. Jahrhundert bis heute (Würzburg: Koenigshausen & Neumann, 2014). 19. Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points:  Dance in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2003), 511. 20. Cranko had already created a version of Romeo and Juliet for La Scala Ballet in 1958. 21. According to Horst Koegler, Romeo and Juliet marked the Stuttgart Ballet’s hour of birth and heralded a renaissance of the full-​length “[b]‌allet d’action” in Western Europe. Horst Koegler, “Ballett in den Häusern des Littmann-​Theaterbaus,” in Die Oper in Stuttgart: 75 Jahre Littmann-​Bau, ed. Ute Becker (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-​Anstalt, 1987), 179. 22. Shakespeare’s works are quoted from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005). 23. John Percival, Theatre in My Blood: A Biography of John Cranko (London: Herbert Press, 1983), 196. 24. Laurie Maguire, Studying Shakespeare (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 83. 25. Nancy Isenberg states: “Scarlatti’s sonatas, which are the backbone of the score, are mostly constructed of hierarchical pair patterns, one pair of sounds building into another more dominant pair. The effect is that of rondeau with a strong chase rhythm. This lends a farcical tone to much of the action [ . . . ].” Nancy Isenberg, “Feminist Movement and the Balance of Power in John Cranko’s Ballet The Taming of the Shrew (Stuttgart, 1969),” in Shakespeare and European Politics, eds. Dirk Delabastita, Jozef de Vos, and Paul Franssen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 177. 26. Elisabeth Dalton, “Designing with Cranko,” in Program, “The Taming of the Shrew,” John Cranko (London: Royal Ballet, 1977). 27. John Cranko, Über den Tanz: Gespräche mit Walter Erich Schäfer (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1974), 17. 28. The ballet critic Clement Crisp wrote about Richard Cragun, for whom Cranko created the role of Petruccio: his “bravura technique [ . . . ] is always the servant of real artistry [ . . . ]. The variations are presented as entities, and their dramatic sense, the light they shed on the character, guide every movement: at their end we know something more about the personality of Petruchio.” Clement Crisp, “Haydée and Cragun,” Financial Times, February 21, 1977. 29. Isenberg, “Feminist Movement,” 171: “Crankos’s Kate [ . . . ] is very human. Far from the virginal Odettes and Giselles, seductive Odiles and Sylphs, and fairy-​tale Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties with whom we associate women in ballet narrative, she brings the ordinary, everyday and domestic into ballet—​perhaps for the first time. [ . . . ] Cranko’s fist-​ clenching Kate brought into ballet the 1960s avant-​garde aesthetic trend. But as ballet is arguably the performing art with the strongest conservative tendencies, Cranko’s choreography was an unusually daring and bold challenging of the boundaries between art and everyday life.” 30. The role was created for the Danish dancer Egon Madsen. Elisabeth Dalton recalls: “I went to the theatre wardrobe and found three of the largest cloaks there [ . . . ] and told Cranko that [the suitors] would have to wear cloaks like these. Madsen picked up his cloak, whirled it round, put it on and immediately started to sneeze. And Cranko said: ‘That’s it! This man has forever got a cold; he is going to start with a cold at the beginning and it is going to get worse and worse. Everything about him is in his cold.’ So throughout the whole ballet

Shakespeare Ballets in Germany    383 Gremio gets sicker and sicker and older and older. [ . . . ] Cranko wanted him to look an old fop, so we gave him a blond wig which was terribly, terribly curly with silly little hats on top, inspired by Cranach drawings. For the last scene he had another wig, which was completely straight, as if he had absolutely gone to pieces.” Elisabeth Dalton in Program “Shrew.” 31. The contest of the three suitors evokes the solos of the three muses in Balanchine’s Apollo (Paris 1928, originally entitled Apollon Musagète). Like Bianca, Apollo rejects two muses (Calliope and Polyhymnia, who respectively represent poetry and mime in the ballet). He subsequently engages in a pas de deux with Terpsichore, whose art, like Lucentio’s, is dance. 32. According to Cranko’s assistant and choreologist Georgette Tsinguirides, Cranko used to refer to Katherine and Petruccio as the only real people in the ballet (private communication, 05.01.2016). 33. Percival, Theatre in My Blood, 196–​197. 34. Margaret Jane Kidnie, The Taming of the Shrew (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2006),  43–​44. 35. In ballets up to the mid-​twentieth century, soli and pas de deux usually expressed a single situation or emotion, like many operatic arias and duets. Choreographers such as Cranko created a form of ballet in which the action progressed even in the course of a pas de deux. See Bührle, Literatur und Tanz, 204–​206. 36. Giselle, the epitome of the Romantic ballet to a libretto by Théophile Gautier after Heinrich Heine, was premiered at the Paris Opera in 1841. 37. In Shakespeare, Petruccio asserts that Katherine’s harsh words after their first encounter are a mere performance—​in Cranko’s ballet, this claim seems to come true. 38. They create an immediate need for money for Petruccio and serve as brides for Bianca’s two discarded suitors. They might also indicate Petruccio’s evolution: the prostitutes are only associated with him in the beginning. After Petruccio meets Katherine—​and maybe finds love—​ he has no further contact with the prostitutes, and they only interact with Bianca’s suitors. Cranko’s 1962 version of Romeo and Juliet also features three prostitutes who initially dance with Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio. After his encounter with Juliet, Romeo is reluctant to dance with them. Kenneth MacMillan adopted the prostitutes in his 1965 version of Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Ballet; they are discussed in detail in Chapter 15 in this volume. 39. Cf. Isenberg, “Feminist Movement,” 173. It remains questionable to what extent prostitutes are “liberated” and what happens to this alleged freedom when they marry. However, Cranko’s choreography in the last scenes makes it clear that his prostitutes are unlikely to submit to the authority of their respective husbands. 40. Maguire, Studying Shakespeare,  82–​83. 41. Jochen Schmidt, “Eine Luftspringer-​Geschichte:  Crankos Ballett Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung in Stuttgart uraufgeführt,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 18, 1969. 42. Hartmut Regitz, “Ein Gag im Sack. Stuttgart: Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung,” Christ und Welt, March 21, 1969. 43. Neumeier in Gisela Sonnenburg, “Ballett für alle:  Gespräch mit John Neumeier. Über seinen Ziehvater John Cranko, Gastspiele in der DDR und Rußland sowie eine politische Idee,” Junge Welt, December 1–​2, 2012. See also Reynolds and McCormick, No Fixed Points, 511–​512:  “In 1965, with his three-​act Eugene Onegin, Cranko achieved something even more remarkable than he had with Romeo: a present-​day addition to the full-​evening classical canon that was uniquely his own, soon accepted as such by audiences and companies

384   Iris Julia Bührle around the world.” The Taming of the Shrew was equally original, even though it has not spread as widely as Onegin. 44. Neumeier in Katja Engler, “ ‘Ich brauche Tänzer, die kreativ denken’: nächsten Sonntag feiert John Neumeier mit dem Handlungsballett Onegin die Eröffnungspremiere seiner Jubiläumssaison,” Welt am Sonntag, November 25, 2012. 45. Laura Colombo, “Terpsichore courtisane: Ashton, Neumeier et la Dame aux camélias au xxe siècle,” in Pas de mots: de la littérature à la danse, eds. Laura Colombo and Stefano Genetti (Paris: Hermann, 2010), 144. 46. This statement refers to Neumeier’s Othello. Eva-​ Elisabeth Fischer, “Vertanzte Sekundärliteratur: John Neumeiers Othello-​Ballett in der Hamburger Kampnagelfabrik uraufgeführt,” Stuttgarter Zeitung, May 29, 1985. 47. Horst Koegler points out that Neumeier’s dramaturgy, like Lessing’s, was the result of an intense dialogue with Shakespeare’s works. Horst Koegler, John Neumeier:  Bilder eines Lebens (Hamburg: Edel Germany, 2010), 14. 48. Alan Brissenden states that it has more dancing than any other Shakespeare play. Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (London: Macmillan, 1981), 25. 49. Neumeier was not the first to cast these roles with the same actors in the twentieth century; Peter Brook famously did so in his 1970 production for the RSC. This might reflect a casting practice in Shakespeare’s time; Emma Smith assumes that the sovereigns of the fairy and the human worlds were doubled in the first performances. Emma Smith, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10. 50. Peter Holland mentions the comic chaos that Robin/​Puck creates and subsequently watches with amusement: “Human behaviour is nothing more than a series of tableaux of folly, put on for Robin’s enjoyment, a spectacle with fairies the only members of the audience.” Peter Holland, “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 46. 51. Holland, “Introduction,” 21: “if we have responded to the play fully, we will share with Bottom the sense of vision, of something revealed from out there, from the world of fairy, not the false or trivial world of dream but a revelation of another reality.” In the ballet, there is a strong feeling that the fairy world is intimately connected to and no less real than the human world. 52. This widespread view has been questioned, for instance, by Joan Stansbury in her article “Characterization of the Four Young Lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Survey 35 (2007): 57–​64. 53. The movement style of the fairies recalls Balanchine, and Neumeier quotes a pose from Apollo in the first scene in the wood. In contrast, Neumeier’s Thisbe, played by a man who desperately tries to dance gracefully on pointe, looks like a parody of the women in Vaslav Nijinsky’s Sacre du Printemps. Ironically, Nijinsky’s women shocked the audience precisely because they did not wear pointe shoes and danced in a non-​classical movement style. 54. A similar evolution of Othello’s movement language can be observed in José Limón’s ballet The Moor’s Pavane, which is discussed in Chapter 12 by Susan Jones in the present volume. 55. In the course of this long pas de deux, Neumeier combines elements of various ways in which Desdemona has been portrayed in this scene on the theater stage, from resisting to acquiescent. For a brief outline of the performance history of this role, see Ayanna Thompson, “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A.  J. Honigmann (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2016), 90–​96. 56. John Neumeier, In Bewegung (Munich: Rolf Heyne, 2008), 204.

Shakespeare Ballets in Germany    385 57. For a description of the work, see Jochen Schmidt, Tanztheater in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main; Berlin: Propyläen-​Verlag, 1992), 54–​55. 58. In Hamletmachine, which was written in 1977 and first performed in Paris in 1979, Heiner Müller uses characters and themes from Hamlet to reflect on the Cold War, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, and the situation of the German Democratic Republic. His fragmented text does not contain a coherent plot, which is also the case in many Tanztheater pieces. In her Macbeth-​inspired work, Pina Bausch interweaves motifs and bits of text from Shakespeare’s play with images and themes that pervade her choreographies, such as the battle of the sexes (Schmidt, Tanztheater, 54–​55). Heiner Müller’s violent imagery brings him close to the choreographer Johann Kresnik, who has similarly used his pieces as vehicles to draw attention to topical political issues (he also staged Hamletmachine in Heidelberg in 1980). Kresnik’s 1988 Macbeth, for instance, ended with the title hero lying dead in a bathtub in the same pose in which the politician Uwe Barschel had been found murdered in his tub the previous year. 59. Schmidt, Tanztheater, 87. 60. For further information on these three works, see Schmidt, Tanztheater, 87 and 96–​97. 61. Horst Koegler, “Schlachthaus der Gefühle,” Stuttgarter Zeitung, July 3, 1995. 62. Eberhard Rebling, Ballett von A bis Z (Berlin: Henschel, 1970), 289. 63. For a description of the ballet, see Franz Anton Cramer, “Warfare over Realism: Tanztheater in East Germany, 1966–​ 1989,” in New German Dance Studies, ed. Susan Manning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 154–​157. 64. Smith notes, “we need to amplify our notion of a play-​text to encompass not simply the words on the page, but the range of their possible materialization on different stages, real and imaginary.” Smith, Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare, 27.

Bibliography Brissenden, Alan. Shakespeare and the Dance. London: Macmillan, 1981. Brissenden, Alan. “Shakespeare and Dance: Dissolving Boundaries.” In Shakespeare without Boundaries: Essays in Honor of Dieter Mehl, edited by Christa Jansohn, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Stanley Wells, 92–​106. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011. Bührle, Iris Julia. Literatur und Tanz: die choreographische Adaptation literarischer Werke in Deutschland und Frankreich vom 18. Jahrhundert bis heute. Würzburg:  Königshausen & Neumann, 2014. Burden, Michael, and Jennifer Thorp, ed. The Works of Monsieur Noverre Translated from the French: Noverre, His Circle, and the English Lettres sur la danse. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2014. Busch, Max, ed. Tatiana Gsovsky:  Choreographin und Tanzpädagogin. Berlin:  Alexander Verlag, 2005. Cramer, Franz Anton. “Warfare over Realism: Tanztheater in East Germany, 1966–​1989.” In New German Dance Studies, edited by Susan Manning, 147–​164. Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2012. Cranko, John. Über den Tanz:  Gespräche mit Walter Erich Schäfer. Frankfurt am Main:  S. Fischer, 1974. Dominic, Zoë. John Cranko und das Stuttgarter Ballett, 1961–​ 1973. Pfullingen:  Günther Neske, 1978.

386   Iris Julia Bührle Isenberg, Nancy. “Accommodating Shakespeare to Ballet:  John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet (Venice, 1958).” In Shifting the Scene:  Shakespeare in European Culture, edited by Ladina Bezzola Lambert and Balz Engler, 129–​139. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. Isenberg, Nancy. “Feminist Movement and the Balance of Power in John Cranko’s ballet The Taming of the Shrew (Stuttgart, 1969).” In Shakespeare and European Politics, edited by Dirk Delabastita, Jozef de Vos, and Paul Franssen, 169–​179. Newark:  University of Delaware Press, 2008. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. The Taming of the Shrew. Basingstoke, UK:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Koegler, Horst. “Ballett in den Häusern des Littmann-​ Theaterbaus.” In Die Oper in Stuttgart:  75 Jahre Littmann-​Bau, edited by Ute Becker, 164–​197. Stuttgart:  Deutsche Verlags-​Anstalt,  1987. Koegler, Horst. John Neumeier: Bilder eines Lebens. Hamburg: Edel Germany, 2010. Maguire, Laurie. Studying Shakespeare. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Neumeier, John. In Bewegung. Munich: Rolf Heyne, 2008. Percival, John. Theatre in My Blood:  A Biography of John Cranko. London:  Herbert Press, 1983. Regitz, Hartmut. Tanz in Deutschland: Ballett seit 1945. Berlin: Quadriga, 1984. Reynolds, Nancy, and Malcolm McCormick. No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2003. Sanders, Julie. Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Schmidt, Jochen. Tanztheater in Deutschland. Frankfurt am Main; Berlin: Propyläen-​Verlag, 1992. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 2005. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by Peter Holland. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Shakespeare, William. Othello, edited by E. A.  J. Honigmann with a new introduction by Ayanna Thompson. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Smith, Emma. The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Chapter 17

“ Therefore Ha ’ D one with Word s ” Shakespeare and Innovative British Ballets Elinor Parsons

The commemorative activities in 2015–​ 2016 marking four hundred years since Shakespeare’s death meant that British audiences of the two Royal Ballet companies were able to see a wide range of Shakespearean ballets. The London-​based Royal Ballet programmed two full-​length pieces: Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet (1965) and Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale (2014). The Birmingham Royal Ballet also staged MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet and another five Shakespearean ballets:  José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949), Frederick Ashton’s The Dream (1964), John Cranko’s The Taming of the Shrew (1969), David Bintley’s The Shakespeare Suite (1999), and the première of Jessica Lang’s response to the sonnets, Wink (2016). The company’s artistic director, David Bintley, also created a full-​length ballet version of The Tempest (2016) for the autumn season. None of the other major British ballet companies—​English National Ballet, Northern Ballet, and Scottish Ballet—​scheduled any of their productions of Shakespeare’s work for the 2015–​2016 season. The priority given to Shakespeare by the Royal Ballet companies reflects a national enthusiasm for commemorative activities, but it also signals the important way in which Shakespeare features in defining their identities. I shall focus on one of the anniversary year’s revivals, David Bintley’s The Shakespeare Suite (1999), in order to examine what happens when British choreographers respond to Shakespeare. I seek to situate Bintley’s piece within a wider context of innovative Shakespearean ballets in the repertoire of the Royal Ballet companies. I shall also, therefore, grant attention to Kenneth MacMillan’s Images of Love (1964) and his more allusive response to Shakespeare in The Prince of the Pagodas (1989).1 By reading the approach taken in Bintley’s one-​act ballet within the context of Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography, I aim to show the complexity of what can be achieved in a balletic adaptation that prioritizes suggestion rather than explication.

388   Elinor Parsons The Shakespeare Suite engages with seven of Shakespeare’s plays: Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. Several of these plays have inspired dance interpretation. Indeed, when discussing the attraction Shakespeare holds for choreographers internationally, Selma Jeanne Cohen identifies the latter four plays as the ones that “dominate the scene. And of these four, Romeo and Juliet is well in the lead.”2 The programming in Britain during the four-​hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death suggests that this remains the case, with both Royal Ballet companies presenting MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet and all of the other significant national ballet companies performing their versions of the play in the couple of years preceding 2016.3 Alan Brissenden suggests that Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s “first play certainly to include practical dancing on the stage.”4 He also notes that Dream “has more dancing than any other Shakespearian play.”5 His observations correlate with a historical emphasis in the ballet repertoire on adapting plays that include danced episodes. By assessing Images of Love, The Prince of the Pagodas, and The Shakespeare Suite, I shall draw attention to the wider scope that exists for adapting Shakespeare’s work. In a recent scholarly survey of “Shakespeare, Ballet and Dance,” it was suggested that the choice for choreographers is necessarily limited because 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.6

Two examples of ballets that could counter Rodney Stenning Edgecombe’s claim are Vladimir Vasiliev’s Macbeth (Bolshoi Ballet, 1980) and David Nixon’s Hamlet (Northern Ballet, 2008). In exploring some of the ways that the language of ballet has evolved in England in the latter part of the twentieth century, I must challenge any fixed notion of the art form’s “sunny artifice.” Edgecombe’s definition of Shakespeare’s work in terms of behavior and location does, however, usefully highlight its physical qualities, thus avoiding the “bias towards understanding the work as embodied in its written or printed text.”7 Studying balletic adaptations brings to the forefront an awareness of the complexity of the Shakespearean and the balletic texts, and my focus is necessarily different in the three case studies.8 In evaluating the achievements of these adaptations, I wish to move beyond an outline of the ways in which the choices that were made “suit” the plays. The interpretive complexity of Images of Love, The Prince of the Pagodas, and The Shakespeare Suite means that, rather than simply holding a mirror to aspects of the plays, these ballets serve to develop British audiences’ conceptions of Shakespeare and of ballet. MacMillan’s Images of Love was conceived just after the Royal Ballet’s leadership had changed. Frederick Ashton’s first season as artistic director was 1963–​1964: “There was an easy handover from de Valois to Ashton. She had founded the company but he was one of its architects.”9 Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet companies and the

Innovative British Ballets    389 Royal Ballet School, shaped ballet in Britain from its origins with the Vic-​Wells Ballet in 1931, and she remained an influence on all three national institutions until her death in 2001. A  key characteristic was her “understanding of the interrelationship of tradition and innovation,”10 and that affected her own work as a choreographer and her artistic policies. In 2012 David Bintley paid a deeply personal tribute to Ninette de Valois: “Madam was this great innovator, she was pushing forwards all the time.”11 Both MacMillan and Bintley were dancers themselves with the Royal Ballet companies, and their interest in narrative work was nurtured by such close involvement with the repertoire of each company. Indeed, Kenneth MacMillan’s biographer Jann Parry suggests that Ninette de Valois regarded him “as her product, the result of her system of training in the ballet school and of apprenticeship in the junior company, both as a performer and choreographer.”12 In reflecting on MacMillan’s debut piece—​Somnambulism (1953)—​de Valois remembers “at last we’d found another . . . English choreographer of real merit.”13 The importance of new work from within the company is exemplified by the triple bill in April 1964 that marked the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth. Frederick Ashton created The Dream, a distilled A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to begin the program, and Robert Helpmann’s twenty-​minute version of Hamlet (1942) was revived to bring the evening to a conclusion. These versions framed Kenneth MacMillan’s Images of Love, where he responded to nine quotations from Shakespeare, addressing “love” in a range of ways. Four of the quotations are taken from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, two from Twelfth Night, one from Julius Caesar, one from The Taming of the Shrew, and one from “Sonnet CXLIV.” Eighteen dancers appeared in the episodes, eight female and ten male. The ballet has only been performed fifteen times, being given nine performances in the spring season, a further three in the autumn and then three in the spring of 1965. The critical response was muted, though Alexander Bland suggested, “An uneven work; but it would be sad if pruning did not preserve it.”14 Despite MacMillan making alterations for the final six performances, which removed three episodes and reordered the remaining six, the ballet has not been revived.15 In 2003 the sequence inspired by “Sonnet CXLIV” featured in the Royal Ballet’s “Tribute to Rudolf Nureyev,” but the decision to perform the extract in front of archive footage of Nureyev and Fonteyn offstage met with widespread criticism because it detracted from the choreography and the dancing.16 In 1964 MacMillan sought to challenge his Covent Garden audience in the structure and choreographic style of the piece. Critical response seemed uncertain of how to interpret “this deliberately episodic ballet.”17 The quotations prefacing each piece were delivered by a respected actor, Derek Godfrey. The inclusion of spoken text is even today unusual in a balletic context, and using the same voice for each quotation underlined the sense of these words as Shakespeare’s, rather than those of individual characters. Indeed, while there are two quotations from the same scene in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the lines were reordered, so Episode 2 is framed by a detail in Proteus’s soliloquy where he confesses that the sight of Sylvia has supplanted all thoughts of Julia: “the remembrance of my former love is by a newer object quite forgotten” (2.4.191–​192). Episode 8’s quotation comes from earlier in the scene, when Valentine shares with Proteus the

390   Elinor Parsons effects of his love: “I break my fast, dine, sup and sleep, /​Upon the very naked name of love” (2.4.139–​140). Avoiding literal engagement with the quotations’ dramatic context was compounded by the shaping of each episode. Episode 2 had one female dancer with three male dancers, and Episode 8 had one male dancer and six female dancers. The ensemble seemed to be well used, with just three of the episodes as pas de deux. The casting meant that most of the dancers appear in more than one episode, for example in the opening performance Donald MacLeary danced in Episodes 1 and 6. However, Rudolf Nureyev’s absence on April 24 caused Gable to move to Nureyev’s role and MacLeary took Gable’s part, with Desmond Doyle then dancing in Episodes 1, 2, and 3. Though the dancers individualized their roles in each Episode, the interchangeability shows that characters were not sustained across the whole piece, which fit with its “semi-​abstract neo-​classical style.”18 MacMillan presents a similar challenge to conventional characterization in his Hamlet-​inspired small-​scale work, Sea of Troubles (1988).19 The costume choices (tunics and tights) and stark set enhanced the sense of abstraction in Images of Love. The quotation taken from the earliest point in The Two Gentlemen of Verona appears as Episode 4: “If you love her, you cannot see her” “Why?” “Because love is blind” (2.1.64–​66). Here, the two voices are those of Speed and his master Valentine. The corresponding pas de deux showed “Christopher Gable, blind and trusting, and Lynn Seymour, a wicked termagant, tormenting him.”20 Another reviewer suggested that the “two lovers, seeing only through their bodies, were drowning in a sea of sensuousness”21 and the judgment of a third is of a “strange, enthralling pas de deux.”22 MacMillan responded to the sense of the quotation, guiding his audience to focus on a possible subtext. Speed’s proverbial statement need not simply be prosaic criticism of his master’s lack of perception, for there is the possibility of it drawing attention to the sensuality of love. An erotic physicality was mixed with physical aggression: “Seymour and Gable grope around the stage in a kind of Grahamesque serpentine style; they collide, embrace, separate, and eventually Seymour gives her young man a couple of kidney punches.”23 The vivid description of the action here shows MacMillan extending the vocabulary of the pas de deux and allying his balletic technique with the kind of contemporary dance practiced by Martha Graham. Barry Kay’s “modishly abstract metal constructivist décor”24 was seen by critics to establish “exactly the off-​beat modern atmosphere demanded by the choreography.”25 Peter Tranchell’s commissioned score helped to emphasize a focus on originality across the piece, although it was less positively received, being regarded, in the words of several critics, as simply “banal music.”26 The creative team MacMillan used reflected how “he understood choreography in the larger context of the theatre, and wanted ballet to be clearly part of that theatre.”27 MacMillan’s work shows his desire to forge connections between ballet and other art forms, and that was demonstrated perhaps most emphatically in this piece in Episode 6. The sequence took Brutus’s line to Lucilius as its inspiration: “When love begins to sicken and decay, It useth an enforced ceremony” (4.2.20). Svetlana Beriosova and Donald MacLeary began “sitting solemnly on seats, as sadly as Picasso clowns, as resignedly as a Pinter couple staring at one another across the breakfast table,”28 and they “put into their joint movements (away from each other and then unwillingly back together)

Innovative British Ballets    391 an impressive combination of hatred, bitterness, disillusion and fading memories of past love.”29 The “strange pas de deux” came as the third in a series of pas de deux, which had begun with the one created for Seymour and Gable. In the revised version of the ballet, its central pas de deux (Episode 5, also from The Two Gentlemen of Verona)30 was cut, but both of the others remained. The Dancing Times critic explores “why the audience so applauds it” and one reason he offers is that the score here “achieves a plangent, dramatic helpfulness.”31 The decision to position such a mournful piece as the third, culminating coupling signals MacMillan’s determination to challenge an audience attuned to ballet (and to Shakespeare) and consequently with expectations of a move toward resolution. In some senses, the trio of pas de deux builds to Episode 7, which is the only pas de trois in the piece. The sequence is based on Sonnet CXLIV, and it is the section to which critics granted the greatest attention as the “most original item” and “the most ambitious project.”32 The sonnet begins “Two loves I have of comfort and despair . . .” and the entire poem prefaced the piece. Rudolf Nureyev in the role of poet is joined by Lynn Seymour as his “worser spirit” and Christopher Gable as his “better angel,” and the trio create an “ambivalent emotional triangle.”33 The identification by critics of the dark lady and the young man can be partly explained by the delivery of the entire sonnet as a framing quotation. The interest paid to this section (as noted earlier, it is the only one that has been performed since 1965) seems, in part, to connect with the inclusion of a more explicit and detailed Shakespearean impetus, in contrast with the more loosely interpretive moments in the other episodes. The privileging of this section of the piece seems to have skewed popular conceptions of Images of Love: it is habitually and erroneously described as a work “based on Shakespeare’s sonnets.”34 While the structure of MacMillan’s ballet resists linear progression, the suggestion here of a ménage-​à-​trois has heightened intensity because Seymour and Gable had been coupled in Episode 4’s pas de deux. In Episode 7, the dance shows “three people so closely intertwined that one could hardly distinguish one’s limbs from another’s.”35 The positive response the episode received was, according to the Dancing Times critic, because “it is a deliberate shocker.”36 Another aspect that should be acknowledged was the casting. Episode 7 is the only sequence where Nureyev has a key role, and the focus of the critics perhaps reflects the public’s fascination with his personality and situation. Indeed, his part was to have been larger, providing “the linking theme . . . as a solitary wanderer in a world of unsatisfied loveless couples.”37 Other commitments during the rehearsal period meant that Nureyev simply appeared at the beginning, in Episode 7, and at the end. An awareness of the dramatic persona of the dancer became a focus of MacMillan’s career, and that seems to be signaled during this piece: “It has been said of this ballet that it sheds new light on the dancers appearing in it—​that MacMillan has enhanced their choreographic personalities.”38 During MacMillan’s career, the connection between specific dancers and the parts they created would grow and develop. The notion of individual personalities that informed Images of Love encourages a connection between the complexity of Shakespeare’s language and ideas and the interpretive layers added by individual dancers. Indeed, the creative contribution dancers made was at the core of the notorious episode in the Royal Ballet’s history when the première of Romeo and Juliet (1965) was given to Fonteyn and

392   Elinor Parsons Nureyev, rather than to the cast on whom the roles had been created, Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable.39 One distinctive aspect of The Prince of the Pagodas is that its young dancer, Darcey Bussell, was plucked from the corps de ballet by MacMillan and her distinctive qualities—​“an attack which is very refreshing . . . an enormous jump . . . a complete innocence and radiance on the stage”40—​were ones that MacMillan exploited in his choreography for Princess Rose. In the following year MacMillan choreographed his Romeo and Juliet (1965), but thereafter his full-​length narrative work paid attention to historical figures such as Anastasia (1970), Manon (1974), Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria in Mayerling (1978), and Isadora (1981), showing his interest in “representing, through the vocabulary of the classic dance, real people in the social setting of their time.”41 A connection might, therefore, be drawn between the inspiration from fiction that inspired Romeo and Juliet and MacMillan’s last full-​length work, the 1989 ballet The Prince of the Pagodas. That link is strengthened by noting the Shakespearean influence on the latter ballet because it draws on “a number of fables: Beauty and the Beast, The Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and King Lear.”42 These elements were fundamental to the scenario devised by John Cranko when he created The Prince of the Pagodas (1957), the precursor to MacMillan’s version and the occasion for the completion of Benjamin Britten’s richly complex score. The Prince of the Pagodas is one of several connections between Cranko and MacMillan. Both men joined the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet as dancers before specializing in choreography, both were resident choreographers for the Royal Ballet, and both ran ballet companies in Germany:  Cranko went to Stuttgart in 1961 and MacMillan went to Berlin in 1966. A creative connection existed between them, with MacMillan creating the clown role of Moondog in Cranko’s The Lady and the Fool (1954) and Cranko supporting MacMillan’s staging of a ballet to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in Stuttgart (1965) when the Royal Opera House Board had refused to do so. Cranko’s The Prince of the Pagodas was not received positively when it premièred on January 1, 1957, at the Royal Opera House, despite its significance as “the first full-​ evening ballet entirely by British artists . . . for which Benjamin Britten wrote the music, his only commissioned score for ballet.”43 Although Cranko mounted it in Milan in May 1957 and it was received more enthusiastically when Stuttgart Ballet presented it in November 1960, it has not remained in the repertoire of any of these companies. Its final performances in London were in 1960. Here, the negative reception Cranko’s ballet had received focused on “the many ensemble, spectacular and purely decorative dances” which meant that “echoes . . . of Lear, The Sleeping Beauty, Rackhamite fairies and monsters, are not developed.”44 Cranko is reported by his biographer John Percival to have intended “to make a series of images from traditional fairy stories, linked by a thread of plot which was as important or unimportant as the audience chose to make it.”45 The emphasis on the audience’s role in making meaning helps to signal Cranko’s wish to accommodate interpretive possibilities, and that is matched by his insistence that “his ballet should be intelligible without the need for a synopsis in the programme.”46 Cranko’s creation of a new scenario in collaboration with Benjamin Britten reflected his desire to create an innovative piece. According to Percival, Cranko’s choreographic style

Innovative British Ballets    393 showed the influence of Martha Graham (whose first visit to London was in 1954) and that of the Bolshoi Ballet (whose first Covent Garden season was in 1956), suggesting that he was pushing the Royal Ballet’s boundaries but “both of these [companies] expected an emotional commitment in the performances that neither the plot nor the dancers of Pagodas brought out.”47 The apparent lack of depth of feeling makes Pagodas unusual in the context of Cranko, a choreographer whose “distinction lies in using dance to express the richness of the human spirit.”48 An interest in psychological complexity marks another connection between Cranko and MacMillan,49 but the latter perhaps had the advantage of being in the position of making The Prince of the Pagodas much later in his career. In Cranko’s piece, the key connection with King Lear appears to be that the kingdom is ruled initially by an aged emperor, whereas MacMillan amplifies the Shakespearean connections in terms of plot and, more fundamentally, of character. In the mid-​1970s Ninette de Valois suggested that MacMillan might prepare a revised version, and protracted discussions then followed. Britten died in 1976 and subsequent negotiation with the Britten Estate proved frustrating for MacMillan. Colin Thubron, the writer of the revised scenario for The Prince of the Pagodas, notes that “MacMillan’s talents flourish in dance of emotional, dramatic or psychological force, and seemed too deeply at variance with the more random and playful premises on which The Prince of the Pagodas had been structured.”50 The revision of the scenario was complicated by an insistence that the score remain almost wholly as it had been composed for John Cranko in 1957.51 In contrast with the experience of having worked with a commissioned piece for Images of Love, MacMillan here felt constrained by Britten’s score. In 1990 MacMillan observed that “[t]‌here is very little room in Cranko’s original libretto for Britten to have written music that would illustrate the inner life or the ‘sub-​text’ of the characters that is so important in drama.”52 MacMillan does suggest an inner life for key characters in the piece, and the methods deployed will be examined. Following an introduction to the ballet’s plot, my analysis will focus upon four characters: the Fool, Princess Rose/​ Cordelia, Salamander Prince/​Edgar, Emperor/​Lear. MacMillan’s ballet retains the premise of an aged Emperor with two daughters, the malicious Belle Épine and the sweet Belle Rose. Whereas Cranko’s first scene saw his Emperor give Épine his crown to placate her anger at the preference shown by her suitors (the Kings from four corners of the Earth) to her younger sister, MacMillan’s ballet begins with the aged Emperor commanding attention by producing a huge map of the kingdom. A musical fanfare heralds the map being unfurled and held aloft with difficulty by two courtiers, establishing the theatrical nature of the Emperor’s division of his kingdom. The process of ripping the map requires exertion from the Emperor, and he moves physically through the map, demonstrating his preference for his younger daughter, Rose, by providing her with a share greater than the “third more opulent” (King Lear, 1.1.68) that Cordelia is given. The land far exceeds that which he chooses to give to Rose’s half-​sister, Princess Épine. Conflating Goneril and Regan accommodates a familiar distinction for ballet audiences between good and bad (such as the contrast between Odette and Odile in Swan Lake), and the decision can connect with the way in which the sisters resolve to “hit together” (1.1.302) in their dialogue at the end

394   Elinor Parsons of the first scene. The detail in Thubron’s scenario that Épine and Rose are only half-​ sisters can explain the absence of any alliance between Épine and Rose and combines King Lear’s two plots with an allusion to the resentful relationship that exists between Edgar and Edmund, motivated by the latter’s illegitimate birth. Indeed, the speed with which Edmund enacts his desire for the “land” (1.2.16) allocated to his brother matches Épine’s swift response to the inequality of her father’s gift. Épine follows Goneril’s lead by resolving to “do something and i’th’ heat” (1.1.307) when she casts a spell on the court, transforming the courtiers to baboons. MacMillan’s decision to defer the arrival of the suitors until the division of the kingdom has been made matches the structure of Shakespeare’s play. The contrast in France and Burgundy’s treatment of Cordelia finds a parallel in the distinctive patterns of movement given to the four men. MacMillan signals here an interest in character that moves beyond the balletic precedents offered by The Sleeping Beauty, where Aurora’s four suitors seem almost interchangeable. The plot of The Prince of the Pagodas has only two further direct connections with King Lear: the movement in Act II to a wilderness beyond the court, and the way in which the concluding combat between the Prince and suitors effects resolution. Both episodes accommodate revelation of character, but there are additional moments in the ballet when the actions of four characters in particular—​the Fool, Rose, the Salamander Prince, and the Emperor—​are imbued with a Shakespearean dimension. The Fool meddles in the action. He is, like Shakespeare’s Fool, absent from the opening scene and then he has a disruptive effect when he fetches Rose so that the suitors can woo her as well as Épine. The Fool’s mischievous intervention establishes a connection with “the shrewd and knavish sprite, Robin Goodfellow” (2.1.33–​34) from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. MacMillan created the role on the Royal Ballet’s virtuoso male dancer, Tetsuya Kumakawa, one of whose distinctive roles in the company was that of Puck in Frederick Ashton’s The Dream. The casting directs attention toward the contrast between the parts. Puck has no partnering work, and while MacMillan’s Fool dances alone, his character is developed through his partnership with Princess Rose. The Fool exceeds Puck’s capabilities for he is able to pause the events at Court by casting a spell. Here his role arguably extends to include Ariel’s powers, and the Shakespearean allusion might draw attention to the controlling aspect of the Emperor’s paternalism. The Fool seems detached from the Emperor and instead seems to offer direction to Rose. At several moments he is positioned behind Rose, ushering her onward, which shows his deference and support. He acts as her “shadow” (King Lear, 1.4.228). The Fool’s presence helps to define who Rose is, and in Act I the solidarity he offers highlights her isolation at Court and her immaturity. She has no female companions, which is unusual in a balletic context—​indeed, MacMillan had provided Juliet with six friends. Rose seems childlike when she plays blind-​man’s bluff, and that game presages the Fool blindfolding her in Act II. The care he shows for Rose serves to accentuate the uncaring behavior of her family. In the central act, Rose encounters her betrothed prince, whom in the opening scene Épine turned into a salamander. The transmutation has a primary association with

Innovative British Ballets    395 Beauty and the Beast, but in deciding that Rose is only able to dance with the Prince when the Fool blindfolds her, there is the impression of greater perception in blindness: “love looks not with the eyes but with the mind” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1.234). While Rose cannot see, the Prince returns to his human shape. The tenderness of the pas de deux means that when the Fool removes the blindfold, Rose feels compassion for the salamander despite his reptilian appearance. The Fool helps Rose navigate nightmare visions of Épine, the four Kings, and her father. The ghostly appearance of these characters function as “shaping fantasies” (Dream, 5.1.5), ensuring that Rose undertakes a journey toward greater self-​awareness and an understanding of her own identity. A connection with Dream helps direct attention toward the sexual awareness that her uncomfortably physical encounters with the Kings prompt. The link between leaving court and spiritual journeying is eminently Shakespearean, and the sequence parallels the relationship between the blinded Gloucester and his son, Edgar, in King Lear. It is as a result of the manipulation of his half-​sibling, Edmund, that Edgar has sought refuge on the heath and it is here, as Poor Tom, that he is able to guide and support his father. The Fool in The Prince of the Pagodas offers comparable guidance to his mistress. In some senses, the Prince-​as-​salamander resonates more strongly with Edgar-​as-​ Poor-​Tom than the Fool. Despite his blindness, Gloucester shows perception and sensitivity on the heath, and the sequence serves to resurrect a familial relationship. It is after the pas de deux that Rose overcomes her instinctive revulsion from the reptile and confirms her compassion and kindness with a kiss. The Prince’s disguise provides the opportunity for Rose’s redemption. The kiss bestowed on the salamander is doubly empowering because it releases the Prince from his disguise and also liberates the Emperor from his imprisonment by Princess Épine. The Emperor’s appearance in Rose’s nightmare visions show him mirroring the salamander’s reptilian movements, suggesting a connection between the vulnerability of the Prince-​as-​salamander and the aging Emperor. The sliding and contorted turns on the floor vividly demonstrate the Emperor’s fall from power, particularly because the throne from which he has observed most of the action in Act I (and to which he returns in Act III) is raised, with steps ascending to it. The Emperor’s movements provide visceral evidence of the fascination that Lear shows Poor Tom: “I will keep still with my philosopher” (3.4.170). Even though the sequence is one that is dreamt by Rose, the Emperor gains humility and, albeit indirectly through his daughter’s experience, he is reinvigorated, prompting parallels with the revival of the King, “the radiant Cymbeline” (5.5.476) in Shakespeare’s late play. Evidence of the Emperor’s newfound energy appears in the ballet’s final act, when his solo includes fast footwork and expansive movement. The invigorating finale in Act III departs from the tragic Lear narrative, apart from the combat that will be staged between the Prince and the four suitors. In Shakespeare’s play Edgar responds to Edmund’s calls for a combatant with the challenge: “thy arm may do thee justice” (5.3.124). Like Edgar, the Prince triumphs, and the victory contributes to a restoration of equilibrium at Court. In the ballet Épine had urged the four kings to attack the Prince, and he fought with each in turn. The remarkable sequence includes a

396   Elinor Parsons different weapon for each suitor: stave, dagger, hand-​to-​hand combat, and fencing foil. All the kings concede victory to the Prince and then leave the court. Épine shows no contrition and she also leaves. The avoidance of injury and death provides a harmonious resolution. An even greater emphasis upon harmony in David Bintley’s version of The Prince of the Pagodas (2011) means that his ballet resists the deeper interrogation of identity that the narrative acquired in MacMillan’s version. The story is one of quest with Rose—​now Princess Sakura (Cherry Blossom)—​searching for her brother, rather than her lover. Bintley created the piece for the National Ballet of Japan in 2011 and it was first performed by the Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2014. He describes a key problem of the existing scenarios as “so many loose ends and unsatisfying denouements,”53 and Bintley identified the key to his interpretation as his engagement with the “Japanese creation story.”54 In summarizing Cranko’s scenario, Bintley is clear that it is “[n]‌ot exactly Shakespeare!”55 and he makes no reference to Shakespeare when discussing his interpretation. Any connections that might be drawn in the piece itself seem tenuously connected with Shakespearean tropes, rather than offering the kind of deeper interpretation that might prompt reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s work. In order to examine Bintley’s engagement with Shakespeare I shall, therefore, focus on the piece he created over a decade earlier, for his Birmingham company: The Shakespeare Suite (1999). In The Shakespeare Suite (1999), David Bintley distills the essence of seven of Shakespeare’s plays.56 He builds on Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s musical response to Shakespeare’s work:  Such Sweet Thunder (1957).57 Bintley retains seven of the musical portraits, with some reassignment of characters, and he integrates three Ellington pieces from other sources:  Black and Tan Fantasy (1927), “Dance No. 2” from the Liberian Suite (1947), and Tymperturbably Blue (1959). Bintley’s decision to use Ellington’s music had been preceded by his use of Ellington and Strayhorn’s Jazz Nutcracker for a one-​act ballet:  The Nutcracker Sweeties (1996). Five years after The Shakespeare Suite, Bintley would extend his engagement with jazz with The Orpheus Suite (2004), using a commissioned score from Colin Towns. Precedent for Bintley’s approach can be found in two examples from the Royal Ballet’s repertoire. MacMillan’s 1953 ballet Somnambulism had used Stan Kenton’s music, and its favorable reception was shown in part by the broadcast on television of the work as The Dreamers in 1954. The impact of MacMillan’s “modern jazz-​style classicism” can also be seen in Frederick Ashton’s Jazz Calendar (1968) with its commissioned score from Richard Rodney Bennett—​whom MacMillan had hoped to engage four years earlier for his Images of Love.58 For Bintley the music has had a fundamental impact, which he attests to when he signals that it “completes my trilogy of works inspired by the life and music of Duke Ellington.”59 All three pieces draw on familiar narratives and have an investment in character. The fascinating dimension of Bintley’s The Shakespeare Suite is the extent to which its compression aids the intensity of expression. Bintley responds, and perhaps extends, the music’s interpretive depth with deeply complex and nuanced “pitch-​perfect vignettes,”60 which come close to encapsulating Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet.61

Innovative British Ballets    397 Bintley begins The Shakespeare Suite with the plays that have been less frequently danced. The ballet’s opening sequence is led by Hamlet, followed by the extracts inspired by The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III.62 I shall focus on these three sequences and the ballet’s conclusion in order to consider Bintley’s interest in the construction of identity, his interrogation of gender roles, and the examination of meta-​theatricality in dance, which is partly achieved through allusion to previous balletic interpretations. At the beginning of the piece, the stage is shrouded in darkness and a male dancer in black holds his right hand aloft with fingers splayed. Ellington and Strayhorn’s brassy opening number—​“Such Sweet Thunder”—​establishes a direct and confrontational tone. The dancer’s initial stance is boldly wide, yet he moves abruptly at right angles to face left and then maintains his central position by springing to turn a semicircle to face right. His hands are clenched and he bends his body forward, then abruptly straightens and arches backward. He faces the audience again to stroke his chin with his fingers, pensively, and that movement, in addition to his black garb, makes it likely that viewers identify the figure as Hamlet. The sudden shifts in direction suggest confusion, and the movement between a protective curling of his body to an exposed unfolding compounds the impression of a character in emotional turmoil. Hamlet then draws attention to the repeated chords on the band’s piano by acting as an extravagant pianist, one hand hitting the imaginary keys, with the other flamboyantly aloft, and his foot tapping the rhythm. Later in the ballet Bottom will hold Titania’s raised arm and synchronize his plucking (and thus tickling playfully) her stomach with the sound of the double bass in the band. The interaction with the music signals the ballet’s translation of the play’s meta-​theatricality. Here Hamlet toys with the audience’s awareness that he is not a musician. He pretends to produce the sound, rather than simply responding to it. The gesture provides a specific parallel to the dramaturgical role Hamlet adopts when he offers advice to the players, suggesting a connection with Hamlet and Bottom in their eagerness to direct other performers. The power of Hamlet’s piano-​playing gesture summons four pairs of dancers upstage. The couples alternate between a range of gestures: a hand appears to act as a mirror in front of a face; forefinger and thumb are placed on the chin, thoughtfully; a hand to the forehead smooths furrows. The mimicry of Hamlet highlights his isolation. At one point the dancers are arranged across the stage with Hamlet in the center, and all, in synchronized action, reprise the movements from the beginning. The repetitions prompt an audience to analyze these actions, to make and remake meanings. The musical number gains texture when the musicians shout “all night long.” That sound might surprise a ballet audience where, as identified in the discussion of Images of Love, words are infrequently used. Drawing attention to a presence in the pit suggests unseen elements and, therefore, encourages awareness of the onstage events as a performance. The end of the sequence is marked with a retreat upstage, Hamlet turning his back to the audience, acting almost as usher to the company. The final tableau is striking as he whips around to face the audience, crossing his arms in front of his body to end swiftly, as the music finishes, with arms outstretched and poised like a bird-​of-​prey. The opening sequence provides an introduction to Hamlet as role-​player: the child, the

398   Elinor Parsons watcher, the thinker, the worrier, the performer, the director, the predator. It also signals the piece’s interest in disrupting expectations of male and female roles. The next piece begins with the eight ensemble dancers filing in upstage and creating an arch for a dancer dressed in a frilly white bridal dress and veil. Again, their presence accentuates the soloist’s isolation. Here, they mock her as she stands with her hands on hips, and when she confronts them, they seek to antagonize her further. Her legs are astride and her flat-​footed movements challenge the expectations of femininity expressed in her dress. She taps her foot, impatiently checks the time on her large black wristwatch, and then petulantly stamps on her bouquet. An identification with The Taming of the Shrew’s Katherina may be made by an audience, and the design decisions create the immediate impression of a couple being “madly mated” (3.2.216) when Petruchio arrives in an ill-​fitted suit, also wearing a visible wristwatch. Both dancers wear matching Converse sneakers. The incongruous footwear (for a bridal couple and for dancers) ensures a similarity of movement (unusual in a balletic pas de deux), which suggests a similarity in their defiance of convention. The way that the sparring will, paradoxically, encourage physical closeness forces a reassessment of what is too often presented as violently divisive antagonism. The only action stipulated in the text is from Katherina to Petruchio: “She strikes him” (2.1.217). In the ballet, Petruchio seeks to tease Kate out of her ill temper by whisking her off, with her arm through his. They pause facing each other, and he matches her aggressive stance where she has both fists raised and he has one fist aloft and holds the bouquet. The pose might remind some members of the audience of John Cranko’s full-​length Shrew ballet, especially when the moment is followed by some similar lifts. David Bintley’s knowledge of Cranko is unsurprising, as he danced Gremio with Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet. Ashton’s The Dream is cited in the later Bottom and Titania partnership, and similarly the Romeo and Juliet pas de deux offers physical quotations from Kenneth MacMillan’s version. The acts of homage signal the way that The Shakespeare Suite’s distillation is of reinterpretations of Shakespeare (in musical and balletic terms) as well as of his plays. Bintley sets Katherina and Petruchio’s partnership within the “Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down)” Dream-​inspired number. There are connections between the confusions of identity in both plays, and the music’s inclusion of pairs of sparring instruments helps accentuate the volatile nature of Kate and Petruchio’s relationship. (In contrast, Ellington’s focus in his “Sonnet for Sister Kate” is the conflicted heroine for whom, as the title playfully signals, familial pressures are in tension with spiritual fulfillment.) The energy of the music that Bintley transfers to Katherina and Petruchio inspires fast-​paced movement. The fluid sense of one movement leading into another matches Katherina and Petruchio’s rapid, quick-​witted exchange and their shared lines during their first meeting (2.1). By playfully kicking Kate, Petruchio makes himself vulnerable because she then catches hold of his foot. He pushes boundaries again by spanking her, and she issues a warning with her finger pointed, which causes his retreat. In the final sequence, Petruchio lifts Kate around her waist and rotates her in order to hold her on his chest, coming close to the suggestion that he might have his “tongue in [her] tail” (2.1.209). The possible intimacy is comically awkward,

Innovative British Ballets    399 and she dismounts to link arms with him, thus making a positive decision to couple more conventionally. They perform the wedding ceremony with perfunctory attention to the formalities until the kiss, which is flamboyantly demonstrative, leaping forward in the play to their decision to kiss “in the midst of the street” (5.1.133). In the Folio text, only Petruchio is named in the Act V stage direction to Exit Padua (5.2.193).63 Bintley’s Petruchio leaves, and the accord in the relationship is shown when Kate makes the decision to follow enthusiastically. In reflecting on the ballet as a whole, Bintley suggests that “they are all love duets, but each one is a dysfunctional relationship,”64 and in the case of Shrew that judgment seems to be the one taken by the onstage ensemble. They look disapprovingly after the couple, and that negative judgment is compounded by the group standing frozen with their hands held in front of their bodies in prayer. An abrupt shift from wedding to funeral prompts a connection between Shrew and Richard III, with the unconventional behavior at the wedding ceremony creating an expectation of transgression. In reflecting upon his piece, Bintley acknowledges that “Richard III was difficult . . . because people don’t know the play very well or the character of Lady Anne.” She wears a black satin dress in the style of Dior with matching elbow-​length gloves, striking a pose as a glamorous woman.65 Richard, in evening dress with dark glasses, scuttles sideways across the stage and the indirect approach to Anne establishes subterfuge. The “bottled spider” (Richard III, 1.3.241, 4.4.81) produces a handkerchief and glides around Anne, persuading her to accept it on his third offering, when his free hand presses her bare shoulder. He produces a red nose and seeks to amuse her with a briefly improvised tap dance. His props here parallel the way he uses his sword and his ring in the equivalent scene in the play. Crucially, the items signal the preparations he has made for this challenge. The red nose illuminates the potential for disbelief in Richard’s self-​congratulatory evaluation of the scene: “Was ever woman in this humour woo’d? /​Was ever woman in this humour won?” (1.2.232–​233).66 The easy confidence of Richard’s movements connects with the verbal fluency he shows throughout the opening scenes of the play. A physical shift occurs when he attempts to partner Anne. He initiates the closer contact by sticking to her back like a leech, lifting both his feet from the floor so she momentarily carries his weight. He rises to the challenge of her turning her back upon him by approaching her in inventive ways. At one point, he puts his hands around her neck, partly as a caress, partly as a threatening gesture. She then allows him to partner her more conventionally, but she breaks away from an attempted tango and he pursues her on all fours. They then create a fluid, swirling waltz. The variety of dance styles offers an equivalent to the range of verbal strategies employed by Richard. In the final moment, Anne falls to the floor and he leans over her with predatory claws. He has undone his bow tie, which hints at the way he has been playing the role of dignified suitor. His prelude to undressing provides an uncomfortable sense of sexual threat. A parallel occurs later in the ballet, when Othello sheds his robe early in his sequence and the dance ends with him poised in a predatory pose above the lifeless Desdemona. The final sequence begins with the ensemble. Their movements in pairs become background for the partnerships that now form as the whole cast gathers. Initially

400   Elinor Parsons Macbeth and Lady Macbeth reassert their coupling, but when Richard enters he is intercepted by Lady Macbeth, and then Lady Anne dances with Macbeth. Richard appears behind Othello and Desdemona and produces a handkerchief from his pocket. The conflicting impression of the white fabric as comforter, a sign of surrender, and yet a weapon demonstrates the distinct tensions in the partnerships that are now on stage collectively. The encounters between characters across the plays spark ideas and questions about the possible new relationships, as well as about the established ones. Bintley enthuses about the ending:  “Suddenly you see Lady Macbeth with Bottom. Now what would that relationship have been like?”67 These possibilities are glimpsed and there is momentary disorder, which allows a distillation of the structure of Shakespearean comedy before the inevitable resolution occurs. All the dancers (with the exception of Titania, who is sleeping) move singly but with shared steps. Hamlet enters upstage center with a lighted church candle and the cast gather around him. They flex their shoulders in unison and then all reach up with one hand. Gradually the characters step away from Hamlet, and Titania wakes. She claps her hand to her mouth and runs offstage, signaling her separation from the mortals’ shift to trance-​like states. Hamlet places his palm over the flame, and his gesture might prompt audience members to remember Othello’s repeated, “Put out the light, and then put out the light” (5.2.7) or Macbeth’s “Out, out brief candle” (5.5.23). In both cases the protagonist connects light with life. The allusion to the death of a lover adds resonance to the gesture in the context of the partnerships here. Fundamentally, Hamlet’s action marks the energy and vitality of what the audience has just witnessed. A choreographed curtain-​call sequence ensures that the final impression is dynamic. At moments all the cast clap in unison, physicalizing Puck’s request to an audience to “[g]‌ive me your hands if we be friends” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.427). The characters group together for a final picture call. That technique appears more frequently in musicals, and the moment compounds the impression of Bintley, in a comparable way to MacMillan, promoting a connection between ballet and other art forms. On Saturday April 23, 2016, both Royal Ballet companies participated in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Shakespeare Live! event, which was broadcast to cinemas nationally, as well as to viewers at home on BBC2. The evening sought to cover Shakespeare in a wide range of performance styles, and the two dance pieces were provided by the Royal companies. A  key influence seems to have been the inclusion of work currently in repertoire, and so the Royal Ballet presented the balcony pas de deux from MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, and the Birmingham Royal Ballet offered the Othello sequence from The Shakespeare Suite. While the choices could be seen to reinforce general attitudes toward the kind of work in which each company excels, it is the choice of these choreographers that seems to me most pertinent. Their work demonstrates the potential for balletic interpretations of Shakespeare to stimulate creativity in so many ways. Audiences can be given a nuanced encounter with Shakespeare’s texts at the same time as they engage with innovative choreographic works from MacMillan and Bintley.

Innovative British Ballets    401

Notes 1. Kenneth MacMillan created a ballet inspired by Hamlet for six dancers, called Sea of Troubles (Dance Advance, 1988). The piece is discussed by Elizabeth Klett in Chapter 18 of this volume. 2. Selma Jeanne Cohen, “Dance Images of Shakespeare’s Characters,” in Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association 1986, eds. Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 276. 3. English National Ballet performed its large-​scale Romeo and Juliet (Derek Deane, 1998) in June 2014, Scottish Ballet took its Romeo and Juliet (Krzysztof Pastor, 2008) to China and Japan at the beginning of 2015, Northern Ballet gave the UK première of Jean-​Christophe Maillot’s Romeo and Juliet in 2015, and the ballet will return to its repertoire in autumn 2016 (Maillot, 1996). 4. Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), 25. 5. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 25. 6. Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, “Shakespeare, Ballet and Dance,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, eds. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete, and Ramona Wray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 214. 7. Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2009), 6. 8. No archive footage of Images of Love is available, to my knowledge, in the UK and so my analysis is largely based on reviews and a few pictures. MacMillan’s The Prince of the Pagodas (1989) was filmed in 1990 and so the commercially available recording has formed the basis of my study, but I also saw the ballet in Birmingham in 1990 and when it was revived at Covent Garden in 1996. I have seen several performances of The Shakespeare Suite on stage, and in addition I have used an archive recording of a television broadcast by the Artsworld satellite channel. The archive recording is 35 minutes; in the theater the duration was listed as 39 minutes. 9. Zoë Anderson, The Royal Ballet: 75 Years (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 156. 10. Beth Genné, “Evolution not Revolution:  Ninette de Valois’ Philosophy of Dance,” in Ninette de Valois: Adventurous Traditionalist, eds. Libby Worth and Richard Cave (Alton: Dance Books, 2012), 29. 11. Anna Meadmore, “Interview with David Bintley:  Filmed Interview,” in Ninette de Valois:  Adventurous Traditionalist, eds. Libby Worth and Richard Cave (Alton:  Dance Books, 2012). 12. Jann Parry, Different Drummer: The Life of Kenneth MacMillan (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 165. 13. Out of Line: A Portrait of Sir Kenneth MacMillan, DVD, produced and directed by Derek Bailey (London: BBC-​TV, 1990). 14. Alexander Bland, “Shakespearean Variations,” Observer, April 5, 1964. 15. The section for twelve dancers from The Taming of the Shrew, two sequences inspired by The Two Gentlemen of Verona—​one pas de deux (“Love, lend me wings to make my purpose swift,” 2.6) and one sequence for seven dancers (“I break my fast, dine, sup and sleep /​ Upon the very naked name of love,” 2.4)—​were all cut for the performances on October 8, 15, and 26, 1964, and on March 17, 20, and 22, 1965. 16. Sylvie Guillem directed the 36-​minute compilation of extracts in collaboration with the filmmaker Francoise Ha Van Kern.

402   Elinor Parsons 17. James Kennedy, “Shakespeare Triple Bill,” Guardian, April 3, 1964. 18. “Shakespeare Celebrations,” Ballet Today, May 1964. 19. In Chapter 18 of this volume Elizabeth Klett analyzes this aspect of Sea of Troubles. 20. Clive Barnes, “Heads and Legs,” Spectator, April 10, 1964. 21. Bland, “Shakespearean Variations.” 22. James Kennedy, “Shakespeare Triple Bill,” Guardian, April 3, 1964. 23. James Monahan, “Shakespeare Triple Bill,” Dancing Times, May 1964. 24. Barnes, “Heads and Legs.” 25. “Shakespeare Celebrations.” 26. Monahan, “Shakespeare Triple Bill.” Clive Barnes is similarly critical of Peter Tranchell’s “ponderously banal score” in “Heads and Legs,” and Alexander Bland of the “insipid vulgarity of [the] score” in “Shakespearean Variations.” David Dougill in 2003 describes the music for the episode based on Sonnet CXLIV as “soupy” in his review “Can You Have Too Much Nureyev? Yes, in the Royal Ballet’s Tribute,” The Sunday Times, April 13, 2003. 27. Clement Crisp, “Tribute to Sir Kenneth MacMillan:  Reviews 1964–​ 1992,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 20, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 134. 28. Barnes, “Heads and Legs.” 29. “Shakespeare Celebrations.” 30. Nadia Nerina and Alexander Grant created roles in the piece set to “Love, lend me wings to make my purpose swift” (2.6.42–​43), which is the penultimate line in Proteus’s soliloquy where he decides to forget Julia, betray Valentine, and seek to win Sylvia. 31. Monahan, “Shakespeare Triple Bill,” and Barnes, “Heads and Legs.” 32. “Shakespeare Celebrations,” and Barnes, “Heads and Legs.” 33. Our Music Critic, “Three Ballets Inspired by Shakespeare,” The Times, April 3, 1964. 34. “Remembering Rudi: Nureyev on Stage and Film,” Dance Now, April 11, 2002. 35. “Shakespeare Celebrations.” 36. Monahan notes the “good hand” it is given; “Shakespeare Triple Bill.” 37. Parry, Different Drummer, 266. 38. Monahan, “Shakespeare Triple Bill.” 39. In Chapter 15 of this volume, Lynsey McCulloch notes this decision when engaging with the internal politics surrounding casting at the Royal Ballet. 40. MacMillan in Out of Line: A Portrait of Sir Kenneth MacMillan (London: BBC-​TV, 1990). 41. Mary Clarke, “Kenneth MacMillan:  Principal Choreographer of The Royal Ballet:  Programme Note,” The Prince of the Pagodas, The Royal Ballet, Birmingham Hippodrome (London: Royal Opera House publications, 1990). 42. The MacMillan Estate, “The Prince of the Pagodas,” Kenneth MacMillan: Choreographer, http://​w ww.kennethmacmillan.com/​b allets/​a ll-​works/​1977-​1992/​t he-​prince-​of-​t he-​ pagodas.html. 43. Peter Brinson and Clement Crisp, Ballet for All (Newton Abbot:  David & Charles, 1973), 162. 44. “The Prince and I:  A Three-​Act Ballet by John Cranko:  Review of The Prince of the Pagodas,” Spectator, January 11, 1957. 45. John Cranko quoted in John Percival, Theatre in My Blood:  Biography of John Cranko (London: Herbert Press, 1983), 113. 46. Percival, Theatre in My Blood, 113. 47. Percival, Theatre in My Blood, 113. 48. Brinson and Crisp, Ballet for All, 164.

Innovative British Ballets    403 49. In Chapter 16 of this volume, Iris Julia Bührle emphasizes the way that Cranko’s choreography facilitates the evolution of complex characters. 50. Colin Thubron, “The New Prince of the Pagodas:  Programme Note,” The Royal Ballet, Birmingham Hippodrome (London: Royal Opera House publications, 1990). 51. Cranko’s ballet has not been performed by the Royal Ballet since 1960. In 2012 the Royal Ballet’s revival of MacMillan’s production was overseen by Monica Mason, dance notator Grant Coyle, and Deborah MacMillan. The Britten Estate agreed for approximately 20 minutes of music to be cut. 52. David Bintley, “The Inspiration: Programme Note,” The Prince of the Pagodas (Birmingham Hippodrome: Birmingham Royal Ballet publications, 2014). 53. Bintley, “The Inspiration: Programme Note.” 54. Bintley, “The Inspiration: Programme Note.” 55. Birmingham Royal Ballet, “Creating The Prince of the Pagodas,” Blog, http://​www. creatingpagodas.com. 56. Bintley’s company, Birmingham Royal Ballet, performed the ballet for the first time on October 6, 1999, at Birmingham Hippodrome. 57. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s composition premiered at a Music for Moderns concert at New York’s Town Hall on April 28, 1957. “Circle of Fourths” was recorded four days later, and the full suite was released as a recording. The band performed Such Sweet Thunder at the annual Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario, on September 5, 1957. 58. Joan Lawson quoted in Parry, Different Drummer, 133. 59. David Bintley, “Duke Ellington Triple Bill Programme Note,” Autumn Season (Birmingham Hippodrome: Birmingham Royal Ballet publications, 2004). 60. Judith Mackrell, “Jazz-​Inspired Ballet Leaps between Heaven and Hell,” Guardian, March 3, 2008. 61. The archive recording is 35 minutes in length; in the theatre the duration was 39 minutes. 62. The Richard III sequence is followed by Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and then Hamlet returns for a solo before the ensemble conclusion. 63. Barbara Hodgdon discusses the “degree of ambiguity” in the stage direction and considers some of the possible choices in her “Longer Note” in the Arden edition, The Taming of the Shrew (London: Routledge, 2010), 306–​308. 64. David Bintley, “Seriously Reduced Shakespeare:  Interviewed by Susan Turner,” Entrechat:  The Magazine of BRB Friends and Donors (Birmingham Royal Ballet Publications, 2015), 7–​9. 65. Bintley had Jackie Onassis in mind (personal interview on Wednesday, September 16, 2015). 66. David Bintley connects these lines with the scenes that were printed in the program. In the television version, each episode is prefaced with intertitles announcing the play and the quotation. 67. Bintley, “Seriously Reduced Shakespeare: Interviewed by Susan Turner,” 7–​9.

Bibliography Anderson, Zoë. The Royal Ballet: 75 Years. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Brinson, Peter, and Clement Crisp. Ballet for All. Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973.

404   Elinor Parsons Cohen, Selma Jeanne. “Dance Images of Shakespeare’s Characters.” In Images of Shakespeare:  Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association 1986, edited by Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer and Roger Pringle, 276–​284. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988. Crisp, Clement. “Tribute to Sir Kenneth MacMillan:  Reviews 1964–​ 1992.” In Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 20, no. 2 (2002): 88–​136. Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. “Shakespeare, Ballet and Dance.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete, and Ramona Wray, 200–​218. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Genné, Beth. “Evolution not Revolution: Ninette de Valois’ Philosophy of Dance.” In Ninette de Valois:  Adventurous Traditionalist, edited by Libby Worth and Richard Cave, 18–​29. Alton: Dance Books, 2012. Hutcheon, Lynda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2009. Meadmore, Anna. “Interview with David Bintley:  Filmed Interview.” In Ninette de Valois: Adventurous Traditionalist, edited by Libby Worth and Richard Cave. Alton: Dance Books, 2012. Out of Line: A Portrait of Sir Kenneth MacMillan. Produced and directed by Derek Bailey. 1 hour. BBC-​TV, 1990. DVD. Parry, Jann. Different Drummer: The Life of Kenneth MacMillan. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Percival, John. Theatre in My Blood: Biography of John Cranko. London: Herbert Press, 1983. The Prince of the Pagodas. The Royal Ballet, Covent Garden. Produced and directed by Derek Bailey. 2 hours 10 minutes. NVC Arts and BBC-​TV, 1990. Sanders, Julie. Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. The Shakespeare Suite. Birmingham Royal Ballet archive video. 35 minutes. Artsworld, 2000. Such Sweet Thunder. Composed and orchestrated by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. 37 minutes. Sony Music Entertainment, 1957. CD.

Chapter 18

M easure in Eve ry t h i ng Adapting Hamlet to the Contemporary Dance Stage Elizabeth Klett

In 1988, Sir Kenneth MacMillan, one of the most celebrated British choreographers of the twentieth century, made the surprising decision to create a small-​scale work for the newly formed touring company Dance Advance (1988–​1991). Markedly different from his best-​known ballets, which include full-​length narrative works created on the Royal Ballet, such as Romeo and Juliet (1965), Manon (1974), and Mayerling (1978), this new piece was postmodern, performed by a cast of six in bare feet on an unadorned stage. Sea of Troubles signaled its relationship to Shakespeare’s Hamlet through its title,1 and also through MacMillan’s brief program note: “In this short ballet, inspired by ‘Hamlet,’ I have taken as a starting-​point the effect of the death of Hamlet’s father without a literal telling of the play. With the appearance of his father’s ghost, and Hamlet’s realization of the need for revenge, his tormented world becomes a nightmare.”2 Critics who attended the premiere performances in Brighton, and later in London, described MacMillan’s work as “the piece de resistance of the program,” “the biggest attraction of the tour,” and a “major coup” for the fledgling company.3 Yet the reviews were mixed overall, with a principal focus on whether or not the piece made Hamlet intelligible and legible for its audiences. Reviewers like Mary Clarke—​who proclaimed Sea of Troubles “brilliantly economical so that we know precisely which incident from the play is being evoked”—​ were in the minority, with the bulk of critics confessing to bewilderment about the relationship between dance and literary text.4 Judith Mackrell believed that “to anyone unfamiliar with the play, it must be completely baffling.”5 Jeffrey Taylor found it “confusing,” fulfilling the prediction of John Percival, who believed it would “prove puzzling to audiences not familiar with the play (even, perhaps, some who are).”6 Kathrine Sorley Walker acclaimed the “strikingly individual” choreography, but feared that “the content, lacking programme explanation, is bound to puzzle many people who see it.”7 These reviews suggest that, in the views of many critics and spectators, a familiarity with Hamlet was necessary to understand and enjoy Sea of Troubles. Unsurprisingly, this

406   Elizabeth Klett viewpoint presents the Shakespearean text as the generator of authoritative meaning, with the dance work as its “baffling,” “confusing,” “puzzling” derivative. The tendency to perceive adaptations as secondary to the so-​called original, and to police the degree to which an adaptation respects the authority of that original, is especially pronounced when looking at adaptations of Shakespeare. Dance adaptations are particularly prone to attack on the basis of perceived failure to live up to Shakespeare’s plays, due to a bias (implicit or overt) toward the plays’ poetic language. Stephanie Jordan’s appraisal of Sea of Troubles is particularly revealing: “MacMillan reads the play as a sequence of high-​expressionist, high-​theatrical aphorisms and we feel lucky that we know the Shakespeare in order to make sense of his episodes.”8 Her comment places the sense, order, and rationality of Shakespeare’s text against the nonsense, disorder, and theatricality of MacMillan’s movement, and clings to Shakespeare as a guide to its troubled waters. What these reviewers fail to acknowledge, however, is that Hamlet is a play that eschews—​rather than generates—​authoritative meanings. It has become a scholarly commonplace that the play is full of contradictions, problems, and puzzles. As R. S. White notes, the play is “a self-​destroying artifact, subverting and blowing up its own plots  .  .  .  disrupt[ing] narrative continuity and explod[ing] expectations.”9 Leon Harold Craig enumerates its “perplexing features,” which include “apparent inconsistencies, confusing details, obscure speeches, historical anachronisms, characters whose motivations and relationships are ambiguous, a ghost whose status is unclear . . . a protagonist who seems a puzzle to everyone, not least of all to himself.”10 The process of finding narrative coherence and authorized meanings in the play becomes further convoluted when we recognize its “impossibly complicated” textual history, which, as Marvin Hunt and others have pointed out, is founded upon at least three different textual variants.11 White proclaims that we must “question its very existence as a single, definable, and autonomous text.”12 Despite these views, critics persist in treating the play as a stable, knowable artifact with definable characters and narrative, and in judging dance adaptations on whether or not they measure up to this fictive ideal. The dance works considered in this chapter—​MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles and Stephen Mills’s 2000 Hamlet for Ballet Austin—​engage directly with the unstable and problematic nature of Shakespeare’s play, albeit in different ways, and to divergent effects. Unlike Sea of Troubles, which received mixed reviews and has been rarely performed since the 1991 demise of Dance Advance,13 Mills’s Hamlet has proven to be a great success and helped to put Ballet Austin on the national and international map. The work has been revived three times in Austin since its premiere, and has been performed by companies like the Washington Ballet, Atlanta Ballet, and Ballet Augsburg in Germany. Mills’s version is more traditional than MacMillan’s: it has a two-​act structure with a narrative arc that directly references Shakespeare, and is performed by a full company, including the corps de ballet, with the women on pointe. Reviewers therefore had an easier time understanding and reading it in relation to Shakespeare’s play, acclaiming it as “exquisite” and “a masterpiece.”14 As Robert Faires wrote of the 2004 Austin production, “one of

Measure in Everything    407 the Western world’s most familiar stories came across with an urgency that made palpable . . . Hamlet’s alienation.”15 However, despite the accolades, there were nonetheless familiar echoes of the critical anxieties surrounding whether or not audiences would be able to follow the narrative. For the 2015 performances, Ballet Austin’s marketing department prepared a series of videos aimed at making the plot and characters intelligible, including the intentionally humorous video “Spoiler Alert! Everyone Dies,” which had the dancers speaking in character and explaining how they met their demises.16 Reviewer Ryan E. Johnson agreed that “a certain knowledge of Hamlet is in many ways essential for true enjoyment of this ballet,” while nevertheless finding “plenty of dark wonder on display for those who aren’t Hamlet experts.”17 It is evident that even in a dance version of Shakespeare that prioritizes narrative clarity, critics and audiences remain worried about the relationship between dance and text, and express “skepticism about the possibility of dance ever doing justice to a narrative” (Butterworth, Chapter  19 in this volume, 435). As Johnson opines, the ballet can only be fully enjoyed if the spectator possesses knowl­ edge of Hamlet, yet again positioning the dance work as secondary, a derivative of Shakespeare’s supposedly authoritative original. Whether overtly stated or not, dance adaptations of Shakespeare are usually expected to be both intelligible and legible for their audiences. Intelligibility indicates that a work is understandable: that the characters are readily identifiable, the narrative unfolds in a linear fashion, and that relationships and events are communicated clearly despite the lack of spoken language. Rebekah Kowal uses “legibility” to describe modern dance adaptations of “canonical literary works” in the 1940s and 1950s; dances that aimed for “choreographic legibility . . . could be ‘read’ as one would read literature through conventions of plot, character, symbol and subtext. . . . [T]‌his move to legibility made modern dance more accessible to broader audiences.”18 Legibility, therefore, suggests a relationship between dance work and literary text that is more specific, and I use it in this chapter to approach the audience members’ appraisals of how MacMillan’s and Mills’s dances relate to Hamlet. Reviewers often presume a hierarchical relationship between a dance work and the Shakespearean text, with the latter assumed to hold ultimate authority and provide meaning that the dance must communicate. This kind of hierarchy was mirrored for a long time in the academy, which privileged Shakespeare and literary studies but did not accord dance studies a similar status. As Amy Koritz described the state of the field in 1995, “dance as a subject of serious scholarly inquiry is still marginal to academics in the United States, increasing the pressure to give precedence to the more familiar and intellectually more prestigious discipline of literary studies.”19 While this has changed in recent years and has given rise to a substantial amount of interest in dance studies in the United States, dance critics often presume that the hierarchy privileging language over movement is still in place. This chapter echoes the aims of this volume as a whole in working to undo this hierarchical relationship, asserting that we must look at the ways in which dance and text work together to create meanings that expand beyond the confines of the Shakespearean narrative. Both MacMillan’s and Mills’s works do this effectively, despite their divergent approaches

408   Elizabeth Klett to adapting Shakespeare. While Mills’s full-​length narrative follows the chronology of events as dramatized in Hamlet, MacMillan’s postmodern piece eschews narrative coherence. Both nonetheless find ample scope for challenging the tyranny of intelligibility and legibility in adapting Shakespeare for dance. Both are also eminently suited to engaging with Hamlet in particular, since it is a text that interrogates the concept of linearity and multiplies potential meanings. This chapter reveals these dance pieces to be complex and “palimpsestuous” adaptations that are, as Linda Hutcheon writes, “haunted at all times by their adapted tex[t]‌,”20 in ways more concrete than William Forsythe’s Sider (2011), which is analyzed in relation to Hamlet by Freya Vass-​Rhee in Chapter 20 of this volume. These works are, to use Hutcheon’s words, “derivation[s] that [are] not derivative . . . work[s] that [are] second without being secondary.”21 Hutcheon and others have roundly rejected “fidelity criticism” that engages in “constant debate over degree of proximity to the ‘original’ ”;22 however, fidelity to the source remains a significant point of reference for reviewers of dance versions of Shakespeare. This is primarily because Shakespeare is often perceived as synonymous with his language; as British theater director Richard Eyre writes, “The life of the plays is in the language. . . . Feelings and thoughts are released at the moment of speech.”23 When that language is removed in favor of movement, dance is judged to be at a disadvantage, having to measure up to the idealized absent original. Yet Shakespeare scholars have long challenged the dominance of this authoritative original. As Margaret Jane Kidnie has argued, looking at adaptations reveals that a Shakespearean text is “not an object at all, but rather a dynamic process that evolves over time in response to the needs and sensibilities of its users.”24 Further, adaptation itself is “an evolving category [which] is closely tied to how the work modifies over time and from one reception space to another.”25 Finally, as Jo Butterworth reminds us in Chapter 19 of this volume, audiences are not passive recipients, but rather “can perceive dance work without text as participants, reactive and affective beings” (432). If we apply these ideas to analyzing the work done by both MacMillan and Mills, choreographers working in different contexts and with different types of companies, we can see Hamlet as a continually evolving process, open to constant interaction and reinterpretation. It is difficult, if not impossible, to read Hamlet in the same way once a viewer has experienced MacMillan’s and Mills’s adaptations. MacMillan and Mills, though of different generations,26 came of age in what might be termed the post-​Balanchine era, in which ballet underwent a significant transformation. George Balanchine, cofounder of the New York City Ballet, modernized ballet technique by integrating movement from modern dance, African American dance, and other disparate forms.27 His work, characterized by an “aggressive . . . anti-​classicism,” 28 moved beyond strictly narrative-​based ballets to focus on abstract works (or “plotless,” as he preferred to call them) that celebrated the beauty of pure movement, rather than telling a story. Even in his narrative works, such as his 1962 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Balanchine tended to eschew excessive pantomime and gesture to convey the story. Matilde Butkas notes, “Since Balanchine so often did not rely on plot, he could focus purely on combining bodies in motion with sound, without undermining the

Measure in Everything    409 importance of either.”29 MacMillan, like Balanchine, deplored the use of pantomime to convey plot and relationships; his big “story ballets,” such as Romeo and Juliet, keep explanatory gestures to a minimum, relying on movement vocabulary instead. Mills, too, as he told me in an interview, seeks to get away from the “trappings of classical ballet,” and to use “gestures that would be readily recognizable” to contemporary audiences.30 MacMillan and Mills are known for creating both large-​scale story ballets and abstract works. They, like Balanchine, have moved beyond the classical ballet tradition to forge new ground: redefining the story ballet by eschewing pantomime and celebrating pure movement, and exploring plotless dance works as well. Yet their versions of Hamlet were also created in a cultural moment in which, as Anna Kisselgoff observed in 2000, companies feel pressure to stage “full-​evening ballets with plot to satisfy public demand. Why that demand exists is open to debate. . . . [P]‌erhaps it is . . . that people like to see characters with whose emotions they can identify.”31 Dale Harris agrees that “the public loves evening-​length ballets. The public loves works that tell stories and come bedecked with expensive and lavish scenery and costumes.”32 Perhaps this helps explain why Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted so frequently for ballet: they provide the potential for emotionally engaging full-​length works, as well as elaborate period mise-​en-​scène. MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles fulfills none of the requirements mentioned by Harris, revealing the choreographer’s desire to create a very different kind of Shakespeare ballet—​different even from his own much-​lauded Romeo and Juliet. The dance is similar to much of MacMillan’s other work thematically; as Jann Parry writes, it is “a tightly wrought piece that contained, in précis form, MacMillan’s perennial concerns . . . betrayal, guilt, and death.” The commission from Dance Advance offered him “a chance to experiment out of the mainstream again, as he had done for choreographic workshops at the start of his career.”33 Sea of Troubles is a one-​act piece that embraces fragmentation, both in narrative construction and as a visual motif. Told through a series of traumatic encounters between Hamlet, Ophelia, Claudius, Gertrude, and the Ghost, MacMillan deliberately disrupts the audience’s ability to understand the story and read it in relation to Shakespeare’s play. He also casts multiple dancers in the same role, intentionally breaking down the association between dancer and role so that spectators cannot readily engage with recognizable characters. The aesthetic of Sea of Troubles is overtly representational, rather than detailed and realistic. There are no elaborate costumes or scenery, and no attempt to indicate a historical period with the designs (by Deborah MacMillan, the choreographer’s wife). As revealed in photographs of the original production (Figure 18.1), the male dancers wear black trousers and white button-​down shirts, and the female dancers wear long, full-​ skirted, sleeveless gray dresses. They indicate changes in character through the strategic use of props and costume additions. For example, Claudius and Gertrude wear crowns, Ophelia wears a chaplet of flowers, and Hamlet sometimes carries a book. The dead characters—​such as the Ghost, Polonius, and Ophelia—​don translucent veils or capes. The only set piece is a white lace curtain that hangs upstage, and serves as the arras through which Hamlet stabs Polonius (miming, rather than using an actual sword). The music is a compilation score using Anton Webern’s Four Songs for Piano and Violin

410   Elizabeth Klett

Figure 18.1.  Dance Advance in Kenneth MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles, 1988. Photographer: Charles Baynon, reproduced with permission.

(1910) and Bohuslav Martinu’s Nocturnes No. 2 and 3 for cello and piano (1931), Bergerette No. 3 (1939), and the first two movements of the Piano Trio No. 3 (1951). All of these selections are minimalist modernist chamber works, primarily atonal and often jarring, rather than melodic. The chamber group Quorum played the music live for the premiere performances and on tour. The stripped-​down performance style was of necessity, since Dance Advance was a small company, composed of six dancers (three men and three women). Michael Batchelor, Susan Crow, Jennifer Jackson, Russell Maliphant, Stephen Sheriff, and Sheila Styles were all classically trained former members of the Royal Ballet and Sadler’s Wells, who formed their own company because they were frustrated at the lack of opportunities for creating smaller-​scale work outside the conventions of mainstream ballet. They started Dance Advance as a touring company to bring dance to a wider audience, and to “bridg[e]‌the gap between classical ballet and modern dance companies; between traditional ballet audiences and the younger generation; between the grand settings of an international opera house and the more intimate atmosphere of small theatres and arts centres.”34 For the members of Dance Advance, as well as MacMillan, Sea of Troubles represented an opportunity to craft a new kind of work that bridged gaps but also pushed boundaries.

Measure in Everything    411 Along with its representational aesthetic, the structure of Sea of Troubles is fragmented rather than linear. It is composed of a series of scenes, initially quite short, that grow longer over the course of the work. Some of the events and relationships depicted in these scenes seem to reference Hamlet; yet they do not follow the narrative sequence of Shakespeare’s play. The first three scenes, for example, provide brief glimpses of the five central characters that articulate their struggles with “betrayal, guilt, and death” (in Parry’s words). The opening image is a man seated on the floor facing upstage, away from the audience.35 He rises to his knees and sways from side to side, bending forward and pushing himself with his hands, before collapsing face down. Another man, draped in a white diaphanous cloak, approaches his prone figure, and lifts the first man from the ground. He whispers in both his ears; the kneeling man reacts with a look of shock and horror on his face, covers his face with his hands briefly, then pushes the other man away and collapses again to the floor. The lights come down on this scene, which seems to depict the Ghost telling Hamlet of his “foul and most unnatural murder” (1.5.25). When the lights come back up, the Ghost has replaced Hamlet on the floor, lying facing toward the audience, with a man standing above him violently pounding on his ear, as though driving a stake into it. The Ghost’s body jerks a few times, and then goes still. A woman enters with a long robe-​like coat and a crown. She places the crown on the head of the standing man (presumably Claudius, who has just killed Old Hamlet); he strikes a kingly pose, and she gazes at him admiringly, providing the sense that she is Gertrude. She drapes the robe over Claudius’s shoulders, but it falls off. She repeats the motion, but it falls off again. She makes an anxious, fluttering movement with her hands and helps him to put on the coat, which he wraps loosely about his body. He lifts his legs high in the air and walks slowly around the body of the dead king, Gertrude following and pushing on his back to propel him forward. He tugs on his legs, which are harder and harder to lift from the floor, revealing that he is “heavy with guilt,” as John Percival observed.36 Gertrude has to help him lift his legs and manages to get him offstage and away from the Ghost’s prone figure as the lights come down. This scene represents the backstory to Shakespeare’s play, which is not actually dramatized (except in the Players’ retelling of the murder through their performance of The Mousetrap in Act 3, Scene 2): Claudius’s murder and usurpation of his brother’s throne and wife. While Claudius’s gnawing guilt is not apparent in Hamlet until his revealing aside in Act 3, Scene 1, anticipating his confession in Act 3, Scene 3, in MacMillan’s choreography his body is immediately burdened with the weight of his unnatural deed.37 The third scene does not appear to relate to the first two at all; two men enter bearing a woman aloft between them. She is wearing a transparent white veil that covers her face and hangs to her knees; since it is made from the same material as the Ghost’s cloak/​shroud, it suggests that she is dead or dying as well. The men sway and ripple her body back and forth between them, skillfully conveying the idea that she is swimming or drowning in water. They put her down center stage and sway her back and forth, manipulating her body so completely that she appears almost boneless in their grip. They exit, and she puts her hands in front of her and mimes distributing flowers, slowly coming to one knee, and then (like Hamlet and the Ghost before her) falls prone to the

412   Elizabeth Klett floor. Two aspects of the scene indicate that she represents Ophelia: the suggestion of death by drowning, and her distribution of tokens. As a spectator, I read flowers into the scene once I realized that she was meant to reference the mad Ophelia; there are no actual flowers present onstage in MacMillan’s version. The characters and events depicted in these opening scenes challenge the audience’s ability to understand what is going on, and to read the movement in relation to Hamlet. Although they effectively set up the five central characters of the piece in ways that relate them back to the play, MacMillan also shatters the frame of reference by staging the events in a different order from how they are presented in Hamlet. He also finds physicality for events that are not depicted onstage in Shakespeare’s play. A spectator, like myself, who is familiar with Hamlet can use contextual clues to identify the characters, but also through the process of accretion, as the scenes provide a succession of signifiers related to each character. For example, if the spectator is uncertain who the male dancer wearing the shroud in Scene 1 is meant to represent, then Scene 2, in which his violent death is enacted, provides a further clue that he is the Ghost of Old Hamlet. Yet these scenes also deliberately disrupt the audience’s attempts to locate them in relation to the events of Hamlet’s narrative. Unlike the play, which opens with the Ghost appearing to Horatio and the guards on the castle walls, MacMillan’s version jumps ahead to open with an abbreviated version of Act 1, Scene 5, when the Ghost tells Hamlet about his “murder most foul” (1.5.27). The next scene shows the Ghost’s murder and Claudius’s accession to the throne (narrated but never physically represented in Shakespeare), while Scene 3 skips ahead to Act 4. Even here, though, the events of Scene 3 are presented as a different narrative sequence. In Sea of Troubles, Ophelia drowns first, then distributes her flowers. In Hamlet, we hear about rather than see Ophelia’s death through Gertrude’s speech in Act 4, Scene 7, which follows from the “mad scenes” in Act 4, Scene 5. As Vass-​ Rhee notes of Forsythe’s Sider, “scenes follow one after another with no clear through line” to which the audience can cling (Vass-​Rhee, Chapter 20 in this volume, 469). The nonlinear structure of these first three scenes is consistent throughout the rest of Sea of Troubles. MacMillan suggests specific plot events from Shakespeare’s play—​ such as the “closet scene” (3.4) in which Hamlet confronts Gertrude and murders Polonius, and the “nunnery scene” (3.1) between Hamlet and Ophelia—​but does not do so in the order that they occur in Hamlet. The ending references the tragic conclusion of Shakespeare’s play, since it invokes the deaths of Gertrude, Claudius, and Hamlet; yet it does so obliquely, by having Hamlet seize the long robe from Claudius, unfurl it, and strike at both Claudius and Gertrude with it. They fall to the floor, Hamlet drapes the robe around himself, and likewise falls to the floor as the lights come down. MacMillan makes no attempt to invoke the specifics of Shakespeare’s ending, such as the fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes, the “envenomed” rapier, and the poisoned wine (5.2.300). Nor does he include the Fortinbras subplot, in which the Norwegian forces take control and bear Hamlet “like a soldier to the stage” (5.2.374). Even though both Shakespeare’s and MacMillan’s versions end with the death of Hamlet, MacMillan’s vision is much more fragmented, engaged in obsessive repetition of the characters’ most traumatic experiences.

Measure in Everything    413 Sea of Troubles uses repetition—​ in particular, the re-​ enactment of characters’ deaths—​to make the viewer unable to perceive the narrative as linear. Unlike in Hamlet, Polonius and Ophelia each dies several times, and the dead bodies of the Ghost and Polonius become confusingly mingled. MacMillan also repeats movement motifs to show the characters confronting and re-​confronting these corpses. In Scene 5, for example, Claudius lifts and turns Gertrude in a sensual embrace inspired by classical ballet, with her leg in arabesque behind them. Then he puts her down abruptly so that she stands astride the Ghost’s prone body. Clasping the back of her neck, Claudius lowers her down slowly over the corpse so that she is forced to look directly into his dead face (Figure 18.2). Although the movement is quite forceful, she is completely still and

Figure 18.2.  Russell Maliphant, Susan Crow, and Stephen Sheriff in Kenneth MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles, 1988. Photographer: Charles Baynon, reproduced with permission.

414   Elizabeth Klett unresisting, possibly suggesting that she is willing to confront her own complicity in her first husband’s death. Claudius repeats the movement later in the same scene, this time more swiftly and violently, pushing her head down toward the corpse roughly as she resists and makes anguished attempts to escape. Claudius then forces himself to look at the dead king’s face, echoing Gertrude’s posture astride the body and holding himself up with his arms. The scene concludes with Claudius collapsing on top of the Ghost’s body, placing his own head against the Ghost’s head, and lying still. Gertrude crosses behind them, takes each of their hands in hers, kneels down, and lays her upper body over both of them. A spectator trying to connect this scene to an equivalent one in Shakespeare’s play will find it difficult. Although Claudius forcing Gertrude to look at the Ghost’s face might recall Hamlet compelling his mother to “look here upon this picture” of his dead father (3.4.53), Claudius does not force a similar confrontation in Hamlet. In fact, Gertrude’s feelings of guilt about their “hasty marriage” are referenced only briefly and indirectly (2.2.57), and her possible complicity in the murder of her first husband is never confirmed. MacMillan uses choreography to show her and Claudius wrestling repeatedly with their guilt over the Ghost’s death, and Gertrude’s final gesture in Scene 5 of Sea of Troubles suggests that she is certainly “cleft . . . in twain,” but that Hamlet is left out of this equation (3.4.157). Unlike Scene 5, Scene 6 does seem to have a clear counterpart in Shakespeare’s play: the “closet scene,” in which Hamlet confronts his mother and kills the eavesdropping Polonius. The Ghost appears in this scene in Hamlet to “whet [Hamlet’s] almost blunted purpose” of revenging his death (3.4.110). MacMillan echoes a number of these plot events in his version, but with significant differences. The scene opens with a trio for Hamlet, Gertrude, and the Ghost, with Gertrude often being pulled between them, then lifted and swung around each of their bodies, so that she drapes across their backs and then whirls around to the front again. Once the Ghost departs, the partnering between Hamlet and Gertrude becomes combative. He stamps his feet in a series of brief, staccato beats on the ball of his foot, in time with the music, while she swings her leg back and forth, repeatedly kicking him and making him ricochet away from her. At this point, Hamlet moves upstage to the lace curtain and stabs through it with his hand; Polonius, clutching a red cloth to his head to signify blood, falls to the floor. Ophelia enters immediately and runs to him, but Gertrude pulls her away and pushes her offstage. Hamlet hides the body behind the curtain as Claudius enters to take the Ghost’s place in the trio with Gertrude and Hamlet, echoing many of the movements performed by the Ghost earlier in the scene. After Claudius and Gertrude exit, Hamlet performs the murder of Polonius in exactly the same way, and Ophelia enters again to mourn her father’s death. Her mourning dance incorporates a series of crouching turns with her arms over her face, punctuated by anguished leaps upward, with her arms upraised.38 Although a viewer might comfortably identify Scene 6 with the “closet scene,” very little about the way it is performed directly reflects Shakespeare’s play. MacMillan’s choreography reveals the twisted triangular relationships between Hamlet, Gertrude, the Ghost, and Claudius, while the repetition of Polonius’s death makes it difficult for the audience to understand and read the scene as a sequence of logical events. Ophelia also appears

Measure in Everything    415 twice in the scene, whereas in Shakespeare’s play her reaction to Polonius’s death is delayed until her “mad scenes” in Act 4. MacMillan’s staging of the scene is not simply a function of having to compress the plot events of Hamlet into a shorter framework. Rather, Sea of Troubles calls the viewer’s attention to the problematic structure of Hamlet through its disruptions of intelligibility and legibility. MacMillan does not even allow the audience to make a concrete association between the dancers and their characters; instead, he casts multiple dancers in the same roles to break down this association. He uses this technique throughout the piece as a whole: for example, by having all three of the male dancers play Hamlet in different scenes. He confronts the audience directly with it in the final scene, however, by bringing on all six dancers, almost as if for a curtain call, in a straight line. The three women wear Ophelia’s flowers in their hair, while the three men embody Hamlet (by virtue of their not wearing Claudius’s crown or the Ghost’s death shroud). The dancers clasp hands and lift their arms over their heads, staring directly at the audience almost defiantly, challenging them to make sense of three Ophelias and three Hamlets in the same scene. The women rise into relevé, move their hips sensually back and forth while on the balls of their feet, then lower down to perform a series of sinuous ronds de jambs, circling their legs in unison. They form a circle, grasping each other’s hands and pulling on each other, writhing and contorting, to create a visual image of Ophelia’s fragmentation (Figure 18.3). Later, right before the dance finishes, MacMillan repeats this formation, but this

Figure  18.3. Susan Crow, Jennifer Jackson, and Sheila Styles as Ophelia in Kenneth MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles, 1988. Photographer: Charles Baynon, reproduced with permission.

416   Elizabeth Klett time with three Gertrudes and three Claudiuses (identifiable by their crowns). They repeat the confrontation with the audience and echo the choreography of the Ophelia/​ Hamlet lineup. One of the effects of the multiple casting, as well as the appearance of several dancers in the same role onstage simultaneously, is that it suggests parallels between characters:  between Gertrude and Ophelia, between Claudius and Hamlet, between Claudius and the Ghost, between Hamlet and the Ghost. Occasionally MacMillan also invokes some parallels that cross gender lines, such as the similar situations of Hamlet and Ophelia, who repeatedly mourn over their fathers’ dead bodies that lie center stage. (Indeed, it is often not clear which dead father the prone body is meant to represent—​ Polonius or the Ghost—​since the same dancers play both roles.) By using a nonlinear narrative, repetition of events and movements, and casting multiple dancers in the same roles, MacMillan interferes with the audience’s ability to understand and read Sea of Troubles: both as a coherent dance work in its own right, and in relation to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Instead of telling an intelligible and legible story, he creates a dark, fragmented meditation on guilt, betrayal, and death. In doing so, he calls attention to the problems inherent in reading and making meaning out of Hamlet, itself a fragmented and unstable text. MacMillan’s multiple ghosts and corpses, like those in Shakespeare, are dancing contradictions; in Susan Zimmerman’s description of the paradoxical status of the Ghost in Hamlet, they are “a mystery in material form, a palpable impalpable.”39 The physical medium of dance allows MacMillan to realize and yet preserve the heart of the mystery of the play, the Ghost, and Hamlet. Mills’s Hamlet for Ballet Austin takes a significantly different approach from MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles, one that emphasizes intelligibility and legibility. Since he set the work on a much larger company, Mills was able to incorporate visual spectacle as well, with impressive sets and costumes that situate the story in the present day. The music is a composite score of works by Philip Glass, whose contemporary aesthetic helps to detach the work from any kind of medieval or early modern setting. Glass, one of the most famous and respected living composers, is known for his “minimalism,”40 and for music that is “highly structured and repetitious.”41 Further, as Thomas Rain Crowe notes, he is a composer who “defines his work in terms of its collaborative content,” meaning that the music is often meant to be heard alongside visual media, such as film, theater, and dance.42 Like MacMillan, then, Mills chose the music to convey distance between his dance piece and the historical setting of Shakespeare’s play. His dancers are costumed in twenty-​first-​century clothing: three-​piece suits for the men, and cocktail dresses for the women.43 Claudius and Gertrude wear slightly more dramatic versions of these costumes: he sports a longer jacket, and her lustrous velvet dress has a long full skirt. The set includes two clear glass tubes at either side of the stage, in which characters can appear and disappear, a riveted metal wall that divides the dancing space in Act 2, and a suspended platform for the dead bodies of Hamlet and Ophelia. Black, white, and red are the predominant colors in Mills’s mise-​en-​scène, although there are notes of purple, peach, and yellow in the costumes as well. The combined effect of music, costumes, and sets is sleek, minimal, and striking, placing the production firmly in a contemporary context.

Measure in Everything    417 Despite the modern aesthetic, Mills’s ballet takes a traditional approach to the narrative, foregrounding coherence and sticking relatively closely to Shakespeare’s play. He does streamline the story by eliminating the Fortinbras subplot and some of the supporting characters, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and he only includes Horatio in the opening scene. The ballet includes a framing device, perhaps as an homage to Robert Helpmann’s 1942 Hamlet: it begins at the end, as Hamlet lies dying on a black bier.44 Horatio clutches his hand as Hamlet’s body contorts in pain, and then goes still. The bier ascends and hovers above the stage, ushering in a flashback to the beginning of the story: the celebration of Claudius and Gertrude’s wedding. Hamlet sits up on the bier, which eventually lowers again so that he can participate in the events that will lead to his death. The ballet proceeds in a linear fashion from this point forward, following the structure of Shakespeare’s play, and ends as it began: with Hamlet’s death. Unlike Sea of Troubles, an audience member at Mills’s Hamlet would have relatively little trouble reading the ballet in relation to Shakespeare’s play, particularly through visual references and gestures. For example, the wedding scene, which corresponds to Act 1, Scene 2, of Hamlet, shows that Hamlet is the only person onstage wearing black. The rest of the courtiers wear bright colors:  red, purple, yellow, and peach (Figure 18.4). Hamlet proves to be a disruptive presence in the celebration, physically as well as visually; he moves hesitantly among the dancing couples, bumping into some of them and making a small gesture of apology as he moves away. When Gertrude moves to kiss him, he turns his head sharply, and when Claudius offers

Figure 18.4.  Aara Krumpe as Gertrude, Ashley Lynn Sherman as Ophelia, and Christopher Swaim as Laertes in Stephen Mills’s Hamlet. Photo by Anne Marie Bloodgood, 2015. Courtesy of Ballet Austin.

418   Elizabeth Klett Hamlet his hand, Hamlet knocks it contemptuously away. These public gestures of rejection produce a dismayed reaction among the watching courtiers. Hamlet’s black costume recalls the “customary suits of solemn black” he wears in Shakespeare’s play (1.2.78), while his public repudiation of Claudius seems to reference his conviction that his uncle is “a little more than kin and less than kind” (1.2.65). Mills follows this scene with Hamlet being visited by the Ghost, who tells him, through gesture and illustrative staging, that he was murdered by Claudius, directly invoking Act 1, Scene 5, of Shakespeare’s play. As in Sea of Troubles, the costume design aids the viewer in identifying the Ghost, as he is clothed entirely in white—​suit, button-​down shirt, tie, and a long trench coat—​splashed with blood. White makeup also helps to suggest his otherworldly status.45 The history he relates to Hamlet plays out in one of the glass tubes: his Ghostly double (wearing the same costume, along with a white mask) lies down to sleep, watched over by Gertrude, who strokes him, but then turns her back as Claudius enters. Claudius pours poison in the Ghost’s ear and he convulses, clutching his ear, then dies. Gertrude turns around and laments over the body, throwing herself over him and weeping silently. Claudius comforts her and wraps her in a hug. This scene will later be duplicated exactly (using three different dancers, wearing key elements of Claudius’s and Gertrude’s costumes, supplied by Hamlet himself) in the players’ scene, corresponding to Act 3, Scene 2, of Hamlet. The Ghost enjoins Hamlet to revenge after the scene has played out by getting him to kneel on the floor, kissing him on the forehead, and then mimetically clutching his ear as he exits. Mills’s first act compresses the first four acts of Shakespeare’s play into a wonderfully economical narrative, encompassing the “nunnery scene” in which Ophelia returns Hamlet’s letters, the play scene that re-​enacts the Ghost’s death, Claudius’s confession of guilt, the “closet scene” in which Hamlet kills Polonius, and Ophelia’s madness and drowning death. Mills stages these scenes in the order they are played out in Hamlet, and reserves Ophelia’s funeral and the fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes for his second act. His storyline suggests causal links between scenes and characters’ actions that are likewise drawn from Shakespeare’s play. For example, Claudius rises to disrupt the players’ performance of the murder, leading directly into his “confessional” scene. Mills brilliantly stages Claudius’s confession within the same glass tube in which the murder of Old Hamlet played out earlier in the act. He dances in the confined space of the tube as though trapped by his own guilt, falling against its walls, whirling around, pounding his fists on the glass, unable to get out. Mills shows that he is trapped in the place where he committed the murder, both spatially and emotionally. He falls to his knees, arms upraised, as Hamlet takes out a dagger and steps up threateningly behind him, ready to strike. As in Shakespeare, however, Hamlet is unable to kill Claudius at this moment while he is praying. Mills told me that this was one of the moments where he felt that Shakespeare’s language could not be fully conveyed through dance: There are some things that I have to leave out that just kill me. Aspects of the words are so beautiful. Like the moment where Claudius has gone to the chapel to pray, and Hamlet is behind him waiting, and he has to kill him before Claudius confesses. . . .

Measure in Everything    419 When it doesn’t happen, when he doesn’t kill him, it’s a really disheartening moment for Hamlet, and I just can’t get it in. There are dozens of moments like that.

Mills seems to perceive it as a partial failure on his part to have created choreography that does not fully capture the complexities of Shakespeare’s play, perhaps echoing the popular perception that Hamlet and Hamlet are nothing but “words, words, words” (2.2.192).46 Yet Mills nonetheless finds a compelling visual and physical representation that goes beyond what is happening in the text. The image of Claudius frantically dancing inside the confined space where he committed the murder both is, and is not, similar to what is happening with Claudius in Shakespeare’s play. It shows that, in certain important ways, Claudius is never able to leave the murder behind; it traps, confines, and defines him in ways that are physical and emotional. Although Mills is primarily working in a mode that seeks to honor the authority of Shakespeare’s play, and to find dance-​based equivalents for the language, his ballet also deliberately expands beyond the confines of the text. Like MacMillan, Mills uses onstage doubles for Hamlet and Ophelia to reveal how their traumatic experiences fragment their psyches. The key difference is that while MacMillan employs doubling to disrupt the audience’s ability to understand and read characters and narrative events, Mills uses it to enhance the spectator’s understanding of the characters’ psychologies. In his words, he wanted to “direc[t]‌the prism toward this madness.” Hamlet has three other “selves” who appear throughout the ballet, designated in the program as Hamlet II, III, and IV. They initially enter after the Ghost’s revelation of his murder halfway through Act 1, articulating Hamlet’s response to his dead father’s news. After the Ghost exits, Hamlet performs a solo to percussive music, clutching his ear in echo of the Ghost, and leaping frantically around the stage. He performs a series of grand jetés that transition into a forward lunge, in which he contracts his upper body into a crouching, anguished pose. Three other men enter, dressed in black like Hamlet, and appearing sequentially, one by one. Each leaps onto the black platform, holds out his hands to Hamlet, and does a spiraling leap down to the floor. When all three have entered, they get up on the center platform, clasp hands, and pull on each other, balancing their weight against each other (Figure 18.5). They grasp Hamlet’s arms and hold him back from leaping off the platform, perhaps indicating that they are paradoxically keeping him from going mad. All four dance in unison, leaping and throwing themselves around the stage, performing attitude turns and sharp jerking gestures with their arms. Hamlet starts a movement and they copy him, one by one, lunging forward and leaping backward, ending in a combative pose, arms raised and fists clenched. The accumulated effect of this scene—​the frantic nature of the music, the rapid and disjointed choreography, and the three other selves—​suggests Hamlet’s burgeoning madness: he is literally fragmenting before our eyes. As Mills put it: “The idea that Hamlet is shattering, that he’s just sort of opening up, and seeing these other sides of himself, was really intriguing to me.” Yet the other three Hamlets also aid Hamlet in his revenge in the final scene. Hamlet takes a dagger provided by one of his doubles to cut Claudius’s throat; the other Hamlet stands behind him and mimics his upraised arm as he draws back the dagger, then stands frozen in that

420   Elizabeth Klett

Figure  18.5.  Frank Shott as Hamlet and Orlando Julius Canova, James Fuller, and Oliver Greene-​Kramer as the Ghost Hamlets in Stephen Mills’s Hamlet. Photo by Anne Marie Bloodgood, 2015. Courtesy of Ballet Austin.

position. The other two Hamlets comfort Laertes and Gertrude as they die: one cradles Laertes’ head in his lap, while the other lies down with Gertrude and puts an arm around her. When Hamlet dies, it is clear that parts of his psyche remain with these other three characters, showing his reconciliation with Laertes, his love for Gertrude, and his hatred of Claudius. Ophelia also has three other “selves” that come out during her mad scene at the close of Act 1.  Mills provides Ophelia with a substantial solo to articulate her breakdown following Polonius’s death, in part because she was the character with which he most identified: “I could just resonate with the fragility that was within her.” We realize that she is mourning her father because she enters carrying his red jacket in her arms and weeping over it, and because this follows directly after Hamlet’s murder of Polonius. Ophelia’s solo takes place downstage, in front of a transparent curtain, as she splashes in a trough full of water that lines the edge of the stage. Wearing a ragged and unkempt gray dress and in bare feet, Ophelia laughs, cries, leaps crazily from side to side, throws herself on the floor, and flings her arms out to the side like a puppet. She rolls back and forth along the floor and pushes herself up into a jump, one arm and leg reaching upward desperately. Three other Ophelias, clad in similar dresses, dance behind her, their outlines and movements hazy since they are behind the screen. They imitate her movements in sequence, as the three other selves did for Hamlet, providing a compelling visual illustration of her fractured self. For instance, they stand one behind the other, hands raised

Measure in Everything    421

Figure 18.6.  Ashley Lynn Sherman as Ophelia and Chelsea Marie Renner, Grace Morton, and Brittany Strickland as the Ghost Ophelias in Stephen Mills’s Hamlet. Photo by Anne Marie Bloodgood, 2015. Courtesy of Ballet Austin.

to their foreheads, as they circle their upper bodies one by one (Figure 18.6). They leap crazily, tossing their arms up in the air, and their legs up behind them. Ophelia eventually splashes into the trough, bending forward to dip her hair in the water, and then flinging her head back, radiating droplets. As she does so, the other Ophelias dance on pointe behind her, in movements that are much more classical: holding hands in a series of arabesques, and waltzing in a circle. The final image of the act is Ophelia suspended behind the transparent curtain, her feet hanging and her head thrown back, moving her arms as though she is floating in water. The other three Ophelias stop dancing to look at her, then walk toward her slowly, their arms raised, as the lights come down. Her death is depicted as the clear result of her fragmentation and madness, highlighting the linear and sequential narrative that Mills has constructed in his ballet. The significant differences between MacMillan and Mills’s dance adaptations of Hamlet are due in part to the very different circumstances under which they were created. Dance Advance was a small ensemble that used every dancer in every piece, and was founded as a touring company to bring art to smaller venues in Britain and abroad. MacMillan was therefore constrained when creating Sea of Troubles by the need to use three male and three female dancers to tell a story that has two central female characters and a plethora of male characters. The use of multiple dancers in the same role must have arisen, at least in part, from the makeup of the company itself. Further, MacMillan was not able to employ elaborate settings or costumes, due to the restrictions

422   Elizabeth Klett of a touring schedule that had to accommodate a variety of theater spaces. Dance Advance also insisted on the use of live musical accompaniment whenever possible, which would have in part dictated the choice of music (all of which is performed by a limited number of instruments). Mills conceptualized his ballet under very different conditions: as an evening-​length work for a medium-​sized resident company (Ballet Austin currently has twenty-​two dancers), with the built-​in expectation that he would use elaborate sets and costumes. The music could also be performed live by the Austin Symphony, which widened the array of musical possibilities. Although I have framed these different circumstances in terms of how they limited MacMillan and enabled Mills, I want to suggest that when it comes to intelligibility and legibility, the opposite is true. Since MacMillan was already working with limited resources, he ironically had greater freedom to create a dance work that did not need to prioritize intelligibility and legibility for its audiences. Mills originally created his Hamlet while serving as interim artistic director of Ballet Austin, and was likely under more pressure to create a visually opulent, narratively coherent Shakespearean ballet that made use of the skills of the entire company. MacMillan had more power to advance his point of view, since at that point in his career, he had significant status and reputation in the ballet world, and he used his influence to bring attention to Dance Advance as it was getting started. As Parry notes, the company “offered him carte blanche” to conceptualize the work in the way that he wanted.47 The circumstances under which these works were created therefore had a significant impact on the ways in which the choreographers approached the relationship between dance and Shakespeare’s play. Despite these different circumstances, and the divergent strategies that MacMillan and Mills took to adapt Hamlet for the dance stage, there are fascinating points of convergence in the finished products. The use of doubling in both productions (particularly the presentation of the characters’ multiple “selves”) indicates a common obsession on the part of both choreographers with the psychological fragmentation of the main characters, particularly Hamlet and Ophelia. Both MacMillan and Mills are invested in exposing the guilt and trauma that the characters undergo, either as victims or perpetrators of violent acts. This is perhaps unsurprising given the extensive history of psychoanalytic criticism of Hamlet, which includes seminal readings by Freud and Lacan,48 among others, that have permeated performance traditions. Other dance versions of Hamlet, such as Helpmann’s ballet, have likewise tended to focus on psychological investigations of the characters. Helpmann, a Shakespearean actor as well as a ballet dancer, envisioned the piece as “a dramatic and turbulent dream-​ version  .  .  .  psychologically revealing though deliberately out of focus,” presented through a “confused psychological dream atmosphere.”49 Following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Mills augments the psychological mood of his ballet by including a non-​Shakespearean scene in Act 2. This “introspection scene,” as he calls it, dramatizes Hamlet’s fractured psyche in a completely physical way. After Ophelia’s funeral, Hamlet is visited by all of the main characters in succession—​Gertrude, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, Claudius, and the Ghost—​as they blame, evade, and repudiate him. Laertes, for instance, points at him accusingly and then kicks and punches him forcefully.

Measure in Everything    423 Ophelia slides her arms over his shoulders from behind in a tender embrace and raises herself onto his back. He holds her gently as he turns and lifts her in a lyrical arabesque. Yet as their brief duet continues, he loses his grasp on her: he reaches out for her, only to have her duck under his arms and slip out of his hold. She runs to the other side of the stage and then returns toward him, reaching wistfully toward him and throwing him a fleeting glance before exiting. Polonius is smeared in blood from the wound that Hamlet inflicted, and holds his reddened hands toward him in denunciation. Hamlet attempts to strangle Claudius, but Claudius slithers out from between his legs and gets away. His encounter with the Ghost is most devastating of all, and comes on the heels of his failure to kill Claudius. The Ghost raises him up from the ground and then stalks away, emphasizing his displeasure at Hamlet’s repeated inability to exact revenge (Figure 18.7). This scene takes place entirely in Hamlet’s head, which is suggested in part by the ritualistic nature of the movement (each character crosses the stage at a measured pace before interacting with Hamlet) and by the presence of Hamlet’s three other selves. It suggests the degree to which Hamlet feels guilty about the things that he has done and has failed to do, as well as his grief over the loss of his loved ones. Mills shares with MacMillan an interest in dramatizing the concern with betrayal, guilt, and death; yet his staging of the introspection scene reveals his markedly different methods. Hamlet’s encounters with each character are staged sequentially, bringing a kind of logic and order to the portrayal of his psychic trauma that MacMillan disavows in Sea of Troubles.

Figure 18.7.  Frank Shott as Hamlet and Stephen Mills as the Ghost in Mills’s Hamlet. Photo by Anne Marie Bloodgood, 2015. Courtesy of Ballet Austin.

424   Elizabeth Klett The final image of Mills’s introspection scene is a deliberate reworking of the last scene of Balanchine’s 1929 ballet Prodigal Son. In the latter, itself a revision of the biblical parable, the son returns home to his father, throws himself at his feet, and pulls himself up the front of the father’s body, climbing into his arms with his knees drawn up to his father’s chest. As Mills recounts, “the father wraps his cloak around him as a way of talking about forgiveness.” In Mills’s Hamlet, the movement is very similar: Hamlet throws himself on the ground and grabs the Ghost’s feet from behind, then climbs up his father’s back to clutch desperately at his neck. This is a “palimpsestuous” moment that invokes a dance antecedent as well as a literary source. In this moment, Balanchine carries as much (or more) authority as Shakespeare, and Mills works with both to create a scene that can be read on multiple levels simultaneously. The scene is emotionally powerful, even if the audience members have no understanding of either referent, clearly communicating the degree to which Hamlet feels rejected by his father. This scene reveals the ways in which Mills’s ballet conveys meanings that are not dictated by Shakespeare and Hamlet. Although Mills, unlike MacMillan, prioritizes intelligibility and legibility in his adaptation of Shakespeare, the ballet offers ways of understanding and reading that move beyond the confines of the so-​called master text. Both MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles and Mills’s Hamlet, though divergent in their choreographic methods, challenge the supposed superiority of language over movement, and assert the legitimacy of dance as an embodied cultural form.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Stephen Mills for speaking with me about his Hamlet, as well as Pei-​ San Brown and Eugene Alvarez at Ballet Austin for their help arranging the interview, photographs, and research materials. I am also grateful to Helen Roberts and the staff at the National Resource Centre for Dance at the University of Surrey for their help finding resources on MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles.

Notes 1. The quotation is drawn from Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy: “To be or not to be: that is the question. /​Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer /​The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune /​Or to take arms against a sea of troubles /​And by opposing end them” (3.1.55–​59). Quotations from Hamlet, which reference the Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, will hereafter be cited in the text. 2. Original 1988 production program for Sea of Troubles, in National Resource Centre for Dance archives, University of Surrey. 3. Jane King, “Laudable, but in Need of Thoughtful Editing,” Morning Star, June 17, 1988; Deirdre McMahon, “Brave Words?” What’s On and Where to Go, May 11, 1988; John Percival, “Not Far Forward,” Dance and Dancers, May 1988. 4. Mary Clarke, “Barefoot in Elsinore,” The Guardian, March 19, 1988. 5. Judith Mackrell, The Independent, June 13, 1988.

Measure in Everything    425 Jeffrey Taylor, The Mail on Sunday, May 22, 1988; John Percival, “Not Far Forward.” Kathrine Sorley Walker, “A Striking Ballet from the Bard,” The Telegraph, March 19, 1988. Stephanie Jordan, “Small Time,” New Statesman, April 1, 1988. R. S. White, Avant-​Garden Hamlet: Stage, Text, Screen (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015), 55–​56. 10. Leon Harold Craig, Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet: A Study of Shakespeare’s Method (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 9. 11. Marvin Hunt, Looking For Hamlet (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 31. 12. White, Avant-​Garde Hamlet, 56. 13. Sea of Troubles was performed by Adam Cooper and Company as part of a MacMillan tribute in Exeter in 2002, and by Cooper and members of the English National Ballet on tour in 2003. More recently, it has been performed by Scottish Ballet in 2013 as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. 14. Claire Christine Spera, “Dance Review:  Ballet Austin’s Hamlet,” Austin American-​ Statesman, September 8, 2015; Timothy Abbott, “Ballet Austin’s ‘Hamlet’: A Treat For the Senses,” Sound Profile Magazine, September 6, 2015. 15. Robert Faires, “Local Arts Reviews: Hamlet,” Austin Chronicle, March 19, 2004. 16. The video is available at Ballet Austin’s YouTube channel:  https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=CyjHI-​mtUIM. 17. Ryan E. Johnson, “Ballet Austin’s ‘Hamlet,’” Austin Examiner, September 16, 2015. 18. Rebekah J. Kowal, How to Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 85. 19. Amy Koritz, Gendering Bodies/​Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early 20th Century British Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 2. 20. Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013), 6. 21. Hutcheon and O’Flynn, Theory of Adaptation, 9. 22. Hutcheon and O’Flynn, Theory of Adaptation,  6–​7. 23. Richard Eyre, Utopia and Other Places: Memoir of a Young Director (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), 176. 24. Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 2. 25. Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, 5. 26. MacMillan was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1929, and died in London in 1992. He was resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet from 1962 to 1966, and artistic director from 1970 to 1977. Mills was born in Kentucky in 1960, and danced with Ballet Austin from 1986 to 2000, becoming artistic director of the company in 2000. 27. In Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts, Brenda Dixon Gottschild argues that Balanchine’s modernization of ballet is indebted to an invisible Africanist legacy: “he introduced to the ballet canon Africanist aesthetic principles as well as Africanist-​based steps from the social, modern, and so-​called jazz dance vocabularies” (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), 60. 28. Juliet Bellow, “Balanchine and the Deconstruction of Classicism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marion Kant (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2007), 237. 29. Matilde Butkas, “George Balanchine,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marion Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 225.

6. 7. 8. 9.

426   Elizabeth Klett 30. Elizabeth Klett, interview with Stephen Mills, Ballet Austin, September 4, 2015. All further quotations from Mills in the text are drawn from this interview. 31. Anna Kisselgoff, “The Stories vs. the Steps,” New York Times, June 9, 2000. 32. Dale Harris, “For You and I Are Past Our Dancing Days,” in Crossed Stars: Artistic Sources and Social Conflict in the Ballet Romeo and Juliet, ed. Rita Felciano and Eric Hellman (San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum, 1994), 6. 33. Jann Parry, Different Drummer: The Life of Kenneth MacMillan (London: Faber, 2009), 639, 637. 34. This description is taken from the title page of the original production program for their opening 1988 tour, which included Sea of Troubles. 35. All descriptions of Sea of Troubles are drawn from a video recording of Dance Advance’s May 31, 1990, performance in Las Palmas, which is in the National Resource Centre for Dance archives at the University of Surrey. The program also included Not Quite Cricket and Shrugs and Signs, and the cast comprised Michael Batchelor, Laura Hussey, Jennifer Jackson, Mari Mackenzie, Moana Nepia, and Stephen Sheriff. 36. Percival, “Not Far Forward.” 37. Claudius reveals his guilt obliquely in an aside, referencing his “deed” and a “heavy burden” that he bears (3.1.52–​53). Later, in a soliloquy, he confirms the Ghost’s accusations: “Oh, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven; /​It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t -​/​A brother’s murder” (3.3.36–​38). 38. A number of reviewers commented that Ophelia’s mourning dance seemed to reference Martha Graham. Although they do not mention the work by name, some of the crouching, anguished movements do appear to offer an homage to Graham’s Lamentation (1930). 39. Susan Zimmerman, “Psychoanalysis and the Corpse,” Shakespeare Studies 33 (January 2005): 106. 40. Jay Nordlinger, “New York Chronicle,” New Criterion 30 (March 2012): 56. 41. Kevin D. Williamson, “Under Us All Moved and Moved Us,” New Criterion 31 (December 2012): 56. 42. Thomas Rain Crowe, “Frontiers of the Acceptable: An Interview with Philip Glass,” Art Papers 15 (January/​February 1991): 24. 43. My analysis of Mills’s Hamlet is based on a live performance I  attended in Austin on September 4, 2015, as well as a live video recording of the February 11, 2009, dress rehearsal, kindly loaned by Ballet Austin. 44. Helpmann’s Hamlet, originally performed by Sadler’s Wells Ballet (which would later become the Royal Ballet), was intended to be, as Anna Bemrose notes in Robert Helpmann: A Servant of Art, “a twenty-​minute distorted dream ‘of events as they might have flashed through the brain of the dying Hamlet’ ” (St. Lucia:  University of Queensland Press, 2009), 65. 45. Stephen Mills created the role of the Ghost and has performed it in each of the Ballet Austin productions of the piece. He told me that the 2015 production would be his final appearance in the role: “It’s too much running, at my age. I love it, because I love the idea of being on the stage with the company, and we make so much work together. It becomes this communal thing which I really, really enjoy.” Interestingly, the idea of choreographer-​as-​ Ghost was similarly reflected in Forsythe’s Sider, as Vass-​Rhee relates in Chapter 20 of this volume. 46. As Hunt writes in Looking for Hamlet, “the play is likes its protagonist, more talk than action,” 1.

Measure in Everything    427 47. Parry, Different Drummer, 637. 48. See, for example, Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-​Analysis, trans. Joan Riviere (London:  Allen, 1992). Freud’s application of the Oedipus complex to Hamlet strongly influenced Ernest Jones’s 1949 book Hamlet and Oedipus, which in turn influenced interpretations of the play by directors such as Laurence Olivier. See also Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 11–​52. 49. Bemrose, Robert Helpmann, 65.

Bibliography Bemrose, Anna. Robert Helpmann:  A Servant of Art. St. Lucia:  University of Queensland Press, 2009. Craig, Leon Harold. Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet: A Study of Shakespeare’s Method. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Eyre, Richard. Utopia and Other Places:  Memoir of a Young Director. London: Bloomsbury, 1993. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. Hunt, Marvin. Looking For Hamlet. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Hutcheon, Linda, and Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2013. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New  York: Routledge, 2008. Koritz, Amy. Gendering Bodies/​Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early 20th Century British Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Kowal, Rebekah J. How to Do Things with Dance:  Performing Change in Postwar America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010. White, R. S. Avant-​Garde Hamlet:  Stage, Text, Screen. Madison, NJ:  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015.

Chapter 19

Hamlet, The   Ba l l et Examining a Choreographic Process Jo Butterworth

What are the considerations and conditions for the creation of new narrative ballets in the classical genre in the twenty-​first century? Through the lenses of literacy and polysemanticism, materiality and signification, this chapter attempts an investigation of the creative and rehearsal processes of one specific ballet, Hamlet, created by David Nixon, the artistic director of Northern Ballet based in Leeds, United Kingdom, which premiered in February 2008.1 The work was set in occupied Paris in the 1940s, and challenged the company to explore and create a tragedy, in ballet, where believable characters play out their lives under extraordinary and fearful conditions. In preparation, the author was invited by Nixon to lead some research and development (R&D) sessions in the form of practical creative devising workshops with twelve members of the company in 2007. This chapter investigates the planning process, the R&D sessions, the choreographic approaches, and creative decision-​making of the artistic director and team and the dramaturgical guidance and scenographic discussions of this work. How, in this case, was a Shakespearian text transformed into dance? British students are generally introduced to selected Shakespeare plays in school, through the study of texts, and are assessed through examination questions. Fundamentally, their understanding develops through cognition rather than sensory experience. Theater students may go beyond the text to the movement and meaning of their director’s choice of period and style, but, it can be argued that, unless studying dance or theater at a professional level, few individuals today gain any significant knowl­ edge of how the body communicates human emotions, feelings, and moods. Yet, audience experience in Shakespeare’s time was evidently based on characterization, narrative, and language, rather than spectacle. At performances at the Globe Theatre in London between 1599 and 1641, it is assumed that audience members stood or sat, dependent on ticket price; they would experience the plays in the open air, in natural light, eating and drinking, watching a choice of up to six plays a week, with all-​male

430   Jo Butterworth casts, in contemporary clothing, on bare stages with little in the way of set. But we can imagine that, formally educated or not, each audience member would understand in his or her own way the body, behavior, and emotional context. They could follow the language, the speeches and context, appreciate the significance of stage spaces, the movement of the actors, and the humor or pathos of seeing men performing female roles. The playwright’s abilities surely included the ability to illuminate the script with appropriate symbolism and archetypal characters of the period.2 As Coursen suggests, “Archetypes [ . . . ] are dynamic and changing, reflecting different insights to different Zeitgeists.”3 In Shakespeare: The Two Traditions (1999), Coursen reviewed nine theatrical productions and eight films, most produced during the years 1994–​1996. He places each production or film in both its historical/​political context and in the play’s production and film history. His introduction locates recent theatrical practice within the context of postmodern theoretical approaches, but one distinctly limited by “coherence” or a controlling unity of symbol. Is this one of the reasons why Shakespeare’s plays have survived for four hundred years and countless attempts to modify them? Whether through genre, style, interpretation, political or social context, the text can be valuably re-​illuminated in performance; the archetypal characters and their interrelationships still signify to audiences, and attract the director, choreographer, composer, or artist to attempt a new approach. The narrative provides both coherence and choice.

Methods: Dance and Theater Analysis The particular orientation of this chapter is influenced by the author’s relationship with Northern Ballet as a trustee since 2005, advising on artistic matters and regularly facilitating choreographic workshops with the company. In the autumn of 2007, she was invited to conduct a series of research and development sessions on choreographic development using the specific narrative of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet with twelve dancers. This orientation provided a particular and personal author-​spectator-​analyst viewpoint on the creation and reception of the work. Influenced by selected interviews, questionnaires, program notes, websites, and critical reviews, and using qualitative research methods, specifically a grounded theory approach with triangulated interpretation, this chapter investigates the planning process, the perceived value of the R&D sessions, the choreographic approaches and creative decision-​making of David Nixon, and the dramaturgical guidance and scenographic discussions of this work. Strauss and Corbin’s definition of grounded theory is of data collection, analysis, and theory standing in reciprocal relationship with each other.4 One does not begin with a theory, and then prove it. Rather, one begins with an area of study, and what is relevant to that area is allowed to emerge, a form of triangulated interpretation “deductively derived from the study of the phenomenon it represents.”5 To recognize the analytical tools applied to this process, some typical approaches to dance

Hamlet, the Ballet    431 and theater analysis have been considered in order to provide contextual information for the reader. Analytical approaches to dance tend to draw upon the seminal theories of Rudolf Laban and on choreological perspectives that were further developed by others, such as Smith-​Autard (2010), Preston-​Dunlop (1998), and Preston-​Dunlop and Sanchez-​ Colberg (2003).6 A limited number of texts on semiology and dance or performance art are also applied to dance, including the work of Foster (1988), Preston-​Dunlop (1998), Fischer-​Lichte (2008), and Bannerman (2010).7 Essentially, these texts identify the elements of body movement (what action); quality of movement (how the body moves); spatial orientation (where the body or bodies move); and relationship (the interrelationship of dancers/​properties). These four elements provide the basic literacy of the genre. Syntax is created through the usual choreographic approaches to motif development, theme and variation, repetition and opposition, unity, contrast, juxtaposition, and the like. Texts on kinesthetic empathy include those by Foster (2011)8 and Reynolds and Reason (2012)9 where the experience of watching a dance is interrogated in terms of the kinesthetic sensations it puts forward and the empathetic connection perceived by viewers. Essentially, semiotic approaches to dance have inevitably drawn upon theater methods of analysis, including those of Pavis; Bennett; Counsell and Wolf; Aston and Savona; and Fortier.10 The conceptual tools for analyzing performance developed by the French theater theoretician Patrice Pavis provide particularly useful starting points for this discussion.11 In the Introduction to Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance and Film (2003), Pavis lays out the array of different perspectives on theater analysis, on the mapping of the various aspects of performance and their organization. Initially, Pavis underlines specifically the nature of the dramaturgical analyses of Roland Barthes and Bernard Dort: Up until the 1960s, this mode of description dominated all others through its breadth of vision, its precision, and the compromise it managed to find between meticulously detailed observation and an interpretative overview.12

In addition to in-​depth observation and interpretation, other modes are applied today in the academic sphere, including semiotic and phenomenological, sociocultural, and psycho-​physical approaches to performance analysis. The term “analysis” tends to suggest fragmentation or segmentation, but as Pavis argues, spectators of a performance need also to perceive the totality of the experience: One can imagine the spectator at the epicenter of a scenic earthquake, endowed with three kinds of vision: psychological, sociological and anthropological. These three perspectives are distinct but complementary, forming many concentric circles that widen individual and psychological perspectives endlessly, taking them toward a sociological vision and to an anthropology, where the stage work reconnects with the surrounding human reality of the spectator.13

432   Jo Butterworth These three perspectives can equally be applied in the case of Nixon’s Hamlet. The individual spectator may bring psychological or sociocultural perceptions to his or her observation and interpretation of the ballet. The psychology of the relationships in Hamlet may be complex, discretely constructed and related to the psyche of the spectator and his or her multiple identifications with characters. Contemporary audiences are not simply intellectuals, cerebral beings, but can perceive dance work without text as participants, as reactive and affective beings.14 A performance contains a wide range of stimulations, suggestions, elements that move us, and that can surround and transport us sensorially or viscerally. Foster (2011) defines choreographic empathy as “the construction and cultivation of a specific physicality whose kinesthetic experience guides our perception of and connection to what another is feeling.”15 Pavis accepts the difficulty of basing a theory of aesthetic experience on the spectator’s point of view. He asks if it is utopian to want to bring together the questions and parameters generated by textual theory, sociology, and socio-​semiotics around the spectator.16 In Hamlet the ballet, the sociology of the original play and the affect of change of location—​that is, dominance of Nazism, ideology, historical conflict—​can certainly make reference to and affect the spectator’s own world. The anthropological perspective—​developed by Pavis because of the growing number of intercultural performances, non-​Western and non-​text-​based work, often with sociocultural perspectives—​is plural in approach. In Hamlet, we juxtapose our personal understandings of the original play (historical) our own experiences of it (school, plays, films) the change of time (350 years) and location (Denmark to France)—​all of which affect the creation/​intention and the reception of the work. These methods, also inspired by phenomenology, intersect to allow us to reflect on the attributes of perception and the way in which the spectator experiences the work. They may equally contribute to the creative processes engaged in by the choreographer, dancers, and creative team. Throughout the 1980s, Pavis continued to develop principles of description, toward conveying the experience of a performance to someone who has not witnessed it. In doing so, he was cognizant of the fact that analysis is effected in accordance with the production of meaning intended for an external observer, as if it were a matter of having to convince them of the pertinence of one’s observations.17

In Looking at Dances: A Choreographic Perspective on Choreography (1998), the dance theoretician Valerie Preston-​Dunlop explains semiotics of dance as the study of the signs of a dance work, that is, “elements in the dance which embody thoughts and feelings in its medium.”18 In order to function, she argues, signs need to be recognizable. A personal thought/​feeling is given a sharable form by choreographer or dancers, one with a chance of being recognized by somebody else. Preston-​Dunlop discusses four semiotic levels—​occurring in the making process, in the medium, in the performance, and in the reception of the work. Dance is full of signs—​a gesture, a glance, a shoe, a color—​ and as long as we also know something of the context, that sign provides significance.

Hamlet, the Ballet    433 Essentially, then, the artist (in this case, the choreographer) must be cognizant of the possible traits in the work’s reception at the point of making, or at least at the point of his or her concept or intent. The choreographer must also be literate in the genre. Susan Leigh Foster offers a lucid definition of literacy in Reading Dancing (1988): Literacy in dance begins with seeing, hearing and feeling how the body moves. The reader of dances must learn to see and feel rhythm in movement, to comprehend the three-​dimensionality of the body, to sense its anatomical capabilities and its relation to gravity, to identify the gestures and shapes made by the body, and even to re-​ identify them when they are performed by different dancers. This reader must also notice changes in the tensile qualities of movement—​the dynamics and effort with which it is performed—​and be able to trace the path of dancers from one part of the performance area to another.19

Foster focuses here on the components of dance that can be felt, sensed, and “read,” which might influence the choreographer and dancers and speak to the audience. The creation of dance works in the past decades have certainly been influenced by these significant elements; as documented elsewhere,20 until the twentieth century, dance tended to be created instinctively by talented individuals following the structure of a narrative or a musical form. However, during the first half of the last century, theatrical dance expanded in numerous directions, demonstrating radical differences of technique, style, form, and content. This growth and experimentation brought with it more intellectual effort and analysis, demonstrating new theories of choreography and craftsmanship. Each dance work demonstrates its own vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and phrasing, though what interests one generation of choreographers soon becomes uninteresting to the next. As the discipline evolved, ideas about dance making were continually challenged; dances may have specific meaning, as determined through characterization or plot, or they may be more abstract or symbolic. Dance content might contain gestural movement or a specific, codified dance language or vocabulary. Should the stage space be used symmetrically, with a specific hierarchy of soloists and corps de ballet? Why not challenge old rules of design in favor of individual material being performed anywhere on stage, deliberately asymmetric, or with an ethos of peaceful coexistence between dance and soundscape? Clearly, by the twenty-​first century, specific choreographic crafting ideas differed, dependent upon genre. But typically, five general stages of choreographic process include the selection of theme or stimulus, initiating an appropriate form, generating dance vocabulary, developing the material using dynamic range, and manipulating it in space. Natural movement might be used as inspiration, but is often stylized in order to extend literal gesture, along a continuum from representational movement, which is easily recognized by audiences, to highly stylized, symbolic dance vocabulary that allows the audience members a greater degree of interpretive freedom.21 Even the use of narrative form and characterization may be manipulated, perhaps through deconstruction or the use of filmic techniques.

434   Jo Butterworth Consideration of construction and form in dance usually includes manipulation and orchestration of the material using contrasts or rhythmic shifts, or opposition, repetition, development, or other transitional ideas. Many professional choreographers today are involved in the choice of scenography, or are strongly influenced by the design of set, costume, or digital technology of their collaborators. The relationship of music and dance is also extremely significant in larger classical companies, and most employ a specialist composer who will create and orchestrate for a live ensemble. All these stages of the creative process are rarely apparent to audience members. We may know little of how a work was created, but go to the theater to experience the interaction of all the elements in live performance.

Polysemanticism Pavis speaks of space, time, and action as tangible elements of a performance “but the difficulty lies, not in describing them separately but in observing how they interact.”22 He tends to hyphenate the three terms together, as “Space-​time-​action,” which he imagines constitutes one body, drawing the rest of the performance to it, like a magnet [ . . . ] it is situated at the intersection between the concrete world of the stage (as materiality) and the fiction, imagined as a possible world.23

For Pavis, the three elements are interdependent, and in dance studies, too, we find it hard to create choreographic performance without amalgamating these elements. Preston-​Dunlop and Sanchez-​Colberg24 use the term “nexus” to denote a similar idea of polysemanticism; by “nexus” they meant the interweaving and signification of performer, movement, sound, and space—​the web of interrelationships between each strand of the dance medium that particularly interests the choreographer in a particular work. This is the normal juxtaposition of mise-​en-​scène, dancers, movement, music, and stage design in any ballet, which provides another form of nexus, another signification. In this ballet Hamlet, David Nixon weaves these strands together to create particular intentional meaning.

Northern Ballet Context Northern Ballet, based in Leeds, United Kingdom, has a legal object that specifies that the company should create, produce, and perform narrative classical ballets, and also advance education in the arts. The company website identifies that since 1987, the company has attracted audiences to dance through “theatrical, emotional and dramatic narrative dance theatre.”25 Recent examples of story ballets performed by the company

Hamlet, the Ballet    435 include Dracula (2005), The Nutcracker (2007), Hamlet (2008), Cleopatra (2011), The Great Gatsby (2013), 1984 (2015), and Jane Eyre (2016). David Nixon, the current artistic director, choreographed all but the last two, created by Jonathan Watkins and Cathy Marston, respectively. Full-​length story ballets pose myriad problems for the spectator. In what ways is it possible to create ballets based on literature? How can the word, the speech, be translated into stylistic movement, and how can that be translated or encoded in such ways that can communicate to audiences? Specifically, how does a choreographer treat a Shakespeare play, comedy or tragedy, a form that deals with explicit storytelling? Is there an expectation that audiences are already familiar with the text? Is the intention one of catharsis, entertainment, or education? As a dance scholar and practitioner preoccupied with how narratives can be recreated or manipulated in the distinct genres of dance, I continue to probe the question, what can dance do best? My answers hover—​and I use the word advisedly—​around the concepts of viscerality, the sensorial, and the experiential. And no doubt, the sensory stimulation of a narrative dance work is generated by the juxtaposition of space, time, and action by dancers in a specific context created by music and design. But how, specifically, does a ballet convey a context, a culture, and the relationship between characters? Judith Mackrell, The Guardian’s dance critic, writing on Veronica Paeper’s Cape Ballet production of Hamlet in June 1994, demonstrates skepticism about the possibility of dance ever doing justice to a narrative: It’s hard also for me to write fairly about Hamlet since I am personally waiting for the death of the full-​length story ballet. Since its apogee in the late 19th century the form seems hardly to have progressed. Apart from some gracefully assured examples by Ashton and Cranko, and some bold, mad experiments by MacMillan, modern examples of the two-​or three-​act ballet tend to look strained and dull (as bad as novelists trying to imitate Trollope).26

There are evident differences of opinion between educated London audiences and critics and typical ballet-​goers in the provinces, where old-​fashioned story ballets are still revered. Northern Ballet is reliant on Arts Council grants, local authority funding, and box office income. Its chief executive and board keep a careful eye on the latter; thus innovation, whether of theme, dance language, set, or music, is carefully considered. Nixon’s proposal of a new ballet based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet was accepted on educational grounds, as the play was listed on the Advanced English syllabus that year, and the artistic collaboration began. Nixon’s collaborators on the making of Hamlet as a ballet during 2007 and 2008 (including the principal dancers, who fully contributed to the development of the dance content) were as follows: • David Nixon (artistic director, choreographer) • Patricia Doyle (co-​director and dramaturg)

436   Jo Butterworth

• • • • • •

Philip Feeney (composer) Christopher Giles (designer, sets, and costumes) Tim Mitchell (lighting designer) Christopher Hinton-​Lewis (Hamlet) Georgina May (Ophelia) Patricia Hines/​Nathalie Leger (Gertrude) and Darren Goldsmith (Claudius).

David Nixon and his collaborators researched many productions to tell this too-​well-​ known story in a very specific way, as has occurred in theater productions of Hamlet too numerous to mention. Why remount the play without a new concept? Hamlet is the most popular play ever written, and has been the subject of more excited critical debate than any other work of literature.27 Essentially, the play is a family drama. Its themes include the nature of duty to family, friends, and those in power; betrayal and sexual morality; the powerlessness of individuals; and in each decade, society changes and the nature of these debates shifts. A challenging example of a new conceptualization is the Wooster Group production, originally created in 2006 for Festival Grec in Barcelona and performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013. Directed by Elizabeth Lecompte, the production juxtaposed old black-​and-​white footage of Richard Burton’s Hamlet of 1964, directed by John Gielgud, with an “avant-​ garde provocation” by an ensemble of eight actors—​a production that Dominic Cavendish termed “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable.”28 But the play continues to stimulate people from different cultures and artistic/​aesthetic positions, and many dance companies have tried. So how was the Northern Ballet’s classical version conceived?

Hamlet (2008) Preparation David Nixon had wanted to choreograph Hamlet since he took the lead role in Patrice Montagnon’s production for the Deutsche Oper Berlin. He worked first with Patricia Doyle, dramaturg and co-​director, to research and prepare a scenario loosely based on the play. Though they chose to retain the main characters from Shakespeare—​Claudius, Gertrude, Hamlet, Ophelia, and Laertes—​the ballet was set in Nazi-​occupied Paris in the 1940s, perhaps somewhat influenced by Irène Némirovsky’s novel Suite Française. The themes the directors chose to foreground were of regime change and dynastic issues, rather than revenge; the strong concept of “home”; resistance and collaboration (by some characters); hypocrisy (of others); mental illness and sexual dysfunction. The creative team, all of whom had worked together before, then discussed the draft scenario. Many influences colored their decision-​making, as Susannah Clapp, who saw twenty-​ four or more Hamlet theater productions in her eighteen years as critic of The Observer, reveals:

Hamlet, the Ballet    437 Under the influence of a determined director or a firebrand actor, the play can become—​with equal conviction—​a revenge tragedy, an Oedipal drama, a study of insanity, the portrait of a fatal flaw or of a molten genius.29

According to Nixon, Hamlet the ballet was never intended to be a revenge tragedy, an Oedipal drama, or a movement version of Shakespeare’s play—​it is not a direct translation of the text, nor a reconstruction of it. Essentially, the play stimulates the ballet; some of the characters exist, yet there is no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in physical form, no Gravedigger, no Mousetrap play. There is no castle, no Elsinore. But there is a sense of regime, strengthened by relocating the work in Nazi-​occupied France in the 1940s, and recasting Hamlet as a soldier returning from the front and Claudius as a Nazi collaborator; there is a strong concept of home despite the war, despite Gertrude’s remarriage; there is also a convincing sense of resistance to change by some characters, and of collaboration with the enemy by others. The dramaturg Patricia Doyle provides some context to the chosen intention: We showed such cruelty in Hamlet, which is in the story, and the dancers were inventive and absolutely committed to showing this aspect of recent history [ . . . ]. I went to Paris, for myself, to see the skulls underground, and the places commandeered by the Nazis for their Administrative Offices and the Gestapo Headquarters. And of course the railway station the Jews were sent from to the camps. And other reminders of that time, like plaques to commemorate dead students, assassinated by the Germans.30

She and David Nixon were justifiably proud of the production, in that it was what they envisaged, what they wanted to make organically, with everyone’s involvement. It seems that the directors, creative team, and dancers were all profoundly satisfied with the collaboration, though many critics were disappointingly unconvinced. As this chapter focuses on the consideration of the creative process of this work, in “making the steps” in the studio with choreographer and dancers, we try to understand the shift from literary masterpiece to a full-​length ballet, to unravel its various stages and question the nature of this process. Let us then start the analysis with the creation of the scenario, or mise-​en-​scène.

Mise-​en-​S cène Mise-​en-​scène is a term not merely to denote the transposition of a text from page to stage, but “rather as a stage production in which an author (the director) has had complete authority and authorisation to give form and meaning to the performance as a whole.”31 Here, the mise-​en-​scène becomes a working document, a series of options and organizing principles, an often messy and unwritten text detailing the

438   Jo Butterworth conscious and unconscious choices that the director and others have made during the rehearsal process. It is not yet concrete. But it may be written down in some form as a production notebook or statement of intention, in diagrams or sketches, in some form of notation or diary, or as a series of emails between collaborators. Pavis terms this the “metatext.”32 Nixon felt drawn to the theme of Hamlet for a number of reasons: having danced in a previous version, he felt some connection, and was looking for a Shakespeare work that had depth, intensity, and emotion. In his mind’s eye he could “see the dance in it” and has always felt that “dance thrives on emotion.”33 He and Doyle were averse to locating the work in the castle of Elsinore and looked for a twentieth-​century period to “host” the story; they felt that the play has “a strong fascist feel to it, control, dominance, a military feel—​our first inclination was Italy in Mussolini’s time.”34 In the preparatory stages of research, three concepts emerged for them—​the idea of one regime taking over another; notions of resistance and collaboration; and the concept of “home,” as felt by Hamlet as he returned from war. Taking these into consideration, their choice was to set the ballet within the confines of Nazi-​occupied Paris in the 1940s, where “emotions were already heightened.” Patricia Doyle then researched the chosen period and themes in some depth, providing “a fantastically detailed backdrop which immersed me in the essence of the play”35 and which helped Nixon to make choices for the scenario. Doyle and Nixon generally work collaboratively on this writing of an outline, which provides an initial structure for the ballet, though Nixon has the final word, as it is he who will then commence what he terms “the second writing,” the steps or dance language, devised with his principal dancers. It is important to point out here that the creation of this dance language does not merely involve selecting preexisting ballet vocabulary; dance steps and phrases develop more deeply from the emotional concepts and gestural language, which will communicate mood, meaning, and relationships. Nor should it be assumed that the choreographer imposes such material; rather, each principal dancer worked collaboratively with Nixon in the studio to create a first draft, then intensified and embodied the dance phrases in dialogue with the choreographer. What emerges in this process must be both visually and viscerally appropriate for both dancer and choreographer. The music of any ballet is another important factor in the audience’s experience. John Price Jones, Northern Ballet’s resident music director, recommended that Philip Feeney be approached to write the original music for Hamlet: If one is looking for a composer to create a musical score for a prepared scenario (as in the case of Hamlet) it is more than a little helpful if this composer has both an enthusiasm for the art form, and understands the structural and emotional needs of the ballet; to have narrative sections, emotional climaxes (usually in a pas de deux), colour, and variety but also unity of material.36

Feeney’s score begins with a minimal, three-​note musical motif, which set the mood for the “strange and tortured individual that is Hamlet.” Nixon remembers that Feeney’s first

Hamlet, the Ballet    439 developed draft “seemed so inspired, so on track, almost magical.”37 Feeney had been informed by discussions with the creative team, listening intently, asking direct questions about how each character was viewed by the choreographer, the lengths of scenes, or the treatment of the music. The treatment, or quality of feeling in a scene, may be very complex; for example, both Feeley and Nixon saw Hamlet as a “heavily flawed, troubled individual” and Gertrude as a mother who chose to marry Claudius, her husband’s brother, in order to protect her son. Thus, in Hamlet’s duet with his mother, depicting Hamlet’s anger, ferocity, and intensity as well as Gertrude’s fear of him and for him as his mother, Feeney made choices about the emotional content of the scene, the timbre, and the orchestration, which ably supported both individual characterization and interrelationships.38 Nixon’s method of progression demonstrates his understanding of the need for one or more specific motifs for each character. His normal approach is to begin to work initially on what he considers to be the major solos and pas de deux in the new ballet, the pillars of the structure, working closely with the dancers who have been chosen to perform the roles. This material is related to and imbued with the traits, mood, and situation of each character and their interrelationships with other characters. Rather than planning the movement language before he goes in to the studio, as is rather typical for many choreographers working in the narrative, classical tradition, Nixon prepares a “key idea” for each character. This approach can be discussed as a philosophy of practice, where Nixon assumes implicitly that both he and the dancer(s) will draw on both embodied knowledge of the classical lexicon, on character development, and on personal experience of affective behavior.

Scenario and Critical Review This section gives details of the scenario as printed in the Hamlet performance program (tour 2011), juxtaposed with critical descriptors from reviews of the first production, which premiered in 2008. It is intended to provide a backdrop to the more detailed discussion and analysis of the making of the ballet, which follows. From a personal perspective, I have always perceived this ballet essentially as an ensemble work, telling the story from Hamlet’s perspective, highlighting his shifting relationships with family (mother Gertrude, recently married to his father’s brother Claudius), friends (his love Ophelia, Laertes her brother, Polonius her father, and Horatio, Hamlet’s friend) and his stark memories of his father (the ghost of the play) in an earlier and happier time. The ballet utilizes a number of flashback scenes, denoted by a specific and recognizable form of lighting design from Tim Mitchell, which communicate to audiences Hamlet’s memories of his farewell to parents and friends, or his strong realization of how his father died; there are also strategic larger group scenes—​the railway station, a Nazi formal party, a Ball at the German Embassy—​scenes that are used to frame—​through juxtaposition of group to soloist—​Hamlet’s distress or Ophelia’s descent into madness.

440   Jo Butterworth The critic Judith Mackrell was not convinced of the efficacy of this relocation. As she wrote after the première in March 2008, Given NBT’s long commitment to producing story ballets, the concept of an updated Hamlet must have seemed very seductive. By relocating Shakespeare’s tragedy to German-​occupied Paris in 1940 [  .  .  .  ] director David Nixon has grounded this most wordy and speculative of plays in a solid and very danceable period drama.39

Mackrell then identifies the crux of the problem as she sees it: “In Shakespeare, Hamlet is driven by conflict, caught between his crippling over-​sensitivity to the corruption around him, and his determination to punish its perpetrators.”40 In the chosen context, however, she believes that the conflict does not make sense: There is no way that Hamlet’s reaction to the brutality around him—​a resistance fighter has her fingers bloodily ripped off, Ophelia is raped by passing SS officers—​can be judged excessive. Nor, with jackbooted Nazis tramping through every scene, can we believe for a moment that Hamlet has any power to damage Claudius.41

Thomas Atcheson’s review for The Culture Vulture (2011) starts from a refreshingly opposing point of view: The Northern Ballet’s interpretation of Hamlet gave me plenty of questions. How can you recreate a complex play with rich language without words? Can you recreate the great soliloquies? Will ballet deliver the narrative? [ . . . ] [yet] [ . . . ] I had another question. Why should Shakespeare have a monopoly on Hamlet? It existed before the Bard and borrows from other tales.42

Thus, we note two distinct approaches:  indeed, numerous reviews of ballets are written by well-​established dance critics, providing exceptionally clear opinions about how ballets should be created. Others support innovation, theatricality, nuance, and experiments of the form. Evaluation, as Banes43 opines, can emanate from many different perspectives. According to Northern Ballet program notes from 2008 and 2011, the ballet begins with Hamlet appearing alone at the Gare de l’Est, returning from the front and in mourning for his father (Figure 19.1). The scene is “helped in no small part by former company principal dancer Christopher Giles’ atmospheric sets, which swiftly and cleverly move us from one location to the next.”44 Here, the audience experiences the train, the steam of its engine, and the chaos of passengers being met by frantic family members. Hamlet, however, stands lost in thought, beset by vague memories of a Paris restaurant, where in 1939 he, Laertes, and Horatio prepared to join the army to fight the Germans, and where he remembered fond images of his father and mother dancing together.

Hamlet, the Ballet    441

Figure 19.1.  Act 1 of David Nixon’s Hamlet. Photo: © Dee Conway, courtesy Northern Ballet.

Hamlet is met by Polonius, now working with the Germans, who whisks him away to the official residence of the Head of the Police department, Hamlet’s home before the war. On arrival, Claudius and Gertrude are hosting a formal party; there is a Nazi presence everywhere. Hamlet observes Ophelia in discussion with Germans, and sees with distaste the demonstrative affection between his mother and Claudius in their new marriage: “For look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within’s two hours” (3.2.120–​121).45 He leaves the party, and the next scene, Hamlet and Ophelia’s reunion, begins with a sense of distrust but gradually recalls the tenderness they used to feel for each other: . . . the piece contains some of the most powerfully imagined choreography Nixon has created. Hamlet’s first duet with Ophelia, with its artless gestures of questioning and remembering, embodies a tenderly specific moment of reunion.46

But Ophelia is led away by Polonius and Laertes, and Hamlet is left with haunting images of what he has experienced this day; his mother with Claudius, Ophelia with a Nazi soldier, and a vision of a brutal beating, glimpsed at the Gare d’Est, of a man in an alley that might easily have been his father. Hamlet spends the night piecing his thoughts together; he imagines that since his father had refused to collaborate with the Germans or wear the swastika symbol, his father’s willing brother Claudius, who may even have signed his father’s death warrant, had replaced him. In Shakespeare’s words, “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life /​Now wears his crown” (1.5.39–​40).

442   Jo Butterworth As Hamlet’s state of mind deteriorates, he seeks out his mother, who is “honeying and making love /​Over the nasty sty” (3.4.83–​84) with Claudius. Neither of them is aware that Hamlet has been observing their lovemaking, nor understand his deep inner feelings of desperation. Claudius asserts his authority as Hamlet’s stepfather, and the last scene in the ballet’s Act 1 is intended as a graphic scene of violence where Polonius, Claudius, and the SS interrogate a member of the Resistance, and Hamlet is being shown what may happen to him if he does not comply. David Mead’s 2008 review opines, While the feel and mood of the piece are well portrayed, only a few moments really linger in the memory, notably the very graphic and realistic torture and murder of a French resistance worker, which truly made you want to turn away. 47

Act 2 of the ballet starts with a short scene of Hamlet and Horatio breaking into Claudius’s office to find and steal the death warrant of Hamlet’s father, signed by Claudius. The action from this point becomes more melodramatic, as Hamlet is now convinced that Claudius murdered his father, and has the evidence to prove it. The dining room scene demonstrates Hamlet’s offensive behavior to the family and guests; (Figure 19.2) this scene is one of the most complex in the ballet, as we view a number of characters and their relationships playing out in controlled gestures, eye contact, sympathetic gazes, and finally, withdrawal.

Figure 19.2.  Act 2 of David Nixon’s Hamlet. Photo: © Dee Conway, courtesy Northern Ballet.

Hamlet, the Ballet    443 Gertrude attempts to discipline her son, and Claudius leaves the room but directs Polonius to stay as a hidden spy. This mother-​son scene is highly emotive, denoting Hamlet’s anger, ferocity, and pain as he attempts to tell her of the warrant, and blame her: “A bloody deed—​almost as bad, good-​mother, /​As kill a king and marry with his brother” (3.4.27–​28). Gertrude is horrified, realizes his pain, and pulls him into her arms. Polonius dashes forward to retrieve the warrant and Hamlet stabs him, mistakenly thinking it is his uncle. Claudius returns, realizes what has happened, and signs Hamlet’s death warrant. Gertrude sinks to her knees in distress as she grasps that Hamlet has committed murder: “Oh Hamlet, through hast cleft my heart in twain!” (3.4.147). That night, Gertrude physically rejects Claudius’s lovemaking, (Figure 19.3) as if she responds

Figure 19.3.  Gertrude and Claudius in David Nixon’s Hamlet. Photo: © Dee Conway, courtesy Northern Ballet.

444   Jo Butterworth to Hamlet’s persuasion: “but go not to mine uncle’s bed. /​Assume a virtue if you have it not” (3.4.150–​151). Hamlet goes on the run from the SS through the streets of Paris, and is taken into hiding by Horatio before he can be captured. Ophelia, meanwhile, arrives late at a ball at the German Embassy, carrying a small posy of swastikas to hand out to guests: “I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died” (4.5.182–​184) (Figure 19.4). Her strange body language as she descends the staircase contrasts very clearly with the classical partner work of the couples dancing, in formal and symmetrical patterns (the only scene where the female dancers are on pointe). Ophelia then goes searching for Hamlet during curfew and is assaulted by Nazi soldiers in the street; this is the quite graphic rape that Mackrell describes in her review, mimetic rather than dancerly. Meanwhile, Gertrude makes a last desperate plea for her son’s life in a very expressive solo, and Hamlet’s death is heard only as a gunshot, offstage. Only Horatio is left to mourn the loss of Hamlet: “Now cracks a broken heart. Good night, sweet Prince, /​And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” (5.2.312–​313). Despite many reservations, Mead writes that “Nixon has succeeded in bringing much of the emotional and psychological impact of Shakespeare’s work to life”: Patricia Hines was a sophisticated Gertrude, whose heartrending final desperate pleas for Hamlet’s life come to nothing. Best of all though was Keiko Amemori’s delicate, fragile Ophelia, an innocent caught up in events that slowly drive her mad.

Figure 19.4.  Ophelia in David Nixon’s Hamlet. Photo: © Brian J. Slater, courtesy Northern Ballet.

Hamlet, the Ballet    445 Her long solo when she interrupts a formal ball at the German embassy to give out swastika flags was an incredibly moving and powerful piece of dance-​drama. Nixon cleverly highlights the formality of that ball amid all the chaos by putting his ladies in pointe shoes for the only time in the work.48

Atcheson concludes, Movement seems to coincide with emotion throughout, with flickers of dance interspersing the narrative. The horror builds with every new discovery whilst the memory of his father follows Hamlet like a ghost. These dream-​like sequences link to the theme of sleep in the play. How easy it is to sleep for eternity than face the horrors of the present. Yet Hamlet is frozen by fear and his own cowardice to take the final step or even to avenge his uncle.49

Here, Atcheson identifies Nixon’s clear intention of evoking emotional intensity through the movement of the body in relationship.

Materiality Pavis writes persuasively about the need to come to grips with a performance’s materiality and to move beyond the kind of sublimation that any use of signs represents. To experience the performance aesthetically, he counsels, one must allow oneself “to be ‘impressed’ by their materiality, and not seek to give them a meaning. This is something that children do quite naturally [ . . . ].”50 Thus, materiality is fully experienced by the spectator when she perceives its particular materials and forms, polysemantically, not when she reduces the performance to its component signs or specific meanings. In a ballet, therefore, when the choreographer wants audience members to be immersed in an aesthetic experience of the material event, he must be aware of the complementary experiences of constructing the work of art, in an objective way, with knowledge and awareness of the semiotic elements and choreographic components utilized, with and at the same time the subjective, experiential, or phenomenological feeling that the performance engenders. This process can be termed materiality in creation. For example, in December 2007, David Nixon planned to work specifically on the duet (pas de deux) between Hamlet and Gertrude from the dining room scene in Act 2. The majority of the company was touring in China, and he invited the author to work on the generation of new dance content with twelve dancers: principals Christopher Hinton-​ Lewis, Georgina May, and Pippa Moore, guest dancer Pattie Hines from Scottish Ballet, and eight younger dancers/​apprentices with the company. My role was to demonstrate how to create new dance content through improvisation, rather than arranging existing classical vocabulary. I concentrated on character, mood,

446   Jo Butterworth and interrelationship (dialogue) using approaches to making material that were not always related specifically to the play. The first day’s exercises were based on Laban-​based instruction—​on choices of body action, dynamic, spatial orientation; on simple compositional tools from Blom and Chaplin (1988) and Smith-​Autard (2010); and on motivational ideas from Humphrey (1997)—​for example, using specific hand gestures that invite or deny friendship or affection, developing them into upper body phrases, and then into whole body movements; using the fundamentals of motif development, taking those gestures into the legs and other body parts, adding turns, changes of level, traveling, elevation, and so on. This approach quickly generates material and facilitates the dancers’ freedom to create. This material can be imbued with differences of meaning, which the dancers attempted by drawing on their own feeling experiences. Later, all twelve dancers contributed to potential dance content for each main character in the Hamlet scenario, by considering what each might be thinking or feeling, what might be affecting him or her. The dancers were asked to create small phrases, or “nuggets” of material, and then to share these with each other. The dancers observed each other carefully and were then asked to extend their own phrases by adapting other specific character-​based movements seen in the studio from other dancers. After clarifying these phrases dynamically and spatially, the dancers then worked in pairs to develop a dialogue. These duets related to specific relationships such as Claudius and Gertrude; Hamlet and Ophelia; and Hamlet and Gertrude. Although I did not choose to use the play text specifically in these sessions, I was aware that every dancer had read the play and the scenario created by Doyle and Nixon, and had watched a number of film versions. Indeed, Kenneth Branagh’s version was voted the most stimulating. I noted the deep interest of these dancers in these processes—​their ability to improvise effectively and freely, their total commitment, their knowledge of the play. The Northern Ballet dancers have acquired great facility for developing character, improvising in a particular style, and working in a collaborative, devising mode; these qualities evolve as elements required in the creation of narrative works at Northern Ballet. During the second and third day of the workshop, I developed selected sections of this material in larger groups, while Nixon worked with two of the principal dancers on the Gertrude/​Hamlet argument of the dining room scene. We used large tables as props, and worked on dialogue in movement and interaction between characters, using the “nuggets” of material already developed, but also encouraging “action-​reaction” moments and further improvisation where necessary. I  tried to avoid any classical stylization. Serendipitously, all this was fortuitous, as Nixon had explored representational mimetic movement with his two dancers, seated at a table, and found this approach totally unsatisfactory. At the very least, although he felt that what I had produced with the two groups of dancers was too aggressive and too stylistically contemporary, he realized that to achieve his aim, the route might be to start somewhere else. This moment indicates the messiness of the creative process, the conscious changes in the mise-​en-​scène, and the development of materiality.

Hamlet, the Ballet    447 Nixon and I  have since engaged in long discussions about the problems of improvising and creating in what he considered to be a contemporary dance style (as he recognized in my workshops), and then he felt that these should be somehow translated into classical form—​why, he asked, have we trained in the classical style for so long if we do not then use it choreographically? However, in a recent interview during the Northern Ballet Choreographic Lab of July 2015, evidence emerged as to how his ideas have shifted: For the emotional, story telling parts, contemporary language can be more effective. It has to do with subject matter—​when you are working with ballet dancers, the shape, the line and the way dancers articulate the body is affected by the classical training—​the language is thus mediated by the training, to create a particular stylistic.51

In the same interview, I further interrogated David Nixon on the creation period, in an attempt to identify how, in his context, he achieves this blending of classical and contemporary styles to forward the narrative action, to create mood and achieve texture in his ballets. Since 2005 I have seen all of Nixon’s ballets, and witnessed in rehearsals his care and attention to emotional intensity, mood, feeling, and engagement. In addition to his close involvement in the writing of the scenario and the creation of the choreography, I note that he often chooses to design the set and costumes himself to ensure a synthesis of elements, reflecting the same polysemanticism, the desire to interweave the elements of music, dance, set, and costume with deep interconnectedness. Nixon’s method of progression demonstrates his understanding of the need for one or more specific motifs for each character. His normal approach is to begin to work initially on what he considers to be the major solos and pas de deux in the new ballet, the pillars of the structure, working closely with the dancers who have been chosen to perform the roles. This material is related to and imbued with the traits, mood, and situation of each character and their interrelationship. In the studio, with the text to hand, Nixon first works on the scenes that are important to him: I am not a linear choreographer. I need pillars, something concrete—​to be able to create a draft of the language of each character [ . . . ]. But the point of view has to evolve, subtly. For example, the first meeting of Ophelia and Hamlet is a synthesis between two idioms.52

In this pas de deux between Hamlet and Ophelia, Nixon created gestural motifs for each character, defining their evolving responses to each other as they reconnect after having been apart for many months. He worked closely with the text of the play, of the particular scene, to stimulate the generation of dance content, and even asked the dancers to speak lines as they moved. Dance cannot perhaps detail the subtlety of parts of the text, but it can certainly communicate feelings and emotions in an experiential way. The duet starts with two people recalling “a relationship, with so much inside to say.” The first motif, framing

448   Jo Butterworth each other’s faces with arm gestures, is described by Nixon to mean “the picture is the same, but do you still fit the frame?” The dance starts with these slight gestures and simple body movement in place, gradually extending spatially, so that as the duet develops this gestural material into larger, more symbolic dance language, traveling, and lifts, it spreads across and around the stage space as the music soars. The movement material developed in this duet is then introduced in earlier scenes when the lovers are alone, as Nixon feels strongly that if the movement material is not evolving, then the characters are not evolving. As the characterization advances, the dance motifs become more complex, extending in action, in time, and in space. The dance becomes tender, caring, more communicative. After a brief interruption and a trio of tense altercation with Laertes, who fears that Hamlet is dallying with his sister, the duet continues, more expressive, indulgent, abandoned, and free-​flowing. Though several male dancers in the company have danced the role of Hamlet, Nixon feels that Christopher Hinton-​Lewis’s contribution to the ballet, as first cast soloist, was immense: He was a great actor, embodying the character, and an excellent partner. He had the ability to take the psychological and physicalize it with a level of intensity. He controlled his feelings—​that is what created the tension. He really contributed to the making of the ballet—​all the men have danced it well, but I don’t think we would have found this Hamlet without Chris.53

In the interpretation of this role, these steps can be different for each principal dancer who plays Hamlet. Hinton-​Lewis (2015) spoke about the process as a “great journey [ . . . ]. It is about having that vulnerability [ . . . ] everyone is building their layers.”54 He believes that engaging the dancers as part of the process helps to develop the dance dialogue in such a way that members of the audience can go through the emotional roller coaster with the dancers: You have to know what the choreographer wants, his interpretation of the story, his clarification of the reading. With David’s experience, he can trust his dancers. But dancers have to do the homework—​you need to know what it is you are trying to portray, then if David wants to change or modify it, then he will.55

This depth and intensity of the preparation of each scene helps to embody the movement and enable it to communicate. This happened for Hinton-​Lewis when he and Steven Wheeler worked with Nixon on a male-​male duet (Steven was playing the role of Hamlet’s father, depicted in Hamlet’s memory), just prior to his meeting with Ophelia. The duet was choreographed with Wheeler as a shadow, always behind Hamlet, with bodily contact but never facing each other, and with no eye contact. It seems that Shakespeare’s text constantly provided direction and emotional intensity for the dancers and choreographer: Generally we worked six hours a day for six weeks—​the hardest part was working on the intensity of the character. I borrowed ideas from others (the text, films, plays,

Hamlet, the Ballet    449 etc.) and then manipulated them to suit the role as I saw it—​and then David would manipulate it further in line with the agreed concept [ . . . ]. I remember working on the complexity of the table scene—​six hours a day—​trying to stay in character even when I wasn’t supposed to be on stage.56

The roles of the two principal female characters could not be more contrasting; Gertrude’s first scenes are classical, with a definite style, the most balletic material in this ballet, chosen to express the power of the regime, elegant but crumbling. In Act 2, Gertrude’s recognition of her son’s emotional state, and toward the end of the ballet, her determination to plead with Claudius to save Hamlet’s life, are equally strongly characterized and clearly communicated, but stylistically they change to phrases of a much more contemporary and gestural texture. Ophelia first portrays love, even ecstasy, in her early pas de deux with Hamlet. Later in the ballet, a complete stylistic contrast, alternating closed awkwardness with wild, free-​flowing gestures, identifies her breakdown and apparent descent into madness. As mentioned, in the ballroom scene, which provides the backdrop to her dance of insanity, instead of handing out flowers, she hands out swastika flags. In Shakespeare’s script, Ophelia dies offstage by drowning, but in this version, she is graphically raped and murdered by Nazi soldiers. Literary and introspective Shakespeare’s Hamlet might have been, but it was also innovative and challenging, questioning the beliefs and assumptions upon which Elizabethan society was grounded. Equally, the materiality of Nixon’s ballet provides challenges for both ballet and contemporary audiences in the United Kingdom, an artistic endeavor without the fripperies and saccharine-​sweet stories of the classical canon. Though it may not have entirely fulfilled its intention, Hamlet the ballet certainly immersed its audience members in an aesthetic experience of the material event, and it did so through the interdisciplinary weaving of dramaturgy, music, design, lighting, and dance. The performance contained a wide range of stimulations, elements that moved the audience and initiated intense memories that surrounded and viscerally transported those who were willing to engage.

Notes 1. Several live performances were viewed at Leeds Grand Theatre, February 16–​23, 2008, and in addition, company videotapes of rehearsals and technical/​dress runs were made available to the author. 2. David Cressy, Education in Tudor and Stuart England (London:  Palgrave Macmillan, 1976); David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order:  Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 3. H. R. Coursen, Shakespeare:  The Two Traditions (Madison, NJ:  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 27. 4. Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin, Basics of Qualitative Research; Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques (London: Sage, 1990), 23.

450   Jo Butterworth 5. Strauss and Corbin, Qualitative Research, 23. 6. Jacqueline Smith-​Autard, Dance Composition:  A Practical Guide to Creative Success in Dance Making, 6th ed. (London: Methuen Drama, 2010); Valerie Preston-​Dunlop, Looking at Dances: A Choreographic Perspective on Choreography (London: Verve, 1998); Valerie Preston-​Dunlop and Ana Sanchez-​Colberg, Dance and the Performative: A Choreological Perspective (London: Verve, 2003). 7. Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing:  Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (Berkeley; Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1988); Preston-​Dunlop, Looking at Dances; Erika Fischer-​Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (Oxford; Abingdon: Routledge, 2008); Henrietta Bannerman, “Movement and Meaning: An Enquiry into the Signifying Properties of Martha Graham’s Diversion of Angels (1948) and Merce Cunningham’s Points in Space (1986),” Research in Dance Education 11, no. 1 (2010): 19–​33. 8. Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy:  Kinesthesia in Performance (London: Routledge, 2011). 9. Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, eds., Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2012). 10. Patrice Pavis, Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance and Film (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2003); Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London: Routledge, 1994); Colin Counsell and Laurie Wolf, eds, Performance Analysis: An Introductory Course Book (London: Routledge, 2001); Elaine Aston and George Savona, Theatre as a Sign System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance (London: Routledge, 1991); Mark Fortier, Theory/​Theatre, an Introduction, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2016). 11. Pavis, Analyzing Performance. 12. Pavis, Analyzing Performance, 7. 13. Pavis, Analyzing Performance, 227. 14. Pavis, Analyzing Performance, 229. 15. Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 2. 16. Pavis, Analyzing Performance, 251. 17. Pavis, Analyzing Performance, 32. 18. Preston-​Dunlop, Looking at Dances, 19. 19. Foster, Reading Dancing, 58. 20. Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildschut, eds, Contemporary Choreography:  A Critical Reader (London:  Routledge, 2009); Jo Butterworth, Dance Studies the Basics (London: Routledge, 2012). 21. Butterworth, Dance Studies the Basics, 36. 22. Pavis, Analyzing Performance, 148. 23. Pavis, Analyzing Performance, 148. 24. Preston-​Dunlop and Sanchez-​Colberg, Dance and the Performative,  42–​43. 25. “Northern Ballet—​The Full Story,” Northern Ballet, https://​northernballet.com/​northern-​ ballet-​full-​story, accessed February 15, 2017. 26. Judith Mackrell, “Coming In from the Cold: Judith Mackrell on the Cape Ballet’s Hamlet,” The Independent, July 1, 1994. 27. Jeff Wall and Lynn Wall, Hamlet: William Shakespeare (London: York Press, 2003). 28. Dominic Cavendish, “Edinburgh International Festival: Hamlet, Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, Review,” The Telegraph, August 11, 2013.

Hamlet, the Ballet    451 29. Susannah Clapp, “Genius, Coward  .  .  .  or Madman? Why Hamlet Gives Actors the Ultimate Test,” The Observer, August 9, 2015. 30. Patricia Doyle, personal interview, January 31, 2016. 31. Pavis, Analysing Performance, 2. 32. Pavis, Analysing Performance, 8. 33. David Nixon, personal interview, September 1, 2015. 34. Nixon, personal interview, September 1, 2015. 35. Nixon, personal interview, September 1, 2015. 36. John Price-​Jones, Northern Ballet program note in Hamlet (2011) program. 37. Nixon, personal interview, September 1, 2015. 38. Nixon, personal interview, September 1, 2015. 39. Judith Mackrell, “Dance Review:  Northern Ballet Theatre,” The Guardian, February 28, 2008. 40. Mackrell, “Dance Review.” 41. Mackrell, “Dance Review.” 42. Thomas Atcheson, “Review: Hamlet and the Movement of Emotion,” The Culture Vulture, September 10, 2011. 43. Sally Banes, “Writing Dance Criticism,” in Writing Dancing in the Age of Post-​Modernism (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 24–​43. 44. David Mead, “Northern Ballet Theatre, Hamlet,” BalletDance, February 21, 2008. 45. All references and quotations are from William Shakespeare, The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, 2nd ed., eds. S. Wells and G. Taylor (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005). 46. Mackrell, “Dance Review.” 47. Mead, “Northern Ballet Theatre, Hamlet.” 48. Mead, “Northern Ballet Theatre, Hamlet.” 49. Atcheson, “Review: Hamlet and the Movement of Emotion.” 50. Pavis, Analysing Performance, 19. 51. Nixon, personal interview, September 1, 2015. 52. Nixon, personal interview, September 1, 2015. 53. Nixon, personal interview, September 1, 2015. 54. Christopher Hinton-​Lewis, personal interview by Skype from New Zealand, September 13, 2015. 55. Hinton-​Lewis, personal interview. 56. Hinton-​Lewis, personal interview.

Bibliography Aston, Elaine, and George Savona. Theatre as a Sign System:  A Semiotics of Text and Performance. London: Routledge, 1991. Atcheson, Thomas. “Review:  Hamlet and the Movement of Emotion.” The Culture Vulture, September 10, 2011. https://​theculturevulture.co.uk/​blog/​reviews/​review-​hamlet-​and-​the-​ movement-​of-​emotion/​. Accessed January 12, 2015. Banes, Sally. “Writing Dance Criticism.” In Writing Dancing in the Age of Post-​Modernism, 24–​ 43. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

452   Jo Butterworth Bannerman, Henrietta. “Movement and Meaning: An Enquiry into the Signifying Properties of Martha Graham’s Diversion of Angels (1948) and Merce Cunningham’s Points in Space (1986).” Research in Dance Education 11, no. 1 (2010): 19–​33. Bennett, Susan. Theatre Audiences:  A Theory of Production and Reception. London: Routledge, 1994. Blom, Lynne A., and L. Tarin Chaplin. The Moment of Movement:  Dance Improvisation. London: Dance Books, 1988. Butterworth, Jo. Personal diary entry, December 12, 2007. Butterworth, Jo. Dance Studies the Basics. London: Routledge, 2012. Butterworth Jo, and Liesbeth Wildschut, eds. Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader. London: Routledge, 2009. Clapp, Susannah. “Genius, Coward . . . or Madman? Why Hamlet Gives Actors the Ultimate Test.” The Observer, August 9, 2015. Counsell, Colin, and Laurie Wolf, eds. Performance Analysis: An Introductory Course Book. London: Routledge, 2001. Cavendish, Dominic. “Edinburgh International Festival:  Hamlet, Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, Review.” The Telegraph, August 11, 2013. Coursen, H. R. Shakespeare:  The Two Traditions. Madison:  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. Cressy, David. Education in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1976. Cressy, David. Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Doyle, Patricia. Questionnaire Response and Follow-​up Emails, February 23, 24, and 28, 2015, and March 14, 2015. Fischer-​Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain. Oxford; Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. Fortier, Mark. Theory/​Theatre, an Introduction. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2016. Foster, Susan Leigh. Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. Foster, Susan Leigh. Choreographing Empathy:  Kinesthesia in Performance. London: Routledge, 2011. Gill, Roma, ed. Oxford School Shakespeare—​Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Hinton-​Lewis, Christopher. Personal interview with the author by Skype from New Zealand, September 13, 2015. Humphrey, Doris. The Art of Making Dances. 2nd ed. London: Dance Books, 1997. Mackrell, Judith. “Coming In from the Cold: Judith Mackrell on the Cape Ballet’s Hamlet.” The Independent, July 1, 1994. Mackrell, Judith. “Dance Review: Northern Ballet Theatre.” The Guardian, February 28, 2008. Mead, David. “Northern Ballet Theatre, Hamlet.” BalletDance, February 21, 2008. http://​ www.balletdance.com/​200804/​articles/​NBTHamlet20080221.html. Accessed September 8, 2015. Némirovsky, Irène. Suite Française. Translated by Sandra Smith. London: Vintage, 2007. Nixon, David. Personal interview with the author, Leeds, September 1, 2015. Northern Ballet. https://​northernballet.com. Accessed September 2, 2015. Pavis, Patrice. Analyzing Performance:  Theater, Dance and Film. Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan, 2003.

Hamlet, the Ballet    453 Preston-​Dunlop, Valerie. Looking at Dances:  A Choreographic Perspective on Choreography London: Verve, 1998. Preston-​ Dunlop, Valerie, and Ana Sanchez-​ Colberg. Dance and the Performative:  A Choreological Perspective. London: Verve, 2003. Price-​Jones, John. Northern Ballet program note in Hamlet (2011) program. Reynolds, Dee, and Matthew Reason, eds. Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2012. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Oxford Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Edited by S. Wells and G. Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Smith-​Autard, Jacqueline. Dance Composition: A Practical Guide to Creative Success in Dance Making. 6th ed. London: Methuen Drama, 2010. Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin. Basics of Qualitative Research; Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques. London: Sage, 1990. Wall, Jeff, and Lynn Wall. Hamlet: William Shakespeare. London: York Press, 2003.

Chapter 20

Hau nted by  Ham let Devising William Forsythe’s Sider Freya Vass-​R hee

As the lights dim on a stage, barren except for two door-​sized sheets of thick cardboard, two dancers walk to center stage. In the silence, the woman takes up the heavy boards and, grasping one in each hand, begins awkwardly and contemplatively pivoting them into different configurations, while the man lowers himself to the floor, sometimes obstructed or blocked by her boards as he inches tensely through tight, awkward positions (Figure 20.1). Though there is a strong sense of intention, their motivations are unclear. Another man in a balaclava has entered and watches them, maneuvering another cardboard sheet as if it were a measuring tool, a wall, a weapon. Absorbed in their individual tasks, the three suddenly freeze as one; after a long pause, they continue as a fourth performer, also wearing a balaclava, enters to stand in the upstage corner. Partially obscured by a cardboard bearing the words “IN DISARRAY,” he begins speaking in dejected dramatic tones; however, the distance and his deliberately garbled speech muffle his voice, making his words indecipherable. After a while, the man and woman walk off the stage in fading light, followed by their guard. The lights come back up, and a new scene commences as the full ensemble enters with cardboard sheets in their hands. After taking up places, they begin kicking them forward and slamming them against the floor in synchrony, creating a popcorn of rhythm as they cover the space in loose, sometimes counterpointed groupings. Choreographer William Forsythe does not directly indicate Hamlet as the source of his work Sider, which premiered in 2011 at Dresden’s Festspielhaus Hellerau. A brief, three-​sentence program note tells the audience only that the performers are engaging with the rhythms of Elizabethan theater speech, listening via headphones to the soundtrack of “a filmed version of a late 16th century tragedy.” Following Sider’s premiere, however, critic Wiebke Hüster reported that this soundtrack was in fact from a filmed production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.1 And indeed, indications of Hamlet are scattered throughout the production:  the text “IS, AND ISN’T” printed on another board, dancers wearing white ruffs and black velvet breeches over strangely colored practice

456   Freya Vass-Rhee

Figure  20.1.  Fabrice Mazliah, Roberta Mosca, and Ander Zabala (background) in Sider’s opening scene. Photo: Patrick Berger.

attire, and spoken texts that, though unclear, allow brief phrases of Shakespeare’s play to be occasionally understood. Sider, however, is not a production, or even a reproduction, of Hamlet:  the play’s narrative is absent, as are robustly identifiable characters. Instead, shades of Hamlet’s text, plot, characters, history, and dramaturgy perfuse the work as a subtle but defining substrate. This did not occur because Forsythe set out to make a work underpinned by Hamlet. Instead, Hamlet was found to be a nebulous presence accumulating and resonating within the ensemble’s devising process, waiting to be recognized by the choreographer and the Forsythe Company ensemble and, once welcomed, speaking to and through the work in a broad array of manners. As such, the process by which Sider was devised, as well the ways in which its connections to Hamlet are suffused within the choreography and communicated to the work’s audience, complicate the views espoused by Hutcheon that adaptations are “haunted at all times by their adapted texts.”2 This chapter, which reveals how Hamlet came to pervade Sider, results from my collaborative experience with the ensemble for this and other works as dramaturg and production assistant. Sider’s rehearsal and performance archive, captured in real time using The Forsythe Company’s Piecemaker software, served as an additional resource.3 The chapter is further informed by my thinking as a dance researcher on the free-​ranging and at times uncanny processes of devised dance dramaturgy, choreography, and mise en scène, in which constellations of ideas are brought into resonance with each other

Haunted by Hamlet   457 to render emergent, unpredictable possibilities of thematics, movement, and staging. In my analysis, the resulting performances imbricate audiences in ways that echo deep dramaturgies that Forsythe drew from Hamlet as the work’s whisper was given fuller voice in the studio and the play’s further potentialities were realized and elaborated. Choreographer William Forsythe is best known for refiguring classical ballet by re-​ visioning balletic principles and aesthetics as a catalyst for improvisational movement during his directorship of the Ballett Frankfurt (1984–​2004). In the second decade of this tenure, and later with his ensemble The Forsythe Company (2005–​2015), he continued extending the development of new choreographic approaches, in the process effacing connections to the visual aesthetics of classical ballet to the point of near indiscernibility.4 Throughout his career, Forsythe has continually derived new choreographic and dramaturgical potentials from ideas and practices inherent in classical ballet. This has involved ongoing and variegated processes of abstraction that amount to what Forsythe terms a “hierarchical collapse” of ballet’s forms, logic, and ideologies.5 In this abstraction—​a word that literally means to draw or pull away from—​ballet’s forms, constraints, and their relations are translated into essential fundamentals. These structures and codes of execution are then physically and conceptually interrogated through improvisational operations or modalities, resulting in permutations of traditional, established ballet practice, while simultaneously yielding rich ground for both improvised movement and emergent performance-​making strategies. Written texts have figured in Forsythe’s oeuvre in a variety of ways, with many works featuring verbatim or derived passages of classic or modern texts. These include Tang dynasty poems (From the Most Distant Time, 1978), texts by Yukio Mishima (The Loss of Small Detail, 1991), Emily Brontë and Charles Manson (Endless House, 1999), Edgar Allen Poe (7 to 10 Passages, 2000), Anne Carson (Kammer/​Kammer, 2000, also with a text by Douglas Martin, and Decreation, 2003), and the surrealist “Ventriloquist’s Opera,” written by Forsythe for director Peter Sellars (Theatrical Arsenal 2, 2009). In some works, such as Invisible Film (1995) and I don’t believe in outer space (2008), popular songs are also quoted. Forsythe has produced further texts for other works, like the “interrogation” dialogues in both LDC (1985) and Die Befragung des Robert Scott (1986), Artifact’s combinatoric monologues (1984), and the tale of a son’s “arrest” recounted in Three Atmospheric Studies (2005–​2006), while texts used in other works including Eidos:Telos (1995) and Yes we can’t (2008/​2010) were produced in collaboration with the ensemble.6 In the first decade of the 2000s, however, Forsythe increasingly focused on the choreographic affordances of the sounds of speech itself. The 2001 work Woolf Phrase has as its basis a set phrase of movement that follows the rhythms of a passage of text from Virginia Woolf ’s 1925 Mrs. Dalloway, with the phrase’s rhythm and speech melody serving as internal “music” that guides the execution of the movement.7 Such strategies are crucial to Forsythe’s diffused and radically open dramaturgies. Though a handful of Forsythe’s works have had concrete, clearly stated themes, Forsythe primarily desires not to “overdetermine the subject” in his works, preferring instead to construct for his audiences a postdramatic and performative dramaturgical space of potentials that “leaves room for interpretation.”8 This avoidance

458   Freya Vass-Rhee of overdetermining imagery is in keeping with Forsythe’s practice of abstraction when working with texts: eliding representational specifics in favor of what might be termed dramaturgical deconstruction, a process by which fundamental themes and ideas are discerned and re-​presented as danced dramaturgies within the overall composition of his works. However, as will be demonstrated in following, Forsythe does not enact a complete abstraction, but instead mines the seam between concrete representation and obscuration of source. The character of these works evokes an interrogative engagement with meaning, a search for clues indicated by postdramatic theater theoretician Hans-​Thies Lehmann: (P)lay, object and language point simultaneously in different directions of meaning and thus encourage a contemplation that is at once relaxed and rapid [ . . . ]. Here everything depends on not understanding immediately. Rather one’s perception has to remain open for connections, correspondences and clues at completely unexpected moments, perhaps casting what was said earlier in a different light.9

In the case of Forsythe’s abstracted textuality, these “different directions” become different levels of representation as texts are translated, obfuscated, or couched within unexpected relationships to other facets of the performance. The field of meaning, though radically open, thus bears markers that guide meaning-​making in a subtle, often ironic manner. For most of the Ballett Frankfurt and The Forsythe Company’s combined thirty-​ year history, Forsythe led what is rightly described as a collective of choreographer-​ dramaturgs. In a 2013 public talk with Elizabeth Lecompte (director of The Wooster Group), he noted how his choreographic practice had altered over time, moving toward less concrete structuring: You’re trying to adapt to what the performers offer—​so you’re trying to find a structure that accommodates [the dancers’] sense of time and composition. . . . People need to try stuff, they need to go like “I don’t feel like moving over there tonight, I feel like it needs to be here now and I’m with my partner” . . . which is important. It might not work, but I also have to allow that to happen in the situation, otherwise it’s going to be. . . . [The works are] living things, they’re alive, like we are.10

Forsythe has long thought of his role within the ensemble not purely as choreographer but as editor, a collaborator working in dialogue with the performers to shape material into its performance form. He also carries out the role of conductor in performance, through strategies of what he terms “live direction”: modulating and energizing individual performances by cueing set scripts of entrances, exits, and transitions based on real-​time decisions about the quality of the dancers’ performances and his perceptions of audiences’ attention. As such, the audience is imbricated in the choreographic relationship:

Haunted by Hamlet   459 It’s a discussion that has to continue in performance—​[The dancers are] going to have to discuss their ideas with you in public, under the stress of the performance—​ So I’m watching people be dialogic onstage, with each other on one hand but also—​ it’s a kind of weird triangulation, you have the people you’re working with onstage but you also have the audience. So how do you triangulate your energies . . . balance that demand between feeling an obligation [to the audience] on one hand, but then feeling the demands of the choreographic task, et cetera, et cetera?11

In the danced-​dialogic processes of Forsythe’s devising of performances, themes emerge that guide the development of works—​which sometimes change substantially over different seasons, or even from performance to performance. As Forsythe has described it, “It’s a bit like a sieve: in that process, what is essential remains, and what isn’t, falls through.”12 Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling note this only partially explicable characteristic of devising processes, commenting, Chance or randomness are combined with some unquantifiable, yet persistent, sense of “appropriateness.” Though the work does not yet exist and is unknown in advance of its making, there is nevertheless an assumption that there is a work to be “discovered” or “recognised.” The pattern fits when it fits the pattern. . . . One feels that something is “right” because it fits the model of the already known, already sought; the “found” gesture is only, in fact, seen—​or enacted—​because it is already learnt, is anticipated, or is being looked for.13

Reflecting this view, Forsythe’s devising processes are often deeply uncanny, as if the performance, rather than being crafted to reflect a vision, is instead at first a silent, not-​yet-​ known presence that slowly materializes within the studio, whispering in a voice at first too faint to be heard, but then becoming undeniable in its existence as a potentiality—​a quasi-​object waiting to be identified, fleshed out, and amplified. As Sigmund Freud has explained, [A]‌n uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on. It is this factor which contributes not a little to the uncanny effect attaching to magical practices.14

Such “magical” moments of unexpected materialization and resonance—​common to devising practices but always surprising and unsettling—​frequently evoke delighted but uneasy laughter in Forsythe’s rehearsals, often accompanied by the singing of the opening notes of the theme from the television show The Twilight Zone. The insistent nature of their appearance makes the way forward seem inevitable but not necessarily easily trustable. However, Forsythe, who has a career-​long history of following such impulses, actively seeks and welcomes the challenges of the uncanny, the unexpected visitation of the possible. In following, I describe the rehearsal processes that led to the

460   Freya Vass-Rhee “Twilight Zone” moment in which Forsythe and the ensemble realized that Hamlet was haunting Sider’s process.

“This Distracted Globe”: Finding Hamlet’s Ghost Rehearsals for the as yet unnamed 2011 Dresden premiere began on April 13, with several company members away on a tour. In a 2013 interview with Jennifer Homans, Forsythe reflected that the initial impulse for the working phase was the idea of inevitability: a new work had to be made by an unavoidable premiere date. According to Forsythe, he had also been reading Samuel Weber’s Return to Freud:  Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis at the time, focusing on Freud’s analysis of wishing. The first rehearsal at the Forsythe Company studio in Frankfurt began in a typically casual manner: encouraged by dancer Fabrice Mazliah, Forsythe began what he called a “pre-​ post-​chat”—​a humorous mock interview with the dancers, addressing the June 16 premiere as if it had already taken place six months earlier: Forsythe: How was this piece for you? Fabrice: It’s done now already. Forsythe: And how do you feel about the piece? Dancer: Oh, it’s amazing. Dancer: I really like it, we changed everything and at the end we had 2 days to make a whole piece. (laughter)

Aware that the discussion was being captured and notated using the ensemble’s Piecemaker software, Forsythe resorted to a familiar way of playing with language, translating words into polyglot, onomatopoeic “language objects.”15 Forsythe: A piece of pieces. Dancer: Pizza! Forsythe: Also known as pizzizza. . . . A slice of your life. . . . What do you remember of the piece? Roberta Mosca: I’ve blocked it out completely. (laughter) Forsythe: Amnesia. An amnesia epidemic . . . macadamnesiac ice cream. Oh, we can’t remember what it will be like. . . . What does Mosca mean [in Italian]? Roberta: It’s a fly. Forsythe: Sounds like Moscow. . . . A shitty flight to Moscow.

From this dialogue, which was also carried out with the touring group when they returned, emerged a list of over 100 neologisms like bohemian girl opera, grounded Luft, Fabricabun, and victory legumes. Returning to a mapping process he had used during

Haunted by Hamlet   461 the making of ALIE/​N A(C)TION in 1992,16 Forsythe, drawing a rudimentary three-​ dimensional “globe” on a piece of paper, then told the dancers to map the terms onto paper in any way that made sense to them. The dancers would then choreographically translate their maps into the full space of the room however they individually chose. This process continued for an entire week, over the course of which some dancers altered their map papers by cutting or tearing them, crumpling them to achieve a cloth-​ like texture, and in one instance even fashioning them into jewelry. The translations into the studio space, which were demonstrated at the end of the period, took on many varied forms as well. Roberta Mosca’s, for example, reflected the preceding dialogue, resulting in what she called “slice of life” and “piazzas”—​an imagined topography like a Sumerian village, with narrow alleyways through which she navigated to open spaces where she could move more freely. In discussions following this map work, Forsythe noted how it had served as a useful means to find an aesthetic that could not have been predetermined by either himself or the dancers. Describing the terms and maps as imaginative spaces that had resulted specifically from the ensemble’s joint playful thinking, he encouraged the dancers to explore the maps’ potentials for resonance and meaning: “So this world has come to you [ . . . ]. Each one of these maps is trying to talk to you—​and you have to figure out how it talks, let it talk to you in a different way. Let it talk to you.” It is here in the idea of the maps’ communication to the dancers that I first discern the as yet unrecognized outline of the ghost of old King Hamlet, who speaks to and is heard only by his son. This dramaturgy, which would develop retroactively, would also have a striking resonance with my dramaturgical research at this point. Without attempting to suggest a theme to Forsythe, I had begun by seeking to flesh out ideas about mapping text into space, first rereading Paul Harris’s essay on Michel Serres’s “topological” approach to philosophy, in which disparate ideas are brought into dialogue with each other through an elastic mapping of their interrelations in conceptual space.17 Within the essay, Harris discusses Serres’s analysis of Guy de Maupassant’s tale The Horla, in which a chilling presence haunts the narrator, ultimately driving him to madness. Forsythe requested material on The Horla from me; Hamlet, however, was still nowhere in sight. The following week saw a shift to a different register of physical work. A  stack of twenty or so large sheets of thick, stiff cardboard, a material that Forsythe had used in a previous installation piece, had arrived in the studio. The ensemble began working with the seven-​foot-​tall “boards,” exploring various ways in which they could be held, moved, and organized, and how they influenced movement of the body. Boards were slid, spun, cantilevered, offered to and taken from others, balanced on body surfaces, set into relationships with parts of others’ bodies, and built into formations and allowed to fall, while similar mechanics were also investigated without the boards. Forsythe noted how working with the cardboards highlighted distinct and varied “ways of maintaining a behavior” and encouraged further exploration of the actions, effort, and tempi afforded by the boards’ size, shape, weight, and substance. This investigation would continue throughout the production period, including Forsythe’s facilitation of improvisational modalities (movement tasks based on associative coordination of body parts

462   Freya Vass-Rhee or rules governing choices of action), which were permitted to shift and change in fluid manners, rather than being rigidly defined. In dialogues with the ensemble, Forsythe emphasized attention, a key theme in his career-​long investigation of choreographic potentials, discussing the interplay between tasks, action, observation, and reaction that underpins the situationality of improvised ensemble performance. He also began offering increasingly oblique instructions, moving toward less logical ideas in order to facilitate less rational modes of improvising together, such as asking two dancers to extrapolate the “future” of another dancer’s movement within their own map structures, and a third dancer to take a “family” role in the improvisation. This initial period of development was interrupted by two weeks of rehearsals and performance of a different work in Antwerp. During the tour, Forsythe took part in a public talk with Elizabeth Lecompte, director of The Wooster Group, which was performing simultaneously at the deSingel International Arts Campus.18 During the talk, longtime friends Forsythe and Lecompte noted parallels in ways they have worked over the years—​their shared interests in the rhythms of spoken text, usage of in-​ear speaker feeds and visual projections—​and joking about ideas “stolen” from each others’ productions. In retrospect, it is noteworthy that Lecompte’s 2007 Hamlet “channels the ghost” of the 1964 film version directed by John Gielgud, with the ensemble re-​performing sections of the work surrounded by projected footage. However, according to Forsythe, he was unaware of this coincidence.19 The week following the tour, the ensemble continued exploring physical work with the boards and developing modalities in small and larger groups. In response to one of the dancers trying to jazz dance while carrying a board, Forsythe, in dialogue with the dancers, generated a nonsensical text about selling “jazz boards” and asked them to stamp its rhythm out with their feet in the manner he recalled having seen in performances directed by Einar Schleef in the late 1980s20 (“. . . You-​could-​be-​the-​ on-​ly-​one-​to-​own-​one-​and-​it’s-​not-​so-​com-​pa-​lilly-​cated—​to-​own-​one—​unliiike a headbag, orrr a hoo-​ray gun, orrr a faaab-​blimpinist. Oh silly we—​we meant to say flah flah flah flah. Solo Josh . . .”). Later, continuing to pursue alternate ways to engage with the rhythms of text, he asked the dancers to “fall into literature,” demonstrating how to fit the rhythms of a passage from his current reading (Albert North Whitehead) to his own stumbling. Asked to supply some texts for the dancers, I gathered a few of Forsythe’s perennial favorites and other potentially useful books from my office—​Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, a collection of Beckett’s plays, and a book of Monty Python’s Flying Circus scripts. The latter contained a Hamlet-​based skit, which caught Forsythe’s eye. Shortly after this work began, he jokingly quipped to the dancers “Oh, we should just do Hamlet. Should we do Hamlet? We have three weeks. . . .” After laughter all around, and as dancers then stumbled through lines from Hamlet, Forsythe quietly mulled over the idea: “I’m ready for a serious rewrite of Hamlet. I’m not joking, I think we could actually . . . cause a stir. . . .” Noting the lack of detailed knowledge of the play and language barriers among the multinational troupe, Forsythe carried the humor forward, suggesting in-​ear feeds: “Wait, I have Elizabeth Lecompte on my earpiece. . . . Elizabeth Lecompte is trying to talk to me . . . ”

Haunted by Hamlet   463 With five weeks remaining before the premiere, there was no reason to think that Forsythe’s lighthearted engagement with Hamlet would become productive, given his tendency to traject through and aggregate dramaturgical impulses. This moment in the process, though, was in fact the event that would catalyze resonances with the devising work the ensemble had carried out up to this point, offering up potentials for abstracting danced dramaturgies from Hamlet’s history, plot, and dramaturgy. Additionally, working with reference to Hamlet proffered a means of tapping into the commodity value of Shakespeare, which, as Fischlin and Fortier note, “comes of a presence that graces, by association, the cultural artifacts produced in Shakespeare’s wake.”21 Returning a moment later to a more serious register, Forsythe commented, “It’d be great because we need rep for London. . . . It’d be fierce.” From this point forward, the devising process shifted, becoming one of invitation and invocation. As the ensemble worked, extracting, abstracting, amalgamating, and translating physical modalities and objects that had been devised but which as yet had had no grounding, except as experimental modes of generating novel movement, Hamlet was both included in the rehearsal process and found to be already resident there. In the end, both Hamlet and the initial devisings would be sifted together, with productive linkages remaining and non-​essentials falling through the sieve of the devising process. In the following rehearsal weeks, Forsythe began to assign dancers provisional characters while working with the boards in various ways. Several of the experiments from this period provided the roots of scenes in the final piece. In one instance, Forsythe had Riley Watts press Katja Cheraneva under a board, “resuscitating” her as she read one of Ophelia’s texts. In Sider, however, it was Watts, who came to be identified with Hamlet, who was violently trapped under a board by a second designated Hamlet, Fabrice Mazliah. The character of Ophelia, in turn, informed the performances of at least two women:  Roberta Mosca, moving obliviously through her “Sumerian village” with Mazliah present and in several other group scenes,22 and Jone San Martin, who in one scene billowed among boards scattered across the stage, gingerly matching the edges of her feet to their edges and angles while tracked by a darkly clad figure (Amancio Gonzales) pushing the boards into new obstructing configurations.23 Equally notable, though, are the highly representational modes tried in rehearsal but excluded from performance, for instance an “Ophelia” being carried atop a board as if on a funeral bier. The resulting work instead shies away almost entirely from overt Hamletian imagery in favor of what Lehmann, describing stylistic traits of postdramatic theater, delineates as a “retreat of synthesis”:24 signs of Hamlet are only vaguely present in Sider, fading in and out of its choreography and mise en scène, their connections and meanings obscured by Sider’s lack of narrative trajectory, absence of clearly definable characters, and the indistinctness of references to aspects of Shakespeare’s play. This avoidance was facilitated by the abstractness of Sider’s initial impetuses—​the dancers’ “map” choreographies, the plain brown cardboard sheets—​as well as those of the three key facets that were drawn from Hamlet to inform Sider’s resonant dramaturgical architecture, which I describe in the following sections.

464   Freya Vass-Rhee

Trippingly on the Tongue: Sider’s Rhythms The overarching physical dramaturgy Forsythe drew from the resonance between Hamlet and the ensemble’s devising processes transcends the individual play to apply more generally to the dramatic cadences of Elizabethan dramatic speech. In interviews, as well as in Sider’s program text, Forsythe stresses the common temporality of the rhythmic development of both Shakespearean speech and early classical ballet. Over the middle and late periods of his oeuvre, Shakespeare’s stricter early blank verse resolves into an increasingly freer prose through variances in iambic pentameter (inversion, feminine endings) and the inclusion of longer, more complex sentences (hypotaxis) extending beyond the single line or beginning or ending mid-​line (enjambment).25 Around this time, first under the patronage of Catherine de’ Medici and King Louis XIII and later under Louis XIV, ballet was simultaneously developing into an art of complex, rhythmically poetic physical counterpoint across the body of the dancer and in relation to the accompanying music. Forsythe’s vocal and physical engagement with Shakespearean and balletic rhythms in Sider reflects a further trait of postdramatic theater delineated by Lehmann:  “musicalization” of performance,26 in which the qualities of speech and sound are enhanced and emphasized through various means such as polyglossia (the inclusion of different languages), nonstandard speech registers and extended vocal techniques, language-​like utterances, nonlinguistic vocal gestures, and the production of complex soundscores through electronic manipulation and superimposition of components. Shifts in the soundscape across the time spans of works contribute to the emergence of an “independent auditory semiotics,”27 which, in the case of dance performance, divides both performer and audience attention across the two modes of perception, while simultaneously opening a wide range of new visuo-​sonic strategies to the choreographer, who in the process becomes as much a “composer” as a dancemaker. The comprehensibility of vocal renderings of texts from Hamlet varies across Sider’s scenes. Later in the initial rehearsal working with Hamlet’s text, described earlier, Forsythe deliberately drew on the dancers’ lack of familiarity with Hamlet as well as the variety of mother tongues among the ensemble’s members. He asked non-​native English speakers to try to produce lines of the text after only glancing at them, made text less intelligible by having dancers jostled on boards while speaking, and encouraged performer David Kern to produce a garbled, unclear rendition of the Ghost’s recounting of his murder at Claudius’s hand. Though Forsythe continued to float the prospect of having Hamlet’s text on in-​ear speakers, the actual decision to play sections of a filmed version of Hamlet through in-​ears was not made until two and a half weeks later, two weeks prior to the premiere and after experimentation had yielded several different ways of vocalizing. After Forsythe chose Tony Richardson’s version (which also stars Nicol Williamson as Hamlet, Judy Parfitt as Queen Gertrude, and Anthony Hopkins as Claudius) for its vibrant speech and action, a series of sonically variant and rhythmically productive scenes were selected from the film.28 Movement modalities that had been developed in rehearsal were set to these relatively

Haunted by Hamlet   465 short scene sections, looping the audio track when necessary to provide adequate length.29 Though half of the ensemble wears balaclavas in performance, no effort is made to completely mask the wires of the in-​ear speakers or the bodypacks the dancers wear, and the Hamlet soundtrack is only obliquely mentioned in Sider’s brief program text.30 In most of Sider’s scenes that include spoken text, the performers garble, mutter, or whisper renderings of Hamlet’s lines. However, the performers’ speech retains rhythmic fidelity to the video rendition. In the opening and closing scenes, for example, Kern, who performs five different characters over the course of the work, stands far upstage, unintelligibly but emphatically muttering sections of Hamlet’s soliloquies, distorting diction and exaggerating intonation (Figure 20.2). Stage miking is carefully adjusted to enable his speech to just reach the auditorium but

Figure 20.2.  David Kern unintelligibly recites a section of Hamlet’s Act 1, Scene 2, soliloquy in Sider. Photo: Laurent Paillier.

466   Freya Vass-Rhee not to be clearly understandable, prompting the audience to crane its ears and attend closely to his voice. In a later scene, Kern mimes the digging of the grave and Hamlet’s contemplation of Yorick’s skull as he shifts from one side of a board to another, switching inflections and timbres to play both Hamlet and the first Gravedigger (Act 5, Scene 1). In other scenes, however, text is delivered more distinctly, signaling that the work in question might indeed be Hamlet and sustaining a tantalizing oscillation of comprehensibility across the work. In one of two early scenes, Laertes’ line, “My dread lord, Your leave and favour to return to France,” is garbled relatively clearly by different performers in three repetitions of its Act 1, Scene 2, section.31 A few scenes later, Kern prances back and forth across the stage, whirling a board and repeating a lively section of Polonius and Hamlet’s dialogue from Act 2, Scene 2 (“My lord, I have news to tell you [ . . . ]. The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-​comical, historical-​ pastoral, tragical-​historical . . .”).32 Hamlet’s text is also used to underpin spoken improvisation in a comical scene that occurs late in the work. During a rehearsal, recalling that Hamlet was a student, Forsythe had asked David Kern, Riley Watts, and Ander Zabala to recite simple equations like “One plus one is two” while holding boards and kicking them forward in the rhythm of their speech. Eventually, the dancers began including algebraic formulations—​1A, 2B, and so forth—​and then, with Forsythe’s encouragement, playing on the obvious pun potentials of the soliloquy lines “To be or not to be” and “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt.” In performance, these three “mathematicians” wear balaclavas, black velvet breeches, and floppy plastic neck ruffs as they kick their way through a pompous improvised argument of calculative logic: “2B. . . . No, not 2 but 4, 2 plus 2 is 4. . . . Therefore, 4 is before B? . . . Maybe, but 2 B is not 2 C. . . . Oh, I see, but 2 comes before 4. . . . What was the question?” Their spoken lines and coordinated kicks counterpoint and compete with the nonsensical “jazz boards” text intoned and stamped out by the remaining dancers, who sweep slowly in a line around the stage like a human clock arm. Focusing on the rhythmic and prosodic “music” of Shakespearean speech also afforded Forsythe a new means to extend his investigation of spoken text as a form of soundscore, as described earlier in this chapter. However, whereas the text’s rhythm and prosody guided the execution of Woolf Phrase’s set fundamental dance phrase and its improvised variations, Sider explored a far wider variety of choreomusical relationships. As noted, at no time during the slightly over one-​hour-​long piece33 does the audience hear the video soundtrack. Instead, in addition to the speaking dancers and their footfall, they hear Thom Willems’ score—​a tense, irregular bass ostinato pulse for most of Sider’s first half, followed by scenes underscored by heavy synthesized crescendi, quiet evocative atmospheres, or no accompaniment. In Sider’s scenes that do include in-​ear soundscore feed, the synchrony of the dancers’ actions indicates the soundtrack in several ways. In Sider’s second scene, for example, the ensemble silently takes up positions onstage with boards and then begins kicking them forward through the stage space in tight synchrony, with the sounds

Haunted by Hamlet   467 of their feet and the punctuating slams of the boards against the floor (which mark the ends of sentences) closely echoing Williamson and Parfitt’s accelerating argument as Hamlet berates his mother following Polonius’s stabbing (3.4). The dialogue heard by the dancers is rendered to the audience as percussive blows of coordinated pattern and emphasis. In the penultimate section of Sider, the ensemble stands behind their boards facing the audience, “playing” the rhythm of the same video scene on the boards’ upper edges with their hands as if the boards were keyed instruments before segueing into the opening of Hamlet’s Act 3, Scene 1, soliloquy, which they eventually also garble in a quiet murmur. In other scenes, however, rather than echoing the text on their in-​ear speakers, duets and trios of dancers move in counterpoint to it, each creating an additional visuo-​sonic “voice” through their choices of timing, movement scale, and dynamics.34 This counterpointed engagement with sound not only contrasts the organization of the unison scenes, but also conflates attempts to discern structure: the variance between dancers’ individual interpretations of the counterpoint produces sequences that are sometimes distinct but sometimes rhythmically reflective of each other. In one such scene, Fabrice Mazliah is shadowed by two “watchmen” (Ander Zabala and Brigel Gjoka) who might be construed as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,35 as he counterpoints and occasionally stumbles to the sound of a section of Claudius’s speech in Act 1, Scene 2. Such scenes could easily be perceived as freely improvised, a view that would be supported by their lack of relation to Willems’s unevenly pulsing score (which the dancers are in fact unable to hear when the in-​ear feed is being played). However, the in-​ear guidance is made clear in these contrapuntal scenes by Forsythe’s added strategy of giving spoken impromptu directives himself to the dancers via microphone, creating sudden unison freezes or turns of the head, phased restarts, unison claps, and set transitions between modes of movement, such as “formal” (court-​balletic) feet and arms in a men’s trio (Figure 20.3). The audience is not informed of this strategy; however, those sitting near enough to the technical desk were likely to hear Forsythe quietly speaking into his microphone.36 Just as rhythm pervades the dancers’ physical and vocal performance, Sider’s mise en scène is also rhythmic along several lines. The work is composed in “sonata” form,37 bracketed at its beginning and end by a repeated scene with the Hamlet-​Ophelia pairing of Mazliah and Mosca, respectively followed or preceded by a percussive rhythmic ensemble scene (the board-​kicking scene and the boards-​as-​instruments scene, described in the preceding). Two other large group scenes punctuate a range of scenes with smaller casts, and there is an interplay of scenes with and without speaking. Finally, the large tubular light object (created by artist Spencer Finch for Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies) hanging above the stage pulses throughout the work’s first half, obscuring the dancers over and over again as it repeatedly fades to black and snaps back on. Taken together, the changing rhythms of dancing, vocalizations, soundscape, and lighting collide within Sider’s scenes, producing patternings of sight and sound that offer coherence and clarity for only brief, unanticipated moments.

468   Freya Vass-Rhee

Figure 20.3.  Josh Johnson, Cyril Baldy and Brigel Gjoka producing improvised “formal” feet and arms in Sider. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.

Hamlet the Obscure Given the dimensions of the boards, obscuration had been in play as an improvisational strategy since the first rehearsals with them. In one complex task that would become key to the two large group scenes in Sider, the group improvised with unshared and fluid rule systems within which the boards could be relationally positioned and moved in the space, used to obscure others from one’s own view or that of the audience, or both. Forsythe was very pleased with the attention and presence manifested in this modality, noting, The only thing that saves it from being utter total crap is that I see you looking for someone else. . . . What makes it really interesting [is] if we see you going “Oh I can do this, I can’t do that” and you trying to strategize with the rules—​“Oh I have to wait, I have to slow down”—​and your thinking processes—​that’s interesting because we see you going through something. The boards aren’t interesting at all—​you are interesting, going through those processes . . . . As soon as you’re focusing, you come into focus, but then the building [of formations with the boards] comes into focus [as well] because it obscures you sometimes. So you’re obscured and there, and obscured and there, and that way I thought there was a real dilation in the presences. . . . You

Haunted by Hamlet   469 develop the rule, you’ve made a decision and you’re going to have to live with it, and you’re in the situation that you’ve created by making the rules. And that gives a different form of awareness than had it been a really complex choreography. . . . There’s a complexity that no one could choreograph; no one could have traditionally choreographed that situation.

Forsythe linked Hamlet’s dramaturgy to this modality through reference to Hamlet’s strategizing and obscuring of his motivations. Seeking to confirm the Ghost’s existence and his belief that Claudius had killed his father, and suspicious that Claudius may be seeking to have him killed as well, Hamlet opts to “put an antic disposition on” in order to deflect attention, as he seeks to establish who among the court are friends and who are foes, also staging the play-​within-​the-​play with the aim of drawing an implicating response from Claudius. In Sider’s performance of the rule-​system-​based scene described earlier, Forsythe shapes the improvisation in real time via microphone, giving directives such as “Find a friend, find an enemy. . . . Keep strategizing, change your rules, keep trying to guess what everyone else is going to do but don’t let them know what you are going to do.” There is a deep linkage here to the practice of ensemble improvisation, which thrives on what Forsythe, citing the poet sage Lao-​Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, refers to as the “don’t know mind”—​a valuable state of uncertainty and response, which, in improvisation, is maintained through the generation of the unknown, the obscuration of intentions, the surprising action. Inherently subversive, the offering of the unknown and unforseeable to one’s co-​performers heightens attention and injects energy, allowing them, and in turn one’s own responding and responsive self, to be “taken by surprise.”38 As with rhythm, Sider’s mise en scène and scenic arc are also permeated with instances of obscurity. Scenes follow one after another with no clear throughline, while the Hamlet-​derived and more abstract characterizations shift among the balaclava-​ hooded performers, who project a stealthy, calculating mien. The boards are kicked, maneuvered, played as instruments, strewn about the stage, and built into formations, becoming a field of ice floes, a skirt, a castle, a rampart. Non sequitur actions occur at random moments, such as abrupt staggering entrances and exits of performers, or Mazliah sitting down to re-​tie his shoe in the middle of a duet. The “jazz board” text, spoken loudly by almost the full ensemble, cannot be clearly heard by the audience over the din of the blustering “mathematicians” and Willems’s oddly blithe scoring. Further, in one striking ensemble scene, Forsythe extends the dramaturgy of obscuration to include himself as live director and co-​performer. In this scene, as the ensemble again interacts with boards, Forsythe “plays Hamlet” himself by giving the ensemble a new and maddeningly high-​speed, confusing stream of absurd, contrary, and even impossible directives over the microphone for each performance. Examples include asking them to move northward (in an unfamiliar theater), to lie down while jumping, to form a sandwich of boards with all of their shoes inside, or telling them to leave the stage but then immediately demanding that they come back, then leave again, and so on.39 As he points out, this also puts the entire ensemble into the role of Hamlet: hearing voices and not knowing the right thing to do.

470   Freya Vass-Rhee

Abstracted Analogies The duplicity of Hamlet’s characters’ obscuring behavior, Forsythe noted, is paralleled by linguistic structures of analogy found throughout Shakespeare’s play. In a further resonance, Forsythe viewed these as linking to an idea that has long been central to his approach to ballet. In his CD-​ROM, Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytic Dance Eye, Forsythe describes the principle of kinetic isometry as “ways of imagining the geometric relationships between different parts of the body as they move.”40 In other words, kinetic isometries describe parallels in the form, trajectory, or dynamics of body parts, such as the upward sweep of a curved arm and leg in the ballet step attitude piqué. In Forsythe’s improvisational aesthetic, this principle opens each danced moment to manifold ana-​logical options—​a field of possibility and choice in which, essentially, the “don’t know mind” thinks through the body. This thought underpinned a further deepening and resonant interweaving of Sider’s danced dramaturgies late in the rehearsal process. Three weeks prior to the premiere, Forsythe noted that Hamlet’s Act 2, Scene 2 soliloquy, in addition to being a meta-​ theatrical commentary, contains this passage: What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? What would he do, Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have?

The analogous relationships couched in these lines—​of the Player to Hecuba and of Hamlet to the Player—​though seemingly obvious at face value, are not as straightforward as they appear.41 Nonetheless, they offered a productive textual rhythm and dramaturgical impulse to Forsythe, who reminded the dancers of an analogical improvisational strategy used earlier by the Ballett Frankfurt ensemble, known as “where it is/​where it was.” He drew a further parallel between Hamlet—​a revenge play—​and the first section of his Three Atmospheric Studies, recalling scenes in which the dancers, enacting a mother’s fragmented memory of a wartime event, worked with a “model of retribution” in the form of a partnering task referred to as “you do to me, I do to you.” He pointed out the similarities of both of these improvisational modes to the analogic oppositions in the most famous of lines from Hamlet, “To be or not to be,” reducing Hamlet’s expressed dilemma to the formulation “is, and isn’t” and noting that this statement also reflects the ghostly status of Hamlet’s father. Similar textual parallels developed in a subsequent rehearsal were used as ten projections that appeared at seemingly random moments on the black back wall during Sider. These included she is to them as they are to us, he is to that as this is to him, these are to him as they are to us, what are these to them? and—​at Sider’s close—​they were, and they weren’t. As Forsythe explained in a talk with Jennifer Homans, these texts also function as a meta-​theatrical device, imbricating the audience as participants in the performance event:

Haunted by Hamlet   471 Everybody’s busy interpreting—​So I thought what if I said, in a kind of very very abstracted way . . . I am to you as you are to her—​What does that mean? Like that, and so it brings up a question as opposed to a subject. . . . You’re asking what is my relationship to this person onstage? . . . I try to triangulate the audience into the Spiel [play].42

Finally, two weeks before the premiere, Forsythe developed a trio with Ester Balfe, Ander Zabala, and Brigel Gjoka, asking Balfe to improvise using her map material while Zabala and Gjoka, referred to in rehearsal as “guards,” were to remain as close to her as possible and attempt to wrongly predict her actions. As she moved decisively but unpredictably, with her partners aiming to stay near but not be hit by her as she moved, Forsythe recited another more strongly rhythmical analogical structure from Act 5, Scene 2, via the dancers’ in-​ears, asking them to use its rhythms and prosodic rise and fall to guide their timings and movement choices in a manner similar to the use of text in Woolf Phrase: If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.

By tasking the men with risky predictive decisions, this “avoidance trio” obliquely reflects the idea of the “inevitable” that Forsythe cites as the starting concept of the work, as well as dramaturgies within Hamlet: Claudius’s attempted avoidance of Hamlet’s retribution, Gertrude’s avoidance of Hamlet’s wrath, and Hamlet’s avoidance of detection as he seeks to vindicate his suspicions about Claudius’s role in his father’s demise. This is an especially lucid example of how the broader constellation of informing concepts—​ rhythm, obscuration, strategy, avoidance, analogy—​coalesced within Sider’s task-​based improvisational modes, corroborating dancer Dana Caspersen’s reflection that “every point within [Forsythe’s pieces] contains the essence of the whole.”43 In Richardson’s filmed Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet’s father manifests to the audience as a ringing resonance and a blinding light, its voice a low and echoing murmur that fades in and out when it speaks. Apprehending his father’s form, Hamlet is struck by an awful uncertainty about whether he can believe what he apprehends and how to react. Frustrated by events he cannot or does not want to understand, his way forward is to try to determine the truth of the Ghost’s message. In Sider, Hamlet resonates and whispers like the voice of the Ghost, growing at times clearer and at others fainter, hinting that Shakespeare’s play is indeed at the heart of the piece. However, the pervasiveness and manifold forms of this presence, couched in the danced dramaturgies of the work, remained the privileged domain of the choreographer and those who performed the work. In this, Sider remains obscure, leaving its audience, like Hamlet, not knowing what to do in an interpretive sense. Forsythe is fond of recounting a story from early in his career in which a woman told him that she was unsure how to approach his works and asked for his advice. His reply: “Just watch.” Given Sider’s elusive Shakespearean dramaturgies,

472   Freya Vass-Rhee his comment might be aptly amended to: mark the ghost of Hamlet and the haunting resonances that emerge, shimmer, and fade into obscurity as Sider speaks to you.

Acknowledgment I wish to thank Robert Shaughnessy for his supportive insight and William Forsythe for clarifying communications.

Notes 1. “Sohlenquietschen frei nach Shakespeare,” Deutschlandfunk Radio, June 17, 2011. 2. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 6. 3. Developed in 2008 by Forsythe Company dancer David Kern, Piecemaker is a tool for capturing and cataloguing rehearsal processes in real time by time-​stamping events with descriptions as they unfold. During this period, the author was responsible for recording and cataloguing. See https://​github.com/​motionbank. 4. Forsythe has, however, periodically returned to his earlier, more classical choreographic style, for example in works such as Opus 31 (1998), Pas/​Parts (1999), the solo Two Part Invention (2009), the duet Rearray (2011), and Blake Works (2016). 5. Forsythe rehearsing Ricercar (2003), September 24, 2006. 6. As Forsythe clarifies, however, in numerous cases the performers vary set texts in performance. Email correspondence, September 5, 2017. 7. Prue Lang, who originated one of the two roles in Woolf Phrase, provides a detailed description of this process in her essay “Thinking, Motion and Language,” http://​sarma. be/​docs/​2970 (originally published in German in Gerald Siegmund, ed., William Forsythe: Denken in Bewegung [Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 2004]). 8. Telephone conversation with the author, July 27, 2017. 9. Hans-​Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen J​ürs-​ Munby (New  York: Routledge, 2006), 87 (orig. Postdramatisches Theater [Frankfurt am Main:  Verlag der Autoren, 1999]). 10. Public discussion with William Forsythe and Elizabeth Lecompte, facilitated by Pieter T’Jonck, deSingel International Arts Campus, Antwerp, May 6, 2011, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=8yYW9HQ_​f4E, accessed September 15, 2015. 11. Forsythe and Lecompte, public discussion, 2011. 12. Roslyn Sulcas, “Interview: Paris 1998,” Ballett Frankfurt website, accessed June 3, 2001. 13. Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling, Devising Performance: A Critical History (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 198–​199. 14. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Art and Literature, Penguin Freud Library vol. 14, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1990), 367. 15. Forsythe’s term for the results of this method, which he first used when developing Sleepers Guts (1996). Email correspondence, September 5, 2017. 16. Forsythe had recently visited in the ensemble’s lager and had found materials from ALIE/​ N A(C)TION that had also been predicated on mapping (author’s fieldnotes). See also Dana Caspersen, “Methodologies: Bill Forsythe and the Ballett Frankfurt,” http://​blogs.

Haunted by Hamlet   473 walkerart.org/​performingarts/​2007/​03/​09/​methodologies-​bill-​forsythe-​and-​the-​ballett-​ frankfurt-​by-​dana-​caspersen/​, accessed February 4, 2004. 17. Paul Harris, “The Smooth Operator: Serres Prolongs Poe,” in Mapping Michel Serres, ed. Niran Abbas (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 113–​135. 18. Forsythe and Lecompte, public discussion, 2011. 19. Interview with the author, October 25, 2015. See The Wooster Group website, http://​ thewoostergroup.org/​twg/​twg.php?hamlet, accessed October 12, 2015. 20. William Forsythe, telephone discussion with the author, October 26, 2015. 21. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, eds., Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (London: Routledge, 2006), 16. 22. It is important to note that this and other descriptions of the dancers’ tasks are general sketches of the improvisational modes. In addition to the modes being refined by additional suggestions in actual practice, the dancers were also at liberty to elaborate their own idiosyncratic relationships to the modes while performing them. This level of individual input largely occurred without verbal communication with others, including Forsythe. 23. In his 2003 work Decreation, Forsythe also “fragmented” the principal characters of Anne Carson’s novel The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, distributing the speaking roles of the wife, the husband, his lover, and the story’s narrator across different members of the ensemble. 24. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre,  82–​83. 25. George T. Wright, “The Play of Phrase and Line” (1988), from Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley:  University of California Press), 207–​228; Russ McDonald, Shakespeare:  An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–​2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 861–​879. 26. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre,  91–​93. 27. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 91. 28. Billy Bultheel and Elizabeth Waterhouse, engaged as dramaturgical assistants, helped isolate scenes within the film that offered a range of different rhythms and timbres. 29. This in-​ear audio score was “played” live during each performance by ensemble composer and repetiteur David Morrow. 30. The Forsythe Company’s full program quote for Sider: The rhythmical inflections of Elizabethan theater, like those of classical dance, have been sustained by a tradition of transmission from performer to performer for over 400 years. In Sider, these intricate patterns of speech are communicated to the performers via the soundtrack of a filmed version of a late 16th century tragedy. The adherence of the performers' actions to this vocal score instigates disquieting configurations of incongruous musicality that underscore the drama's themes of analogy and obscuration. 31. For Sider, The Forsythe Company used an e-​text file hosted by Project Gutenberg in cooperation with World Library: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, http://​www.gutenberg.org/​cache/​epub/​1122/​pg1122-​images.html, accessed December 13, 2016. Names of editors, manuscripts used, and pagination are not provided in the file. 32. In Richardson’s filmed version, the text elides several lines. 33. Like many of Forsythe’s works, Sider is structured as a set order of improvisational modalities, entrances and exits, and cued transitions between “scenes.” Scene length, however, is determined in real time by Forsythe, who “live directs” each performance by prompting the stage manager to cue entrances from the wings, using a small handheld

474   Freya Vass-Rhee light to cue transitions onstage, cueing sound or light changes, or—​as for Sider’s ensemble and a few individual roles in earlier works—​through use of in-​ear speakers. The length of Sider varied from performance to performance due to Forsythe’s live direction. However, the piece’s typical running time was one hour, six minutes, with variance of seldom more than two minutes. 34. See Freya Vass-​Rhee, “Auditory Turn:  William Forsythe’s Vocal Choreography,” Dance Chronicle 33, no. 3 (2010): 388–​413. 35. “Watchmen,” the term used in rehearsal and performance for this scene of Sider, may be a reference to the DC comic book series published in 1986–​1987 and adapted as a film in 2009. Forsythe never made this connection explicit to me; however, there are uncanny parallels between the plots of Watchmen and Hamlet. 36. Forsythe, who has commented on his role as an additional performer in his works in several interviews, resolutely refused to work in enclosed technical booths during this and many other works, instead cueing and “conducting” performances in full view and within earshot of spectators seated at the back of auditoriums. It is worth questioning whether his performance was meant to be part of the audience’s experience. 37. Forsythe, quoted in “On Ballet: William Forsythe in Conversation with Jennifer Homans,” Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, October 12, 2013. 38. See Susan Leigh Foster, “Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind,” in Taken by Surprise:  A Dance Improvisation Reader, ed. Ann Cooper Albright (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 3–​10. 39. In one memorable instance, Forsythe instructed the dancers via in-​ears to become intensely interested in Fabrice Mazliah and follow him as closely as possible around the stage, then told them to be dismissive of him, saying “Just leave him—​just say ‘Fuck you, Fabrice.’ ” Onstage, Fabrice turned and shouted, “Fuck you!” at the ensemble, as those of us listening to the in-​ear feed of soundtrack and Forsythe’s instructions choked back laughter. 40. Quoted in Roslyn Sulcas, “Both a New World and the Old Made Explicit,” in Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye, ed. William Forsythe (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012 [original publication 1999]), 27. 41. As Alex Newell points out, Hamlet confounds the Player’s very real tears with his acting the role of Hecuba, while simultaneously equating his own situation with that of Hecuba. The soliloquy’s analogical questions reflect an “intellectual confusion in the heat of emotion,” blurring distinctions not only between the Player as performer and as private person, but also between the relation between life and art more generally. The Soliloquies in Hamlet:  The Structural Design (Madison, NJ:  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992),  60–​66. 42. Quoted in “On Ballet.” 43. Dana Caspersen, “Decreation and Continuity,” in William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography:  It Starts From Any Point, ed. Steven Spier (Oxon/​New  York:  Routledge 2011), 94.

Bibliography Boenisch, Peter M. “Decreation Inc.:  William Forsythe’s Equations of ‘Bodies before the Name.’” Contemporary Theatre Review 17, no. 1 (2007): 15–​27.

Haunted by Hamlet   475 Hansen, Pil, and Darcey Callison, eds. Dance Dramaturgy: Modes of Agency, Awareness and Engagement. New York: Springer, 2015. Lehmann, Hans-​ Thies, and Patrick Primavesi. “Dramaturgy on Shifting Grounds.” Performance Research 14, no. 3 (2009): 3–​6. Spier, Steven. William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography:  It Starts from Any Point. New York: Routledge, 2011. Vass-​Rhee, Freya. “Auditory Turn: William Forsythe’s Vocal Choreography.” Dance Chronicle 33, no. 3 (2010): 388–​413.

Chapter 21

Da ncing He r  De at h Dada Masilo’s The Bitter End of Rosemary (2011) as a South African Contemporary Rethinking of Hamlet’s Ophelia Kathrina Farrugia-​K riel

I chose Ophelia1 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; Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and endued Unto that element. But long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.2

Out of a darkened stage, a naked figure walks into the light. The curve of her back shifts with the rise and fall of her breath. Labored and erratic, her breathing becomes more vigorous and then violent, as she moves further into the lit space. Her arms fling across her naked body. Flicking her head in spasmodic movements, she jerks her torso, turns and throws her arms in the air. The lit space reveals a rope, loosely tied around her neck. She

478   Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel turns her body and reveals a cross, hung on the rope that adorns her dark skin. Reaching up and spinning around, she tussles through the lit space. A voice is overheard: a neurotic laughter escalates into hysteria. Then, . . . She places down the cross that cannot exorcise her pain. The narrativity within the choreography and incredible energy of Dada Masilo gives meaning to the fate of this Rosemary, whose body is her only means of expression once she is out of her mind.3

As the naked figure, Masilo marks a distinct presence through the incarnation of “Rosemary” as a young, black South African woman re-​envisioning Hamlet’s Ophelia. In her twenty-​five-​minute solo, Masilo embodies the struggle, angst, and bitterness that culminate in the end of “Rosemary,” a visceral display of Ophelia’s plight, madness, and subsequent death. Set to compositions by Philip Miller that are sung by Ingnatia Madalane and Lebohang Borale, the enigmatic lighting by Suzette le Sueur and costume by Ann Bailes offer an intriguing reconceptualization and manifestation of Ophelia’s narrative. Masilo’s work premiered in March 2011 at the French fringe festival Anticode 11. Though not as well known as the more extensively shown works Carmen (2009) and Swan Lake (2010), The Bitter End of Rosemary toured venues in South African provinces, including Gauteng’s The Dance Factory and The Nunnery at Wits University (Johannesburg), the Western Cape’s Cape Town City Hall, and KwaZulu-​Natal’s Jomba! Contemporary Dance Experience (Durban). The Bitter End of Rosemary returned to Europe at the Tanzhause NRW in Dusseldorf in 2011 and at the Flux Laboratory (Geneva) in 2014. In this chapter I draw upon excerpts from a recording of the solo, fragments of which are available on YouTube.4 Accompanying the chapter are three photographs that were taken during performances at The Dance Factory in 2011 (Figures 21.1–​21.3). As an emerging choreographer within a post-​apartheid5 context, Masilo asserts a heritage-​driven approach to performance-​making, “challenging personal mediation of lack of agency and voice.”6 Masilo, a native of Soweto,7 steadfastly rose to fame within South African dance circles, garnering the 2008 Standard Bank Young Artists Award at the annual National Arts Festival (NAF) in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. Since 2010, her meteoric rise within the South African dance scene has mirrored the steady exportation of her work to the festivals and dance houses of European cultural capitals and more recently across North American cities, including Montreal and New York. Masilo’s collaborations are as provoking and intriguing as her solo performances. Her choreographic contributions to productions devised in collaboration with other South African artists, including Miller, William Kentridge, and Catherine Meyburgh, have subsequently showcased her work within the Australian performance landscape.8 In this chapter, the interrogation of Masilo’s vision of Ophelia, as experienced through Rosemary, is brought about through a set of interdisciplinary methods at the crossroads of dance, textual, and literary analysis. I  consider Masilo’s work against postcolonial Shakespearian readings and the post-​apartheid artistic and cultural conditions within the South African context. Furthermore, I  delve into the performance histories of Ophelia’s representation and assimilate new theories for understanding recent artistic practices such as those exemplified in The Bitter End of

Dancing Her Death    479

Figure 21.1.  Masilo’s opening moments in The Bitter End of Rosemary. Photo © John Hogg.

Rosemary. Masilo’s position as a female (and black) choreographer is viewed within and outside of contemporary South Africa. As a result, I ask how Masilo’s identity as a contemporary South African dance-​maker in the twentieth-​first century manifests itself against the choreographic and textual treatment of Ophelia’s madness and subsequent death. An analysis of The Bitter End of Rosemary is offered against the literary body of work on Shakespeare and women’s studies in order to construct discourse on Masilo’s “Rosemary” as a manifestation of Ophelia’s fate as she dances her impending death. The chapter concludes with new discourses on the reinterpretations of performance texts, where the shards of interrogation of Hamlet’s Ophelia become embedded within a collage of Masilo’s choreographic trajectories. Amidst the rise of transmodernism in literature and dance in the early twenty-​first century, I aim to argue that Masilo’s treatment of Ophelia in The Bitter End of Rosemary can be viewed against a new transmodern framework for understanding artistic hybridity and postcolonial discourses.

480   Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel

Approaches to Reading Shakespeare and the Dance: The Post-​colonial Condition, Artistic Hybridity, and the Transmodern Paradigm As Michael Neill reminds us in Post-​Colonial Shakespeares, “reading is always done from somewhere.”9 My interest in a close analysis of Masilo’s reimagining of Ophelia within The Bitter End of Rosemary reveals the work as a complex choreographic entity. Her approach to reconceptualizing Ophelia’s narrative as a performance of the tragedy ignites the choreography as an enigmatic and multifaceted kinesthetic experience for the spectator. In pursuing analyses of this contemporary rethinking of Hamlet’s Ophelia, I look to considerations of the post-​colonial condition against the appropriation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet within the South African context. Alongside this, the post-​apartheid condition is also considered as a driving mechanism for appreciating and understanding the work of Masilo and The Bitter End of Rosemary. What happens when certain choreographic practices, such as those of Masilo, are viewed in the light of new theoretical frameworks—​ both postcolonial and post-​apartheid conditions? How do these recent choreographic practices impact an understanding of Masilo’s rethinking of Ophelia? I want to argue that the artistic hybridity that emerges from Masilo’s reimaging of a Shakespearian tragedy reflects the concerns of transmodern dance practices, a recent phenomenon that is arguably reflective of the new interpretations of Shakespeare’s work. Critical perspectives on Shakespeare and colonial pasts articulate “a site of conflict between the oppressors and the oppressed.”10 For Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, “the meanings of Shakespeare’s plays were both derived from and used to establish colonial authority.”11 As David Johnson suggests, “proposals for African education repeated substantially the nineteenth-​century divide between utilitarian instruction for the masses, and a literary education for the rulers.”12 The 1930s brought about desire for a literary education for all Africans; by the “colonial dusk” of the 1940s, plays like The Tempest outlined, according to Johnson, “order, hierarchy, and unity” to appease colonial anxieties. In the latter parts of the twentieth century, the radical potential of the hybrid Shakespeare text within a South African context, according to Martin Orkin, can be used to “engender a hybridity amongst students and others which would be radical and subversive of the effects of apartheid.”13 The title Post-​Colonial Shakespeares infers “the overlaps, tensions, as well as possibilities of a dialogue, between Shakespearian and post-​ colonial studies.”14 In leaving the domains of “European imperialist discourses as male and white,”15 I propose a shift to consider a black South African female choreographer’s retelling of Hamlet’s Ophelia against an understanding of hybridity, where the “identity politics which often constitutes the impulses of post-​colonial theorisation” offer new ways to interrogate the reimaginings of iconic narratives.16 The reconceptualization of Shakespearian narratives within a uniquely South African context is a recurring theme in local productions, including those by Forgotten Angle

Dancing Her Death    481 Theatre Collaborative (FATC), a company set up in 1995 to create performances that are focused on social issues connected to personal empowerment and social healing as well as “speaking the unspeakable.”17 FATC’s Macbeth (2008) and I Think It’s Hamlet (2013), in which Masilo contributed choreographic material as well as performed as part of the cast, capitalize on the use of the Shakespearian texts and offer opportunities to address the problematic heritage of high art (typified by the colonial and apartheid values) and black social concerns, including the struggle against HIV and AIDS in South Africa during the latter parts of the twentieth century. The empowerment of hybridity in these creations reflects an amalgamating force of reconciliation and social transformation within contemporary times. Like their predecessors caught between colonialism and apartheid, the post-​apartheid South African movement of black dancers appears to search for their voices, managing negotiations across a diversity of cultures, as well as retelling or appropriating narratives that connect to “South African” identities. In her seminal text on post-​apartheid dance, Sharon Friedman’s understanding of the post-​apartheid18 condition infers that “the very cultural diversity and plurality of South African cultures means that artists should be free to express themselves in a wide variety of dance genres and styles.”19 As Maxwell Xolani Rani asserts, “apartheid distinguished between African social traditional dances and ‘high art,’ which came from the Western aesthetic tradition.”20 By the early 1990s, training in Western dance forms and opportunities to work outside of South Africa, according to Friedman, reviewed the notion of a “South African dance aesthetic”; for choreographers such as Vincent Mantsoe, the search for his choreographic identity became part of the post-​apartheid movement. While celebrating their “African roots,” the emerging generation of choreographers at the turn of the twentieth century, including Gregory Maqoma, continued to revel in the artistic hybridity that encapsulated the transformation of a post-​apartheid South Africa. As Friedman reminds her readers, “the influences on our work derive from all our intermingled hybrid identities.”21 Two decades into the post-​apartheid era in South Africa, emerging choreographers like Masilo find themselves carrying the legacy of their predecessors, but also forging new artistic directions. For London-​based dance critic Maggie Foyer, Masilo is one of the success stories of the new South Africa: “she epitomises all that is positive about the new country:  the vibrant confluence of cultures, the edgy mix of danger and beauty and, most of all, life enhancing energy.”22 Post-​apartheid work “questioned, not just assumed, cultural harmony after the end of apartheid rule but also began to question political processes, and indeed, notions of nation.”23 Indeed, it is the questioning of the essence of “being South African,” in identifying through race, class, and political ideology, that largely reflects the multiplicity of heritage. Within the context of the arts and dance, it is imperative to acknowledge that the artistic hybridity that fluctuates across the South African landscape symbolizes a kaleidoscopic topography of struggles, tensions, and resolutions. It is in this light that the hybrid identities within the South African choreographic communities are shaped against their post-​apartheid existences. The hybrid identities that Friedman alludes to and the artistic hybridity that results from the postcolonial and post-​apartheid conditions in the South African

482   Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel context have become intriguing phenomena in the early twenty-​ first century. I would argue here that the nature of works created in recent times is reflective of a new condition, theorized as a “transmodern condition.” In its historical origins, the earliest attempt in defining transmodernism can be credited to the Spanish feminist philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda and her monograph Saturn’s Smile:  Towards a Transmodern Theory (1989). Rodríguez Magda proposed a continuum of three theoretical stances across the twentieth century—​ modernism (thesis), postmodernism (antithesis), and transmodernism (synthesis)—​and various definitions have emerged across Latino-​Hispanic, European, and South American contexts. In its most reductive terms, transmodernism is defined as “attempts to recover the centers of modernism and repudiate postmodernism’s dismissal of meaning in a kind of ‘transversal unification’ that effect a convergence without coincidence.”24 Through his analyses of Brazilian novels by Chico Buarque and Santiago Nazarian,25 Christopher Taggart Lewis depicts transmodern thinking as a “shifting, ever-​changing organism . . . that bridges the gaps between the shards (of postmodernism), anchoring identity between multiplicity and (global) interconnectivity.”26 The transference and application of this theoretical framework into dance27 elicits new paradigmatic offerings for understanding recent choreographic practices, including those typified by artistic hybridity. Through reconceptualizing perspectives on alterity (otherness) and différence by political philosopher Enrique Dussel, artistic works shed light “on the shattered human condition and providing alterity with a voice.”28 In its parameters, a transmodern paradigm largely reflects a collective set of values, notably: weaving and twisting of shards of texts, sources or choreographic histories; pluralistic possibilities that eliminate artistic or choreographic monopolies and hierarchies; dimensions of choreographic “otherness” as the defense of cultural difference and artistic hybridity; and a convergence of the historical markers of postmodernism against new emergences of modernism, as expressions of the body collide with shards of inferences. In applying this new paradigm to the South African context, and more importantly to an analysis of The Bitter End of Rosemary, I seek to align the connections of a transmodern condition with the postcolonial and post-​apartheid conditions as markers of Masilo’s approach to dance-​making.

A New Voice in Post-​Apartheid South African Dance: The Rise of Dada Masilo Born in 1985, Dikeledi (Dada) Masilo grew up in a matriarchal family in the Johannesburg township of Soweto. Masilo had a modest upbringing with her mother,

Dancing Her Death    483 Faith Masilo, and her grandmother, playing childhood games on the Tshwane township streets.29 In 1994, Masilo joined The Peacemakers, an “all girl” dance group set up by dance leader Mulalo Nemakula, “to gather the girls, take them off the street and to motivate them again.”30 The Peacemakers presented choreographed street and show dances set to music by Michael Jackson,31 merging the “light footedness and broken rhythmic patterns” of the pantsula32 and popular MTV-​style dances from the 1990s.33 The Peacemakers offered young township girls a competitive but also physical engagement that honed young Masilo’s interest in dance. However, it is impossible to consider the events in Masilo’s young life during the 1980s and 1990s without considering the political changes that were taking place across the nation. The election of F. W. De Klerk in 1989, the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC), and the negotiations for the release of Nelson Mandela brought about the beginnings of change in apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s. Moreover, the general elections on April 27, 1994, resulted in the ANC’s majority vote and signaled the end of racial segregation. Mandela’s election as the first black president of the Republic of South Africa and the annual celebration of Freedom Day on April 27 are reminders of these crucial political changes for all South Africans. For Masilo, then a ten-​year-​old Soweto native, these political changes paved the way for new opportunities in the post-​apartheid era of the mid-​1990s. Masilo’s interest in the possibility of a career in dance was ignited as a result of performances at The Dance Factory in Johannesburg in 1996. The Dance Factory reflected a liberating ideology that epitomized the changes from pre-​to post-​apartheid eras. It offered Masilo the possibility to nurture her talent. In 1999 Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s ROSAS performed at The Dance Factory, leaving a significant mark on the young Dada. Masilo completed her studies at the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg in 2003, followed by Jazzart Dance Theatre in Cape Town.34 Masilo successfully auditioned at De Keersmaeker’s Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (P.A.R.T.S.) in Belgium, and began her further training in the fall of 2005. Without the national political changes, the visiting dance companies, and the facilitatory role of the Dance Factory, Masilo’s trajectory in dance would have had a different outcome. While Faith Masilo suggested that “dancing was not a good career option,”35 Masilo’s path in dance was to follow that of many black South Africans, including Gregory Maqoma and Boyzie Cekwana, who studied abroad in order to “broaden experience and outlook.”36 Following her studies in Belgium, Masilo returned to Johannesburg in 2008 to begin her choreographic career in her homeland. Her choice of vocabularies suggests connections between particular dance genres, as reflections of her South African background and upbringing, as well as her Belgian dance training. Short and bow-​legged, Masilo claimed that she never aspired to be a ballet dancer. And yet, the challenges that ballet, as a politicized dance genre within South African contexts, posed for Masilo reflect the complexities of a dance form that idiosyncratically she respects and challenges. Within the South African context, ballet reflects a set of politicized histories.37 Masilo acknowledges the problem of “ballet versus African dance.”38 Nemakula attests that

484   Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel ballet was seen as a “white thing”; in addition, she maintains, “apartheid contributed a lot because we were so stereotyped.”39 For young black dancers like Masilo, the experience of ballet in post-​apartheid South Africa differed significantly from the apartheid experiences of those black or colored40 dancers, including those of Nemakula. Masilo’s generation, one that thrived on the post-​apartheid scholarships to European vocational dance schools, appears to overturn the politics of segregation into a choreographic politic that embraces difference. In her youth, Masilo performed South African dances, including the pantsula dances, as well as taking ballet classes at the Dance Factory. As Masilo suggests, “I fuse styles trying to find a signature . . . I love the edginess of it.”41 What Masilo attempts to undertake in her own choreography is a layering of ballet and traditional South African dances. The upward lightness of ballet’s ports de bras is brought into action alongside the downward groundedness of the pantsula footwork. Her arms float into suspended classical lines while the soles of her feet rhythmically pound, then tap, then trudge the earth. She is equally at ease extending a stretched foot and balancing in an arabesque position as she recovers into more grounded footwork. These examples arguably reflect the binary of coexistences between ballet and the indigenous dance forms of South Africa, a reminder that the post-​apartheid generation is empowered by drawing upon the plethora of dance forms, including the formerly racially segregated dances, to produce transformational choreographic forms. For Masilo’s generation, these dances are not exclusively unique to black artists; they are, however, incumbent to the “groundbreaking” generation of black dance makers who attempt to question and challenge the problematic heritage of ballet, social and indigenous dance forms in South Africa.42 Masilo created her first solo during her studies at P.A.R.T.S. in Belgium. Set to Saint-​ Saëns’s The Dying Swan, Masilo’s solo was dedicated to her aunt, who passed away from AIDS.43 Of her first attempt at choreography, Masilo suggests to the New York Times critic Roslyn Sulcas that the solo inferred “rejection and pain and dying.”44 Since creating her first full-​length production in 2008, Masilo has produced a series of reworkings or revisions of ballets,45 musical scores, and literature, including Romeo and Juliet (2008), Carmen (2009), Swan Lake (2010), The Bitter End of Rosemary (2011), and Death and the Maidens (2012). Masilo’s work largely explores perceptions of humanity, including homosexuality, the treatment of female sexuality, and the victimization of women, including rape. Her approach to making work reflects her exploration of many influences, from popular and national dance cultures (including ballet, pantsula, and flamenco) to diverse musical choices. While Masilo’s Romeo and Juliet garnered her the NAF’s Standard Bank Young Artists Award in 2008, it is works like Carmen and Swan Lake that have brought international recognition to Masilo within the dance houses across Europe, North America, and Australia.46 Critics’ reviews of Masilo’s work offer insights into varying perceptions of her choreography. In The Independent, Zoë Anderson described Masilo’s London performances as “an exuberant opening to the Sadler’s Wells Sampled season.”47 Brian Seiwert of the New York Times was less understanding of her performances at the Joyce Theater: “Like the androgyny of male and female swans in tutus or long skirts, the idea of mixing is given rather than explored.”48 In Critical Dance, Foyer was more convinced:

Dancing Her Death    485 In her “Swan Lake,” Masilo takes ballet not as a ring-​fenced European cultural preserve but simply as a splendid dance form to be both employed and enjoyed. . . . Her swan corps is inclusive: male/​female, black/​white, united by their white tutus, bare feet and tufts of swan feathers on their heads.49

French critic Rosita Boisseau described Masilo as “a young artist always moving between two countries, two planes.”50 Masilo’s work immediately reflects the “in-​between-​ ness” that is arguably reflective of the post-​apartheid artistic resolution. It is in such context and politics that Masilo’s attempt to articulate Ophelia’s madness and death in The Bitter End of Rosemary generates one of the most powerful and sophisticated works created by Masilo in recent times.

Masilo’s Contribution to the History of Representation of Ophelia’s Madness and Death The Bitter End of Rosemary suggests the manifestation of a complex network of performance histories, including the layering of subnarratives from Shakespeare’s text, theatricalized counterpoints of the presence of the body, as well as the treatment of historical or stylistic influences, in Masilo’s articulation of her choreography. As Carol Chillington Rutter reminds us, “Ophelia’s body is to be watched.”51 In the hands of Masilo, Rosemary/​Ophelia’s story remains suspended in time as well as space. There is little indication of period, location, or setting in Masilo’s performance. Instead, The Bitter End offers an episodic narrative that is driven by the emotive characterization and Masilo’s feminist reimagining of Ophelia’s condition. Masilo’s choices in shaping Rosemary’s journey across the twenty-​five-​minute solo narrate Ophelia’s embodiment of purging, anger, and a resolution through death. From the start of Masilo’s performance, Rosemary’s condition enacts a manifestation of Ophelia’s heritage. It accumulates a series of emotive stances, from exorcism and chastity, to anger and resolution. As a result, the episodic narratives within the choreography of The Bitter End are layered upon the human condition of Ophelia and the performance histories of this Shakespearian character. In Shakespeare’s play, the character of Ophelia transitions from a young innocent girl to a woman forced to take her own life within just five of the drama’s twenty-​five scenes.52 Ophelia’s death in Hamlet marks a turning point in the meta-​narratives of Elsinore and Hamlet’s life. Ophelia’s role in the Shakespearian text renders a triangle of deceit—​between herself, Hamlet, and her family—​as a crucial shift in the plot to ruin Hamlet. Her position as the “victim” in the play offers several modes to interpret the representation of her character. When she makes her first appearance in Act 1, Scene 3, Ophelia is subservient to her father, Polonius. Laertes later describes his sister as “a

486   Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel document in madness,”53 driven by the unhappiness that is brought about by the unscrupulous actions of her father to pawn her off as a love interest and the catalyst for the subsequent ruin of Hamlet. Ophelia’s madness is thus driven by the deceit of three men in her life: her father, her brother, and her love interest, Hamlet. Her impending torture and subsequent death hangs on the loss of her value as “woman”—​as a daughter, sister, and lover. Philippa Berry’s study on deaths in Shakespearian tragedies suggests that “Ophelia’s echo of Hamlet’s madness turns or angles our view of tragic grief and suffering.”54 For feminist writer Elaine Showalter, Ophelia’s madness echoes “the oppression of women in society as well as in tragedy,” her character suggesting “a potent and obsessive figure in our cultural mythology.”55 Indeed, Ophelia’s parting words to Gertrude and Laertes are laden with grief as she summons them to remember her tragic losses: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray, love, remember. And there is pansies; that’s for thoughts.”56 After rejection and humiliation, Ophelia returns to a place of solace, to drown her sorrow amidst the “crow-​flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples.”57 Ophelia’s narratives, as a woman and as an agent of tragedy in Hamlet, bear witness to the enigmatic possibilities of reading “Ophelia” as textual and historical entities that “exploit the woman’s body as muse” and offer an intriguing collection of performance histories.58 As Showalter reminds her readers, “Ophelia does have a story of her own that feminist criticism can tell; it is neither her life story, nor her love story . . . but rather the history of her representation.”59 From “decorous and pious” to a “schizophrenic heroine,” artists have interpreted “Ophelia” as “woman” through a multiplicity of representations.60 Ophelia’s representations in nineteenth-​century paintings reflect various guises, the most popular being that of a woman dressed in white, surrounded by flowers and floating on or submerged in the stream that drowned her. Eugene Delacroix’s The Death of Ophelia (1838) and John Everett Millais’s painting (1851–​1852) illustrated the drowned body of Ophelia in such a guise. Other works captured Ophelia’s willingness or surrender to entering the water. Arthur Hughes (1852) illustrated a waif-​like Ophelia as a pale and thin girl, holding reeds, daisies, nettles, and pansies, and whose gaze is directed toward her fate, down in the water. Madeleine Lamaire (1880) characterized Ophelia as a feminine figure entering the stream. Ophelia’s appearance offers contractions: her dress slips off her shoulders to reveal her breasts, while the elegant shoe that covers her foot is about to enter the water; her left hand clutches her dress and the nettles she gathered, while her right hand delicately holds a buttercup. Lamaire’s Ophelia appears to glide into the water, maleficently gazing at those who might be seeking her, in stark contrast to Hughes’s waif, who can only seek solace in the stream. In theater, Ophelia’s presence in Hamlet fluctuated during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Frequently depicted in “decorous style, relying on the familiar images of white dress, loose hair, and wildflowers to convey a polite feminine distraction,”61 her lines were reduced and the role was assigned to a singer rather than an actress, until Victorian actress Ellen Terry subverted Ophelia’s characteristic white dress by wearing Hamlet’s woeful black in 1878. In Victorian productions, Ophelia’s madness was depicted through schizophrenic patients photographed in hospitals.62 Freudian

Dancing Her Death    487 interpretations infiltrated the depiction of Ophelia, perceiving her as a “loose woman,” in the early twentieth century.63 Subsequent renditions produced toward the end of the twentieth century, including those by Trevor Nunn (1970) and Jonathan Miller (1974/​1981), represented Ophelia’s madness through “protest and rebellion.”64 In her analyses of the burial scenes in four twentieth-​century cinematic versions of Hamlet, Carol Chillington Rutter locates the body as “the scene’s ‘matter.’ ”65 In the multiple interpretations of Ophelia, Showalter alluded, “there is no ‘true’ Ophelia . . . but perhaps only a Cubist Ophelia of multiple perspectives, more than the sum of all her parts.”66 For Masilo, a rethinking of the presence of Ophelia’s body in The Bitter End of Rosemary suggests a contemporary articulation of Ophelia as “woman” and as “tragedy.” In placing Ophelia’s plight as a central manifestation in the role of “Rosemary,” [m]‌ad, lost and naked, Dada-​Ophelia faces the world vulnerable and helpless, twisting and rearing, her words incomprehensible and her body entangled in her own movements. But perhaps this insanity is actually just the reality of an exposed body, of a being in search of herself?67

The Bitter End of Rosemary can be viewed as the antithesis of “nothing,” where “Ophelia’s speech of ‘nothing’ reaffirms those links between sexuality and death.”68 While “Ophelia’s story becomes the Story of O—​the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference,”69 at the hands of Masilo the antithesis of “nothing” and “feminine difference” becomes a lived and theatricalized experience. From the pious but ferocious opening moments of the dance to the manifestation of her incoherent and erratic anger in the latter stages of the performance, Masilo embodies the vulnerability of Rosemary (as Ophelia). This is palpable from the early moments of the twenty-​five-​minute solo performance. As she steps into the dimly lit stage, the ripples and undulations in Masilo’s body denote the toxic mixture of grief, despair, and hysteria. Her dance of death transitions into a naked manifestation, or interplay, of texts. Masilo’s dance with the crucifix reveals a hysterical display of Ophelia’s madness and self-​flagellation. The pulsating movements in Masilo’s body and the swinging of the cross tied around her neck echo the screaming and laughter of the singers, Madalane and Borale, in the soundscape of The Bitter End of Rosemary. Never acknowledging her audience, Masilo’s movements reflect Rosemary’s plight and Ophelia’s angst, as her feet slap the floor and she swings the crucifix from left to right, bent over double as she follows the burden around her neck. As the woman who embodies Ophelia’s “otherness” in Masilo’s work, “Rosemary” acts as a metaphoric reference to Ophelia’s narrative through the “accident of her own death by drowning,”70 the Victorian ritual of decking corpses in rosemary, and the representation for seeking a new life. In her offering to Queen Gertrude, Ophelia reminds her that rosemary reflects remembrance. In The Bitter End, Rosemary becomes a metonymic reflection and the personification of Ophelia’s grief, as a remnant of the madness, rage, and the subsequent submission to death. Rosemary is therefore an agent of remembrance as Masilo (as choreographer and performer) urges her audience to recall vulnerable and

488   Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel betrayed women, those widowed by war, those battered and raped by men, and those denied their freedom to life through sexually transmitted diseases including HIV and AIDS. Unlike Ophelia’s other representations in preceding performances of Hamlet, Masilo’s diminutive but robust stature does not reduce her embodiment of Rosemary (as Ophelia) to a “waiflike” figure. While retaining the femininity of Ophelia, Rosemary is black and naked, wearing braids on an almost shaved head. Masilo’s naked body sought new ways to perceive the movement for the solo: “perhaps if I take my clothes off . . . it will change the way I move.”71 Equally, the braids on top of Masilo’s largely shaven head replace the garlands worn by other “Ophelias,” for example as depicted by Delacroix, or the gold braiding in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 film adaptation. As she shakes her head in anger, Masilo’s braids extend the afflictions of her rage and pain, and contrast the contours of her naked body. Masilo’s solo performance signifies a distinct absence of the men that bring so much pain to Ophelia. In literary studies, “Hamlet is a prototype of the melancholy hero”72 and “writing the gap into the Hamlet/​Ophelia narrative”73 becomes central to understanding the condition of Ophelia. For Masilo, the physical absence of men in The Bitter End of Rosemary is counterbalanced by the explicit manifestation of torture, hysteria, and subversion in Rosemary’s presence. In the early moments of The Bitter End of Rosemary, Masilo reveals a powerful quest to exorcise the sinful pleasures of the body, as well as the connections to the vignettes of betrayal. As her solo unfolds, Masilo storms across the stage, wearing a gold, Renaissance-​styled coat over her naked body. The virulent repetition of shaking her torso increases with intensity as Masilo purges Rosemary’s memories: “Wait! What? Stop! I told you not to move!” Masilo shakes her arms above her head. She is at odds with herself, as though her internal conflict metamorphosizes into an outward physicality that shifts between the victim and the violator. She retreats across the stage. She gasps. Her anger subsides as though she meanders through her recollections. “No! No!” She shakes her head in disbelief. Her horror turns back to anger: “Shut the fuck up!” Masilo’s anger reinterprets Ophelia in the form of Rosemary, a woman empowered by raging against the injustices inflicted on her and the many women before her. In a similar vein, Ophelia recounts her torture: He took me by the wrist and held me hard, Then goes he to the length of all his arm, And with his other hand thus o’er his brow He falls to such perusal of my face As he would draw it.74

Ophelia became, in Lacanian terms, “the object of Hamlet’s male desire.”75 In her reconceptualization of Ophelia’s narrative, Masilo places Rosemary as a manifestation of desire at center stage. Despite Hamlet’s absence in Masilo’s performance, oppression becomes an embodied reflection of his subversion. As Showalter reminded her readers, “chiefly interesting, of course, is what she tells us about Hamlet.”76 Masilo’s decision to focus exclusively on the downfall of Rosemary (as Ophelia) suggests the duality of

Dancing Her Death    489 empowerment and victimization that fuels this young, black South African. She audaciously dares to comment upon and at the same time marginalize the patriarchal society that has long shaped the colonial and postcolonial histories of her culture. As she sensuously shifts her body in the harrowing dance, Masilo seduces us into recollections and reinterpretations of Ophelia. It is difficult to ascertain any biographical moments within the realm of The Bitter End of Rosemary. Nevertheless, the threads of family histories, including the death of Masilo’s aunt from AIDS, further the dimensions of this contemporary reconceptualization of tragedy. Through the intensity of the utterances of anguish and unmuted rebuke, Masilo uniquely shapes her inquiry into Ophelia’s performance histories and the victimization of women, bitterly recalling episodes of brutality and loss. Symbols of sorrow and repentance are manifested through various artifacts used within Masilo’s choreographic treatment of Ophelia’s narrative and Rosemary’s destiny. The character of Rosemary, the lily, and the cross (which symbolizes death, Christian sacrifice, and the renewal of faith) are indicative of Masilo’s connections to the Shakespearian text. In Shakespeare’s play, flowers to Ophelia are as synonymous as the skull is to Hamlet. For Showalter, the willow tree and flowers serve as reflections of the pure humanist world against the distrust and deceit within Elsinore. Ophelia is muted and repressed by forces that engulf her. At the news of her death, Queen Gertrude sighs as she scatters flowers: “Sweets [flowers] to the sweet. Farewell.”77 In examining the representations of Ophelia, Showalter described how the Victorian actress Harriet Smithson entered in a long black veil . . . spreading the veil on the ground as she sang, she spread flowers upon it in the shape of a cross, as if to make her father’s grave, and mimed a burial, a piece of stage business which remained in vogue for the rest of the century.78

Masilo’s dance seductively embraces and challenges the Shakespearian narratives. Amidst periods of silent anger and vocalized screams, she slams flowers as though they are symbols of Rosemary’s pain. Masilo draws out an erotic manifestation of remembrances; she seductively turns and undulates the flower around the contours of her body. The lily, signifying Rosemary’s desires, marks the trajectories across and along Masilo’s naked body. As Le Seur’s lighting captures the contours of Masilo’s body, the brownness of her skin and the whiteness of the lily are visceral moments in the performance, and appear as contrasts while Masilo displays her naked body at center stage. As her audience, I  am reminded of the intense and poignant beauty, as though her preceding fit of madness is forgivable set against the sum total of her sexuality, and, ultimately, her need to fulfill her human desire. As the solo reaches its final moments, Masilo points toward a glass bowl located at the downstage corner of the stage. Masilo acknowledges Rosemary’s fate and proceeds to bathe herself in water and rose petals (Figure  21.3). Consumed by resolution, Rosemary’s madness is now subdued in Ophelia’s fate and impending death. The metonymic use of water and flowers in the final moments of Masilo’s performance

490   Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel

Figure 21.2.  The contours of pain and disappointment in The Bitter End of Rosemary. Photo © John Hogg.

offer direct references to Shakespearian narrative, and the various representations of Ophelia’s death in art and performance histories. Showalter reminds us that, for Gaston Bachelard, death through drowning “traces the symbolic connections between women, water and death.”79 Nevertheless, it is also possible to consider Ophelia’s actions as self-​ defense, for as Rutter contrarily reminds us, “to drown herself ‘in her own defense,’ [is] a representation designed to invite spectators to worry over that malapropism, perhaps to read ‘defence’ as ‘offence.’ ”80 As her solo draws to a close, Masilo’s presence reflects an eerie calmness, in stark contrast to the shades of madness, anger, and despair in the earlier parts of the dance. The surrender to the water suggests metaphoric references to “feminine death water,”81 in which the water itself becomes a symbol of both women and tears. The water that runs down Masilo’s body symbolizes the loss and sadness of

Dancing Her Death    491

Figure 21.3.  The final moments of The Bitter End of Rosemary. Photo © John Hogg.

those women who were sacrificed at the hands of the brutality of rape or the cruel fate of HIV and AIDS. Through the thematic centrality of Shakespeare’s Ophelia to other feminine victims, Masilo centralizes the plight of other iconic victims, such as Giselle or the chosen one in Le Sacre du Printemps.82 Nevertheless, it is the unsung, everyday women, victims of their oppressors through racial, sexual, or religious circumstances, who are pivotal to the thematic and visual impact of The Bitter End of Rosemary. As the lights fade on Masilo, a poignant silence prevails. Masilo chose Ophelia. And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, That sucked the honey of his music vows, Now see that noble and most sovereign reason

492   Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel Like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh; That unmatched form and feature of blown youth Blasted with ecstasy. O woe is me, T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see!83

From PostColonial and Post-​ Apartheid Readings to Transmodern Inferences in The Bitter End of Rosemary As an emerging choreographer, Masilo embraces the collision and convergence of multiple dimensions of “otherness.” The shards of choreographic influences, references, and dimensions of text, performance, and cultural histories in The Bitter End of Rosemary celebrate alterity at the intersections of culture, histories, and practices. The components discussed in the earlier parts of this chapter offer intriguing insights into the reconceptualization of Rosemary as Ophelia. Masilo’s solo eliminates artistic monopolies and hierarchies, and brings together dimensions of “otherness” as a defense of cultural différence and sustainment of artistic hybridity. Thus, Masilo’s The Bitter End of Rosemary charts a contemporary study of Hamlet’s Ophelia. The exposure that Masilo garnered across European contexts84 during the last decade has afforded Masilo the opportunity to draw upon her South African heritage as well as European choreographic influences. Considerations of the postcolonial and post-​apartheid choreographic practices and the artistic appropriation of Hamlet’s Ophelia within The Bitter End of Rosemary contribute to an understanding of Masilo’s transmodern rethinking of Ophelia. In view of “postcolonial Shakespeares,” The Bitter End of Rosemary reflects artistic tensions, overlaps, and dialogues between studies in South African post-​apartheid choreography and the retelling of Shakespeare within postcolonial studies. Orkin’s suggestion of retelling Shakespeare, as a subversion of the effects of apartheid, enables a reading of Masilo’s choreography as a manifestation of pursuing artistic voices that bring her personal, cultural, and artistic agencies to the fore. As a second generation of post-​apartheid dance, Masilo’s choreography exhibits the complexity of South African heritage as it converges with a Shakespearian text and its performance histories, and generates a synthesis of understanding of postcolonial and post-​apartheid artistic existences. Through her position as an emerging black South African choreographer, Masilo has thrived within the post-​apartheid opportunities for black youths in South Africa. The Bitter End of Rosemary reflects the concerns of a young black South African artist who has shaped her understanding of performance-​making in interaction with both her native South African and European counterparts. Masilo’s choice of vocabularies denotes a

Dancing Her Death    493 multifaceted collection of dance genres that add to the heritage of telling Ophelia’s story. The solo is arguably reflective of a “post-​apartheid” choreographic condition through its characteristics of cultural difference and artistic hybridity. While The Bitter End of Rosemary resonates with the proliferation and survival of dance genres in South Africa throughout the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, the work equally manifests the artistic exposure that Masilo garnered through her studies in Belgium. The vocabularies in Masilo’s solo are reflective of the expressive body of both “African” and “European” dance traditions, largely through the groundedness of social and traditional African dance forms, including the pantsula and gumboot dances, and modernist aesthetic sensitivity from De Keersmaeker’s influences. Masilo’s artistic reimagining of Rosemary as Ophelia infers a plethora of malleable and corporeal textures, set against a richness of performance histories that articulate a transmodern condition. In viewing Masilo’s solo, I am drawn to the weaving and twisting of shards of texts, sources, and choreographic histories in The Bitter End. Masilo’s utterances during the solo reflect a new shard of textuality in the solo, while the physical components of the performance suggest references to black South African heritage as well as the diverse representations of Ophelia’s tragedy. By bringing these components together, Masilo articulates the vulnerability of women and flexes her artistic voice through the intricacies of the performance-​making and the negotiations with different sources connected to thematics of Ophelia. This also suggests the transformational power of this young black South African choreographer’s ability to generate unique insights into the performativity of “becoming” Ophelia and to bring agency to the many victims of HIV and AIDS in the rainbow nation. In its transmodern dimension, The Bitter End of Rosemary elicits pluralistic possibilities that eliminate any overriding artistic monopolies and hierarchies. The plethora of performance histories present in Masilo’s choreography, including the components from indigenous and imported dance forms to the South African culture, retain their identity and collide with other performance histories, accumulating to generate a complex weaving of shards of heritage. Against these compositional shards, Masilo’s work depicts a transmodern convergence of the postmodern intertextual condition against new emergences of modernism. As a transmodern rethinking of a Shakespearian tragedy through this uniquely South African and contemporary performance, The Bitter End of Rosemary reveals Masilo’s signature as a post-​apartheid and contemporary black South African female choreographer and renders her choice of Ophelia as one that profoundly resonates across this artistic and cultural context.

Notes 1. Program notes from “Republic:  Art, Authority, Nationhood,” Cape Town, Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts, September 21, 2011. 2. Queen to Laertes, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, 2nd ed., eds. S. Wells and G. Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 4.7.138–​155. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition.

494   Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel 3. “Anticodes ne laisse personne indifferent.” Original review: “. . . Elle a déposé à terre la croix qui n’a pu exorciser sa souffrance. La chorégraphie narrative et l’énergie incroyable de Dada Masilo donne du sens au destin de cette Rosemary, qui n’a plus que son corps pour s’exprimer quand son esprit s’échappé.” 4. These extracts from the performances at Flux Laboratory are available online via YouTube (Dada Masilo:  The Bitter End of Rosemary) at https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=ucHWVQQMk_​0. 5. Sharon Friedman, “Mapping an Historical Context for Theatre Dance in South Africa,” in Post-​Apartheid Dance: Many Bodies Many Voices Many Stories, ed. Sharon Friedman (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 1. Friedman refers to Clare Craighead’s definition of apartheid as “separateness” (2006: 22), an ideological separation and racial discrimination of white against other nonwhite groups in South Africa that ensued following the election of the National Party in June 1948. Post-​apartheid refers to the era following the 1994 elections of the African National Congress and end of the apartheid regime. See Clare Craighead’s “‘Black Dance’:  Navigating the Politics of ‘Black’ in Relation to ‘the Dance Object’ and the Body as Discourse,” Critical Arts 20, no. 2 (2006): 22. 6. Program notes from “Republic: Art, Authority, Nationhood.” 7. Soweto refers to the South Western Township in the urban areas of Johannesburg. 8. Following its performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Next Wave Festival in October 2015, Refuse the Hour (2015) was presented at the Perth International Arts Festival 2016, February 12–​14. 9. Michael Neil, “Post-​colonial Shakespeare? Writing away from the Centre,” in Post-​Colonial Shakespeares, eds. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (New York: Routledge, 1998), 168. 10. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds, Post-​Colonial Shakespeares (New York: Routledge, 1998), 3. 11. Loomba and Orkin, Post-​Colonial Shakespeares, 1. 12. David Johnson, “From the Colonial to the Post-​colonial: Shakespeare and Education in Africa,” in Post-​Colonial Shakespeares, 222. 13. Martin Orkin, “Possessing the Book and Peopling the Text,” in Post-​Colonial Shakespeares, 9. 14. Loomba and Orkin, Post-​Colonial Shakespeares, 2. 15. Loomba and Orkin, Post-​Colonial Shakespeares, 2. 16. Margot Hendricks, “ ‘’Tis not the fashion to confess’:  ‘Shakespeare-​Post-​coloniality-​ Johannesburg, 1996,’ ” in Post-​Colonial Shakespeares, 86. 17. “Forgotten Angle Theatre Collective.” 18. Apartheid brought about “policies of separate development and rhetoric” (Freidman, “Mapping,” 1). Post-​apartheid refers to the period following the election of the African National Congress in April 1994. As Friedman suggests, “the new democracy has created space for most aspects of life to be revisited. . . . Dance makers have increasingly challenged to re-​appraise the manner in which dance has been traditionally composed and to review the relevance of the subject matter in the search for a South African voice” (Friedman, “Mapping,” 7). 19. Friedman, “Mapping,” 10. 20. Maxwell Xolani Rani, “Lost Meaning—​New Traditions:  Shaping New Identity in the “New” South Africa: An Overview of Social Traditional African Dance in South African Townships,” in Post-​Apartheid Dance, 79. 21. Friedman, “Mapping,” 7.

Dancing Her Death    495 22. “Dada Masilo: Swan Lake.” 23. Lliane Loots, “Voicing the Unspoken: Culturally Connecting Race, Gender and Nation in Women’s Choreographic and Dance Practices in Post-​Apartheid South Africa,” in Post-​ Apartheid Dance, 11. 24. Christopher Taggart Lewis, “When the Glass Slips:  Building Bridges to Transmodern Identity in the Novels of Santiago Nazarian and Chico Buarque,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2011. 25. These novels were published between 2003 and 2009. 26. Lewis, “When The Glass Slips.” 27. Beyond the theoretical model articulated by Dussel, there are currently four applications of varying thoughts on transmodernism. John Marvin’s doctoral thesis examines the concept of transmodernism in the work of James Joyce (1882–​1941), Wallace Stevens (1879–​ 1955), Thomas Pynchon (b.1937), and Stanley Kubrick (1928–​1999). The case studies outlined in this chapter promote a network and synthesis of interpretations that grew out of and beyond “the alchemy of Nietzsche’s philosophy and the continuing development of scientific thinking.” See John Marvin, “Nietzsche and Transmodernism: Art and Science beyond the Modern in Joyce, Stevens, Pynchon and Kubrick” (PhD diss., State University of New York, Buffalo, 2004), 81. “When the Glass Slips: Building Bridges to Transmodern Identity in the Novels of Santiago Nazarian and Chico Buarque” was presented at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University by Christopher Taggart Lewis in 2011. By 2012, my framework for transmodern dance practices was offered within the parameters of contemporary Italian and French ballet and the revisions of Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces (1923) by Mauro Bigonzetti and Angelin Preljocaj. Through analyzing the bodies of work by both choreographers, transmodern dance practices became synonymous with the complexity of artistic hybridity in movement vocabularies, the choreographic form, and the thematic treatment of narratives. 28. Lewis, “When the Glass Slips,” 34. 29. “Dada Masilo Turns Tchaikovsky on His Head in ‘Swan Lake.’ ” 30. “Dada-​the-​dancing-​swan.” 31. “Dada Masilo: South African Dancer.” 32. Xolani Rani describes pantsula as “the expression of rebellious youth in the townships” (Lost Meaning, 81). Performed in the streets, “the competitive spirit of the pantsula was revealed in the streets—​who could be the flashiest dresser and who could perform the most creative pantsula dance” (Lost Meaning, 81). In the twenty-​first century, the pantsula dance migrated from the townships and into the commercial dance sector. 33. Gerard M. Samuel, “Shifts in the Panstula in a Performance Context in Kwa-​Zulu Natal: A Case Study of Pearl Ndaba’s Golden Dancers between 1998–​2001,” in Footsteps across the Landscape of Dance in South Africa, eds. Jill Waterman and Karen Vedel (South Africa: Armstrong & Associates, 2002), 54. 34. “Dada Masilo Turns Tchaikovsky on His Head in ‘Swan Lake.’ ” 35. “Dada-​the-​dancing-​swan.” 36. Friedman, “Mapping,” 8. 37. Wayne Muller and Hilde Roos, Eoan: Our Story (Milpark: Fourthwall Books, 2013). The Eoan Group embodied the racial segregation, including offering ballet classes as artistic refinement to the coloured communities in the Western Cape. In Post-​Apartheid Dance: Many Bodies Many Voices Many Stories, Friedman offers a historical overview of racial segregation and theater during the mid-​twentieth century.

496   Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel 38. “Dada-​the-​dancing-​swan.” 39. “Dada-​the-​dancing-​swan.” 40. As defined by the Population Registration Act of 1950, four major races were identified as the predominant groups in South Africa in the 1940s: black, colored, Indian, and whites. 41. “Dada Masilo: South African Dancer.” 42. Friedman, “Mapping,” 8. Friedman refers to the “groundbreaking” generation of female choreographers, including Nelisiwe Xaba, Mamela Nyamza, and Dada Masilo; this, however, does not exclusively refer to “black” South Africans being the only ones who have attempted to work with merging two dance forms together. They are not, however, the first dance makers who have bridged African social and traditional dances and Western dance forms. Vincent Mantsoe, Sylvia Glasser, and Gregory Maqoma explored notions of “African Roots” in their work in the 1990s. 43. “Dada Masilo Turns Tchaikovsky on His Head in ‘Swan Lake.’ ” 44. “Dada Masilo Turns Tchaikovsky on His Head in ‘Swan Lake.’ ” 45. “Reworking” is the term proposed by Vida Midgelow, while Giannandrea Poesio proposes the term “revision” as a reconceptualization of the dance, dramatic, and musical narratives of a ballet. See Midgelow, Reworking the Ballet: Counter Narratives and Alternative Bodies (New  York:  Routledge, 2007) and Poesio, “Elusive Narratives:  Mats Ek,” in Decentring Dancing Texts: The Challenge of Interpreting in Dances, ed. Janet Lansdale (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 46. Carmen was first produced at the annual National Arts Festival in 2009. Following some revisions, the work toured France extensively and made appearances in Italy and the United States. Swan Lake is arguably the more seasoned in its existence, and the work has continued to tour France as well as appearing at London’s Sadler’s Wells in June 2014. During its North American tour, Masilo’s Swan Lake received its Canadian premiere in Montreal in January 2016. The work subsequently ran at theaters in the US Northeast in January 2016, visiting the Byham Theater in Pittsburgh, the Fine Arts Center in Boston, and the Joyce Theater in New York to various critical receptions. 47. “Dada Masilo’s Swan Lake.” 48. “Review: Dada Masilo’s ‘Swan Lake.’ ” 49. “Dada Masilo: Swan Lake.” 50. “Dada Masilo, le success.” 51. Carol Chillington Rutter, Enter the Body:  Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (New York: Routledge, 2001), 30. 52. Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia:  Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” in William Shakespeare:  Hamlet (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism), ed. Susanne L. Wofford (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 221. 53. Laertes, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, 4.5.178. (Act 4, Scene 5, Line 176). 54. Philippa Berry, Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings:  Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies (New York: Routledge, 1999), 71. 55. Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 221. 56. Ophelia, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, 4.5.175–​ 177. (Act 4, Scene 5, Lines 174–​175). 57. Ophelia, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, 4.7.141. (Act 5, Scene 1, Line 169). 58. Rutter, Enter the Body, 38.

Dancing Her Death    497 59. Showalter, Representing Ophelia, 223. 60. Ibid.,  227. 61. Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 226. 62. According to Showalter, the 1850s offered new insights into the work undertaken at asylums, including unprecedented insights into photographs of female patients at the Surrey Asylum. Dr.  Hugh Welch Diamond photographed his patients in Ophelia-​like poses, draped with a cloak and a garland on their heads (231). 63. Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 235. 64. Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 237. 65. Rutter, Enter the Body, 28. 66. Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 238. 67. Program notes, The Bitter End of Rosemary. 68. Berry, Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings, 70. 69. Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 222. 70. Berry, Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings, 71. 71. “Dance: Laying bare.” 72. Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 225. 73. Rutter, Enter the Body, 49. 74. Ophelia, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, 2.1.88–​92 (Act 2, Scene 1, Lines 84–​88). 75. Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 220. 76. Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 220. 77. Queen Gertrude, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, 5.1 (Act 5, Scene 1, Line 229). 78. Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 226. 79. Bachelard in Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 225. 80. Chillington Rutter, Enter the Body, 53. 81. Berry, Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings, 71. 82. Program notes, The Bitter End of Rosemary. 83. Ophelia, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, 3.1.158–​164 (Act 3, Scene 2, Lines 154–​160). 84. Within the limitations of this chapter and the case study of The Bitter End of Rosemary, my conclusive remarks and the conceptual application of transmodern dance practices are exclusively made in the light of the points raised in this chapter. As outlined in the introduction to this chapter, Masilo’s productions have also toured North America and Australia.

Bibliography Berry, Philippa. Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies. New York: Routledge, 1999. Dada Masilo:  The Bitter End of Rosemary. July 8, 2014. https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=ucHWVQQMk_​0. Dussel, Enrique. Twenty Theses on Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Farrugia, Kathrina. “Transmodern Dance Practices: Angelin Preljocaj, Mauro Bigonzetti and Revisions of Les Noces (1923).” PhD diss., London Metropolitan University, 2012.

498   Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel Friedman, Sharon, ed. Post-​ Apartheid Dance:  Many Bodies Many Voices Many Stories. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. Guiziou, Frédérique. “Anticodes ne laisse personne indifferent.” Brest Maville, March 17, 2011. http://​www.brest.maville.com/​actu/​actudet_​-​anticodes-​ne-​laisse-​personne-​indifferent_​6-​ 1729485_​actu.Htm. Accessed February 3, 2016. Loomba, Ania, and Martin Orkin, eds. Post-​Colonial Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 1998. Marvin, John. “Nietzsche and Transmodernism: Art and Science beyond the Modern in Joyce, Stevens, Pynchon and Kubrick.” PhD diss., The State University of New York, Buffalo, 2004. Midgelow, Vida. Reworking the Ballet:  Counter Narratives and Alternative Bodies. New York: Routledge, 2007. Poesio, Giannandrea. “Elusive Narratives: Mats Ek.” In Decentring Dancing Texts: The Challenge of Interpreting in Dances, edited by Janet Lansdale, 73–​88. Basingstoke, UK:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Rutter, Carol Chillington. Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage. New York: Routledge, 2001. Samuel, Gerard M. “Shifts in the Panstula in a Performance Context in Kwa-​Zulu Natal: A Case Study of Pearl Ndaba’s Golden Dancers between 1998–​2001.” In Footsteps across the Landscape of Dance in South Africa, edited by Jill Waterman and Karen Vedel, 53–​58. Johannesburg: Armstrong & Associates, 2002. Showalter, Elaine. “Representing Ophelia:  Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” In William Shakespeare:  Hamlet (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism), edited by Susanne L. Wofford, 220–​240. Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Sulcas, Roslyn. “Dada Masilo Turns Tchaikovsky on His Head in ‘Swan Lake.’” New  York Times, February 2, 2016. http://​www.nytimes.com/​2016/​02/​02/​arts/​dance/​dada-​masilo-​ turnstchaikovsky-​on-​his-​head-​in-​swan-​lake.html. Accessed February 3, 2016. Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor. The Oxford Shakespeare:  The Complete Works. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Wofford, Susanne L., ed. William Shakespeare:  Hamlet (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism). Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Chapter 22

Emb odim ent, Re c i pro c i t y, and Recep t i on Shakespeare Adaptations in a Black Atlantic Context Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman

In the centuries-​long tradition of adapting Shakespearean works, those including African and African diaspora histories, environments, and cultural signifiers have enlightened historical realities and nuances within Shakespeare’s texts for audiences. Yet these adaptations also reflect modernist, postcolonial, and contemporary discourses through cross-​cultural encounters and intercultural collaborations. One such encounter includes the authors’ performance as a research project integrating African Caribbean themes and folkloric dance elements into TheaterCNU’s 2014 production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Catalyzed by this project and its process, we frame our work in relation to a range of adaptations incorporating African and African diasporic themes and performance forms. We include Orson Welles’s 1936 Negro Theatre Project’s production known as “Voodoo” Macbeth, Aimé Césaire’s 1969 adaptation Une Tempête, and a more contemporary adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the Classical Theatre of Harlem in 2013, directed by Justin Emeka. Utilizing Paul Gilroy’s concept of the black Atlantic as a space of multiple cultures, ethnicities, and their encounters and exchanges, this chapter questions how this multiplicity of knowledges and histories express itself through twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​ century adaptations of one of the most celebrated colonial writers.1 What significations result from incorporating African and Caribbean folkloric/​vernacular dance and cultural signs within a colonial theatrical text in a postcolonial adaptation? How does this inclusion enlighten, interrogate, challenge, and collaborate with the text? How does the text affect the meaning-​making of the dance and cultural sign? Aligned with dance scholar and historian Susan Foster’s “Manifesto for Dead and Moving Bodies,” we hope

500    Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman that by consorting with bodies of the past, they will help in “deciphering [our] own present predicaments and in staging some future possibilities.”2

Asadata Dafora and Orson Welles’s “Voodoo” Macbeth American actor, director, and producer Orson Welles directed the Negro Theatre Project’s production of Macbeth as part of the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Theatre Project in Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre.3 Commonly known as “Voodoo” Macbeth, Welles set this Macbeth in a post-​revolutionary Haiti under the leadership of Emperor Henri Christophe with a full cast of over one hundred African American actors, including choreographic and musical direction of the witch-​related or “voodoo” and “jungle” denoted scenes by the West African choreographer Asadata Dafora.4 Welles’s “Voodoo” Macbeth holds particular relevance due to its incorporation of Haitian-​specific themes and Africanist drumming, singing, and choreography at a time coinciding with the development of the US modern concert dance tradition. The production had an extremely popular run, including ten weeks at the historic Lafayette Theatre5 in Harlem and then touring the country after a brief run on Broadway, in which it is said to have been attended by over a hundred thousand people.6 The press received the production with varying amounts of praise and criticism, often reflecting more about the critics’ contemporary popular sentiments on race than the production. “Voodoo” Macbeth was both perceived and created largely as spectacle due, in part, to Welles’s construction of a complete sensory experience through the incorporation of sound and lighting effects that Kathleen McLuskie, John Perpener, and others have suggested were more akin to cinema and radio than theater.7 Those sound effects primarily consisted of live drumming by West African drummers and were the signifiers of “voodoo.” In addition to the drummers and the aural environment they created, the “voodoo” element became central to this adaptation through Welles’s manipulation of the text by expanding Hecate’s presence into three scenes (instead of only one), including even the final assertion after Macbeth’s murder that, “The charm’s wound up!” It is the connection of the witches’ supernatural manipulation and “evil” via “voodoo” signifiers that focuses the production, creating the environment for greatest visceral impact and, therefore, presenting Vodou as spectacle.8 Marguerite Rippy addresses the ways in which Welles crafted a production reflective of modernist fantasies of the primitive, specifically through the centrality of the “voodoo” drumming.9 Within the adaptation’s nineteenth-​century Haitian context, the witches became what generously could be called Vodou ounsi, the worshiping practitioners of the religion, who engage in danced ritual performance as part of ceremonial practice. However, just two years after the almost twenty-​year US occupation of Haiti (1915–​1934) in which the production emerged, these “witches” signified more as “voodoo” conjurers

Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception    501 of black magic—​a sensationalized and dark interpretation of the African-​based religion of Haiti.10 We utilize the term “voodoo” encased in quotes, therefore, to maintain its reference to a nonspecific, rather superficial and exoticized idea of “voodoo” associated with black magic and a fulfillment of modernist primitivist fantasies of black culture, instead of the black Atlantic religious system of Haitian Vodou.11 Authors such as Richard Halpern and Richard France assert that this adaptation made Shakespeare available to a largely African American audience and that Welles’s intention was to adapt the play “so that it would live for his audience as it once had for the Elizabethans.”12 The fact that this production became dubbed “Voodoo” Macbeth gestures toward the sensationalist perceptions of “voodoo” in the United States, and racist opinions of a dark, exotic, and dangerous Haiti—​as was Scotland to the Elizabethans. As France continues, racism would inevitably affect a critical response to an all-​black cast at this time, and yet Welles did not work against those factors. In other words, he played into a certain amount of stereotyping.13 However, Rippy demonstrates that the drummers, while central to the production, also consistently maintained their position as the focal point of positive reviews.14 She notes the ambivalent aspects of Welles’s production in its retrospective criticisms as “reenacting white colonial fantasies of race” while simultaneously having toured and employed an all-​black cast through the segregated United States when many people were out of work.15 Benjamin Hilb argues that the elements signifying toward Vodou in Welles’s production constitute “vital symbols of authentic black culture” that have been discredited due to racist reviews by white critics.16 However, whether or not the drumming and choreographic “jungle” scenes constitute “authentic black culture,” they do not represent Haitian Vodou; the argument for authenticity within this production might instead reinscribe fantasies of monolithic otherness, rather than the multiplicity of the black Atlantic.17 In dance scholar Anthea Kraut’s historicization of black vernacular dance within the American concert dance tradition in Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston, she alludes to the ways in which the “primitivist notions about black dancing bodies” in the 1930s “often obscured the legibility of staged African retentions,” perhaps such as those choreographed here by Dafora.18 In Hilb’s desire to counter racist critical responses to Dafora’s choreography, he draws associations between Haitian Vodou ritual ceremony, mythology, and history that he finds spectacular and the sensational, aural, visual, and visceral effects of Welles’s production. While critics and scholars have discussed white fantasy and desire in relation to the production (see Hilb, Manning, McLuskie, Needham, Rippy), one must look to the choreographer of the Africanist scenarios, Asadata Dafora, to further understand the “voodoo” elements in the production within the historical context of the black concert dance tradition in the United States. While the administrative, decision-​making bodies, and technicians of the Negro Theatre Project at this time were white, Welles and producer John Houseman employed black artists, in addition to the cast, in the musical direction and choreographic positions.19 Co-​choreographers included Clarence Yates, an African American dancer trained in ballet, who focused on the ballroom and banquet scenes of the courtly

502    Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman members. Asadata Dafora choreographed “the jungle” scenes and “voodoo” sections, as they are named in the script, associated with the evil conjuring of the witches. Dafora, originally from Sierra Leone, first brought African dance to the US concert stage with his successful Broadway dance opera Kykunkor, or Witch Woman in 1934.20 Dafora grew up attending local festivals as part of his Temne cultural heritage. As an adult he traveled throughout West Africa to study differing traditions, including dancing and drumming. Additionally, he traveled throughout Europe, living in Italy for two years to study voice at La Scala in Milan, as well as teaching dance and performing while living in Berlin.21 He therefore came to the United States with the diverse knowledge that led to his success working within European and African performance traditions on the American stage. Dance scholar John Perpener suggests many of Dafora’s dancers from Kykunkor joined the Federal Theatre Project as the African Dance Troupe and participated in Welles’s Macbeth.22 Nigerian performer Abdul Essen, one of Macbeth’s drummers, for example, held the role of “Witch Doctor” in Kykunkor.23 Unfortunately, film footage and sound recordings of the whole production no longer exist.24 Therefore scholars must rely upon the playscript, promotional materials, photographs, reviews, and others’ texts on the subject. We know that Dafora worked with a large cast, including nine “Voodoo Men,” nine “Voodoo Women,” eight “Witch Men,” and ten “Witch Women,” as listed in the script.25 In collaboration with Welles’s direction, Abe Feder’s lighting design and cues, six drummers, additional sound effects, and set design, Dafora’s choreography allowed Africanist embodied gesture and choreography to emphasize the power and spectacle in the supernatural scenes. For example, in the opening of Act 2, Scene 2, before Hecate enters with Macbeth, three witches hover above the cauldron “in a state of ecstasy” around which “Voodoo women” squat in two concentric semi-​circles (see Figure 22.1). They all rise upon Macbeth and Hecate’s entrance, as a witch proclaims, “By the pricking of my thumbs /​Something wicked this way comes.” The drums commence as Macbeth directs Hecate to “Call ’em,” and Hecate begins, “Round about the cauldron go.” The notes in the script then specify, “The half circle becomes a full one, moves around the cauldron in time to the drums and the chanting.”26 Perpener offers an illustrative imagining of this scene, of the “possessed” and “hysterical” witches, as they are described in the script. The circular choreography, “the celebrants swirling like a whirlpool,” reflects Vodou and Africanist ritual dance practices.27 Specific rhythms, songs/​chants, or dances are not documented, however.28 This may be due in part because the legibility of Africanist dance practices relied heavily on who received the work and therefore the formation of the content in the archive.29 Dance scholar Susan Manning reflects upon two differing critical camps delineated by race at this time. The downtown white press and uptown black press tended to have varying perspectives on and receptions to the work of the WPA’s theater and dance projects in Harlem. For instance, in relation to the African Dance Unit’s production Bassa Moona, coauthored and directed by Kykunkor performer Momodu Johnson in 1936, Manning notes, “Whereas Harlem critics recognized the production’s construction of Africanness, downtown critics assumed its authenticity.”30 At the same time, the ability

Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception    503

Figure 22.1. “Voodoo” Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2, 1936. Federal Theatre Project Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress (016.00.00).

of a work to exist and succeed largely relied on who produced the work and thereby who received credit and visibility within that work. Anthea Kraut excavated Zora Neale Hurston’s contemporaneously staged Caribbean dance performances to reveal that their invisibility within the archive and genealogy of American concert dance was due to “racialized notions of artistry and authenticity, notions that insisted on essential, immutable differences between black folk performers and white ‘creative’ artists.”31 Rippy explores how Welles emerged from his production with the status of creative genius, despite and due to all the labor of contributing black artists. With “Voodoo” Macbeth, the white press was more apt to include racial bias, condescension, fascination, and desire in its reviews of this all-​black production, while the uptown black press focused on the larger picture of the actors’ depth of work, the universality of the portrayals within Shakespeare’s drama, and the production’s success. For example, New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson’s oft-​cited review describes having been so excited by the production that he could not sleep; however, his comments reflect the racism and exoticism of the “voodoo” elements: The witches scenes from “Macbeth” . . . have always worried the life out of the polite tragic stage. . . . But ship the witches down into the rank and fever-​stricken jungles of Haiti, dress them in fantastic costumes, crowd the stage with mad and gabbling

504    Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman throngs of evil worshipers, beat the voodoo drums, raise the voices until the jungle echoes . . . there you have a witches’ scene that is logical and a stunning triumph of theatre art.32

The language Atkinson provides to describe Macbeth’s witch scenes, those same scenes associated with Vodou, includes lack of agency, ensuing chaos, and violence. These qualities constitute sensationalized accounts, stereotypes, and misunderstandings of Haitian Vodou throughout its history and encounters with outsiders.33 Richard Halpern adds, “For whites traveling uptown to see the production, Welles’ savage representation of Haiti might well have blended with their own cultural preconceptions about Harlem itself.”34 The black community was also wary of this kind of characterizing and stereotyping that so often plagued black performance from the view of the white gaze.35 Welles himself recalls years later, in a 1975 interview, the riotous atmosphere on opening night due, in part, to the fear that this production would parody the black cast within the Shakespearean context in a minstrel fashion.36 Ultimately, black critics saw a larger picture of the Negro Theatre Project’s Macbeth. Roi Ottley, of the Amsterdam News, the United States’ longest running “Black-​owned and operated” media outlet currently based in Harlem,37 wrote, The Negro has become weary of carrying the White Man’s blackface burden in the theatre. In Macbeth he has been given an opportunity to discard the bandanna and burnt-​cork casting to play a universal character.38

This excerpt illustrates Ottley’s acknowledgment of the production as a classical Shakespearean work set in an African diaspora/​postcolonial context, performed by an all-​black cast with an artistic team of African and African American choreographers and musical directors. Ottley’s reference to minstrelsy reflected and may have assuaged the fears around parody of those uptown community members.39 Even France’s book, while frequently cited in other texts addressing Welles’s Macbeth and published in 1990, contains language based in racist and sensationalized perceptions and clearly limited knowledge of Vodou. France describes the opening drums as follows: The production began with a pounding of jungle drums. That sound, along with the tropical setting, defined the locale: Haiti, circa 1820. The almost constant beat of the drums underscored the importance of events and accentuated the mounting tragedy. Thus was created a primitive aural violence that went beyond mere ethnicity to speak of an immemorial evil that has existed since the fall of man.40 (italics added for emphasis.)

It is of note here that the drums create an environment of primitivity, violence, and evil in this context, whereas sacred drumming in Africanist traditions constitutes a complex ordering of rhythmic language to access the divine. The qualities France references, therefore, are associated with sensationalized “voodoo,” a misunderstanding of Vodou

Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception    505 ritual performance and its central component of rhythm. France reinscribes this connotation contained within the script’s terse description of “voodoo” drumming and an abstract jungle set.41 No references to knowledge of Haitian Vodou rhythms by the African drummers in the production seem to exist. In fact, no acknowledgment of specific Haitian Vodou elements in the production, or Sierra Leonean or Nigerian for that matter, occur in the script, Welles’s rehearsal notes, or secondary sources.42 In Barbara Leaming’s 1985 biography of Orson Welles, “voodoo practitioners” are mentioned blessing the drums, which makes it seem that the author is conflating “blessings” or rituals around the drums with “voodoo,” even though those gestures and actions most likely were specific to the cultural practices of the drummers who were from Nigeria and Sierra Leone.43 “Voodoo” becomes an all-​encompassing term for any African-​based ritual practice in this context.44 These misapprehensions and absences reflect a slippage of signification for those “discursive and institutional frameworks” receiving the work and arguably gesture toward the use of “voodoo” as a primitivist trope within modernist sensibilities of nostalgia, racism, fantasy, and exoticism.45 Welles’s “Voodoo” Macbeth gained extreme popularity due not only to its exotic and stereotypical representations of Vodou, but also to what Mark Franko refers to as Dafora’s pan-​Africanism.46 As Richard Halpern suggests, “attending a production of Macbeth was thereby transformed into the equivalent of an anthropological field trip [by downtown white audience members].”47 Simultaneously, this staging of Shakespeare at the height and center of the Harlem Renaissance employed around 125 black cast members, embraced the narrative of the Haitian revolution in the wake of America’s invasion and occupation of the country for corporate finance and political means, and created a world through Africanist drumming and choreography directed by Dafora, “one of the most important advocates for and conveyors of African art and influence in 20th century U.S.”48 However, the absence of Haitian-​specific sacred dance culture and history in this project is notable in consideration of the fact that artists like Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston, dancers, choreographers, and anthropologists researching in Haiti and the Caribbean were not consulted. Rippy addresses this exclusion as a further example of the ways in which “Voodoo” Macbeth missed the mark in terms of Haitian representation and may have instead reflected the director’s own “imperialist nostalgia,” albeit a symptom of modernism.49

Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête Welles’s Macbeth reflects a young white director’s Depression-​era modernist adaptation for an all-​black cast and largely black audience, with slippages in signification relating to Africanist embodied practices. Martinican poet and philosopher Aimé Césaire, on the other hand, writing during a period of worldwide colonial collapse and civil rights protest, violence, progress, pan-​Africanism, and Black Power movements in the United States and the Caribbean, produced Une Tempête: d’après “La Tempête” de Shakespeare /​

506    Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman Adaptation pour un Théâtre Nègre (A Tempest:  Based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest /​ Adaptation for a Black Theater). Césaire integrates multiple signs referencing Africanist embodied spiritual practices, including dance, song, and rhythm. This anti-​colonial 1969 textual adaptation, with productions that followed, highlights the colonial encounter with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, focusing on the slave/​master dialectic in the Caribbean environment.50 Césaire’s revisioning of the racial makeup of Caliban, Ariel, and Prospero explicitly reintroduces race into this relationship and ultimately alters the power dynamic between Caliban and Prospero.51 Césaire brought the concept of negritude (négritude) and Africanist cultural influence and power into his text, which included dance-​based cultural signifiers such as Yoruba divinities. Negritude encompasses assertions of African heritage and African cultural identity through shared history and legacy, rather than a certain essentialist racial reality.52 The rupturing of colonialism plays an integral role in this shared history and therefore in the ideological and poetic foundation of negritude and Césaire’s work, as exemplified in A Tempest.53 Césaire’s play, while based in the structure of Shakespeare’s story, becomes his own through textual, structural, and thematic manipulations. For example, Césaire condenses the original text from five acts to three, which A. James Arnold suggests as one of the “formal reminders that we are not to rely on the play’s Shakespearean origins for our understanding of it,” despite its relationship with the original.54 Césaire, however, emphasizes this relationship. For instance, he lists the characters, “as in Shakespeare,” but with “two alterations” and an addition of Eshu, “a black devil-​god.”55 Eshu, an orisha (or divinity) from the Yoruba religion, resides at the intersection of the spiritual and human world and has been perceived as devil-​like because of its association with the color red and its trickster personality, which controls the surprises that fate consistently promises. Upon entering in Act 3, Scene 3, during Ferdinand and Miranda’s wedding celebration, Eshu proclaims himself as “God to my friends, the Devil to my enemies! And lots of laughs for all!”56 While the play’s differences are immediately made apparent, Joan Dayan addresses Césaire’s embrace of “unoriginality” as his recognition of the reciprocal relationship between his own poetics and those of Shakespeare’s. This reciprocity extends throughout the text, and Césaire’s work becomes, in Dayan’s words, “a labor that defies any simple opposition between black and white, master and slave, original and adaptation, authentic and fake.”57 Eshu, who becomes Eleguá/​Elegba in the Cuban Yoruba religion, La Regla de Lucumí, wears both red and black to teach that one must view something from multiple perspectives to truly understand its nature. Like Eshu, Césaire’s text implores its readers to enter from multiple vantage points. With the theme of colonialism at the fore of Césaire’s text, Prospero remains in the colonialist position with Caliban, his “black slave,” along with Ariel, his “mulatto slave.”58 While Shakespeare’s composition includes the relationship of colonizer to colonized, Joseph Khoury specifies the difference between texts in that “Shakespeare was problematizing the colonizer/​colonized relationship for his strictly English (i.e. colonizer) audience, while Césaire was writing for both the colonizers and the colonized.”59 Steve Almquist perceives A Tempest as an inversion of the original text in which

Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception    507 Caliban’s perspective becomes centralized.60 And while Caliban becomes an African diaspora figure, by the time Césaire wrote his text, Almquist maintains, his character already held a place of recognition for “those whose lands had been conquered and whose cultures (and languages) had been ignored or belittled.”61 Upon entering in Act 1, Scene 2, Caliban exclaims, “Uhuru!” a Swahili word meaning freedom, popularly invoked in anti-​colonial uprisings in eastern Africa, especially Kenya, in the early 1960s.62 “Uhuru!” aligns Caliban with not only an Africanist identity, but also a pan-​African ideological agenda of independence and liberty. Césaire constitutes Caliban’s identity through language, while language also shapes Caliban and Prospero’s relationship. After Caliban proclaims, “Uhuru!” and again after Prospero misapprehends and questions his utterance, they engage in an argument over language. Prospero condescends:  “Mumbling your native language again! I’ve already told you, I don’t like it. You could be polite, at least; a simple ‘hello’ wouldn’t kill you.” Caliban resists, retorts emphatically, and the following linguistic sparring ensues: Prospero: Since you’re so fond of invective, you could at least thank me for having taught you to speak at all. You, a savage . . . a dumb animal, a beast I educated, trained, dragged up from the bestiality that still clings to you. Caliban: In the first place, that’s not true. You didn’t teach me a thing! Except to jabber in your own language so that I could understand your orders. . . . Prospero: What would you be without me? Caliban: Without you? I’d be the king, that’s what I’d be, the King of the Island. . . .63

Caliban’s assertion of his kingliness/​authority in this context relates to his African diasporic identity—​a lineage stripped by the colonial encounter—​and his relationship to the Yoruba religion, specifically with the orisha Shango, introduced in the following scene at the top of Act 2, Scene 1, in a song. While language plays a central role in Césaire’s text, Africanist embodied knowledge resounds. Khoury and Dayan describe Shango as the divinity or force representing thunder and lightning, but Shango is also a historic Yoruba king, a healer, representative of male virility, and the divinity ruling the drums and dance. He is one of the most popular orishas in the Yoruba religion in Cuba, La Regla de Lucumí, and the Yoruba religion in Trinidad and Tobago is eponymously named for him. One of Shango’s strengths resides in his strong and agile dancing. While all the orishas dance, Shango’s dance includes jumps and kicks, multiple flying forward rolls, and, perhaps most uniquely to him, strong movements of the arms, symbolically drawing the lightning from the sky down to his genitals. Caliban invokes Shango through song in active moments, for example, while working or when “setting forth to conquer Prospero!” (3.4.52) as in Act 3, Scene 4. Caliban strides through A Tempest as a revolutionary activist. From his entrance with “Uhuru!” in Act 1, Scene 2, to imploring Prospero to call him “X” later on in that same scene, and then to reprimanding Ariel’s passivity in Act 2, Scene 1, Caliban’s voice through Césaire is both Africanist and revolutionary, while invoking the strength

508    Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman of Shango.64 Khoury recognizes the songs to Shango as part of Césaire’s philosophy of negritude. He writes, “This is Césaire’s way of saying that a revolution must be cultural at its core.”65 A Tempest represents the complications of the colonial encounter, and Césaire invokes the question of revolution for his readers and, as Dayan asserts, “its possibility in the contemporary Caribbean.”66 The final invocation of Shango occurs in Act 3, Scene 5, after Caliban laughs off an attempted exorcism by Gonzalo, reflective of colonialist misunderstandings of African diaspora religions, and Prospero suggests that they reconcile: “Come, let’s make peace. We’ve lived together for ten years and worked side by side! Ten years counts for something, after all! We’ve ended up by becoming compatriots.” Caliban responds, “You know very well that I’m not interested in peace. I’m interested in being free! Free, you hear?”67 Caliban continues with a lengthy monologue addressed to Prospero, speaking about the effects of the colonial encounter for both colonizer and colonized. Caliban’s last lines in the script crescendo beyond song to shouting, “Shango marches with strength /​along his path, the sky! /​Shango is a fire-​bearer, /​his steps shake the heavens /​and the earth /​ Shango, Shango, ho!”68 Césaire’s revolution incorporates the embodied knowledges of Africa and its diaspora through religious and cultural practices. His text addresses the complexities and interdependencies present within the colonial encounter, including an adaptation with a major colonizer’s bard. Rather than reifying exotic notions of otherness, as in Welles’s Macbeth, the work engages with the multiple knowledges of the so-​ called colonized within the context of that colonial/​postcolonial context.

Justin Emeka’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Classical Theatre of Harlem) Contemporary actor, writer, director, and capoeirista Justin Emeka, professor of Theatre and Africana Studies at Oberlin College, incorporated cultural signifiers of Africa and its diaspora in the Americas, such as Yoruba spirituality and Capoeira, the Brazilian martial art disguised as song and dance, into his 2013 Shakespeare adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Classical Theatre of Harlem. The production ran for eighteen days in the Richard Rogers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem. In addition to Africanist cultural elements, he reflected the contemporary social-​political relevance of same-​sex partnership in US society by changing Lysander to Lysandra, thus reflecting the culturally rich and diverse traditions of Harlem and the larger United States while remaining loyal to Shakespeare’s text. Emeka, who had previously worked with Shakespeare’s texts, felt it was important for the two traditions—​Shakespeare’s works, their production, and Harlem’s cultural and artistic milieu—​to cooperate. This possibility for reciprocity reflects Césaire’s approach to Shakespeare’s work as well.69 Emeka stated in a personal communication, “Harlem was not just in reverence to Shakespeare’s tradition or vice versa, but they were working together.”70

Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception    509 More similarities to Césaire’s A Tempest exist in Emeka’s production, though not necessarily a conscious homage, due more to the significations of the cultural referent and its reception. Particularly, Exu (Eshu/​Elegba) takes a central role for Emeka in the character of Puck (see Figure 22.2). Imagining A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Harlem, “a mecca of African cultural convergence,” Emeka embraced Harlem as a way to understand the spirit-​world of the play, and this became one of his points of entry into the production. How relevant, then, that the lord of the crossroads—​the divinity who is called upon first and last in Yoruba-​based ceremonial context throughout the Americas, the orisha who exists between the earthly and the spiritual realms, who opens or closes the way, a trickster who teaches his adherents to look at a situation from

Figure  22.2.  Puck as Exu/​Eshu amidst the fairies in Justin Emeka’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Photo by Lelund Durond Thompson.

510    Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman multiple perspectives to find understanding—​should lead Emeka and the audience into A Midsummer Night’s Dream. However, Emeka also entered the play through the development of the fairies’ movement style. As a Capoeira practitioner for twenty years, Emeka feels that this form, philosophy, and history inevitably inform his work. An embodiment of “African traditions reimagined in the New World,” he integrated Capoeira into the movement vocabulary of the fairies. Combined with Brooklyn-​based choreographer Lakai Worell of Purelements and his blending of West African dance, hip-​hop, and Western contemporary approaches, the fairies developed a movement style embodying the multiplicity of the black Atlantic present in Harlem. Emeka stated that he began to understand the play through the fairies and, therefore, through this multifaceted movement language. The emphasis on movement in this production came through immediately in the audition process. Emeka spoke to us about the movement-​based call-​back audition for the fairies. Some of those actors were vying for lead parts, so he had to convince them of the importance of movement within his production. Within rehearsal videos and photos, one sees the dynamic range of movement, as well as culturally specific gestural vocabulary incorporated into the staging and choreographed in relation to the text. In Emeka’s “Director’s Journal,” he states, “sound becomes rhythm, movement becomes dance.”71 The African diasporic vocabularies reference African roots and a dynamic multiplicity of black Atlantic identity expressed through movement, color, sound, and relationship. The multiplicity of the movement forms mirrors the multi-​ethnic, multi-​racial, multi-​national cast, in addition to the community for which the production ran. Zainab Jah, an actor of Sierra Leonean descent from Britain who portrayed Titania, said of the cast in an online interview, “it just reflects New  York, and especially, Harlem so clearly.”72 Emeka noted that while in the past it had been progressive to simply include actors of color in productions, now it is “even more important to incorporate the culture of black and brown people into how you tell the story.”73 This sentiment reiterates the ways in which Emeka’s vision of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Africanist cultural context places movement, rhythm, and spirit at the center of the production. Emeka also spoke of the importance of the theater reflecting its audience, and he felt the positive anticipation and reception of the production by the Harlem community. These three adaptations of Shakespeare’s works, which included Africanist cultural elements for various audiences at different times in the twentieth and twenty-​ first centuries, resulted in differing levels of signification for their audiences and actors. Additionally, their relationship to the original varied, based on the time and place in which the productions existed, the specificity of cultural elements incorporated, and the perspective from which the director engaged with both original and adaptation. Consequently, in considering the inclusion of African Caribbean embodied traditions and visual signifiers within the staging of TheaterCNU’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, we too had questions and planning at hand regarding relationship, reception, and embodiment.

Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception    511

Practice as Research: Pericles, Prince of Tyre The inspiration for director Denise Gillman’s and choreographer Ann Mazzocca’s74 2014 African Caribbean adaptation of Pericles, Prince of Tyre at Christopher Newport University (CNU) came from Gillman seeing Mazzocca’s performance of “Ocean, Ogou, Ossain,” a choreography embodying an arc of energy representative of African Caribbean divinities of the ocean and earthly elements. This dance, choreographed and performed by Mazzocca, embodied the physical spirit of the ocean through expansive wave-​like movements of Yanvalou and Parigol, transitioning into the more contained and syncopated Mayi from the Haitian folkloric repertoire of Rada dances.75 With the accompaniment of a percussionist who also morphed through the various rhythms, Mazzocca physicalized the ever-​changing nature of the seas, which can be gentle and calm and yet, seemingly without warning, turn to forceful undulations indicative of the power the ocean can wield. As Linda McJannet asserts in relation to the physical theater adaptations of Pericles Redux and The Tempest Replica in Chapter 24 of this volume, Mazzocca’s work demonstrated to Gillman that “it is possible to combine dance and storytelling in ways that make movement the medium, not the servant, of the story.”76 The authors launched their project from this perspective. Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, is a small liberal arts public state school with about five thousand students. The population of CNU is almost completely in-​state and about three-​quarters white. Residing in a relatively conservative Christian location with a strong Christian religious affiliation on campus, we knew challenges would arise in presenting African Caribbean folklore within a Shakespearean context, and that we must diligently face questions regarding the diversity or lack of diversity of the cast, perceptions and potential misperceptions of the audience, a relative lack of culturally specific knowledge of African Caribbean folkloric traditions by the audience, and concerns about misappropriation. During the pre-​production process, Gillman, Mazzocca, and dramaturge Laura Grace Godwin explored several questions in order to make unified creative decisions. We asked, how can Pericles be adapted from its Greek and medieval cultural roots so it embraces the African Caribbean folkloric traditions of Haiti and Cuba? Where specifically should dance and music be woven together? What parts of the text should be adapted or cut? Since Mazzocca’s choreography and performance of “Ocean, Ogou, Ossain” had inspired the collaboration, the movements of Yemayá, Cuban Yoruba orisha of the ocean, and Yanvalou would dominate the major tempest scene of Act 3, Scene 1. The only place in the text where dance is specifically mentioned is Act 2, Scene 3, when King Simonides, after the jousting and feasting, calls for the visiting knights to dance. The joyful and bawdy nature of King Simonides’ court at Pentapolis led Mazzocca to suggest a Haitian Rara. Mazzocca then identified the beginning of Act 1, Scene 1, as a possible movement opportunity, where Pericles comes ashore on the banks of Tarsus

512    Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman and finds the famine-​ravaged Tarsus citizens crawling on the ground, weak with hunger and begging for food. After making decisions regarding the adaptation’s gen­ eral scope and where to include dance, the task of making textual cuts and the design process began. An overarching question concerned deciding upon guiding principles that would determine the cutting and/​or adapting of the text. Like our predecessors, Welles, Césaire, and Emeka, in their adaptations of Macbeth, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we considered making radical changes to the original Shakespearean text. All three of their works hinged on shifting the importance and centrality of the witches, Caliban, and Puck, respectively, to serve their unique visions. Whereas their adaptations hinged upon characters, our transformation would hinge upon place. In moving forward, the team decided our adaptation would emphasize the timelessness and mythic aspects of the story, while carefully weaving in the Haitian and Cuban folkloric dance, music, and cultural traditions, including songs and visual symbols of vévé to heighten the scenic and sensorial dimensions of the text and space, move the plot forward, and place Pericles in a specific world of which we had knowledge and from where we drew inspiration. One of the main challenges faced during the process of incorporating African Caribbean folkloric components into the design included ensuring that the cultural elements would be incorporated respectfully and not just co-​opted for their cultural uniqueness. In addition to weekly production and design meetings, Gillman, Mazzocca, and Godwin began to meet and discuss questions of representation. These informal gatherings allowed for an acknowledgment of the tricky nature of incorporating a cultural form outside of the context of Shakespeare’s world, and also, our contemporary CNU world. In these deliberations, we were very aware of the lessons learned from Welles’s “Voodoo” Macbeth and its misappropriation and misrepresentation of Haitian cultural and sacred traditions. In addition to her dramaturgical work, Godwin crafted a salon speaker series before each performance. Godwin invited speakers across many academic disciplines to highlight some of the visual aspects, textual themes and symbols, and the African Caribbean folkloric traditions in song, dance, and music explored within our Shakespearean adaptation. The crux of our collaboration and the presence of Caribbean vocabulary and imagery within the play came primarily in the form of music and dance. Certain scenes evoked a particular natural element, energetic quality, or action for which expression through specific Haitian and/​or Cuban folkloric songs and dances resonated.77 In the very opening of the production, before Gower addresses the audience, she sits center stage with a conch to her ear. The cast quietly enters in darkness to sing “Wongol o w’ale”—​the imagined song coming from the sea, from the conch. This Vodou song references the lwa, or divinity, Wongol, a former king of Angola, acknowledged largely in the region of Haiti known as the Artibonite, where the well-​known Vodou communities (lakou) of Souvenance Mystique, Badjo, and Soukri Danach reside.78 The themes of loss, a changed land, and longing for return have made this song popular among Haitian diaspora communities.79

Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception    513 Wongol o w’ale, ki lè w’ap vini wè m’ankò w’ale Ki lè w’ap vini wè m’ankò Payi a chanje Ki lè w’ap vini wè m’ankò wale Wongol o you’re leaving, when are you coming to see me again? When are you coming to see me again? The country has changed/​is changing. When are you coming to see me again?

While the song references a specific lwa, or Haitian divinity, it also both acknowledges the Haitian cultural community in which Mazzocca has participated while alluding to the fundamental themes of Pericles. The next opportunity for the use of specific folkloric dance and song emerged on the island of Tarsus in Act 1, Scene 4. In this scene Cleon, the governor of Tarsus, and his wife Dionyza lament with their starving people the blight and famine that have befallen their land for several years. O Dionyza, Who wanteth food, and will not say he wants it, Or can conceal his hunger till he famish? (1.4.10–​12)

As Dionyza surveys the citizens of Tarsus as they lay dying on the steps of their palace, Cleon speaks of Tarsus’s long history and reminds the citizens of their days of glory and then contrasts it with their current devastation. Cleon observes, “Here many sink, yet those which see them fall /​Have scarce strength left to give them burial” (1.4.48–​49). It is these specific given circumstances of the famine and the physical decline of the starved citizens of Tarsus that led Mazzocca to choose the Cuban Yoruba orisha, or divinity, Babalu Aiyé—​also known as Asojano in the Cuban Arará religion—​to realize this scene. Babalu Aiyé/​Asojano embodies society’s illnesses on an epidemic scale. For this scene we chose the song “Sara Godemo,” from the Arará religion, which comes from the Fon African nation. In the Arará religion, the spiritual/​divine elements called vodunes constitute the root word for Vodou as well. This generic song can be sung for all vodunes but is often evoked in relation to Asojano. Asojano, Father or King of the Arará people, holds the weight of the world on his shoulders, carries disease, and also connects to the earth. Sara godemo sara gode Sara titi namu Saragode Agromito nawado ojúá (ohunng) Sara godemo sara gode (These two lines are sung an octave lower) Sara titi namu Saragode Agromito nawado ojúá.80

514    Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman The rhythm of the song corresponds to the dancers’ movements, which include a double accent of the shoulders and deliberate, syncopated steps. Agricultural symbolism infuses the dance with a patting and spreading motion of the hands with elbows bent, or taking imagined seeds from one’s pocket and releasing them to the earth. Sometimes Asojano’s dance includes stumbling in his illness—​but the feet  always maintain the syncopated rhythm of Arará with a step on counts one, two, and a pause on three of the phrase, included in this scene as four dancers enter. We incorporated a sense of solemnity and sacredness to this scene through the a capella “Sara Godemo,” the sound of the dancers’ steps as they entered, and intimate postures leaning against one another, with a sense of anonymity through the donning by the dancers and actors of translucent shrouds. Percussionist Dale Paul Lazar added sparse bell accompaniment. Within the entire text of Pericles, only one specific reference to the characters’ dancing exists. This reference comes in the stage directions of Act 2, Scene 3, when King Simonides, overseeing the jousting feast, commands the visiting knights and ladies of the Pentapolis court to dance. The text gives very few descriptive clues to the nature and style of this dance except to say it’s a “soldier’s dance” (2.3.95) and its music will be loud. Much of the inspiration for using the Haitian Rara dance for this specific moment came from the personality of the Pentapolis kingdom and its ruler, King Simonides. One of the first observations Pericles makes about the kingdom and its people comes after he has been washed upon the Pentapolis shore. While watching the fishermen working from afar he observes, “mirth becomes their labors” (2.1.95). These qualities of living and celebrating are echoed again by King Simonides as he addresses the knights after the jousting match, “Prepare for mirth, for mirth becomes a feast” (2.3.7). Within this mirthful and happy kingdom, there is also a strong quality of bawdiness, which is often expressed by King Simonides and Thaisa, his daughter. The best example of this quality comes during the feast scene, where Thaisa makes the following sexual comments about Pericles in an aside to the audience. By Juno, that is queen of marriage, All viands that I eat do seem unsavory, Wishing him my meat. (2.3.30–​32)

Rara seemed to reflect Pentapolis’s combination of mirthful joy and bawdy sexuality. Rara, a processional form of dance, music, and singing, occurs during the season of Lent for forty days after carnival (kanaval) leading up to Easter weekend in Haiti. The form appears secular due to its mostly public movement through the streets and the reveling of its participants. However, it has connections to Vodou religiosity and employs subversive, political, and bawdy, even obscene, lyrics in its songs. Rara bands fill the streets and travel great distances to visit important political and religious figures in the community, and sacred sites in the landscape.81 The movements for the dance in this scene came from the folkloric performance genre of Rara as taught to Mazzocca by Haitian folkloric educators and choreographers based in New York City, including Mikerline Pierre, Peniel Guerrier, Lionel St. Surin, and Julio Jean.82 The entire cast

Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception    515 danced this section, creating the crowded sensibility of Rara on the streets. The dancers focused their movements in the hips through a winding circular motion called gouyad in Haitian Creole, pulsing forward and back, twisting side to side, with accents or hits in one direction and its opposite. The dancers interacted with each other and the audience in a celebratory, flirtatious, and playful way. While some of the movements included large outstretched arms with jumping and hopping, other moments evoked intimacy through close proximity and more subtle isolations. The dance literally moves Pericles and Thaisa to the climax of the scene in which they slow their dance to a snail’s pace, their bodies pressed against one another, as King Simonides shouts for them to “Unclasp! Unclasp!” (2.3.107). Perhaps the most substantial moment for the sounds and movements of Caribbean folklore to help move the plot forward and layer the performance with nonverbal embodied representation came from the tempest dance in Act 3, Scene 1. Gower moves the story forward nine months. Thaisa is pregnant, and Pericles receives word to urgently return home. Pericles sets sail for Tyre and encounters a great tempest. The tempest begins with Gower’s narration at the top of Act 3. He introduces all the different parts of the storm and their effects on the ship. Each element is activated through his utterance, and eventually he creates the scene for the storm’s full entrance at the top of Act 3, Scene 1. And so to sea. Their vessel shakes On Neptune’s billow; half the flood Hath their keel cut: but fortune, moved, Varies again; the grizzled north Disgorges such a tempest forth That, as a duck for life that dives, So up and down the poor ship drives. (3.1.44–​50)

Gower implores the audience to “In your imagination hold /​This stage the ship, upon whose deck /​The sea-​tossed Pericles appears to speak” (3.1.60). Each sailor enters to sit at the edge of a wedge, rocking it to embody the building waves, while Pericles takes his position, standing in the center of the imagined ship. Cuban Yemayá and Haitian Yanvalou movement vocabularies formed the choreographic foundation for this scene. Yemayá, mother of all the orishas, represents the ocean and manifests its calm state to the stormy, rough seas. Yanvalou’s association with the lwa Danbala Wedo and his female counterpart Ayida Wedo suggests an association with water as well. Danbala, a snake that represents the ancient male creative force, together with Ayida, a rainbow, create a sexual totality whereby he connects the oceans of the heavens to the streams and rivers on Earth, while she connects the oceans of the Earth to the streams and rivers of the heavens.83 Pericles calls out to ask for the waves to recede and for relief from the storm at the top of Act 3, Scene 1, yet the waves deepen and the choreography of the tempest’s waves commences.

516    Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman The god of this great vast, rebuke these surges, Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou that hast Upon the winds command, bind them in brass, Having called them from the deep! O, still Thy deaf ’ning dreadful thunders; gently quench Thy nimble sulphurous flashes! —​O, how Lychorida, How does my queen? —​Thou storm, venomously Wilt thou spit all thyself? The seaman’s whistle Is as a whisper in the ears of death, Unheard. —​ Lychorida! —​ Lucina, O. (3.1.1–​10)

In coordination with each “O” that Pericles shouts, representing his physical vulnerability as the ship shifts with the intensity of the rising waves, dancers representing those waves enter from the voms surging into the performance space with a Yemayá-​inspired turn, full skirt rising up on the diagonal and then crashing down. Following their entrance, the dancers continue around the central ship, diving forward and scooping their arms up, drawing their skirts to a peak toward Pericles, then falling away in a pendulum swing reflective of the 6/​8 time signature, repeatedly dancing the first wave-​like movement of Yemayá’s tratao, her liturgical order of dances, rhythms, and songs (see Figure 22.3).

Figure 22.3.  Dancers surround Pericles with wave-​like movement of Yemayá. Photo by Dale Pickard.

Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception    517 Once all five dancers enter, they continue to circle Pericles, individually turning now so that the skirts are drawn out laterally from momentum and the dancers manipulate them with small up-​and-​down flicks of their wrists to create a rippling motion. Pericles continues to plead for the easing of Thaisa’s birthing pains on their “dancing boat.” Divest patroness and midwife gentle To those that cry by night, convey thy deity Aboard our dancing boat; make swift the pangs Of my queen’s travails! (3.1.11–​14)

As Lychorida enters with the newborn baby, the dancers drop to their knees and sway their torsos laterally with skirts in their outstretched arms to create a figure-​eight wave-​ like motion, maintaining the tension of the presence of the storm while also allowing for an intimacy of this moment when Pericles meets his newborn daughter and learns of his wife’s death. At that moment, Pericles cries, “How? How, Lychorida?. . . oh you gods! /​ Why do you make us love your goodly gifts /​And snatch them straight away? . . . (3.1.19–​ 24).” Again, the language of the cry creates a rise and rhythm for which the dancers respond with movements of Yanvalou. Yanvalou movement involves a wave-​like undulation of the dancers’ spines sequencing through their arms and out their fingertips. Upon hearing of Thaisa’s apparent death, the sailors demand she be thrown overboard in keeping with maritime superstitions. Pericles reluctantly agrees and places Thaisa in a wooden coffin with jewels and a letter proclaiming her royal birth in the hope she will receive a suitable burial. Thaisa’s body, carried in on a stretcher, then lies in the center of the performance space on the wedge. The drumming settles down, and the dancers again move to a seated position on the floor, dropping their skirts, and gesturing in slow motion, seemingly stretching time. The movements for Yemayá include manipulations of the skirt as a prop to represent the ocean. Both male and female dancers in our production spun and swept their skirts forward and backward and side to side, initiated by lateral movement of the torso to replicate the motion of the waves. The dancers moved around Pericles and the sailors, creating the energetic momentum of the rising and tempestuous seas, during which Thaisa appears to die after giving birth. The sailors throw her overboard in her wooden coffin and Pericles ultimately shipwrecks onto the island of Tarsus.

Conclusion While the motivations, approaches, and settings for the adaptations considered in this chapter vary, they serve as contrasting ways in which Africanist themes and vocabularies signify in the context of Shakespearean text, narrative, and colonial history. Shakespeare’s service of colonialist agendas exists and has received considerable scholarly attention.84 Despite criticism, over the past 400 years Shakespeare’s texts have also

518    Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman been adapted worldwide in differing historical, social, political, artistic, and educational contexts, attesting to the works’ ability to inspire artists to hold up a mirror to multiple cultures and histories. While this relationship can be problematical due to colonialist histories and Shakespeare’s position as a most celebrated colonial writer, the adaptations explored in this chapter demonstrate multiple ways in which Africanist presences and embodied knowledges have added layers of meaning for certain audiences, while creating slippages in signification for others. In these adaptations, however, Africanist embodied knowledges have offered a poetics of signification, communicating, albeit in differing ways, to audiences, while offering the expressive action of bodies in motion to highlight ideological, spiritual, supernatural, fantastical, personal, historical, and contemporary realities.

Notes 1. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 2. Susan Leigh Foster, ed. Choreographing History (Bloomington; Indianapolis:  Indiana University Press, 1995), 6. 3. John O.  Perpener, “Asadata Dafora Horton (1890–​1965),” Dance Heritage Coalition, http://​www.danceheritage.org/​treasures/​dafora_​essay_​perpener.pdf, accessed July 19, 2015; Richard France, ed., Orson Welles on Shakespeare: The W.P.A. and Mercury Theatre Playscripts (London: Routledge, 2001). 4. Asadata Dafora was born as Asadata Dafora Horton in Freetown, Sierra Leone, with the last name of his grandfather’s master in Nova Scotia (Perpener, “Asadata Dafora Horton”) but in his most well-​known production Kykunkor (1934) the program lists him as Asadata Dafora. Susan Manning and other scholars thus refer to him as such. Susan Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance:  Race in Motion (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 235. His listing in the Federal Theatre Project’s production notebook of the New York production of Macbeth includes Horton. 5. The Lafayette Theatre opened in 1912 and became desegregated a year later, becoming the center for black theater in New York City. 6. Marguerite Rippy reports that Federal Theatre promotional materials suggest that 150,000 people attended the production in New  York. Marguerite Rippy, “Black Cast Conjures White Genius: Unraveling the Mystique of Orson Welles’s “Voodoo” Macbeth,” in Weyward Macbeth:  Intersections of Race and Performance, eds. Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 83–​90. Susan Quinn reports this same number on the production’s tour. She states, “In Bridgeport, Hartford, and Chicago, in Indianapolis, Detroit, Cleveland, and Dallas, a total of 150,000 people of all races sat together to watch an unprecedented all-​black Shakespeare production.” Susan Quinn, The Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 111. Richard Halpern suggests that over a hundred thousand viewers had seen this production after its run in Harlem and then on tour. Richard Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 35. 7. Kathleen McLuskie, “Shakespeare Goes Slumming: Harlem ’37 and Birmingham ’97,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, eds. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen

Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception    519 (Malden, MA:  Blackwell, 2005), 262. John O. Perpener III, African-​American Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 117. 8. In Haitian American poet-​artist-​anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse’s Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-​Quake Chronicle, she reflects on how Vodou is “continually maligned by those whose knowledge is restricted to popular images that favor the macabre. . . . the religion remains trapped in stereotypes, making it extremely difficult to dispel geopolitically driven myths too entrenched in the spectacular.” Gina Athena Ulysse, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-​Quake Chronicle (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015), 89. 9. Rippy, “Black Cast Conjures White Genius,” 83–​90. 10. Vodou has historically been sensationalized in both early twentieth-​century written accounts and American media representations since the 1932 release of the film White Zombie. Adam M. McGee writes about “voodoo’s enduring appeal for the genre of horror [ . . . ] voodoo is used to add flavor and induce a particular mood. The appeal of voodoo (the imagined religion) in horror is not surprising, since for Europeans and white Americans, Vodou (the real religion) has always been greeted as a kind of horror. Early twentieth-​ century accounts, published mostly as travel journals and read widely, echoed Moreau de Saint-​Méry’s depiction of Haitian Vodou as grotesque and carnivalesque, even insinuating that Vodouisants performed human sacrifices.” Adam McGee, “Haitian Vodou and Voodoo: Imagined Religion and Popular Culture,” Studies in Religion/​Sciences Religieuses 41, no. 2 (2012): 240. Elizabeth McAlister comments on “sensationalized descriptions” of Afro-​Caribbean “mystical arts” in “Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-​Whites:  The Race and Religion of Zombies,” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 459. Andrew Apter refers to sensationalized accounts of Vodou, particularly in Wade Davis’s search for the zombie in The Serpent and the Rainbow in “On African Origins: Creolization and Connaissance in Haitian Vodou,” American Ethnologist 29, no. 2 (May 2002): 233–​260. See also Bryan Senn’s Drums O’ Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema (Baltimore, MD: Luminary Press, 1998). 11. Gilroy’s concept of the black Atlantic brings attention to the multiplicity of cultures and encounters that make up Haitian Vodou—​not only a syncretized religion between African and European religious traditions, but also containing multiple primarily West and West Central African lineages as well. The Library of Congress changed the official spelling of Vodou in 2012 to reflect the accepted spelling and pronunciation by Vodou practitioners and scholars. 12. Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns, 35. France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare, 14. 13. Ibid., 13. 14. Rippy, “Black Cast Conjures White Genius,” 86. 15. Ibid., 84, 89. 16. Benjamin Hilb, “Afro-​Haitian-​American Ritual Power: Vodou in the Welles-​FTP Voodoo Macbeth,” Shakespeare Bulletin 32, no. 4 (2014): 651. Hilb takes this approach one step further to suggest that contemporary critical discourses around the production reinscribe these biased analyses, thus continuing to discredit the Vodou elements as primitive and racist. Ibid., 653. 17. Anthea Kraut, in Choreographing the Folk:  The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston, describes how various representations of the black vernacular in staged dancing in American performance during this period often resulted in questions around authenticity and ownership. She later invokes cultural critic Robin Kelley’s assertion that terms

520    Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman like authenticity police “the boundaries of modernism” through “race, class, and gender hierarchies.” Anthea Kraut, Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 13 and 211. 18. Ibid., 12. 19. Houseman was a friend of Rose McClendon, who was directing the WPA’s Negro Theatre Project. She was a well-​known African American actress, having performed in Porgy and Bess and the Pulitzer Prize–​winning In Abraham’s Bosom. Houseman was known for working with black artists because of his production of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Shortly after the Negro Theatre Project was established, McClendon died (Perpener, African American Concert Dance, 115). Since this left Houseman as the sole producer, Rippy quotes Simon Callow from his 1997 biography, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu, vol. 1, noting how Houseman tried to alleviate charges of racism by dividing the work of the Negro Theatre Unit into “work by, for and with black actors” and “classical work performed by black actors but staged and designed by white artists” (Rippy, “Black Cast Conjures White Genius,” 84). 20. Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance, 46. Manning notes that Dafora referred to his performance as a “native African opera.” 21. Ibid., 45. Maureen Needham refers to the Temini, rather than Temne. Maureen Needham, “Kykunkor, or Witch Woman:  An African Opera in America,” in Dancing Many Drums:  Excavations in African American Dance, ed. Thomas DeFrantz (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 237. 22. Perpener, “Asadata Dafora Horton,” 2, and Perpener, African American Concert Dance, 115. Manning refers to members of the African Dance Unit of the Lafayette Theatre participating in Welles’s Macbeth. Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance, 84. 23. Needham in DeFrantz, Manning with citation from Lincoln Kirstein, Rippy, Hilb, and the Internet Broadway Database refer to Essen, while Franko, Perpener, and Daphne Lamothe spell his last name Assen. “Abdul” without his last name is listed in Welles’s playscript. 24. Currently, the last four minutes of Welles’s “Voodoo” Macbeth exists in video form in the public domain, which has been extracted from a US government documentary about Depression-​era African American employment called We Work Again. This excerpt, however, does not contain dance or African or Haitian drumming. National Film Preservation Foundation, http://​www.filmpreservation.org/​preserved-​films/​screening-​room/​voodoo-​ macbeth, accessed July 27, 2015. 25. France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare, 38. 26. “Federal Theatre Project, production notebook, Macbeth script page  40,” Library of Congress, http://​memory.loc.gov/​cgi-​bin/​ampage, accessed May 3, 2016. 27. Perpener, African American Concert Dance, 119. Brenda Dixon Gottschild, “Crossroads, Continuities, and Contradictions:  The Afro-​Euro-​Caribbean Triangle,” in Caribbean Dance from Abakua to Zouk:  How Movement Shapes Identity, ed. Susanna Sloat (Gainsville:  University Press of Florida, 2002), 3–​10, and Brenda Dixon Gottschild, “First Premises of an Africanist Aesthetic,” in Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 11–​20. 28. Hilb, “Afro-​ Haitian-​ American,” 655, and Marguerite Rippy, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects:  A Postmodern Perspective (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 73. A Welles archive exists at the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan that may have further documentation of Welles’s process in creating this production, but has very limited visual documentation of the performance.

Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception    521 29. In discussing modern dance of the 1930s, Mark Franko makes a clear delineation between a dance and its effect upon its audience as constituting that audience’s subjectivity. Mark Franko, “Nation, Class, and Ethnicities in Modern Dance of the 1930s,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 4 (1997): 475–​476. 30. Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance, 90. 31. Kraut, Choreographing the Folk, 210. 32. Brooks Atkinson quoted in Quinn, Furious Improvisation, 110; Perpener, African American Concert Dance, 119; France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare, 14. 33. For more on this history of stereotyping and sensationalism of Haiti and Vodou, see McAlister, “Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-​Whites”; McGee, “Haitian Vodou and Voodoo”; and Ulysse, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives. 34. Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns, 37. 35. France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare, 13; Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns, 37; Rippy, “Black Cast Conjures White Genius,” 87. 36. “Rare 1975 Orson Welles Interview on His All-​African American ‘Voodoo Macbeth’ (1936),” https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=EgKhU9Dgs3g, accessed April 17, 2016. This public perception is also detailed in PBS’s 1996 documentary The Battle over Citizen Kane. 37. New York Amsterdam News, http://​amsterdamnews.com/​about/​, accessed May 3, 2016. 38. Quinn, The Furious Improvisation, 110. 39. Rippy, Orson Welles, 75. 40. France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare,  32–​33. 41. Kate Ramsey explores the fetishization of Vodou drums during the process of their destruction and collection by marines during the US occupation in Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law:  Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2011), 118–​176. 42. Barbara Leaming and Susan Quinn briefly mention the knowledge of “voodoo” by some of the drummers, which includes cursory mention of a drummer employing a “voodoo doll” toward a negative reviewer. Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles: A Biography (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 108. Perpener also describes this sensational story to illustrate the mythology surrounding the Welles production. Perpener, African American Concert Dance, 120. 43. Manning describes Abdul Essen as a practicing Muslim (Modern Dance, Negro Dance, 48). 44. Hilb argues that rather than this misrepresenting Vodou, it reflects the multiplicity of West African cultural lineages present within the religion. His argument embraces an Africanist philosophical approach of intra-​African syncretism, a concept acknowledging the practice of multiple allegiances within African religious practices, as well as the sharing of African cultural traditions, languages, and practices that dance anthropologist Yvonne Daniel describes in Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé (Urbana-​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 3–​4. 45. Foster, Choreographing History, 5. The assertion of “voodoo” as a primitivist trope reflects Rippy’s argument most specifically, while also standing upon Kraut’s and Manning’s research from this period. 46. Franko, “Nation, Class, and Ethnicities,” 476. The Haitian folkloric dance tradition was not codified for the stage until the 1940s in Haiti. See Lois Wilcken and Kate Ramsey citations in bibliography. Jean Leon Destiné, the Haitian dancer, choreographer, and researcher who helped to develop the Haitian folkloric dance performance repertoire, came to the United States in the 1940s to establish relationships with internationally

522    Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman renowned dance artists, choreographers, anthropologists, and innovators in dance, including Asadata Dafora. Millery Polyné, “‘To Carry the Dance of the People Beyond’: Jean Léon Destiné, Lavinia Williams, and Danse Folklorique Haitienne,” in Rhythms of the Afro-​Atlantic World: Rituals and Remembrances, eds. Mamadou Diouf and Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2010), 136–​157. 47. Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns, 37. 48. Hilb, “Afro-​Haitian-​American,”  664. 49. Rippy, referring to bell hooks’ concept of imperialist nostalgia, “Welles’s ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth,” 690. Joyce Aschenbrenner, in Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life, notes that Dunham attempted to create a ballet based on the life of Henri Christophe, but was discouraged because of Welles’s Macbeth two years earlier. She therefore suggests the discrepancy between the embrace of a Europeanist presentation of African American culture and history and what would have been a more accurate representation of Haitianness through Dunham’s interpretation. Joyce Aschenbrenner, Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life (Urbana-​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 119. 50. Jenni Ramone “‘Downright unsaxogrammatical’? Do Postcolonial Adaptations Contest, or Reinforce Shakespeare’s Canonical Status?” in Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance, eds. Sarah Annes Brown, Robert I. Lublin, and Lynsey McCulloch (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 177. A. James Arnold, “Césaire and Shakespeare:  Two Tempests” Comparative Literature 30 (1978): 237. 51. Ramone, “ ‘Downright unsaxogrammatical’?” 177. 52. Joseph Khoury, “The Tempest Revisited in Martinique:  Aimé Césaire’s Shakespeare,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6 (2006): 27. Thomas A. Hale states that Césaire developed his concept of négritude while in Paris in the 1930s as a response to the policy of assimilation in which one’s African heritage had no value in France. Thomas A. Hale, “Aimé Césaire: A Bio-​Bibliographical Note,” Callaloo 17 (1983): 134. 53. Steve Almquist, “NOT QUITE THE GABBLING OF ‘A THING MOST BRUTISH’ Caliban’s Kiswahili in Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest,” Callaloo 29, no. 2 (2006): 588. 54. Arnold, “Césaire and Shakespeare,” 238. 55. Aimé Césaire, A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (New  York:  Ubu Repertory Theater Publications, 1985, 1992). All subsequent quotations from Césaire’s work are from this edition unless otherwise specified. 56. Ibid., 47. 57. Joan Dayan, “Playing Caliban: Césaire’s Tempest,” in Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice, ed. Sarah Lawall (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 142. 58. Ibid. 59. Khoury, “The Tempest Revisited,” 22. 60. Almquist, “NOT QUITE THE GABBLING,” 593. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 587; Dayan, “Playing Caliban,” 149. 63. Césaire, A Tempest, I.2.11–​12. 64. Almquist includes a reference to an interview with Césaire in which he discusses the US civil rights movement as influential in his writing of A Tempest including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers. Almquist, “NOT QUITE THE GABBLING,” 601–​602.

Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception    523 65. Khoury, 27, referencing Lilyan Kesteloot. 66. Dayan, “Playing Caliban,” 143. 67. Césaire, A Tempest, 3.5.63. 68. Ibid., 3.5.70. 69. Dayan highlights Césaire’s ability to change the relationship from definers and defined to a multiplicity. She states, “To teach Césaire’s text as mere reaction to what is prior or canonical, without confronting the syncretic, oddly mixed nature of Shakespeare’s play is to continue to marginalize the colonial subject outside the untouchable ‘master plots’ of civilization and conquest.” Dayan, “Playing Caliban,” 152–​153. 70. Personal communication with Justin Emeka via phone, July 17, 2015. Following information from Emeka taken from the same interview. Emeka reiterates this concept in multiple interviews and online videos, including Justin Emeka, “Director’s Journal: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Classical Theatre of Harlem,” https://​vimeo.com/​69066681, accessed November 26, 2017; and AriseEntertainment 360, “Shakespeare in the Park,” https://​www. youtube.com/​watch?v=rqOGovUxS1g, accessed November 26, 2017. 71. Emeka, “Director’s Journal.” 72. What’s the 411TV, “A Midsummer Night  .  .  .  in Harlem,” https://​vimeo.com/​7 1606642, accessed May 1, 2016. 73. AriseEntertainment 360, “Shakespeare in the Park.” 74. Mazzocca Bellecci changed her name from Mazzocca to Mazzocca Bellecci in October 2018, therefore the chapter text reflects her maiden name usage. 75. Vodou contains multiple African lineages from the Fon, Yoruba, and Kongo. These African nations correspond to pantheons, which contain families of divinities, or lwa, and their corresponding rhythms, dances, and energetic qualities. The Rada pantheon comes from the Fon lineage and embodies cool characteristics and natural elements of earth and water. 76. Linda McJannet, Chapter 24 in this volume. 77. Dance and song enjoy an intimate relationship within these forms, and so, too, in our production often a song would accompany the movement. There were also times when the actors sang without dance, and danced without song. 78. From an exhibit at Le Bureau d’Ethnologie, Port-​au-​Prince, Haiti. December 16, 2015. Mazzocca spent time at Souvenance Mystique during its annual multiple-​day ceremony in 2008 and 2011 and has also published a chapter about her experiences, entitled, “Roots/​ Routes/​Rasin: Rural Vodou and the Sacred Tree as Metaphor for the Multiplicity of Styles in Mizik Rasin and Folkloric Dance in Haiti and the Diaspora,” in Vodou in the Haitian Experience:  A Black Atlantic Perspective, eds. Celucien L. Joseph and Nixon Cleophat (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 13–​34. 79. Boukman Eksperyans also popularized this song. They are a Haitian mizik rasin (roots music) band who were part of a movement to embrace and incorporate Vodou culture, which included rhythms, songs, and style, into popular music. A version from the album Kalfou Danjere released in 1992 in the track entitled, “Mayi a Gaye,” sung delicately a cappella by Mimerose Beaubrun, one of the cofounders of the band, with responsorial chorus, acted as our model. Mazzocca most recently experienced the song spontaneously sung by participants during the curtain call of a tenth anniversary performance of Haitian folkloric dance educator Peniel Guerrier’s Kriye Bode performance at Kumble Theater at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY, in June 2015. Guerrier honors Haitian cultural champions in his annual workshop and performance. Beaubrun, an honoree, was present

524    Ann E. Mazzocca Bellecci and Denise Gillman at the event and the cast of the performance and all honorees on stage at the end of the show sang it together. 80. Mazzocca learned this song and its meaning from Radames Viegas in Havana, July 2006. When he taught this song, he explained that Asojano is ill and the scavenging vultures are eating the worms on him, corresponding to a danced gesture flicking the shoulders, which represents the healing of the illness. 81. Elizabeth A. McAlister wrote an influential ethnography on Rara entitled, Rara!: Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002). 82. Mazzocca has also witnessed Rara in the streets of Haiti in the Artibonite and its version in the diaspora in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and Manhattan’s Central Park. 83. Poetic descriptions of the lwa can be found in Maya Deren’s historical ethnography, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1970 (1953)). 84. See especially Ania Loomba, “Shakespeare and the Possibilities of Postcolonial Performance,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, eds. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (Malden, MA:  Blackwell, 2005), 121–​ 137, and Ania Loomba, “Shakespeare and Cultural Difference,” in Alternative Shakespeares, Vol. II, ed. Terence Hawkes (London; New York: Routledge, 2003), 164–​191.

Bibliography Daniel, Yvonne. Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé. Urbana-​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen:  The Living Gods of Haiti. Kingston, NY:  McPherson, 1970 (1953). Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Hagedorn, Katherine J. Divine Utterances:  The Performance of Afro-​ Cuban Santeria. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2001. Joseph, Celucien L., and Nixon S. Cleophat, eds. Vodou in the Haitian Experience: A Black Atlantic Perspective. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Kraut, Anthea. Choreographing the Folk:  The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Manning, Susan. Modern Dance, Negro Dance:  Race in Motion. Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Chapter 23

Shakespeare a nd L.O.V.E . Dance and Desire in the Sonnets James Hewison

Scorn not the Sonnet . . . with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.1

From inauspicious beginnings as a work in progress showing in a marquee at the Ebbw Vale Garden Festival in 1992, where every member of the already small audience left before the end, to its eventual reception as an award-​winning production that toured widely on the international stage for over a decade,2 Volcano Theatre Company’s contemporary physical theater production L.O.V.E. has generated an enduring legacy and can now be regarded among a select body of late twentieth-​century physical-​theater works that have helped define the genre in the United Kingdom. Through a radical and physical interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, L.O.V.E. triangulated a narrative that forced together the text’s three protagonists in a stew of mutual desire and retribution, bypassing the fact that in the text itself the characters of the Lovely Boy, the Dark Lady, and the poetry’s speaker never actually meet, beyond the reader’s imagination. Wrapped in the aesthetics of exhaustion, camp, and irony, and permeated by a soundtrack of Shirley Bassey standards, L.O.V.E. was directed and choreographed by Nigel Charnock (1960–​2012), one of the key figures of recent British contemporary dance and physical theater practice. This chapter explores that production through firsthand knowledge, by drawing on the author’s experience of performing in L.O.V.E. from 1993 to 2003 and of assisting in the restaging of the work in 2012. First the chapter considers the Sonnets themselves and the history of agitated concern over potential readings of their thematic content. Volcano’s theatrical adaptation of Shakespeare’s text and the resultant choreographic and narrative construction of L.O.V.E. are then explored, discussing the production in relation to its stimulus and through wider performance aesthetics. Finally, the chapter considers the cultural and political impact of L.O.V.E. both in the United Kingdom and internationally.

526   James Hewison

The Sonnets Some questions for Mr. WS: What started it, Will? Was it a look, a honeyed word? Or blood, Will? Was it in your blood? Your love was as a fever. Your lust was full of blame. Your blood was moving Will.

Henri Bergson suggested that “there is no perception that is not prolonged into movement.”3 One can only wonder at the first perceptive glance, or full-​blooded stare, that stirred Shakespeare’s feelings for the Lovely Boy, to whom the majority of the Sonnets are addressed. The poems are the sublimely processed residue of what may have been present in that intimately explosive moment. They remain much regarded galaxies of imagery and intrigue for readers across centuries and cultures, some of whom continue to look, microscopically rather than through telescopes, for answers to such questions as, what, or who, started it, Will? Katherine Duncan-​Jones offers an intriguing picture of the first leaking of news of the existence of several “sugred sonnets” by the “honey-​tongued Shakespeare” through reference to a report of 1598 that some of the poems were already in circulation “among his private friends.”4 The following year saw an unauthorized publication of at least two of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in a seemingly pirated volume by William Jaggard, which has been described as “slight, quirky, occasionally sententious and frequently obscene [that] did the fast-​rising playwright no great credit.”5 Jaggard’s loose appropriation of Shakespeare’s work can, in some respects, be compared to Volcano’s own adaptation of the Sonnets some four centuries later. Certainly there are similarities in terms of the production’s deliberately quirky and frequently obscene elements, and while some audiences responded negatively, and even aggressively, to the production, L.O.V.E. undoubtedly fleshed out new readings and interpretations that excited others into fresh perspectives on Shakespeare’s text. Early critical reception of the Sonnets would appear to have been, not unlike the initial response to L.O.V.E. itself, muted. Bewildered silence seems to have been the primary reaction, tempered with examples of outright shock and anger at what has been neatly and numerically summarized as the “homoerotic thrust of 1–​126, combined with the outrageous misogyny of 127–​154.”6 In one surviving early volume, “Sonnet 129,” which graphically warns the reader of the perils associated with the pursuit of lust, has been deliberately crossed out in full by the owner’s hand, and the first purchaser of another historic manuscript summarized his feelings on the final page as “What a heap of wretched Infidel stuff.”7 Several historic attempts have been made to re-​envision the Sonnets by applying a firmly heterosexual gloss over the obvious fact that the vast majority of the poetry is addressed to, and in praise of, a young male beauty. Kate Chedgzoy argues that “the idea

Shakespeare and L.O.V.E.   527 that the Sonnets, read as autobiographical documents, inscribe Shakespeare’s own homoeroticism, remains troublesomely central to the debate [and] the special intensity in Shakespeare’s case appears to be a matter less of his ascribed sexual identity than of his unique cultural status.”8 Aside from historical concerns over seemingly explicit homoerotic themes and Shakespeare’s cultural iconography, Bruce Smith suggests that the Sonnets’ shock value also lies in their deviance from the expected tone of lyrical love poetry in that they appear to be “focussed on what love is like after sexual consummation, not before.”9 In this respect, the relatively few poems that are addressed to the Dark Lady are often very far in tone from what might be considered to be the appropriate Elizabethan authorial attitude, which was to idealize the suitably unreachable and chaste female beloved. Shakespeare instead approaches his Mistress through layers of equivocation, reluctantly accepting, despite often cruel exposure of what he considers to be her many faults, his visceral attachment. The explosive force of the Sonnets stems from the text’s sheer tonal honesty, and Duncan-​Jones argues that while some of the poems are indeed sweetly honeyed, the sequence “consumed in its totality, is salt, satiric and bitter,” and equal in power and impact to Shakespeare’s most “painfully adult and sexually cynical” works.10 Smith concurs, suggesting that the Sonnets “improvised a new form of discourse” that tested and stretched the form and thematic purpose of love poetry. 11 Joel Fineman offers a rationale for such radical development by suggesting that even as Shakespeare encountered it, the Elizabethan love sonnet had become largely exhausted of its impact: [T]‌he poetry of praise had lost so much of its original and traditional force that Shakespeare can no longer uncomplicatedly employ a poetic mode that he must nevertheless think of as orthodox. This is the general situation that leads Shakespeare to develop in his sonnets a new poetics and, along with this, a new first-​person poetic posture.12

Fineman argues that Shakespeare breathes new life into the form primarily through subversion of the concept of the speaker of the Sonnets, allowing that voice an unprecedented and sometimes paradoxical range of emotional perspectives on the object of his love, and on the act of communication of feeling. Four centuries of analysis of these frequently contradictory and painful motivations have led Gregory Bredbeck to suggest that “the history of commentary on Shakespeare’s Sonnets is also the history of how to read humanistically.”13 If Shakespeare’s purpose was the pursuit of a genuine humanization of expression through the sonnet form, then Volcano’s propulsion of the words into the mouths and bodies of performers, and through the affective realms of speaking, dancing, and doing, can be regarded as an attempt to flesh the fecund bones of that revolutionary language. Reflecting on the forceful spoken delivery of the text in L.O.V.E., Ellen Cranitch

528   James Hewison clearly sympathized with that perspective:  “Shakespeare’s sonnets have survived because he made constant creative use of the form. He extended its possibilities, ironically subverted its conventions, and informed the verse with the directness of the speaking voice.”14 Helen Vendler, however, offers a note of caution toward overtly social and psychological readings of the poetry, focusing instead on a more formalist investigation, arguing that in the Sonnets, “the true ‘actors’. . . are words, not ‘dramatic persons.’ ”15 Vendler’s mistrust of dramatization of the text is rooted in the idea that the function of Shakespeare’s speaker is to iterate words for us, the reader, to inherit and dwell with, as our own. We are not, she argues, hearing an actor speak. We are with the poet’s mind as we are with our own, through an act of congress of “mind alone with itself.”16 Volcano’s production of L.O.V.E. is of course antithetical to Vendler’s position in its dramatic (ab)uses of the text, most notably through the forcing of dialogue and narrative action between characters whose only coexistence is in the reflections of the speaker of the Sonnets, and their vicarious resonance in the mind of the reader. There is however, a somewhat perverse alignment between Vendler and Volcano around the function of the rhyming couplet of the Sonnets. Vendler takes issue with what she regards as a reductive suggestion that the couplet is often “an actor’s line” in terms of its outwardly summative and declarative tone.17 In L.O.V.E. the couplet was also frequently not an actor’s line, and was often omitted from the narrative dialogue precisely because of its lack of dramatic propulsion, or because the tone of contemplative reversal or ironic hesitancy did not serve the narrative conceit. For example, in performance the Lovely Boy delivers a solitary meditation on time and decay through iteration of “Sonnet 60”: “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,/​So do our minutes hasten to their end.” The scene ends, however, with the character’s bleak acceptance of time’s inevitable victory:  “And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.” The Boy abandons the final couplet and its plea that history may be more forgiving of the poet’s verse. The narrative construction of the scene required a decisively mournful summation rather than a return to hopeful ambiguity, and so the couplet was cut. Expanding on the dueling and sometimes contradictory attitudes of the speaker in the Sonnets, Vendler, echoing Fineman’s earlier concept of paradox, suggests that Shakespeare explores a deliberate strategy of funnelling competing lines of thought through what she refers to as a vortex-​like structure, allowing, or forcing, a diversity of potential meanings to converge and confer: Shakespeare’s speaker often considers, in rapid succession, any number of intellectual or ideological positions . . . narrowing [to] a vortex of condensed perceptual and intellectual force, and either constricting or expanding that vortex via the couplet.18

The organic processes of the vortex mirror, to some extent, those of a volcano. Each is suggestive of the forcing of fluid energy. The latter is often conceived of as more explosive and direct, a violent release of accumulated power against the former’s gradually

Shakespeare and L.O.V.E.   529 spiraling displacement of constantly accreting form. This comparison of natural phenomena, the vortex and the volcano, is a teasingly obvious, perhaps simplistic, metaphor through which to view Volcano Theatre Company’s adaption of the Sonnets. However, the image has agency. The aesthetics of L.O.V.E. were often geared toward the generation of direct and explosive energy, and the resultant threat of damage and violence. Equally, the frequent use of repetition within the production, as both a choreographic device and as a means to manipulate Shakespeare’s words for theatrical and narrative emphasis, is suggestive of the spiraling representational processes of the vortex. The production could legitimize those aesthetic choices, therefore, by pointing back through the smoldering craters of its newly hewn performance imagery to the textual roots that inspired it, and which harnessed similarly fluid energy. What Shakespeare’s reaction to L.O.V.E. would have been is of course unknowable, although, in her review for The Times, Cranitch offered comforting thoughts when she suggested that “whilst not every scholar would agree . . . it is possible that Shakespeare, himself a great innovator and stage practitioner [would] be craning forward from, rather than turning in, his grave to see the results.”19 Charnock and Volcano’s approach to adaptation of the Sonnets was to select and reassemble the text as required, developing their selected narrative themes and applying the language to the generation of theatrical and choreographic imagery. In doing so, the production can be said to share an uneasy alliance with what Vendler identifies as her primary aim in constructing her extensive forensic commentary on the Sonnets, which was to “make the core visible.”20 Volcano’s approach to exposing the core or heart of the Sonnets was, however, emotional and physical: an attempt to embody and theatricalize its thematic explorations of the consequences of obsessive desire. The key was in the act of transformation and fleshly translation. L.O.V.E. offered not only a reading of Shakespeare’s work, but an embodied and unruly interpretation, using dance and physical theater to bring corporeal agency to the unseen movement between the poetry’s protagonists and to best capture what Lynsey McCulloch has described as the “unspoken” in Shakespeare’s language.21 Whether viewed as outwardly explosive or inwardly meditative, there is wider critical agreement over the ability of the Sonnets to continue to resonate as affective performative utterances. Smith discusses the poetry’s confessional agency, suggesting that “the speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, because he asks for our imaginative complicity, ends up by confessing us.”22 F. T. Prince introduces a note of empathy, claiming that “we hear the deliberate inflections of the voice rising and falling, the throb of emotion rising up in a man’s voice as he speaks.”23 This notion of compassion and confession between the reader and the speaker of the Sonnets is extended in performance to include the audience, most notably when the Lovely Boy recites “Sonnet 121: ’Tis Better to be Vile than Vile Esteemed.” The poem, a protest against false accusation, is defiantly reinflected in L.O.V.E. as the character’s passionate cri-​de-​coeur, both a defense and celebration of his apparent sexual laxity. While speaking the text, the Boy roams among the audience, frequently pausing to kiss and fondle unsuspecting, though usually very willing, members of the public. The scene ends with his emphatic declaration that “all men are bad, and

530   James Hewison in their badness reign.” In this scene the Lovely Boy (ab)uses the audience to confess, celebrate, and share his sexual agency and liberal attitude toward the fulfillment of desire. By implication of their general acceptance of his cheaply won amorous gestures, he draws the audience, too, into this sanguine philosophy. The Poet and the Dark Lady have meanwhile returned from their own brief and more circumspect share in these public flirtations, and wait patiently onstage for the Boy’s prolonged escapade to end. The stage and the auditorium are set, actors and audience now all together in the realm of L.O.V.E. So let the mad pursuits begin.

Making L.O.V.E.: “Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds” (Sonnet 116) Paul Davies and Fern Smith formed Volcano Theatre Company in Swansea, Wales, in the mid-​1980s, coming together through shared interests in politics, poetry and physicality. Neither had been trained in theater or dance. Smith was a psychology student, while Davies was studying for a PhD in politics and held a black belt in karate. Davies said of the company’s inception, “We lived through the dynamic madness of punk and sought to connect our theatre to that energy.”24 Each felt the need to respond to what they perceived as the cultural stagnation and political desolation of late 1980s Thatcherite Britain through making and performing a brand of theater that resonated with their creative energy: There was the feeling that theatre had turned its back on an increasingly complex situation. And here the problem was an expanded definition of the political. Sexual politics were now at the very centre of both our theatre practice and our imagined speculations on how we might live. We needed to use movement and words to break through what we considered to be irrelevant patterns of performance and inherited patterns of response. In a very obvious way this was theatre that was young, angry and urgent.25

Volcano’s early repertoire focused on radical and physical adaptations of literary texts, sometimes fusing sources, for example combining Tony Harrison’s poetic vision of the Medea myth with extracts from Valerie Salernas’s SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, in their 1991 production Medea:  Sexwar. The company sought texts that offered malleability and space for the translation of poetic imagery into theatrical action. The appeal of the immediacy and confessional honesty of the Sonnets therefore made them a highly attractive site for the company’s first investigation of Shakespeare.26 Referencing Maarten van Dijk’s notion of theatrical cheek in his essay, “Lice in Fur: The aesthetics of Cheek and Shakespearean Production Strategy,” Volcano’s early physical theater work can be characterized as both punky and cheeky. Cheek in this sense means “productive aggressiveness and effrontery [which] become weapons

Shakespeare and L.O.V.E.   531 against a vapidly consensual dominant discourse [of] containment, canonicity and consistency.”27 Van Dijk’s concept echoed Volcano’s aim to kick against what they perceived as established and safe processes, even where that agitation might result in their own destabilization: We made a lot of shows that began with a text. Our first task was to demolish what had previously been built  .  .  .  pain and pleasure were at the centre of the reconstruction process, designing performances that sometimes teetered on the brink of collapse.28

L.O.V.E. thus can be viewed as a cheek-​filled fissure in the genealogy of readings and responses to the Sonnets, veering radically from the realm of respectful recitation, and adding a deliberately raw and fleshy dimension to the text’s frequently impassioned explorations of the pleasures and consequences of human desire. In this sense the work responds to Jo Butterworth’s (Chapter 19) and Sheila Cavanagh’s (Chapter 25) questioning of what dance can do best. In doing so, L.O.V.E. resonated strongly with the answers Butterworth tentatively offers in that it communicated most effectively through “viscerality, the sensorial and the experiential.” Volcano’s inception in the mid-​1980s aligned with the emergence of a wave of companies that shared an interest in such visceral, athletic, and risky movement vocabularies, notably Ultima Vez in Belgium and DV8 Physical Theatre in the United Kingdom. While frequently experimenting with the integration of spoken text and movement, these artists also utilized the aesthetics of physical exhaustion and the techniques of raw corporeal impact to explore the politics of interpersonal narrative. Nigel Charnock was a pivotal figure in that period. Volcano’s first collaboration with Charnock began with a brief choreographic intervention in Medea: Sexwar (1991). Building on the critical success of that work and the potential for mutual artistic development, a decision was made to deepen the relationship with L.O.V.E.: “Nigel was seeking to return to his passion for words and the immediacy of performance, and we were trying to develop a more sophisticated relationship to movement.”29 The sophistication of the resultant choreographic work in L.O.V.E. led one critic to observe that “this is not so much a play as a dance with words.”30 However, given the respective backgrounds of the collaborators, the production also resisted easy classification in those terms. It was made by a self-​styled physical theater company, neither of whose cofounders had a background in dance. Charnock, who did, seemed intent on freeing himself from associations with dance culture, pointedly describing himself in the original program for L.O.V.E. as an “ex-​dancer,”31 and consciously crediting himself as the director of the show, avoiding any reference to its choreographic elements. Despite that apparent reluctance and suspicion, Charnock was also both “meticulous on the fine detail of movement”32 and deeply generous regarding his choreographic ambitions: “if you couldn’t do it, Nigel would spring up like some wolf protecting her cubs and show you what he meant.”33

532   James Hewison That same forensic eye was drawn to the author’s own experience of rehearsal for the role of the Lovely Boy.34 I recall Charnock vigorously warming up simply to observe rehearsal, perhaps more so than the company had done to perform, and his choreographic and directorial interventions were equally thorough and precise. His advice on movement quality and execution focused on how that related to character and narrative intention. “The Boy would do it this way” he would say to me, “because the character wants that.” These were directives on how the choreography was driving the action, as well as how it was to be evidenced in the body. Charnock’s concern was for embedding an emotionally and psychologically justified physicality within narratively driven choreographic structures, and that narrative focus was evidenced also in his editorial approach to the Sonnets themselves: “For all the breadth and intensity of emotion explored, nothing actually happens. We needed to create a narrative, so I spent many nights with the sonnets spread out on my bedroom floor, scrubbing out lines and adding different ones together, making Shakespeare say what I wanted him to say.”35 The narrative that Charnock and Volcano eventually extracted centered on a love triangle that explored the Poet and the Dark Lady’s rivaling infatuation with the Lovely Boy, and the latter’s fickle and often cruel oscillations between his respective admirers. The geometry of L.O.V.E. was more isoscelian than equilateral, however, with the Boy acting, and dancing, at the sharply pointed fulcrum of unstable episodes of desire and rejection. Eventually, after much humiliation and disappointment, first the Dark Lady and ultimately the Poet take their revenge, and the final act in this dramatic reversal is the Boy’s violent death at the hands of the Poet. Ironically, the weapon of choice is a book, the torn-​out pages of which are first used to choke the victim—​the Boy is made to eat the Poet’s words—​before, finally, the full force and weight of the tome is used to brutally beat him to death. In the aftermath of violence, the Dark Lady returns to mourn the now lifeless body, and the Poet goes back to his solitary life of reading. This wrenching of narrative thread from the fertile ground of the text is symptomatic of what Hugh Grady finds to be a thoroughly postmodern approach to interpretation and adaptation of Shakespeare’s work: “the former unity of the text has been placed under suspicion, seen not as intrinsic to the work but instead a result of decisions made in the act of interpretation.”36 In Chapter  20 of this volume, Freya Vass-​Rhee describes William Forsythe’s choreographic appropriation of aspects of Hamlet as a process that “mines the seam between concrete representation and obscuration of source.” This metaphor of mining has echoes with Charnock’s description, earlier, of wrestling a narrative from scatterings of literary tracts, conjuring images of the sweat and effort involved in digging, or panning, for narrative gold. Vass-​Rhee notes Forsythe’s avoidance of direct synthesis with the narrative and characterizations of Hamlet in his subsequent production. In (re)writing L.O.V.E. something very different was happening. There was no official story to resist or embrace, albeit that the Sonnets carried their own cultural currency and biographical intrigue. Volcano and Charnock were exploring in a seam of their own making—​ digging, constructing, and re-​enforcing their narrative from the rich poetic ground. Interestingly, as a means to explore and expose her views on such acts of interpretation,

Shakespeare and L.O.V.E.   533 Vendler conducts her own experiment in textual reconstruction by creating a pastiche of a sonnet, made up of three separate quatrains and a couplet taken from four genuine Shakespearean Sonnets. She then dismisses her ersatz poem as lacking the essential quality of a Shakespearean sonnet, “which is to unfold itself in a developing dynamic of thought and feeling marked by a unifying play of mind and language.”37 Vendler’s exercise is an exploration of absence, an exposure of that which she regards as essential, and missing, when devoid of authorial control. Charnock and Volcano’s approach to adaptation of the Sonnets was of course—​despite the similar process of cutting and pasting—​very different. Nevertheless, the resultant performance text, both spoken and danced language, sought to deliver absolutely what Vendler identifies as the lacuna in her own playfully appropriative pastiche. Volcano’s L.O.V.E., in dismembering the text, attempted to add real body and human presence to the textual play of feeling, mind, and language. In a footnote to his 1957 essay, “Shakespeare and the Dance,” Walter Sorell referenced his own concerns for the preservation of authorial intention over interpretive acts, and claimed that he was [i]‌nduced to investigate this subject by the prevalent misunderstanding and confusion which [he] found in most, if not all, performances of Shakespearian plays which ask for some dancing . . . for there can be no better service rendered than that one might help recreate and relive his work in the spirit in which it was conceived.38

Sorell writes of the plays but, as previously discussed, the spirit in which the Sonnets were conceived, published, and initially received is somewhat murky. That Shakespeare never intended the poems as a source for theatrical or choreographic investigation is difficult to doubt, and the assumption must be that the raw and anarchic amplification of the text’s excesses in L.O.V.E. would have been anathema to what appear to have been, recalling van Dijk, Sorrell’s apparently constraining sensibilities. However, writing somewhat prophetically in his later essay, “The Choreographer and Shakespeare” (1971), Sorell alluded to what might be their most appropriate theatrical interpretation: The sonnets have remained the most baffling background for a dance creation. Their theme is love but not love alone. They encompass loneliness, loss, waste and doom. The abstractness and intellectualization of their topics will—​if at all—​attract the modern dancer more than the ballet choreographer.39

Alan Brissenden summarizes the role and function of dance in Shakespeare’s plays as being to evoke, at a “fundamental level, the view that order is possible, that harmony can be restored.”40 In L.O.V.E. the reverse was often the case. The violent choreographic imagery used in performance reflected the poetry’s frequently painful and contradictory sentiments, resulting in what one critic described as “a vicious love triangle which brings out all the darkness of Shakespeare’s most rapturous work.”41 However, despite their intimate and nontheatrical conception, Volcano’s treatment of the Sonnets can be

534   James Hewison regarded as a faithful attempt to create sympathetic parallels between the blood-​stirred passion in the writing and its physical embodiment and exposure on stage.

Performing L.O.V.E.: “The Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame” (Sonnet 129) L.O.V.E. was an exhilarating and frightening show to perform. The demands were exacerbated by several factors, such as the need to execute vocal and choreographic material while often working at reflex-​speed, and to sustain that delivery through stamina-​testing repetitions. There were also genuine physical risks, notably around the choreography of the razor-​sharp knife that played a significant part in the ending of the show, a hazard further complicated at that point in performance by the scenographic perils of a treacherously wet, champagne-​drenched floor. Even the frantic action in, on, and around the large four-​poster bed that formed the center-​point of the set was potentially risky since beneath its lush red velvet drapes and black satin sheets, the bed was an industrially tough and unyielding iron structure. Davies suggested that performing L.O.V.E. also depended on [t]‌he emotional fragility of the actor, and the need to be phenomenologically really in the movement, which requires letting go. And also because the words are of the highest order of intensity, and so you didn’t always know exactly what was going on on-​stage, or you were digging around in stuff better left buried. That’s why people were drawn to the show. Grand Guignol meets high campery. It felt on stage as raw and committed as it possibly could be.42

I recall succumbing to such an experience of raw emotional fragility in performance. Without warning, and in the midst of a scene that I had played many times previously, I found myself becoming overwhelmed by Shakespeare’s words, so much so that I was unable to speak them. Drifting lost or immersed in the performance moment, I realized that my eyes had begun to fill with tears in deep recognition of a poet’s four-​hundred-​ year-​old expression of pain as I attempted to recite “Sonnet 36”: “Let me confess that we two must be twain,/​Although our undivided loves are one.” It was not an act of emotional recall, a resonant personal memory seeping too strongly into the performative moment. It was an external force, the sheer pain and beauty of the words as they sounded in my ears, and with a clarity and impact that I had never previously encountered. It might be regarded as what Vendler suggested as a moment of being truly with the mind of the poet. And in that mindful, yet paradoxically absent state, I sensed my own heart, recalling Wordsworth, unlocking, and, in full view of the audience I had to, literally, step away from the performance moment. And in the midst of tragedy, the comic, because in losing myself, and finding another, through my theatrical iteration of the sonnet’s very

Shakespeare and L.O.V.E.   535 pregnant first line, “Oh let me confess,”43 I realized, as I returned to performance consciousness, that I could not recall what it was that I was supposed to be confessing to. And in that panicked state I did what would be expected and started to improvise, but this was Shakespeare, and in sonnet form. I have no memory of what I actually said, though I still see very clearly the face of my fellow actor, now fully realizing the depth of my turmoil, turning his face upstage desperately trying not to let the audience see his laughter at my predicament.44 Given the inherent risks in L.O.V.E., any such loss of focus or unwarranted improvisatory response was potentially dangerous. Soame Jenyn’s poetic analysis of The Art of Dancing from 1728 suggested that improvisation, adaption, and interpretation of discrete dance forms were ubiquitous in Elizabethan stage performance: “Long was the Dancing Art unfix’d and free; hence lost in error and uncertainty.”45 On the night of my second performance in L.O.V.E., I made such an unfixed error. This came toward the end of the performance, when the male characters’ clothes are cut from their bodies by the Dark Lady (Figure 23.1) in a vengeful display of power, all rhythmically choreographed to a soundtrack of Bassey’s version of The Look of Love. The Dark Lady’s spoken text

Figure 23.1.  Fern Smith as the Dark Lady. Photo: Jonathan Littlejohn.

536   James Hewison here was “Sonnet 41”: “Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits,/​When I am sometime absent from thy heart.” The standard reading of the poem has the speaker excusing the Boy for his youthful amorous misdemeanours, assigning blame on others, notably women, for their, albeit understandable, attraction to his irresistible beauty. In L.O.V.E. the text is reclaimed and delivered by the Dark Lady as a tirade of blame, underpinned and given physical emphasis by closely choreographed positioning of the knife. The look of L.O.V.E. at this point was bleak indeed, particularly from the perspective of the prone, stripped, and soon-​to-​be blindfolded male protagonists, as their tormentor manipulated her weapon to threaten castration, penetration, and, above all, to assert her enraged authority. Blindfolded, I had no idea that the result of my overly demonstrative movement was that I had sliced my left index finger against the blade. The knife was so sharp in fact that I felt nothing at all, and did not sense the seep of my blood onto the stage and my fellow performers’ bodies until the blindfold was removed and I saw the free-​flowing results of my overenthusiastic protestations.

Choreography in L.O.V.E.: “What Is Your Substance, Whereof Are You Made?” (Sonnet 53) Shirley Bassey’s iconic interpretations of popular songs were used to both subvert and underline the emotionally charged choreographic and narrative action in L.O.V.E., and this knowing referencing of pop culture enhanced the work’s kitsch and sardonic attitude. However, despite that choice of soundtrack, the rhythm and tonal quality of the words provided the real driving force for the resultant choreographic material. For example, the insistently self-​reproachful tone of “Sonnet 148: Oh Me! What Eyes Hath Love Put in My Head?” generated a sympathetically percussive section of choreographic material that was delivered largely in unison by the three characters as an embodied signifier that all were equally conscious of their susceptibility to love’s blinding qualities. Continuing the play of mutual reinforcement of words and movement in this scene, shared illustrative gestures were employed to further underline the textual intention. The performers’ hands would slap against their eyes on the choral delivery of “love’s eye is not so true as all men’s: no,” offering a collectively resigned physical and verbal statement affirming the characters’ inability to see truth beyond the grip of love. Within that same section, a more full-​bodied choreographic emphasis underscored the spoken delivery of “oh cunning love, with tears thou keeps’t me blind.” Here the Lovely Boy repeatedly launched himself, missile-​like, at his two lovers, who would catch him momentarily before releasing and violently rolling him away. The impactful physical pattern was repeated as the words were similarly reiterated with increasing intensity, deliberately disrupting the structure of the sonnet in search of theatrical and choreographic emphasis. With each repetition the Boy ran further downstage to gather more

Shakespeare and L.O.V.E.   537 impetus for his attack, thereby drawing the audience ever closer to the destructive cyclical relationships in play. Eventually, in this bruising and exhausting sequence, the Dark Lady and the Poet deliberately turn their backs on their assailant, linking arms and walking away in a mutual show of defiant disregard. The result is that they genuinely do not see, and cannot control, the Boy’s next moment of impact, and consequently he crashes against their backs and falls to the floor. This somewhat slapstick choreographic image frequently evoked laughter in the audience, as was the intention, but that response resonated also from recognition of the ironic physical reinforcement of the bitter textual implications of blindness to another’s faults when viewed through love’s false lens. The abrasive choreographic elements in L.O.V.E. resonated with the aesthetics of many other dance and physical theater works of the period. Ana Sanchez-​Colberg, analyzing images of grappling with unruly bodies in DV8 Physical Theatre Company’s Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988), suggests that “the violent eradication of personal space signifies death.”46 The violent eradication of personal space is synonymous with corporeal impact, which, in L.O.V.E., frequently signified an unstoppable coming together of bodies to either gratify their shared desires or avenge their singular rejections, the ultimate consequence of which was death. Shakespeare explored the maddening reciprocity of such inescapably destructive relationships in “Sonnet 147:  “My Love Is as a Fever,” a text reiterated three times in L.O.V.E., offering, perhaps, the production’s bleak central mantra that “desire is death.” Near the beginning of the performance the first two words of this sonnet echo repeatedly from each of the characters’ mouths in an overlapping canon of competitive declaration: “My love, my love, my love,” the repetitive and escalating vocal emphasis of “my” proclaiming their individual sexual urgency. Toward the climax of the production, the sonnet is reiterated in unison, as the characters stumble side by side toward the murderous final act. All are now in a state of shamed dishevelment, stripped to their champagne-​sodden underwear, the men blindfolded and clinging to the Dark Lady, who still wields the knife she has just used to torture them. This articulation of the sonnet now suggests a shared state of shocked confession and realization. The characters have tragically failed to heed their own warnings regarding the ultimate consequences of unrestrained desire, and collectively they now embody the sonnet’s evocation of a journey into madness: “past cure I am, now reason is past care, and frantic mad with evermore unrest;/​My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are.” The emphasis in L.O.V.E. on embodied as well as verbal wrestling with the Sonnets sometimes spilled into examples of actual combat, most notoriously through an ironic choreographic intervention on one of the most famous poems, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” (Sonnet 18). Prince, citing Keats, described the Sonnets as “poems of enjoyment; of ‘luxury,’ the absorbed contemplation of beauty.”47 This particular text, absorbed as it appears to be in a study of comparative beauty, aligns itself with that seemingly romantic view. However, in L.O.V.E., the words are translated into sarcastic dialogue, exchanged between the Dark Lady and the Poet as they engage in a slapstick wrestling match, while the Lovely Boy looks on, amused by this open display of rivalry between the suitors for his affections. Davies and Smith had previously trained with a

538   James Hewison professional wrestler, and Charnock, who reputedly “loathed the use of dance to explore beauty,” was delighted to employ elements of that abrasive, and yet often highly camp, sporting repertoire as a means to undermine the traditional interpretation of this particularly famous poem.48 The creation of textual and choreographic dissonance was used elsewhere in performance as a narrative device or as a means to explore the ambiguity found in the words themselves. In a deliciously entitled review, “Between the Lines and the Sheets,” Kate Bassett observed that “Charnock’s choreography does embody key qualities of the poems . . . levity to intense sincerity, passion and loathing [and] the duplicitous nature of the sonnets where lacerating irony lurks under doting sweetness.”49 An example of the embodiment of such irony occurred around Volcano’s staging of another of the Sonnet’s more famous poems, “Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds Admit Impediments” (Sonnet 116). Traditionally interpreted as an evocation of love’s ability to endure, the text in performance became a coldly resigned monologue, recited by the Dark Lady as she watched the two male characters repeat a series of acrobatic twists and folds around the luridly decorative bed, locking arms, lips, and torsos and ending their duet in a final, lengthy kiss. In this context the words became an ironic commentary on what the Dark Lady regards as the Boy’s infidelity and the Poet’s treachery. In certain parts of the world this scene, for the fact of two men kissing, was the most charged moment of the entire performance. Occasionally met with whistles and boos, or cries and ovations, and sometimes with both reactions simultaneously, this spiraling choreographic knot was used in L.O.V.E. as a paradoxically somber, and celebratory, unraveling of Shakespeare’s paean to constancy and commitment. A more direct and reciprocal relationship existed between choreography and text in the staging of Sonnet 129: “The Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame Is Lust in Action,” which Vendler has described as a “spate of adjectives of social trespass.”50 Here the words seem to punch from the page, warning the reader of lust’s bloody and murderous nature, while also finally acknowledging that human beings will inevitably fail to heed such advice: “All this the world well knows, but none knows well/​To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell” (Sonnet 129). In L.O.V.E. the percussive energy of the text was amplified through a section of choreography known as the Kissing Circle. The choreography of kissing was a visual device to underpin the tone and theme of the text, each of the characters sharing liberally in the distributed oral embracing, and repeating those liaisons with increasing rapidity and violence, building the physical energy of the scene toward an extreme visual image. The act of kissing also created a sonic effect to momentarily remove two of the three unison speaking voices from the ensemble, therefore modulating the audible source of text as one performer’s mouth was ambushed by another’s, breath and words sucked away, leaving a singular voice to continue the spill of text before the temporarily distracted others broke free to rejoin the choreographic pattern. Structurally the scene comprised two distinct phases of

Shakespeare and L.O.V.E.   539 movement material across which the repeated spoken text would slide, creating a revolving binary carousel through which the words and action would converge. Beginning as a series of gentle lifts and manipulations of limbs, the tempo of the scene increased with each repetition of the cycle, and became so rapid that this was one of the most exhausting and physically extreme sections of the performance. The quality of the movement and spoken text altered with this acceleration so that eventually a genuine sense of desperation came into attempts to maintain accurate execution of the material. At its climax, the performers would be grabbing, slamming, and crashing into each other, while shouting the text with an equally frantic speed, intensity, and volume. The scene was akin to drowning in addicted self-​loathing, the performers gasping and grasping for fresher air, and by this point the imagery was far more violent than sexual, with the mouth as a weapon. The end only comes when the Lovely Boy forcibly ejects himself from the now vicious Kissing Circle, seeking temporary refuge on the bed. After his escape, however, the Dark Lady and the Poet stay locked in the now slowly decelerating choreographic pattern, still attempting to manipulate and kiss their absent lover. It is a chaotic and exhausted stage picture. The choreography of the Kissing Circle underlined the sonnet’s journey from pleasure to loss and regret: “A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe,/​Before, a joy proposed, behind, a dream.” The Boy ends the scene as a dream-​like figure, his absent form still blindly held and kissed by his obsessively unseeing lovers. The choreography in L.O.V.E. was not always directly contingent on the inclusion of spoken text. Sometimes the movement served its own discrete purpose to direct narrative or effect energy. One such section, which frequently resulted in audible groans of distaste from the audience, was the “Comparison.” The scene was structurally simple: the Lovely Boy drifted from one expectant lover to the next, comparing, in intimate detail and through various forms of manual, oral, and other sensory inspection, the relative merits of their respective bodies, before launching into an orgy of indecision by throwing himself repeatedly from one to the other. The use of a Bach harpsichord sonata to underscore and rhythmically organize the scene served only to highlight that this was, by contrast, a deliberately low narrative episode that sweated, groped, and sniffed at the Lovely Boy’s excess, and his lovers’ relative states of passive desperation. The metered and fluid nature of the music contrasted with the chaotic physical action to create a dissonant and contradictory stage environment that led directly to the denouement of the show:  the spray of champagne, the flourish of roses, and then, pulled from the heart of the bouquet, the knife. Irrespective of the fact that the “Comparison” scene was without spoken text, the choreographic material and the scenographic elements still fully resonated with one of the Sonnets’ dominant discourses, the inherent contradictions and unavoidable disappointments and the dangers of love and desire: “Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud . . . /​And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. . . . /​All men make faults” (Sonnet 35).

540   James Hewison

Reception of L.O.V.E.: “O Me! What Eyes Hath Love Put in My Head” (Sonnet 148) Despite the critical and popular success of L.O.V.E., it continued to be capable of generating degrees of antipathy to rival the response to Shakespeare’s publication of the Sonnets some four centuries earlier. A review in the Belfast Telegraph from 1993 quoted a minister who, despite his own admission that he had not actually seen the performance, criticized the piece as being “an insult and an intrusion into the deeply held morality in the province [which] should be stopped at once.”51 A decade after first encountering similar accusations, Volcano became embroiled in a more disturbing situation in Tbilisi, Georgia, on the first leg of a British Council–​sponsored tour of the former Soviet region of the South Caucasus. Peter Aspden, writing for the Financial Times Magazine on the work of the British Council at the time, described the events: On opening night at the Marjanishvili Theatre, one of the country’s most well-​ respected venues, all was going well until the scene in which the company’s two male protagonists share a lingering kiss on stage. There was a detectable sense of unease, some shifting in seats and then some catcalls and jeers and finally, extraordinarily, the voice of the theatre’s director . . . ordering his own troupe’s actors to join him in walking out. Outside, after the show, a furious argument developed which ended in the street [ . . . ]. Some local religious leaders had decided to use the play as a pretext for sermonising on the state of morals in the country.52

I remember Tbilisi, though I differ with Aspden over what evoked the strongest negative reaction of the evening. Lying blindfolded on the forestage toward the end of the performance, sensing the restless and unpredictable audience a few feet away, and knowing the knife was just a few inches away, I recall a chorus of distinctly male voices rising in objection to the image of the Dark Lady, straddling the two stripped and defenseless men, threatening her brand of emasculatory revenge. The sexual politics of that image were appreciated even less by some sections of the audience than the act of two men kissing. As a result of the argument that erupted immediately after the performance, during which the company was advised to stay locked in the dressing room, the two remaining performances in Tbilisi were cancelled. This was something of a shock, as while Volcano had previously experienced negative reactions to their work in the United Kingdom, nothing similar had happened throughout their extensive experience of overseas touring. Fern Smith’s comment on being banned by political and religious forces was that “ironically it left us with nothing to do for a couple of days but look at churches.”53 The incident in Tbilisi served to peak already heightened media interest for the remainder of the Caucasus tour, especially the performances in the predominantly Muslim country of Azerbaijan. Writing of that subsequent reaction, Aspden noted that

Shakespeare and L.O.V.E.   541 [a]‌fter about twenty minutes it gets to the kiss, the male kiss, which starts as a tentative peck but develops into something more carnal. There are some gasps, and then a handclap, and then some more applause. And then most of the house joins in the applause, as the kiss, reaching Hitchcockian levels of languorous eroticism goes on and on. It is an extraordinary moment and a moving one too. It is rare, as a regular theatre goer in a western country, to see a taboo aired, broken, stamped on and thrown away in the space of a few lusty seconds.54

Aspden’s comment underlines what made L.O.V.E. so effective, and especially perhaps in international contexts, in that it was a radical translation of arguably the most intimate works of one of the greatest British cultural icons through the creative energy and skill of some of the leading exponents of British contemporary dance and physical theater practice of that time.

Restaging L.O.V.E.: “From Fairest Creatures We Desire Increase” (Sonnet 1) In 2012 Volcano restaged their production of L.O.V.E. with a new cast of performers. I  assisted in that process of reproduction and watched the premiere of the work alongside Davies and Smith as audience members. It was an astonishing experience. We were a strange spectatorial mirror, reflecting on the performance through the residue of years spent dwelling within that same material. My body twitched and lurched in response to bone-​deep memory of the unfolding action, knowing that while the roots remained, my ability to deliver the performance’s demanding energy was gone forever. The feeling was of being carried both back and forward in time. My self, passed on, and moved beyond, through the life, and death, of the new Lovely Boy. Time’s ebb toward death and the imperative of regeneration to counter that inevitable outcome are of course critical messages in the Sonnets, and this was another repeated mantra in L.O.V.E., exercised through reiteration of Sonnet 126: “O Thou My Lovely Boy.” The text is used at several points to warn the Boy of the impact of “time’s fickle glass,” and of his waning capacity and power to enchant. He acknowledges this sobering thought himself in his only solitary moment in the entire performance when he recites Sonnet 60: “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore/​So do our minutes hasten to their end.” The sonnet’s reflections on aging and death are delivered in full, save for the final couplet and its suggestion that the poetry itself may offer the only lasting trace of feeling and thought. In performance, the Boy omits that hopeful reversal and instead ends his public meditation with the bleak acceptance that against Time’s power “nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.”

542   James Hewison

Conclusion When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/​I summon up remembrance of things past (Sonnet 30)

In Inflammatory Material, Volcano’s self-​penned reflective and historical document, created in 2013 to mark the company’s twenty-​fifth anniversary of making and performing theater, there is a double-​page close-​up photograph of Fern Smith as the Dark Lady in L.O.V.E. It depicts the moment in performance when she pulls the knife from a bunch of roses and draws it slowly across her mouth. It is a pivotal point in performance: there are no more fun and games from there, violence is certain and death inevitable. In the photograph Smith’s mouth is wide open, and the knife’s blade rests there, reflecting teeth and lips and a gaping rage to come. Her eyes are hidden from view, but I know those scorned orbs. I am trying to write down a quote from the page, something about words—​the title of the page is Words—​but my attention is repeatedly drawn back to the knife. I stop writing and reach out to touch the image. I touch it with the finger that still bears the scar that I inherited from its blade. I slide my scar along the photographic edge, remembering, reconnecting, and returning the compliment, opening up the past to bleed. This chapter ends as it began, with reflections on blood and memory. It has considered how Shakespeare’s seemingly blood-​stirred words have generated a legacy of intrigue and conjecture, as well as an enduring passion for the Sonnets’ confessional agency. These evocations of blood and memory suggest new metaphors for Shakespeare’s poetic motivations. Could the Sonnets be considered in some ways as elegantly fashioned and enduring literary scars, the surface traces of an inner rupture? Whatever the catalyst, the chapter has argued that Volcano’s L.O.V.E. embraced and celebrated that creative outpouring by embodying the risk and dare that Shakespeare brought to his studied, and often studded, language, through reciprocally risk-​laden choreographic and abrasive performative aesthetics.

Notes 1. William Wordsworth, “Scorn Not the Sonnet,” http://​www.poetryfoundation.org/​poems-​ and-​poets/​poems/​detail/​4554, accessed April 27, 2016. 2. L.O.V.E. won a Time Out Magazine Theatre Award in 1993 and enjoyed a decade of overseas touring, often with British Council sponsorship, including to major international festivals, such as Wiener Festwochen, Vienna; Grec Festival, Barcelona; and the first International Theatre Festival, Buenos Aires. 3. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Digireads.com: 2010), 50.

Shakespeare and L.O.V.E.   543 4. Katherine Duncan-​Jones, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Arden Shakespeare: 1997), 1. 5. Duncan-​Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 2. 6. Duncan-​Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 50. 7. Duncan-​Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 69. 8. Kate Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press: 1995), 167. 9. Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England:  A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1994), 229. 10. Duncan-​Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 102. 11. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England, 264. 12. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1986), 2. 13. Gregory Bredbeck, quoted in Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture, 167. 14. Ellen Cranitch, “Hard Lines for the Poor Adapter,” The Times, April 6, 1993, 33. 15. Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA:  Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: 1997), 11. 16. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 19. 17. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 28. 18. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 11. 19. Cranitch, “Hard Lines for the Poor Adapter,” 33. 20. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 32. 21. Lynsey McCulloch, “‘Here’s that shall make you dance’:  Movement and Meaning in Bern:  Ballet’s Julia und Romeo,” in Reinventing the Renaissance:  Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance, eds. Sarah Annes Brown, Robert I. Lublin, and Lynsey McCulloch (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 268. 22. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England, 233. 23. F. T. Prince, Shakespeare: The Poems (London: Longmans, Green, 1963), 36. 24. Paul Davies and Fern Smith, Inflammable Material (Swansea:  Volcano Theatre with Swansea Metropolitan University, 2013), 3. 25. Paul Davies, “Physical Theatre and Its Discontents,” in Staging Wales: Welsh Theatre 1979–​ 1997, ed. Anna Marie Taylor (Cardiff: University of Wales Press: 1997), 164. 26. Paul Davies, unpublished interview with James Hewison, Swansea, August 2015. 27. Maarten van Dijk, “Lice in Fur: The Aesthetics of Cheek and Shakespearean Production Strategy,” in Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity, eds. Michael Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie, with Christopher Holmes (London: Routledge, 2001), 162. 28. Davies and Smith, Inflammable Material, 10. 29. Paul Davies, “Nigel Charnock, 1960–​2012,” http://​www.volcanotheatre.co.uk, 1, accessed December 1, 2015. 30. Kate Basset, “Between the Lines and the Sheets,” The Times, April 10, 1993, 28. 31. Volcano Theatre Company, Theatre Program, L.O.V.E., 1992. 32. Davies, interview, 2015. 33. Davies, Nigel Charnock, 1960–​2012, 3. 34. The author took over the role in 1993 from the original Lovely Boy, Liam Steel. 35. Charnock interviewed in Cranitch, “Hard Lines for the Poor Adapter,” 33. 36. Hugh Grady, “Modernity, Modernism and Postmodernism in Twentieth-​ Century’s Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity, 32.

544   James Hewison 37. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 25. 38. Walter Sorell, “Shakespeare and the Dance,” Shakespeare Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1957): 369. 39. Walter Sorell, “The Choreographer and Shakespeare,” in The Dancer’s Image: Points and Counterpoints (New York: Columbia University Press: 1971), 305. 40. Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (London: Macmillan Press, 1981), 2. 41. Peter Aspden, “Does This Look Like the Best Way to Sell This?” Financial Times Magazine, July 26, 2003, 28. 42. Davies, interview, 2015. 43. I would insert the “Oh” for theatrical emphasis in performance, which in this case merely added to the weight of expectation about what was supposed to follow. 44. In 2012 I referenced that moment of loss as a point of departure for the creation of a new piece of solo dance-​theater work, entitled Oh Let Me Confess, which was a response to the experience of performing in L.O.V.E. over a ten-​year period. 45. Soame Jenyns, “The Art of Dancing,” in Sorell, Shakespeare and the Dance, 373. 46. Ana Sanchez-​Colberg, “Altered States and Subliminal Spaces: Charting the Road towards a Physical Theatre,” Performance Research 1, no. 2 (1996): 53. 47. F. T. Prince, Shakespeare: The Poems, 32. 48. Davies, interview, 2015. On one occasion the scene got out of hand, driven perhaps by emergent interpersonal differences. At the climax of the fight I was supposed to dive into the action, playfully adding to the chaotic rough and tumble. However, sensing that things were now real, I hesitated, unsure; both Davies and Smith were bigger, stronger, and far better wrestlers than me. 49. Bassett, “Between the Lines and the Sheets,” 28. 50. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 550. 51. Gail Walker, Belfast Telegraph, March 3, 1993. 52. Aspden, “Does This Look Like the Best Way to Sell This?” 28. 53. Aspden, “Does This Look Like the Best Way to Sell This?” 28. 54. Aspden, “Does This Look Like the Best Way to Sell This?” 28.

Bibliography Bristol, Michael, and Kathleen McLuskie, with Christopher Holmes, eds. Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity. London: Routledge, 2001. Brown, Sarah A., Robert I. Lublin, and Lynsey McCulloch, eds Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance. London:  Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Duncan-​Jones, Katherine, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997. Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Raw, Laurence, ed. Translation, Adaptation and Transformation. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Smith, Bruce R., ed. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England:  A Cultural Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997.

Chapter 24

Inc orp oratin g t h e   T e xt John Farmanesh-​Bocca’s Pericles Redux and Crystal Pite’s The Tempest Replica Linda McJannet

Scholars and Shakespeare aficionados are familiar with many of the ballet and modern dance adaptations of the plays discussed in the preceding chapters. Lately, however, theater practitioners have made the case for integrating dance and movement throughout a Shakespeare performance in a style known as “physical theater.”1 According to historian Sabine Sörgel, after World War II, Western theater experienced “a major shift towards dance and somatic practice.”2 Under the influence of phenomenology, she argues, practitioners sought to rely less on “words and their rational meanings” and more on a “pre-​conceptual engagement with life and experience.”3 Pioneering directors, such as Antonin Artaud, Jacques Lecoq, and Jerzy Grotowski, moved in this direction, drawing on mime, Asian drama, and “the popular commedia tradition of the actor as improviser/​dancer/​acrobat”4 to champion versions of “poor theater” centered on the actor’s body. They challenged the ability of spoken language alone “to convey the experience of self-​in-​the-​world,”5 and they sought to “provoke the imaginations of the spectators” rather than provide “literal replications of life.”6 Grotowski, in particular, advocated a minimalist approach to set, costumes, and other effects, including music. The Empty Space, Peter Brook’s 1968 manifesto against “deadly” theater, was strongly influenced by Grotowski, and Brook’s celebrated 1970 Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its “white box” set and circus trapezes, is arguably the first physical theater production of Shakespeare.7 Physical theater also descends from avant-​garde dance. In the 1970s, German choreographer Pina Bausch pioneered tanstheater, which Sörgel and others see as a response to the devastation of two world wars, the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and “the successful reconstruction of the old patriarchal regime” after the defeat of fascism.8 Like Isadora Duncan before her, Bausch went beyond the currently “codified” languages of the body.9 She often celebrated movement trouvé, activities of ordinary (peacetime) life, such as “walking, . . . carrying babies, caressing, kissing”—​or

546   Linda McJannet gently brushing someone’s hair.10 Later, Sasha Waltz focused on the beauty of the body itself and its vulnerability to objectification. In her Körper (Bodies, 2000), half-​naked dancers stacked like firewood recalled images from the Nazi death camps, and the sculpted torsos of dancers, curled in a fetal position and seen from the back, could be mistaken for a row of sandbags. Unlike Grotowski, Bausch embraced expressionistic sets and costumes and envisioned a kind of complete theater (or gesamtunstwerk) that included the spoken word. Later choreographers, including William Forsythe, whose Hamlet-​influenced Sider is discussed by Freya Vass-​Rhee in Chapter 20 of this volume, also began to challenge the notion of dance as “the silent art” and created “dance with words.”11 Although the words might be playful, evocative fragments rather than part of a coherent narrative, as modern and classical ballet began to privilege pure movement over storytelling, dance theater sought to engage audiences in multiple ways and explored socially conscious themes. Dance theater and physical theater diverged somewhat in the 1980s, as physical theater retained a stronger “connection with narrative” and “the full exploration of the theatrical medium.”12 However, some dance theater proponents continued to value storytelling, albeit in unconventional ways. Choreographer Crystal Pite has resisted what she views as “the taboo around narrative.”13 Her pure dance creations often have a narrative essence: in Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue (2008), she set herself the abstract task of creating ten duets for five dancers, but her impulse also had a narrative core: “It’s a beautiful word—​rescue—​ it evokes a whole story in a single word.”14 For their stories, physical theater ensembles, such as the British group DV8, tend to devise their own texts, but a surprising number have turned to classic works. My examination of the websites of thirteen ensembles featured in a recent journal revealed that six had produced one or more of Shakespeare’s plays, including the Fight or Flight Theatre Company, which performs plays on trapeze.15 This chapter considers John Farmanesh-​Bocca’s Pericles Redux and Crystal Pite’s The Tempest Replica to explore the range and richness of recent physical theater and dance theater approaches to Shakespeare.16 For Pericles Redux, I rely a primarily on a single-​ camera, archival recording of the June 15, 2008, performance at the Sunset Center in Carmel, California, provided to me by the company’s current artistic co-​director, Jones Welsh Talmadge.17 For later changes, especially to the prologue, I rely on the official trailer for the 2008 Edinburgh Festival, videos posted online by cast members from performances in Los Angeles in 2009, and my conversations with Welsh Talmadge and with Farmanesh-​Bocca, who reports that the work underwent so many changes that it had “eleven opening nights.”18 This comment reflects Farmanesh-​Bocca’s reverence for the ineffability of live performance, a view that my discussion will strive to respect, even as I attempt to account for the work’s appeal to both audiences in the theater and viewers of the recording, such as myself. For The Tempest Replica, I  rely on a professionally produced and edited DVD of a performance on October 20, 2011, at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, Germany. Several details discussed in Peter Dickinson’s article, “Textual Matters,” suggest that, prior to the North American performances that he witnessed, this work also underwent changes, including greater use of text projected on the scrim.19

Incorporating the Text    547 Overall, I will explore the paradox that while these works include most of the text (in the case of Pericles Redux) or significant fragments of it (in the case of The Tempest Replica), their creators nonetheless avoid logocentrism, the tendency to privilege text over movement, which practioners of both dance theater and physical theater have historically resisted. They do so, I will argue, by incorporating (including and embodying) text in innovative ways and disrupting linear narrative when it suits their purposes. In addition, although both works attend in their different ways to plot, character, and theme, they also engage with deeper elements of Shakespeare’s dramatic art: they mingle comic and tragic, “classical” and vernacular, and they “pivot” among different styles of movement and registers of performance. As a result, although a performance of either of these pieces could, to borrow Margaret Jane Kidnie’s terminology, be defended as an “instance” of their respective Shakespearean sources, rather than an “adaptation,” the creative contributions of the choreographer-​directors and their dancer-​actors are primary, not the text.20 Pericles Redux was created in 2008 by the Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble (hereafter NMA), which is now based in Los Angeles. Under founding artistic director John Farmanesh-​Bocca, the members of NMA aspire to “bring the worlds of Dance and Theatre closer together, while honoring the power of the spoken word.”21 They view the body as a “story-​telling machine”22 and imply that to survive, to appeal to contemporary audiences wedded to electronic devices and professional sports, theater needs to exhibit “the excitement . . . and immediacy of a live sports event,” as well as “the elegance and intimacy of dance.”23 Accordingly, the ensemble draws on acrobatics, clowning, and fencing, as well as modern dance, contact improvisation, and Pilobolus-​like, multi-​body sculptural forms.24 One reviewer described it as a blend of “Commedia dell’ arte, Monty Python, and Cirque du Soleil.”25 Conceived as a workshop production in which seven actor/​dancers took all the parts, Pericles Redux was performed on a bare stage with a raised platform at the rear. Simple, nonperiod costumes suggested the settings and the characters’ identities: a gilt-​edged robe for the emperor Antiochus; sailors’ middies or camouflage-​trousers for Pericles and his men; mini-​negligées for seductresses; a pith helmet and white linen shorts for King Simonides. The eclectic score included extracts from Beethoven, a contemporary string quartet, New Age/​electronic music, and Latin rhythms. A relatively full version of the text was spoken by the actor-​dancers, albeit in wildly varying registers, from slapstick to straight and deeply moving. Few scenes were cut, but speeches were pared down and replaced or supplemented with movement.26 The Tempest Replica is an innovative example of contemporary dance theater created in 2011 by Crystal Pite and her Vancouver-​based company, Kidd Pivot. Pite worked with William Forsythe in Frankfurt, and his influence is apparent in her work.27 Her choreography features “buckling, rippling phrases, in which movement impulses might begin at any point in the body.”28 Her style has been described as a blend of classical, contemporary, and hip-​hop, executed with “exquisite control.”29 The Tempest Replica set included a rear scrim on which images, both still and moving, were frequently projected.30 Music was used sparingly. Except for a rendition of Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” and a brief piano interlude for a duet between the lovers, Owen Belton’s score consisted

548   Linda McJannet of atmospheric tones and diegetic sounds:  seagulls’ cries, gale-​force winds, surf, splintering timbers, animalistic roars, voices, and the amplified “skriiinnnng” of a sword being drawn from a metal sheath. Lines of the text were spoken by the dancers and heard (sometimes distinctly, sometimes not) as part of the score; text was also emblazoned at climactic moments on the scrim. The terms “redux” and “replica” in the titles used by Farmanesh-​Bocca and Pite suggest the choreographers’ urge to “bring back” or “replicate” their respective sources, but they also stake out a separate existence for these works: each is a distinct work of reimagination, to be judged on its own terms.

Physicalizing the Text Like many directors of Shakespeare films, Farmanesh-​Bocca and Pite framed their adaptations with strategic introductory sequences. Although Pericles Redux, as noted earlier, included most of Shakespeare’s text, Farmanesh-​Bocca’s prologue relied exclusively on music, mime, and dance. He experimented with two versions. The first began in “Diana’s Diner” (a humorous reference to the goddess who appears in Act 5 to arrange the happy ending). Seated at a café table, Pericles and Thaisa enacted an all too familiar scene of marital alienation, avoiding eye contact, checking their watches, and finally slumping in their chairs in a kind of stupor—​all this (ironically) to the beautiful slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Diana (Alix Angelis, dressed as a waitress) eventually touched each of three male figures posed as a quasi-​classical “statue” and brought them to life. Tall and lean, with long arms and torsos, they inhabited the space with more than human ease and authority; their shaven heads and bare chests reminded one critic of “an albino Blue Man Group.”31 Since they silently observed and sometimes intervened in the action, these characters were referred to by the cast as the Fates. Having surveyed the audience and the alienated couple before them, each Fate pulled a die from a hidden pocket and held it out ceremoniously, like a magician beginning his act. One Fate received all the dice and started to shake them. Just as he was about to release them, he found a purchase on Pericles’ chair and leapt over the table. The energy of this unexpected leap rippled through the audience. Each Fate then took a turn with the dice, celebrating a good roll with out-​stretched arms, until one was determined to be the winner.32 They then removed Thaisa’s limp body and the café furniture and took Pericles into their power. In this version, the main action was thus presented as a flashback recounting Pericles and Thaisa’s courtship, separation, and miraculous reunion. Before the company’s performances at the Edinburgh Festival, however, the restaurant portion was cut as too static (though it was very funny).33 Thereafter, the piece began with three hooded figures entering to strong, syncopated notes on the cello and violin.34 They executed the business with the dice, shed their robes, and turned their attention upstage, where, as the red lighting shifted to blue, a group of urban pedestrians appeared, crossing and re-​crossing the platform at the rear. They chose one (Pericles,

Incorporating the Text    549 John Farmanesh-​Bocca) and brought him to the edge of the platform, from which he literally tumbled into their power. Thus the scene of marital dysfunction was replaced by a briefer and more general image of urban anonymity and rote “busy-​ness.” In both versions, a four-​minute sequence of pure dance followed, during which the Fates established (or perhaps conferred) Pericles’ identity as a prince: they constructed a throne with their bodies on which he sat, while their outstretched fingers created a crown above his head. Farmanesh-​Bocca’s “raw-​boned”35 choreography featured front falls, shoulder stands, pushups, lifts, and floor work. The Fates caught Pericles in full leap and spun him around, his body extended, as if to preview the physical buffeting he will endure on sea and land. Toward the end of the sequence, they repeatedly leapt upon Pericles, as if to crush him; each time, he threw them off with a cry. Finally, Pericles jumped upward, arms wide, and the three caught him at the apex and held the cruciform pose for several seconds. Pericles then sank into their arms until they lifted him into a final leap, the momentum of which carried him offstage, into a new life. The Fates reviewed their work with satisfaction. The lighting changed from blue to warm daylight, and they began, sometimes in unison and sometimes individually, to speak lines from the first chorus: “This’ Antioch, then . . . .” (1 Cho. 17).36 In both versions, the prologue-​in-​movement replaced the first sixteen lines of the text and established that movement will be the main medium of storytelling—​or at least co-​equal with the dialogue. In the text, the Chorus, poet John Gower (one of the play’s sources), entreats his audience to “accept [his] rhymes” since the tale provides both “pleasure” and profit (a theme “to make men glorious,” that is, eager for or worthy of glory [1 Cho. 9–​14]). Farmanesh-​Bocca’s prologues intensified the theme by opening with inglorious images of alienation and anonymity. Through the athletic moves and commanding presence of the Fates, the audience and Pericles were swept out of a disappointing or colorless reality and thrust into another world, a generic ancient “Syria,” where evil and danger lurked, but where heroic action (“glory”) might be possible. By contrast, Pite, whose work included only fragments of the dramatic text, began with a snippet of pure (if minimal) theater—​quotidian movement and dialogue. Shakespeare begins with the shipwreck, during which the destructive power of the storm is exacerbated by class-​based animosity between the noble passengers and the crew. Only in the next scene do we learn who the victims are, and that it was Prospero who raised the storm. Despite the rejection of linearity in parts of the dance world and, indeed, in parts of this very work, Pite used her prologue to make the exposition more linear and therefore (presumably) more clear. As spectators entered the theater, they found Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) in street clothes, making a fleet of white origami boats downstage right. Prospero, breaking the silence, called for Ariel (Sandra Marín Garcia) three times. She finally entered, also in street clothes, and received a paper boat and a one-​word command: “Shipwreck.” Ariel cradled the boat in her hand for a few moments, imitating the rise and fall of waves, then calmly put it in her mouth and crunched down. This bizarre action cued a momentary blackout and the thunder, lightning, and video projections that created the storm. More important, it startled and amused, removing the scene from the naturalistic mode it had seemed to embrace and

550   Linda McJannet signaling Pite’s unconventional approach to her material. She has said that she tackled The Tempest out of a desire “to transpose . . . shipwreck into the body.”37 Ariel’s action showed one humorous way to do it. After these interpolated prologues, Farmanesh-​Bocca and Pite (at least for the first half of her piece) adhered closely to their respective sources, but they physicalized the text in ingenious ways. In Pericles Redux, the integration of movement and text was achieved chiefly via the talents of the actor/​dancers who played the Fates—​and who doubled nearly all the secondary parts, changing costume offstage or transforming their identities before our eyes. Shakespeare’s play relies at times on pantomime: it contains three rather pedestrian dumb-​shows; but Farmanesh-​Bocca integrated movement into other narrative speeches and climactic moments. The effect was frequently comic. In the text, one of Pericles’ courtiers relates how the incestuous Antiochus and his daughter were punished (offstage) by divine fire (2.4.1–​12); in Pericles Redux, two Fates spoke the lines, seeming to call down the flames that incinerated the couple onstage in mid-​ lift. Momentarily functioning as stagehands, one Fate detached the daughter from her father’s arms and carried her off, rigid in her pose of guilty horror, and the other tipped the stiff corpse of Antiochus on its heels and dragged it into the wings. The Fates’ choreography underscored pathos as well. They were the waves that carried off Thaisa’s makeshift coffin, lifting and lowering it, twisting it in the eddies. As mariners, their tumbling, rolling bodies (and that of Pericles) created the illusion of the ship tossed in the storms, and they jointly executed the acrobatic, sculptural lifts by which the gravity-​defying goddess Diana appears to Pericles, ex corporibus rather than ex machina. The Fates also indicated movement through space or the passage of time. Prior to the Act 4 chorus that shifts the scene to Marina in Tarsus, they performed an athletic sequence in which they somersaulted off each other’s backs and rotated each other’s outstretched bodies like pinwheels, suggesting both the hands of a clock and movement through space. They then cradled the young Marina and mimicked her movements as she grew from unsteady toddler to young woman (see Figure 24.1). Their movements prepared us for Marina’s moral and physical resilience—​she had guardian angels. Overall, the narrative was linear, since the work followed the text with only minimal rearrangements, but mime and dance were prominent throughout, clarifying the action and adding both poignancy and humor. By contrast, Pite’s fusion of dance and storytelling had two distinct parts, one linear and based on robotic mime, one nonlinear and based on pure dance. As Pite explained, in the first half, “the plot points of the narrative [were] delivered minimally, through the gestures, postures, and configurations of the faceless body inside a maquette-​like space.”38 The “maquette-​like space” refers to Pite, Jay Gower Taylor, and Nancy Bryant’s design, a bare stage with a papery rear scrim, peopled with white-​clad dancers, who resembled the tiny human figures inserted in an architectural model.39 White fabric also covered the dancers’ heads and faces, ensuring that any expression of emotion came from the body as a whole. For the first thirty minutes, Prospero (who remained in street clothes) manipulated the replica characters, either directly or indirectly through Ariel. Pite supplemented the onstage dumb-​show with sound and video projections. Images of

Incorporating the Text    551

Figure 24.1.  The three Fates (Mike Buffo, Dash Pepin, and Vincent Cardinale) watch over the young Marina (Claire Moorer). Photograph by Stephen Moorer. ©Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble. Used by permission.

pelting rain dominated the storm scene, and we heard the muffled cries of the crew and the splitting of timbers while the male dancers and their projected doppelgängers moved semi-​realistically, falling, rolling, desperately holding onto one another in a line to avoid being swept overboard. After the storm scene, the replicas’ movements were mostly robotic, pop-​and-​lock.40 Miranda (Cindy Salgado) communicated her distress at the apparent loss of the ship by deep contractions and larger-​than-​life gestures: cocking her head, reaching out, covering her face, heaving her chest in convulsive sobs of empathy, and repeating the sequence. Eventually, Prospero picked her up like a manikin, sat her down upstage, and turned her head to the scrim, on which projected silhouettes mimed the events of Prospero’s long speech in 1.2: Antonio’s betrayal, their capture by Alonso, the sea voyage, and their first encounters with Caliban. Humor continued to be prominent as the action unfolded onstage. Prospero condemned Ferdinand to a Sisyphean task with a stone that, controlled by a semi-​visible string, returned to its original position with an amplified scraping sound every time Ferdinand succeeded in moving it. Humor governed potentially sad details, too, as when the grief-​stricken Alonso watched Ferdinand’s diadem rolling forlornly across the stage, implying his loss at sea. Caliban featured largely in the first half, either as a maquette figure on all fours, or as a projected,

552   Linda McJannet enlarged silhouette acting out his fantasies of rape and rebellion. (See Figure 24.2 for his replica costume in a rare moment when he walks upright.) Trinculo and Stephano were cut, so there was no lower-​class conspiracy, only Caliban’s resistance to Prospero’s rule, but the pantomime section covered the plot up to the harpy’s condemnation of the Neapolitan party in 3.3 and the marriage masque for Ferdinand and Miranda in 4.1. Pite’s hope was that, “armed with the plot points of a narrative,” the viewer would experience the duets of the second half “as more than just [dances] between two people”; rather, they would be “imbued with a story we have all shared.”41 The first half was witty and interesting as dance and theater, although, as we shall see, some viewers found it too long, and it did not enlighten others as much as

Figure 24.2.  Peter Chu as Caliban in the first half of The Tempest Replica. Photographed by Jörg Baumann at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt. ©Jörg Baumann and Kidd Pivot. Used by permission.

Incorporating the Text    553 Pite had wished. Nonetheless, the humor and precision of Pite’s choreography and the dancers’ ability to articulate every bone and joint of their bodies apparently kept many audience members engrossed, even if they were unsure of what was going on. In addition to pantomime, The Tempest Replica physicalized the text in even more elemental ways. Lines were sometimes spoken by the dancer/​characters or incorporated into the score as whispery textures. Ariel’s description of the shipwreck was heard several times on the soundtrack while she danced, but the sound of the words mattered as much or more than the meaning. Fragments of the text were also simultaneously heard and seen. As the projected image of the harpy confronted the “three men of sin” and shrieked that she had “made [them] mad” (3.3.53 and 58), these words also appeared in large, distorted letters on the scrim. As Dickinson has argued, these textual features were not evidence of logocentrism in the usual sense. Rather, they played with the text as an aural object and incorporated it into the sensuous whole of the work.42 As noted earlier, the scrim at the rear of the stage had a papery texture. Indeed, it reproduced the deckle edge and the “chain” and “laid” lines visible on handmade paper, such as that on which The Tempest was first printed in 1623. In addition, projected text usually appeared in a typeface and spelling that mimicked those of the First Folio. These papery motifs connected with the maquette figures and the origami boats, as well, so that, as reviewer Luke Jennings put it, it seemed as if the set and the occupants of Prospero’s “ ‘insubstantial realm’ [were] physically constituted from the pages on which they [had been] written.”43

Pivots and Transitions In telling their stories through movement, both Farmanesh-​Bocca and Pite combined potentially incongruous elements and styles of performance. Farmanesh-​Bocca seeks to ensure that the performances “pivot effortlessly” from dance, to pedestrian movement, to athletic exertion, and he uses humor to deepen audience engagement.44 As one artistic co-​director put it, realistic presentation can cause the audience’s “defense mechanisms [to] go up right away,” whereas a playful approach slips under the radar. In addition, she asserted, when a work shifts from farce or slapstick to “something that’s . . . beautiful,” the audience is taken by surprise, and “the levity makes it heartbreaking.”45 Not surprisingly, then, in Pericles Redux the style of presentation alternated between seriousness and comedy. The actor/​dancers movingly conveyed Pericles’ horror and dismay in Antioch, his grief at the loss of Thaisa, and his joyful reunion with Marina (see Figure 24.3). But Farmanesh-​Bocca also created a Monty Python version of King Simonides, who entered with a “silly walk” while playing a child’s plastic keyboard. When the same actor (Alexander Rodgers) incongruously played jealous Dionyza’s daughter, he performed a moonwalk while wearing a schoolgirl’s tartan miniskirt. Mytilene was imagined as a seedy beach community with a bossa-​nova soundtrack and drew on other pop-​culture

554   Linda McJannet

Figure 24.3.  Pericles (John Farmanesh-​Bocca) and Marina (Devon Dionne) in the recognition scene of Pericles Redux. Photograph by Stephen Moorer ©Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble. Used by permission.

allusions. The bawd (an excitable, cross-​dressed Dash Pepin) wore a Carmen Miranda outfit; the decrepit Pander (Vincent Cardinale) shuffled about in knee socks, flip-​flops, and high-​waisted Bermuda shorts; and Bolt (Mike Buffo) glided on “heelies” (sneakers with rollers in the heels) wearing a T-​shirt with a lightning bolt decal. Judging by the presence and absence of laughter at the appropriate moments on the DVD, I inferred that the audience had no trouble making the transitions from serious to comic and back again. The dances and other movement called for in the text were likewise presented in different tones and styles. Pericles’ fight with Antiochus’ henchmen was full of impressive marital arts moves, whereas the tournament that takes place offstage in the text (in 2.2)

Incorporating the Text    555 was enacted onstage as slapstick: each knight had an ill-​chosen weapon, and one was too old to compete seriously. The dances called for in 2.3 also received a light-​hearted treatment: the soldiers’ dance featured Gangnam-​style gallops, sparring, marching, communal drinking, and one-​armed pushups.46 Comically, Pericles was the first to collapse in the pushup competition. In this version, he was an everyman figure who endures, rather than a romantic hero. Later in the same scene, Pericles and Thaisa danced a goofy pas de deux, poking fun at the trope of love at first sight and perhaps at this staple of classical ballet. They moved in trance-​like slow motion, with childlike “giant steps,” alternately gazing blissfully at each other and then coyly away. By engaging audiences at different levels of seriousness (and with more comedy than in most productions), Farmanesh-​Bocca highlighted the improbability of the action. He played with the clichés of romance (shipwreck, betrayal, pirates, supposed death and resurrection, etc.), enabling the audience members to recognize the fairy-​tale elements, even as they empathized with the characters’ ordeals. At the same time, and equally important to NMA, the pantomime and danced choruses ensured that even first-​time viewers could grasp the whole story in unapologetically linear form. Pite is also interested in pivots, as the very name of her company implies. For her, a pivot “allows for another point of view. It is a turning point . . . that extends our perspective of the possible.”47 Whereas NMA aims for organic transitions, Pite delights in the shock of contrast and underlines her pivots with witty effects. As Jennings put it, about thirty minutes into the piece, “Pite throws a switch. The paper characters are unmasked and clothed in contemporary dress, and the step-​by-​step exposition is replaced by pure dance,”48 chiefly duets between Prospero and the other characters. In essence, Pite combined in one work what Elinor Parsons elsewhere in this volume identifies as distinct modes of appropriating Shakespeare for dance:  “explication” (the pantomime, maquette section) and “suggestion” (the evocative duets).49 Elizabeth Klett similarly contrasts Stephen Mills’s “intelligible and legible” adaptation of Hamlet with Kenneth Macmillan’s Sea of Troubles, a “dark, fragmented meditation on guilt, betrayal, and death.”50 To Pite, however, these approaches are complementary, not mutually exclusive. Pite’s mechanism for the transition from pantomime to pure dance was elaborate. The maquette section ended with a comically accelerated marriage of replica-​Ferdinand and replica-​Miranda, complete with church bells, doves, and fireworks (all orchestrated by Ariel). To celebrate, the newlyweds jitterbugged to Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Pite seemingly reimagined Shakespeare’s classical wedding masque as an impulsive Las Vegas ceremony. As in the text, the celebratory mood was interrupted by Prospero’s remembrance of a threat. Pite had eliminated Stephano and Trinculo, so Caliban’s projected silhouette, big as a dragon and accompanied by roaring, provided the necessary rupture. Once Prospero quelled this threat, however, the shadow play depicting his eviction from Milan unexpectedly ran again on the scrim, but this time faster and in reverse. It ended with a silhouette of Prospero huddled over his books in an Italianate tower as a bell chimed. Although initially puzzling (at least to me), the shadow-​play-​in-​reverse refocused attention on the revenge plot and highlighted Prospero’s unfinished business regarding

556   Linda McJannet his dukedom. It also literally rewound the piece to beginning, to the interpolated prologue, and we again saw Prospero alone on stage, calling for Ariel, who entered, once again in street clothes (see Figure 24.4). However, all was not quite as it had been before. Although shoeless in the second half, Ariel walked initially on half-​toe as if still wearing the white pumps of her replica costume. On the soundtrack, synchronized with her steps, we heard the tap and scrape of her invisible shoes. I loved this detail, but like Deborah Jowitt, I could not make sense of it at first.51 However, by the end of their second-​half duet, during which Prospero silenced Ariel’s cries for freedom even as he supported her in airy, spiraling lifts, the reprise of her high-​heeled shoes seemed emblematic of her subjugation. Paradoxically, when Ariel was granted her freedom near the end of the piece and left Prospero alone on stage, the tap-​tap of her receding footsteps echoed again for several moments. Thus, this aural detail keyed to onstage movement pivoted from a sign of Ariel’s containment to a sign of Prospero’s loneliness after her release. Ten minutes after the rewind of the shadow play, a further pivot occurred. A doorbell chimed, an unseen door opened, and the dancers, now all in street clothes and using quotidian movement, rushed onstage to the sounds of a party in full swing. The incongruous doorbell elicited audible laughter. After some milling about, the characters gathered in small groups in a “long-​ time-​ no-​ see” atmosphere.52 We were now

Figure 24.4.  Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) and Ariel (Angela Marín Garcia) in the second half of The Tempest Replica. Photographed by Jörg Baumann at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt. ©Jörg Baumann and Kidd Pivot. Used by permission.

Incorporating the Text    557 thoroughly out of the replica world. The mood shifted when a male character (Antonio, I inferred, from his behavior) suavely offered to entertain with a magic trick; he created a pistol with his hand, loaded it, spun the imaginary chamber, cocked it (all with amplified diegetic sound), and positioned it on Prospero’s forehead. Prospero calmly took control of the threatening hand/​gun and dominated Antonio in the duet that followed. By the end, Antonio’s body, gripped by semi-​paralysis, seemed at war with itself. After this transitional section, the second half continued with solos, duets, and small group sequences characterized by lifts, leaps, and attitude turns. As Jennings put it, they revealed “new things about the characters’ emotional circuitry”: “While [Caliban] is all sullen antagonism, . . . [Ariel] writhes in [Prospero’s] grasp like a trapped dragonfly, her long limbs probing the air.”53 Unlike the pantomime section, the duets and solos did not adhere to the chronology of the play. Ariel’s midpoint duet with Prospero took us back to the beginning, as lines from her first speech were spoken clearly in the score: “All hail, great master! . . . I come /​To answer thy best pleasure, be’t to fly, /​To swim, to dive into the fire” (1.2.189–​191). This duet was followed by Prospero’s Act 5 rebuke of Antonio. Prospero’s lines, “For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother /​Would even infect my mouth” (5.1.130–​131), were projected on the scrim, as an alienated Antonio, apparently loitering on the docks, smoked a cigarette.54 An enigmatic duet for Antonio and Sebastian ensued (Yannick Matthon and Jiri Pokorny), mostly on hands and knees; Antonio took the lead, as he did in their conspiracy against Alonso, and the sword-​ sound was heard repeatedly. Ten minutes later, during a solo for Ariel, her lines about firing the ship were heard again, and a solo for Ferdinand (Jermaine Maurice Spivey) explored his apparent drowning, both of which also happen in Act 1.  Having been fascinated by how “to transpose the idea of a shipwreck into the body,”55 Pite obsessively returned to the opening scene. For me, the most arresting duet in the second half was Caliban’s with Prospero. Dressed in a dark suit, like the other male characters, Caliban (Peter Chu) had lost his gargoyle qualities, but his movements captured his alterity. He was not comfortable with his erect posture, his movements remained disjointed, and he struggled with language. Pite is known for her ability to “turn abstract intellectual ideas” into dance.56 In Caliban’s case, she imagined that he experienced visceral impediments when he attempted to speak. His body shuddered; he clutched his abdomen or throat; he convulsed; we felt his gorge rise. The soundtrack contained hiccups, retching, gulps, gasps, and even giggles, a panoply of pre-​language vocalizations. In addition, we heard in the soundtrack and at times directly from Caliban the lines that explained his condition: “You taught me language and my profit on’t /​Is I know how to curse” (1.2.363–​364). Caliban eventually uttered more lines of dialogue—​spoke more language—​than any other character, including Prospero. Twice he exclaimed defiantly, “This island’s mine!” (1.2.331). He cursed (“The red plague rid you /​For learning me your language!” 1.2.364–​365), and he cried out for vengeance: “Knock a nail in his head” (3.2.59); “brain him, /​ . . . /​Batter his skull” (3.2.88–​90). Prospero called Ariel’s name five times; Ferdinand mouthed “Hell is empty, /​And all the devils are here” (1.2.214–​215); and Ariel’s lines were repeatedly heard on the soundtrack, but only Caliban spoke several full sentences onstage. In the

558   Linda McJannet text, Caliban’s initial lack of language and his having been taught to speak by Prospero and Miranda is given much weight, so it was doubly ironic that, in this version, he was the character who spoke most often and most vehemently on his own behalf. His ability with language also increased the painful effect when Prospero dragged him about by the nape of the neck, as if he were a naughty puppy. Most poignantly, midway through their duet Prospero extended his hand as if to reconcile, only to withdraw it when Caliban warily extended his. Caliban in this version deserved better.

Final Movements: Interpolated Epilogues Both Farmanesh-​Bocca and Pite ended their works with movement-​based codas. Pericles Redux had a “reverse epilogue.” After Pericles’ final speech, the cast mimed and danced the entire story backward, rewinding to the opening scene in a sequence lasting almost five minutes. Although costume changes were necessarily forgone, the gestures and tableaux of the intimate scenes and the choreography of the fight and storm scenes came through clearly.57 The idea of running Shakespeare backward has been done for laughs by the Reduced Shakespeare Company. Here, since choreography was involved, the device was far more challenging physically. Moreover, unlike the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s skits, the rewind had a serious purpose. After we returned, either to the restaurant (in the original version), where the previously disaffected couple eagerly took each other’s hands in renewed affection, or (in the later version) to the crowd of pedestrians into which the Fates reinserted Pericles, all three Fates leapt from the platform and vigorously rolled the dice again, downstage center, before the lights cut to black. The implication was that the cycle of romance—​of life—​repeats; we in the audience may be next. This potentially sobering theme drew the audience into the action, but the mood was leavened by the tour de force of the reverse epilogue. The physical skill of the performers and the totality of the theatrical experience, of which the audience was thus vividly reminded, left audience members (including me) “elated and amazed” and with “a lot to think about.”58 The epilogue also functioned, I would argue, as a celebration of physical theater itself. Like Ginger Rogers in relation to Fred Astaire, the members of a physical theater company can do it all, and they can do it backward. Pite also constructed her own epilogue-​in-​movement, which, like so many aspects of this piece, was open to multiple interpretations. Having freed Ariel as he promised, Prospero lay supine on the stage, apparently despondent. When Miranda entered and stood over him, he rose and then nudged her to join Ferdinand by brushing the backs of her calves with his hand. The lovers shared a lovely earth-​ bound, contact-​improvisational duet to music (delicate piano and electronic tones). As they exited, Prospero seemed about to follow them, but the “ding-​dong” of the doorbell was heard again, announcing another pivot. The invisible door opened,

Incorporating the Text    559 admitted a wedge of light, and three male figures entered, one by one, in their replica costumes once more. An ocean buoy or a church bell sounded, and I wondered for whom the bell tolled—​Prospero or his former enemies? A fourth figure entered, replica-​Alonso, judging by his kingly wave. The choreography for this small group, Pite’s favorite choreographic unit,59 began quietly. As the first figure entered, Prospero turned, walked downstage, and stood with his head in his hands. The replicas, one after the other, mimicked his movements and touched him (or the dancer in front of them) in what seemed gestures of condolence; there were several moments of stillness. Then the movement intensified; the characters appeared to relive the terror of the shipwreck, linking hands and trying to hold on. Prospero, a dark figure in the midst of the white-​clad quartet, mimed giving commands or crying out in terror—​or both. He mouthed, as Ferdinand had done earlier, “Hell is empty, /​And all the devils are here!” (1.2.214–​215). The soundtrack with its storm noises reprised the shipwreck scene as well. When the storm subsided, Prospero’s body ceased to move and was lowered to the floor by the replicas. Now he appeared to be the manikin; they placed him face down in the swath of light, arranged his body in an awkward sprawl, and stood back (see Figure 24.5). They regarded him

Figure 24.5.  The Tempest Replica, the final tableau with Eric Beauchesne as Prospero. Photographed by Jörg Baumann at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt. ©Jörg Baumann and Kidd Pivot. Used by permission.

560   Linda McJannet for several moments and then mimed applause, first slowly, then more quickly, as the lights faded to black. While Pite’s final tableau left open the question of whether Prospero could or would leave the island, it conveyed (like the epilogue in the text) his diminished powers and the response desired of the audience—​namely, applause. Shakespeare’s Prospero, having renounced his magic, pleads for help from our “good hands” in order to return to Milan—​or indeed to leave the stage.60 Commenting on Pite’s ending, Jennings observed that, in freeing Ariel and his enemies, “Prospero frees himself, but all freedom comes at a cost.”61 In this interpretation, the effort of forgiveness—​ and perhaps of creating and managing the characters and events—​took its toll. The New York Times reviewer, Alastair Macaulay, who objected to what he viewed as Pite’s emphasis on “malignity and negative emotion” throughout the work, termed the applause “sarcastic,”62 but I didn’t read it that way. Rather, it seemed a wry reminder that, for better and for worse, artistic creations may outlive and/​or overpower their creators, a theme Pite explores in other works, such as Dark Matters.63 Moreover, Pite’s view of the play differs from the one Macaulay inferred. She described it as a “beautiful human story about choosing love over revenge and power,”64 which would support a gentler view of her coda.

Moving Audiences Pericles Redux and The Tempest Replica succeeded with audiences in several cities on both sides of the Atlantic. In the case of Pericles, critics were moved primarily by the physical aspects of the performance. They noted the ensemble’s ability to “do it all: jump, leap, clown, pout, sing, dance, and even act,” and praised the seamless blend of “high art with low comedy, slapstick humor with acrobatic dance.”65 The Scotsman asserted that “[m]‌oments of athletic dance pepper the action without a hint of incongruity, with lifts and jumps serving only to drive the show along.”66 Only one critic objected to the work’s pervasive physicality:  Lyn Gardner complained that the production “was so in love with its own physical virtuosity that it [rode] roughshod over the play” and became “exhausting.”67 However, the company apparently achieved its aim of clarity. One spectator asserted that “[s]omebody [who] doesn’t even get Shakespeare, who doesn’t understand, can come in and know exactly what is going on. You don’t even have to hear the words.”68 Pite’s Tempest Replica also reaped accolades:  “magic,” “brilliantly conceived and wonderfully executed” (New Jersey Star Ledger); “mercurial and full of power and humor” (Journal Frankfurt); “fluid as quicksilver” (Ballet Tanz); “Text, sound, light, and movement intertwine as magically and swiftly as in a fever dream” (Seattle Times).69 Dickinson lauded Pite’s ability to take “a sacred cultural text like The Tempest” and “to make the words have flesh.”70 Not everyone loved the piece, however. Macaulay complained that “[a]‌ll the dancing [was] flashy” and that every “character [got] the same wheeling attitude turns.”71 He also found the storyboard “tedious” and doubted that

Incorporating the Text    561 anyone unfamiliar with the text could have worked out “what on earth is happening.”72 Macaulay’s response somewhat resembles the Fox News commentators’ complaints about Synetic Theater’s “wordless Shakespeare” discussed by Sheila Cavanagh in Chapter 25 of this volume.73 He was not entirely wrong, however. There are a lot of attitude turns, and had I not been familiar with the play, I doubt I would have understood the first half of the piece. Deborah Jowitt, a former dancer and no Shakespeare “purist,” reported she was often “baffled” in the first half and wasn’t “sure of who [was] agonizing with whom” in the second.74 Overall, however, audiences seem to have embraced The Tempest Replica for its ambitious concept, imaginative and witty choreography, and brilliant execution. Pite has gone on to even more ambitious pieces. In 2015, Polaris, her contribution to an evening of three dances set to the orchestral works of Thomas Adès, was billed as “the big event,” both for its scale (“a seething black-​clad mob” of sixty-​five dancers) and for the anticipation that the announcement of her new work aroused.75

Conclusion Farmanesh-​Bocca and Pite (and their respective ensembles) reimagined a Shakespeare play via the body. Both relied on their irreverent touch and the versatility, strength, and endurance of the performers to engage their audiences. Both works pivoted between comedy and seriousness. Farmanesh-​Bocca included a plastic keyboard from Toys-​Я-​ Us in a work that dealt with famine, incest, and apparently irreparable loss. Pite’s dark reimagining of The Tempest announced two major pivots with a homely doorbell. Both works relied upon linearity, but playfully disrupted the narrative arc when it suited their purposes. Pite’s work is more demanding intellectually and kinesthetically. It speaks best, I would venture, to those experienced with Shakespeare or with dance or both.76 At the same time, notwithstanding her grand theatrical effects, Pite works on an almost clinical level. Initially fascinated by how one could “transpose . . . shipwreck into the body,” she devised solos and duets that explored similar questions. How might it feel to drown (Ferdinand)? To be imprisoned in a guilty body that attacks itself (Sebastian and Antonio)? To experience nausea associated with having to speak the language of one’s oppressor (Caliban)? While the dance world has sometimes viewed narrative as a crutch or a distraction from the experience of pure movement, NMA and Kidd Pivot show that it is possible to combine dance and storytelling in ways that make movement the medium, not the servant, of the story. In a seminal article, Henrietta Bannerman argued that of the dance genres, dance theater was most likely to achieve “transactional intensity,” to engage spectators so as to “arouse a response,” but she speculated that such meaningful intensity arose “more from the inclusion of the spoken text than . . . from the movement or dance element.”77 My research suggests that, for these two works, the opposite is the case. Although Shakespeare’s text was included, in whole or in fragments, dance and

562   Linda McJannet movement were the keys to audience engagement. In addition to responding to the choreography itself, audiences were “elated and amazed” by the performers’ willingness to take artistic and physical risks.78 Pericles Redux is an exhilarating version of one of Shakespeare’s romances. Despite (or perhaps because of) its baffling details, The Tempest Replica—​and especially Sandra Marín Garcia’s Ariel, Prospero’s duet with Caliban, and the ending sequence—​will color how I read or see The Tempest in the future. These adaptations, like any good production, shape the afterlives of the plays and the cultural phenomenon we call “Shakespeare.” Enrique Pardo envisioned a “promised land where literature and the physical body [might] meet . . . and yield more complex images” than either could alone.79 John Farmanesh-​Bocca’s and Crystal Pite’s adaptions of Shakespeare take us a good distance toward that intriguing ideal.

Notes 1. My use of this term varies slightly from Sheila Cavanagh’s in Chapter 25 of this volume. I reserve the term for companies that combine text and dance or other kinds of movement, as opposed to the “wordless Shakespeare” of Synetic Theater, which Cavanaugh discusses. 2. Sabine Sörgel, Dance and the Body in Western Theatre: 1948 to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), xiii. 3. Sörgel, Dance and the Body, xiii and 91. 4. Dymphna Callery, Through the Body: A Practical Guide to Physical Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2001), 11. 5. Ana Sanchez-​Colberg, “Altered States and Subliminal Spaces: Charting the Road towards a Physical Theatre,” Performance Research 1, no. 2 (1996): 44. 6. Callery, Through the Body, 5. 7. The supposedly lost recording of this production has recently been found. See Linda McJannet, “Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: An Archival Discovery. Borrowers and Lenders 10, no. 2 (Spring 2017). http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/783443/show. 8. The phrase is from Johannes Birringer (1986), quoted in Sanchez-​Colberg, “Altered States,” 45. 9. Sanchez-​Colberg, “Altered States,” 44. 10. Maria Shevtsova, “Performance, Embodiment, Voice: The Theatre/​Dance Cross-​overs of Dodin, Bausch, and Forsythe,” NTQ (New Theatre Quarterly) 19, no. 1 (February 2003): 3–​17, esp. 9–​10. 11. Rita Felciano, “Talk to Me,” American Theatre 28, no. 9 (November 2011): 24–​25. In the second act of Forsythe’s The Loss of Small Detail, for example, the dancers chant “It’s snowing” as white flakes inundate the stage. On dance theater as a “cross-​over” genre, see Shevtsova, “Performance,” 3–​17. 12. Sanchez-​Colberg, “Altered States,” 48. 13. Quoted in Peter Dickinson, “Textual Matters: Making Narrative and Kinesthetic Sense of Crystal Pite’s Dance-​Theater.” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 1 (April 2014): 62. 14. Emily Macel, “Quick Q&A: Crystal Pite,” Dance Magazine 82, no. 5 (May 2008): 16. 15. K. C. Wright, “13 Innovative Physical Theater Companies,” Back Stage, November 4, 2014, n.p. https://​www.backstage.com/​news/​13-​innovative-​physical-​theater-​companies, accessed August 22, 2017. For the Fight or Flight Theatre, see Diep Tran, “Soaring Shakespeare,” American Theatre 28, no. 9 (November 2011): 23.

Incorporating the Text    563 16. I am grateful to Not Man Apart and Kidd Pivot for making their work available to me. I am especially grateful to Jones Welsh Talmadge of Not Man Apart, who played one of the Fates in 2009 and talked with me over dinner after a performance of East West on September 26, 2015, in Salinas, CA, and at other times. Artistic director John Farmanesh-​ Bocca also kindly spoke with me in person on April 7, 2016, after a performance of his Tempest Redux, which debuted too late to be included in this chapter, and by phone on October 13, 2016. Like all who study the performing arts, I recognize that recordings, including professionally edited ones, can never fully capture the vitality and nuances of a live performance, let alone the collective effect of a series of performances and later versions of the work. 17. As of this writing, it was still available at https://​youtu.be/​drqL6pfXP3M. 18. Telephone conversation with the author, October 13, 2016. 19. Dickinson, “Textual Matters,” 73. 20. Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London; New York: Routledge, 2009), 28. 21. Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble, “Vision Statement,” www.notmanapart.com/​ about, accessed August 22, 2017. 22. Farmanesh-​Bocca, quoted in Leslie Dunn, “Perils of Pericles,” Monterey County Herald, June 12, 2008, n.p. http://​www.montereyherald.com/​general-​news/​20080612/​perils-​of-​ pericles, accessed July 29, 2018. 23. Not Man Apart, “Vision.” 24. Pilobolus, founded in 1971 by a group of Dartmouth College students, initiated a style of movement in which dancers intertwine and cantilever their bodies to create intriguing, nonhuman forms. 25. Kathryn McKenzie Nichols, “Acclaimed Pericles Redux Returns,” Monterey County Herald, October 23, 2008. http://​www.montereyherald.com/​general-​news/​20081023/​acclaimed-​ pericles-​redux-​returns, accessed July 29, 2018. 26. Farmanesh-​Bocca and Elizabeth Gray co-​edited the performance text, which runs just under two hours. 27. See, for example, the discussion in Shevtsova, “Performance,” 10–​13. 28. Claudia La Rocco, “In a Struggle of Wills, Who Is Really the Manipulator?” Review of Kidd Pivot, Dark Matters at Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ. New York Times, October 27, 2010, C5(L). 29. Heather Wisner, “Kidd Pivot,” Dance Magazine 83, no. 2 (February 2009): 97. 30. Initially there were two scrims; Prospero removed one after the storm scene. 31. Travis Michael Holder, “Pericles Redux,” review of Pericles Redux at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, Los Angeles, Back Stage 50, no. 30 (July 23, 2009): 40. In 2008 the Fates were Vincent Cardinale, Dash Pepin, and Mike Buffo. In 2009 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, Jones Welsh Talmadge replaced Mike Buffo (Welsh Talmadge, email to the author, January 25, 2016). 32. The dice game had real consequences: whoever won the game got the “primary” position in the Fates’ sequences. In other words, the actors were subject to chance, just as Pericles was (Welsh Talmadge, conversation with the author, September 26, 2015). 33. Welsh Talmadge, conversation with the author, September 26, 2015. 34. The Vitamin String Quartet is credited with most of the music in the work, including excerpts from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and their cover of Moby’s electronic composition, “God Moving over the Face of the Waters.”

564   Linda McJannet 35. Holder, “Pericles Redux,” 40. 36. All Shakespearean quotations are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 37. Sadlers Wells, “Crystal Pite Talks about The Tempest Replica: Crystal Pite, Sadler’s Wells Associate Artist, Part  3,” http://​www.sadlerswells.com/​screen/​video/​3414379101001, accessed October 4, 2016. 38. Kidd Pivot, “The Tempest Replica: Notes from Crystal Pite,” www.kiddpivot.org, accessed August 20, 2017. 39. Unlike the simple costumes of Pericles Redux, the replica costumes triggered multiple associations. As maquette figures, they underscored Prospero’s role as the “architect” of the plot. Pite also referred to them as “fencing costumes,” which anticipates the conflicts that characterize the duets to come (quoted in Dickinson, “Textual Matters,” 70). Deborah Jowitt described the maquette figures as “well-​kept mummies,” stressing their limited vitality (“Lie There My Art,” a review of Kidd Pivot, The Tempest Replica at the Joyce Theatre, New York City, Dance Beat: An Arts Journal Blog, December 9, 2012, www.artsjournal. com/​dancebeat/​2012/​12/​lie-​there-​my-​art, accessed August 22, 2017). To me, the dancers’ pointy chins and robotic movements were insect-​like, and the white fabric suggested the chrysalis from which the pupa emerges to move freely, as the characters do in the second half. Caliban’s version of the costume, with its shoulder and elbow fins and crested headpiece, suggested a gargoyle or a stegosaurus, especially when his shadow was enlarged on the scrim. Whereas the design of Pericles Redux aimed for transparency and utility, Pite’s design tantalizes our interpretive impulses long after the work is over. 40. “Pop and lock” refers to break-​dancing moves that isolate or “pop” parts of the body and “lock” individual movements, cutting off the flow from one to another. 41. Kidd Pivot, “The Tempest Replica: Notes.” 42. Dickinson, “Textual Matters,” 72–​73. 43. Luke Jennings, “A Perfect Storm,” review of The Tempest Replica at the Hippodrome, Birmingham, UK, The Observer, May 10, 2014, 29. 44. Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble, “Organization Manifesto and the NMA Vision,” updated August, 2015, private copy provided by Jones Welsh Talmadge. The importance of transitions is increased by NMA’s adoption of Tolstoy’s hierarchy of the elements of an epic. According to Tolstoy, whom they quote in their Manifesto, the five elements in order of increasing importance are: story, character, time, context, and transition—​the opposite of what one might think. 45. Jennifer Landon, interview, Not Man Apart, “Pericles Redux @ the Kirk Douglas Theatre,” with audience interviews, YouTube, posted September 8, 2009, https://​www.youtube. com/​watch?v=qGfK_​lQdrF8, accessed August 22, 2017. Landon played Marina/​Thaisa in the Los Angeles production. 46. Gangnam-​style dancing was made popular in the first decade of the 2000s by Psy, a pop singer from South Korea. 47. From Nancy Shaw’s 2006 interviews with Pite, quoted in Dickinson, “Textual Matters,” 61. 48. Jennings, “A Perfect Storm,” 29. 49. See Chapter  17 in this volume, Elinor Parsons, “ ‘Therefore, Ha’ Done with Words’: Shakespeare and Innovative British Ballets.” 50. See Chapter 18 in this volume, Elizabeth Klett, “Measure in Everything: Adapting Hamlet to the Contemporary Dance Stage.”

Incorporating the Text    565 51. Jowitt, “Lie There My Art.” 52. Jowitt ingeniously suggests that the cocktail party replaces (or reprises) the banquet scene (“Lie There My Art”). 53. Jennings, “A Perfect Storm,” 29. 54. The setting is suggested by the soundtrack with the boom of metal hulls and seagulls’ cries. 55. Sadlers Wells, “Crystal Pite Talks.” 56. Gia Kourlas, “One Story about Two People Told in Four Ways,” review of Kidd Pivot, The You Show at the Jerome Robbins Theater, New York City, New York Times, February 25, 2012, C6(L), and the reviewer for The Georgia Straight, quoted on the company website. 57. The sequence has been posted online. See Pacific Repertory Theatre, “Pericles Reverse Epilogue,” YouTube, November 22, 2008, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=qGfK_​ lQdrF8, accessed August 22, 2017. 58. Not Man Apart, “Pericles Redux @ the Kirk Douglas.” 59. I infer this from her comments to Macel, “Quick Q&A,” 16. 60. “Now my charms are all o’erthrown, /​And what strength I have’s mine own, /​Which is most faint. . . . /​ . . . [R]‌elease me from my bands /​With the help of your good hands” (Epi. 1–​3,  9–​10). 61. Jennings, “A Perfect Storm.” 29. 62. Alastair Macaulay, “Prospero Imagined Anew, with Mime,” review of Kidd Pivot, The Tempest Replica at the Joyce Theatre, New  York City, New  York Times, November 30, 2012, C4(L). 63. See La Rocco, “In a Struggle of Wills,” C5(L). 64. Sadlers Wells, “Crystal Pite Talks.” 65. Laurence Vittes, “‘Pericles Redux,’” Hollywood Reporter 410, no. 35 (July 20, 2009): 11. 66. Quoted in Nichols, “Acclaimed Pericles Redux Returns.” 67. Lyn Gardner, “Edinburgh Festival:  Pericles Redux,” The Guardian, August 6, 2008, https://​www.theguardian.com/​culture/​2008/​aug/​06/​pericles.redux, accessed October 6, 2016. 68. Not Man Apart, “Pericles Redux @ the Kirk Douglas Theatre.” 69. Quoted on the company’s website; see Kidd Pivot, “The Tempest Replica.” 70. Dickinson, “Textual Matters,” 71. 71. Macaulay, “Prospero Imagined.” 72. Macaulay, “Prospero Imagined.” 73. See Chapter  25 in this volume, Sheila Cavanagh, “  ‘A Delightful Measure or a Dance’: Synetic Theater and Physical Shakespeare.” 74. Jowitt, “Lie There My Art.” 75. Joan Acocella, “Thomas Adès: Concentric Paths—​Movements in Music,” The New Yorker, November 23, 2015, 21. 76. Jennings reports that although the audience in Birmingham was enthusiastic, the Hippodrome was “half-​empty” (“A Perfect Storm,” 29). 77. Henrietta Bannerman, “Is Dance a Language? Movement, Meaning, and Communication,” Dance Research 32, no. 1 (2014): 72. 78. Audience member’s comment, Not Man Apart, “Pericles Redux @ the Kirk Douglas Theatre.” 79. Enrique Pardo, “The Angel’s Hideout: Between Dance and Theatre,” Performance Research 3, no. 2 (1998): 19.

566   Linda McJannet

Bibliography Acocella, Joan. “Thomas Adès:  Concentric Paths—​Movements in Music.” The New  Yorker, November 23, 2015, 21. Anon. “A Storm of Movement: The Tempest Replica.” Dance Magazine 86, no. 9 (September 2012): 12. Dickinson, Peter. “Textual Matters: Making Narrative and Kinesthetic Sense of Crystal Pite’s Dance-​Theater.” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 1 (April 2014): 61–​83. Dunn, Leslie. “Perils of Pericles.” Review of Pericles Redux at the Sunset Center, Carmel, CA. Monterey County Herald, June 12, 2008. http://​www.montereyherald.com/​general-​news/​ 20080612/​perils-​of-​pericles. Accessed July 29, 2018. Felciano, Rita. “Talk to Me.” American Theatre 28, no. 9 (November 2011): 24–​26, 82. Gardner, Lyn. “Edinburgh Festival:  Pericles Redux.” The Guardian, August 6, 2008. https://​ www.theguardian.com/​culture/​2008/​aug/​06/​pericles.redux. Accessed October 6, 2016. Holder, Travis Michael. “Pericles Redux.” Review of Pericles Redux at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, Los Angeles. Back Stage 50, no. 30 (July 23, 2009): 40. Jennings, Luke. “A Perfect Storm.” Review of The Tempest Replica at the Hippodrome, Birmingham, UK. The Observer, May 10, 2014, 29. Jowitt, Deborah. “Lie There My Art.” A  review of Kidd Pivot, The Tempest Replica at the Joyce Theater, New York City. Dance Beat: An Arts Journal Blog, December 9, 2012. www. artsjournal.com/​dancebeat/​2012/​12/​lie-​there-​my-​art. Accessed August 22, 2017. Kidd Pivot. “The Tempest Replica:  Notes from Crystal Pite.” www.kiddpivot.org. Accessed August 20, 2017. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London; New  York: Routledge, 2009. Kourlas, Gia. “One Story about Two People Told in Four Ways.” Review of Kidd Pivot, The You Show at the Jerome Robbins Theater, New York City. New York Times, February 25, 2012, C6(L). La Rocco, Claudia. “In a Struggle of Wills, Who Is Really the Manipulator?” Review of Kidd Pivot, Dark Matters at Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ. New York Times, October 27, 2010, C5(L). Macaulay, Alastair. “Prospero Imagined Anew, with Mime.” Review of Kidd Pivot, The Tempest Replica at the Joyce Theatre, New York City. New York Times, November 30, 2012, C4(L). Macel, Emily. “Quick Q&A: Crystal Pite.” Dance Magazine 82, no. 5 (May 2008): 16. McJannet, Linda. “Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: An Archival Discovery. Borrowers and Lenders 10, no. 2 (Spring 2017). http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/783443/show. Accessed October 19, 2018. Nichols, Kathryn McKenzie. “Acclaimed Pericles Redux Returns.” Monterey County Herald, October 23, 2008. http://​www.montereyherald.com/​general-​news/​20081023/​acclaimed-​ pericles-​redux-​returns. Accessed July 29, 2018. Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble. “Organization Manifesto and the NMA Vision.” Updated August, 2015. Private copy provided by Jones Welsh Talmadge. Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble. “Pericles Redux @ the Kirk Douglas Theatre.” With audience interviews. YouTube, September 8, 2009. https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=UDOL5BlntkY&t=33s. Accessed August 18, 2017.

Incorporating the Text    567 Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble. “Pericles Redux [Promotional Trailer].” YouTube, June 1, 2008. https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=atDsb3mQf7Q. Accessed August 18, 2017. Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble. “Vision Statement.” www.notmanapart.com/​ about. Accessed August 22, 2017. Pacific Repertory Theatre. “Pericles Reverse Epilogue.” YouTube, November 22, 2008. https://​ www.youtube.com/​watch?v=qGfK_​lQdrF8. Accessed August 18, 2017. Pardo, Enrique. “The Angel’s Hideout: Between Dance and Theatre.” Performance Research 3, no. 2 (1998): 19–​26. Sadler’s Wells. “Crystal Pite Talks about The Tempest Replica:  Crystal Pite, Sadler’s Wells Associate Artist, Part  3.” http://​www.sadlerswells.com/​screen/​video/​3414379101001. Accessed October 4, 2016. Sanchez-​Colberg, Ana. “Altered States and Subliminal Spaces: Charting the Road towards a Physical Theatre.” Performance Research 1, no. 2 (1996): 40–​56. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans et  al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Shevtsova, Maria. “Performance, Embodiment, Voice:  The Theatre/​Dance Cross-​overs of Dodin, Bausch, and Forsythe.” New Theatre Quarterly (NTQ) 19, no. 1 (February 2003): 3–​17. Sulcas, Roslyn. “A Rarity Gets Notice in Ballet.” New York Times, November 20, 2015, C4(L). Tran, Diep. “Soaring Shakespeare.” American Theatre 28, no. 9 (November 2011): 23. Vittes, Laurence. “‘Pericles Redux.’” Hollywood Reporter 410, no. 35 (July 20, 2009), 10–​11. Wisner, Heather. “Kidd Pivot.” Dance Magazine 83, no. 2 (February 2009): 96–​97. Wright, K. C. “13 Innovative Physical Theater Companies.” Back Stage, November 4, 2014. http://​w ww.backstage.com/​news/​13-​innovative-​physical-​t heater-​companies. Accessed August 22, 2017.

Chapter 25

“ A Delightfu l Me asu re or a Danc e ” Synetic Theater and Physical Shakespeare Sheila T. Cavanagh

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, correctly or not, is considered by many as the man of inaction, and his endless cogitation, the lines and lines of “words, words, words” (2.2.196), threaten to render him radically unfit for dance.1 In this chapter I consider controversy surrounding Synetic Theater’s wordless Hamlet: The Rest Is Silence (2002), giving specific attention to conservative figureheads’ pronouncements that Hamlet is fundamentally antipodal to dance. While dance scholars address the bias toward text, not only from conservative pundits but also from scholars in other disciplines, similarities of structure in both texts and choreography intimate deep-​lying connections between these two modes of expression. Over the 2015–​2016 season in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, Synetic Theater offered its distinctive mixture of productions featuring innovative renditions of classic texts. Several of the pieces were new, including Alice in Wonderland, The Man in the Iron Mask, and As You Like It. Synetic normally gravitates toward titles by well-​known authors, ranging from Charles Dickens and Mary Shelley to Franz Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe. These performances are generally well reviewed, and Synetic boasts a number of local Helen Hayes theater awards, marking its prominence among the many groups mounting work in this region. As Juliet Moser notes about the Company’s presentation of Frankenstein, Synetic’s performances frequently grab the attention of both audiences and critics: “[Frankenstein] written by Artistic Director Paata Tsikurishvili and Nathan Weinberger and choreographed by Irina Tsikurishvili, bears Synetic’s signature style of re-​telling familiar stories through intense physicality that forces audiences to reexamine their notions of what theatre is and ought to be.”2 John Stoltenberg similarly praises Synetic’s 2017 production, The Mark of Cain: Fans of Synetic Theater’s music-​and movement-​based works derived from classic texts will find a surprise twist in the company’s latest offering. Typically, a Synetic

570   Sheila T. Cavanagh extravaganza creates a vivid other world, someplace unto itself, visually voluptuous, aurally luscious, always a trip to somewhere fantabulous. But with The Mark of Cain, Synetic’s first wholly original devised work in five years, the other world collides with the real world. The mythic meets the immediate. And the impact is smashing.3

Over the years, Synetic has crafted a significant place in this area’s theatrical scene. Their productions regularly capture critical and popular attention, whether they are adapting childhood favorites, such as Sleeping Beauty or The Wizard of Oz, or turning their attention to darker texts, such as Dante’s Inferno or The Trial. Not surprisingly, therefore, strong reviews often accompany Synetic’s productions, whatever their literary provenance, but the company is best known for its ongoing series of “wordless” Shakespeare productions that began with Hamlet: The Rest Is Silence in 2002. As this recent season suggests, these Shakespearean pieces are extremely popular, enjoying numerous revivals. In 2015–​2016, remounted productions of Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream made up half of the Company’s offerings. In 2018, they added Titus Andronicus to the diverse list of Shakespearean plays they have produced, which range from Antony and Cleopatra to King Lear, as well as an increasing number of comedies, tragedies, and romances. Synetic generally includes dialogue in its non-​Shakespearean performances, but its tradition of presenting Shakespeare without words has become entrenched in Washington, D.C., theater culture. Each year, they add new offerings to their physical theater repertoire, which incorporates both commissioned and borrowed music in order to tell these classic stories through a combination of highly choreographed movements, stunning sets, and noteworthy costumes. When Synetic first began, they were lodged in a Washington, D.C., church basement, where their audience seemed to be predominantly Eastern European. Over subsequent years, they have enjoyed regular residencies at the prestigious John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and at the highly respected Shakespeare Theater Company. They now enjoy a permanent space in Crystal City, Virginia, where they reportedly greatly benefit local businesses: “A few years ago, Arlington Arts Commission Chair John Seal said that Synetic Theater alone brought $3.75 million in revenue to Crystal City restaurants.”4 Increasingly diverse audiences keep returning for Synetic’s Shakespearean series, demonstrating that this brand of theater resonates with many arts supporters in the area. They are able to remount many of their productions repeatedly because they continually attract new and repeat audiences. Rather surprisingly, however, the company has also generated some high-​profile criticism, with attacks on their performances emanating first from The Wall Street Journal, then reiterated and extended on Fox News. The Wall Street Journal has reported influentially on matters Shakespearean, in recent years, as witnessed by the viral response generated after John H. McWhorter’s article on September 25, 2015, announcing that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is commissioning a set of Shakespearean plays “translated” into modern English.5 In contrast to many Shakespearean enthusiasts,

“A Delightful Measure or a Dance”    571 McWhorter champions the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s project, suggesting that, currently “[m]‌uch of Shakespeare goes over our heads because, even though we recognize the words, their meaning often has changed significantly over the past four centuries.” Notably, however, libertarian writer James Bovard used the same journalistic venue a few months earlier to assert an unassailable primacy for Shakespearean language. In his essay, he denounces Synetic’s complete departure from spoken text, claiming, “Synetic is known for high-​energy performances relying on acrobatics, pantomime and special effects. But flips and twists cannot suffice for nouns and verbs.”6 Oddly, although Bovard is unrelenting in his tirade against Synetic, he admits that Shakespeare can be presented successfully through dance:  “Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ has been beautifully adapted by [composer Sergei] Prokofiev, but that presentation succeeds thanks to magnificent music and viewers’ familiarity with the characters and storyline.” Apparently, the composer Sergei Prokofiev (or the ballet’s numerous choreographers who have used his score, including Leonid Lavrovsky, Kenneth MacMillan, and Rudolf Nureyev) found a way to transform Shakespeare appropriately such that Bovard does not believe others, including Synetic, can replicate this achievement. Not long after the publication of Bovard’s article in The Wall Street Journal and wider discussion of the issue in local news outlets, the Fox News channel’s daytime talk show Outnumbered joined the discussion—​with a panel comprising hosts Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, Andrea Tantaros, and Sandra Smith, regular guest and Fox News stocks editor Elizabeth MacDonald, and former US Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton. In the DCist (July 24, 2015), Rachel Sadon reports on the escalated criticism of Synetic on Fox News, with an account that warrants citation at length. The hosts of the Fox show seized on two particular sentences from Bovard’s piece and ran with them: “Omitting words allows Synetic to finish Shakespeare plays in barely half the time they often require. The company has received numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and its state affiliate, the Virginia Commission for the Arts.” The first, and more bizarre, accusation is that the wordless plays are simply too short: Is the government trying to accommodate the fact that we have no attention spans for the arts anymore?” asks Sandra Smith. “I think that’s ultimately what its [sic] about,” responds Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery, the sneering host who introduced the story. Right. Definitely, that’s it. The government is choosing which productions to fund based on run time.7

While the convoluted logic presented on Fox News muddies the rationale behind its criticism against Synetic, this segment, combined with Bovard’s pronouncements, demonstrates that Synetic’s performances are striking a nerve among conservative political commentators. Apparently, none of those weighing in on Fox News or The Wall Street Journal had actually seen a Synetic performance at the time they presented their negative judgments, but this did not impede their willingness to denigrate the Company.8

572   Sheila T. Cavanagh In Bovard’s formulation, “The latest Shakespearean fashion, at least in the Washington area, is to invite people to a feast of language and serve nothing but grunts, grimaces, and grins—​with a few gyrations thrown in for dessert.”9 Wordless Shakespeare apparently constitutes a threat of some kind, one that predates the uproar greeting overtly politicized Shakespearean productions, such as 2017’s Trump-​infused Julius Caesar at the Public Theater in New York: the production is also explicit and graphic, featuring a blond, Trump-​like Caesar in a red tie, whose bloody stabbing is seen as offensive and inappropriate to some who have seen it. They, along with Breitbart News and Fox News, have driven a campaign on social media against the Public that has prompted two corporate sponsors—​Delta Air Lines and Bank of America—​to withdraw their support of the production, and a third, American Express, to distance itself.10

While some audience members in New York protested the portrayal of Trump as Caesar, they seem oblivious to any danger in Synetic’s productions, and continue to support this pioneering company, despite the negative press they have received. As the existence of this Handbook demonstrates, moreover, there is an increasing interest in the relationship between Shakespeare and dance, which does not seem unduly impeded by the absence of language in most Shakespearean-​based dance or physical theater productions. However closely Shakespearean drama may conventionally be linked to its “language,” both dance and what Synetic terms “physical theater” have proven to be innovative and appealing ways to present Shakespeare’s work. Since Synetic emphasizes their “wordless” approach in their marketing, it seems unlikely that audiences feel conned by being presented with bold choreography rather than what James Bovard terms “a feast of language.”11 According to their website, the name “Synetic” reflects the Company’s artistic goal of combining the concepts of “synthesis” and the “kinetic”: SYNthesis: Combining distinct elements to form a whole KinETIC: Pertaining to or imparting motion: active, dynamic, energetic SYNETIC: A dynamic synthesis of the arts.12

They identify their ambition to become “the premier American physical theater” by “fusing dynamic art forms—​such as text, drama, movement, acrobatics, dance, and music” to produce what they envision as “world-​class theater.”13 Although they do not include words in their Shakespearean productions, they insist that the text is key to their interpretations. They call their performances “physical theater” in order to emphasize their dramatic foundation. The movement always emerges from the text, even though the words are not included. They also draw extensively from the Georgian pantomime tradition, which corresponds with their use of elaborate, exaggerated movements as storytelling devices.14 Synetic Theater pieces generally last about ninety minutes without an interval, although a couple of their comedies, including As You Like It, run longer.

“A Delightful Measure or a Dance”    573 They incorporate imaginative costumes, athletic, highly choreographed, movements, striking set designs, and original music and other sound effects. Their movements are large, physically demanding, and energetic. Some of their productions include significant amounts of water, with patrons being advised which seats fall within the “splash zone.” Their ensemble uniformly includes highly skilled performers (some, but not all of whom, are Georgian) who bring remarkable physical and expressive abilities to the stage, captivating the audience with what Washington Post reviewer William Triplett has described as “a fugue-​poem for the limbic system.”15 As I note elsewhere, Triplett further encapsulates what he considers the core of the Synetic Hamlet: “Synetic’s production of the greatest verse tragedy in Western literature utters not a single word—​but like a beautifully choreographed nightmare, it fuses movement, music, and light into a haunting series of images that summon the very heartbeat of the story.”16 The purported “heartbeat of the story” is what remains key here. This Hamlet (and the company’s other Shakespeare plays) is translated into a different medium, but as Triplett’s review suggests, these productions still resonate with what many perceive as the “essence” of the originals. Even without words, there is emotion, striking symbolism, and substantial communication between performers and audience. Although Synetic labels itself as “physical theater,” not as dance, dance theory provides a relevant framework through which to discuss these movement-​based artistic creations, in which spoken and written language is absent. As André Lepecki and Jenn Joy note, scholars do not always know “how to theorize dancing that explicitly addresses the fact that its grounds are heterogeneous, dynamic, bumpy, bubbling, treacherous, violent, resonant, vibrant and always inventive political terrains.”17 Similar descriptors can be applied to Synetic’s performances, which memorably present Shakespeare’s remarkable stories, while resisting standard performative categorizations. It remains difficult, it seems, to discuss narratives based on movement and presented solely through live performance. Notably, Synetic Artistic Director Paata Tsikurishvili draws most of his performers from the acting community, whom he and his wife then train in movement, rather than hiring dancers. He remarks that local actors believe these performances are dance, while area dancers characterize them as acting.18 “Physical theater,” therefore, marks Synetic’s overlap between these realms. As Jacqueline Smith-​Autard notes, when used in reference to movement, the term “language” can only be used as an “analogy,” since the “language of movement can [not] replace or be the same as language in a vocally communicative context.”19 At the same time, however, she rightly notes that “movement is a vast communicating language and that varieties of its elements constitute many thousands of movement ‘words.’ ”20 Henrietta Bannerman, moreover, argues that “vocabulary and syntax are present in dance.”21 This metaphorical juxtaposition between the language of text and the language of movement correlates with Synetic’s status as physical theater, a genre that does not directly correlate with traditional conceptualizations of dance or of theater. Synetic’s distance from the privilege typically accorded to “Shakespeare’s language” draws attention instead to the company’s dynamic and successful, but wordless, narrative style. These performances clearly present compelling stories, even without dialogue.

574   Sheila T. Cavanagh Synetic depicts complex relationships between characters in plays as diverse as Antony and Cleopatra, Twelfth Night, and King Lear. Political and personal conflicts, as well as intermittent bouts of anguish, crises of conscience, expressions of love, and other profound Shakespearean events and emotions are all clearly communicated through the thoughtfully constructed and memorable choreography that characterizes Synetic productions. Striking movements, the imagery presented through creative props, costumes, and set design, and the powerful audio landscape make speech unnecessary. However essential poetry appears to be in Shakespeare’s text, its absence in Synetic’s productions presents no insurmountable barriers against presenting these classic narratives. When their Romeo and Juliet opens with complicated sets resembling clockwork, for example, audiences know that the passing of time will be an important feature of Synetic’s telling of this familiar story. The set for Antony and Cleopatra, in contrast, emphasizes correlations between this drama and images known through countless Egyptian-​based museum exhibitions. Much Ado about Nothing signals its placement in post–​World War II America by recreating the classic image of a sailor leaning over and kissing a woman bent backward. The set of As You Like It is filled with an abundance of pipes, emphasizing the urban setting that replaces the Forest of Arden. While these productions are linked by their emphases on dramatic movement, costumes, and sets, they are all remarkably different. When one has seen one Synetic performance, one has definitely not seen them all. Gabriele Brandstetter analyzes what she terms “the poetics of dance” by focusing on ways that “dance and literature converged in an intricate choreography of interdependence and autonomy.”22 While her monograph focuses on dance from the last century, the performances she describes resonate with images corresponding with those created by Synetic, such as “[Valeska Gert’s] piece Cinema, in which she danced a movie, parts of a newsreel, a military parade, a film diva, a marathon man, a bicyclist, and the cranking film operator.”23 This artistic variation does not, however, necessarily “compensate” for Synetic’s lack of language. Not surprisingly, politically conservative commentators are not the only ones to doubt whether some of these plays can succeed without dialogue. Tim Treanor, for example, claims that Synetic’s significant abilities are insufficient to overcome a major flaw in their conceptualization of Hamlet: I herewith file the following minority report about the current revival of this widely-​ praised, Helen Hayes-​winning production. The application of Synetic Theater’s astounding talents and amazing theatrical inventiveness to an effort to produce Hamlet without words proves one thing, and one thing only. It can’t be done.24

Treanor’s objection, however, is specific to this particular play, which he insists demands verbalization: “Hamlet is about words; Hamlet is drunk with words.” He does not, apparently, feel the same about Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet. He claims, in fact, “even the wordplay [in Macbeth] that resolves the story (‘. . . was from my mother’s womb untimely ripped’) can be done representationally.” His appreciation for the company’s “astounding

“A Delightful Measure or a Dance”    575 talents” and “amazing theatrical inventiveness” suggests, however, that even Treanor’s hesitation is tempered by what the company accomplishes. While Treanor’s caution is not surprising, those achievements he values correlate with the kinds of disciplinary collaborations permeating contemporary dance and physical theater. Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildschut, for example, describe a wide range of influences on current movement practices that closely parallel the kinds of presentations Synetic creates: The study of choreography has developed in the academy through its engagement with music and scenography, and equally with ideas and theories from aesthetics, cultural studies, anthropology, gender studies, semiotics, performance theory and the like. Now, increasingly, choreography becomes the catalyst for activity/​exploration and research in other disciplines—​cognitive science, psychotherapy, robotics engineering or medicine.25

Synetic’s willingness to incorporate images and movements from similarly diverse cultural and intellectual realms creates their rich, varied, and vibrant narrative style. Notably, Synetic’s mission statement identifies it as an “American” physical theater company that combines “traditions of the Caucasus with distinctly American styles to tell classic stories.”26 This designation of Synetic as “American” physical theater raises a number of interesting questions about these performances, particularly since Hamlet, a play with a long, political history in the former Soviet Union, was the company’s first Shakespearean production. Conservative American political personages, such as those populating Fox Television, join a lengthy history of bringing politics to Shakespearean arts. As Nancy Isenberg notes, “Shakespeare’s passionate and moody Dane and his story remained prominent in the collective consciousness of the people of the Russian Empire and later of the Soviet Union.”27 Peter Holland has written about the significance of the play in pre-​Soviet Russia, from its first adaptation in 1748 by Alexander Petrovich Sumarokov to the challenges offered to Russian Hamletism in the nineteenth century by writers Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov.28 For the would-​be revolutionary, Hamlet’s indecision and inaction were anathema. Unsurprisingly, in the Soviet era, the play was unofficially banned by Stalin. But its resonance for Russian culture persisted and became pertinent once more in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union neared collapse. Nancy Isenberg, in reference to Svetlana Voskresenskaja’s TV ballet Hamlet: Reflections on the Theme Hamlet, produced in Moscow in 1991, explains how the place of Hamlet in Soviet consciousness led to a highly choreographed, political presentation. Her remarks are cited at length here since they offer a detailed description of the theatrical/​political tradition that eventually resulted in Synetic’s production, even though its creators do not explicitly link their theatrical presentation to historical events in the region encompassing the country of Georgia: once the first Soviet states had started fighting for their right to secede, and virtually everywhere on the Soviet map artists were looking to Hamlet as a means to interrogate the changes in political authority that were taking place, it is not altogether

576   Sheila T. Cavanagh surprising that this same political context also produced a choreographic Hamlet equally charged with political significance. Soviet audiences, used as they were to the tight rein of censorship, looked to all the performance arts, that with a pose, a gesture, a pause, or a glance can go where words are not allowed, as a place where anti-​Soviet feelings could be aired and shared. Ballet, albeit recognizably limited in its ability to convey complicated plot lines, has a range of non-​verbal expression for sentiments, states of mind and inter-​relational involvement that far surpasses any other performance art. A Soviet audience would have high expectations for an impassioned and timely articulation of Russian Hamletism, as a questioning of destiny and responsibility, in a ballet that proposed in its title to reflect on the Hamlet theme.29

Although Synetic presents itself as an “American” company, its roots in the Soviet theatrical tradition are evident, and the evolution of Hamlet into their signature production aptly includes aspects of both their native environment and their adopted home. In response to questions about this balance between “American” and “Georgian” influences, Tsikurishvili states that the lengthy training in film, mime, and dance that he and his wife (choreographer Irina Tsikurishvili) received in Georgia laid the foundation for their work, but that the two hundred performers they have trained in northern Virginia have brought in a complex mix of American performance styles that have ineluctably molded their presentations.30 When Synetic performed in the Republic of Georgia in 2012, the troupe presented their Fellini-​esque King Lear and the Georgian play Host and Guest rather than Hamlet, thereby circumventing the opportunity to participate in this lengthy tradition of “Hamletism” that their Georgian audience would have understood. Apparently, they wanted to feature an American troupe’s rendition of a significant Georgian play in that drama’s homeland and to highlight Synetic’s “spectacular” style through King Lear.31 By offering Hamlet as their Company’s premiere production in 2002, however, they situated themselves firmly within a performance history that much of their original Soviet expat audience would recognize. While Synetic’s initial determination to perform without spoken language apparently resulted from concerns about the original Company’s thick Georgian accents, this decision has enabled them to create a distinctive theatrical experience that remains wildly popular among audiences of increasing diversity. While their audiences probably do not realize it, Georgian dance may first have entered widespread modern consciousness through its influence on the “Daleks” in Doctor Who.32 Synetic’s continuing success, however, suggests that its combination of wordless choreography with classic drama works well for many viewers, regardless of whether they recognize the popular or historical cultural heritage of these performances. Even without recognizable political connotations, however, Synetic’s lack of dialogue relegates its performances to the realm that Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy suggest has often separated dance from the kind of academic discourse associated with texts: “Long viewed as unintellectual, intuitive and uncritically expressive, dance did not easily emerge as a scholarly discipline within the text-​centered university.”33 Performances based on movement introduce what Goellner and

“A Delightful Measure or a Dance”    577 Murphy term the “[i]‌nteresting theoretical and practical issues [that] arise when the ephemerality of dance gets caught up in the ‘permanence’ of the written word. That dance cannot be frozen, held, stilled in its very essence.”34 Jane Desmond says, “Dance is both a product. . . and a process,”35 although, as Susan L. Foster notes, “[b]odies of texts, like dancing bodies, are subject to disciplinary actions that cultivate them in specific ways.”36 As Shakespeareans, even those who address theatrical performance in their scholarship, our efforts to characterize verbally how movement represents meaning forces us to expand the terms of our disciplines to include sentient, as well as linguistic, points of reference. “Parallels between the philosophical and practical areas of dance and spatial theory,” moreover, suggest that movement can illuminate aspects of theatrical performance that conventional literary approaches struggle to articulate.37 Peggy Phelan astutely describes the problems arising when addressing performances such as Synetic’s wordless Shakespeares: To attempt to write about the undocumentable event of performance is to invoke the rules of the written document and thereby alter the event itself. Just as quantum physics discovered that macro-​instruments cannot measure microscopic particles without transforming those particles, so too must performance critics realize that the labor to write about performance (and thus to “preserve” it) is also a labor that fundamentally alters the event.38

Currently, filmed versions of Synetic performances exist only as informal recordings made for rehearsal purposes and a few clips and trailers appearing on YouTube. As Phelan suggests, moreover, filming is limited in its ability to preserve and present a live performance. Although many of us are now enjoying filmed and streamed versions of productions by Shakespeare’s Globe, the National Theatre, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, these media do not replicate the experience of attending a live performance. Technology unavoidably alters what an audience sees. Film may give the illusion of capturing a live presentation, but the result does not coincide with what those personally present have witnessed. Discussions about the Synetic Hamlet, for instance, may need to differentiate between the 2002 production, where the artistic directors performed Hamlet and Ophelia in the Rosslyn, Virginia, office building stage they occupied for several years; the 2007 production with a partially new cast, at the Kennedy Center’s “Family Stage”; and the 2014 rendition, where the central characters were replaced by noticeably younger performers and where the troupe performed in their permanent space in Crystal City, Virginia. Since there is no “definitive” filmed version of this production, there is no static or “ur” performance that critics can respond to. If there were such a film, moreover, it would represent just one iteration of a production that changed between performances, as well as over the years between presentations. Scholars generally elide such inevitable differences between stagings, but these alterations in casting, tempo, and other vagaries emanating from live performance require acknowledgment and consideration. Silently

578   Sheila T. Cavanagh implying that each performance replicates its predecessors and successors erases inevitable differences. Carolyn Abbate astutely discusses a related problem that emerges when scholars attempt to describe live musical performances: Actual live, unrecorded performances are for the same reason almost universally excluded from performance studies; they, too, remain wild. Performance has been subsidiary as well in the sense that when real performances (invariably recordings) are cited they are often being summoned for an endorsement. Thus some performer’s rendition, some director’s staging, is deemed revelatory when it corresponds to one’s own or some historically sanctioned reading of the work, but ill-​conceived or offbeat when failing to do so.39

While Abbate analyzes the circumstances surrounding recordings of live music, not of dance or physical theater, her points apply broadly to performative genres. It is frequently difficult for scholars who typically focus on text to respond appropriately to kinesthetic movement, except to evaluate how well a production conforms to metrics created for other purposes. Interpretive challenges inevitably emerge. It is impossible, for instance, to assess Synetic’s rendition of Shakespeare’s famous speeches since they do not appear in these versions of the plays. Like operatic renditions of Shakespeare, which pare character counts and trim scenes deemed unnecessary, movement-​based Shakespeare does not attempt to recreate the original. Synetic’s Twelfth Night does not replicate the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Twelfth Night, but neither did Trevor Nunn’s 1996 film version. All productions, whatever the medium, involve change. Jane C. Desmond usefully describes the resulting complexities that often impede efforts to categorize and assess moving performances: dancing bodies are performative in every sense of the word. They enact a conception of self and social community mediated by the particular historical aesthetic dimensions of the dance forms and their precise conditions of reception.40

Synetic fits this pattern by its striking movements and distinctive choices regarding the use of sets, props, and costuming. Their Shakespearean productions can readily be termed “bold,” since they consistently presents strong movements, images, and characterizations. These performances demand full attention from their audiences. Synetic’s Shakespearean repertoire also demonstrates why scholars would benefit from the kind of expansion in their critical perspective that Desmond suggests when she carefully delineates the aspects of dance (or physical theater) that need to be reconceptualized as part of the academic field of cultural studies: These realms specifically include kinesthetics, emotion, and concepts of bodily expressivity. They have been overlooked due to an overreliance on literary theory involved with verbal texts, or film theory derived primarily from studies of narrative

“A Delightful Measure or a Dance”    579 films. Nonnarrative, nonverbal (even the naming of such in the negative underscores our reliance on verbal narrativity as the primary organizational paradigm for a great deal of cultural studies).41

As Desmond suggests, many interpreters of Shakespeare base their analyses solely on linguistic aspects of the plays, with much less emphasis accorded to elements of the drama that are harder to describe, quantify, or assess. Desmond further argues, however, that this critical myopia impedes academic understanding because the study of movement offers significant enrichment to areas commonly known as “cultural studies”: But much is to be gained by opening up cultural studies to questions of kinesthetic semiotics and by placing dance research (and by extension, human movement studies) on the agenda of cultural studies. By enlarging our studies of bodily “texts” to include dance in all its forms—​among them social dance, theatrical performance, and ritualized movement—​we can further our understandings of how social identities are signaled, formed, and negotiated through bodily movement. . . . Cultural studies remains largely text-​based or object-​based, with literary texts still predominating, followed by studies of film texts and art historical objects. Even excursions into popular culture are concerned largely with verbal or visual cultural products, not kinesthetic actions.42

Desmond’s argument contains many important points for literary and cultural critics to consider seriously about movement-​based productions. Textual critics are generally not trained in the scholarly analysis of kinesthetic actions and often detour around the imperative to do so, even if they are working in performative realms such as theater. Synetic Theater demonstrates a strong integration between language and kinesthetic actions, supporting Desmond’s insistence on the importance of incorporating movement studies into more familiar textually based cultural studies frameworks. Despite its absence of spoken language during performances, Synetic’s production process focuses heavily on the text of the play being produced, although Paata Tsikurishvili acknowledges that he tends to read his Shakespeare most carefully in Georgian rather than English.43 In a call for submissions for the 2105 Women’s Voices Theater Festival in Washington, D.C., the company’s complex engagement with the text during production development is emphasized: Synetic’s process is typically involved, as the textual content of the play is developed in conjunction with the rehearsal process to create pieces of total theater. Scripted work is typically “semi-​devised” as the company of actors work with the director, choreographer, and playwright/​adaptor to develop all story elements in a long rehearsal process. Playwrights should expect a heavy development schedule if selected.44

A further note indicates, however, that submitted entries do not need to be verbally dense:  “Full length scripts does [sic] not necessarily mean an abundance of pages—​ Synetic is well versed in wordless or semi-​wordless productions.” The Synetic process

580   Sheila T. Cavanagh is geared to “translate” language into images and movement that tell the story as vividly and “accurately” as possible, although there are sometimes clear textual changes even in the absence of words, such as their noteworthy, though controversial, choice to begin A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the birth of the unnamed Indian boy. Synetic relies heavily on familiar visual images to bolster the narrative power of their physical movements. In the case of Hamlet, Synetic incorporates recognizable images associated with the play, such as Yorick’s skull and Ophelia’s flowers, in order to convey its condensed, but nuanced interpretation. Much Ado about Nothing draws from American films crafted during the period following World War II and includes a live recreation of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic image of a sailor in Times Square on VJ Day, kissing a young woman in a “tango cambré” embrace.45 King Lear resonates with images and movements familiar from Federico Fellini’s films. As You Like It presents a harsh modern environment and incorporates pole-​dancing into its movement repertoire. While Synetic’s program notes typically contain a brief synopsis of the action, this is not really needed. Even those people in the audience who are unfamiliar with the plays can easily follow the narratives as they are presented. Audience members can then decide whether Triplett is correct in holding that this Hamlet accurately invokes Shakespeare’s play, or whether they concur with Treanor, who maintains, “It’s a story a lot like Hamlet, but it’s not the real McCoy.”46 The performers emphasize the ability of their bodies and of the set to provide a physically and emotionally evocative experience. The term “poetry in motion” appears appropriate with regard to these offerings, despite the level of cliché those words inevitably engender. Resembling, in some regards, the highly skilled, athletic performers associated with groups such as Cirque du Soleil, Synetic cast members use their bodies to offer remarkably intricate and complex emotional, psychological, and philosophical renditions of Shakespeare’s dramatic texts.

Conclusion Productions such as the Synetic wordless Shakespeares encourage us to renew our efforts to describe and discuss this “infinite variety” of Shakespearean texts. In the case of Synetic, it could be helpful, for example, to consider further whether or not movement has a “nationality.” Is it helpful to characterize Synetic Shakespeare as Georgian, American, English, or more broadly, “international”? Are such distinctions useful for aesthetic analysis and interpretation, or simply for marketing? Is Synetic correct in characterizing these performances as “physical theater” rather than dance? How might one determine when and how a nonverbal presentation conveys meanings that more typically require vocal articulation? What “added value” emerges through physicality, and what kind of meaning is lost? Bannerman argues that the “language” of dance and verbal language are more closely related than we often recognize, claiming that dance and language share “structural characteristics.”47 Is what Triplett deems the “essence” of Hamlet something that can be articulated in either of these modes? Can it be agreed upon? What exactly is it about Hamlet

“A Delightful Measure or a Dance”    581 that Triplett insists we “know in our gut” when we see the Synetic version of the play?48 Performance studies have become better able to incorporate kinesthetic experiences into analysis, but the distance between reviews of such productions and rigorous academic investigation still needs to be bridged. As Lynne Anne Blom and L. Tarin Chaplin note, language in dance presents “a grouping of related movements that have kinesthetic logic and intuition.”49 This kind of juxtaposition between reason, movement, and intuition is ripe for renewed interdisciplinary scrutiny. Accordingly, the vibrant Shakespearean canon being produced by this Georgian/​American theater company offers substantial new material for performative consideration.

Notes 1. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, in The Oxford Shakespeare:  The Complete Works, 2nd ed., eds. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005), 369–​400. All subsequent quotations from Shakespeare’s works are from this edition. 2. Juliet Moser, “Frankenstein,” DC Theatre Scene, September 22, 2006, http://​dctheatrescene. com/​2006/​09/​22/​frankenstein/​, accessed January 21, 2018. 3. John Stoltenberg, “Review: The Mark of Cain at Synetic Theater,” DC Metro Theater Arts, July 21, 2017, http://​dcmetrotheaterarts.com/​2017/​07/​21/​review-​mark-​cain-​synetic-​ theater/​, accessed January 21, 2018. 4. Rachel Sadon, “Fox News Piles on the Criticism of Synetic’s Silent Shakespeare,” DCist, July 24, 2015, http://​dcist.com/​2015/​07/​synetic_​theater_​reaps_​the_​benefits.php, accessed January 21, 2018. 5. John H. McWhorter, “A Facelift for Shakespeare,” The Wall Street Journal, September 25, 2015, accessed January 21, 2018, https://​www.wsj.com/​articles/​ a-​facelift-​for-​shakespeare-​1443194924. 6. James Bovard, “A Silenced Shakespeare in Washington,” The Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2015, http://​www.wsj.com/​articles/​a-​silenced-​shakespeare-​in-​washington-​1436825550, accessed January 21, 2018. 7. Sadon, “Fox News.” 8. Nelson Pressley, “Most Foul:  Senator Singles Out Synetic’s ‘Silent’ Shakespeare,” The Washington Post, December 11, 2015, https://​www.washingtonpost.com/​entertainment/​ theater_​dance/​most-​foul-​senator-​singles-​out-​synetics-​silent-​shakespeare/​2015/​12/​09/​ 3e6057da-​9918-​11e5-​94f0-​9eeaff906ef3_​story.html, accessed January 21, 2018. 9. Bovard, “A Silenced Shakespeare.” 10. Michael Paulson and Sopan Deb, “How Outrage Built over a Shakespearean Depiction of Trump,” New York Times, June 12, 2017, https://​www.nytimes.com/​2017/​06/​12/​theater/​ donald-​trump-​julius-​caesar-​public-​theater-​oskar-​eustis.html?_​r=0, accessed January 21, 2018. 11. Bovard, “A Silenced Shakespeare.” 12. Synectic Theatre, “Mission & History,” http://​synetictheater.org/​history-​mission/​, accessed January 21, 2018. 13. Synectic Theatre, “Hamlet . . . the Rest Is Silence press release,” http://​synetictheater.org/​ wp-​content/​uploads/​2014/​03/​HamletPressRelease.pdf, accessed January 21, 2018.

582   Sheila T. Cavanagh 14. Paata Tsikurishvili, personal interview, January 15, 2016. 15. William Triplett, “Review of Hamlet . . . the Rest Is Silence, by Synetic Theater,” Washington Post, April 8, 2002, C01, https://​www.washingtonpost.com/​archive/​lifestyle/​2002/​04/​ 08/​synetics-​hamlet-​the-​rest-​is-​silence/​48b1e056-​7a34-​46bd-​a044-​4362607e31a0/​?utm_​ term=.5dbe4560cf8d, accessed January 21, 2018. 16. Triplett, quoted in Sheila T. Cavanagh, “In Other Words:  Global Shakespearean Transformations,” in Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, eds. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 204. 17. André Lepecki and Jenn Joy, eds, Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory, and the Global (London: Seagull Books, 2009), ix. 18. Tsikurishvili, personal interview. 19. Jacqueline Smith-​Autard, Dance Composition:  A Practical Guide to Creative Success in Dance Making (London: Routledge, 2004), 11. 20. Smith-​Autard, Dance Composition, 17. 21. Henrietta Bannerman, “Is Dance a Language? Movement, Meaning, and Communication,” Dance Research 32, no. 1 (2014): 66. 22. Gabriele Brandstetter, Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-​ Gardes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 385. 23. Brandstetter, Poetics of Dance, 372. 24. Tim Treanor, “Hamlet; The Rest Is Silence,” DC Theatre Scene, June 4, 2007, http://​ dctheatrescene.com/​2007/​06/​04/​hamlet-​performed-​by-​synetic/​, accessed January 21, 2018. 25. Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildschut, eds., “Section Introduction,” Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge, 2009), 382. 26. “Mission & History,” http://​synetictheater.org/​history-​mission/​. 27. Nancy Isenberg, “Dramatic Leaps and Political Falls: Russian Hamlet Ballet in 1991,” in The Hamlet Zone: Reworking Hamlet for European Cultures, ed. Ruth J. Owen (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 18. 28. Peter Holland, “‘More a Russian than a Dance’: The Usefulness of Hamlet in Russia,” in Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, eds. Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 315–​338. 29. Isenberg, “Dramatic Leaps,” 21–​22. 30. Tsikurishvili, personal interview. 31. Tsikurishvili, personal interview. 32. “Bug-​eyed Monsters,” BBC, http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​doctorwho/​classic/​news/​briefhistory/​ daleks.shtml, accessed January 21, 2018. 33. Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy, eds., Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 3. 34. Goellner and Murphy, Bodies of the Text, 5. 35. Jane C. Desmond, ed., Meaning in Motion:  New Cultural Studies of Dance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 2. 36. Susan L. Foster, “Textual Evidences,” in Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, 245. 37. Butterworth and Wildschut, “Section Introduction,” 380. 38. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 148. 39. Carolyn Abbate, “Music-​Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 3 (2004): 509. 40. Desmond, Meaning in Motion, 16.

“A Delightful Measure or a Dance”    583 Desmond, Meaning in Motion, 16. Desmond, Meaning in Motion, 29. Tsikurishvili, personal interview. Synetic Theater, http://​synetictheater.org, accessed February 2014. Alfred Eisenstaedt, V-​J Day in Times Square (1945), http://​100photos.time.com/​photos/​ kiss-​v-​j-​day-​times-​square-​alfred-​eisenstaedt 46. Treanor, “Hamlet; The Rest Is Silence.” 47. Bannerman, “Is Dance a Language?” 66. 48. Triplett, “Review of Hamlet.” 49. Lynne Anne Blom and L. Tarin Chaplin, The Intimate Act of Choreography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), 23. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Bibliography Brandstetter, Gabriele. Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-​Gardes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Butterworth, Jo, and Liesbeth Wildschut, eds. Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader. London: Routledge, 2009. Desmond, Jane C., ed. Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Goellner, Ellen W., and Jacqueline Shea Murphy, eds. Bodies of the Text:  Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Lepecki, André, and Jenn Joy, eds. Planes of Composition:  Dance, Theory, and the Global. London: Seagull Books, 2009. Smith-​Autard, Jacqueline M. Dance Composition:  A Practical Guide to Creative Success in Dance Making. London: Routledge, 2004.

Index

Note: Tables and figures are indicated by an italic t and f following the page number. Abbate, Carolyn, 578 Abbott, George, 304, 305 absence dancing bodies and, 204, 205, 209 textual, 154, 155, 156, 157 actor-​audience relationship, 97, 100, 141, 145, 164. See also dancer-​spectator relationship “a dancing,” 125n1 adaptation. See also dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s work approaches to, 265–​267, 273–​276, 344 as evolving category, 408 vs. instance, 547 vs. reconstruction, 267, 269, 273–​274, 275 text fidelity in, 344 vs. translation, 328, 339–​340 in written records of dances, 274 Adelman, Janet, 165 aesthetic experience, 232 African Caribbean dance, 506, 511, 512, 514–​517,  523n77 African dance forms in Broadway theater adaptations, 307, 311, 425n27 diaspora/​postcolonial context for, 504 engagement with Shakespeare, 518 legibility of, 501, 502 post-​apartheid contexts for, 481, 483–​484, 492–​493,  496n42 African Dance Unit, 502 African National Congress (ANC), 483 Agamben, Giorgio, 200–​201, 202, 210–​211, 212 Agrippa, Camillo, 185, 186f, 193n55 ALIE/​N A(C)TION (1992, Forsythe), 461, 472n16

allemande (“almain”), 53, 70n28 All Is True (1613, Fletcher and Shakespeare), 113, 119, 125 Almquist, Steve, 506–​507, 522n64 Alonso, Alicia, 350 “Among School Children” (Yeats), 232 Analyzing Performance (Pavis), 431 anaphora, 331 Anastasia (1970, 1971, MacMillan), 350, 352, 393 Anatomy of Abuses, The (Stubbes), 26 Anderson, Zoë, 484 andiaplosis, 331 Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits (Lyndesay), 84 Anglo, Sydney, 187, 194n62, 194n64 animals, masque portrayal of, 121–​122 anthropological analysis, 432 Antic (1993, Brandstrup), 288 “antic,” 131n68 anti-​dance treatises,  26–​28 anti-​masque. See also masque characteristics of, 133, 141 costume designs, 116, 128n39 court association with, 4, 120–​121, 122, 129n52 defined, 108 development of, 14, 115–​116, 123 masque following, 264, 267, 271 morris dance (see morris dance) music for, 116 performer wages, 116, 122 romance and, 149n36 in Stone No More (2012), 267–​270 apartheid, 483, 494n5, 494n16. See also post-​apartheid  era Apologie de la Danse (de Lauze), 73n64

586   Index Apter, Andrew, 519n10 Arará religion, 513 Arbeau, Thoinot. See also Orchésographie on branle, 176, 182 on cinquepace, 54, 54t on coranto, 60–​61, 61t on dance as rhetoric, 220, 233n12 on dancers walking, 72n55 on dance-​touch relationship, 159 on dancing-​music relationship, 158 Dixon’s work based on, 276n6 on eye contact, 182, 183 on galliard, 55, 62 on lifting female dancers, 178, 183 on Lyonnaise, 191n13 on measure, 53 on passy-​measures pavan, 64 on tourdion, 55, 71n47 on volta, 271 Arcangeli, Alessandro, 74n72, 174 archetypes, 430 archival and source material. See also specific works as adaptive, 274 choreographic sources, 13–​14, 50–​51, 78–​82 court records, 30, 32, 36–​37 “dancing with the archive,” 266–​267, 269, 273, 275, 276 Inns of Court manuscripts (see Inns of Court manuscripts) literary mentions, 29 treatises and instruction manuals, 23–​24,  26–​28 Arena, Antonius, 16–​17 Aristophanes, 334 Armin, Robert, 92 arms, movement and carriage of, 177–​178, 182 Arnold, A. James, 506 “art,” artifice and, 205–​206 Artaud, Antonin, 545 Ascham, Robert, 23–​24 Aschenbrenner, Joyce, 522n49 Ashcroft, Peggy, 352 Ashton, Frederick, 288, 331, 341n20, 388, 396 Aspden, Peter, 540–​541 Astaire, Fred, 305 Aston, Elaine, 431

As You Like It (2015, Synetic Theater), 580 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 37, 86, 225, 226, 228 Atcheson, Thomas, 440, 445 Atkinson, Brooks, 305, 318, 319, 503–​504 attribution, collaboration and, 237, 238, 239, 241–​245,  251 audiences actors’ relationship with, 97, 100, 141, 145, 164 dancers’ relationship with, 218–​219, 227, 228, 230 experience of, 429–​430 Forsythe’s engagement of, 458–​459, 471 subjectivity of, 521n29 textual understanding of, 430 Ausdruckstanz (expressionist dance), 287, 308, 360 Bachelard, Gaston, 490 backstage plots, 239–​240 “back tricks,” 62, 66, 67, 73n68 Bailes, Ann, 478 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 370 Balanchine, George ballet technique modernized by, 408, 425n27 Broadway dance influenced by, 306–​307 choreographic influences, 305, 321n4 choreographic style, 306, 307, 408–​409 narrative ballets choreographed by, 340n4 pattern employed by, 335, 336 on text-​to-​dance translation, 327, 328 Balanchine, George, works of Boys from Syracuse (1938), 304–​307 Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962) (see Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962)) Prodigal Son (1929), 424 On Your Toes (1936), 305 Baldy, Cyril, 468f Balfe, Ester, 471 ballet Balanchine’s influence on, 408, 425n27 dramaturgy, 375, 384n46 early Shakespeare adaptations, 360 emergence as art form, 359, 464 ephemeral nature of, 380

Index   587 expressionist influence on, 287–​288 Forsythe’s influence on, 457 gender politics within, 351–​352 iterative nature of, 346 “mime” vs. expression in, 293–​294 narrative in, 409 non-​verbal communication in, 285, 290 other art forms connected to, 390, 400 Petipa formula in, 361–​362 popularity of adaptations, 354 prostitution associated with, 350–​351, 352 relation to source text, 362 South African context for, 483–​484 story-​ballet genre, 374–​375, 434–​435 Ballet Austin, 406, 407 Le Ballet de Monseigneur le Duc de Vandosme (1610), 128n27 ballo della torcia, 126n13 “ballo de torchio,” 188 Banes, Sally, 307 Bannerman, Henrietta, 329, 431, 561, 573, 580 Barankiewicz, Filip, 368f, 369f, 373f Barnes, Clive, 340n9, 345, 402n26, 440 baroque dance, 191n26 Barren Sceptre (1960, Limón), 288–​290, 297–​301 Barthes, Roland, 237, 431 Barton, Anne, 304 Baskervill, Charles, 52, 94 bassadanza,  15–​16 Bassa Moona (1936), 502 basse danse, 53, 56, 70n30, 71n47 Bassett, Kate, 538 Bassey, Shirley, 525, 536 Batchelor, Michael, 410 Bausch, Pina, 379, 385n57, 545, 546 Beauchesne, Eric, 549, 556f, 559f Beaumont, Francis, 136, 138, 141 Beaumont, Francis, works of Maid’s Tragedy masque, 150n40 Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn (see Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn (Beaumont)) Beaumont morris, 257n27 Beauty of the Husband, The (Carson), 473n23 Belton, Owen, 547–​548 Bemrose, Anna, 426n44

Bendle, Katherine, 34 Benjamin, Walter, 328, 338 Bennett, Richard Rodney, 396 Bennett, Susan, 431 Beretti, Filippo, 381n4 Berger, Harry, 57 bergomask (Bergomaske), 37, 86 Bergsma, Deanne, 351 Bergson, Henri, 526 Beriosova, Svetlana, 390 Berlant, Lauren, 272 Bernstein, Leonard, 312, 315 Berry, Philippa, 486 Berry, Ralph, 354 “Between the Lines and the Sheets” (Bassett), 538 Bigonzetti, Mauro, 495n27 Bintley, David, 389, 396–​400 Birmingham Royal Ballet, 387, 400 Birth of Venus (Botticelli), 199–​200, 214n4 Bitter End of Rosemary, The (2011, Masilo), 479f, 490f, 491f circulation in European contexts, 478, 492, 493 Ophelia re-​envisioned in, 477–​478, 487–​492 post-​apartheid/​post-​colonial perspectives on, 492, 493 reception in South Africa, 478 themes engaged in, 484–​485, 487–​488, 491, 492 transmodern condition reflected in, 493 black Atlantic concept, 499, 510, 519n11 Blackfriars Boys, 113–​114, 115, 116, 124, 127n20 “Black Spirits” (Macbeth), 249, 250 Bland, Alexander, 389, 402n26 Blom, Lynne Anne, 581 Blood Relations (Adelman), 165 bodies. See also movement; touch arms, 177–​178, 182 as assemblages of moving parts, 199–​200 body language, 161 communication through, 161, 162, 167, 429 disability and difference, 201 early modern body-​in-​love, 183, 184, 188 eyes, 175, 176, 177, 179, 182, 183, 190n9 feet (see feet) gendered separation of, 163, 166

588   Index bodies (cont.) hands, 160–​162, 167, 178 mythological, 199–​200 porosity of, 165, 167, 211 posture of, 178, 182, 192n31, 192n33 relation to dance, 158 relation to minds, 227, 229–​230, 299 relation to text, 6, 155, 156, 163, 577 religious separation of, 162, 163, 164–​165 religious understanding of, 177 social dance and cultural regulations on, 164 tongue, 177 transformed in love, 176, 183, 184, 188 twisting of, 179, 182, 192n33 upper body, 178, 182 bodies, dancing absence/​presence and, 204, 205, 209 communication through, 299 discipline of, 173 divided at waist, 178, 181 humoral model for, 173, 184–​185 ideal body, 273 lethal potential of, 174, 189, 194n69 opposition between sides of, 182 as performative, 578 sociopolitical significance of, 179, 182 sweaty, 184–​185, 194n60 time lost/​regained and, 197–​198, 202, 207, 210, 211 virtue communicated through, 220 Bodin, Jean, 29, 247 body-​in-​love, early modern, 183, 184, 188 body language, 161 Boisseau, Rosita, 485 Boleyn, Anne, 129n49, 164 Bolton, John, 571 Book Named the Governor, The (Elyot), 23, 25, 219 Borale, Lebohang, 478 Botticelli, Sandro, 199 Boukman Eksperyans, 523n79 Bovard, James, 571, 572 Boys from Syracuse, The (1938, Balanchine), 304–​307,  312 Branagh, Kenneth, 67n2, 446 Brandstetter, Gabriele, 574

Brandstrup, Kim, 288 branle, 126n13, 176, 178, 182, 188, 190n12 Brathwaite, Richard, 25 Bray, Thomas, 254, 260n84 Bredbeck, Gregory, 527 Brennan, Anthony, 154, 155 Bridges, Richard, 32 Bright, Timothy, 174, 175 Brissenden, Alan on Cleopatra (1765), 360 on dance and cosmic order, 188 on dance and textual absence, 155 on danced endings, 86, 87 on dance in Love’s Labour’s Lost, 155 on dance staging, 59 on dance symbolism, 155 on Dream (1964), 388 on “mutton” pun in Twelfth Night, 73n68, 104n55 on Oberon choreography, 264 on role/​function of dance in Shakespeare’s plays, 533 on Romeo and Juliet dance adaptation, 388 Shakespeare and the Dance, 2, 21, 155, 188 on Shakespeare’s works as springboard, 353 on stage directions, 21, 129n48 on text-​to-​dance translation, 329 British Drama (Wiggins), 105n70 Britten, Benjamin, 392, 393 Broadway musicals choreographic trends in, 303, 307, 319–​320,  321 Shakespeare adaptations, 303–​304, 324–​326 (see also Boys from Syracuse; Kiss Me, Kate; West Side Story) Brome, Richard, 241, 242 Brontë, Charlotte, 192n31 Brook, Peter, 384n48, 545 Brooke, Arthur, 347 Brooke, Nicholas, 354 Brown, G., 100 Brown, Sarah, 274–​275 Bruce, Betty, 305 Brunes, Johannis de, 31f Bruster, Douglas, 143 Bryant, Nancy, 550 Buarque, Chico, 482

Index   589 Buffo, Mike, 551f, 554 Bull, Deborah, 351 Bulwer, John, 161, 162, 167 Burke, Peter, 23 Burt, Robert, 44n91 Bussell, Darcey, 351, 392 Butkas, Matilde, 408–​409 Butterworth, Jo, 575 cadance, 54 cadenza, 55 Callow, Simon, 520n19 Calmo, Andrea, 15–​16, 18n12 Calvin, John, 23, 39n6 Calvo-​Merino, Beatriz, 229 Campion, Thomas, 120 canary, 63, 73n70, 178 Canova, Orlando Julius, 420f caper, 59, 62, 66, 67, 104n55 Capoeira, 508, 510 Caravaggio, Livio Lupi da, 178 Cardell, Thomas, 123 Cardinale, Vincent, 551f, 554 Carmen (2009, Masilo), 484, 496n46 carnivalesque, 370–​371 Caroso, Fabritio choreographic descriptions, 53, 70n27, 160, 221 directives of, 178, 182, 194n60 Carranza, Jerónimo Sánchez de, 185 Carroll, Tim, 97, 99 Carson, Anne, 473n23 Caspersen, Dana, 471 Castiglione, Baldassare, 23, 181, 190n9 casting, 246, 352, 391–​392, 510, 511 Cavarero, Adriana, 179 Cavell, Stanley, 298–​300 Cekwana, Boyzie, 483 Césaire, Aimé, 506, 508, 522n52, 523n60 Une Tempête (1969), 505–​508, 522n64 Chamberlain, John, 138, 139–​140 Chamberlain’s Men, 89–​90 Channell, Luke, 253, 254 chaos-​harmony progression, 264, 266 Chapel Children, 143 Chaplin, L. Tarin, 581 Chapman, George, 85, 116, 134, 257n28

Charnock, Nigel, 525, 529, 531, 532, 533, 538 Chauker, Katherine, 33 Chedgzoy, Kate, 526–​527 cheek, theatrical, 530–​531 Chekhov, Anton, 575 Cheraneva, Katja, 463 Chirologia (Bulwer), 161 “Choreographer and Shakespeare, The” (Sorell), 533 choreographers, 116, 237, 253–​255 choreographic empathy, 432 choreographic sources, 50–​51, 78–​82 choreography of bodies, 241 collaboration and authority in, 241–​242 as colonizing ideological force, 162 dance-​text differential and, 254 evolution of, 433–​434 garden design and, 198–​199 gesture-​potentiated language and, 222 interdisciplinary nature of, 575 international travel of, 50–​51, 190n12, 262 modernist aesthetic in (see modernist aesthetic) notation of, 160, 169n43, 191n26, 221, 254, 323n31 stylistic flexibility and, 181 Christians, 162, 163, 164–​165, 177. See also Protestants; Puritans; religion Christophe, Henri, 500, 522n49 Chronicles of Scotland and England (Holinshed), 247 Chu, Peter, 551f, 557 church house, 44nn80–​81 cinquepace. See also galliard choreography of, 54–​55, 54t, 71n47 meaning of, 54, 55 in Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare), 51, 56–​57, 58, 59 relation to galliard, 54, 55, 57 relation to passy-​measures pavan, 64 as repentance metaphor, 56–​57, 58 in Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 59, 60, 62, 63 cinque passi, 54 Clancy, William, 227 Clapp, Susannah, 436–​437 Clark, Stuart, 251

590   Index Clarke, Mary, 292, 293, 405 class, socioeconomic arm movement and, 178 articulated/​challenged in dramatic jig plots,  93–​94 boundary-​crossing dances, 14–​15, 16, 17, 88–​89, 143–​144, 145, 146 as changeable, 179 choreographic expression of, 158–​159 divisions created by dance, 3 food and, 15, 18n12 middle class, 39n3, 135, 144, 145, 146 touch and, 158–​159 Clegg, Roger, 215n21 Cleland, James, 24–​25 Cleopatra (1765), 359, 360, 380n2 Clerico, Francesco, 360 clothing, 179, 192n33, 272 cognition, situated/​embodied, 228 cognitive dissonance, 225–​226, 228, 230, 232 cognitive science, 227–​230, 232 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 210, 211 Cohen, Selma Jeanne, 388 Cole, John, 34 Colie, Rosalie, 355 collaboration in dance scene authorship attribution and, 237, 238, 239, 241–​245, 251 choreographers as composers, 237, 253–​255 reproductive language for, 242 social ills represented by, 239 transtemporal, 238, 245–​246, 254 Collier, John Payne, 64, 65, 74n77 Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare), 304–​307 “composer,” associations with, 254 Conclusions upon Dances (Lowin), 27–​28 conduct manuals, 23–​26, 179, 180 Confesse, Nicholas, 263 Connolly, Bobby, 307 “construction,” 274 Cook, Amy, 228 coranto choreography of, 60–​62, 61t, 63 literary references to, 60, 73n60, 73n63 meaning of, 60 music for, 60 in Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 59, 60, 63, 66

Corbin, Juliet, 430 Cornazano, Antonio, 262 corrente, 62, 73n62 cosmic harmony, dance as metaphor for, 23, 26, 188, 198 costumes acquisition of, 142 circulation and rental of, 142–​143 for Hamlet (2000), 416 for MacMillan’s harlots, 349, 352 for masque/​anti-​masque performances, 113, 142, 159 for morris dances, 135 for Sea of Troubles (2011), 409 Cotgrave, Randle, 53 Counsell, Colin, 431 country dance, 37, 85, 151n59 courante sequence, 61, 61t Coursen, H. R., 430 Court Beggar, The (Brome), 241–​242 Courtier, The (Castiglione), 23 court records, 30, 32, 36–​37 Cragun, Richard, 382n27 Craig, Leon Harold, 406 Craighead, Clare, 494n5 Crane, Mary, 86 Cranitch, Ellen, 527–​528, 529 Cranko, John aesthetic in dance adaptations, 287 ballet dramaturgy, 374, 383n42 choreographic goals, 361–​362 choreographic influence of, 359, 361, 362, 374 choreographic style, 362, 364–​365, 370, 392–​393 MacMillan connected to, 392, 393 movement language, 362, 364–​365 social integration promoted by, 370–​371 Cranko, John, works of Lady and the Fool (1954), 392 Onegin (1965, 1967), 361, 374 Prince of the Pagodas (1957), 392–​393 Romeo and Juliet (1962), 344, 346, 347–​348, 350, 361, 362–​363 Taming of the Shrew (1969) (see Taming of the Shrew (1969)) crip time, 202, 203, 204–​205, 210, 212

Index   591 Crisp, Clement, 353, 382n27 Critical Dance (Foyer), 484–​485 cross-​dressing in afterpieces, 87 cognitive dissonance and, 225, 227 deception through, 159, 165 religious implications of, 166, 167 same-​sex encounters and, 163 in As You Like It (Shakespeare), 225, 227 Crow, Susan, 410, 413f, 415f Crowe, Thomas Rain, 416 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 181 Cuban dance and culture, 511, 512, 513, 515 cultural studies, 579 Curtain (theatre), 92 cushion dance, 30–​32, 31f, 35–​36, 44nn80–​81 Czinner, Paul, 343 Dafora, Asadata, 500, 501, 502, 505, 518n4 Dafora, Asadata, works of Kykunkor (1934), 502, 518n4 “Voodoo” Macbeth (1936), 500, 501, 502 Daleks, 576 Dallington, Robert, 14 Dalton, Elisabeth, 382n29 Dalton, Elizabeth, 364 D’Anania, Giovanni, 247 dance. See also choreography as autonomous art form, 293, 300 communal nature of, 218, 219, 228 as cosmic harmony metaphor, 23, 26, 188, 198 debates over, 21–​22 disorderly behavior associated with, 32–​33, 35–​37, 46n121, 96, 164 in early modern England and Europe, 3, 13–​17, 18n3, 18n8 ephemeral nature of, 108, 156, 160, 220–​221,  577 feminist politics and, 213n4 gender and (see gender) humoral model and, 173, 176–​177, 184–​185 idea of, vs. dancing, 156 individuation and, 201–​202, 207 instruction, 13, 14, 18n3 (see also dance schools) language of, 381n4, 580–​581

as marital harmony metaphor, 26 medical concerns about, 24, 28 military training and, 194n69 moral benefits of, 23, 36 moral objections to, 26–​28, 32–​33, 35, 39n6, 44n91, 164, 219 multiple meanings and associations, 22–​23,  28 neurocognition of, 227, 228–​229, 232 notation of, 160, 169n43, 191n26, 221 opposites contained in, 181, 182, 188 physical benefits of, 23–​24, 28, 174 players’ skills, 108, 114, 144, 158 poetics of, 574 polarizing effect of, 163–​164 as process, 274 regional/​national styles of, 14, 18n8 relation to body, 158 relation to disability, 203, 205 relation to masque, 267 relation to music, 158, 434 relation to text, 157, 213n4, 254, 577 relation to time, 197, 198, 200, 205, 207, 210–​211, 212, 269 relation to touch, 159 religious perspectives on (see religion) Shakespearean-​era conceptions of, 22–​28 Shakespearean-​era practices (see dance practices, Shakespearean-​era) Shakespeare’s conceptions of, 2, 37–​38 social (see social dancing) social benefits of, 36 social mobility and, 179, 180 as symbol of harmony and concord, 155 textual nature of, 255 transformative agency of, 219 as wordless medium, 284, 299, 300, 301, 319 dance, rhetoric and conduct manuals on, 179 dance as wooing, 222–​223, 224 mutuality of, 222 patterns of, 231, 232 in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618), 217 power to persuade, 217, 219, 220, 230, 233n12 rhetorical language, 179, 218, 221, 222, 224 suspiciousness about, 219

592   Index dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s work. See also specific works appraisal approaches, 344 ballets, 360, 380, 388 (see also ballet; specific works) Broadway musicals, 303–​304, 324–​326 (see also Boys from Syracuse; Kiss Me, Kate; West Side Story) haunted by texts, 408, 456 lifespan of, 380 modernist aesthetics in (see modernist aesthetic) popularity of, 379–​380 post-​apartheid context for, 480, 481 (see also Bitter End of Rosemary (2011)) psychological treatments, 287, 288–​289, 292–​293,  294 scope of “texts” for, 385n63 translation and (see translation) “wordless Shakespeare,” 562n1, 570–​574, 576, 577 dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s work, relation to text in dance perceived as secondary to text, 6, 374, 406, 407, 408 fidelity to text in, 344, 345, 346, 348, 355, 408 “instance” vs. “adaptation,” 547 intelligibility and, 407, 408, 409, 411–​416 legibility and (see legibility) logocentrism, 6, 374, 406, 407, 408, 547 Dance Advance, 405, 406, 409, 410, 410f, 421, 422 dance and theater analysis, approaches to, 430–​432 dance-​drama,  290 Dance Factory (Johannesburg), 478, 483, 484 dance instruction, 13, 14, 18n3, 68n8, 69n20, 261–​262 dance manuals, 21, 22, 39n1, 177–​178, 181, 182 dance music anti-​masque,  116 coranto, 60 as emotionally/​physically moving, 158 Haitian, 512–​513, 523n79, 524n80 instruments, 45n104 masque, 263 relation to dance, 158, 434 during whipping punishment, 33

Dance Pathologies (McCarren), 351 dance practices, Shakespearean-​era dance types, 29 demographics of dancers, 32 disorderly conduct associated with, 32–​33, 35–​37, 46n121, 96, 164 (see also under Protestants) events and venues, 34–​35, 46n117 gender and (see gender) lascivious/​sexual dancing, 33–​34, 46n123 quantitative analysis of dancing references, 29–​30, 32–​36,  42n62 in religious celebrations and spaces, 22, 35, 37, 44n80 source material about, 29–​30, 32, 43n70 time of day, 35, 46n118 Tortworth cushion dance scandal, 30–​32,  35–​36 dance practices, transmodern, 480, 482, 485, 495n27 dancer-​dance relationship, 232–​233 dancers, 32, 350–​351, 352 dancer-​spectator relationship, 218–​219, 227, 228, 230. See also actor-​audience relationship dances, categories of, 27–​28 dances, duets (pas de deux), 367, 368–​370, 383n34, 391 dances, solo, 87, 103n26 dance scenes. See also specific works collaborative authorship/​attribution of, 238, 242–​245 meta-​choreographic,  241 moral ambiguity and nuance of, 37–​38 playwrights’ attention to, 241 rehearsal demands, 239 relation to dramatic action, 244 repeatability/​individuality of, 239–​240 stage directions for (see stage directions; specific plays) dance schools, 13, 18n3, 69n20 dance studies, 50, 407, 578–​579. See also dance and theater analysis; dance theory dance-​text differential, 254 dance theater, 561. See also Tanztheater dance theory. See also dance and theater analysis criticism of, 198

Index   593 early modern dance practices and, 199 modernism/​thesis,  482 post-​colonial/​post-​apartheid, 480,  493 postmodernism/​antithesis, 482, 493 Renaissance, 198–​199 transmodernism/​synthesis, 482, 493, 495n27 Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography, The (Franko), 262 dancing manuals, 29, 39n1, 68n8 dancing masters, 68n8, 116, 162 “dancing with the archive,” 266–​267, 269, 273, 275, 276 Daniel, Yvonne, 521n44 Darrigol, Oliver, 190n8 Dash, Irene, 305, 306, 320–​321 Daunt, Giles, 35, 44n79, 44n84 Davenant, William, 253–​254 Davies, Christopher, 34 Davies, Elizabeth, 34 Davies, John, 23, 26, 40n39, 60 Davies, Paul, 530, 534, 537–​538 Davis, Fred, 308, 309 Dayan, Joan, 506, 507, 508, 523n69 Daye, Anne on commercial transfer of masque choreographies, 116, 244 on dance-​masque relation, 267 dance scenes with dialogue, examples of, 72n55 manuscript authentication by, 64 on masks and vizards, 113, 159 on Oberon choreography, 264, 268 Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988, DV8 Physical Theatre), 537 Dead Man’s Fortune (ca. 1591), 239–​240 Deane, Derek, 350 death, stillness and, 199, 200, 204 Death of Ophelia, The (Delacroix), 486 deconstruction, dramaturgical, 458 Decreation (2003, Forsythe), 473n23 De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, 483, 493 Dekker, Thomas, 134, 241 De Klerk, F. W., 483 Delacroix, Eugene, 486 De la Démonomaniedes Sorciers (Bodin), 247 de Lauze, François, 73n64 de Maupassant, Guy, 461 demonologies, 246–​247

Denby, Edwin, 307 Derrida, Jacques, 156, 157, 213n4, 339 Desmond, Jane, 577, 578–​579 Destiné, Jean Leon, 521n46 de Valois, Ninette, 388–​389, 393 Diaghilev, Sergei, 361 Dialogue against Light, Lewd, and Lascivious Dancing, A (Fetherston), 27 Dickinson, Peter, 546, 553, 560 Dido and Aeneas (ca. 1687), 254 digestion, dance and, 24 Dionne, Devon, 554f disability, 202, 203, 204–​205, 210, 212 Discoverie of Witchcraft (Scot), 247 divertissements, 346 Dixon, Peggy, 261, 276n6 Doctor Who, 576 Dodds, E. R., 6 Donat, Robert, 292 doppio all’Italiana, 70n27 Dort, Bernard, 431 “double masque,” 118 “double nature,” 334, 335 “doubles,” 53 “doubles hopped,” 53, 70n28 Dougill, David, 402n26 Dover Wilson, John, 154–​155 Downes, John, 253–​254 Doyle, Desmond, 390 Doyle, Patricia, 436, 437, 438 Drakakis, John, 154 dramatic jig. See jig, dramatic, in danced endings dramaturgical deconstruction, 458 Dream, The (1964, Ashton), 288, 341n20, 387, 388, 389 Dromgoole, Dominic, 100–​101 Drout, John, 29 Duchess of Malfi, The (1613, Webster), 121, 122 Duck, Arthur, 33 Dudley, Robert, 180, 181f Duncan, Isadora, 545 Duncan-​Jones, Katherine, 526, 527 Dunham, Katherine, 505, 522n49 Durante, Viviana, 351 Dussel, Enrique, 482 Dutch Courtesan, The (1604, Marston), 114, 115 DV8 Physical Theatre, 531

594   Index “early modern,” term usage, 188n1 Ebreo, Gugleilmo, 162 Edelman, Lee, 202 Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning, 388 Eisenstaedt, Alfred, 580 Eliot, T. S., 292 Elizabeth I, 50, 68nn7–​8, 180, 181f, 229 Ellington, Duke, 396, 397, 398, 403n57 Elyot, Thomas, 23, 25–​26, 219–​220, 224 Emeka, Justin, 508–​510 emotions, 158, 174–​175, 184 empathy, 218, 228, 230, 232, 431, 432 Empty Space, The (Brook), 545 endings, danced diversity of dances, 88–​89 dramatic jigs (see jig, dramatic, in danced endings) jigs (see jig) solos, 87, 103n26 tradition of, 83, 84–​85 endings, dancing after, 87–​89 Engelhardt, Molly, 351 English Dancing Master, The (Playford), 30, 35 adaptations guided by, 271 attention to hands in, 160–​161, 162, 167 body exalted by, 163 on country dances, 271 cultural change encompassed by, 168n41 cushion dance, 30, 35 masque, 160 measures, 38n1 singles/​doubles,  53 on sociopolitical/​ideological implications of dance, 160, 161 English Gentleman, The (Brathwaite), 25 English Gentlewoman, The (Brathwaite), 25 English National Ballet, 401n3, 425n13 Eoan Group, 495n37 epic, elements of, 564n43 Eshu, 506, 509–​510, 509f “Essay on the Art of Dancing, An” (Noverre), 381n4 Essay toward an History of Dancing (Weaver), 254, 255 Essen, Abdul, 502, 521n43 ethnicity, arm movement and, 178 Every Woman in Her Humor (1609 [1607]), 85

experimental dance, 20th-​century, 287 “explication,” 555 Eye of Anguish (1950, Graham), 288 eyes, 175, 176, 177, 179, 182, 183, 190n9 Eyre, Richard, 408 Faires, Robert, 406–​407 fairies, 376, 384n50, 384n52 Falocco, Joe, 275 Farmanesh-​Bocca, John, 546, 548, 553, 554f, 555, 558, 561 FATC (Forgotten Angle Theatre Collective), 480–​481 Feder, Abe, 502 Federal Theatre Project, 500, 502 Feeney, Philip, 438–​439 feet as expressive, 182, 188 footwork variations, 178 love’s effect on, 175, 176 relation to body, 177, 178 relation to eyes, 179 of Romeo, 173, 175, 178, 183–​184, 185 soles of lead, 173, 175 in swordplay, 183, 184 Fellini, Federico, 580 feminist politics, 213n4 Ferrabosco, Alphonso, 263 Fetherston, Christopher, 23, 27, 33, 96 Fight or Flight Theatre Company, 546 Filipczak, Zirka, 192n33 Fineman, Joel, 527 Fischer-​Lichte, Erika, 431 Fischlin, Daniel, 265–​266, 463 “fixture”-​“motion” paradox, 213 Fletcher, John, 133, 134, 136, 141, 238, 243 Florio, John, 60, 64 Fokine, Mikhail, 293 Fonteyn, Margot, 291, 343, 352, 391 footwear, 184 Ford, John, 241 Forgotten Angle Theatre Collective (FATC), 480–​481 Forrest, John, 135, 141, 257n27 Forsythe, William attention emphasized by, 462 audience relationship, 458–​459, 471

Index   595 choreographic evolution of, 457, 458, 472n4 Cranko’s influence on, 361 danced-​dialogic processes of, 459, 546 improvisational aesthetic, 457, 470 influence of, 457 kinetic isometry, 470 mapping process, 460–​461 meaning engaged by, 458, 461 performance in Sider (2011), 469, 474n36 roles of, 458, 473n33, 474n36 texts engaged by, 457 Forsythe, William, works of, 457 Decreation (2003), 473n23 Sider (2011) (see Sider (2011)) Tempest Replica (2011), 547 Woolf Phrase (2001), 457, 466, 471, 472n7 Fortier, Mark, 266, 463 Foster, Susan Leigh, 162, 213n4, 254, 431, 432, 433, 577 Foucault, Michel, 189n4, 237 Fox, Edward, 97 Fox News, 570, 571–​572 Foy, Eddie, 303–​304, 321n1 Foyer, Maggie, 481, 484–​485 Fraleigh, Sondra, 219 France, Richard, 501, 504, 505 Frankenstein (2006, Synetic Theater), 569 Frankenstein (2016, Scarlett), 349–​350 Franko, Mark, 254, 262, 274, 275, 505, 521n29 “French slides,” 53 Freud, Sigmund, 459 Friedman, Sharon, 481, 494n5, 494n16, 496n42 Fuller, James, 420f Fuller, Loïe, 214n4 Gable, Christopher, 6, 352, 355, 390, 391, 392 Gaffoyne, Jasper, 67n8 gagliarda, 54, 73n62 gait, in dance styles, 182 Gallese, Vittorio, 230 galliard. See also cinquepace choreography of, 54–​56, 62–​63, 71n47 favored by Queen Elizabeth, 180 meaning of, 55 paired with pavan, 72n47 in post-​play dancing, 99, 100, 103n26 relation to cinquepace, 54, 55, 57

relation to passy-​measures pavan, 64 as repentance metaphor, 57–​58 rhythm of, 70n39 in Shakespearean-​era literature, 29 in Stone No More (2012), 271 in Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 59, 62, 63, 66 variations on, 55, 62 Game at Chess, A (Middleton), 241 Garber, Marjorie, 208, 215n32, 351–​352 Garcia, Sandra Marín, 549, 556f, 562 garden design, choreography and, 198–​199 Gardner, Lyn, 560 Garrick, David, 360 Gauchet, Claude, 17 Gaudet, Paul, 153 gender in anti-​masque morris tension, 145, 146 Bintley’s interrogation of roles, 397, 398 bodies separated according to, 3, 163, 166 choreography and, 214n4 in cinquepace choreography, 57 clothing and, 179 in conduct manuals’ approbation of dance, 25–​26,  28 cross-​dressing (see cross-​dressing) dance partner selection and, 176, 191n13 dance styles and, 180 disorderly conduct and, 33 evolving roles of women, 365 eye contact and, 182, 183 female dancers associated with prostitution, 350–​351,  352 female interpretations of Hamlet, 291 feminist politics, 213n4 harlot characters’ gender roles, 352–​353 kinetic experience of dance and, 271–​272 “leading” and “following” roles, 41n40 Macbeth as male and female, 297–​298, 299–​300 marriage norms and, 225 in masque scenes, 108, 112–​113, 118 misogynistic themes, 526 modesty and, 170n86, 183 in performance of witch roles, 246 playhouse attendance and, 19n19 politics and, 213n4 posture and, 192n33

596   Index gender (cont.) religious boundaries and, 165, 166 religious conversion and, 165–​166 same-​sex partnership, 508 sexual violence, 399, 444, 449, 457n25 single-​sex group dancing, 28, 37 spectator gaze and, 199 theater-​female sexuality connection, 145 time’s dance and, 211 touch and, 155 treatment of women, 348 women’s sexuality, 349 Georgi, Yvonne, 361 Georgiadis, Nicholas, 346, 349 Germany, 359, 360, 374 Germany, dance and Shakespeare in, 360 gesture, 162, 179, 200, 222, 408–​409 Ghost Sonata, 98 Gielgud, John, 462 Giles, Christopher, 440 Giles, Thomas, 142, 263 Gillman, Denise, 511, 512 Gilroy, Paul, 499, 519n11 Gjoka, Brigel, 467, 468f, 471 Glanvill, Joseph, 253 Glass, Philip, 416 Glasser, Sylvia, 496n42 Globe playhouses (London), 92, 96, 97–​101,  105n81 Godfrey, Derek, 389 Godwin, Dwight, 297 Godwin, Grace, 511, 512 Goellner, Ellen, 576–​577 Gonzales, Amancio, 463 Goodman, Benny, 547, 555 Gossett, Suzanne, 137, 148n24 Gottschild, Brenda Dixon, 307 Gower, John, 549 Grady, Hugh, 532 Graham, Martha, 288, 390, 393, 426n38 Grant, Alexander, 402n30 Gray’s Inn Christmas revels, 69n21, 71n47 Green, Tony, 97 Greenblatt, Stephen, 161, 248, 304 Greene, Robert, 94, 263 Greene, Thomas, 121 Greene-​Kramer, Oliver, 420f

“Gregory Walker,” 65 greve, 54, 55, 57 grotesque style, 254 Grotowski, Jerzy, 545 grounded theory, 430 Gruber, Lilo, 361 Gsovsky, Tatiana, 288, 360–​361 Gsovsky, Victor, 361 Guazzo, Francesco, 247 Guerrier, Peniel, 523n79 Guillem, Sylvie, 401n16 Guilpin, Everard, 95 Gurr, Andrew, 19n19, 96, 101, 142 Haber, Judith, 355 Haddington Masque, The (1608, Jonson), 115, 122, 124 Haiti cultural representation in Pericles, 512–​513,  515 dance forms, 511, 512, 514–​515, 521n46 music of, 512–​513, 523n79, 524n80 as setting for “Voodoo” Macbeth (1936), 500–​501,  505 Halpern, Richard, 501, 503, 505, 518n6 Hamlet (1788, Clerico), 360 Hamlet (1942, Helpmann) character handling in, 294 Images of Love (1964) framed by, 389 modernist aesthetic in, 289–​294, 300 psychoanalytic interpretation in, 288, 292–​ 293, 294, 300, 422 set design, 291, 293 Hamlet (1964 film), 462, 464 Hamlet (2000, Mills), 417f, 420f, 423f Balanchine’s influence on, 424 conditions for conceptualizing, 422 contrasted with Sea of Troubles (1988), 421–​422,  555 costumes and set for, 416, 417, 418 legibility and intelligibility in, 416, 417–​419, 422, 424 multiple “selves” in, 419–​421, 420f, 421f, 422 psychological mood of, 422–​424 successive understanding of time in, 408 success of, 406–​407 Hamlet (2007, Lecompte), 462

Index   597 Hamlet (2008, Nixon), 441f, 442f, 443f, 444f collaboration, 435–​436, 437–​439 creative process, 436–​439, 446, 447–​448 critical review, 388, 440, 442, 444–​445 materiality in, 445–​449 mise-​en-​scène, 437–​439, 446 polysemanticism in, 434, 445 reception of, 432 scenario, 439, 440–​444 Shakespeare Suite and, 388 signification in, 430, 432–​433 Hamlet (Gsovsky), 288 Hamlet (Shakespeare) authoritative meanings eschewed in, 406 dance adaptations of, 288, 290–​295, 405 (see also Bitter End of Rosemary (2011); eponymous works; Sea of Troubles (1988); Sider (2011)) popularity of, 436 psychoanalytic criticism of, 422 Russian culture and, 575–​576 in Shakespeare Suite (1999), 397–​398 Hamlet: Connotations (1976, Neumeier), 288, 375 Hamletmachine (1979, Müller), 379, 385n57 Hamlet: Reflections on the Theme Hamlet (1991, Voskresenskaja), 575 Hamlet: The Rest Is Silence (2002, Synetic Theater), 569, 573, 574, 580 hands, 160–​162, 167, 178 Hanna, Judith Lynne, 350–​351 harlots. See also prostitution costumes for, 349, 352 roles in Romeo and Juliet (1965, MacMillan), 344, 346–​348, 352–​355, 356, 357n32 Harman, R. Alec, 65–​66 Harris, Dale, 409 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 205, 246 Harris, Paul, 461 Hart, Lorenz, 304, 305, 306 Harvey, Elizabeth, 164, 165 Hatton, Christopher, 179–​180 Haut Barrois (branle), 178 Hawkins, Eric, 288 Hawkins, William, 309 Haydée, Marcia, 365, 374 Hearne, Jeremy (Hierome), 116, 122–​125, 263

heat, 24, 176–​177, 184–​185 Heddon, Deirdre, 459 Helpmann, Robert, 289, 290, 291, 293, 294, 422 Helpmann, Robert, works of Hamlet (1942) (see Hamlet (1942)) Murder in the Cathedral (1935), 292 Henri III (France), 16 Henry, Prince of Wales, 123 Henry IV (Shakespeare), 87 Henry VIII, 109, 126n13 Henry VIII (Fletcher and Shakespeare). See also All Is True (1613) masque scene in, 109, 113, 115, 119, 124, 134 stage direction, 119, 129n48 Henslowe, Philip, 278n27 Hentzner, Paul, 88 Herberg, Will, 323n35 Herbert, Henry, 96 He takes her by the hand (1979, Bausch), 379 Hewison, James, 532, 534–​536 Higgins, John, 345–​346 Hilb, Benjamin, 501, 519n16, 521n44 Hillman, David, 177 Hindlin, Naomi, 296 Hines, Patricia, 444, 445 Hinton-​Lewis, Christopher, 445, 448–​449 Hoby, Thomas, 23 Hog Hath Lost His Pearl, The (Tailor), 122 Holborne, Anthony, 268, 271 Holinshed, Raphael, 247 Holland, Peter, 384nn49–​50,  575 Holm, Hanya, 308–​309, 310, 311–​312 Holm, Hanya, works of, 308, 312 Ballet Ballads (1948), 308 Camelot (1960), 312 Golden Apple (1954), 312 Insect Comedy (1948), 308 Kiss Me, Kate (1948), 308–​312 My Fair Lady (1956), 312 Out of This World (1950), 312 Holmer, Joan Ozark, 184 Homans, Jennifer, 336, 337, 340n9, 342n26, 460, 470–​471 Horla, The (de Maupassant), 461 Horwell, Veronica, 100 Horwitz, Dawn Lillie, 305 Houlder, Thomas, 34

598   Index house, meanings of, 165 Houseman, John, 501, 520n19 Hoving, Lucas, 296–​297 Howard, Skiles, 57, 58, 85, 179 Howell, Veronica, 97 Hughes, Arthur, 486 humoral model bodily change vs. social change, 190n10 categories, 174 “crystalline humor,” 175, 190n8 in dance vs. swordplay, 184–​185 early modern views of, 189n4 heat/​coolness and, 176–​177 for Romeo’s behavior, 174–​175, 177 Humphrey, Doris, 296 Hunt, Marvin, 406 Hurry, Leslie, 291, 293 Hurston, Zora Neale, 501, 503, 505 Hussey, Dyneley, 292 Hüster, Wiebke, 455 Hutcheon, Linda, 408, 456 Hymenaei (1606, Jonson), 113, 115, 118, 124 identity, 323n35, 481–​482, 502–​503, 519n17 Il libro del cortegiano (Castiglione), 23 images, 200–​201, 202, 211 Images of Love (1964, MacMillan), 388–​391,  396 improvisation, 445–​446, 447, 457 Improvisation Technologies (Forsythe), 470 individuation, 197, 201–​202 Inflammatory Material (Volcano Theatre Company), 542 Inns of Court manuscripts as choreographic source, 50, 80–​81 cinquepace described in, 55, 71n47 coranto mentioned in, 60 galliard described in, 71n47 measure described in, 52–​53, 71n47 “instance,” 547 Institution of a Young Noble Man (Cleland),  24–​25 intelligibility, 407, 408, 409, 411–​416 Iroquois Theatre fire, 321n1 Isenberg, Nancy, 365, 370–​371, 382n24, 382n28, 575 I Think It’s Hamlet (2013, Sabbagha), 481

Jackson, Jennifer, 410, 415f Jaggard, William, 526 Jah, Zainab, 510 Jakobson, Roman, 339 James I (king), 1, 123, 145 James the Fourth (Greene), 94 Jazz Calendar (1968, Ashton), 396 Jennings, Luke, 349, 350, 357n25, 553, 555, 557, 560 Jensen, Phebe, 37 Jenyn, Soame, 535 “Jewish residue,” 165, 166 Jews, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 170n86 jig after end of play, 50, 83–​84, 87–​89, 189 (see also jig, dramatic) criticism of, 4 cross-​pollination between plays, 240–​241 dramatic (see jig, dramatic) at end of play, 29, 83, 84–​86 (see also jig, dramatic) features of, 51–​52 as hot/​hasty wooing metaphor, 56, 57 in Much Ado about Nothing, 51–​52, 56, 57, 58 multiple meanings of, 50, 51, 83–​84, 85 origins of, 51 prohibition of, 89, 95–​96 Scottish, 52, 85 as solo dance, 87, 103n26 in Twelfth Night, 59–​60, 94 jig, dramatic, in danced endings dancing featured in, 92, 93, 94 function of, 84, 89, 93–​95, 101 vs. “jig,” 101n3 Kemp’s development of, 89–​92 modern alternative to, 99 number of dancers in, 92–​93 “original practices” approach to staging,  97–​101 plots of, 93–​94 prohibition of, 89, 95–​96 relation to plays, 94–​95, 101 Shakespeare’s attitude toward, 89 social order articulated/​challenged in, 89, 93–​94, 96, 215n21 as solo dance, 87, 103n26 Johnson, David, 480

Index   599 Johnson, Josh, 468f Johnson, Momodu, 502 Johnson, Robert, 141, 263, 268 Johnson, Ryan, 407 Jommelli, Niccolò, 360 Jones, David, 305 Jones, Inigo, 116, 117f, 128n39, 263, 270, 271 Jones, John Bush, 318 Jones, John Price, 438 Jonson, Ben “anti-​masque” coined by, 116 court masque attended by, 126n7 dance as rhetorical language for, 217 on Hatton’s dance and social success, 180 on post-​play jigs, 83 stage direction in Oberon, 268, 269 on transformative agency of dance, 217, 219 Jonson, Ben, works of Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, 114, 115 Masque of Beauty, 115, 121 Masque of Oberon, 116, 121, 123, 142 Masque of Queens, 115–​116, 119, 121, 122, 124, 248 Oberon, The Fairy Prince (see Oberon, The Fairy Prince (Jonson)) Satyr, 180 Jordan, Stephanie, 406 Jowitt, Deborah, 313, 561, 564n38 Joy, Jenn, 573 Judas Tree, The (1992, MacMillan), 353, 357n25 Juliet and Romeo (1785, Luzzi), 360, 381n9 Julius Caesar (1999, Globe), 99 Julius Caesar (2017, Synetic Theater), 572 Kafer, Alison, 202 Kang, Sue Jin, 368f, 369f, 373f Kay, Barry, 390 Kchessinska, Mathilde, 350, 352 Kelley, Robin, 519n17 Kemp, William dramatic jig developed by, 89–​92, 91f on morris dance costumes, 135, 148n13 onstage/​offstage dance trends influenced by, 240 performance style, 92 texts connected to, 98 Kenton, Stan, 389

Kentridge, William, 478 Kern, David, 464, 465–​466, 465f Kerr, Walter, 318 Khoury, Joseph, 506, 507 Kidd Pivot, 547, 555, 561 Kidnie, Margaret Jane, 274, 367–​368, 408, 547 kinesthetic empathy, 230, 431 kinetic isometry, 470 King Lear (2012, Synetic Theater), 576, 580 King Lear (Shakespeare), 288, 394 King’s Men affected by plague, 116 costume supply and, 143 danced endings, 96 Fletcher’s involvement with, 134 Lowin’s involvement with, 42n57 masque scenes performed by, 109 Shakespeare’s involvement with, 134 social boundaries crossed by, 3 Kirkham, Edward, 143, 151n53 Kirsh, David, 232 Kisselgoff, Anna, 409 Kiss Me, Kate (1948, Holm), 308–​312, 323n31 Klett, Elizabeth, 555 Koegler, Horst, 361, 382n20, 394n46 Köhler-​Richter, Emmy, 361 Koner, Pauline, 288, 296, 297, 299 Koritz, Amy, 407 Körper (Bodies, 2000, Waltz), 546 Kowal, Rebekah, 407 Kraut, Anthea, 501, 503, 519n17 Kresnik, Johann, 379, 385n57 Kroll, Richard, 251 Krumpe, Aara, 417f Kumakawa, Tetsuya, 394 Kylián, Jiří, 361 Laban, Rudolf, 431 Lamaire, Madeleine, 486 Lancing, K., 100 Lang, Harold, 308, 309 Lang, Jessica, 387 Lang, Prue, 472n7 Lao-​Tzu,  469 La Pierre, Sebastian, 122 lateral agency, 272 LaTouche, John, 308

600   Index Laud, William, 35 Laufe, Abe, 308 Laurents, Arthur, 312, 316, 318, 319, 323n34 la volta (lift), 178, 183 Lavrovsky, Leonid, 287, 346, 347, 354, 362 Lawrence, Pauline, 295 Lawrence, William, 44n79 Lazar, Dale Paul, 514 Leaming, Barbara, 505, 521n42 Lecompte, Elizabeth, 458, 462 Lecoq, Jacques, 545 Lefton, Sue, 99 legibility challenged in Sea of Troubles (2011), 408, 409, 411–​416, 422 defined, 407 in Hamlet (2000), 416, 422, 424 of staged African dances, 501, 502 Le Gratie d’Amore (Negri), 62 Lehmann, Hans-​Thies, 458, 463 Lepecki, André, 156–​157, 274, 275, 573 Le Picq, Charles, 360 Le Sueur, Suzette, 478, 489 Lewis, Christopher Taggart, 482 Liebler, Naomi Conn, 345 Life of Henry V, The (1997, Globe), 98–​99 Ligeti, György, 375 “light,” connotations with, 188, 194n68 light/​dark contrasts, 188 Limón, José, 288, 289, 290, 296, 298, 305 Limón, José, works of Barren Sceptre (1960), 288–​290, 297–​301 Moor’s Pavane (1949), 6–​7, 296–​297 Lindley, David, 227 literacy, 431, 433 literary analysis, 228 logocentrism, 6, 374, 406, 407, 408, 547. See also dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s work, relation to text in Long, John, 230, 231 Long, Robert Emmet, 314 Loomba, Ania, 480 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 86, 89, 240 Lords’ Masque, The (Campion), 118, 120, 121, 123 loss disability and, 203, 204, 210 of time, 197, 198, 211

Louis XIV, 194n69 love at first sight, 176, 177, 190n9 full-​bodied state of, 176, 183, 184, 188 L.O.V.E. (1992, 2012, Charnock), 535f choreographic/​narrative construction of, 527–​528, 532–​533, 537–​539 critical and popular response to, 525, 527–​528,  540 performance experience, 534–​536, 540, 541 physical-​theater genre shaped by, 525 Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (Jonson), 114, 115 love-​melancholy, 174–​175, 176, 184, 188 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 86, 109, 112, 134, 155 Lowin, John, 23, 27–​28, 42n57 Lublin, Robert, 274–​275 Lucini, Antonio Francesco, 185, 186f Luhrmann, Baz, 231 l’uomo retto (“the upright man”), 179 Lupton, Donald, 83, 88, 89 Luther, Martin, 39n6 Luzzi, Eusebio, 343, 360 Lyndesay, David, 84 Lyonnaise, 191n13 Macauley, Alastair, 337, 340n9, 354, 560–​561 Macbeth (1980, Vasiliev), 388 Macbeth (1988, Kresnik), 385n57 Macbeth (2008, Sabbagha), 481 Macbeth (Shakespeare). See Tragedy of Macbeth MacDonald, Elizabeth, 571 Mackrell, Judith, 329, 405, 435, 440, 444 MacLeary, Donald, 390 MacMillan, Kenneth on adaptation process, 345–​346 biographical background, 425n26 choreographic style, 287, 409 Cranko connected to, 359, 362, 392, 393 infidelity to text, 344, 345, 346, 348, 355 influences on, 346, 347, 359, 362, 389 modern jazz-​classical influences, 396 other full-​length narrative work, 392 prostitute roles in works of, 352–​353 views on women, 353

Index   601 MacMillan, Kenneth, works of Anastasia (1971), 350, 352, 393 Images of Love (1964), 388–​391 Judas Tree (1992), 353, 357n25 Manon (1974), 352, 392 My Brother, My Sisters (1978), 345–​346 Prince of the Pagodas (1989), 392, 393–​396 Romeo and Juliet (1965) (see Romeo and Juliet (1965)) Sea of Troubles (1988) (see Sea of Troubles (1988)) Somnambulism (1953), 389, 396 Madalane, Ingnatia, 478 Madsen, Egon, 382n29 Maguire, Laurie, 364, 372 Mahood, M. M., 155 Maid’s Metamorphosis (1600), 85 Malcontent, The (Marston), 221 Maliphant, Russell, 410, 413f Maltese Branle, 178 Mandela, Nelson, 483 “Manifesto for Dead and Moving Bodies” (Foster), 499 Mannes, Jörg, 379 Manning, Erin, 198, 201, 207 Manning, Susan, 502 Manon (1974, MacMillan), 352, 392 Mantsoe, Vincent, 481, 496n42 manuals. See conduct manuals Maqoma, Gregory, 481, 483, 496n42 “Maria” (Bernstein, Sondheim), 312–​313 Mark of Cain, The (2017, Synetic Theater), 569–​570 marriage dance as metaphor for, 23, 26, 56, 57, 224–​225 gender norms and, 225 repentance related to, 57, 58 “marriage market,” 366–​367 Marsh, Christopher, 30, 221 Marston, Cathy, 435 Marston, John, 60, 83, 90, 114, 124, 134, 221 Martin, John, 310–​311, 312, 320, 340n9 Martinu, Bohuslav, 410 Marvin, John, 495n27 Mary Queen of Scots, 126n13 mascarade, 109, 110f, 112, 125 mascherata, 109, 111, 127n16

Masilo, Dada (Dikeledi) biographical background, 482–​483 choreographic style, 484 FATC collaborations, 481 post-​apartheid influences on, 492–​493 rise of, 478, 483–​485, 496n42 themes engaged by, 484 Masilo, Dada, works of Bitter End of Rosemary (2011), 477–​478, 479f, 490f, 491f Carmen (2009), 484, 496n46 Death and the Maidens (2012), 484 Romeo and Juliet (2008), 484 Swan Lake (2010), 484, 496n46 Masilo, Faith, 483 masks and vizards, 113, 159. See also masque Mason, Monica, 351 masque. See also anti-​masque anti-​masque preceding, 264, 267, 271 cancelled/​absent (see Merchant of Venice, cancelled masque in) choreographies transferred to commercial performance, 116, 244 costumes for, 113, 142, 159 defined, 158 dialogue and, 112–​113 embedded, 136, 139, 141, 142–​143, 144, 151n53 genre characteristics, 104 in-​house, 109, 110–​111f literary use of, 126n10 masque-​within-​a-​play,  113 moral ambiguity and nuance in, 37 number of dancers, 160 professional dancers added to, 108, 115–​116 relation to dance, 267 romance and, 149n36 set design, 119, 129n49 socioeconomic tensions within, 135, 136–​137,  146 source materials about, 108 in Stone No More, 270–​273, 275 structural politics of, 271 Stuart, 108, 125, 151n59, 159 torchbearers in, 190n11 touch in choreography of, 155, 159, 160–​161,  167 Tudor, 4, 107, 113, 125

602   Index masque, court anti-​masque in, 120–​121, 122, 129n52 commercial restaging of, 136, 137, 139–​142, 164, 257n27 (see also under Two Noble Kinsmen) cultural ideologies embedded in, 163–​164 gender in, 118 novelty important to, 139, 141, 142 performance space for, 138–​139, 149n26 Shakespeare influenced by, 109 socioeconomic context for, 137–​139 Masque of Oberon, The (Jonson), 116, 121, 123, 142 Masque of Queens, The (Jonson), 115–​116, 119, 121, 122, 124, 248 Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, The (Beaumont), 120, 121, 123, 135, 137–​139, 140, 143 commercial restaging of (see Two Noble Kinsmen, anti-​masque morris dance in) masquerade, 4, 154 masquing, impromptu, 109 Masten, Jeffrey, 238, 241, 243, 245 “matachin” dances, 126n6 materiality, 445–​449 Matthon, Yannick, 557 May, Georgina, 445 May games, 140 “maying,” 140, 148n31 Mazliah, Fabrice, 456f, 460, 463, 467,  474n39 Mazzio, Carla, 177 Mazzocca Bellecci, Ann, 523nn78–​79, 524n80, 524n82 Mazzocca Bellecci, Ann, works of “Ocean, Ogou, Ossain,” 511 Pericles, Prince of Tyre (2014), 511, 512 Mazzolini, Silvestro, 247 McAlister, Elizabeth, 519n10 McCarren, Felicia, 351 McClendon, Rose, 520n19 McConachie, Bruce, 228 McCormick, Malcolm, 362 McCulloch, Lynsey, 50, 274–​275, 529 McDonald, Russ, 49 McGee, Adam, 519n10 McGowan, Margaret, 67n7, 180

McHale, Duke, 305 McJannet, Linda, 511 McLuskie, Kathleen, 500 McManus, Clare, 143 McRuer, Robert, 202 McWhorter, John, 570–​571 Mead, David, 442, 444–​445 measure ambiguous references to, 52 choreographic sources for, 52–​53, 71n47 as marriage metaphor, 56, 57 in Much Ado about Nothing, 51, 52–​53, 56, 57, 58, 59 multiple meanings of, 52, 53, 69n18, 69n24, 127n18 relation to basse danse, 53, 56, 70n30, 71n47 relation to passy-​measures pavan, 64 “measure with changes,” 113 Medea: Sexwar (1991, Volcano), 530, 531 medical theories, 24, 28, 174. See also humoral model melancholy, 175. See also love-​melancholy Memorable Masque of the Inner Temple and Lincoln’s Inn, The (Chapman), 116, 120, 121, 257n28 Mendelssohn, Felix, 330, 336, 338, 339, 375 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), cancelled masque in absence-​presence relationship in, 155, 156 choreographic “traces” in, 156, 157 class/​gender/​religious boundaries and, 164, 167 as controversial work, 157 hand gestures in, 161, 162 interrogation possibilities, 153–​154 as metaphor for disguise/​deception, 155 offstage action evoked by, 154 religious conversion in, 164–​167 staged theatricality in, 166–​167 text relationships in, 155, 156–​157, 163 meta-​choreographic scenes, 241 meta-​dramatic scenes, 241 meta-​theatricality,  397 Method for Travell, A (Dallington), 14 Meyburgh, Catherine, 478 middle class, 39n3, 135, 144, 145, 146

Index   603 Middleton, Thomas, 114, 121, 125, 134, 136, 241, 248 “middling sort,” 39n3, 135, 144, 145, 146 Midgelow, Vida, 496n45 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (1962) source translation, 339 structure and thematics in, 334–​338 tempo and rhythm in, 330–​333, 341n19 as translation, 328, 329–​330, 338, 339 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (1970), 545 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (1977, Neumeier), 375–​376, 380 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (2013), 508–​5 10 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 37, 85–​86, 143, 150n39, 395 dance adaptations of (see Dream (1964); eponymous works) Mildmay, Humphrey, 148n24 Millais, John Everett, 486 Miller, Jonathan, 487 Miller, Philip, 478 Milling, Jane, 459 Mills, Stephen, 408, 425n26, 426n45 works of (see Hamlet (2000)) mind-​body relationship, 227, 229–​230, 299 Miranda, Lin-​Manuel, 312, 323n33 Mirren, Helen, 294 mirror neurons, 229, 230 mise-​en-​scène, 437–​439, 446 Mitchell, Tim, 439 modernist aesthetic abstraction in, 289 examples of, 288–​296, 298, 300 formalism in, 289 presentation of character in, 287, 288, 289, 290, 294, 295, 297, 300 spatial choreographic design in, 288, 289, 294, 295, 300 modesty, 170n86, 183 Monahin, Nona, 16, 262 Mondschein, Ken, 193n55 Montgomery, Lisa Kennedy, 571 Moore, Pippa, 445 Moorer, Claire, 551f Moor of Venice, The (1969, Schilling), 379 Moor’s Pavane, The (1949, Limón)

choreographic process, 6–​7, 296–​297 commemorative performance of, 387 foundational truth questioned in, 289 modernist aesthetic in, 288, 289–​290, 295–​296,  300 popularity of, 376 psychoanalytic interpretation in, 289, 295 Mordden, Ethan, 305, 310 Moreno, Rita, 312 moresca dances, 126n6 Morley, Thomas, 60, 62, 65, 222 Moross, Jerome, 308 morris dance vs. anti-​masque, 120–​121 Beaumont morris, 257n27 class boundaries crossed by, 14–​15 collaboration about roles, 241 defined, 126n6 disorderly conduct associated with, 32 moral ambiguity and nuance in, 37 in The Rivals, 253 trends, 141 morris dance, anti-​masque characteristics of, 135, 140 costumes for, 135, 142 number of dancers, 135–​136 socioeconomic boundaries crossed by, 14–​15, 143–​144, 145, 146 socioeconomic history and context, 133, 143, 144 in Two Noble Kinsmen (see under Two Noble Kinsmen) venues for, 136, 140 Morton, Grace, 421f Mosca, Roberta, 456f, 460, 461, 463, 467 Moser, Juliet, 569 Moulton, Robert, 309–​310, 311 movement academic study of, 578–​579 elements of, 431 language of, 573 patterned, 227, 232 quality of, 261–​262 movement-​image,  200 movement trouvé, 545–​546 Mr. Bluebeard (1903), 303, 321n1 Much Ado about Nothing (1993 film), 67n2

604   Index Much Ado about Nothing (2004, Globe), 100 Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare) dance and marriage/​wooing in, 22–​23, 56, 57, 222–​225 danced ending, 85 dance prominent in, 155 masque scene in, 109, 112, 134 morally complex dance scenes in, 37 specific dances referenced in, 51–​58, 85 staging of, 58–​59, 66, 72n49, 72nn52–53, 72n55, 72n57 Mulcaster, Richard, 24, 69n18 Müller, Heiner, 379, 385n57 Murder in the Cathedral (1935, Helpmann), 292 Murphy, Jacqueline Shea, 576–​577 music, cognitive dissonance and, 226 music, dance. See dance music “mutton” pun (Twelfth Night), 73n68, 104n55 My Brother, My Sisters (1978, MacMillan), 345–​346 Nashe, Thomas, 83 nationality, 178, 323n35 Nazarian, Santiago, 482 Negri, Cesare celebrities instructed by, 67n7 choreographic descriptions, 53, 55, 62, 160, 178, 190n11 negritude, 506, 508, 522n52 Negro Theatre Project, 500, 501, 520n19 Neill, Michael, 480 Nemakula, Mulalo, 483–​484 Némirovsky, Irène, 436 Nerina, Nadia, 402n30 Neumeier, John Cranko’s influence on, 359, 361, 374 on Cranko’s Onegin (1965), 374 German vs. American reception of, 374 movement vocabulary, 376 Shakespearean ballets, 375, 384n46 story-​ballet genre, 374–​375 Neumeier, John, works of, 375 Death in Venice (2003), 374 Hamlet: Connotations (1976), 288, 375 Lady of the Camellias (1978), 374 Midsummer Night’s Dream (1977), 375–​376 Othello (1985), 376–​379, 384n54 “neuroplay,” 228

Nevile, Jennifer, 190n12, 198–​199 Newell, Alex, 474n41 New Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (1981, Schilling), 379 “nexus,” 434 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 330, 495n27 Nijinska, Bronislawa, 291, 495n27 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 384n52 Nikolais, Alwin, 311 Nine Daies Wonder (Kemp), 91, 91f Nixon, David, 435, 439, 447–​448 works of (see Hamlet (2008)) Norman, Mathew, 44n91 Northbrooke, John, 219 Northern Ballet, 401n3, 434–​435, 446 Nothbrooke, John, 96 “nothing,” Shakespeare’s use of, 201, 202, 203, 205, 207, 208, 212, 215n32 Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble, 547, 561, 564n43 Noverre, Jean-​Georges, 191n26, 293, 359, 360, 381n4 No Wit/​Help like a Woman’s (Middleton), 134, 136 Nunn, Trevor, 487 Nureyev, Rudolf, 343, 352, 390, 391–​392 Nyamza, Mamela, 496n42 Oberon, The Fairy Prince (Jonson), 116, 263–​265, 266, 278n27 “Ocean, Ogou, Ossain” (Mazzocca), 511 O’Day, Kevin, 379 Official Branle, 178 “offstage” dancing, 22, 34–​35, 46n117, 240 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 156 Oh Let Me Confess (2012, Hewison), 544n44 “Old Measures,” 52, 69n20 Olivier, Richard, 98 O’Malley, Evelyn. See Stone No More (2012) Onegin (1965, 1967, Cranko), 361, 374 Onstage and Offstage Worlds in Shakespeare’s Plays (Brennan), 154 “onstage” dance after play endings (see endings, dancing after) to end plays (see endings, danced) social dancing tied to, 94 On Your Toes (1936, Balanchine), 305

Index   605 Ophelia (Hughes), 486 Orchésographie (Arbeau). See also Arbeau, Thoinot circulation of choreographies in, 190n12 coranto described in, 60 dramatic jig described in, 95 footwork variations in, 178 hand motion discouraged in, 178 as limited masque dance source, 264 title of, 40n39 Torch/​Candlestick Branle described in, 176, 190n12 Orchestra (Davies), 23, 26, 40n39 Orgel, Stephen, 246, 251 “original practices” (OP), 97–​98, 273–​274 Orkin, Martin, 480, 492 Orpheus Suite (2004, Bintley), 396 Oswin, Cindy, 98 Othello (1985, Neumeier), 376–​379, 380, 384n54 Othello (Shakespeare), dance adaptations of, 288, 376–​379. See also Moor’s Pavane (1949); Othello (1985) O’Toole, Peter, 352 Ottley, Roi, 504 Paep er, Veronica, 435 Pandosto or the Triumph of Time (Greene), 263 pantsula dances, 484, 493, 495n32 Paradoxes of Defence (Silver), 184, 193n55 Pardo, Enrique, 562 Parfitt, Judy, 464, 467 Parry, Jann, 346, 347, 389, 409, 411, 422 Parsons, Elinor, 555 pas de deux, 367, 368–​370, 383n34, 391 pas doubles, 53 passamezzo, 64, 65–​66, 74nn72–​73,  75n87 pas simples, 53 “passing measure pavan,” 64 passy-​measures pavan, 63, 64–​66 Paster, Gail Kern, 176 pattern, 231, 232, 335, 336 Paul’s Boys, 113, 116, 127n20 pavan (pavane) learning to dance, 261 in Moor’s Pavane (1949, Limón), 290, 295 in Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare), 59

paired with galliard, 72n47 relation to passy-​measures pavan, 64–​65 rhetoric coupled with, 224 in Stone No More (2012, O’Malley), 270–​271 “pavins,” 53 Pavis, Patrice, 431, 432, 434, 445 pavoneggiare (“peacocking”), 182 Peacemakers, The, 483 “peacocking,” 182 Pellicer, Juan Christian, 277n19 Pepin, Dash, 551f, 554 perception, cognition and, 227 Percival, John, 392, 405, 411 Pericles (Shakespeare), 37, 115, 128n31 Pericles, Prince of Tyre (2014, Mazzocca), 499, 511–​517,  516f Pericles Redux (2009, Farmanesh-​Bocca), 554f choreographic style, 547, 553–​555 costumes and set, 547, 564n38 dance-​text relationship, 547, 549, 550, 560, 562 dice game, 548, 558, 563n31 reception of, 560 reverse epilogue, 558 revisions to, 546, 548–​549 score, 547–​548 Perpener, John, 500, 502, 521n42 Petipa, Marius, 362 Petrarchism, 353–​356 Peyser, Joan, 314 Phelan, Peggy, 154, 157, 577 philosophy, topological approach to, 461 physical-​theater  genre vs. dance theater, 546 emergence of, 545 increasing interest in, 572 L.O.V.E. (1992, Charnock), 525 physical skill in, 558 Shakespeare adaptations in, 546 Synetic Theater, 572, 573 term usage, 562n1 theorizing, 573 Piacenza, Domenico da, 262 Pickett, Philip, 98, 264 Piecemaker software, 456, 460, 472n3 pied en l’air (foot in the air), 54, 55 Pillchorne, Henry, 33–​34 Pilobolus, 547, 563n23

606   Index Pitcher, John, 117–​118 Pite, Crystal, 546, 557 Pite, Crystal, works of Polaris (2015), 561 Tempest Replica (2011) (see Tempest Replica (2011)) Ten Duets (2008), 546 Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, A (Morley), 65, 222 Plato, 334 Platter, Félix, 109 Platter, Thomas, 14, 87, 92, 99 Playford, John. See English Dancing Master Pleasant Treatise of Witches (anonymous), 251 Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618, Jonson), 217 “plot,” meaning of, 255 “plot scenario,” 255 Poesio, Giannandrea, 496n45 Pokorny, Jiri, 557 Polaris (2015, Pite), 561 politics, 571, 572–​573, 575 polychronic objects, 246 polymath practice, 1–​2 polysemanticism, 434, 447 Porter, Andrew, 345 Porter, Cole, 308, 309 Portrait of Sir Henry Unton (unknown), 110–​111f, 113 post-​apartheid  era African dance forms in, 481, 483–​484, 492–​493,  496n42 as context for ballet, 483–​484 as context for Shakespeare’s works, 480, 481 defined, 494n5, 494n18 Masilo shaped by, 492–​493 posture, 178, 182, 192n31, 192n33. See also upper body posture (landing), 54 Praetorius, Michael, 13 Preljocaj, Angelin, 495n27 presence, 155, 156, 157, 204, 205, 209 Preston-​Dunlop, Valerie, 431, 434 Priest, Josias (Joseph), 253, 254, 260nn83–​84 Prince, F. T., 529, 537

Prince of the Pagodas, The (1957, Cranko), 392–​393 Prince of the Pagodas, The (1989, MacMillan), 392, 393–​396, 401n8 Prince of the Pagodas, The (2011, Bintley), 396 privacy, in performance spaces, 148n24 Prodigal Son (1929, Balanchine), 424 Prokofiev, Sergei, 6, 343, 346, 354, 355, 362, 571 prostitution ballet associated with, 350–​351, 352 harlot roles (see harlots) in Romeo and Juliet (1965, MacMillan), 352–​353,  383n37 social integration and, 370–​371, 383n38 in Taming of the Shrew (1969, Cranko), 383nn37–​38 Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Herberg), 323n35 Protestants, English circumstances for dance prescribed by, 26–​27 dance opposed by, 22, 23, 28, 35, 39n6 dance permitted at religious celebrations, 35, 39n6 dance seen as corrupting influence by, 32–​33, 44n91, 164 disorderly behaviors prohibited by, 32–​33, 35–​37, 46n121, 96 impact of conflicted views on dance, 35, 39n6 psychoanalytic turn, in dance adaptations, 289, 292–​293, 294 pump, defined, 184 Purcell, Henry, 254, 295 Puritans, English, 22, 35 “quadran pavan,” 64–​65, 66 “quanto,” 73n63 Quattrocento, 199 Queen Elizabeth I Dancing with Robert Dudley (painting), 180, 181f Queen’s Men, 89 queer themes, 163, 297–​298, 299–​300, 508, 526. See also cross-​dressing; gender; L.O.V.E. (1992) Quinn, Susan, 518n6, 521n42 Quirey, Belinda, 267 Quorum, 410

Index   607 race. See also apartheid; post-​apartheid era dance forms and (see African Caribbean dance; African dance forms) in Une Tempête (1969), 506 in “Voodoo” Macbeth (1936) and reviews, 500, 501, 502, 503–​505, 520n19 Rainolds, John, 96 Ramsey, Kate, 521n41 Rancière, Jacques, 214n4 Rara dance, 511, 514–​515, 524n82 Rasch, Albertina, 305, 307 Ratmansky, Alexei, 350 Ravelhofer, Barbara on country dance-​masque connection, 151n59 on gender in morris choreography, 146 “house” styles interpreting dances, 274 on London dancing schools, 18n3 on masque costumes, 142, 159 on Oberon choreography, 263, 264 on rehearsal of passive female subject, 272 on scarcity of choreographic sources, 13–​14 on social codes informing dance, 219 on upper body regality, 182 Reading Dancing (Foster), 433 Reason, Matthew, 431 reconstruction, vs. adaptation, 267, 269, 273–​274,  275 Reduced Shakespeare Company, 558 Refskou, Anne Sophie, 161–​162 Regitz, Hartmut, 372 rehearsal, playwrights’ direction of, 241 Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Stern), 241 reinvention, 275 religion. See also specific traditions anti-​dance tracts,  26–​28 celebratory dancing and, 22, 35, 39n6 clothing regulated by, 166, 170n86 conflicted views on dance, 35, 39n6 conversion, 165–​166 gender boundaries and, 166 Jewish/​Christian bodies separated by, 162, 163, 164–​165 movement regulated by, 178 prosecution of dancing and, 37

social dancing and, 162, 164, 166 touch regulated by, 155, 164–​165, 166 “Renaissance dance,” 188n1 Renaissance man, 1 Renner, Chelsea Marie, 421f repentance themes, 56–​58 “repertoire,” 266 repertory, cycling of, 239 “reproductive futurism,” 202, 210 Restoration Macbeth (1664), 250–​254 revels, 125n1, 133, 164, 271 “revision,” 496n45 “reworking,” 496n45 Reynolds, Dee, 431 Reynolds, Nancy, 362 rhetorical language. See dance, rhetoric and rhythm, 267, 331, 333, 464–​467, 469 Rich, Barnaby, 29, 56 Richard III (Shakespeare), 399 Richardson, Tony, 462, 464, 471 Rippy, Marguerite, 500, 501, 503, 505, 518n6, 520n19 Rivals, The (1668, Davenant), 253 Rizzolatti, Giacomo, 229 Roach, Joseph, 181 Robbins, Jerome, 314–​315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320 works (see West Side Story (1957)) Rodgers, Alexander, 553 Rodgers, Richard, 304, 305, 306 Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María, 482 Rokotnitz, Naomi, 228 romance, masque/​anti-​masque and, 149n36 Romeo and Juliet (1958, Cranko), 344, 346 Romeo and Juliet (1962, Cranko), 344, 346, 361, 362–​363, 380, 382n20 Romeo and Juliet (1965, MacMillan) casting of, 391–​392 dance performances of, 387, 388, 401n3 (see also specific adaptations) gender and sexuality themes in, 348–​353 harlots’ role in, 344, 346–​348, 352–​355, 356, 357n32 infidelity to text in, 344, 345, 346, 348, 355 influences on, 346–​347 Petrarchism challenged in, 353–​356

608   Index Romeo and Juliet (cont.) success of, 343 translation/​adaptation process in, 6, 344, 354, 355 Romeo and Juliet (1972, Schilling), 379 Romeo and Juliet (1975, Kresnik), 379 Romeo and Juliet (2008, Masilo), 484 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) bodies-​in-​love in, 183, 184 Broadway adaptation of (see West Side Story (1957)) dance adaptations of, 6, 343, 350, 354 (see also eponymous works) dance scenes in, 37, 109, 111–​112, 134, 175 humoral composition in, 174–​176, 184–​187 lack of scholarly attention to, 345 love-​melancholy in, 174–​175, 176, 184, 188 rhetorical devices in, 230, 231–​232 swordplay in, 183–​187 themes in, 173, 174, 175, 178, 187–​188, 231 ROSAS, 483 Rosen, Heinz, 361 Rosenthal, Jean, 315 Rosseter, Philip, 116 Roussel, Raymond, 462 Rowley, William, 136, 241 Royal Ballet, 352, 387, 388–​389, 391–​392, 400 Royston, Darren, 261 ruade, 62 Ruddock, Nicholas, 33 Rutter, Carol Chillington, 485, 487, 490 Rylance, Mark, 97, 99, 100–​101 Sadler’s Wells Ballet, 291, 426n44 Sadon, Rachel, 571 Salgado, Cindy, 551 “saltatio”/​“saltator,”  88 “salt jests,” 95 Sanchez-​Colberg, Ana, 431, 434, 537 Sanders, Julie, 346 San Martin, Jone, 463 “Sara Godemo,” 513, 514 Sarlòs, Robert, 273 Saturn’s Smile (Rodríguez Magda), 482 satyrs, in masque/​anti-​masque scenes, 117f Oberon (1611), 116, 121, 263, 265 Stone No More (2012), 267, 268, 269, 270

Winter’s Tale (1611), 116, 264, 265, 270, 277n26 “Satyr’s Masque, The” (Oberon), 263, 264, 268, 270 sault majeur (high jump), 54 sault moyen (moderate jump), 54, 55 Saviolo, Vincentio, 184, 185, 188 Savona, George, 431 Scarlatti, Domenico, 364, 382n24 Scarlett, Liam, 349 Schalkwyk, David, 298–​299 Schanzer, Ernest, 87, 99 Schilling, Tom, 379 Schleef, Einar, 462 Schmidt, Jochen, 372, 379 Schnittke, Alfred, 377 Scholz, Uwe, 361 Schoolmaster, The (Ascham), 23–​24 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 327 Schuller, Gunther, 297 Scot, Reginald, 247 Scottish Ballet, 401n3, 425n13 Scottowe, John, 89, 90f Sea of Troubles (1988, MacMillan), 410f, 413f, 415f contrasted with Hamlet (2000), 421–​422,  555 costumes and set for, 409, 421–​422 legibility/​intelligibility disrupted in, 408, 409, 411–​416, 422 mixed reviews for, 405 multiple “selves” in, 390, 409, 415–​416, 419, 422 music for, 409–​410 performance style, 410 psychological mood of, 422, 423 scale of, 405 structure of, 411, 412–​413 Seiwert, Brian, 484 semiotic analysis, 431, 432 Sensible Flesh (Harvey), 164 Serres, Michel, 461 Seymour, Lynn, 6, 352, 390, 391, 392 Shakespeare, William acting career, 126n8, 134 choreographic knowledge, 15, 16 conceptions of dance, 2, 37–​38

Index   609 disability aesthetic employed by, 201 homoeroticism of, 526–​527 knowledge of dance, 277n14 masque appropriated by, 108–​109, 113, 114–​122, 125, 134 restoration themes invoked by, 304 textual absence employed by, 154–​155 witch dances scripted by, 246, 247 Shakespeare, William, works of. See also Shakespeare’s plays Comedy of Errors, 304–​307 Hamlet (see Hamlet (Shakespeare)) Henry IV, 87 Henry V, 60 Henry VIII (see Henry VIII (Fletcher and Shakespeare)) King Lear, 288, 394 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 86, 109, 112, 134, 155 Merchant of Venice (see Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare)) Merry Wives of Windsor, 240 Midsummer Night’s Dream (see Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare)) Much Ado about Nothing (see Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare)) Othello, 288, 376–​379 Pericles, 37, 115, 128n31 Richard III, 399 Romeo and Juliet (see Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)) Sonnets, 526, 527, 528–​529, 533 Taming of the Shrew, 308–​312, 352, 398–​399 Tempest (see Tempest (Shakespeare)) Timon of Athens (see Timon of Athens (Shakespeare)) Tragedy of Macbeth (see Tragedy of Macbeth (Shakespeare)) Twelfth Night (see Twelfth Night (Shakespeare)) Two Gentlemen of Verona, 389, 401n15 Two Noble Kinsmen (see Two Noble Kinsmen (Shakespeare)) Winter’s Tale (see Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare)) As You Like It, 37, 86, 225, 226, 228 Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage (Teague), 306

Shakespeare and the Dance (Brissenden), 2, 21, 155, 188. See also Brissenden, Alan “Shakespeare and the Dance” (Sorell), 533 Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (Kidnie), 7, 274 “Shakespearean era,” term usage, 38n2 Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (Brooke), 354 Shakespeare’s Entrails (Hillman), 177 Shakespeare’s Globe playhouse, new, 97–​101,  105n81 Shakespeare’s plays as adaptations of other works, 6 archetypal characters in, 430 Broadway adaptations of, 303–​304, 324–​326 (see also Boys from Syracuse; Kiss Me, Kate; West Side Story) collaborative authorship in, 6, 238 colonial themes in, 480, 517–​518 dance adaptations of (see dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s work) danced endings to (see endings, danced; jig; jig, dramatic) danced rhythms of, 267 dance references in text of, 21–​22, 49–​50 (see also specific dances; specific plays) dance scenes in (see dance scenes) dancing after endings, 87–​89 deviation from norms, 199 Italian influence on, 163 politics and, 575–​576 as processes, 275 as springboard for choreographic ideas, 353 translation vs. adaptation of, 328 Shakespeare Suite, The (1999, Bintley), 387, 388, 396, 397–​400, 401n8 Shakespeare y sus mascaras, o Romeo y Julieta (Shakespeare and His Masks) (2003, Alonso), 350 Shango (Une Tempête), 507, 508 Shankes, John, 96 Shankes Ordinarie (Shankes), 96 Shapiro, James, 157–​158, 165 Shaw, Brandon, 214n11, 317, 346 Sheriff, Stephen, 410, 413f Sherman, Ashley Lynn, 417f, 421f Shott, Frank, 420f, 423f Showalter, Elaine, 486, 487, 488, 489, 490

610   Index Sider (2011, Forsythe), 456f, 465f, 468f choreographic development, 460–​463,  473n22 Hamlet engaged in, 408, 455–​456, 462–​463, 464–​467, 468–​472 improvisation in, 462, 466–​467, 468, 469, 471, 473n33 in-​ear directions, 464–​465, 467, 471, 474n39 mise en scène, 467, 469 program notes, 455, 464, 465, 473n30 rhythmic engagement, 464–​467, 469 “Twilight Zone” moment, 459 signification in Midsummer Night’s Dream (2013), 508, 510 polysemanticism and, 434 semiotics and, 432–​433 in Une Tempête (1969), 506 in “Voodoo” Macbeth (1936), 500–​501, 504–​505 Silver, George, 184, 185, 193n55 Simondon, Gilbert, 197 Singing Simpkin, 98, 240 “singles,” 53 Sir Giles Goosecap (1606), 85 Sledge, Eddie, 308, 309 Sly, Christopher, 370 “slydes,” 53 Smith, Bruce, 95, 527, 529 Smith, Emma, 380, 384n48, 385n63 Smith, Fern, 530, 535f, 537–​538, 540, 542 Smith, Oliver, 312, 315 Smith, Sandra, 571 Smith-​Autard, Jacqueline, 431, 573 Smithson, Harriet, 489 social dancing, 94, 162, 164, 166, 179, 183 soli, 383n34 Somnambulism (1953, MacMillan), 389, 396 Sondheim, Stephen, 312 “Sonnet 18,” 537 “Sonnet 35,” 539 “Sonnet 36,” 534 “Sonnet 41,” 536 “Sonnet 60,” 528, 541 “Sonnet 116,” 538 “Sonnet 121,” 529 “Sonnet 126,” 541

“Sonnet 129,” 538 “Sonnet 148,” 536 Sonnets (Shakespeare) critical reception of, 526, 527 physical interpretation of (see L.O.V.E. (1992)) sexual themes in, 526–​527 Shakespeare’s intention for, 533 structure of, 528–​529 Sorell, Walter, 164, 310, 533 Sörgel, Sabine, 545 South Africa, 480, 481, 483–​484, 496n40 Soviet Union, Hamlet’s resonance in, 575–​576 space-​time-​action,  434 Sparti, Barbara, 162, 164 spectatorship, 218, 219–​220, 227–​230 Spencer, Christopher, 250, 251 Spewack, Bella, 308 Spewack, Samuel, 308 Spivak, Gayatri, 156 Spivey, Jermaine Maurice, 557 Spivey, Michael, 228 sprezzatura, 23, 24, 181, 182 sprung kicks, 54 stage directions. See also specific works authorship questions and, 129n48, 237 implications of “they dance,” 239 as rhetorical language, 222 scarcity of, 21, 221, 222, 237 staging, “original practices” approach to, 97 Steiner, George, 334 Stern, Tiffany, 241, 242, 255 Stevenson, Ben, 350 stichomythia, 331, 332 stillness, 199, 200, 204 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 205, 206 Stolze, Kurt-​Heinz, 364 stone, connotations of, 209, 210, 211, 212 Stone No More (2012, O’Malley), 265–​273, 275, 276 story-​ballet genre, 374–​375, 434–​435 Strauss, Anselm, 430 Strayhorn, Billy, 396, 397, 403n57 Strickland, Brittany, 421f Stubbes, Philip, 23, 26–​27, 33, 36 Styles, Sheila, 410, 415f Such Sweet Thunder (1957), 396, 397, 403n57

Index   611 “suggestion,” vs. “explication,” 555 Sulcas, Roslyn, 349–​350, 484 Sumarokov, Alexander Petrovich, 575 Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1600, Nashe), 94, 241 Sutton, John, 227 Sutton, Julia, 74n73, 75n87, 178 Swaim, Christopher, 417f Swan Lake (2010, Masilo), 484, 496n46 swordplay footwork in, 183, 184 foreign influences on, 184, 185, 186f, 187, 193n55 geometric approaches to, 185, 186f, 194n62, 194n64 humoral composition and, 184 relation to dancing, 183, 185, 187 Symposium (Plato), 334 Synetic Theater, 561, 562n1, 570–​575, 576, 577, 579–​580 Synetic Theater, productions by As You Like It (2015), 580 Hamlet: The Rest Is Silence (2002), 569, 573, 574, 580 Julius Caesar (2017), 572 King Lear (2012), 576 Mark of Cain (2017), 569–​570 Tailor, Robert, 122 Taming of the Shrew, The (1969, Cranko), 363f, 368f, 369f, 373f character evolution in, 364, 365–​368, 373, 382nn27–​28 choreography of, 361, 363–​373, 382n28 commemorative performance of, 387 language challenges in, 363–​365, 367, 372 pas de deux in, 366, 367, 368–​370 prostitution in, 383nn37–​38 psychological realism in, 364, 365 “Shakespearean” quality of, 380 translation of literary source in, 365, 366, 372–​373 Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare) Broadway adaptation of, 308–​312 dance adaptations of, 352 (see also eponymous works) in Shakespeare Suite (1999), 398–​399

Tantaros, Andrea, 571 Tanztheater (dance theater), 287, 379, 545, 546 tap dancing, 306, 307, 311 Tarlton, Richard, 89, 90f Tarlton’s Newes (1590), 89 Tate, Nahum, 254 Taylor, Diana, 266 Taylor, Jay Gower, 550 Taylor, Jeffrey, 405 Taylor, Paul, 100 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilych, 291 Teague, Frances, 305, 306 Tempest, A (Une Tempête, 1969), 505–​509,  522n64 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) dance adaptations of (see Une Tempête (1969); specific works) masque scene in, 109, 115, 118–​119, 121, 124, 134 Tempest Replica, The (2011, Pite), 551f, 556f, 559f choreographic style, 288, 547, 555 costumes, 550, 564n38 dance-​text relationship in, 548, 553, 562 epilogue-​in-​movement, 558–​560 reception of, 560–​562 score, 547 set, 547, 550 text physicalized in, 549–​553, 560, 561 tempo, 330–​333 Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue (2008, Pite), 546 Terry, Ellen, 486 Terry, Walter, 309, 320 Tethys Festival (1610, Daniel), 118, 123 Tetley, Glenn, 288 text Broadway adaptations’ treatment of, 303, 306, 311 as process, 408 relation to body, 6, 155, 156, 163, 577 relation to dance, 157, 213n4, 254, 577 relation to dance adaptations (see dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s work, relation to text in) “Textual Matters” (Dickinson), 546

612   Index theater and dance analysis, approaches to, 430–​432 Theater CNU, 499 Theatre and Mind (McConachie), 228 theatrical cheek, 530–​531 theatricality, staged, 167, 397 “they dance,” 239 Thomas, Helen, 273–​274 Thomasen, Laura Søvsø, 161–​162 Thompson, Robert Ferris, 181 Thorp, Jennifer, 64 Throckmorton, Thomas (Bishop of Gloucestershire), 30, 43n72 Thrumbull, William, 263, 277n19 Thubron, Colin, 393 time lost, 198, 211 paradox of, 201 relation to dance, 197, 198, 200, 205, 207, 210–​211, 212, 269 relation to disability, 202, 203 relation to images, 200–​201, 202, 211 reproductive lens for, 202, 210 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare) masque scene in, 109, 114–​115, 116, 122, 124, 125, 134 morally complex dances in, 37 Tiramani, Jenny, 97 title-​pages, of anti-​masques, 141, 150n38 Tolstoy, Leo, 564n43 Tom Tyler and His Wife (1551), 84–​85 tongue, 177 “Too Darn Hot” (Porter), 309 torchbearers, 176, 177, 190n11 torch dance, 126n13, 176, 188, 190n12 Tortworth cushion dance scandal, 30–​32,  35–​36 touch. See also bodies; hands class boundaries for, 158–​159 as contagious, 165 gendered boundaries for, 155 humoral imbalances ascertained by, 174 in masque choreography, 155, 159, 160–​161,  167 in pulse-​taking, 189n4 relation to dance, 159 religious boundaries for, 155, 164–​165, 166

tourdion, 55, 71n47 “Toward a Universal Language of Motion” (Greenblatt), 161 Towns, Colin, 389 “traces,” choreographic, 156 tragedies, Shakespearean, 289 Tragedy of Macbeth, The (Shakespeare) dance adaptations of (see Barren Sceptre (1960); eponymous works; Restoration Macbeth (1664)) as transtemporal collaboration, 245–​246 witch dances in (see witch dances) Tragedy of Richard II, The (2003, Globe),  99–​100 Tranchell, Peter, 390, 402n26 translation vs. adaptation, 328, 339–​340 creative labor and, 328 intersemiotic, 339 kinesthetic, 327 lack of language for, 328–​329 Petrarchan mode and, 353–​354 term usage, 340n5 transmodernism dance practices, 480, 482, 485, 495n27 dance theory, 482, 493, 495n27 transtemporal collaborations, 238, 245–​246, 250–​251,  254 Trapp, John, 95 Trattato Di Scientia d’ Arme (Agrippa), 185, 186f Treanor, Tim, 574–​575 Treatise of Melancholie, A (Bright), 174 tremor cordis, 207, 212, 213 Tribble, Evelyn, 222, 227, 228 Triplett, William, 573, 580–​581 Trusting Performance (Rokotnitz), 228 Tsikurishvili, Irina, 569, 576 Tsikurishvili, Paata, 569, 573, 576, 579 Tsinguirides, Georgette, 383n31 Tudor, Antony, 288 Tudor form, anti-​masque and, 4 Turgenev, Ivan, 575 Turgis, George, 124 Twelfth Night (2002, Globe), 99 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) dance adaptations of, 288

Index   613 dance references in text of, 59–​66, 94 dramatic jig in, 94 political overtones, 38 suggested staging of dance scenes, 66–​67,  72n50 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The (1996, Globe), 98 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The (Shakespeare), 389, 401n15 Two Noble Kinsmen (Shakespeare) anti-​masque in, 120, 121, 123 collaborative authorship of dance in, 238, 241, 242–​245 masque dancers, 120, 130n54 masque scene in, 109, 115 Midsummer Night’s Dream similarities, 143, 150n39 plot of, 134–​135 theatrical/​social context for, 143 Two Noble Kinsmen (Shakespeare), anti-​masque morris dance in anti-​masque context for, 133, 134, 140 choreographic authorship of, 243–​244 dance specified by name, 134 Memorable Masque of the Inner Temple and Lincoln’s Inn as influence on, 257n28 positive/​dark overtones of, 143–​144, 145 raucous nature of, 37 relation to court original, 141, 142, 143, 145 as restaging of Masque of the Inner Temple, 135, 136, 137, 139–​142, 147, 244–​245 socioeconomic commentary in, 14–​15, 143–​144,  151n58 tzniut, 170n86 Ultima Vez, 531 Ulysse, Gina Athena, 519n8 Une Tempête (A Tempest, 1969, Césaire), 505–​509,  522n64 Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Phelan), 154 Unton, Henry, 110–​111f, 113, 190n11 upper body, 178, 182 Vaill, Amanda, 317 van Dijk, Maarten, 530–​531 van Dyk, Peter, 361

van Kampen, Claire, 97, 98 Van Kern, Francoise Ha, 401n16 Vasconcelos, Naná, 377 Vasiliev, Vladimir, 388 Vass-​Rhee, Freya, 532 Vendler, Helen, 528–​529, 533, 534, 538 Vennar, Richard, 119, 129n47 Venuti, Lawrence, 330 “vernacular,” 126n6 Vigarello, Georges, 192n33 Villiers, George, 38n1, 73n64 virtue, 23, 219–​220 Vitamin String Quartet, 563n33 Vives, Juan Louis, 25 vizards and masks, 113, 159. See also masque Vodou, Haitian general cultural misrepresentation of, 519n8, 519n10, 519n16, 521n41, 521n45 misinterpretation in “Voodoo” Macbeth (1936), 500–​501, 504–​505, 512 multiplicity within, 519n11, 521n44, 523n75 representation in Pericles (2014), 512–​513 Volcano Theatre Company formation of, 530, 531 Inflammatory Material, 542 L.O.V.E. (1992), 525, 529, 532 Medea: Sexwar (1991), 530, 531 volta, 271 “Voodoo” Macbeth (1936, Dafora), 503f archival materials from, 502, 520n24 black artists employed in, 501, 505 black culture representation in, 500–​501, 504–​505,  512 critical reviews of, 500, 501, 502, 503–​505 popularity of, 500, 505, 518n6 recognition for, 503 as spectacle, 500, 502 Voskresenskaja, Svetlana, 575 Vosseler, Heidi, 305 Walens, Moyses, 109 Walker, Kathrine Sorley, 405 walking, in dance styles, 182 Walls, Peter, 263 Wall Street Journal, 570, 571 Walter, Erich, 361 Waltz, Sasha, 546

614   Index Wanamaker, Sam, 98 Wang, Xin Peng, 379 Warburg, Aby, 199, 200, 214n4 Ward, John, 69n24, 73n63 Watkins, Jonathan, 435 Watts, Riley, 463, 466 Weaver, John, 254, 255, 260n83 Weber, Sam, 460 Webern, Anton, 409–​410 Webster, John, 252 Weidman, Charles, 305 Weinberger, Nathan, 569 Welles, Orson, 501, 503, 505. See also “Voodoo” Macbeth (1936) Welsh Talmadge, Jones, 546 Wentersdorf, Karl, 65 Westminster Order (1612), 95–​96 West Side Story (1957, Robbins), 323n32 Wheeldon, Christopher, 3, 288 Wheeler, Steven, 448 White, R. S., 406 Whitlock, Keith, 160, 163–​164 Whittier, Gayle, 355 Why Haiti Needs New Narratives (Ulysse), 519n8 Wiggins, Martin, 105n70, 240 Wigman, Mary, 308, 309 Wilcox, Richard, 34 Wildschut, Liesbeth, 575 Wiles, David, 95 Willems, Thom, 466, 467, 469 Williams, Sian, 99, 100, 101 Williamson, Audrey, 292, 293–​294 Williamson, Nicol, 467 William the Jew of Pesaro, 162 Wilmot, John, 30, 31–​32, 35–​36, 44n79, 44n84, 46n121 Wilson, Dover, 269 Winerock, Emily, 262, 277n14 Winter’s Tale, The (2014, Wheeldon), 288, 387 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare) action and negation in, 203–​204 adapted in Stone No More, 267 anti-​masque in, 116, 117, 121, 264 archival material for, 263–​265, 266 chaos-​harmony progression in, 264

choreographic instructions and textual clues in, 264–​265 crip time in, 203, 204–​205, 210, 212 dating of, 265 fixture and motion in, 213 live bears in, 278n27 masque scene in, 109, 115, 264 morally complex dances in, 37 Oberon as influence on, 116, 263, 265 satyrs in, 116, 264, 265, 270, 277n26 Witch, The (Middleton), 248–​249 witch dances choreography of, 249, 254 gender in casting of, 246 grotesque style in, 254 as inversions of church liturgy, 247, 251 in Macbeth, 121, 246–​247, 248–​250 in Masque of Queens, 121 as polychronic objects, 246 polyspatial/​polytemporal character of, 246 popular interest in, 246–​247, 251, 254 supernatural associations with, 246, 247–​248, 250, 258n38 synchronic migration between plays, 248–​250 transgressivity and, 247 transtemporal collaborations, 238, 245–​246 in The Witch, 248, 249, 250 witches, 121, 251, 252, 253 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 298 Wolf, Laurie, 431 The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy of Sophonisba (1605, Marston), 124 Woodford, Donna, 350 Wooding, Barbara, 42n57 Wooing of Nan, 92, 93, 94 Woolf Phrase (2001, Forsythe), 457, 466, 471, 472n7 “wordless Shakespeare,” 562n1, 570–​574, 576, 577 “words as mind-​reading,” 299, 300 Worell, Lakai, 510 World Tossed at Tennis, The (Middleton), 136 Xaba, Nelisiwe, 496n42 Xolani Rani, Maxwell, 481, 495n32

Index   615 Yachnin, Paul, 137 Yates, Clarence, 501–​502 Yeats, William Butler, 232, 233 Yoruba spirituality, 506, 507, 508, 509, 511, 513

Zabala, Ander, 456f, 466, 467, 471 Zeffirelli, Franco, 231, 346 Zimmerman, Susan, 416