The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation 2019010334, 9781138050198, 9781315168968

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND GLOBAL APPROPRIATION

The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation brings together a variety of different voices to examine the ways that Shakespeare has been adapted and appropriated onto stage, screen, page, and a variety of digital formats. The thirty-nine chapters address topics such as trans- and intermedia performances; Shakespearean utopias and dystopias; the ethics of appropriation; and Shakespeare and global justice as guidance on how to approach the teaching of these topics. This collection brings into dialogue three very contemporary and relevant areas: the work of women and minority scholars; scholarship from developing countries; and innovative media renderings of Shakespeare. Each chapter is clearly and accessibly written, but also draws on cutting edge research and theory. It includes two alternative tables of contents, offering different pathways through the book – one regional, the other by medium – which opens the book up to both teaching and research. Offering an overview and history of Shakespearean appropriations as well as discussing contemporary issues and debates in the field, this book is the ultimate guide to this vibrant topic. It will be of use to anyone researching or studying Shakespeare, adaptation, and global appropriation. Christy Desmet was Josiah Meigs Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA, and co-general editor of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Sujata Iyengar is Professor of English at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA, and co-founder and co-editor of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Miriam Jacobson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA.

ROUTLEDGE LITERATURE HANDBOOKS

Also available in this series: The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space Edited by Robert T. Tally The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures Edited by Laurence Roth and Nadia Valman The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory Edited by Andrew Hiscock and Lina Perkins Wilder The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story Edited by Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature Edited by A. Robert Lee The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation Edited by Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-LiteratureHandbooks/book-series/RLHB

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND GLOBAL APPROPRIATION

Edited by Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Desmet, Christy, 1954– editor. | Iyengar, Sujata, editor. | Jacobson, Miriam Emma, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of Shakespeare and global appropriation / edited by Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019010334 | ISBN 9781138050198 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315168968 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Adaptations— History and criticism. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616— Influence. | Cultural appropriation. Classification: LCC PR2880.A1 R68 2019 | DDC 822.3/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010334 ISBN: 978-1-138-05019-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-16896-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

We dedicate this volume to the memory of our late, beloved, and much-missed friend and colleague, Christy Desmet – “a lass unparallel’d.”

CONTENTS

List of figures xxi List of contributors xxii Acknowledgmentsxxvii

Introduction: Shakespearean appropriation in inter/national contexts Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson

1

PART I

Transcultural and intercultural Shakespeares

13

  1 “. . . the great globe itself . . . shall dissolve”: art after the apocalypse in Station Eleven15 Sharon O’Dair   2 Others within: ethics in the age of Global Shakespeare Alexa Alice Joubin

25

  3 “You say you want a revolution?”: Shakespeare in Mexican [dis]guise Alfredo Michel Modenessi

37

  4 “Don’t it make my brown eyes blue”: uneasy assimilation and the Shakespeare–Latinx divide Ruben Espinosa

48

  5 “To appropriate these white centuries”: James Baldwin’s race conscious Shakespeare Jason Demeter

59

vii

Contents

 6 Bishōnen Hamlet: stealth-queering Shakespeare in Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet69 Brandon Christopher   7 Edmund hosts William: appropriation, polytemporality, and postcoloniality in Frank McGuinness’s Mutabilitie79 Barbara Sebek   8 Shakespeare appropriation and queer Latinx empowerment in Josh Inocéncio’s Ofélio90 Katherine Gillen   9 Calibán Rex? Cultural syncretism in Teatro Buendía’s Otra Tempestad102 Jennifer Flaherty 10 Fooling around with Shakespeare: the curious case of “Indian” Twelfth Nights113 Poonam Trivedi PART II

Decolonizing Shakespeares

125

11 “Flipping the turtle on its back”: Shakespeare, decolonization, and First Peoples in Canada Daniel Fischlin

127

12 Nomadic Shylock: nationhood and its subversion in The Merchant of Venice139 Avraham Oz 13 “What country, friend, is this?” Carlos Díaz’s Cuban Illyria150 Donna Woodford-Gormley 14 Inheriting the past, surviving the future Adele Seeff

161

15 The politics of African Shakespeare Jane Plastow

171

16 Da Kine Shakespeare: James Grant Benton’s Twelf Nite O Wateva!181 Theresa M. DiPasquale viii

Contents PART III

World pedagogical Shakespeares

193

17 “Make new nations”: Shakespearean communities in the twenty-first century Sheila T. Cavanagh

195

18 Appropriating Shakespeare for marginalized students Jessica Walker 19 Beyond appropriation: teaching Shakespeare with accidental echoes in film Matthew Kozusko 20 Teaching Global Shakespeare: visual culture projects in action Laurie E. Osborne

206

217 227

PART IV

Regional, local, and “glocal” Shakespeares

241

21 Othello in Poland, a prevailingly homogeneous ethnic country Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney

243

22 Shakespeare in Ireland: 1916 to 2016 Nicholas Grene

254

23 Shakespeare’s presence in the land of ancient drama: Karolos Koun’s attempts to acculturate Shakespeare in Greece Tina Krontiris

267

24 “To be/not to be”: Hamlet and the threshold of potentiality in post-communist Bulgaria Kirilka Stavreva and Boika Sokolova

280

25 What’s in a name? Shakespeare and Japanese pop culture Ryuta Minami 26 “Subjugating Arab forms to European meters”? Shakespeare, Abu Shadi, and the first translations of the sonnets into Arabic David C. Moberly

290

304

27 Shakespeare’s anāshīd315 Ahmad Zakī Abū Shādī (translated by David C. Moberly) ˙ ix

Contents

28 Paul Robeson, Margaret Webster, and their transnational Othello323 Robert Sawyer PART V

Transmedia Shakespeares

335

29 Ecologies of the Shakespearean artists’ book Sujata Iyengar

337

30 Falstaff and the constructions of musical nostalgia Stephen M. Buhler

348

31 The Moor makes a cameo: Serial, Shakespeare, and the white racial frame Vanessa I. Corredera

359

32 De-emphasizing race in young adult novel adaptations of Othello370 Keith Botelho 33 Resisting history and atoning for racial privilege: Shakespeare’s Henriad in HBO’s The Wire378 L. Monique Pittman 34 Indigenizing Shakespeare: Haider and the politics of appropriation Amrita Sen

388

35 Ovidian appropriations, metamorphic illusion, and theatrical practice on the Shakespearean stage Lisa S. Starks

398

36 Determined to prove a villain? Appropriating Richard III’s disability in recent graphic novels and comics Marina Gerzic

409

37 Some Tweeting Cleopatra: crossing borders on and off the Shakespearean stage Louise Geddes

420

38 The Sandman as Shakespearean appropriation Miriam Jacobson

x

431

Contents

39 Shakespeare’s scattered leaves: mutilated books, unbound pages, and the circulation of the First Folio Christy Desmet

442

Index455

xi

ALTERNATIVE TABLE OF CONTENTS 1: CHAPTERS BY REGION

PART I

“The great globe itself ”

Introduction: Shakespearean appropriation in inter/national contexts1 Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson

  2 Others within: ethics in the age of Global Shakespeare Alexa Alice Joubin 17 “Make new nations”: Shakespearean communities in the twenty-first century Sheila T. Cavanagh 20 Teaching Global Shakespeare: visual culture projects in action Laurie E. Osborne

25

195 227

28 Paul Robeson, Margaret Webster, and their transnational Othello323 Robert Sawyer 36 Determined to prove a villain? Appropriating Richard III’s disability in recent graphic novels and comics Marina Gerzic

409

37 Some Tweeting Cleopatra: crossing borders on and off the Shakespearean stage Louise Geddes

420

xii

Alternative table of contents 1: by region

39 Shakespeare’s scattered leaves: mutilated books, unbound pages, and the circulation of the First Folio Christy Desmet

442

PART II

“Where America?”   1 “. . . the great globe itself . . . shall dissolve”: art after the apocalypse in Station Eleven15 Sharon O’Dair   3 “You say you want a revolution?”: Shakespeare in Mexican [dis]guise Alfredo Michel Modenessi

37

  4 “Don’t it make my brown eyes blue”: uneasy assimilation and the Shakespeare–Latinx divide Ruben Espinosa

48

  5 “To appropriate these white centuries”: James Baldwin’s race conscious Shakespeare Jason Demeter

59

 6 Bishōnen Hamlet: stealth-queering Shakespeare in Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet69 Brandon Christopher   8 Shakespeare appropriation and queer Latinx empowerment in Josh Inocéncio’s Ofélio90 Katherine Gillen 11 “Flipping the turtle on its back”: Shakespeare, decolonization, and First Peoples in Canada Daniel Fischlin 18 Appropriating Shakespeare for marginalized students Jessica Walker 19 Beyond appropriation: teaching Shakespeare with accidental echoes in film Matthew Kozusko 29 Ecologies of the Shakespearean artists’ book Sujata Iyengar xiii

127 206

217 337

Alternative table of contents 1: by region

30 Falstaff and the constructions of musical nostalgia Stephen M. Buhler 31 The Moor makes a cameo: Serial, Shakespeare, and the white racial frame Vanessa I. Corredera

348

359

33 Resisting history and atoning for racial privilege: Shakespeare’s Henriad in HBO’s The Wire378 L. Monique Pittman PART III

“Mighty Europe”   7 Edmund hosts William: appropriation, polytemporality, and postcoloniality in Frank McGuinness’s Mutabilitie79 Barbara Sebek 21 Othello in Poland, a prevailingly homogeneous ethnic country Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney

243

22 Shakespeare in Ireland: 1916 to 2016 Nicholas Grene

254

23 Shakespeare’s presence in the land of ancient drama: Karolos Koun’s attempts to acculturate Shakespeare in Greece Tina Krontiris

267

24 “To be/not to be”: Hamlet and the threshold of potentiality in post-communist Bulgaria Kirilka Stavreva and Boika Sokolova

280

PART IV

“Wide Arabia” 12 Nomadic Shylock: nationhood and its subversion in The Merchant of Venice139 Avraham Oz 26 “Subjugating Arab forms to European meters”? Shakespeare, Abu Shadi, and the first translations of the sonnets into Arabic David C. Moberly

xiv

304

Alternative table of contents 1: by region

27 Shakespeare’s anāshīd315 Ahmad Zakī Abū Shādī (translated by David C. Moberly) ˙ PART V

“The bounds of Asia” 10 Fooling around with Shakespeare: the curious case of “Indian” Twelfth Nights113 Poonam Trivedi 25 What’s in a name? Shakespeare and Japanese pop culture Ryuta Minami

290

32 De-emphasizing race in young adult novel adaptations of Othello370 Keith Botelho 34 Indigenizing Shakespeare: Haider and the politics of appropriation Amrita Sen

388

PART VI

“Africa and golden joys” 14 Inheriting the past, surviving the future Adele Seeff

161

15 The politics of African Shakespeare Jane Plastow

171

PART VII

“Realms and islands”   9 Calibán Rex? Cultural syncretism in Teatro Buendía’s Otra Tempestad102 Jennifer Flaherty 13 “What country, friend, is this?” Carlos Díaz’s Cuban Illyria150 Donna Woodford-Gormley 16 Da Kine Shakespeare: James Grant Benton’s Twelf Nite O Wateva!181 Theresa M. DiPasquale

xv

Alternative table of contents 1: by region PART VIII

“The fairy land” 35 Ovidian appropriations, metamorphic illusion, and theatrical practice on the Shakespearean stage Lisa S. Starks 38 The Sandman as Shakespearean appropriation Miriam Jacobson

xvi

398 431

ALTERNATIVE TABLE OF CONTENTS 2: CHAPTERS BY MEDIUM

PART I

Live performance   2 Others within: ethics in the age of Global Shakespeare Alexa Alice Joubin

25

  3 “You say you want a revolution?”: Shakespeare in Mexican [dis]guise Alfredo Michel Modenessi

37

  8 Shakespeare appropriation and queer Latinx empowerment in Josh Inocéncio’s Ofélio90 Katherine Gillen   9 Calibán Rex? Cultural syncretism in Teatro Buendía’s Otra Tempestad102 Jennifer Flaherty 10 Fooling around with Shakespeare: the curious case of “Indian” Twelfth Nights113 Poonam Trivedi 12 Nomadic Shylock: nationhood and its subversion in The Merchant of Venice139 Avraham Oz 13 “What country, friend, is this?” Carlos Díaz’s Cuban Illyria150 Donna Woodford-Gormley

xvii

Alternative table of contents 2: by medium

14 Inheriting the past, surviving the future Adele Seeff

161

15 The politics of African Shakespeare Jane Plastow

171

16 Da Kine Shakespeare: James Grant Benton’s Twelf Nite O Wateva!181 Theresa M. DiPasquale 21 Othello in Poland, a prevailingly homogeneous ethnic country Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney

243

22 Shakespeare in Ireland: 1916 to 2016 Nicholas Grene

254

23 Shakespeare’s presence in the land of ancient drama: Karolos Koun’s attempts to acculturate Shakespeare in Greece Tina Krontiris

267

24 “To be/not to be”: Hamlet and the threshold of potentiality in post-communist Bulgaria Kirilka Stavreva and Boika Sokolova

280

28 Paul Robeson, Margaret Webster, and their transnational Othello323 Robert Sawyer 30 Falstaff and the constructions of musical nostalgia Stephen M. Buhler

348

PART II

Print

Introduction: Shakespearean appropriation in inter/national contexts Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson

1

  1 “. . . the great globe itself . . . shall dissolve”: art after the apocalypse in Station Eleven15 Sharon O’Dair

xviii

Alternative table of contents 2: by medium

  5 “To appropriate these white centuries”: James Baldwin’s race conscious Shakespeare Jason Demeter

59

 6 Bishōnen Hamlet: stealth-queering Shakespeare in Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet69 Brandon Christopher   7 Edmund hosts William: appropriation, polytemporality, and postcoloniality in Frank McGuinness’s Mutabilitie79 Barbara Sebek 20 Teaching Global Shakespeare: visual culture projects in action Laurie E. Osborne 26 “Subjugating Arab forms to European meters”? Shakespeare, Abu Shadi, and the first translations of the sonnets into Arabic David C. Moberly

227

304

27 Shakespeare’s anāshīd315 Ahmad Zakī Abū Shādī (translated by David C. Moberly) ˙ 29 Ecologies of the Shakespearean artists’ book Sujata Iyengar

337

32 De-emphasizing race in young adult novel adaptations of Othello370 Keith Botelho 35 Ovidian appropriations, metamorphic illusion, and theatrical practice on the Shakespearean stage Lisa S. Starks

398

36 Determined to prove a villain? Appropriating Richard III’s disability in recent graphic novels and comics Marina Gerzic

409

38 The Sandman as Shakespearean appropriation Miriam Jacobson 39 Shakespeare’s scattered leaves: mutilated books, unbound pages, and the circulation of the First Folio Christy Desmet

xix

431

442

Alternative table of contents 2: by medium PART III

Film and television   4 “Don’t it make my brown eyes blue”: uneasy assimilation and the Shakespeare–Latinx divide Ruben Espinosa 18 Appropriating Shakespeare for marginalized students Jessica Walker 19 Beyond appropriation: teaching Shakespeare with accidental echoes in film Matthew Kozusko

48 206

217

33 Resisting history and atoning for racial privilege: Shakespeare’s Henriad in HBO’s The Wire378 L. Monique Pittman 34 Indigenizing Shakespeare: Haider and the politics of appropriation Amrita Sen

388

PART IV

Mobile applications and web interfaces 11 “Flipping the turtle on its back”: Shakespeare, decolonization, and First Peoples in Canada Daniel Fischlin

127

17 “Make new nations”: Shakespearean communities in the twenty-first century Sheila T. Cavanagh

195

25 What’s in a name? Shakespeare and Japanese pop culture Ryuta Minami

290

31 The Moor makes a cameo: Serial, Shakespeare, and the white racial frame Vanessa I. Corredera

359

37 Some Tweeting Cleopatra: crossing borders on and off the Shakespearean stage Louise Geddes

420

xx

FIGURES

10.1 Feste as a snake charmer in the Old Globe and University of San Diego production, 2011 116 10.2 Piya Behrupiya with backdrop of Shakespeare as a blue-hued Indian god, 2012 119 20.1 Karl Hofer, Masken, 1918, lithograph, 17 in. × 12 3/4 in. (43.18 cm × 32.39 cm), Colby College Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Sills, 1964.105A235 20.2 Hans Freese, Ophelia, 1917, lithograph, 10 in. × 9 1/2 in. (25.4 cm × 24.13 cm), Colby College Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Sills, 1964.105V236 20.3 Edward Gordon Craig, Hamlet. 1928 236 22.1 King Lear: 1928, Abbey Theatre, set design by Dolly Travers-Smith 258 22.2 F.J. McCormick as Lear, 1928 259 22.3 Pauline McLynn as Katharina in Rough Magic production of The Taming 261 of the Shrew, 2006 22.4 Derbhle Crotty as Henry IV and Aisling O’Sullivan as Prince Hal in 1 Henry IV, Druid Theatre Company production of DruidShakespeare, 2015 263 22.5 Marty Rea as Iago in Abbey Theatre production of Othello, 2016 264 23.1 Scene from Karolos Koun’s 1936 student production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, showing the fairyland and its inhabitants 270 23.2 Scene from Karolos Koun’s 1971 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, showing Bottom/Pyramus and Starveling/Moonshine 274 29.1 Mark McMurray, “Enter Caliban,” from The Tempest, 2001, mixed media (amate paper, feather) 341 29.2 Jan Kellett, Sea-Change, 2001, mixed media (parchment, oxidized silver, ribbon, paste paper) 344

xxi

CONTRIBUTORS

Keith Botelho is Professor of English at Kennesaw State University. His book, Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity, was published by Palgrave Macmillan, and he is currently co-editing a two-volume collection of essays on insects in the early modern world entitled Lesser Living Creatures: Insect Life in the Renaissance. Stephen M. Buhler is Aaron Douglas Professor of English at the University of NebraskaLincoln and the author of Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof. He co-founded the Flatwater Shakespeare Company and serves as its Education Director and Chief Dramaturg. Current research topics include Soviet Shakespeares and Nick Cave’s John Milton. Sheila T. Cavanagh is Founding Director of the World Shakespeare Project, Professor of English at Emory University, and author of Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in the Faerie Queene and Cherished Torment: the Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania. She has published widely on pedagogy and on Renaissance literature. Brandon Christopher, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of ­Winnipeg, focuses on early modern drama, contemporary Shakespearean adaptations, and comics and graphic narratives. He is currently at work on a project tentatively titled “Shakespeare and Comics/Comics and Shakespeare: Adaptation, Reciprocity, and the Contingency of Cultural Value.” Vanessa I. Corredera is Associate Professor of English at Andrews University. Her in-­progress monograph explores the racial representations highlighted and obscured in adaptations of O ­ thello ­ hakespeare created in “post-racial” America (2008–2016). Her p ublications include essays in S Quarterly, Literature/Film Quarterly, EMLS, and Shakespeare and the Power of the Face. Jason Demeter (PhD, George Washington University), Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Norfolk State University, specializes in Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and African American literature. His transatlantic and transhistorical interests center around the relationship between canonical Anglophone literature and American constructions of race and national identity. xxii

Contributors

Christy Desmet was Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor and Head of First-Year Composition at the University of Georgia. Her books include Reading Shakespeare’s Characters (1992); Lives of Shakespearian Actors IV; the co-edited Shakespeare and Appropriation and Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare (with Robert Sawyer); Shakespearean Gothic (with Anne Williams); and Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare (with Natalie Loper and Jim Casey). With Sujata Iyengar, she cofounded and co-edited the award-winning, online, multimedia scholarly periodical Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. She died in July 2018. Theresa M. DiPasquale is Gregory M. Cowan Professor in English Language and Literature at Whitman College. Her publications include articles on the poetry of Donne, Milton, Lanyer, and Spenser, and on “Shakespeare and the Ali‘i Nui” (Borrowers and Lenders 8.2 [2013/14]), as well as the books Literature and Sacrament (1999) and Refiguring the Sacred Feminine (2008). Ruben Espinosa, Associate Professor of English, University of Texas at El Paso, is the author of Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England (2011) and co-editor of Shakespeare and Immigration (2014), and is currently working on two monographs: Shakespeare on the Border: Language, Legitimacy and La Frontera and Shakespeare on the Shades of Race. Daniel Fischlin is University Research Chair and Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He is Founder and Director of the influential Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, and he is also the General Editor of the Shakespeare Made in Canada series (Oxford University Press/Rock’s Mills Press). Jennifer Flaherty is Associate Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Georgia College. Her research has been published in journals such as Comparative Drama, Topic, Theatre Symposium, and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. She has also contributed chapters to the volumes Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction and The Horse as Cultural Icon. Louise Geddes is Associate Professor of English at Adelphi University. She is the author of Appropriating Shakespeare: A Cultural History of Pyramus and Thisbe and co-editor of The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, and she has published in Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. Marina Gerzic is affiliated with the ARC Centre for Excellence for the History of Emotions, the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Inc., and the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at The University of Western Australia in both research and administrational roles. She is the editor (with Aidan Norrie) of From Medievalism to Early-Modernism (Routledge, 2019). Katherine Gillen, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University–San Antonio, is the author of Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity, and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare’s Stage (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and is currently working on a monograph, Race, Rome, and Early Modern Drama. Nicholas Grene is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin. His books include Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Yeats’s Poetic Codes (Oxford University Press, 2008); Home on the Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2014); and The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer (Bloomsbury, 2017). xxiii

Contributors

Sujata Iyengar is Professor of English at the University of Georgia and, with the late Christy Desmet, co-founder and co-general editor of the award-winning, online, multimedia, scholarly periodical Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Her books include Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (2005), Shakespeare’s Medical Language (2011), and the edited collection Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (Routledge, 2015), but she has also published on early modern drama, critical race theory, Shakespearean appropriation, the medical humanities, book arts, and knowledge-work as craft. With Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, she is co-principal investigator of a multi-year international collaborative grant from the FACE Foundation for a series of colloquia and publications on contemporary appropriations of scenes from early modern drama, “Scene-Stealing/Ravir la scène.” Iyengar’s chapter in this volume comes from her current book project, “Shakespeare and the Art of the Book,” an exploration of Shakespearean artists’ books and fine-press editions as aesthetic, critical, and dramatic interventions into Shakespearean text. Miriam Jacobson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where she specializes in early modern material culture, transcultural exchanges, and poetics, exploring such areas as imported words and things (pearls, horses, flowers) and hair bracelets, mummies, and resurrected corpses in the literature of early modern England. The author of Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Jacobson has also published essays on early modern ecocriticsm, gender, language, and performance. Her collection Organic Supplements: Bodies, Things, and the Natural World 1580–1750, co-edited with Julie Park, is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press. She directs the Symposium on the Book at the University of Georgia. Alexa Alice Joubin is Professor of English at George Washington University, where she cofounded the GW Digital Humanities Institute and holds the Middlebury College John M. Kirk, Jr. Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at the Bread Loaf School of English. Her latest book is Race (Routledge Critical Idiom series). Matthew Kozusko is Associate Professor of English at Ursinus College, where he teaches Shakespeare and early modern drama. His research focuses on Shakespeare and ­performance, theatre history, and appropriation. He is editor of the book series Shakespeare and the Stage (FDUP) and co-general editor for Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Tina Krontiris is Professor Emerita at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is the author of Oppositional Voices (Routledge, 1992); Shakespeare in Wartime (Alexandria, 2007); and numerous articles on the reception of Shakespeare in Greece. Her website is www.enl.auth.gr/staff/ krontiri.htm. Krystyna Kujawin´ska Courtney, Associate Professor at the University of Łódź, Poland, chairs the British and Commonwealth Studies Department and the International Shakespeare Research Centre. She has published essays and monographs (in Polish and English) on the global reception of Shakespeare’s dramatic works both in contemporary and early modern culture, as well on Ira Aldridge, and the role of women in Shakespeare studies. She is a member of the WSB and a co-editor of the journal Multicultural Shakespeare.

xxiv

Contributors

Ryuta Minami is Professor of English at Tokyo University of Economics. He co-edited Replaying Shakespeare in Asia (Routledge) and Performing Shakespeare in Japan (Cambridge University Press). His recent publications include “Hello Sha-kitty-peare?: Shakespeares Cutified in Japanese Anime Imagination,” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16.3 (2016). David C. Moberly is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Minnesota. His work appears in chapters within Palgrave’s Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe, Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare’s Broadcast Your Shakespeare, and the forthcoming anthology Shakespeare & the Arab World. Alfredo Michel Modenessi, Professor of English, Drama and Translation at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), stage translator and dramaturg, has published, lectured, and directed seminars on Shakespeare, drama, translation, and film in Spain, Germany, Brazil, Chile, Italy, France, Portugal, and Mexico. He has translated over forty-five plays, including sixteen by Shakespeare. Sharon O’Dair, Professor of English, Emerita, former Director of the Hudson Strode ­Program (University of Alabama), is author of Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars, as well as co-editor of The Production of English Renaissance Culture; “Shakespeareans in the Tempest: Lives and Afterlives of Katrina” a special issue of Borrowers and Lenders 5.2 (2010); and Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity. Laurie E. Osborne, Zacamy Professor of English at Colby College, researches Shakespeare on screen and in contemporary popular culture. She has recently published “The Paranormal Bard: Shakespeare Is/As Undead” in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction (Cambridge, 2018) and co-edited and contributed to Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience (Arden/ Bloomsbury, 2018). Avraham Oz, Professor Emeritus at the University of Haifa and the Academy of Performing Arts, Tel Aviv, chaired the Departments of Theatre at Tel Aviv University and the University of Haifa; was Associate Artistic Director, the Cameri Theatre; and is now directing his play, Glorious Mountain, about the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. L. Monique Pittman, Professor of English, Andrews University, directs the J.N. Andrews Honors Program. Her monograph, Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television (2011), examines how perceived Shakespearean authority shapes the portrayal of gender, class, and ethnic identities. Recent articles appear in Shakespeare Survey, Borrowers and Lenders, Adaptation, and Shakespeare Bulletin. Jane Plastow is Professor of African Theatre at the University of Leeds. She has spent much of her career researching, writing, directing, teaching, and training in relationship to academic and professional and community theatre in East Africa, most recently editing African Theatre: Shakespeare In and Out of Africa (2013). Robert Sawyer is Professor of English at East Tennessee State University, where he teaches Shakespeare, Victorian literature, and literary criticism. Author of Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare, he was also co-editor with Christy Desmet of Shakespeare and Appropriation and

xxv

Contributors

Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare. His book entitled Marlowe and Shakespeare: The Critical Rivalry was published in 2017, and his book Shakespeare Between the World Wars was released in 2019. Barbara Sebek is Professor of English at Colorado State University. Her articles on international trade, teaching Shakespeare globally, and the emergence of global consciousness in the early modern period have appeared in various journals and collections. Adele Seeff directed the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies (University of Maryland). She co-edited seven “Attending to Early Modern Women” proceedings volumes, and co-edited the Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She publishes on Global Shakespeares in journals and anthologies; her book, South Africa’s Shakespeare and the Drama of Language and Identity, appeared in 2018 (Palgrave). Amrita Sen, Associate Professor and Deputy Director, UGC HRDC, University of Calcutta, has published on East India Company women, Bollywood Shakespeares, and early modern ethnography. She co-edited, with Julia Schleck, a special issue on “Alternative Histories of the East India Company” for the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies. Boika Sokolova teaches Shakespeare at the University of Notre Dame (USA) in England. She has published extensively on Shakespeare and performance and is co-author of Painting Shakespeare Red (2001) and a number of publications on European Shakespeare. She is currently working, with Kirilka Stavreva, on a performance history of The Merchant of Venice. Lisa S. Starks, Professor of English at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, has published widely on Shakespeare, including Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid (Palgrave, 2014). She is currently editing a collection, Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theater (Edinburgh University Press). Kirilka Stavreva is Professor of English at Cornell College, author of Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech in Early Modern England, and author of numerous articles on European Shakespeare. With Boika Sokolova, she is currently writing a book on key performances of The Merchant of Venice. Poonam Trivedi (University of Delhi) has extensively researched performance/film Shakespeare in India. Publications (co-edited) include Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas: ‘Local Habitations’ (2018); Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys (2017); Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia (2010); and India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance (2005). Jessica Walker is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Georgia in Gainesville. Her previous essays on Shakespeare and appropriation can be found in Shakespearean Gothic (2009), Journal of the Wooden O (2012), Mastering the Game of Thrones (2015), and Bonds of Brotherhood in Sons of Anarchy (2018). Donna Woodford-Gormley is Professor of English Literature at New Mexico Highlands University. Her publications include Understanding King Lear: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents (2004) and several articles and chapters on Shakespeare in Cuba.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We first acknowledge, praise, grieve, and memorialize the late Christy Desmet. Senior colleague, peerless collaborator, and dear friend to both of us, she reviewed with us all but a handful of chapters in this volume and copy-edited many of them during what would become her last days on earth. We dedicate this volume to her memory and donate any editors’ royalties earned to the University of Georgia’s newly founded Christy Desmet Memorial Fund: https://gail.uga. edu/commit?search=71970003&desonly=1. We acknowledge our contributors, along with our forbearing editors Polly Dodson, Zoe Meyer, and Jennifer Bonnar for their patience as we weathered the storm of Christy’s abrupt passing, and our indefatigable graduate research assistant, Mikaela LaFave, who came to the University of Georgia in August 2018 planning to study with Christy, only to find herself instead posthumously copy-editing Christy’s work. We thank our colleagues at UGA and elsewhere for their kindness. We also thank David Schiller, Christy’s widower, for his support. Several of these chapters were revised from presentations delivered at the international conference “Appropriation in a World of Global Shakespeare” at the University of Georgia in November 2015, which celebrated the tenth anniversary of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, co-founded by Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar. We gratefully acknowledge the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, the Office of Academic Programs, the Provost’s Office, the UGA Libraries, the Graduate School, the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, the office of Service-Learning, the Department of English, and Mrs. Mary Denmark Hutcherson for their generous support of that conference. We are also grateful to UGA’s Willson Center, Department of English, and the Office of Institutional Diversity for jointly supporting our professional indexer. Some chapters have been or will be published in other formats elsewhere. Kirilka Stavreva and Boika Sokolova edited and condensed for us portions of co-authored essays that had appeared online in a special issue of Toronto Slavic Quarterly (2017). Thanks to the Société Française Shakespeare (SFS) for permission to republish Christy’s essay, originally written for the Society’s annual conference in 2018.

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INTRODUCTION Shakespearean appropriation in inter/national contexts Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson

Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer’s Shakespeare and Appropriation (1999) presented something of a milestone in Shakespeare Studies. As the first edited collection to appear in Terence Hawkes’s ground-breaking series, Accents on Shakespeare, it put cutting-edge scholarship on Shakespeare into the hands of scholars and students all over the world, and as one of the first scholarly essay collections on Shakespearean appropriation, it legitimized, validated, and broadened a new sub-discipline, one that encompassed Shakespeare, film and media studies, performance studies, and genre studies. Six years later, Desmet and Sujata Iyengar launched what would become the award-winning, online, multimedia, scholarly periodical Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (B&L) (Iyengar et al. 2019), the first scholarly journal to be devoted to the study of Shakespearean afterlives. A generation after Shakespeare and Appropriation, and nearly fifteen years after the first issue of B&L, however, the time has come for a new look at how the field of Shakespearean appropriation has developed and exists today: globally. This brief introduction to the volume cannot serve as a comprehensive guide to the field of Shakespeare and appropriation but instead seeks to offer a glance at three particular realms that Shakespeare and Appropriation and Borrowers and Lenders brought into focus, almost by accident: the work of women and minority scholars, scholarship from developing or former Eastern bloc countries, and innovative media renderings of Shakespeare and Shakespeareana. Shakespeare and Appropriation joined a set of scholarship in the 1990s that grew largely out of the British cultural materialist school on the one hand and out of an American- and multiculturally inflected feminism on the other. The first might have been in part stimulated by Alan Sinfield’s provocative salvo “Against Appropriation” (1981), which argued that literature’s power resides not in any transcendent or overarching humanity we might discover in it but in its gross discontinuities with our present moment, and fortified by Terence Hawkes’s Meaning By Shakespeare (1992), which deftly redefined appropriation from Sinfield’s limited sense of presentist or universal identification to mean readers’, viewers’, and writers’ inevitable understanding and deployment of Shakespearean words, texts, and motifs in their own ideological interests rather than in any historically “authentic” manner. Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare (1990); Michael Bristol’s Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (1990); and Hugh Grady’s The Modernist Shakespeare (1991) could likewise exemplify this early strain of scholarship, which extended appropriation to the notion of Shakespeare’s biography (following in the footsteps of

1

Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson

Samuel Schoenbaum’s magisterial Shakespeare’s Lives in 1970 and its significantly revised edition of 1991) and to the very editing of the texts we have. 1990 saw the publication of Marianne Novy’s Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, and, the following year, Jean Marsden’s The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth (1991), along with Peter Erickson’s monograph, explicitly multicultural in purpose and in practice, Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (1991). Notably, male reviewers acknowledged neither Novy’s nor Marsden’s books in their discussions about what was becoming a mild controversy in the pages of the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and The Times Higher Education Supplement, namely, the question of whether or not we could access, in Stephen Orgel’s phrase, an “authentic Shakespeare” (1988) or whether what we did was always (“always already,” in Derrida’s ubiquitous deconstructive phrase) appropriation. Extensively cited and widely influential, however, Novy’s and Marsden’s germinal collections foregrounded the important roles that women authors and scholars had played and would play in the analysis and dissemination of Shakespeare, including Shakespearean appropriation. These early investigations also laid the groundwork for Shakespeareans to venture beyond what became known as the “fidelity discourse.” The so-called fidelity discourse in the study of Shakespearean adaptation (including the study of Shakespeare on film and of Shakespeare in performance) prioritized the analysis of works in relation to an imagined, static Shakespearean text or to an idealized Platonic performance. (Ruby Cohn’s Modern Shakespearean Off-shoots [1976; rpt. 2015] had notably, and presciently, bucked this tendency: she called all appropriations “rewritings” and further subdivided this rewriting under the heading of theatrical emendation; adaptations, which retained plot or characters, but not necessarily text; and transformations, which deployed Shakespearean elements in unpredictable and highly creative ways.) The new appropriation studies enabled scholars to investigate adaptations as works with inherent value and meaning, not merely as derivative works; moreover, as the original Shakespeare and Appropriation declared, appropriations allowed authors and readers to collaborate with Shakespeare so that “both the subject (author) and object (Shakespeare) are changed in the process” (Desmet and Sawyer 1999: 4). To this list we can add Linda Hutcheon’s magisterial Adaptation (2006; rev. ed. 2012), which not only distinguished among types of adaptation but volubly asserted the rights of such creations to be taken as authentic artistic productions of their own; Julie Sanders’s exhaustive Adaptation and Appropriation (2006; rev. ed. 2015), which further defined and clarified the terms currently in use; Diana Henderson’s far-seeing Collaborations with the Past (2006; rev. ed. 2018), which both affirmed the joint relationship between Shakespeare and his adaptors or appropriators and foregrounded the importance of the media environment in which Shakespearean adaptations could flourish; M.J. Kidnie’s rigorous Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (2009), which turned a reflective eye upon stage and theatrical practice as appropriative processes; Douglas Lanier’s perceptive Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (2002), which developed a taxonomy of sorts for seemingly ephemeral references to Shakespeare in advertising, comic books, television shows, and so on and used them to track Shakespeare’s overarching use as a cultural signifier in the West; and Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe’s New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (2007), which championed the unprecedented formal and aesthetic innovation that Shakespeare elicited in film. Several important functions of Shakespearean appropriation – the deployment of Shakespeare in the service of creativity, originality, historicity, media innovation, formal experimentation, and cultural authority (for both conservative and progressive ends) – emerge in Global Shakespeare. Dennis Kennedy’s edited collection, Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (1993), and Cartelli’s Repositioning Shakespeare (1999) took Shakespeare in global contexts seriously as performances or interventions, not mere curiosities or colonial remnants. Like 2

Introduction

adaptation or appropriation studies of Shakespeare, however, Global Shakespeare Studies boasts a scholarly pedigree that is “decades – even centuries” long, as Laura Estill points out, not only in regularly scheduled issues of the Shakespeare Yearbook on country-specific topics such as “Shakespeare in France” (Klein and Maguin 1995) or “Shakespeare in Japan” (Anzai et al. 1998) but in the presence and activity of longstanding Shakespeare societies with “glocal” interests, that is to say, regional or ethnic groups seeking to create a global, transnational, or transhistoric identity through Shakespeare (Riemenschneider 2007; Estill 2014; Kozusko et al. 2006; Scheil 2012). Global Shakespeare has likewise moved on from concerns about fidelity, or documentary interest, to investigations of the new artforms or ideas that Shakespeare, often in tandem with a digital media environment, can enable in global contexts. The new artforms, media, and other transformations enabled by Global Shakespeare can range from the alteration of language forms, such as Dev Virahsahmy’s using Shakespeare translations to standardize Mauritius Creole (Mooneeram 2009) or the development of “an archaic, elevated version of the language currently spoken in Zimbabwe” (Massai 2013: 158), to the “affective” use of performance for progressive goals, such as the refugee-camp theatre performances of Hamlet and King Lear discussed by Jyotsna Singh and Abdulhamit Arvas (2015), to the conservative consolidation of colonial prejudices (Mayo 2016) or the acquisition of social capital through new media technologies (McHugh 2017; Bennett and Carson 2013) or the attempted breakdown of consumer and marketer through the Shakespeare “prosumer” or “user” (Fazel and Geddes 2017). Alexa Alice Joubin suggests that in non-English contexts the body becomes more important as a signifier (2017b: 429–30). Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys, edited by Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Judy Celine Ick, and Poonam Trivedi (2016) works to revise current binaries in discussion of Global Shakespeare by emphasizing intra-Asian adaptations that speak to one another rather than turning always back to England. The contents of the volume are interested, rather, in intercultural Shakespeare, being divided somewhat on the question of whether all drama is intercultural (Patrice Pavis’s 1996 position). Ick, in the first chapter, takes further Joubin’s call in “Asian Shakespeare 2.0” which recommends flexibility and recognition of the mobility of appropriations beyond the borders of the nation-state. Ick argues for an “archipelagic” approach to adaptation, which measures borders by the fluidity of the sea and the connectedly of islands in an archipelago. Ick focuses on two genres, one old and one new, where the relations of global and local are endlessly tangled (2017).1 Scholars of silent film identified the global reach of Shakespearean silent film (Semenza 2011; Burnett 2012) and the origins of early film in theatrical practice and adaptation (Buchanan 2009; Thakur 2014). The recent collection Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas (Trivedi et al. 2019) models ways in which we can discuss the interplay among local, regional, and national categories when they engage with Shakespeare on screen. Most recently, scholars are also beginning to analyze the influence and mechanisms of live-streaming elite, British theatrical productions across the world in cinemas, and identifying the characteristics of this new, hybrid, intermedia form (Aebischer et al. 2018). The figure of the rhizome, drawn from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and popularized in Shakespearean appropriation studies by Lanier (2014), has offered many Shakespeareans another way to consider Shakespearean elements that seem to shoot up far from an English textual “root.” We can also helpfully deploy, from the narrative theorist Gerard Genette, and from textual scholarship, the figure of mouvance and the idea of movement – to consider how fragments or even entire plays or speeches mean differently depending upon fluid and contingent contexts (see also Desmet 2018 on theories and ethics of citing or quoting, not only Shakespeare but each other). In these senses the global appropriation of English-language plays 3

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is akin to so-called appropriation art: it means differently depending upon who is watching, where, when, and why. We are also seeing a resurgence of interest in the mythography of Shakespeare – the common folktale or proverbial origins of plots, motifs, characters, structures, and groupings (Engler 2018; Iyengar 2017; Mancewicz and Joubin 2018); the presence and adaptation of commedia dell’arte characters or stock types; rhythms of grammar or speech that seem comprehensible. This interest in folk tale and analogue perhaps corresponds to the Shakespearean traces that have been called “remains” (Lehmann 2002), “attenuation[s]” (McLuskie 2015), “incidental[s]” (Olive 2013), “accidents” (Yates 2006), and “Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare” (Desmet et al. 2017). The Arden Shakespeare, third series, now refers to “antecedent texts” rather than “sources,” to account for the difficulty of proving direct influence or derivation while at the same time acknowledging the importance of intertextual or transmedia structures, characters, and historical events. Such structures can constitute, the late Barbara Mowat suggested (1994) and Allison Meyer extends in 2015, what Claes Schaar (1982) called “infracontexts” – semantic similarities that trigger memories in the reader or viewer and that, once recognized, insert the read or viewed text into a deep, vertical, richly signifying emotional context.

Exploring global appropriation This Handbook comprises five sections, each with between four and eleven chapters. Part I, “Transcultural and Intercultural Shakespeares,” investigates the ways in which Shakespeare can enable new conversations about on the one hand the relationship between minoritized communities in the nation-state (ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual minorities, for example) and on the other the power relationships between smaller and larger nations. The chapters in this section foreground the concerns raised by Alexa Alice Joubin’s and Elizabeth Rivlin’s Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (2014) about the moral consequences of Shakespearean appropriation, both as a philosophical endeavor and as a real-life praxis with measurable environmental and social effects. Communities foregrounded in the intercultural appropriations discussed here include racial and ethnic groups within nation-states, sexual minorities, inhabitants of the Global South, and victims of climate catastrophe. The section opens with a salvo from Sharon O’Dair that questions, through a sustained reading of Emily St. John Mandel’s dystopian novel Station Eleven, the enterprise that many have called the Shakespeare industrial-complex. At a time of clear and present environmental danger, asks O’Dair, do the world-wide performance extravaganzas, conferences, and centennials in Shakespeare’s honor enlarge our humanity, as is often claimed, or merely license humans once more to soil their own nest? Next, Alexa Alice Joubin explicitly addresses the ethics of Shakespearean and cultural appropriation and the delicate balance between using “others” instrumentally – an unethical act even if motivated by the impulse towards self-knowledge – and the reciprocal, mutually affirmative ways of sharing and creating knowledge that characterize ethical Shakespearean appropriation. Alfredo Michel Modenessi offers us in Chapter 3 a pungent, forceful, and deeply personal example of what he sees as unethical appropriation, cataloguing the failures of Matthew Dunster’s Globe Much Ado, set to the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1917; Poonam Trivedi’s “Fooling Around with Shakespeare: The Curious Case of ‘Indian’ Twelfth Nights” (Chapter 10), which concludes this section, similarly deconstructs the Globe to Globe festival’s and other attempts to “Indianize” Shakespeare. Ruben Espinosa acknowledges in Chapter 4 the prevalence of lazy stereotypes in performance that widen “the Shakespeare–Latinx divide,” but broaches an “uneasy assimilation” of Shakespeare across that divide, through the creation of a “hybrid political culture.” Katherine Gillen (Chapter 8) even locates a queer Latinx empowerment within this kind 4

Introduction

of hybrid performance space in the queer of color playwright Josh Inocéncio’s Ofélio. This kind of political hybridity can also manifest as what Jennifer Flaherty calls in Chapter 9 “cultural syncretism” in her reading of the Cuban play Otra Tempestad. Several chapters identify, explicitly or implicitly, the hybrid politics and aesthetics of Shakespearean appropriation by minoritized communities as a kind of double consciousness or double vision. In Chapter 5 Jason Demeter analyzes James Baldwin’s “race-conscious ­appropriative ­ uboisian strategy” for engaging with Shakespeare as one that foregrounds multiplicity and a D “double consciousness” that mitigates Shakespeare’s presumed and mistakenly called universalism. Brandon Christopher’s theoretically dense Chapter 6 deftly uncovers the double significance of the Manga Shakespeare series. Marketed to teens and children, these publications d­ isseminate “subversive” sexual content even as they valorize the historically devalued medium of the comic book. “Double time,” argues Barbara Sebek in Chapter 7, allows Frank M ­ cGuinness’s play ­Mutabilitie to “dethrone . . . Shakespeare” as the site of colonial authority. Through its appropriation of Shakespeare and of Edmund Spenser as both characters and as texts, the ultimate expulsion of these characters from the postcolonial kingdom McGuinness’s play makes a space for a hybrid nation. The chapters in Part II, “Decolonizing Shakespeares,” examine how adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare’s drama play out in postcolonial settings, with attention paid to multiple discourses of otherness, whether it takes the form of immigrants in exile, visual interplay of naked and clothed, or the linguistic patois of oppressed peoples. In “ ‘Flipping the Turtle on Its Back’: Shakespeare, Decolonization, and the First Peoples in Canada” (Chapter 11), Daniel Fischlin argues that Shakespeare plays a powerful dual role in both decolonizing and haunting Canadian First Nation post-settlement narratives, with Shakespeare taking on the metaphoric role of wendigo or cannibalizing spirit. Theresa M. DiPasquale’s Chapter 16, “Da Kine Shakespeare: James Grant Benton’s Twelf Nite O Wateva!” also examines a critique of Shakespeare by a hybrid, colonized North American culture, but her chapter presents a close reading and analysis of how the first Hawai’i Creole English or so-called Pidgin translation and adaptation of Twelfth Night cleverly, and with humor, foregrounds a multivalent dialogue that is both global and local and wrapped up in a class-based critique of the play itself. Donna Woodford-Gormley’s chapter, “ ‘What Country, Friend, is This?’ Carlos Díaz’s Cuban Illyria” (Chapter 13), engages with perceived European colonial anxiety about South America and the Caribbean, examining a production of Twelfth Night that, in its framing narrative presented in the program and visually in its staging, imagines a dialogue between Shakespeare and Elizabeth I that exposes European prejudices about native cultures that turn out to be present in the play itself. In Chapter 12, Avraham Oz turns to the persecution and exile of Jews from the Iberian peninsula to discuss both how The Merchant of Venice engages with Machiavelli’s malleable notion of nationhood and how Oz brought these ideas to the forefront in his own, Hebrew-language translation, adaptation and production of the play. Oz’s production featured a Palestinian actor in the lead role of Shylock, and thus expanded the motifs of displaced nations and diaspora beyond the struggles of post-Inquisition Jews. Adele Seeff and Jane Plastow each examine Shakespeare in African appropriations, with Seeff arguing in Chapter 14, “Inheriting the Past, Surviving the Future,” that South Africa’s multiethnic and multilingal cultural identity is what has kept Shakespearean adaptations and appropriations alive, despite the country’s continued divisions among ethnic and class groups. Even the productions that attempt to present a vision of a unified South Africa, Seeff reveals, nevertheless engage in complex conversations about alterity that can be consumed and misinterpreted depending on the local or foreign status of the audience. Plastow’s Chapter 15, “The Politics of African Shakespeare,” recounts how Shakespeare’s works entered sub-Saharan Africa through British colonizers’ efforts to translate and disseminate Shakespeare’s 5

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works into African languages, became charged with political struggle in critiques of colonialism and postcolonial African governments, and are rejected as historically irrelevant by today’s young Africans. Part III,“World Pedagogical Shakespeares,” turns to the role that global forms of Shakespearean appropriation can play and have played in both virtual and face-to-face learning environments. On the one hand, Sheila T. Cavanagh mobilizes classrooms around the world among many different cultures, adapting Shakespeare to each culture’s own set of understandings while bringing diverse global communities together. In her Chapter 17, “ ‘Make New Nations’: Shakespearean Communities in the Twenty-First Century,” Cavanagh examines several pedagogical case-­ studies of students learning about Shakespeare through intercultural networks – such as a tribal college in Jharkhand, India, and classrooms at the University of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur learning about a controversial Israeli production of The Merchant of Venice – in order to argue that these interactions forge pedagogically and theoretically innovative nontraditional Shakespearean communities. Jessica Walker’s chapter, on the other hand, “Appropriating Shakespeare for Marginalized Students” (Chapter 18), looks closer to home for underrepresented communities, and proposes strategies for making Shakespeare accessible and relevant to undergraduate students marginalized from traditional university scholarship by race, class, social position, and age. Matthew Kozusko examines a similar question in his chapter, “Beyond Appropriation: Teaching Shakespeare with Accidental Echoes in Film” (Chapter 19): how might popular culture such as contemporary films – many of which seem not to have a direct link to Shakespearean drama – be mobilized to engage students in fresh, rhizomatic ways of reading and understanding Shakespeare’s appropriative influence? Finally, Laurie E. Osborne draws on her own experience teaching Global Shakespeare at Colby College, a small, northeastern liberal arts college, in Chapter 20, “Teaching Global Shakespeare: Visual Culture Projects in Action,” where she argues that teaching Global Shakespearean appropriation through collaborative projects centered on the examination and creation of visual uses of Shakespeare across cultures (film and art) allows students to understand layers of meaning within Shakespeare’s writings as well as empowers them to understand how cultures around the globe have been influenced by and influenced their own interpretations of Shakespeare’s works. Part IV, “Regional, Local, and ‘Glocal’ Shakespeares,” features country-specific and languagespecific case-studies that engage what have come to be called “glocal” methodologies. The portmanteau word “glocal” (global + local) originated from business English in the 1980s (it was added to the OED only in the third edition, June 2010) and crossed over to Shakespeare Studies in 2007 (Desmet 2017: 20). Desmet characterizes these mingled locally parochial, globally ambitious projects as both processes that can “subordinate . . . local traditions” to global markets and yet unleash a “gleeful[ly] . . . anarchic” and potentially “redemptive space for local Shakespeares” by offering ways to thwart global hegemony (2017: 21). The chapters in this section range from Nicholas Grene’s broad theatrical survey of a century of Irish drama (Chapter 22) to original translations of hitherto-untranslated work (such as David C. Moberly’s translation of “Shakespeare’s anāshīd,” Chapter 27). The section opens with Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney’s thoughtful exploration of how or whether the prolonged presence of the brilliant African American tragedian Ira Aldridge in Poland altered how Polish critics and theatregoers thought about race in Othello. Kujawińska Courtney then moves forward in time to discuss the subordination of racial identity and Poland’s own racist history (including its treatment of Jewish people) to Marxist emphasis on the class struggle under communism, and to post-communism’s perhaps market-driven, perhaps fear-driven elision of issues of race and ethnicity, given the vanishingly small number of people of color in Poland and the resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiments. 6

Introduction

Tina Krontiris centers Chapter 23 around a failed attempt to “acculturate” Shakespeare’s plays in a Greek context in her account of legendary director Karolos Koun’s struggle to make Shakespeare part of his repertoire, in part because of Shakespeare’s own reliance (from Koun’s perspective) on the local and physical environment of England. Kirilka Stavreva and Boika Sokolova’s Chapter 24 describes and theorizes with sophistication and nuance another heroic failure – the imagined production of I, Hamlet in post-Communist Bulgaria and the film made about this wildly ambitious, “transcenden[t]” “denunciation of post-communist consumerism,” The Hamlet Adventure. Ryuta Minami likewise critiques consumerist digital cultures in Japan, which produce what he dubs “hollow Shakespeares.” In contrast, David C. Moberly’s English translation (the first) of Egyptian poet and critic Abu Shadi’s essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets engages deeply with Shakespeare’s plays, life, and cultural significance; Moberly’s introduction contextualizes Abu Shadi in early twentieth-century Arab letters and evaluates his contribution to the conversation surrounding so-called Arab Shakespeare (Chapters 26 and 27). We conclude this section with Robert Sawyer’s clear-eyed analysis of the transnational “third space” created by the Paul Robeson/Margaret Webster Othello in 1924, delineating both its welcome freedoms and its unwelcome consequences for the actors involved. Part V, “Transmedia Shakespeares,” examines appropriations of Shakespeare in multimedia contexts. Like the mythography that we mention above that underpins many Global Shakespearean appropriations, transmedia Shakespeares move across multiple settings and contexts. We define “transmedia” here as motif, story, character, or other borrowings commonly understood as Shakespearean that live across a range of different media. Examples might include the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet holding a skull, the love-test at the beginning of King Lear, the discursive body of Richard III, and so on, transmediated into the artists’ books, graphic novels and comics, musicals, anime, tweets, young adult novels, video games, television series, and Bollywood films that we discuss in this section. Transmedia appropriations are not limited by historical context; thus we can place Lisa S. Starks’s “Ovidian Appropriations, Metamorphic Illusion, and Theatrical Practice on the Shakespearean Stage” (Chapter 35), which examines Shakespeare’s and early modern theatre’s appropriation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to describe actors’ transformations within and without Shakespeare’s plays, in dialogue with the one that follows, Marina Gerzic’s “Determined to Prove a Villain? Appropriating Richard III’s Disability in Recent Graphic Novels and Comics” (Chapter 36), which examines how the transposition of Richard III into graphic novels draws attention to and catalyzes a conversation about Richard’s deformity in line with contemporary Disability Theory. Another chapter on comics, Miriam Jacobson’s “The Sandman as Shakespearean Appropriation” (Chapter 38), engages with its media through a material textual analysis to demonstrate the collaborative, dynamic, and haphazard way in which Neil Gaiman and Steve Vess depict Shakespearean authorship. Jacobson’s attention to the formal characteristics of comics (panels, lettering, color, visual positioning of characters) is in conversation with Sujata Iyengar’s “Ecologies of the Shakespearean Artists’ Book” (Chapter 29), which reveals how book artists’ uses of Shakespearean texts reveal commentaries on books as objects and on reading as a visual, material process. These chapters, and Christy Desmet’s concluding chapter to this volume (Chapter 39), invite readers to engage with particular qualities of what Iyengar calls “bookness.” Radio, television, and digital media also contribute rich fields that comment on Shakespeare in order to cast a light on twenty-first-century collaborative communities and culture. In Chapter 31, “The Moor Makes a Cameo: Serial, Shakespeare, and White Racial Frame,” Vanessa I. Corredera argues that veiled Shakespearean references to Othello and Romeo and Juliet in the twelve-episode NPR true-crime podcast Serial (2014) function to contain the story within a white racial frame, whereas for L. Monique Pittman, reading David Simon’s popular television 7

Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson

series The Wire as a Shakespearean rhizome in Chapter 33, such references liberate the Shakespearean historical tetralogy from its white, hegemonic origins in order to shed light on issues of race and class in contemporary African American culture in Baltimore. Both Corredera’s and Pittman’s arguments, which pinpoint how the Shakespearean text can be mobilized in contemporary narrative either to maintain a hegemonic status quo (Corredera’s “white frame”) or to set it free, can be placed in dialogue with Keith Botelho’s analysis of two postcolonial young adult novels’ adaptations of Othello. In Chapter 32, “De-emphasizing Race in Young Adult Novel Adaptations of Othello,” Botelho argues that both novels set in the Global South – one in 1980s Sri Lanka, the other in an unnamed South American country – engage with their Shakespearean origins in order to de-emphasize race in favor of sexuality and class issues. Digital social media, too, makes an appearance in Louise Geddes’s analysis of a Dutch stage adaptation of Shakespeare’s Roman plays, “Some Tweeting Cleopatra: Crossing Borders On and Off the Shakespearean Stage” (Chapter 37), which incorporated live and post-show tweeting communities to reshape the messages of the plays, including the audience in a wider, dynamic network of collaboration with the production. Musical and intertextual quotation abounds in both Stephen M. Buhler’s Chapter 30 (“Falstaff and the Constructions of Musical Nostalgia”) and Amrita Sen’s analysis of the Kashmiri contexts of the film Haider, a Bollywood adaptation of Hamlet (Chapter 34). For Buhler, Falstaff ’s continued musical song quotations turn the The Merry Wives of Windsor into an elegiac text, connecting Falstaff with musical nostalgia. For Sen, in “Indigenizing Shakespeare: Haider and the Politics of Appropriation,” Haider’s incorporation of Kashmiri folk theatrical performance (the Bhand Pather) and parodic citation of mainstream Bollywood celebrity Salman Khan (among many other cross-media quotations) allow the director, Vishal Bhardwaj, to recast the tragedy within a distinctly local Kashmiri political context, while at the same time engaging in a larger postcolonial conversation about Kashmir’s place in India and Shakespeare’s place in global cinema. We conclude with Desmet’s “Shakespeare’s Scattered Leaves: Mutilated Books, Unbound Pages, and the Circulation of the First Folio” (Chapter 39). This chapter examines the figuration of the Shakespearean text as scattered leaves in film and stage productions. In light of recent and current digital narratives of the increased consumption and circulation of Shakespeare’s First Folio, Desmet argues that amidst an elegaic conversation about material textual dissolution, a counter-narrative of “Shakespeare Unbound” emerges, one that liberates the author and his texts from the decomposing or ephemeral material page.

How to use this book Although we have arranged the chapters in this Handbook in five broad thematic clusters, readers will find conversations and commonalities among contributors that bypass or transcend these divisions. For example, we have included Ryuta Minami’s pungent analysis of what he calls the “hollow” Shakespeare of Japanese manga, anime, video- and mobile games in our section of regional or national case studies, but his chapter speaks equally well to the transmedia Shakespeares of our next section and to Louise Geddes’s chapter about fan networks and the ­knowledge-sharing “postdramatic” Shakespearean economy. Sharon O’Dair’s opening chapter and Christy Desmet’s closing one reflect upon – provocatively, in O’Dair’s case, and positively, in Desmet’s – the value of books in general, and of Shakespeare in particular, at a time of global climate collapse. Desmet’s comments on the viral travels of the St. Omer folio nicely counterpoint O’Dair’s environmental critique of traveling Shakespeare and the conference circuit. Several of the chapters in our “Transcultural and Intercultural” section could equally well have gone into our “Regional, Local, 8

Introduction

and Glocal” section, and vice versa: Tina Krontiris’s thorough discussion of renowned Greek director Karolos Koun and his ultimately unsuccessful attempts to acculturate Shakespearean drama speaks to Poonam Trivedi’s account of failed attempts to “Indianize” Twelfth Night. Laurie E. Osborne’s and Sheila T. Cavanagh’s imaginative use of technologies old and new (websites, teleconferencing, rare books) to internationalize their curricula and student bodies generate a “transmedia” Shakespeare, just as many of Jessica Walker’s strategies to reach marginalized students were, we learn from Jason Demeter’s chapter in Part I, anticipated by James Baldwin fifty years ago. To encourage readers, teachers, and students to “dip into” the Handbook and to make new connections, we have therefore also included two “alternative” tables of contents, one organized by region, and the other organized by medium (in both cases, broadly understood). In all cases, we have striven to reach Shakespearean scholars, students, enthusiasts, and practitioners from different parts of the world and with different levels of access to peer-reviewed scholarship. We originally intended to use the documentation style of 1999’s Shakespeare and Appropriation. But one of the most interesting challenges of editing a volume about Shakespearean appropriation in the second decade of the twenty-first century is the problem of consistent documentation, when one’s archive includes not only the traditional scholarly codices and articles in journals that can be found at many university libraries, but also ranges across newspaper cuttings collected diligently by individual scholars over a period of some thirty years and accessible only in small, local libraries, rarely indexed and unavailable by interlibrary loan; popular reviews on websites arbitrarily taken down by site administrators and now invisible even on web-crawlers or internet archives; computer games re-released by designers in radically different forms or unreadable with present-day technologies; personal communication with authors, directors, and actors; Twitter posts; and not only the live performances that theatre history has long documented but also various cinematic and televisual remediations and ­re-contextualizations of those historical performances. Our goal has been, where such resources no longer exist or are inaccessible to the great variety of readers, to allow our contributors to document these resources to the fullest extent that they are able and to accept, as all humanists must, that some research is not always going to be “replicable.” What we call “global” often excludes much of the world (Joubin 2017a). Our volume, too, cannot claim comprehensiveness. We would have loved to publish more voices from the Global South; when Christy Desmet died, so did our chapter on Shakespeare in Korea; and we have two chapters from the former Eastern bloc, but, counter-intuitively, nothing from France or Germany, both of which have extraordinarily rich traditions of Shakespeare study and performance. While we think the volume investigates cultural and linguistic diversity in North America richly and profoundly, we know it lacks an equivalent range of analysis regarding minoritized cultures elsewhere. We are confident, however, that others will extend the work and play of Shakespearean transformations, translations, transgressions, and transmutations in books, playhouses, classrooms, conversations, on screens, and face-to-face through the next several decades and beyond.

Note 1 This paragraph was written by the late Christy Desmet.

References Aebischer, Pascale, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Laurie E. Osborne, eds. 2018. Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience. London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden. Anzai, Tetsuo, Soji Iwasaki, Holger Klein, and Milward, Peter, eds. 1998. Shakespeare in Japan: Shakespeare Yearbook 9. Lewiston, NY: Mellen.

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Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson Bennett, Susan, and Christie Carson, eds. 2013. Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bristol, Michael. Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare. 1990. New York: Routledge. Buchanan, Judith. 2009. Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burnett, Mark Thornton. 2012. Shakespeare and World Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cartelli, Thomas. 1999. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. London and New York: Routledge. Cartelli, Thomas, and Katherine Rowe. 2007. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen. New York: Polity Press. Cohn, Ruby. 1976. Modern Shakespearean Off-Shoots. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Desmet, Christy. 2017. “Import/Export: Trafficking in Cross-Cultural Shakespearean Spaces.” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation, and Performance 15.1: 15–26. ———. 2018. “Quoting Shakespeare in Contemporary Poetry and Prose.” In Shakespeare and Quotation. Eds. Julie Maxwell and Kate Rumbold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 231–46. Desmet, Christy, and Robert Sawyer, eds. 1999. Shakespeare and Appropriation. New York and London: Routledge. Desmet, Christy, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey, eds. 2017. Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Engler, Balz. 2018. “On Gottfried Keller’s A Village Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare Adaptation in General.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11.2. Accessed 19 Feb. 2019, www.borrowers.uga.edu/783959/show. Erickson, Peter. 1991. Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves. Berkeley: University of California Press. Estill, Laura. 2014. “Digital Bibliography and Global Shakespeare.” Scholarly and Research Communication 5.4, https://doi.org/10.22230/src.2014v5n4a187. Fazel, Valerie F., and Louise Geddes, eds. 2017. The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture. London: Routledge. Grady, Hugh. 1991. The Modernist Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon. Hawkes, Terence. 1992. Meaning by Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge. Henderson, Diana. 2006. Collaborations with the Past. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. Rev. ed. 2013. London and New York: Routledge. Ick, Judy Celine. 2017. “The Augmentation of the Indies: An Archipelagic Approach to Asian and Global Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys. Eds. Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, et al. London: Routledge. 19–36. Iyengar, Sujata. 2017. “Shakespeare’s Anti-Balcony Scene.” Scènes du Balcon/Balcony Scenes: Arrêt sur Scène/ Scene Focus 6. Accessed 16 Feb. 2019, www.ircl.cnrs.fr/productions%20electroniques/arret_scene/ 6_2017/ASF6_2017_12_iyengar.pdf. Iyengar, Sujata, Matthew Kozusko, and Louise Geddes, eds. 2019. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (B&L). Accessed 31 Jan. 2019, www.borrowers.uga.edu. Joubin, Alexa Alice. 2011. Asian Shakespeare 2.0.: Asian Theatre Journal 28.1: 1–6. ———. 2017a. “Global Shakespeares in World Markets and Archives: An Introduction to the Special Issue.” B&L 11.1. Accessed 16 Feb. 2019, www.borrowers.uga.edu/783688/show. ———. 2017b. “Global Shakespeare Criticism beyond the Nation State.” In Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Ed. James C. Bulman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 423–40. Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Elizabeth Rivlin, eds. 2014. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. New York: Palgrave. Kennedy, Dennis, ed. 1993. Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kidnie, M.J. 2009. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London: Routledge. Klein, Holger, and Jean-Marie Maguin, eds. 1995. Shakespeare in France: Shakespeare Yearbook. Vol. 5. Lewiston, NY: Mellen. Kozusko, Matthew, Christy Desmet, and Robert Sawyer, eds. 2006. “Shakespeare Readings, Societies, and Forums.” Special Cluster, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2.1. Accessed 16 Feb. 2019, www.borrowers.uga.edu/7151/toc. Lanier, Douglas. 2002. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave. 21–40. Lehmann, Courtney. 2002. Shakespeare Remains. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Introduction Lei, Bi-qi Beatrice, Judy Celine Ick, and Poonam Trivedi, eds. 2016. Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys: Critical Encounters, Cultural Geographies, and the Politics of Travel. London: Routledge. Mancewicz, Aneta, and Alexa Alice Joubin, eds. 2018. Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave. Accessed 16 Feb. 2019, https://doi-org.proxy-remote.galib.uga. edu/10.1007/978-3-319-89851-3 Marsden, Jean I., ed. 1991. The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Massai, Sonia. 2013. “Two Gentlemen of Verona for/by Zimbabwean Communities.” In Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment. Susan Bennett and Christie Carson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 157–60. Mayo, Sarah. 2016. “ ‘What witchcraft is this!’: The Postcolonial Translation of Shakespeare and Sangomas in Welcome Msomi’s uMabatha.” Postcolonial Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Studies 1.2: 189–226. Accessed 16 Feb. 2019, https://postcolonialinterventions.com/archive/. McHugh, Caitlin. 2017. “ ‘Thou Hast It Now’: One-on-Ones and the Online Community of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More.” In Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. Eds. Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave. 169–83. McLuskie, Kathleen. 2015. “Afterword.” In Shakespeare on the Global Stage. Eds. Paul Edmondson and Erin Sullivan. London: Bloomsbury Arden. 323–38. Meyer, Allison Machlis. 2015. “Multiple Histories: Cultural Memory and Anne Boleyn in Actes and Monuments and Henry VIII.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9. 2. Accessed 16 Feb. 2019, www.borrowers.uga.edu/1580/show. Mooneeram, Roshni. 2009. From Creole to Standard: Shakespeare, Language, and Literature in a Postcolonial Context. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Mowat, Barbara A. 1994. “Rogues, Shepherds, and the Counterfeit Distressed: Texts and Infracontexts of The Winter’s Tale 4.3.” Shakespeare Studies 22: 58–76. Novy, Marianne, ed. 1990. Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Olive, Sarah. 2013. “Representations of Shakespeare’s Humanity and Iconicity: Incidental Appropriations in Four British Television Broadcasts.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 8.1. Accessed 16 Feb. 2019, www.borrowers.uga.edu/783384/show. Orgel, Stephen. 1988. “The Authentic Shakespeare.” Representations 21: 1–25. Riemenschneider, Dieter. 2007.“Of Warriors, a Whalerider, and Venetians – Contemporary Maori Films.” In Global Fragments: (Dis)Orientation in the New World Order. Eds. Anke Bartels and Dirk Wiemann. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 139–51. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. Rev. ed. 2016. London and New York: Routledge. Schaar, Claes. 1982. ‘The full voic’d quire below’: Vertical Context Systems in “Paradise Lost.” Lund, Sweden: Gleerup. Scheil, Katherine. 2012. ‘She hath been reading’: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Schoenbaum, Samuel. 1970. Shakespeare’s Lives. Rev. ed. 1991 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). London: Oxford University Press. Semenza, Gregory M. Colón. 2011. “The Globalist Dimensions of Silent Shakespeare Cinema.” Journal of Narrative Theory 41.3: 320–42. Sinfield, Alan. 1981. “Against Appropriation.” Essays in Criticism 31.3: 181–95. DOI: 10.1093/eic/ XXXI.3.181. Singh, Jyotsna G., and Abdulhamit Arvas. 2015. “Global Shakespeares, Affective Histories, Cultural Memories.” Shakespeare Survey 68: 183–96. Taylor, Gary. 1990. Reinventing Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thakur, Vikram Singh. 2014. “Parsi Theatre: The Precursor of ‘Bollywood Shakespeare.’” In Bollywood Shakespeares. Eds. Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave. 21–44. Trivedi, Poonam, and Paromita Chakravarti, eds. 2019. Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas: “Local Habitations.” London: Routledge. Yates, Julian. 2006. “Accidental Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Studies 34: 90–122.

11

PART I

Transcultural and intercultural Shakespeares

1 “. . . THE GREAT GLOBE ITSELF . . . SHALL DISSOLVE” Art after the apocalypse in Station Eleven Sharon O’Dair

Traditionally regarded as Shakespeare’s farewell to art, Prospero’s lines in The Tempest also speak to the current moment, to an anticipated moment of a global collapse: The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And . . . Leave not a rack behind. The Tempest.1 4.1.152–56 This reminder of our frailty and insignificance – our little lives rounded with a long sleep – urges professional self-reflection about the scope and salience of the Global Shakespeare enterprise. This chapter considers the future – and the ethics – of Shakespeare performance and scholarship and does so by offering an ecocritical analysis of a recent post-apocalyptic adaptation of King Lear, Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven (2014). Station Eleven emphasizes the role of art in society before and after a plague-induced apocalypse that is also a carbon apocalypse, when people no longer can turn on lights or the sound system, when they no longer can travel easily by car or plane and must look, instead, to the past, to sun and candle, to horsepower and human power. Before that, I discuss briefly two disasters relevant to these concerns that took place on the Gulf Coast of the United States and that have affected all of that country and, indeed, the world. In 2010, off the coast of Louisiana, the Macondo oil well exploded, killing eleven of its crew. Drilled by Transocean for British Petroleum, on a multi-billion dollar rig called the Deepwater Horizon, Macondo became the largest oil spill in American history, spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for eighty-seven days, from April 20 until July 15, when BP announced a containment cap had stanched the flow. And in 2005, Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on the Mississippi coast was one that put New Orleans on the “clean” side of what geographer Richard Campanella explains was “a declining Category-2 storm” (2015). Katrina’s “strongest winds and waves had actually spared New Orleans,” yet the Crescent City was devastated because “a patchwork of under-engineered and poorly maintained levees had failed fundamentally” (Campanella 2015). As a result, reports Thomas Beller ten years later, many in New Orleans have concluded that no 15

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one should call the disaster by the name of Katrina (2015). For these activist New Orleanians, “Katrina” implies a natural disaster, something unavoidable, something for which humans are not responsible. For these activists, the flood in New Orleans was a disaster, like the Macondo blowout, created by human greed and error by behavior that is neither good nor wise but is normalized around the world, among all 7 billion, 500 million of us.2 Beller thinks that the activists exemplify “an ascendant theme in ecological thought: that the distinction between what is nature and what is not has blurred beyond recognition” (2015). He follows ecotheorist and literary critic Timothy Morton in suggesting that, as Beller puts it, “there are some phenomena that defy our attempts to categorize them as natural or not” (Beller 2015). But is this correct? Does this line of argument by the activists that “Katrina” misidentifies the disaster exemplify this “ascendant theme” in ecological thought, ecological theory? Does blurring capture what the activists in New Orleans insist upon? What they want? Morton agrees with the activists that anthropomorphizing the storm, calling it Katrina, “implies something invading our social space from the outside.” But the activists would not agree with Morton that a storm, like Katrina, reveals that “nonhumans can be agents and do stuff ” (quoted in Beller 2015). Morton wants Katrina, whatever we call it, to exemplify ecological theory’s blurring of the line between human and non-, the cultural and the natural. The activists want to call the storm something else, something that clarifies the lines, draws them more boldly. The storm was a man-made disaster, say the activists, which to acknowledge would force a focus on human responsibility for the flooding of New Orleans in order to ensure that such malfeasance does not occur again, there or anywhere else. In insisting on theory here, Morton thwarts or disables activism, or the need for it, which may be part of the point. Indeed, some have argued that a resistance to environmental activism has characterized the phenomenal growth over the past decade of ecocritical theory and hence ecocriticism, in terms both of numbers of practitioners and their status within the academy (Fraiman 2012; Garrard 2012). A year or so after Macondo was capped, however, Peter Maass reviewed a number of books about the disaster that had quickly made it into print; he noted no blurring, other than that resulting in the quick erasure of the event from the American consciousness: “business-as-usual has returned with surprising speed to the Gulf of Mexico and to America” (2011). In chronicling this rapid erasure, Maass spends most of his time dissecting the pressures, perils, and rewards of an oil market barely encumbered by regulation. But he concludes with a literary turn, noting what readers of literature had known or wondered since the very day of the explosion, April 20, 2010 – that the well and its site had been named after the town in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, named by a group of employees who offered the highest bid in a contest BP had devised to raise money for the charity United Way. Of course, Maass concludes, “No one could know how miserably appropriate the choice would be.” But even this miserable irony is not all: The final twist of One Hundred Years of Solitude is relevant, too. A text that had been impenetrable is finally deciphered at the end of the novel. Written one hundred years earlier, it foretold the events that destroyed Macondo. When it comes to drilling for oil and the hazards of climate change, the texts that predict our future are accumulating. They are all too clear. Maass 2011 Maass refers here to the Macondo blowout, and probably to Katrina, too. Macondo and Katrina are apocalyptic; they unveil; they are revelatory. And unlike the impenetrable text in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Katrina is a text that for many reveals the future, the human-made future, 16

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all too clearly. For these, it is a text without blurred lines. Most of humanity, however, does not read Katrina in the same way: “business-as-usual has returned with surprising speed to the Gulf of Mexico and to America” (Maass 2011). James Berger suggests in his influential After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse that the post-apocalyptic studies “what disappears and what remains, and of how the remainder has been transformed.” Yet it does so with fresh assurance: the apocalypse is a “definitive catastrophe – not only final and complete but absolutely clarifying.” The post-apocalypse reveals a world “in which all identities and values are clear,” the “murkiness of life” as it was before suddenly irrelevant (Berger 1999: 7, 8). Here Berger posits an ideal typical understanding rooted in tradition; as he points out, and as our response to Katrina demonstrates, modern and contemporary post-apocalyptic scenarios reveal less clarity (1999: 8).3 Station Eleven, like its Shakespearean antecedent, King Lear, offers a world of scarcity and danger, where, as Craig Dionne points out, “one survives by taking shelter from the elements and by hiding from others,” others who may be armed and vicious, out for blood or whatever it is you have got that they want. But if, as Dionne claims, King Lear “leaves us . . . with no real plan to move forward” (2016: 29, 146), Station Eleven reveals the plan: to walk, for years and possibly forever, with knives, crossbows, and guns, with senses sharpened, “an absolute focus taking hold,” because “this is what it would take” to survive (Mandel 2014: 190). When asked about the apocalypse, about how the world has changed since it occurred, Kirsten Raymonde replies, “I think of killing” (Mandel 2014: 265). “A wire of a woman, polite but lethal,” she thinks of the killing she has done – two people with strikingly accurate knife throws and then a third in the course of the novel – and she thinks of the killing done by the Georgia Flu, the pandemic that drew a line, “a before and an after,” through the lives of the few who survived (Mandel 2014: 20, 267). We might also think of the old King’s “kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill” (King Lear 4.6.183). Or even of “the big fat O, the nothing that haunts [King Lear], the “O, O, O, O!” with which Lear expires” (O’Toole 2015). These are clarified values, indeed, but they are not values we moderns normally embrace. Station Eleven won an Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award; it is a bestseller, a breakout novel for Mandel. The novel begins and ends on a stage in Toronto, where a film star, aging at fifty-one years old, is playing King Lear. On stage with him in act 4 are three little girls, an innovation meant to evoke happier times for Lear and his daughters; one of the little girls is Kirsten Raymonde. Suddenly the actor playing Lear, Arthur Leander, suffers a massive heart attack and dies on stage, despite the efforts of an audience member, Jeevan Chaudhary, a former paparazzo training to be a paramedic, to save him (Mandel 2014: 10).4 That very day, the Georgia Flu arrives on the North American continent, in Toronto, virulent and deadly, continuing its wild, quick, and devastating pass through humanity, killing 99% of the population (Mandel 2014: 253; Vermeulen 2018: 11–12).5 It is as if Arthur had a heart attack and so did the planet – or at least the human part of it. Mandel’s elegiac musings on loss and survival are filtered primarily through the experiences of these three characters that she puts on a stage in the novel’s first pages, but especially through Arthur and Kirsten, man and girl become woman, past and present – or arguably, present and future – linked together because of art, because of a passion for acting and a mysterious comic book named Dr. Eleven, a comic book unlike any other.6 In Year Twenty, calendars having been recalibrated upon the collapse, Kirsten walks with the Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors who perform Shakespeare and music of all sorts to small communities who cling to the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan. Readers learn early that the Symphony had “performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.” Dieter, one of the actors, thinks the 17

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reason is that “people want what was best about the world” (Mandel 2014: 37–38). Indeed, sounding throughout the novel is a phrase stenciled onto one of the Symphony’s three caravans, horse-drawn remains of pick-up trucks: “Because survival is insufficient” (58). For Mandel herself, the “line became almost the thesis statement of the entire novel” (Scott 2015). Thinking that “a period of absolute mayhem and chaos and horror [could not] last forever everywhere on Earth,” Mandel set out to imagine and explore “the new culture and the new world that begins to emerge” (Scott 2015). The Traveling Symphony is where she places hope in the postapocalyptic. Shakespeare, too, is where she places hope. Because the novel insists on something more than survival and emphasizes Shakespeare in Toronto and around the shores of the Great Lakes, it is unsurprising to read some gushing by reviewers, upon the novel’s release, about the crucial importance to society of art and performance. Mandel’s “message,” according to one, is that “civilization – and just as importantly, art – will endure as long as there is life” (Barnett 2014); another concludes that what is sufficient, what continues to make life livable, is beauty – whether it be the beauty of art (people still crave the enchantments of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ even after society has collapsed) or the beauty of memory (a TV Guide found amid the rubble becomes wondrous when it points to a world that no longer exists). Domestico 2014 Nor, in contrast, is it surprising to read critics who push back against such gushing, as Sigrid Nunez does in The New York Times: “Survival may indeed be insufficient, but does it follow that our love of art can save us?” (2014). Nunez echoes Kate Soper’s deflating counter to Jonathan Bate’s audacious claim in The Song of the Earth that poetry will save the earth: given the small readership of poetry, Soper writes, “I would argue, more modestly, that poetry . . . can probably do rather little in itself by way of ‘saving the earth’ ” (2011: 22–23). And I would add that anyone reading Bate in the early part of this century should have come to the same conclusion. Poetry, drama, prose fiction – art – is not going to save the earth, which is not to say that art cannot aid in navigating the Anthropocene or in learning how to change the ways we live, our carbon and consumption dependencies. A smattering of literary critics has now published analyses of the novel, focusing, too, on apocalypse, its causes, and its meanings. Mark West thinks the apocalypse in the novel is not the result of the Georgia Flu but of global capitalism, symbolized by the global economic collapse of 2008; it’s a collapse that Mandel minimizes and does not critique. The hope that reviewers see in Station Eleven occurs as a result: Mandel avoids apocalyptic revelation, working rather “to redeem the pre-apocalyptic world” (West 2018: 21, 23). In a different register, one more attuned to the early modern, Philip Smith agrees: “St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic scenario returns us to an era when Shakespeare contained all the seeds of culture” (2016). Like West, Smith is skeptical of such redemption or hope, adding to West’s distaste for capitalism a distaste for modernity’s (and, he argues, Station Eleven’s implicit) colonialism and imperialism (2016: 300). Pieter Vermeulen thinks the novel’s apocalypse can be read as about “climate change (among other Anthropocene phenomena)” and, in particular, about the dangers and ubiquity of climate change denial. Too, and in contrast to West and Smith, Vermeulen argues that “Station Eleven is not about the unperturbed continuity of a humanist tradition – indeed, that the persistence of culture depends on artifacts (paperweights, comics, scripts) underscores its contingency.” That tradition is deeply destabilized in the novel, a conclusion with which I agree (2018: 20, 23, 23–24). Neither gush nor skepticism does justice to Station Eleven, whose depiction of the role art and performance play in our lives is more nuanced and complicated than either gush or skepticism 18

Art after the apocalypse in Station Eleven

allows – and more nuanced and complicated than Mandel herself allows. It is difficult for this reader, for instance, to subsume under the same category of art or performance the Shakespeare offered by the Traveling Symphony and the Shakespeare offered by the National Theatre or Miramax, institutions which, like literature itself, seem “to belong to the prodigal world of leisure and excess” (Dionne 2016: 194). Station Eleven establishes such a contrast in two ways. First are the conditions under which the Symphony performs, which are difficult and obviously in contrast to the conditions under which almost any Shakespeare company performs today. Second are the reasons why the members of the Symphony perform, which are in obvious contrast to the reasons why Arthur Leander performs. On the road, the Symphony “walked slowly with weapons in hand, the actors running their lines and the musicians trying to ignore the actors, scouts watching for danger ahead and behind on the road” (Mandel 2014: 35). The Symphony knew that civilization in Year Twenty was an archipelago of small towns. These towns had fought off ferals, buried their neighbors, lived and died and suffered together in the blood-drenched years just after the collapse, survived against unspeakable odds and then only by holding together in the calm, and these places didn’t go out of their way to welcome outsiders. 48 When they did accept these “outsiders,” the towns received a performance from people whose instruments are sometimes damaged or whose bowstrings come literally from the horses pulling their caravans. When they did, they received a performance from people whose costumes and props are dirty and worn: the backdrop for Dream is constructed from sheets, hand-sewn and painted but grimy from years of travel, and Kirsten’s costume as Titania is a wedding dress whose “chiffon and silk [is] streaked with shades of blue from a child’s watercolor kit” (57). At one point, one of the actors tells Kirsten her dress needs a thorough washing. But soap is difficult to come by, as is food; the Symphony are hunters and gatherers of rabbits and fish, toilet paper and Q-tips. They are scavengers in buildings too dangerous or too dreadful to enter or endure. The Symphony’s motto, “because survival is insufficient,” is less a defiant conviction than a “question that had dogged [them] since they’d set out on the road,” fifteen years prior (Mandel 2014: 137). As Dieter points out, the motto “on the lead caravan would be way more profound if we hadn’t lifted it from Star Trek” (119) – if the favorite “line of text” of the “best Shakespearean actress in the territory” wasn’t from a TV series (120). Mandel’s narrator observes, “sometimes the Traveling Symphony thought that what they were doing was noble. There were moments around campfires when someone would say something invigorating about the importance of art, and everyone would find it easier to sleep that night.” But even so, what the Symphony was doing, what they were always doing, often “seemed a difficult and dangerous way to survive and hardly worth it” (119). It is difficulty and danger that any number of comparisons to the material conditions of Shakespeare’s own company can only paper over, as the character referred to only as “the clarinet” observes: Survival might be insufficient, she’d told Dieter in late-night arguments, but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare. He’d trotted out his usual arguments, about how Shakespeare had lived in a plague-ridden society with no electricity and so did the Traveling Symphony. But look, she’d told him, the difference was that they’d seen electricity, they’d seen everything, they’d watched a civilization collapse, and Shakespeare 19

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hadn’t. In Shakespeare’s time the wonders of technology were still ahead, not behind them, and far less had been lost. 288 What motivates the Traveling Symphony? What motivates actors and musicians who kill brigands, then drag “the men into the forest to be food for the animals, and [continue] on into Mackinaw City to perform Romeo and Juliet” (296)? Mandel’s answer is passion, love, the sheer necessity to perform, to practice one’s art. Once, when Kirsten and August, a violinist, are on watch, in the middle of the night, August whispers to her, “There are times when I want to stop. . . . You ever think about stopping?” Kirsten replies,“You mean not traveling anymore?” And August says, “You ever think about it? There’s got to be a steadier life than this.” Which Kirsten agrees to, but then she asks, “In what other life would I get to perform Shakespeare?” (135). As most reviewers and critics note, Mandel interweaves several moments in time, which allows her, among other tasks, to keep prominent all that has been lost: no more pharmaceuticals. . . . No more flight. . . . No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance. . . . No more internet. . . . No more social media. . . . No more avatars. Mandel 2014: 31–32 But in developing the histories of Arthur Leander and Jeevan Chaudhary, the one-time paparazzo, Mandel develops an inquiry into the role art and performance play in contemporary life, life before the apocalypse. Like Mandel’s previous novels, which blend the mystery and literary fiction, Station Eleven beggars generic description. One might call it a literary science fiction that retains the plot-drivers of mystery – who is the prophet? Or the artist and writer of the comic book, Dr. Eleven? Why does the prophet hold a fragment of Dr. Eleven, the comic book no one had heard of but Kirsten? Why is his dog named Luli, just like the dog in Dr. Eleven? What is the provenance of the paperweight Kirsten carries with her, a beautiful object “of no practical use whatsoever, nothing but dead weight in [her] bag” (66)? These questions are answered for readers, but not necessarily for characters: “These were the hours of near misses,” the narrator tells readers about the first days of the collapse (223) and near misses remain at the end of the novel, too. Most compellingly, readers do not know whether Kirsten unravels these mysteries, although I suspect most readers assume she does, because Mandel places Kirsten, the character obsessed with both Arthur and Dr. Eleven, in the Severn City Airport for five weeks with the character who holds all the cards, Clark Thompson, Arthur’s oldest friend. In the first days of the epidemic, as institutions shut down and imposed quarantine, Thompson was flying to Toronto for Arthur’s funeral along with Arthur’s second wife and son, Tyler, when their plane was diverted to and grounded at the Severn City Airport. But readers never know whether Kirsten and Clark do talk about Arthur, his son, Arthur’s wives, the paperweight, or Dr. Eleven, and thus how Kirsten is bound to them all. For my purposes here, this ambiguity matters because Arthur Leander and Dr. Eleven (or I should say, Dr. Eleven’s creator, Arthur’s first wife, Miranda Carroll) represent different understandings of the role art plays in life: the former values art insofar as it is commercially viable, a path to fortune and fame, and the latter insofar as it is a craft that one perfects because one must, because of love or passion. The former dominates the world before the apocalypse, and the latter dominates the world after. Dr. Eleven is anomalous in the world that was lost; its artist and writer is considered “an eccentric, the actor’s wife who inks mysterious cartoons that no one’s ever laid

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eyes on” (Mandel 2014: 94). But in Miranda’s life, the comic book is a “constant” (89). It makes her happy to spend hours working on it, and that is the work’s only point, that it is important to her (95), not whether she publishes it or makes riches from it or becomes famous because of it. Arthur Leander is the norm in the world that was lost; like everyone else, he “longed for [fame]” (79) and by his mid-thirties, Arthur had achieved it; he was “extremely, unpleasantly famous” (79). He’d “spent his entire life chasing after something, money or fame or immortality or all of the above,” and he had captured them all, save immortality (327). Mandel therefore creates a question for her readers to consider: in “this awakening world” (Mandel 2014: 332), which model of art-making will be nurtured, that of Arthur or of his ex-wife, Miranda? That of prodigal excess, of fortune and fame? Or that of craft and practice, of anonymity or near anonymity? Readers do not know whether Kirsten discovers that her beloved Dr. Eleven was drawn and written by her beloved thespian’s former wife or whether she discovers that the prophet who tried to kill her, who would have killed her, is that same beloved thespian’s son. Nor do readers know whether such knowledge would change Kirsten’s attachment to acting, or Shakespeare, or art. If post-apocalyptic art, whether film or novel, trades in hope, what is Mandel’s hope for art, what is our hope for art? A return to a world, Arthur’s world, our world, in which “it was possible to make a living . . . by photographing and interviewing famous people,” like the paparazzo Jeevan Chaudhary stalking the famous actor Arthur Leander (167)? Or is our hope for a world more like that in which Shakespeare lived and died, in which “anon.” graced title pages and playbills more often than author’s names? Perhaps something else? Station Eleven’s ambiguity here is matched by its ambiguity about the cause of the apocalypse. On the one hand is the judgment of Clark Thompson, which is simple, cut-and-dried: those who died “were exposed to a certain virus, and [those who survived] weren’t” (Mandel 2014: 59). On the other hand is the judgment of Elizabeth Colton, the actress and model, who was Arthur’s second wife and the mother of his son. Elizabeth long has thought that “everything happens for a reason” (253), including even the moment, some decade and a half prior, when Arthur left Miranda for her. Such belief her son imbibes and develops as he grows into the prophet: “We were saved because we are the light. We are the pure” (60). What’s crucial for my purposes here is that both judgments assign responsibility for the apocalypse to forces outside of human control – a virus or God. The virus in Station Eleven resembles “Katrina,” and as with “Katrina,” one may ask: is it a force outside of our control or is it a force for which we are partly – or largely – responsible? As with the novel’s consideration of art, then, but even more subtly, Station Eleven complicates the question of causation and responsibility. In this novel, Mandel alludes specifically to climate change, noting “the fevered summers of this century, this impossible heat” (138), or “the white-hot sky” near Lake Michigan, or a temperature of “106 Fahrenheit, 41 Celsius” (35). Intense heat is why the Symphony stops walking, takes frequent breaks, searches for water, even when they suspect they are in danger. Much of what the novel elegizes, however, are wonders of a world powered by technology and carbon – cell phones, computers, the internet, and air travel. The novel’s plot leads to the Severn City airport, which houses the Museum of Civilization and a jumbo jet filled with corpses, a jumbo jet that was sealed off with its passengers still alive in order to prevent spread of the virus. So, if Mandel offers as causal a pandemic, she does so, I think, because she assumes readers know enough about the origins and diffusion across the planet of HIV, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and other viruses to infer that environmental stress, population growth, and air travel underlie the pandemic Georgia Flu and the apocalypse: forests and jungles are cut for agriculture and cattle ranches, humans live in proximity to animals, viruses jump from one species

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to another and are jetted across the globe. Our way of life, the carbonized world that was lost, causes the pandemic and the apocalypse.7 Recent years have seen extraordinary numbers of Shakespearean production around the globe – on stage, on film, on social media, and in academic conferences and published papers and books. No doubt some of this work is and was tied to the anniversary years of 2014 and 2016, but Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin identify 2012’s Globe to Globe festival as “usher[ing] in a new era of global Shakespeare appropriation, [by bringing] theater companies from many parts of the world to the United Kingdom to perform Shakespeare in their own languages.” Perhaps anticipating continued growth, the organizers of Globe to Globe were “self-conscious about international politics and the guilty pleasure of festive cosmopolitanism” and emphasized the affirming and empowering consequences of the festival, with Shakespeare cast as “an agent to foster the multicultural good.” Still, Joubin and Rivlin write, Globe to Globe invites pressing questions: How does Shakespeare make other cultures legible to Anglo-American audiences? What does it entail for the British media to judge touring productions of Shakespeare from around the world? What roles do non-Western identities, aesthetics, and idioms play in the rise of Shakespearean cinema and theater as global genres? To what extent do non-Western Shakespeare productions act as fetishized commodities in the global marketplace? 2014: 1 Serious ethical questions, these, which it is not my purpose to answer here. Instead, I want to build upon Joubin and Rivlin’s concern with ethics to ask different questions regarding globalized Shakespeare performance and criticism. Given our cascading ecological crisis, the potential for apocalypse as revealed in Station Eleven, should Shakespeareans and theater audiences support touring Global Shakespeare? Should the companies doing the touring support these tours? Should Shakespeareans, whether Anglo or not, travel by air to Mumbai, Nairobi, Beijing, or Cape Town to view and review these productions? What do these touring productions suggest about the value of art in our lives: do they belong to the world of Arthur Leander, the world of prodigal excess, of fortune and fame? Or do they belong to the world of Miranda Carroll, the world of craft and practice, of anonymity or near-anonymity? In the fall of 2015, news sites across the globe explained that carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere soon would exceed 400 parts per million and do so permanently; indeed, levels have not dipped below 400 since then.8 In 2016, the atmosphere was one degree centigrade warmer than it was before the industrial revolution; climatologists report that we have already burned two-thirds of the CO2 that will take us to two degrees centigrade. In its 2001 report on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explained the magnitude of the mitigation challenge. At that time, carbon emissions globally were about 6.3 billion tons, thus averaging about 1 tonne per capita per year. The stabilization of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere at 450, 550, 650, and 750ppmv will require steep declines in the aggregate emissions as well [sic] emissions per capita and per dollar of gross domestic product (GDP). . . . Stabilization of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere at 450, 550, 650, and 750 ppmv would require limiting fossil-fuel carbon emissions at about 3, 6, 9 and 12 billion tonnes, respectively, by 2100. 22

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One ton per capita per year in 2001, which to stabilize at 450 ppm, would require a cut in half, to one-half ton per capita per year. In 2014, according to the World Bank, the average consumption globally per capita per year is just under 5 tons; for the average North American, the rate is about 15 tons per year.9 A round trip flight between New York and London emits about 1.2 tons per person. To bring the twenty-three actors of the Isango Ensemble from Cape Town to the Globe to Globe Festival in London emitted 46 tons, or 2 tons per actor. To bring the 21 actors of the Ngakau Toa from Auckland to the Globe to Globe Festival in London emitted 84 tons, or 4 tons per actor. I could offer additional examples, but the point, I hope, is clear: along with having children, air travel is the biggest carbon sin humans commit. But perhaps not; perhaps the biggest carbon sin we commit is not acting on what we know. Many reasons may be and have been offered for our failure – from nefarious governments and corporations to the salvation promised by technology or the need to bring a billion people out of the direst poverty. But I like the honesty of literary critic Stephanie LeMenager, who concludes that we love oil petromodernity – and the world it brings us – theater, movies, books, plastics, air conditioning, central heat, air travel. To leave petromodernity would be to leave all of modern life, a point that Station Eleven also makes clear (2014: 69). To leave petromodernity would be to enter a future with a diminished life, including diminished art, a scenario imagined by Mandel in Station Eleven. Mandel subjects the value and even possibility of art-making, whether novel or performed Shakespearean play, to sustained pressure and interrogation. So for us, pre-apocalypse if you will, what are the ethics of artistic and scholarly production in the early twenty-first century? What are we in this game for? For whom? And for what? In the Anthropocene, is the standard for performance in London at Shakespeare’s Globe, or is it in Wales at The Willow Globe, “a living willow theater planted on a working, organic farm” (O’Malley 2018)? These questions each of us must answer. But to nudge readers toward one, consider the old King again. On the heath, in “the pelting of this pitiless storm,” King Lear understands that he has “ta-en/Too little care of this,” of the squalor around him, the conditions in which his subjects live. Regrettably, Lear is too late in his resolve to “take physic, Pomp/ . . . And show the Heavens more just” (3.4.29, 32–33, 36). Will we be too late, too? Will we regret our lives, as rich, famous thespian Arthur Leander regrets “almost everything” (Mandel 2014: 329)?

Notes 1 References to Shakespeare are to the Arden texts of The Tempest, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T.Vaughan (Shakespeare 2011) and King Lear, edited by R.A. Foakes (Shakespeare 1997). All ­further citations will be incorporated into the body of text. 2 For current numbers on the world population, see the U.S. and World Population Clock, www.census. gov/popclock/world. 3 Mark West (2018), in contrast, sees Mandel’s refusal to reveal as surprising or unusual, as going against the revelatory requirements of apocalyptic literature. 4 Pieter Vermeulen wrongly identifies Jeevan as “a paramedic” (2018: 16). 5 Vermeulen calculates the death toll to be “99.6 percent of the world population” (2018: 11–12). 6 The trans-temporality of Station Eleven is noted by Vermeulen (2018) and by Martin Paul Eve (2018). 7 Eve (2018) thinks only a heavy dose of theory, of hyperobjects, meta-data, and symptomatic reading can reveal climate change’s crucial role in Station Eleven. Like Vermeulen, I think the novel’s concern with climate change is clear. Eve’s point, I think, is less about Station Eleven than it is about a contemporary debate in literary criticism about how to read, deeply or at the surface. 8 See Accessed 12 Jul. 2018, https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2018/06/07/anotherclimate-milestone-falls-at-mauna-loa-observatory/ 9 See Accessed 12 Jul. 2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?end=2014& start=2010

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References Barnett, David. 2014. “Station Eleven by Emily St. John, book review: Hope amidst an apocalypse.” The Independent. 3 Oct. Accessed 19 Jul. 2018, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/ station-eleven-by-emily-st-john-mandel-book-review-hope-amidst-an-apocalypse-9773270.html. Beller, Thomas. 2015. “Don’t Call it Katrina.” The New Yorker. 29 May. Accessed 9 Jul. 2018, www.new yorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/dont-call-it-katrina. Berger, James. 1999. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Campanella, Richard. 2015. “The Katrina Lexicon.” Places Journal. Jul. Accessed 9 Jul. 2018, https://places journal.org/article/a-katrina-lexicon/. Dionne, Craig. 2016. Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene. Earth, Milky Way: Punctum Books. Domestico, Anthony. 2014. “ ‘Station Eleven,’ by Emily St. John Mandel: review.” SF Gate. 9 Oct. Accessed 19 Jul. 2018, www.sfgate.com/books/article/Station-Eleven-by-Emily-St-John-Mandel-5795198.php. Martin Paul Eve. 2018. “Reading Very Well for Our Age: Hyperobject, Metadata and Global Warming in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.” Open Library of Humanities 14 Feb. https://doi.org/10.16995/ olh.155. Fraiman, Susan. 2012. “Pussy Panic Versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies.” Critical Inquiry 39.1: 89–115. https://doi.org/10.1086/668051. Garrard, Greg. 2012. “Nature Cures? Or How to Police Analogies of Personal and Ecological Health.” ISLE 19.3: 494–514. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/iss066. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2001. IPCC Third Assessment Report: Climate Change 2001. Working Group III: Mitigation. Accessed 19 Jul. 2018, www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg3/index. php?idp=57. Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Elizabeth Rivlin. 2014.“Introduction: Shakespeare and the Ethics of A ­ ppropriation.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 1–20. LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maass, Peter. 2011. “What happened at the Macondo Well?” New York Review of Books. 29 Sep. Accessed 19 Jul. 2018, www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/what-happened-macondo-well/?page=1. Mandel, Emily St. John. 2014. Station Eleven. New York: Knopf. Nunez, Sigurd. 2014. “Shakespeare for Survivors.” The New York Times. 14 Sep. Accessed 19 Jul. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/books/review/station-eleven-by-emily-st-john-mandel.html. O’Malley, Evelyn. 2018. “ ‘To Weather a Play’: Audiences, Outdoor Shakespeares, and Avant-garde Nostalgia at The Willow Globe.” Shakespeare Bulletin 36.3: 409–27. https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2018.0038. O’Toole, Fintan. “Behind ‘King Lear’: The History Revealed.” New York Review of Books. 19 Nov. Accessed 9 Jul. 2018, www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/nov/19/behind-king-lear-history-revealed/. Shakespeare, William. 2011. The Tempest. Eds. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. Rev. ed. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 1997. King Lear. Ed. R.A. Foakes. London: Thomson Learning. Simon, Scott. 2015. Interview with Emily St. John Mandel. “Survival is Insufficient: ‘Station Eleven’ Preserves Art after The Apocalypse.” National Public Radio. 20 Jun. Accessed 9 Jul. 2018, www.npr.org/ templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=415782006. Smith, Philip. 2016. “Shakespeare, Survival, and the Seeds of Civilization in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.” Extrapolation 57.3: 289–303. Accessed 9 Jul. 2018, http://dx.doi.org.libdata.lib.ua.edu/10.3828/ extr.2016.16. Soper, Kate. 2011. “Passing Glories and Romantic Revivals: Avant-Garde Nostalgia and Hedonist Renewal.” In Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches. Eds. Alex Goodbody and Kate Rigby. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 17–29. Vermeulen, Pieter. 2018. “Beauty That Must Die: Station Eleven, Climate Change Fiction, and the Life of Form.” Studies in the Novel 50.1: 9–25. Accessed 9 Jul. 2018, https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2018.0001. West, Mark. 2018. “Apocalypse Without Revelation?: Shakespeare, Salvagepunk, and Station Eleven.” Open Library of Humanities. 30 Jan. Accessed 19 Jul. 2018, http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.235.

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2 OTHERS WITHIN Ethics in the age of Global Shakespeare Alexa Alice Joubin

Shakespeare is a proper noun naming a collection of privileged signifiers, but to perform and study Shakespeare is to engage with the notion of “others within.” Historically, Shakespeare’s name and works have been integrated as the “other” within many significant world cinematic and theatrical traditions. Shakespeare has become something that is both part of a local performance tradition and at the same time a usefully alien presence to inspire new works, as evidenced by James Ivory’s 1965 film Shakespeare Wallah, which follows a traveling troupe of English actors performing Shakespeare in India. Shakespeare is both an icon that is familiar enough in local contexts for dramaturgical purposes and a stubbornly foreign presence that can be called upon for political agendas. Another example is Shakespeare in Germany. As Andreas Höfele’s latest book shows, there has been a strong identification of the German “national character” with Hamlet since the 1840s (2016: ix). Yet the vitality of this recurring motif depends crucially on the fact that Shakespeare remains a non-German voice, an other within. The “split between the official German and its discontents” constantly points to Hamlet as a foreign ghost that stalks and aids the battlements of the formation of German identity (Höfele 2016: 2). In Anglophone cultures, Shakespeare has also been colored by other accents in terms of increasingly hybrid performance styles, multilingual and multinational casts, and international networks of funding and marketing partners at festivals. In recent years, many English-speaking film studios, theatre companies and festivals have amplified and taken advantage of the theme of Shakespeare as an “other within,” something that is both familiar and exotic – and by implication worth seeing again. Examples abound. Set in London but frequently commenting on Indian diasporic communities in Britain, Sangeeta Datta’s 2009 film Life Goes On retells the tragedy of King Lear within a British-Asian culturescape by drawing on Bollywood conventions. The ambitious Globe to Globe festival in 2012 saw thirty-seven plays performed in thirty-seven languages by international companies to mark the occasion of the London Olympics (Bird 2013). The events provide not only festive cosmopolitanism but also what seems to be a moral high ground amid anxieties about globalization. Stories told by visiting companies helped to sell performances of war zones to audiences in a carnival zone. As an iconic playhouse that bills itself as a reconstructed early modern space, the architecture and symbolic significance of the London Globe – host of the festival – play a key role in framing the performance events. Theatre buildings have become a part of the mediation and meaning-making process (McAuley 1999), and in my theory, the 25

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playhouse provides quotation marks – signaling linkage and distance – around both the stage utterance and embodiment. In 2014, the Royal Shakespeare Company announced a £1.5m government-backed initiative to commission a new Mandarin translation of the Complete Works. Along a similar axis, in 2015, Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned projects to translate the plays into modern English, an initiative that has sparked much debate. There are plenty of examples of political uses of Shakespeare as a convenient other within. In October 2015, during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Britain, he quoted The Tempest, “what’s past is prologue” (FTLN 0973), to British Prime Minister David Cameron, and urged the two countries to “join hands and move forward” despite the antagonistic history between them including the Opium Wars, glossing over criticism of Chinese human rights issues. Significantly, Xi received a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets from Queen Elizabeth II as a gift during the state banquet, perhaps as a hint that art could transcend the different values each government holds.1 In 2016, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival produced Desdemona Chiang’s Winter’s Tale with an Asian American cast, an adaptation that set the romance in pre-modern China and America’s Old West, combining both Asian and Asian American perspectives. Meanwhile, from 2014– 2016, the London Globe toured Dominic Dromgoole’s production of Hamlet through some 200 countries and territories (Dromgoole 2017). Writing for the Economist, journalist Jasper Rees observes with enthusiasm that Global Shakespeare shows us that while “cultures may find reasons to be at one another’s throats, there is something primordial that binds all of us: the human need to stand up and tell stories of love and death.” When Dromgoogle’s twelve-actor Hamlet toured through Africa, Annastacia, a 16-year old girl, traveled 60 kilometers to Kasane, Botswana, with her school group to see the show. The message she took was this: “In our culture when somebody marries his brother’s wife this is dangerous because children end up doing mistakes in life” (Rees 2015). Both the journalist and the audience saw ethical messages in Global Shakespeare performances. In 2018, the independent film company Shanty Productions debuted their film, Twelfth Night, with a multiethnic cast (Smethurst 2018). Sheila Atim’s black Viola is one of several refugees washed ashore on a pebbled beach in the film. Film director Adam Smethurst drew on the idea of using Shakespeare as an other within during an interview: “With the widespread rise of anti-immigrant populism and governments actively encouraging a hostile environment for refugees, telling the story of the outsider surviving in an alien world on her wit, charm and ingenuity became and remains compellingly urgent” (“Olivier Award winner” 2018). There are high moral expectations for high art. Everywhere we look, there are signs that Shakespeare is taken as a spokesperson for the human in many parts of the world. Global Shakespeare seems to be the answer to competing demands from both conservative and neoliberal societies – namely, the demands that we become more transnational in outlook while simultaneously sustaining traditional canons. Recent journalistic discourses reflect these two intertwined threads (Dickson 2015). For both conservatives and innovators, the genre of Global Shakespeare is politically expedient in a neoliberal economy. But what does it mean to do Shakespeare while black? What does it mean for a white director to borrow from African traditions and Asian theatrical styles (Orkin and Joubin 2019)? What does it entail for the media to judge productions by minority directors and actors who may look exotic but are in fact part of the local theatre scene? How much should artists be expected to participate in and be judged by cultural conflict in the neoliberal economic era? The answers to these questions change according to the cultural contexts. British directors working in London face different challenges from non-Anglophone directors touring their works to New York. Renowned for his multilingual and transnational A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a production that 26

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showcased the rich diversity of India (commissioned by the British Council, 2006–2008; tours to India, the U.K., Australia, North America) and a former artistic director of the Young Vic (1993–2000), Tim Supple is currently director of Dash Arts. As a white British director, Supple occupies a position of power when borrowing from Indian performance traditions, which means the intercultural exchange is not innocent or always on equal footing regardless of the artist’s intentions. What is the role of colonial dialogue here? Should it take over the intercultural conversation? Supple sees as his mission to share concrete understanding of other cultures with his audiences in order to combat the tendency to “see the elsewhere as a generality.” As for producing plays with a multinational, multilingual cast, he believes it is “not just about us, but rather about the actors whom we are working with. About their stories. Their lives” (Supple 2015). Performances that frame Shakespeare as the other within raise an important question about the role of language in performances of classics. Language is often granted more significance than the materiality of performance, leading to the tendency to privilege certain modernized and editorialized versions of Shakespearean scripts in English and their accurate reproduction in both English and foreign-language performances. There is an ideological investment in completeness and fidelity to Shakespeare’s text, as if it is an ethical burden of Shakespeare’s modern collaborators. Smethurst’s 165-minute film Twelfth Night, for example, insists on reproducing Shakespeare’s full script. The textual fidelity might be an attempt to quell the filmmaker’s or his audiences’ anxiety about the production value of Shakespeare in modern dress. The slow pace of the film, however, took away the momentum and vitality of the cinematic narrative itself. Kenneth Branagh’s 242-minute film Hamlet (Castle Rock Entertainment 1996), too, is tethered to a fantasy of textual fidelity. The studio advertises the film as a complete Hamlet, while in reality the filmmaker uses a conflated text drawing on several versions of the tragedy including the First Folio, the Second Quarto (for additions), and emendations from The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1988), edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Further, the tendency to privilege Shakespeare’s English-language text (even in heavily editorialized and modernized forms) creates a problem, making us blind to many other aspects of Global Shakespeare in performance, reflecting the saying, often attributed to Henri Bergson, that “the eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” Performances of Shakespeare have always borrowed other accents (as Kent says in Lear: “If but as well I other accents borrow [FTLN 0577]). I propose that we theorize Global Shakespeare through two interrelated concepts: performance as an act of citation and the ethics of citation. To bring the concept of performance as citation and the ethics of citation together, I draw on Elizabeth Rivlin’s and my theory that acts of appropriation carry with them strong ethical implications. In our book Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, we argued that a crucial, ethical component of appropriation is one’s willingness to listen to and be subjected to the demands of others. These metaphorical citations create moments of “self and mutual recognition” (Joubin and Rivlin 2014: 17). Seeing the others within is the first step toward seeing oneself in others’ eyes. The act of citation is founded upon the premise of one’s subjectivity, the subject who speaks, and the other’s voice that one is channeling, misrepresenting, or appropriating.

Appropriation as citation To translate, appropriate, and interpret drama and literature is an act of citation. Here I speak of quotation in a metaphorical sense. As Christy Desmet theorizes, quotation is a form of écriture that espouses “the paradoxes of verbal replication as a dialectic between the arbitrary marks of print convention and the aural illusion of ventriloquism” (Desmet 2018: 231). One simple way 27

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to identify a quotation is obviously the verbatim reproduction, in writing or orally, of someone else’s words. There are many other ways, however, to allude to Shakespeare in embodied performances (think of a man holding up a skull without saying a word) as well as out-of-context political uses of Shakespeare’s words. As Derrida has pointed out, the relation between signifiers and the signified involves an endless chain of deferral. The image of a man holding up a skull would be construed to refer to Hamlet’s dialogue (on Yorick’s skull and mortality) with the gravedigger in Shakespeare as well as to typical gestures of actors playing Hamlet that have been popularized since the Victorian period. Quotation in the most straightforward sense is an act of replicating someone else’s words, an act of deferring an idea through the reproduction of others’ words. Quoting or misquoting lines from Shakespeare carries with it the burden of previous uses of those lines, thus creating irony or solidarity as the case may be. Citation, by contrast, refers to the larger culture of quoting others, whether verbatim or in a metaphorical manner. A culture of citation would allude not only to Shakespeare but also to other widely circulated interpretations of Shakespeare. Along the way, local cultures that sustain a performance might also be quoted to create new contexts for a narrative. We invoke Shakespeare or a particular cultural tradition for all sorts of reasons under many different guises. Global citations of Shakespeare – whether in performances or by politicians – demonstrate a spectral quality across cultures, media, and histories. These works are full of echoes and cross-references to other genres, events, and works. Our experience of the plays is ghosted by our prior investments in select aspects of the play and in previous performances. These ghosts, as Marvin Carlson puts it, “are simultaneously shifted and modified by the processes of recycling and recollection” (Carlson 2003: 2). A smuggled copy of the 1970 edition of The Alexander Text of the Complete Works of Shakespeare inspired Nelson Mandela while he was in the Robben Island jail. The South African prisoners there signed their names next to passages that were important to them. The passage Mandela chose on December 16, 1977, came from Julius Caesar, just before the Roman statesman leaves for the senate on the Ides of March in act 2, scene 2: Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard. It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come. FTLN 0980–0985 These lines supposedly taught Mandela how to dream and how to rise from the ashes. Interestingly the story about the “Robben Island Bible” has gained much more traction outside South Africa, particularly in London, thanks to the British Museum’s exhibition during the 2012 London Olympics and an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC in 2013. Many political prisoners who signed their names in that Complete Works could not recall their choice of passage or its significance during interviews. For the individuals directly involved, the political purchase of these citations was no longer relevant. This is an instance of “ethical impact” in the eyes of beholders. In Guns of the Magnificent Seven (Wendkos 1969), a film about the rescue of a Mexican peasant revolutionary leader, Chris (George Kennedy) quotes this same passage from Julius Caesar to a peasant. At the end of the film, the peasant is heard quoting the same passage to a boy after they 28

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have been liberated by the Magnificent Seven. Political quotations of Shakespeare are ubiquitous, whether from Egyptian intellectuals quoting Hamlet, a play that became “near-ubiquitous” there in the mid-1960s (Litvin 2011: 91), or the former U.S. Secretary of State George Schulz referring to the United States as “the Hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond” to terrorism in the 1980s (Johnson 1992: 421n.129). The ramifications of quoting Shakespeare in these contexts are far-reaching. Here is a more recent example of performative quotation of Shakespeare. During the 2012 London Olympics, actors quoted, in several significant venues, Caliban’s eloquent description to newcomers of his world, an “isle . . . full of noises” (The Tempest, FTLN 1518–26). It was recited by Kenneth Branagh dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunel during the opening ceremony (directed by Danny Boyle). While this event might not have been aesthetically coherent or interesting (Prescott 2015), it bears statistical significance as an instance of global citation of Shakespeare because, along with other sport and cultural events, Branagh’s performance was broadcast live, taped, and presented in 3D on television, radio, and the internet with subtitles or voiceover to an estimated 4.8 billion viewers and listeners in more than 200 countries and territories (International Olympic Committee 2012). Several athletes recited Caliban’s speech in video commercials for the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival. The closing ceremony again echoed the “Isles of Wonder” theme. Timothy Spall’s Winston Churchill recited the same passage Branagh had spoken earlier. These quotations are taken out of context. The enchanted isle full of noises refers to the British Isles that are gearing up to welcome guests from afar. Caliban has been recruited to represent Britain’s cultural others as well as the others within Greater London. Branagh and Spall’s use of Caliban’s speech is a clever but ethically dubious repossession of a colonial narrative and figure. Multilingual and Global Shakespeare performances represented a step toward consolidating the underdefined postimperial British identity and creating new international identities for touring companies from outside the U.K. The choice of center-staging Caliban may be inspired by the use of the name in popular culture. An albino character who has the ability to track mutants is named Caliban. The name evokes monstrosity and an abject subject. He first appears in 1981 in the X-Men comic books published by Marvel Comics. Caliban also appears in X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), directed by Bryan Singer, and in Logan (2017), directed by James Mangold. He is not born Caliban. His abusive father gives him the name to ridicule his albino appearance and non-normative body. One of the key features of Shakespearean performance in our times is cross-media and crosscultural citations. Let’s take a look at intermedial modes of citation. An example of the spectral quality of performance is Polish director Piotr Lachmann’s Hamlet gliwicki (or Hamlet from Gliwice) with Videoteatr, a multimedia enhanced production in Gliwice in 2006 discussed at length by Aneta Mancewicz in her study of intermediality (2014). The adaptation combines live action with mediatized and live video footage. In one scene, recounts Mancewicz, Hamlet (played by Zbigniew Konopka) engages in a metaphysical conversation with Gertrude on a screen who speaks from a place of “eternal lightness and transparency” (Lachmann 2006). Gertrude is a product of Hamlet’s memory. Director Lachmann is present on stage, mixing videos. Gertrude urges Hamlet to verify her presence by touching her on screen: “Touch me. Touch me through the pane” (Lachmann 2006). She even offers her hand. Hamlet touches the screen, and their hands meet. The adaptation evokes ghosting in Shakespeare’s Hamlet while it remembers PolishGerman history. According to Mancewicz, such strategies of combining onscreen and onstage action are a staple of contemporary Shakespeare performance in Europe (2014: 1–3). Further, adaptations refer to or echo one another across cultures and genres in addition to the Shakespearean pretext. Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film version of Romeo and Juliet is a good example. 29

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Mexico City is a stand-in for Verona Beach, and the film also cites MTV and global teen cultures. It brings both the melodramatic and tragic elements of the play into stark relief against modern media history. John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998) features a stuttering prologue during a tense but amusing metatheatrical negotiation. As if to counter the overkill of quoting the prologue not once but three times in Lurhmann’s film, Shakespeare in Love couldn’t quite spit out the prologue in one go. The intertextual links among these high production value adaptations compel us to relate them to one another. The Singaporean film Chicken Rice War (Cheah 2000) parodies Hollywood rhetoric and global celebrity culture by commenting on the popularity of Luhrmann’s film. Chicken Rice War’s engagement with Shakespeare shows its director’s desire to use a global icon to critique the Singaporean government’s propaganda about the city-state’s identity: “New Asia.” In Lurhmann’s film, Shakespeare’s play and the cultural values associated with this work are a platform for formal experimentation and reflection on modern media culture. In Chicken Rice War, Lurhmann and Shakespeare provide material for a critique of the politics and ethics of recognition (recognizing Romeo and Juliet, recognizing Tiffany jewelry, recognizing “New Asia”). Along similar lines, the Finnish comedy film 8 Days to Premiere (Leppä 2007) features the same passages from Romeo and Juliet throughout the movie in home and theatre rehearsals, and finally performed on stage at the end of the film. Like the Singaporean film, the Finnish comedy focuses on the redeeming power of love rather than the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Dramatic tension arises not through the Shakespearean pretext but through whether the actors playing the titular characters will overcome all sorts of obstacles to be together in the end, especially whether the actress playing Juliet will transcend her traumas and successfully deliver her final speech. One of the ethical questions being raised by these works is that of reception. Compared to Shakespeare in Love and Lurhmann’s Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet gliwicki, Chicken Rice War, and 8 Days to Premiere do not have a full record of reception because they are not yet on the map. They are not considered worthy of a place in the historical record of globalization. Finnish critics objected to 8 Days to Premiere’s failure to offer enough Shakespearean elements. Outside Finland, the film is virtually unknown because Finnish is a language that is neither part of the English-speaking or World Englishes communities nor part of cultures that are more diametrically opposed to the West. The invisibility of an artwork goes hand in hand with the invisibility of minority cultures. In short, the two interrelated modes of Global Shakespeare are contained within the metaphors of life and death: the rhizomatic growth of roots and networks of living artworks and the ghosting of past and present voices. There are other kinds of echoes and citations across genres, sometimes across different cultures. Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa adapted Macbeth for the big screen in 1957. Castle of the Spider’s Web (or Throne of Blood, as it is known in English) pioneered the techniques of defamiliarizing the quotidian by featuring ordinary daily objects writ large and by presenting human tableaux in stark contrast against nature. Set in the samurai world, the film opens with Macbeth and Banquo riding on horseback through a forest that is so dense that it is resembles a maze and a spider’s web. A mountain spirit spins cotton in the woods on a spinning wheel. This scene domesticates Nature and highlights the tension between culture and nature in Kurosawa’s narrative. The scene simultaneously quotes the traditional Japanese cultural practice of weaving and Macbeth’s struggle with the implications of his unnatural deeds that murder sleep. In later scenes we are introduced to castles that are constructed of the wood from the spider-web forest – a metaphor for desires and historical forces that ensnare the protagonist. Kurosawa’s signature long shots frame the low-ceilinged castles as icons of impenetrable and inescapable social order. 30

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In turn, Kurosawa influenced stage director Yukio Ninagawa through his techniques of quoting quotidian life writ-large. In 1985, Ninagawa produced a landmark production of the same play with a cinematically inspired visual vocabulary that echoes Kurosawa’s. The Buddhist altar – a small wood cabinet containing images of Buddha and family ancestral tablets, commonly found in many Japanese homes – is enlarged and transformed by Ninagawa into a framework for the story of samurai warlords. Figures dance behind semi-transparent screen doors in the prologue. The altar serves as both a mundane symbol of the sacred and a secular interface between the present and the past. Additionally, two elderly women who are not part of the play sit by the outsized altar. Their presence reinforces both a sense of daily life and estrangement. Throne of Blood has influenced and inspired other works outside Japan in a rhizomatic network of cross-citations. In 1985, John R. Briggs combined both approaches when he brought the Scottish play, Kurosawa, and Asian America together in his Shogun Macbeth. Regarded as a “Kurosawa-lite adaptation,” in both the positive and negative senses of the phrase, the adaptation in English is interspersed with a great number of Shakespearean lines and set on the island of Honshu in twelfth-century Kamakura Japan (1192–1333). Just two years later, in 1987, Wu Hsing-kuo’s Beijing opera The Kingdom of Desire redefined Beijing opera by paying tribute to and fine-tuning Kurosawa’s visual language. Wu’s Macbeth faces a similar fate to Shakespeare’s, killed by his soldiers’ arrows. Just a few years ago, Aleta Chappelle directed Macbett, a Kurosawainspired film set in the Caribbean. It is “unabashedly Japanese [yet] profoundly Shakespearean” (Dawson 2008: 158). Kurosawa’s approach of turning familiar artifacts into venues of estrangement has proven popular. In 2010, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned Ping Chong to adapt and direct an English-language stage version of Throne of Blood.

Ethics of citation Behind these acts of quoting others lie some questions about ethics. Often, when Shakespeare is cited, the passages are given an ethical burden and curative quality. Ethics suggest mutually accepted guidelines on how human beings should act and treat one another and, in particular, what constitutes a good action. In our contemporary context, ethics are often interpreted specifically in terms of a responsibility to cultural otherness. We owe it to the people who make the culture, and we owe it to the artist who create the works that we study. We owe it to ourselves to listen intently for what they have to say. This is Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of the priority of ethics over knowledge production. We are responsible for the preservation of the alterity of the Other, even as we make the obscure known by “freeing it of its otherness.” In other words, we are constantly striving against what Levinas calls “the imperialism of the same,” an assertive move of acquisition that forces unfamiliar things to “conform to what we already know” (Levinas, quoted in Davis 2015: 48). There is another aspect of the problem: Parallel to the assertive, acquisitive move in knowledge production is “knowledgeable ignorance,” which, according to Norman Daniel, is the tendency to insist on “knowing” something as one’s own ideological construct. It is a form of laziness and [an] irresponsible act to know ‘people as something they are not, and could not possibly be, and maintaining these ideas even when the means exist to know differently.’ Daniel 1960: 12, quoted in Joubin 2017: 436 Appropriation does suggest an aggressive act of taking ownership of Shakespeare. Acts of appropriation turn Shakespeare into a signifier that can be seized and re-deployed against his will, as 31

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it were. However, appropriation can also be therapeutic and politically reparative. The political agency that comes with appropriation can lead to ethical and political advocacy. Take The Merchant of Venice, for example. Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech is one of the most often appropriated and cited passages. Al Pacino’s superb performance brought humanity to the character and highlighted the difficulty to wrestle with a complex speech that is simultaneously a human rights declaration and a demonstration of vindictiveness. The speech features prominently in a trailer for Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002). The pianist smuggles in a volume of the play when being taken away to the concentration camp. The film itself makes use of passages from The Merchant of Venice, which has become one of the most iconic works on anti-Semitism. The citation of multilayered histories and Shakespeare are powerful and moving. Adaptations also cite Shakespeare and local music and cultures and bring them into a new, hybrid cultural landscape. In Ivan Lipkies’s Huapango (2004), Otilio, the richest man of Huasteca Tamaulipeca, falls deeply in love with Julia, a happy and straightforward young woman who is the best ballerina of the Huapango troupe. Her dance partner is Santiago, a stocky, strong man who secretly loves her. In the final scene, before Otilio kills Julia, as the camera moves back and forth between private and public spaces and between dead silence and lively festive music, we find parallels to the Othello narrative and a slice of Mexican culture. What does it entail to quote someone or a work? In the age of global performance culture, quotation can be a gesture of deferral or a demarcated space for reflection. Evoking Shakespeare creates a visually and rhetorically marked space, a rupture between contemporary artists’ works and Shakespeare’s words. A quotation, whether in translation or in some other appropriated forms, is an attempt at reproducing a predecessor’s ideas, or what Marjorie Garber calls “cultural ventriloquism, a throwing of the voice that is an appropriation of authority” (2002: 16). While words are being repeated or embodied in a new context, two speakers (Shakespeare and the modern actor) cannot truly share the same words. As Christy Desmet points out in her study of Shakespeare quotation in contemporary poetry, one voice or the other must be suppressed in this process. While “quotation marks are the topographic signs of deference, quotation as ventriloquism is an aggressive act of appropriation that can put under erasure” both the person quoting a source and the one who is being quoted (Desmet 2018: 232). As a result, there are two possible outcomes of an act of citation. The contemporary living director or translator may be seen as channeling the voice of the dead (like the Ghost in Hamlet, a rhetorical figure speaking the words of another), or Shakespeare’s authorial presence may be subsumed under the embodied presence of living, contemporary artists (which some journalists have seen as theft or infidelity to a classical author, an act of transgression). Ethics is an essential, but often missed, term in discussions of Shakespeare and appropriation. Shakespearean appropriations ultimately are confronted by ethical claims upon them. According to Levinas, there is profound reciprocity between notions of self and other. He emphasizes the moment of the “I” ’s subordination to “You.” He calls this state of subjectivity a “passivity undergone in proximity by the force of an alterity in me” and insists that “It is through the condition of being hostage that there can be in the world pity, compassion, pardon and proximity – even the little there is, even the simple ‘After you, sir’ ” (Levinas 1998: 112). If this condition of forcible subjection to the other is also the precondition for ethical action, then provocative implications follow for the study of appropriations. Where Shakespeare is read and performed matters as much as the historical question of “when” and the dramaturgical question of “how” these plays are performed. For instance, when Juliet asks Romeo how he has made it to her balcony, Romeo says he is aided by “love’s light wings” (FTLN 0894). This exchange is usually interpreted in a lighthearted manner, with an emphasis on the couple’s youthful exuberance. In twenty-first-century Palestine, however, 32

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Romeo and Juliet acquires a new sense of urgency. In the shadow of bombing and wars, the lovers’ fleeting affair soon gives way to the danger they are in and the risk they take. Reading the play with his students in Abu Dis, Tom Sperlinger notes that what may be otherwise construed as a more innocent lover’s complaint or “teenage hyperbole” (2014: 142) now acquires a far more earnest tone, especially when Juliet warns Romeo that “If they do see thee, they will murder thee” (FTLN 0898). Engaging with Romeo and Juliet in the context of modern military conflicts entails a deeper level of self-reflection and offers the potential to see the play in a new light. Global Shakespeare today represents the lived experiences of people in diasporic communities, such as British expatriates in Hong Kong, African American theatre, and people of Asian decent living in London. Diasporic Shakespeares are distinct from national Shakespearean performances because they are designed for heterogeneous communities and incorporate elements from several cultures, as evidenced by works by British Indian, Asian American, Chinese Singaporean, Québécois (Francophone Canadian), and African and Caribbean Canadian artists. In Yves Sioui Durand’s film Mesnak, a 2011 French and aboriginal Québécois adaptation of Hamlet that was shot in Canada, the Hamlet-figure struggles with his diasporic identity. Dave, an urban aboriginal in his early twenties, is a Montreal actor. His adoption at the age of three has erased all memory of his Native culture. When he receives his first-ever contact with his biological mother through a photo in the mail, Dave leaves for Kinogamish, the reserve where he was born. His soul-searching journey parallels Hamlet’s, and throughout the film, we hear productive echoes of Hamlet’s identity crisis. White directors appropriating non-Western traditions face accusations of imperial imposition. Some of them seem to arrive on the scene with an original sin for simply being white and male. When this happens, I believe it presents a problem. Non-white artists face the challenge of being typecast. What if you are a minority and you are an aspiring stage director, artistic director, or actor, or you aspire to work in any capacity in theatre? What if you are interested in doing Shakespeare, Ibsen, and “canonical” and “mainstream” plays rather than being recruited to “do a black play” simply because you happen to be black (regardless of your cultural identification)? For minority actors, identity politics can be a double-edged sword. Black British actors are often associated with art forms that are considered ethnically authentic and that “match” their perceived identity and interests, such as jazz. British Indian actors are lined up with Bollywood routines. For artists who thrive to breach the racial line, they face a seemingly impossible choice of heeding the call for cultural assimilation or “preserving” ethnic cultural roots. These works and life stories behind the scene are full of cultural ambivalence and contradictions. Like the artists who appropriate it, the Shakespearean canon has become a hybrid and heterogeneous subject. These subjects are defined not by purity but, in Stuart Hall’s words, by “the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity, by a conception of identity which lives . . . through difference” (Hall 1994: 402). The culture of citation transacts in repetitions with a difference.

Political citationality “My angel!” In Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2014 film Haider, a woman’s voice is heard outside a hut in the snow in Kashmir in 1995, a landscape devoid of colors other than mostly black, white, and deep blue. Ghazala’s son, Haider, a lone fighter, is hiding inside the severely damaged hut. Having sustained gun-shot wounds, he is surrounded by the soldiers led by his uncle Khurram who plans to kill him with a shoulder-launch rocket, but Ghazala, caught in between her lover and her son, who is intent on avenging his father’s death, convinces Khurram to give her one last chance to persuade Haider to give up his revenge plan and surrender. Soft-spoken Ghazala might not 33

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appear to be a particularly strong woman at first glance, but she is taking on the active role of a liaison, a negotiator, and now a game changer. Family issues and personal identity are tragically entangled in terrorism, politics, and national identity when Haider responds to his mother’s plea that “there is no greater pain than to see the corpse of your own child” by re-asserting that one cannot “die without avenging the murder of one’s father.” His moral compass is clearly pointing in a different direction from that of his mother, who does not believe politics should and can take precedence over love. His mother’s love is apparent, but it is not enough to change Haider’s mind. In her desperate last attempt to turn her son around, Ghazala spells out what is one of the most significant themes of the film: “revenge begets revenge; revenge does not set us free. True freedom lies beyond revenge.” The clash between the mother’s and her son’s worldviews is tragic. What follows is a moving scene in which a determined mother sacrifices her own life to save her son. Ghazala kisses Haider good-bye and walks out toward Khurram and his men. Standing in front of them, she opens her coat to reveal a suicide vest consisting of numerous hand grenades. As everyone runs away from her, Khurram and Haider rush towards Ghazala but are unable to stop her. Bhardwaj’s choice of slow motion accentuates the impossible weight of Time. Khurram and Haider finally realize what is at stake, only too late. They race against time to save their lover and mother, respectively, but are up against time – linear time. Nothing could be turned back. Life can only be lived forward. The blast kills everyone except Haider, who is spared because he is farther away, and Khurram, who loses his legs and is severely injured. For a brief moment, the flame over Ghazala’s remains brings, in an eerie way, both warmth and despair to Haider’s face as he stands over the carnage. He wastes no time to mourn his mother by picking up a pistol and walking towards Khurram, now crawling in the snow, to take his revenge. As the camera pans over the two bloodcovered figures against a background of blood-stained snow, two competing voices are heard in the voice-over, namely, Haider’s father’s abomination: “Aim bullets at those cunning, deceiving eyes that entrapped your mother” followed by Haider’s mother’s plea for him to give up his revenge mission. Haider eventually spares Khurram’s life and walks away, leaving him howling in the snow, begging for Haider to “finish him off.” It is ambiguous whether Haider spares Khurram because his mother’s death has shown him the path to love and peace, or because “finishing [Khurram] off ” is a charitable act rather than revenge, considering Khurram’s circumstances. There are explicit and more subtle parallels and echoes among Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Indian history, and Haider: the figures of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can be seen in the video-store owners (Suman and Suman) in the film; the talented journalist Arshia finds herself on a path leading toward Ophelia’s tragic life thanks to her father and brother. Like Hamlet, Haider explores dramatic ambiguity: how much does the Gertrude figure know about Claudius’s plan to kill Hamlet? Does she consciously intervene to save Hamlet? If so, does her act of self-sacrifice give her more agency in a men’s world? As Tony Howard points out, Haider’s ending “poses uncomfortable contemporary questions about suicide and revenge – and the ability of Shakespeare’s texts to help us answer them” (2015: 51). The ending of Haider is ambiguous, as we are not shown whether or how Haider finds a new path in life, but rather, we are shown rolling intertitles bring us back to our contemporary reality. The information given here is largely positive and hints at the reconciliation between India and Pakistan over the territorial conflict: In the last two decades, thousands of lives have been lost in the Kashmir conflict. The last few years of relative peace have renewed hope. With tourism growing from just 4.2 million tourists in 1995 to 140 million tourists in 2013. Bhardwaj 2014 34

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Self-conscious about the film’s portrayal of the Indian soldiers, the filmmaker decides to provide a counterbalance and ethical disclaimer, inviting audiences to reflect on the linkage and disjunctions between the fictional world and reality: In the recent devastating floods in Kashmir, the Indian army saved the lives of thousands of civilians. We salute their efforts and their valour. Principal photography for this film was entirely conducted in Kashmir without any disruptions. Bhardwaj 2014

Conclusion In conclusion, Global Shakespeare is a body of travelling cultural texts and a space where people and ideas meet. They meet in a space where differences are both visible and invisible in various forms of embodiment. When actors embody various characters they draw attention to their skin color, accents, and intentionally highlighted or concealed traces of cultural inscriptions in their life. Such meetings are facilitated by a culture of citation and political uses of Shakespeare as an other within.

Note 1 References to the works of Shakespeare come from Mowat et al. (n.d.) and are cited parenthetically within the text by Folio Through Line Number, FTLN.

References Bhardwaj, Vishal, dir. 2014. Haider. UTV Motion/Vishal Bhardwaj Pictures. Bird, Tom. 2013. “One Touch of Shakespeare Makes the Whole World Kin.” Shakespeare Theatre Association conference. DeSales University, Center Valley, PA. 11 Jan. Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cheah, Chee Kong [CheeK]. 2000. Chicken Rice War. Mediacorp/Raintree/Singapore Film Commission, Shaw Organization. Daniel, Norman. 1960. Islam and the West. Rpt. 1966. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Davis, Donald R. 2015. “Three Principles for an Asian Humanities: Care First . . . Learn From . . . Connect Histories . . .”. Journal of Asian Studies 74.1: 43–67. Dawson, Anthony. 2008. “Reading Kurosawa Reading Shakespeare.” In A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. Ed. Diana E. Henderson. London: Wiley Blackwell. 155–75. Datta, Sangeeta, dir. 2009. Life Goes On. SD Films/Miracle Communications. Desmet, Christy. 2018. “Quoting Shakespeare in Contemporary Poetry and Prose.” Shakespeare and Quotation. Eds. Julie Maxwell and Kate Rumbold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 231–46. Dickson, Andrew. 2015. Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe. London: Vintage. Dromgoole, Dominc. 2017. Hamlet Globe to Globe: Two Years, 193,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play. New York: Grove Press. Garber, Majorie. 2002. Quotation Marks. London and New York: Routledge. Stuart Hall. 1994. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press. 392–404. Höfele, Andreas. 2016. No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howard, Tony. 2015. “Hamlet in Kashmir.” Around the Globe 60: 51. Ivory, James, dir. 1965. Shakespeare Wallah. Merchant Ivory Productions. International Olympic Committee. 2012. Factsheet: London 2012 Facts and Figures. Lausanne, Switzerland: International Olympic Committee, Nov. Accessed 5 Jun. 2013, www.olympic.org/Documents/Refer ence_documents_Factsheets/London_2012_Facts_and_Figures-eng.pdf.

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Alexa Alice Joubin Johnson, Boyd M. 1992. “Executive Order 12333: The Permissibility of an American Assassination of a Foreign Leader.” Cornell International Law Journal 25: 421n.129. Joubin, Alexa Alice. 2017. “Global Shakespeare Criticism Beyond the Nation-State.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Ed. James C. Bulman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 423–40. Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Elizabeth Rivlin, 2014.“Introduction.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 1–20. Lachmann, Piotr, dir. 2006. Hamlet gliwicki [Hamlet from Gliwice]. Videoteatr. Leppä, Perttu, dir. 2007. 8 Days to Premiere. Juonifilm: FS Film OY. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Litvin, Margaret. 2011. Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mancewicz, Aneta. 2014. Intermedial Shakespeares on European Stages. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McAuley, Gay. 1999. Space in Performance: Making Meaning in Theatre. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Mowat, Barbara, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles, eds. n.d. “Shakespeare’s Plays, Sonnets and Poems.” Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019, www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. “Olivier Award-winner Sheila Atim stars as shipwrecked twins Viola and Sebastian in a new and timely screen adaptation.” 2018. Shakespeare Magazine. Oct. Accessed 15 Jan. 2019, www.shakespearemagazine. com/2018/10/olivier-award-winner-sheila-atim-stars-as-shipwrecked-twins-viola-and-sebastian-ina-new-and-timely-screen-adaptation-of-shakespeares-much-loved-comedy-twelfth-night-releasedon-25-october/. Orkin, Martin and Alexa Alice Joubin. 2019. Race. The New Critical Idiom Series. New York: Routledge. Pavis, Patrice, ed. 1996. The Intercultural Performance Reader. London: Routledge. Prescott, Paul. 2015. “Shakespeare and the Dream of Olympism.” In Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year. Eds. Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan. London: Bloomsbury Arden. 1–38. Rees, Jasper. 2015. “All the World’s a Stage.” The Economist. Nov./Dec. Accessed 30 Jan. 2019, www.1843 magazine.com/features/all-the-worlds-a-stage. Sperlinger, Tom. 2014. Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation. Winchester: Zero Books. Smethurst, Adam, dir. 2018. Twelfth Night. Shanty Productions. Supple, Tim. 2015. Public lecture. Milburn Studio, University of Warwick, 2 Jun. Wendkos, Paul, dir. Guns of the Magnificent Seven. 1969. Mirisch/United Artists.

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3 “YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?” Shakespeare in Mexican [dis]guise Alfredo Michel Modenessi

In memoriam Mauricio Modenessi Acts of appropriation, although they articulate where the author “stands” in relation to the object of appropriation, can be intensely personal, as well as political. Desmet 1999: 7

Two tales, one city My epigraph also applies contrariwise: acts of appropriation have intensely personal effects, especially on audiences at the receiving end. Those effects are always political. This chapter stems from a busy fortnight in October 2017, when I saw twice, at the London Globe, a Much Ado About Nothing staged by Matthew Dunster, purportedly set in the time of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917), and thrice, at the Southwark Playhouse, Mendoza, a Mexican adaptation of Macbeth to the same era that originated in 2011. I also sat on pre-show panels with members of each company. Let me add that I am a Mexican-Salvadorean scholar and stage translator with over thirty years of experience; that I had seen Mendoza repeatedly; that I share its ideas and aesthetics, am friends with its troupe “Los Colochos,” and have contributed modestly to their projects. My links with Mendoza are “intensely personal.” Conversely, I knew nothing about the Globe’s Much Ado, save that its website advertised a “bold production” featuring “Latin music, desert flowers, and revolutionary politics” (“Much Ado About Nothing [2017]” 2018). This neo-exoticist trumpetry suggested a harmless pageant deserving little attention. It turned out differently. If my conjecture bespeaks prejudice, I plead no contest. Notwithstanding, while Mendoza illustrates “appropriation as an aesthetic phenomenon” (Desmet 1999: 3), the Globe’s Much Ado epitomizes “cultural appropriation,” the feckless use of identitarian markers from one culture by another, usually hegemonic. As I’ve said elsewhere (Modenessi 2017: 550–52), Mendoza derives from a thoughtful articulation of Shakespeare’s art and themes with Mexico’s realities and artistry, eventually reinscribing Macbeth as an austere but deeply significant, richly imaginative stage experience in which the appropriated good and its offshoot see eye to eye. Instead, the Globe’s production, the

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last in Emma Rice’s tenure as artistic director, outdistanced my prediction: the show was a polychrome flourish of audience-catering stunts that bedazzled candid viewers but delivered a barren ­Shakespeare – hardly “revolutionary.” The panel I shared with Dunster and composer James Maloney confirmed how this appropriation resurrected embarrassingly condescending practices and discourses instead of enabling intercultural dialogue, turning my prediction into an “intensely [unpleasant] personal” experience, twice. Howbeit, the Globe’s extravaganza merits close examination: it helps to explore key concepts and factors for the correlation of the Shakespeare industry and Latin America, as well as pernicious effects of “globalization” on otherness and diversity. To avoid reductive ideas of “authenticity” and the like, I’ll start discussing this appropriation of my “cultural identity” on the “Global” stage of the “Unreal City,” at my hometown, the “surreal city” (see Breton 1939).

How “perception” becomes reality – and how “reality” bites [back] From Coco (Unkrich 2017) to the unsuspected ads for Ross Noble’s 2018 London gigs, imagery of the Day of the Dead, a Mexican tradition gone massively “global,” is now as officially ubiquitous as Frida Kahlo’s. To wit, the 007 film Spectre (Mendes 2015) features an insane parade in Mexico City to “celebrate” the Day of the Dead, with giant puppets, bizarre floats, and 1,500 extras in skull-like makeup dancing to Thomas Newman’s pseudo-African-Caribbean music as if it actually pertained to them. As its world-wide impact testifies, this was a clinically efficient materialization of the preposterous but alluring pipe-dreams of five alpha males from La-la-land (Sam Mendes, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Jez Butterworth, and John Logan), with some Mexican help. Incidentally, it also belongs in the top ten most ludicrous film depictions of “exotic Mexico,” among native items like Tizoc (Rodríguez 1957). The case is neither rare nor exclusive to Mexico, as other Hollywood or West End cultural fabrications testify; Mexico just happens to be a current pet of “globalism” as the new orientalism. It is uniquely illustrative regarding identitarian “authenticity,” however. The following year, the Mexico City mayor and chambers of commerce promoted “The Day of the Dead Parade” from fiction to annual fact, creating, by decree, a “new tradition” in our loaded calendar. It has occurred thrice already, gleefully embraced by an overpopulation ever ready to party, despite a few complaints from tunnel-vision ethno-puritans. Compare “Cinco de Mayo,” which although virtually defunct in Mexico, is the chief “Mexican tradition” in the U.S., although few know what it “celebrates.” This captures to surreal perfection certain aspects of the Latin American experience of [post]coloniality. Notwithstanding Eduardo Galeano’s apt objection, “What integration can be achieved among countries that have not even been able to integrate internally?” (1997: 260), the culturally diverse Latin American countries are grouped under one denominator due to historic factors, including our endless status as “developing nations” plagued by conflict, exploitation, and oppression, domestic and foreign, after independence from the empires presiding over three centuries of miscegenation, marginalization, mythologization, and decimation or extermination of the native cultures. This is a major token of the self-fashioning of Europe as the cradle of modernity or, for Enrique Dussel, “the Eurocentric fallacy”: “Modernity appears when Europe organizes the initial world-system and places itself at the center of world history over against a periphery equally constitutive of modernity” (1995: 9–10). The latter part of this correlation was soon redacted by the “organizing” West, however, and the “periphery” was consequently downgraded from driving energy to passive and humble recipient. Significantly for what follows, this paradigm “reigns not only in Europe and the United States, but also among intellectuals in the peripheral world” (Dussel 1995: 10).

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Thus, “Latin America” is a self-undermining construct congregating heterogeneous “nations” left “in-between” (Santiago 2001) after the physical withdrawal of the colonial powers: oscillating dissimilarly from one sense of belonging (the European) to another (the native), much reviled and largely obliterated, yet also mythicized. Latin American cultural production inevitably is encoded in “Western” languages; hence, it is sometimes perceived as forever craving the distant flesh of absent “forefathers,” consuming it as best it can, and still forever unsatisfied. But Latin America consumes what it inherited and continues to obtain from past and foreign worlds without becoming a formula. Substantial Latin American arts and artists, albeit “peripheral,” cannot be styled “subordinate”; they have redefined the cultural fabrics of their European sources. Accordingly, Latin American theater makers no longer approach Shakespeare reverentially but perform critical appropriations, “transcreating his energies into autonomous works with resources, questions, and answers of their own that simultaneously enhance our experience of their sources” (Modenessi 2017: 554–55). This is a crucial distinction between cultural anthropophagy, which applies to Mendoza, and the “cannibalization” pertaining to the parasitic ways of trade and empire, which include cultural appropriations like the Globe’s Much Ado. The Spectre fabrication is illustrative, if crude. Transforming into fact a fiction that was “globally” delivered as “Mexican” straight from its producers’ fantasies isn’t reprehensible or shameful. There’s nothing wrong in ingesting some outsider’s “invention of the Mexican” and selectively making it a reality of our own. As creative process, cultural anthropophagy begins at an aggressive “intake” but doesn’t consume the “in-taken” good mechanically or destructively. The insider “eating” the outsider’s “substance” seeks to assimilate its strengths to his own, thereby likewise stressing and enhancing the merits of the source. Anthropophagy generates diversity, critical appropriation, not blatant or blind abuse, or worse, self-gratifying “tribute”; moreover, it’s a one-way street, a prerogative of Caliban, not of Prospero (see Budasz 2005). The counterappropriation of the parade, a reply to the foreign warping of a local practice, is validated by the fact that it stimulates unregimented creativity and strips the La-la-land’s figment to its brittle bones: Spectre will forever remain a scavenger of the “exotic” while its dumbfounding offshoot develops a life of its own, spinning off some “high-quality” variants but, better still, many garish ones: countless and diverse “Mexican realities.”

It’s [still] the [stupid] economy Cultural anthropophagy is a healthy outlet to a complex identitarian situation, as the “inevitability of cultural imitation is bound up with a specific set of historical imperatives over which abstract philosophical critiques can exercise no power” (Schwarz 1988: 82). But while the actualization of the fictional parade was generally met with amused approval, in Mexico other appropriations may be branded “lowly imitations” by self-conscious groups who “attach mythical solidity to the economic, technological, and political inequalities of the international order” (90). For them, the juxtaposition of forms of modern civilization and local realities is “a mode of non-being or even a humiliatingly imperfect realization of a model situated elsewhere” (90). This leads to sheepishly assuming the “natural” superiority of any foreign source over any domestic use of it and to consistently yielding to “global” products, sidelining the local. The exportation of “Live” National Theatre productions to Mexico illustrates this “global” deceit. “Globalization” seeks to “maximize its homogenizing effects upon multiple markets” (Modenessi 2005: 105). For this, in Mexico a brand like “NT-Live” has to rely on consumers with strong buying power, many of whom find “Shakespeare” daunting, boring, or indifferent. But if it’s coupled with the logo of a “truly English” company, like the NT, many will readily

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pay to see taped productions (sometimes wretched), hard to grasp even for competent English speakers, and often poorly subtitled, instead of attending a live, local show that may be splendid – like Mendoza. This hurts the local artists and likewise, reinforces clichés about an “authentic” Shakespeare, since the perception of those spectators is levelled – “globalized” – prior to their [non]choices by the misconception that an English Shakespeare is “naturally” superior for being “genuine,” a misconception shared by many “global” tourists who visit the Globe (or other stages and sites of the “Big Bard” industry) and see not a valuable (or worthless) event but the same old [no]thing: “authentic Shakespeare.” So, what was “Mexican” supposed to convey as an integral part of the Globe’s Much Ado and its smashing success at the box-office, with the press, and with some Mexicans? A complex answer may start by acknowledging that “the idea of a national identity is constructed around the interests and worldviews of dominant classes or groups through a variety of cultural institutions” (Larraín 2001: 16). This also enables a simple answer: the “Mexican” in the Globe’s “Mexican” was as “Mexican” as “Mexican” is “globally” construed. A reviewer, for example, said it shined “a light on Mexico’s rich culture” (Gilpin 2017). But how so? Did the Globe’s crew, this journalist, and others stop to question their perceptions of “Mexico’s rich culture” so as to validate the appropriation, as concept and as product? This I mean to probe but, again, within an uneven correlation of power, it is logical to expect the dominant party to construct the “identity” urged by its “interests and worldviews,” based solely on its own assumptions. A finer understanding of what “Mexican” imports to this appropriation, however, demands realizing that no “invention of the Mexican” can keep up with the “identity” that it strives to pin down, because “the criteria for defining [national identity] are always narrower and more selective than the increasingly complex and diversified cultural habits and practices of the people” (Larraín 2001: 16–17). So, the powers and institutions behind an “identity” are reflected in the mindset of the party exercising that “identity” into social praxis, for example, as a theater event. Thus, the Globe’s Much Ado confirms Larraín’s previous points, plus a third: “in the public versions of cultural identity, diversity gets carefully concealed behind a supposed uniformity” (2001: 17) – that is, the uniformity coveted by the “global,” something totally alien to a show like Mendoza.

How the [“Mexican”] war was won Although partiality need not preclude objectivity, my own account of the Globe’s Much Ado might be suspect; therefore, I will let its reviewers temper my biased tongue. Practically all forty-plus reviews I consulted agreed on two counts (my examples are typical): first, that the “Mexican” element was “colorful, vibrant,” and so on and, second, that it contributed little to the “merry war” (1.1.60) between Beatrice and Benedick, towards whom all comments inexorably gravitated, as Much Ado has become the play where B hates B, B gets B, B loses B, and B gets B back, regardless of “revolutionary” concepts.1 The verdict: many “likes” for a cool, fun fiesta, with minor party poopers. A fair sample is a millennial-frank reviewer who thought that the play was adapted “shockingly well” for “a modern audience” (Gormley 2017). Still, he calls the setting “an excuse for colorful mise en scene” without “thematic justification” and concedes that it could be a “cynical attempt to make Shakespeare cool.” But the show “oozes passion,” “musical numbers,” and “foot-stomping aplomb,” so that “it’s fun and it’s quirky and it’s cool.” Conclusion: “There isn’t a cynical bone in this production’s delicious Mexican body.” Space precludes my addressing this apparent sexualization of “the invention of the Mexican,” but delicious is the circularity of the argument: if “this Mexican body” seems opportunistic for “cool,” it cannot be so because 40

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it is “cool,” and its “cool” isn’t merely opportunistic but excitingly so, particularly to a student who spends his time “writing, playing video games, and wondering why people don’t think I’m cool.” This assessment not only conveys which “worldview” the show conjured best but exhibits the main “interest” actualized on stage – that is, the “cool” that draws “modern audiences.” The “interests” on stage did not quite align with the “revolutionary politics” publicized on the website or the “complex agenda” blared by Dunster (Parsons 2017). As reviewers noted, he did not convey “any compelling political reason for the setting” (Gardner 2017), and so, “The Mexican Revolution” didn’t “throw much light on Much Ado” while Shakespeare didn’t “much illuminate the Mexican Revolution” (Hayes 2017). Dunster’s direction and casting also did not help. The adaptation gave “LAMDA and Guildhall actors the opportunity to sport massive sombreros” in pursuit of “infectiously good fun,” but little demonstrable substance to deliver “the serious political points that it craves to make” (Boughey 2017), beyond colorful dances, tableaux, and phraseological gimmicks – for example, Beatrice’s “over-emphatic work” (Fiona Mountford 2017). To be fair, one blogger liked the “bits about women” sorted “in ways I’m happy to have happen forever,” although she had “no idea what about the revolution we were supposed to pick up” (Kerry 2017). The stage teemed with dark-skinned players, natural or brownface – an issue keenly assessed by the Mexican American Mayra Cano (2017) – which made some critics charmingly describe the cast as “physiognomically correct” (Cavendish 2017) or “suitably mixed-race” (Baker 2017). However, Beatrice (Beatriz Romilly), Benedick (Matthew Needham), and the patriarch Leonato (Martin Marquez) were notoriously white.2 Was this because of the usual suspect reasons, fumblingly uttered by one critic: “is it racist to have a Mexican Revolution CONCEPT with white people in the leads? probably, right?” (Kerry 2017); or did these critics know that Mexico’s social and skin-color issues are far more complex than commonplace has them – and doubtless more than what the production even gestured toward? Unlikely. No reviewer (except Cano), nor the makers of this Much Ado, demonstrably saw past the “suitable mix” unto the complex entanglements that make Mexico a puzzle when it comes to race, class, and gender. Mexico is an “in-between” society: why and how is a dark visage supposed to render, ipso facto, a part “meaningfully Mexican”? Dropping banalities on a program or journal while stereotypes stack up on stage and page won’t cut it. To boot, despite the fact that most of his fashionably dark-skinned actors stemmed from regions other than Latin America, Dunster underscored the instrumentalization of the players’ bodies by saying that casting “a Latin American [?] play” enabled him to meet actors “from Southern and Central America,” thereupon adding that it would be great if people “who haven’t been to the Globe ended up visiting us because of that” (Parsons 2017). Supplementing Dunster’s myopia about color-blindness, even favorable comments observed that the setting looked “straight out of Sergio Leone” (Boughey 2017) or “like the South Bank branch of Wahaca” (Lukowski 2017). But while many noted the polychrome TexMex-cumHollywood foibles, few deplored them. One critique epitomizes the general attitude: There is more than a note of stereotype to the flowing dresses and bristling moustaches, and something potentially awkward about casting a mix of actors of actual Hispanic3 origin with others who merely have darkish complexions. Nonetheless, to this privileged white male it didn’t feel too egregious. Lukowski 2017 It came as no surprise, then, when others said that the show “steers clear of caricaturing,” yet added, “Don Pedro is a greasy Mexican bandit straight out of a Spaghetti Western” (Nick730 2017), or that “It’s packed with clichés, but they are well-intentioned . . . a line is drawn on the 41

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respectable side [?] of Speedy Gonzales accents” (Thomson 2017). Colorful fun trumps good old racism anytime. The number of reviews espousing this “well-intentioned” condescension foregrounds the main issue. It is not whether this sort of appropriation is “authentic enough,” because it actually tried too hard to be, and succeeded, as it delivered what everyone noticed but most condoned: authentic “Mexican” clichés, recognizable world-wide, “globalized.” In this, the Globe resembled food chains, travel agencies, and the Mexican Ministry of Tourism more than a company committed to address class, gender, and race, as Rice was wont to claim (see Sherwin 2017). Consider one exquisite reviewer who found the set-up “so transporting that my belly started craving a burrito” (Cavendish 2017). By striving for “genuine” detail, the production appeared just as geared toward crowd-pleasing as other recent shows crammed with glittery effects, like the RSC’s 2016 Tempest, or the NT’s 2018 Macbeth. There must be better ways. Embedded in the widespread use of gimmicks on the “Big Bard” stages, however, a use that often cripples Shakespeare in his own cradle, the specific issue with the Globe’s Much Ado was its bafflingly sub-par, self-sufficient approach to research and preparation vis-à-vis the “inevitability of cultural imitation” (Schwarz 1988: 82), which affects those who arrogate “exotic” fantasies of another culture in the name of “tribute” as much as those who appropriate Shakespeare beyond his native language or moribund practices. First, the authentic “Mexican” clichés on which this Much Ado thrived were second hand: “genuine” imitations of clichés about Mexico – “sleepy Mexicans in ponchos . . . rootin’, tootin’ six shooter gun play” (Boughey 2017) – created long ago, mostly by “ugly Americans,” that is, by the very stereotype into which Dunster turned Dogberry: “a culturally-insensitive” American film director who “feels like a heightened parody of the play’s problems” (Hayes 2017). Irony works in mysterious ways. Worse, those American clichés descend partly from movies of the Mexican “Golden Age” (1940–1970), which sold the world on much of what eventually became Speedy González. This show’s stereotypes belong in the “global” scene, for sure; they do not matter in Vegas, EuroDisney, or Televisa. Why perpetuate them via Shakespeare? Or maybe, in his quest to decry the ugliest American of all (see Parsons 2017), Dunster tried to fight stereotype with stereotype? Again, unlikely. Or inept. For, if so, his particular rootin’ tootin’ gun backfired, not only because Speedy González will beat any lukewarm “revolution” but also because “no amount of self-awareness excuses perpetuating clichés” (Trueman 2017). Cultural appropriation is not an issue per se: it becomes one from the combination of the what with the how and the what for. To wit, the worst mimicry of stale clichés was the music. Yet it was praised by virtually everyone, even those who otherwise faulted the show (see Gardner 2017). The total lack of informed criticism on such an organic element suggests that the reviewers were as deaf as the Globe’s crew and the “global” times, not only to the very matter of music – to the pleasure of perceiving and pursuing acoustic diversity over sameness – but to the obligation of researching your subject responsibly, and proceeding accordingly.

Let’s [neither] face the music [nor] dance Most Mexicans who saw the Globe’s Much Ado the second time I did belonged to what Dunster calls “The London Mexican Society” (Parsons 2017) – actually, the “Red Global MX-UK,” a trade-intensive network. As part of a paradigmatic “global” audience, many loved the production, like an American teaching in Mexico who reviewed the show favorably, unsurprisingly stressing the terms “universal,” “timeless,” and “Bard” (Schuessler 2017). Red Global MX-UK also organized the “Mexican Magic Night at Shakespeare’s Globe” (“Shakespeare . . .” 2017), 42

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so-called in a document including, for my participation, the question: “What has Mexico learnt from Shakespeare?” We didn’t get to it. But the panel conveyed what the heads of this show learnt from “Mexico” and how they approached their what for: a “tribute” to Mexican culture, where popular music is as vital as it is diverse. Maloney’s bubbly soundscape yelled out “fiesta!” to the crowd. But it was the worst aural experience of my life. My father was a professional of Mexican popular music for forty years; I grasp and enjoy its infinite variety as passionately as my own subjects and tools. Maloney’s score, somewhere deemed “evocative” (Macdonald 2017), was a humdrum cover of “mucho bandido” soundtracks, aping Micalizzi and Pregadio, rather than Morricone, as much as the show overall mirrored B-spaghetti-western flicks.4 Was that what Macdonald yearned for? Because, considering the randomness of responses, Mexican music was a cipher to reviewers. Where some heard “Latin music” (Gormley 2017), as the Globe advertised, or “exuberant South American compositions” (Gardner 2017), others (wrongly right) perceived a band “heavy on Spanish guitar” (Hari Mountford 2017) or “a flamenco fiesta” (Lung 2017). Clueless, most resorted to “mariachi music” (Viney 2017), which does not exist, or “mariachi band” (Trueman 2017), which is chiefly a string ensemble sharing little with the Globe’s combo: guitar, keyboards, drums, and other percussions,5 and a trumpet frequently echoing the nauseating horns of bullfights.6 But the mind-dagger was a ghastly travesty of the historically fluid and beloved “La llorona” in the style of a xaranga from Valencia.7 In sum, Mexican music was flattened out to accommodate “global” fictions of “Flamenco,” peppered with much hand-clapping and “Olés!” by players and audiences that likely place “South America” somewhere in [their cliché of] Spain and locate “Mexico” in [their cliché of] South America. Confirming that in “public versions of cultural identity . . . diversity gets concealed behind uniformity” (Larraín 2001: 17), Maloney’s “vibrant” score simulated stereotypical “Spanish” music that the “global” audience passively received as stereotypically “Mexican,” much as the witnesses from various nationalities in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” confidently identify the orangutan’s gibberish as being in a language with which, however, they are completely unacquainted. There was one musical high point, nonetheless: a splendid rendition of P.J. Harvey’s “The Desperate Kingdom of Love” by Anya Chalotra, who played Hero. As some observed (Viney 2017), the song went uncredited by the Globe. The choreography was on par: a TV-contest fantasy of “traditional Hispanic dancing” (LoAlbo 2017), overcharged with “Flamenco” stomping, sideways skirt-twirling, and upwards arm-and-hand-twisting and clapping, well in keeping with the score. (Mercifully, no tightbetween-the-teeth roses.) The same applies to the wardrobe and decor, which elicited the usual adjectives (“colorful,” “zesty,” and so on) and invited a reviewer to flaunt his (misapplied) familiarity with the words “china poblana” (LoAlbo 2017). For a play “set” around Monterrey, ca. 1914, the costume and set designers went prom-crazy visiting, mimicking,8 and mashing-up a myriad “colorful” outfits and objects from any era, anywhere, and nowhere in Mexico, indiscriminately expanding on palettes and details, with a stop in Coyoacán, Mexico City, for a now mandatory allusion to Frida Kahlo (specifically, the commonplace 1943 Tehuana self-portrait), the “global” “icon of Mexican art” – except in Mexico, where her power as tourist/currency magnet is nonetheless much appreciated. But my “intensely personal” distress on that “Magic Night” began at the pre-show panel, where Elizabeth Baquedano, a Mexican archeologist living and lecturing in the U.K. for decades, said that she loved the production because some details, such as the stucco on a tomb in the middle of the pit, were “exact.” But that’s no better than Dunster and Maloney’s tedious excuse that this came from “an honest place.” Although a blogger concurred – “[t]he director and designer researched it in Mexico, and there are plenty of photos” (Viney 2017) – regardless 43

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of the amount of “exact details” or “photos,” the quality of research and information that went into the production couldn’t have been more wanting, albeit “well-intentioned” and “cool.” The context note in the program (Hall 2017) illustrates this weakness. Instead of solid though basic information and, maybe, a little insight, the program-buyers got a page-and-a-half of fanfiction on the usual Pancho Villa tall tales, speaking assumptively, among other things, of “Pueblo Indians” from the south of Mexico (?), a battle of “Ceyalá” (Celaya), and a “Plano de Ayala” (Plan de Ayala). David Hall has a B.Sc. in chemistry and psychology, plus training in education and acting, and teaches IBD in a posh boarding school. I don’t mean that a sixth-form teacher couldn’t do the job, but this one certainly didn’t. His text not only makes us miss sorely the specialists who usually author these notes, but betokens the Globe’s general failure to approach the culture being “honored” with a modicum of professional ethos. The worst token was Dunster’s frivolity during the panel concerning the terms “research” and “conversation.” The least to be expected from anyone purporting to engage professionally with a foreign culture is a disciplined approach to learning. That was patently missing from Dunster’s narrative (recycled from Parsons 2017) on the genesis of his “revolutionary” concept: how he was first “aesthetically” struck by images of Mexican women wearing Edwardian dresses but carrying guns, and so forth.9 His mythicizing rapture could not take him outside his pre-conceptions towards a complex understanding, howsoever incipient, of the soldaderas that amazed his sight; for instance, towards finding out what the actual, generally dreadful, circumstances of those women were, regardless of which side of the conflict they were on. A reliable scholar10 from either shore of the Atlantic would have helped to prevent the Globe’s glamorization and exploitation of their myths and images (starting with the ads’ thoughtless use of “desert flowers” and photoshop), similar to what has forever plagued soldaderas on Mexican and foreign media.11 Regarding the music, Dunster repeated that he and Maloney visited Mexico to explore their “hunch that there was so much more to the tradition than the mariachi music we tend to hear” (Parsons 2017).12 The idea of travelling “to explore” a hunch about a vital part of a different culture hangs equidistantly between hilariously smug and appallingly unprofessional. Unfazed, Dunster added: “we were right, of course: we found that out everywhere we went,” with a touch of the adventurer “upon a peak in Darien.” But where their patronizing attitude wrapped in good-will hide actually took them was – Frida Kahlo’s house/museum! And a square, also in Coyoacán, where they were fascinated with some street music: what an aural snapshot of our “[colorful] brave new world.” Such were their investigative standards, in the name of what Dunster kept calling “an honest attempt at conversation.” I could only say that in Mexico we left tights and ruffs alone long ago, just as we expect others to stop fantasizing us through the plastic “Hispanic” window. I could not mention that within a mile of Kahlo’s house, they could have found my University’s Faculty of Music, the National Center for the Arts, the National Film Archives, the National Radio Archives, and the National Theatre Company, which performed 1 Henry IV at the Globe in 2012, a possible experienced interlocutor – plus numerous playwrights, theater and visual artists, musicians, and historians, who might have loved a “conversation,” and maybe even a performance of Mendoza, from which to also learn about Shakespeare a la mexicana. Had there been professional discipline from the heads of this project, there would have been dialogue with qualified advisors, Mexican or not, in all areas. Yet, apart from the “many photos,” no advice from solid, critical sources was evident, although they wouldn’t have been hard to find, starting, simply, with the Web and the academic staff of the Globe itself. But like many in the “global” world, Dunster and Maloney, and Rice, seem culturally monolingual, impervious to foreign input. Maybe they must go selfsufficiently about their journeys, exploring and discovering all on their talented own. Or maybe 44

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consulting the other is too great a demand, so the only option is to fantasize it and then call it “a conversation.” In the end, “sincere intentions” don’t matter: misguided self-sufficiency always turns honest purpose into glaring frivolity, which no excess of big declarations, stage business, box-office success, or frantic applause can disguise or assuage, even if coming from some Mexicans who, I fear, are easily beguiled with glam. At the end of the show, the audience went berserk with what a candid reviewer called “an Intense Meaningful Revolutionary Song” with “a lot of solidarity power fists.” Bewildered, she added, “What was that song doing?” (Kerry 2017). Another answered: “Dunster is very wide of the mark if he thinks this production has landed any political blows” (Boughey 2017). But that song could never have landed a “political blow”: it was the “cool,” “spirited” outburst that, outside “shithole countries,” clears throats of save-the-world angst before moving from the Globe stage to the Globe pub. For the Globe’s “bold” Much Ado was actually gutless. It failed to convey anything of value because it went all out for a trite “celebration,” instead of reaching intelligently deep inside my culture and ripping out a “concept” that could hit audiences hard with critical perspectives and move them to more than tamely clapping their hands at some sadly sanitized, though glitzy, “Mexican” borrowed robes and looney tunes. I’d much rather have my “identity” capably torn to pieces on stage than suffer through three hours times two over self-deluding excuses and rank clichés that strive to make a Shakespeare comedy “relevant” while also making sure that everything’s “cool.” The Globe’s “Mexican” Much Ado would have pleased as many, and been just as commercially prosperous, had it been developed with more professional and artistic drive and less posestriking. Then again, those may not be the “interests and worldviews” of the people behind this show. But perhaps they do wish to contribute to their own society by way of “political blows.” Only, as far as I know, just as it couldn’t deliver anything remotely “revolutionary,” or interesting, with this “Mexican” gig, the Rice regime didn’t produce a single “bold” show. Certainly nothing involving, for instance, the grey streets, pubs, “f-me-pumps” and “six-foot-two or taller” mates of, say, Southgate, North London, ca. 2003 – just to mention a possible, closer setting for a Shakespeare with greater “cool” that that of colonialist homesickness.

Notes 1 References to Shakespeare’s plays are cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number and come from Mowat et al. n.d. 2 Romilly was born in Spain; Marquez is Anglo-Spanish. 3 An absurd invention by American bureaucrats. 4 “Pistolero dell’Ave Maria II” (2015) illustrates both. 5 Maloney’s score, like much Anglo-American popular music, leans heavily on drums for rhythm. A hint: mariachis don’t use percussions, let alone drums. 6 Surely, the trumpet invited the word mariachi. Ironically, trumpets were imposed on the original ensemble for commercial purposes in 1941 by a radio mogul. 7 Logically, Spanish/Moorish influences abound in Mexican music; the fundamental harmonies in “La llorona” are, indeed, flamenco. But Maloney’s ear couldn’t make it past the Spanish Levante, let alone to Oaxaca and the outstanding blend of that influence with southeast Mexican traditions. For Valencian genres intersecting with Maloney’s score, go to “Amapola, Xaranga” (2017). 8 Baker (2017) felt (uselessly) compelled to clarify that the wardrobe didn’t lapse “into student themed party cliché.” 9 Space precludes exploring why Dunster’s gender-reversed “Doña Juana” was the only female mostly and consistently wearing male clothes. 10 In Britain alone, the names of Alan Knight and Alison McClean come immediately to mind, but this production seemed content with the Frank McLynn-type of expertise. Sadly, even Wikipedia knows more about soldaderas than what the program and show reflected.

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Alfredo Michel Modenessi 11 A basic web search will deliver thousands of images to contrast with the program’s cover art and Dunster’s treatment of the female roles: photos of actual soldaderas, with or without weapons, more or less suggestive of their actual conditions, whether on-site, or carefully posed; as well as all sorts of exploitative “interpretations” in multiple media: pinup, film, TV, and even anime-like. An entry point for information is Fernández (2009); Salas (1990) remains helpful. 12 Yet, “mariachi” was all that many reviewers heard. So much for “the hunch.”

References “Amapola. Xaranga El Truc.” 2017. YouTube. Accessed 16 Jan. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8a Y6iUiBJk. Baker, Tom. 2017.“Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare’s Globe).” The Daily Spectacle. 7 Sep. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, http://dailyspectacle.co.uk/2017/09/theatre-review-much-ado-about-nothing-shakespeares-globe. Boughey, Simon. 2017. “Review – Much Ado about Nothing.” Live Theatre UK. 20 Jul. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, https://livetheatreuk.co.uk/2017/07/20/review-much-ado-nothing. Breton, André. 1939. “Souvenir du Mexique.” Minotaure 6.12–13: 31–52. Budasz, Rogério. 2005. “On Cannibals and the Recycling of Otherness.” Music & Letters 87.1: 1–15. Cano, Mayra. 2017. “Much Ado about Nothing @ Shakespeare’s Globe: London 2017.” Reviewing Shakespeare. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and The University of Warwick. Accessed 1 Apr. 2018, http://blog gingshakespeare.com/reviewing-shakespeare/much-ado-nothing-shakespeares-globe-london-2017/. Cavendish, Dominic. 2017. “The Globe’s New Much Ado about Nothing is Super, and That’s the Problem.” The Telegraph. 21 Jul. Accessed 13 Jul. 2018, www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/globesnew-much-ado-nothing-super-problem-review. Desmet, Christy. 1999. “Introduction.” In Shakespeare and Appropriation. Eds. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer. London and New York: Routledge. 1–14. Dussel, Enrique. 1995. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. Trans. Michael D. Barber. New York: Continuum. Fernández, Delia. 2009. “From Soldadera to Adelita: The Depiction of Women in the Mexican Revolution.” McNair Scholars Journal 13.1. Accessed 16 Mar. 2017, http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mcnair/ vol13/iss1/6. Galeano, Eduardo. 1997. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Trans. Cedric Belfrage. New York: Monthly Review Press. Gardner, Lyn. 2017. “More Sombreros than a Club 18–30 Holiday.” The Guardian. 21 Jul. Accessed 13 Jul. 2018, www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/jul/21/much-ado-about-nothing-review-shakespearesglobe-mexican-revolution. Gilpin, Debbie. 2017. “BWW Review: Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare’s Globe.” Broadway World UK. 20 Jul. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, www.broadwayworld.com/westend/article/BWW-Review-MUCHADO-ABOUT-NOTHING-Shakespeares-Globe-20170720. Gormley, Connor. 2017. “Much Ado About Nothing at The Globe Theatre.” Cultured Vultures. 22 Aug. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, https://culturedvultures.com/much-ado-nothing-globe-theatre-review/. Hall, David. 2017. “Heady Days.” Program for Much Ado about Nothing. London: The Globe. Hayes, Sally. 2017. “Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare’s Globe.” Exeunt Magazine. 23 Jul. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-much-ado-nothing-shakespeares-globe. Kerry. 2017. “Much Ado About Nothing @ Shakespeare’s Globe.” Planes, Trains, and Plantagenets. 27 Aug. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, www.planestrainsandplantagenets.com/2017/08/much-ado-about-nothingshakespeares-globe-august-27-2017/. Larraín, Pablo. 2001. “The Concept of Identity.” In National Identities and Socio-Political Changes in Latin America. Eds. Antonio Gómez-Moriana and Mercedes Durán-Cogan. London and New York: Routledge. 1–29. LoAlbo, Robert M. 2017. “Dios Mío, London Globe’s ‘Much Ado’ Is Far From Nada.” PlayShake speare.Com. 7 Aug. https://www.playshakespeare.com/much-ado-about-nothing-reviews/theatrereviews/15612-dios-mio-london-globe-s-much-ado-is-far-from-nada. Lukowski, Andrzej. 2017. “Much Ado About Nothing.” Time Out. 21 Jul. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, www. timeout.com/london/theatre/much-ado-about-nothing-41. Lung, Bev. 2017. “Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare’s Globe.” The UpComing. 21 Jul. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, www.theupcoming.co.uk/2017/07/21/much-ado-about-nothing-at-shakespeares-globetheatre-review/.

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Shakespeare in Mexican [dis]guise Macdonald, Brendan. 2017.“Much Ado About Nothing, the Globe.” CultureWhisper. 14 Jul. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, www.culturewhisper.com/r/theatre/summer_of_love_globe_2017_much_ado_about_nothing/8775. Mendes, Sam, dir. 2015. 007 Spectre. Eon Productions. Modenessi, Alfredo Michel. 2017. “ ‘Victim of Improvisation’ in Latin America: Shakespeare Out-sourced and In-taken.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Ed. James C. Bulman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 549–67. ———. 2005. “Meaning by Shakespeare South of the Border.” In World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. Ed. Sonia Massai. London and New York: Routledge. 104–11. Mountford, Fiona. 2017. “Fiercely Populist Take is a Feast for the Eyes.” Evening Standard – Go London. 21 Jul. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, www.standard.co.uk/go/london/theatre/much-ado-about-nothing-the atre-review-fiercely-populist-take-is-a-feast-for-the-eyes-a3681991Moun.html. Mountford, Hari. 2017. “Much Ado Meets Mexico.” The Londonist. 24 Jul. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, https:// londonist.com/london/theatre-and-arts/theatre-review-much-ado-meets-mexico. “Much Ado About Nothing [2017].” 2018. Previous Productions, Discovery Space. Shakespeare’s Globe. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, www.shakespearesglobe.com/discovery-space/previous-productions/much-ado-aboutnothing-6. Nick730. 2017. “Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare’s Globe).” Partially Obstructed View. 29 Jul. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, http://partially-obstructed-view.blogspot.com/2017/07/theatre-review-much-ado-aboutnothing.html. Parsons, Danielle. 2017. “ ‘Returning from Conflict’: Q&A with Andrew Dunster.” Program for Much Ado about Nothing. London: The Globe. “Pistolero dell’Ave Maria II.” 2015. The Spaghetti Western Database. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, www.spaghettiwestern.net/index.php/Pistolero_dell%27Ave_Maria,_Il. Rodríguez, Ismael, dir. 1957. Tizoc. Producciones Matouk. Salas, Elizabeth. 1990. Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History. Austin: University of Texas Press. Santiago, Silviano. 2001. The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture. Ed. Ana Lúcia Gazzola. Trans. Tom Burns, Ana Lúcia Gazzola, and Gareth Williams. Durham: Duke University Press. Schuessler, Michael K. 2017. “Much Ado about Nothing en el Teatro Globe.” Letras Libres. 18 Sep. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, www.letraslibres.com/espana-mexico/arte/much-ado-about-nothing-en-el-teatro-globe. Schwarz, Roberto. 1988. “Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination.” New Left Review 1.167: 77–90. “Shakespeare with a Mexican Twist.” 2017. RedGlobalMx-United Kingdom. 20 Oct. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, www.redglobalmx.uk/single-post/2017/10/20/Shakespeare-with-a-Mexican-Twist–Connecting-withthe-creative-industries-and-the-community. Sherwin, Adam. 2017. “Axed Shakespeare’s Globe Boss Emma Rice Bows Out with Defiant Trumpbaiting Season.” iNews. 2 Feb. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, https://inews.co.uk/essentials/axed-shakespearesglobe-boss-emma-rice-bows-defiant-trump-baiting-season/. Thomson, Simon. 2017. “Emma Rice Shows her Usual Flair in This Mexican-set Romp.” Daily A.M. 27 Jul. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, www.cityam.com/269289/much-ado-nothing-globe-emmarice-shows-her-usual-flair. Trueman, Matt. 2017. “Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare’s Globe).” What’s on Stage. 21 Jul. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/reviews/much-ado-about-nothing-shakespearesglobe_44171.html. Unkrich, Lee, dir. 2017. Coco. Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar Animation Studios. Viney, Peter. 2017. “Much Ado about Nothing – Globe 2017.” The Blog of Peter Viney. 23 Jul. Accessed 11 Jul. 2018, https://peterviney.wordpress.com/stage/much-ado-about-nothing-globe-2017.

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4 “DON’T IT MAKE MY BROWN EYES BLUE” Uneasy assimilation and the Shakespeare–Latinx divide Ruben Espinosa Tybalt’s slow swagger brings the chaos of Baz Luhrmann’s opening scene in Romeo + Juliet (1996) to a mesmerizing halt. Already established by that point in the film is the unsurprising dichotomy of fair-skinned Montagues and the darker-skinned, more menacing Capulets. Tybalt, though, overshadows all, as he exhibits an unmatched bravado. The slow-moving shots over his person – bedecked in black, with Catholic iconography in full view – create an uneasy tension. He is, in no uncertain terms, a bad hombre. When he finally draws his pistol, he aims it not at the nearby Montagues, but instead at a well-dressed, fair-skinned young boy, whose eyes, the close-up shot makes clear, are as blue as can be. Through this act, Tybalt, played by Columbian American actor John Leguizamo, stands as a threat not only to the white Montagues but – as a Latino – to all white people. The depiction of menacing Latinxs1 in film is hardly uncommon, of course. Predating Romeo + Juliet by some fifteen years, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s Up in Smoke (1978) candidly addresses perceptions of Chicanxs as violent. Through his original song, “Mexican Americans,” Cheech attempts to dispel this popular view of Chicanxs. Cheech begins: “Mexican Americans don’t like to just get into gang fights/They like flowers, and music, and white girls named Debbie, too./Mexican Americans are named Chata, and Chela, and Chemma, and have a son-in-law named Jeff ” (Up in Smoke). While the opening reflects an unspoken desire of Chicanxs to connect to the white world via romantic partners, it culminates into a moment of self-awareness regarding the whitewashing of Hollywood and the absence of Chicanxs in film: “Mexican Americans don’t like to go the movies where the dude has to wear contact lenses to make his blue eyes brown/’Cause don’t it make my brown eyes blue” (Up in Smoke). As provocative as it may be, Cheech’s message is lost on Chong, who offers a song that is “the same thing, only different” in response: “Beaners will kick you in the face!” (Up in Smoke). Chong’s farcical erasure of Cheech’s vision of Mexican Americans reestablishes the stereotypical view of violent Chicanxs. Even though Up in Smoke, nearly forty years old now, draws attention to the misrepresentation of Chicanxs in film, the issue persists.2 Luhrmann, who capitalized on a multicultural vision for his 1990s, updated version of Romeo and Juliet, himself cast both Latinx and white actors to represent Latinxs and ultimately perpetuates negative stereotypes about Latinxs. The juxtaposition of the brown-eyed Tybalt against the blue-eyed boy is striking because of the Latino’s 48

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violent potential. We are positioned to look at the Latino through those frightened blue eyes. When Latinx audiences look to Shakespeare in film, then, this is what they see, if they see themselves at all. The near invisibility and misrepresentation of Latinxs in filmic productions of Shakespeare broadens what I term the Shakespeare–Latinx divide because such narrow perceptions suggests that either Shakespeare doesn’t belong to Latinxs or Latinxs don’t belong in Shakespeare.3 However, this chapter attends to Latinx encounters with Shakespeare in both film and fiction that intentionally veer from the borders of expected authenticity, situating themselves instead with the multivalent possibilities behind bicultural experiences, code-switching, and macaronic designs in the borderlands of language. Focusing on Arturo Islas’s novel La Mollie and the King of Tears and Theresa Dowell-Vest’s short film Color Blind (a Romeo & Juliet Story) – works that intersect with Shakespeare but do not adapt him faithfully – I scrutinize how the uneasy nature of assimilation for U.S. Latinxs both informs our understanding of the Shakespeare–Latinx divide and makes evident that Shakespeare does indeed belong to Latinxs. Attending to critical race studies that shed light on the multiple positionalities from which people of color apprehend Shakespeare opens the door to cross-cultural understandings of his works. The “shared experiences of expendability” for blacks and Latinxs lead to what John Márquez describes as “a model and praxis of solidarity” (Márquez 2016: 48). The promise behind such unity opens a critical space to dislocate Shakespeare’s presumed place in America and to imagine his global reach anew. What follows is an exploration of how scholars and artists alike might tap into that potential.

Shakespeare in El Chuco I begin by turning to a keen appropriation of Shakespeare’s King Lear from a distinctly Chicanx perspective. Because both its author and protagonist are Chicanos, La Mollie and the King of Tears offers unique insight into the pressures of assimilation and limits of legitimacy for Chicanxs and the way these issues impact their encounters with Shakespeare. As a fronterizo, and as the first Chicano professor to earn tenure at Stanford University, Islas was all-too familiar with negotiating the perceived deficits of a bilingual and bicultural identity. Arturo Islas was born and raised in the border city of El Paso, Texas. As a gay Chicano with a long career in academe, Islas had manifold experiences with navigating identity politics.4 Similarly, La Mollie’s narrator, Louie Mendoza, negotiates apprehensions about his imagined place in America – sometimes drawing on encounters with Shakespeare to do so. These encounters lay bare Chicanx apprehensions about linguistic, cultural, and national identity, as access to Shakespeare is almost always governed by access to language and power. Skillfully, Islas offers access from his particular standpoint. At the outset of La Mollie, Louie, a jazz musician residing in San Francisco, addresses the fraught nature of identity politics for a Chicano living in a white world.5 Sitting in an emergency room, Louie narrates his long, winding story to a silent interviewer researching language and accents. Set in 1973 amid the presence of the Kahoutek comet – which Louie’s girlfriend, Mollie, believes portends something sinister – the story centers on Louie’s past and present relationships. We learn that Louie is from El Paso, Texas, and that his daughter Evelina’s suicide compelled him to leave his hometown. Sexist, misogynistic, and hyper-masculine attitudes inform the narrative and appear to stem from deep-seated insecurities about cultural identity. Indeed, early on Louie connects his linguistic identity to perceptions of his inferiority: “la Mollie’s been to college and talks English real good – not like me – and she gets a big kick outta correcting me in front of her big-shot Anglo friends” (Islas 1996: 3–4). Because Mollie comes from an affluent family, Louie must navigate the Pacific Heights social circles to which she belongs. 49

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“La Mollie calls me her Chicanglo,” Louie says, “cause I got El Chuco [a nickname for El Paso, Texas] written all over me but I know lots about old gringo movies so she can show me off in front of her hip pals” – people who sometimes see him as a “dumb Mexican cause of the way [he] talk[s]” (Islas 1996: 19, 22).6 Louie’s apprehensions about linguistic identity hardly emerge solely through his relationship with Mollie, though, as his early experiences in El Paso shape his view of language. Not surprisingly, some of these experiences involve Shakespeare. Contemplating his formative years in El Paso, Louie reflects on his life in the projects and connects it to an early encounter with Shakespeare. Louie says: Like once our English teacher – Miss Leila P. Harper – took us to see a Shakespeare play at the local college. She spent over a month getting us ready to understand tragedy, even when right from the first, after she told us that most everybody dies or goes crazy in a tragedy and there ain’t nothing the characters can do about it, I raised my hand and said, ‘You mean like in the projects, Miss Harper?’ Everybody else laughed, but she don’t say nothing and just looks at me the way them old-maid teachers do and goes right on talking about Hamlet and Macbeth and them other court dudes like they know something we don’t. Islas 1996: 9 Louie’s attempt to connect with Shakespeare – however facetious it may be – is met with silence, and his denigrating comment about Harper illustrates clear resentment for being belittled. Louie relates to the play’s violence because of his lived experiences, but the violence transcends the play and his experiences as it manifests into a power struggle within the classroom where Harper uses Shakespeare as a tool to inhibit certain perspectives. My aim is not to exculpate Louie for his sexist comments but rather to consider how this young man’s attempt to relate to Shakespeare is immediately silenced. Through the lens of intersectionality, we recognize that either feminist or antiracists readings run the risk of rendering both characters as lesser than. As Kimberlé Crenshaw writes, The failure of feminism to interrogate race means that resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of color, and the failure of antiracism to interrogate patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce the subordination of women. Crenshaw 1991: 1252 Recognizing the manner in which disparaging views of gender, class, and race in this episode reinforce oppressive structures is critical. Despite this stifling experience, Louie engages Shakespeare playfully in conversations with his classmates, and as a result of this, he is nicknamed “Chakespeare Louie,” a sobriquet drawing on the assumed inability of native Spanish speakers to pronounce the digraph “sh” correctly (Islas 1996: 10). For Chicanxs, as Gloria Anzaldúa argues, linguistic and ethnic identity are “twin skin,” and thus bilingualism presents a unique set of tensions (Anzaldúa 1987: 81). Chicanxs internalize how language is used against them by “the dominant culture” and use “language differences against each other” (Anzaldúa 1987: 80).7 The “Chakespeare Louie” moniker speaks to this as it keeps Louie in check – he might get Shakespeare, but he’ll never truly belong within the dominant, English-speaking community. This attention to Shakespeare and language in an educational setting calls to mind not only Anzaldúa’s view of “linguistic terrorism” (Anzaldúa 1987: 80–81), but also Pierre Bourdieu’s 50

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exploration of “legitimate language” as a tool of oppression (Bourdieu 1982: 43–65). Bourdieu argues that the educational system “contributes significantly to constituting the dominated uses of language . . . by consecrating the dominant use as the only legitimate one, by the mere fact of inculcating it” (Bourdieu 1982: 60). This “symbolic domination” has real-world consequences for the “dominated classes,” as they are disconnected from forms of power because legitimate language is perceived as beyond their control (Bourdieu 1982: 59–60). As an icon of the English language, Shakespeare exists as a vehicle to define this view of legitimacy and to advance linguistic terrorism. In school, Louie grapples with linguistic terrorism the more he engages with Shakespeare. “Then, just when I get this Shakespeare dude pegged,” Louie says, “Miss Harper throws us another curve and makes us memorize the ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ speech from Macbeth” (Islas 1996: 11). Louie negotiates his understanding of the play with Harper’s instruction, and Shakespeare’s “hard-to-understand” language becomes the focal point (Islas 1996: 11). Louie comments on the verbalization of Shakespeare’s words: “The first time she read that speech to us, I thought she was saying ‘tomato’ with a English accent” (Islas 1996: 11). Harper employs a predictably British articulation, but this move to define what Shakespeare sounds like only makes Shakespeare that much stranger.8 Islas recognizes expected norms about the way Shakespeare should be spoken and pits that against the unique nature of borderland epistemologies. Louie describes listening to Shakespeare performed: Well, there we all were, sitting there in this auditorium watching Macbeth – four English classes from the “disadvantaged” school district plus other kids from the “privileged” side of town – and waiting to hear this famous speech. Then from outta nowhere, this string-bean college guy dressed in long dark-purple underwear and carrying a cardboard spear that was wilting at the top walks up to Macbeth and says in the biggest Texas accent you ever heard, “The Kuh-ween, m’loard, is day-ed.” We laughed so hard I thought we were all, even the girls, gonna pee in our pants. Islas 1996: 11 Two aspects of this experience stand out to me – Louie’s feeling of inferiority and his attention to the play’s deficiencies. Immediately, Louie recognizes his social standing by juxtaposing his “disadvantaged” status against “privileged” audience members, and instead of a sophisticated adaptation, the play leaves much to be desired. Both the audience on Louie’s side and the production are rendered inadequate. Weak stage props, laughable costumes, and the jarring Texas accent all contribute to this inadequacy. But the scene also broaches important issues of belonging and alienation where the borderland experience is concerned. For Louie, and for Islas even, Shakespeare presents a bridge to explore his marginality. Although inadequacy looms large in this episode, it is linguistic legitimacy that takes center stage. For weeks following this production, Louie explains, students “drove Miss Harper crazy” by pretending they were going to ask a serious question “and then announcing in all kindsa different accents that Lady Macbeth had croaked” (Islas 1996: 11–12). Herein, Louie considers how legitimate language – and, in turn, how perceptions of legitimacy – are conceived. Focusing on Dolores Conrad, one of three black students in the school, Louie drives home his point about legitimate access to Shakespeare: Dolores approached “Miss Harper, waited til Leila P. noticed she was there and, making her eyes all wide and bug-like the way she knew white people thought black people always looked, said reals slow, ‘Mizz Macbeth, she dead’ ” (Islas 1996: 12). I sidestep the issue of race for the moment before returning to it later in this chapter. Here, I want to highlight the trajectory of Louie’s early encounters with Shakespeare on the border. 51

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First, Harper introduces Shakespeare by employing a feigned British accent. Next, during the staging of Macbeth, a college student delivers his lines with a pronounced Texas accent. High school students (mostly Chicanxs, we can assume) capitalize on the discrepancy between what they are taught Shakespeare sounds like and what they hear in the theater to push back against their teacher.9 Finally, Louie arrives at Dolores’s playful rendering of Shakespeare – comical insofar as it is meant to amuse her peers, but poignant because it allows her to underscore the racist caricature of black Americans – which illustrates a particular spectrum of the way language is, to borrow from Bourdieu, consecrated by the dominant classes to render those who are dominated (like Louie and Dolores) inconsequential. The key, of course, is that Louie, Dolores, and his peers understand this. The implications behind this experience are not lost on Louie. He says of this episode: Now, whenever I hear anyone ask, ‘Why can’t they learn to speak English?’ specially if they say it with a Texas accent, I think about Macbeth and Miss Harper and wonder how come some accents are okay and some ain’t. You know, I shoulda asked Miss Harper just so’s I could see her squirm. Islas 1996: 12 One’s recognition that she or he might be contributing to a system perpetuating social inequities is enough to make anyone squirm, and this is precisely why the negotiation of Shakespeare’s cultural capital from a Chicanx perspective is so valuable. To be clear, I’m not alluding only to Louie’s light treatment of Shakespeare, but rather, I’m calling explicit attention to the way Islas makes such keen use of Shakespeare as a vehicle to aim directly at attitudes that diminish the perceived legitimacy of Latinxs. As soon as Louie considers the legitimacy/illegitimacy of certain accents, he asks the silent interviewer, “So why’re some better than others, do you think?” (Islas 1996: 12). The obvious answer – if one is willing to squirm in this uncomfortable terrain – is because one is white and the other is not. Through the paradigm of linguistic terrorism, we see that English language competency is not enough for Latinxs to be seen as legitimate U.S. citizens. Dominant views that Latinxs refuse linguistic assimilation persist. However, Leo Chavez debunks this myth through statistical evidence proving that most Latinxs do learn English. He then identifies the true threat: “the real concern should be with the loss of a major resource, languages other than English, during a time of increasing global economic, cultural, and political relationships” (Chavez 2008: 62–63). Bilingualism is an asset, but the inexact command of English often results in the view of Latinx inferiority. Islas is pointedly aware of this dynamic. What I find compelling is that Islas draws attention to the way linguistic identity exists as a barrier between Louie and Shakespeare while simultaneously crafting a novel that masterfully bridges that divide. For example, Islas engages elements of King Lear to structure his novel, and this begins with the imagined influence of the Kahoutek comet. While Mollie finds the comet ominous, Louie remains skeptical. This calls to mind Edmund’s early attention in King Lear to human folly where perceptions of planetary influence on fate are concerned. Ultimately, Edmund says of his social standing: “Fut, I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star of the firmament twinkled on my bastardy” (1.2.115–17).10 Edmund does not have the luxury of laying blame on anything beyond social structures that define him, and Louie’s situation is comparable as he, too, must navigate a world that dictates his inferiority. In a similar fashion, the novel draws on Cordelia to address Louie’s daughter Evelina, who “hardly never blinked or made no sound, even when she cried” (Islas 1996: 13). While Louie feels that Evelina’s tongue is the problem, her mother, Theresa, insists that there is “something wrong 52

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with Evelina’s eyes” (Islas 1996: 15). They even visit a parish “dedicated to Santa Lucia, the patron saint of the blind” (Islas 1996: 15). It is difficult not to recognize here the elements of silence and blindness that run throughout King Lear. Louie says of the impact of his daughter’s condition: That was my real crazy period and I drank all the time. . . . I’d come in maybe three or four in the morning and see her lying there under the covers, her face so quiet, her mouth so soft, and I couldn’t even undo the buttons of my shirt. Islas 1996: 15 Lear’s final words, of course, focus on Cordelia’s voice, which he defines as “soft,” and on her mouth: “Pray you, undo this button. . . . Do you see this? Look, her lips,/Look there. Look there!” (5.3.246, 285–87). The struggle to unbutton oneself – to tend to the mundane in the presence of a silent daughter – bears tragic weight for these two men. Islas does not offer an updated version of King Lear, but instead, he draws on the energies of Shakespeare to infuse Louie’s narrative with cultural capital that readers will likely find meaningful, if not legitimate.11 Near its closing, La Mollie explicitly attends to King Lear as Louie worries about Mollie’s fate in that emergency room. Recognizing that Mollie might meet a tragic end like Cordelia, Louie says of Lear, the “King of Tears”: Then that old man Lear’s gonna have to defend his throne cause I’m gonna cry so much that all the people’ll be wanting to anoint me, whatever Miss Harper’d say to dissuade em. But you don’t wanna hear about how much I can cry, do you? You want us Chicanos to be tough little Mexicans that got calluses on our scars and come outta the barrio with steel knuckles thinking the world’s a prize fight, right? That ain’t how it is, man. Hurt’s hurt, I don’t care what you call it or how you say it. Islas 1996: 155–56 To the end, Louie feels the weight of Harper’s view of his illegitimacy. Rather remarkably, Islas connects Harper and Mollie through their eye color, and – as one might assume – their eyes are “so blue they poke holes right through you” (Islas 1996: 156). One wonders how much more legitimate he feels, if at all, seeing himself in Mollie’s blue eyes. He could never be anointed as anything beyond the way he, as a Chicano, is seen. He makes this clear to the reader in suggesting that his capability for compassion deviates from the societal view of Chicanxs, and this is directly aligned to Cheech’s understanding that most people assume gang fights define the Chicanx experience. If this were simply an unfolding narrative in a novel, it would be one thing, but the truth is that Islas’s own experiences in publishing meant confronting similarly awful stereotypes. Paul Skenazy writes of Islas’s early letters of rejection from New York publishers: His rejection letters read like a course in Anglo stereotypes of Mexican Americans: There is not enough barrio life or violence in the novel; there is no reading public to buy the work of a Mexican American; the book lacks the voice of protest and political rage that should be a part of any work from a so-called minority population. Skenazy 1996: 170 Through La Mollie, Islas confronts these racist attitudes by drawing brilliantly on language that the oppressor finds valuable in a deliberate effort to fracture attitudes and assumptions about those who so often do not have a voice within that world. 53

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With Islas’s commitment to addressing social inequalities in mind, I return to the issue of race that I sidestepped above. Louie says of Dolores: “She was one of the three black students in the whole school and very respected by any of the cholas who tried to mess with her. In fact, the cholas made her an honorary member of their club – the Darling Dears – after her” encounter with Harper (Islas 1996: 12). On the surface, the inclusion of a black peer into a Chicanx club (i.e. gang) isn’t so momentous, but Louie draws attention to the barriers of interracial friendships and relationships. After Dolores delivers her “Mizz Macbeth” line, Louie says: I almost died laughing and I gave Dolores a big smile and wink when she passed by my desk on the way back to hers. I felt like giving her a big hug, too, but I didn’t cause I knew what the guys would do to me if I did. Islas 1996: 12 Racial divisions in the U.S. run deep, and this is no different in la frontera. However, given that Islas is taking to task the way Shakespeare is taught, and the way Shakespeare might fail to resonate with students of color, I find this attention to racial division – however fleeting – quite suggestive. How is it that the shared experience of feeling illegitimate in that moment fails to open the door to a legitimate connection between brown and black? Islas does not take up this question, but the short film that I turn to now certainly does. Focusing on an interracial relationship between a black man and a Latina, Color Blind draws on Romeo and Juliet not only to engage divisiveness but also to interrogate racist attitudes among oppressed groups that often share similar apprehensions about belonging. Attending to these tensions affords an opportunity to consider how the desire to approximate whiteness, a perceived marker of legitimacy, often magnifies such apprehensions, and also uncovers racial divisions among people of color.

Bridging the black/brown divide In his effort to locate through the shared experiences of blacks and Latinxs solidarity with implications for social justice, Márquez notes the tendency not only for “African Americans but all groups of color” to isolate themselves (2016: 59). “Latino/as are also guilty of this,” Márquez writes, “especially in their seemingly unending quest to access whiteness” (Márquez 2016: 59). Given pressures of assimilation, pervasive narratives that vilify Latinxs, consistent whitewashing in Hollywood, and the dominance of whiteness in popular culture, it is hardly surprising that Latinxs feel that belonging means accessing whiteness. The issue of assimilation also influences how Latinxs engage Shakespeare, because appropriations that deviate from established ideas about his language and whiteness often lead to impressions of a less authentic Shakespeare and, indeed, less legitimate consumers of his work. Through this “quest to access whiteness,” Latinxs eschew the possibility of creating a community of resistance to oppressive structures that devalue their worth, and this not only broadens the critical divide between black and brown but magnifies, at every turn, the unbearable weight of alienation. Indeed, it’s enough to make my brown eyes blue. Color Blind addresses the brown/black divide through the relationship between John (a black, teenage Romeo) and Desiree (a Latina, teenage Juliet), and it scrutinizes the insularity, insecurity, and racist tendencies within the Latinx community.12 The film explores racial boundaries by drawing on Shakespeare’s cultural capital. The adaptation opens with Desiree’s sister, Tillie, on her cell phone: “Yeah mom, she’s here. Uh huh. Esta con el. [She’s with him]” (Color Blind). The influence of the unseen Latina matriarch is evident and conveys the generational discrepancy in 54

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views of interracial relationships. In direct opposition to this closemindedness, the young lovers, John and Desiree, banter playfully when they first appear. John says that he has written “something” for Desiree: “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?/It is the East, and Desiree is the sun” (Color Blind). He goes on to read portions of Romeo’s passage peppered with references to Desiree’s reproachful mother. While the young lovers kiss, the imposing figure of Tillie appears in the background. The ensuing confrontation reveals not only intolerance and racism, but also the feeling of Latinx inferiority. In vague terms, Tillie suggests that Desiree’s involvement with John will mar her success: “I can’t stand to watch you throw your life away. You can’t be with someone like him right now” (Color Blind). When Desiree challenges this, Tillie says, “You have your whole life ahead of you. Do you really want to end up working in the floristeria [florist’s] your whole life?” (Color Blind). John, Tillie believes, is an obstacle to Desiree’s upward social mobility. When John asks Desiree if something is wrong, Tillie answers, “Yes, there’s something wrong, boy! . . . Don’t you have enough problems of your own without ruining other people’s lives?” (Color Blind). Tillie employs the racist title “boy” and, in disgust, tells Desiree, “Estas acqui besandote con un negro asqueroso [Here you are kissing a filthy black man].” John responds, “Hold up. Who are you calling a dirty, black, negro? Listen, yo amo as esta mujer. [I love this woman.] . . . Love ain’t got no color” (Color Blind). Tillie’s use of Spanish is meant to exclude John, but his bilingualism allows him access to her views. The film moves away from its appropriation of Shakespeare as the cultural and racial significance of these characters is brought to the center. In a moment of frankness, Tillie says, “Dez, we’re Hispanic. People treat us like nothing. But you have a chance to do something, to break out of that stereotype. He’s a black man, Dez” (Color Blind). Once again, her vagueness forces the viewer to interpret specifics. What is that stereotype? How does a relationship with a black man make that situation worse? If a black man hinders movement toward being “something,” would a relationship with a white man suggest the opposite? The video offers the full weight of Latinx cultural identity in the U.S. while keeping things honest by showing the would-be victim of bigotry and racism exhibiting explicit racism. Pressed to explain her attraction to John, Desiree focuses on the idea of security. She says that he “makes [her] happy . . . he makes [her] feel safe” (Color Blind). Although the U.S. is home to many Latinxs, it is a home that fails to tender clear stability. If this is true for Latinxs, it is certainly germane to the black experience in America. For this Latina, security is found in the community that John offers, and the comfort behind this community is akin to the comforting idea of “young love” in Romeo and Juliet; however, we would be hard pressed to ignore the violent reality in the world of the play and the arresting level of racism in this adaptation. In the climactic moment, Tillie is asked to consider John’s perspective. Desiree says to John, “Make her see what I see” (Color Blind). John stands atop a picnic table to recite Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. Shakespeare gives way to Dr. King, but – as in the case with Islas – linguistic identity is critical. John code-switches, and he demonstrates his desire for the coalescence of race, language, and cultural identity. His effort to compel Tillie to see what he sees relies not only on the energies of the Civil Rights Movement, but also on crossing linguistic borders. Despite this arrival at the predictable call for equality, xenophobia and racism are hardly effaced. Tillie’s body language suggests she is uninspired, even as the young couple embraces in seeming happiness. The film deviates from Romeo and Juliet through its happy ending but also insofar as the acrimonious world around the couple remains in place without any indication of ensuing change. Like La Mollie, Color Blind borrows from Shakespeare to explore pressures of assimilation for U.S. Latinxs. Unlike La Mollie, though, it fails to engage the nuances that Shakespeare’s work 55

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affords. For example, Islas not only draws on Romeo and Juliet in his epigraph, but he also engages the play meaningfully in his exploration of Harper’s resentful nature and eventual suicide – aspects of the novel that stem beyond the scope of this chapter. Such appropriation of Shakespeare, however, is not the point of this film. Color Blind draws on this quintessential love story to frame the young interracial couple, but it is the film’s attention to the black/brown divide that gives it teeth. One wonders how a U.S. Latina like Tillie – someone who is treated like “nothing” – fails to empathize with a black man who encounters similar obstacles to belonging. The film’s attention to the uneasy nature of assimilation for Latinxs brings to mind Anzal­ dúa’s recognition of the shared oppression that all people of color in the U.S. face. As Anzaldúa writes, “Chicanos and other people of color suffer economically for not acculturating. This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for a psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity” (Anzaldúa 1987: 85). This is not to suggest that all people of color experience identical forms of oppression. To be certain, one must be attuned to the distinct historical circumstances, oppressive measures, and abuses that different people of color have faced over time (Márquez 2016: 48–54). Despite such differences, though, it is critical to underscore the “psychological conflict” that results from pressures of assimilation. For his part, Márquez considers this conflict and the “collisions between global processes and local histories that enable a shared wariness of expendability and exploitability” for “African Americans and Latinos/as” to theorize a different kind of hybridity. Márquez writes: In this imaginative rather than embodied or corporeal example of race mixture, hybridity or hybrid political cultures are thus a central component of decolonial ethics, an alternative form of relation to the world, to one another, to our increasingly diverse and rapidly changing home spaces. Márquez 2016: 48 This alternative allows for intersectional understandings of the varied experiences of people of color, and it creates a space for inclusion and resistance to oppressive forces that often define these experiences.13 In these closing moments, then, I want to explore briefly the value of taking up Márquez’s call to consider how hybrid political cultures, through solidarity, can unsettle and destabilize “the identitarian silos and colonial politics of recognition” (Márquez 2016: 48). We must find common ground for a community that takes to task the forces that make such “colonial politics” possible. Elsewhere, I have explored the invaluable impact that early modern race studies has on the way we might employ ethnic studies in our field, especially where issues of diversification and inclusivity are concerned (Espinosa 2016). Ethnic studies advances the possibility of fostering such inclusivity, and the act of looking toward the intersections of Shakespeare and Latinx culture – as this chapter does – brings with it an opportunity to expand our archives and the circle of critics and criticism attending to politics of belonging. Setting a 2025 benchmark to measure “progress toward establishing the field of early modern race studies with a stronger foundation through a wide spectrum of social issues, a broader scholarly framework, a larger academic audience, and a deeper public engagement,” Peter Erickson and Kim Hall trace in the phases of early modern race studies dispersed methodologies without clear coordination (Erickson and Hall 2016: 4). This dispersal “creates a loss of concentrated collective energy and, in particular, a specific curtailment or abandonment of political focus” (Erickson and Hall 2016: 4). The key, they suggest, is a unified front, one that resists speaking “only the language of our dominant culture” (Erickson and Hall 2016: 13). They argue that the 56

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“voices of people of color,” however strange they might sound, should be embraced (Erickson and Hall 2016: 13). My aim in this chapter was not only to take up Erickson and Hall’s call, but also to draw attention to works that offer – with disparate levels of sophistication, and through different mediums – a glimpse into the way Latinx culture absorbs, adapts, and interprets Shakespeare. Certainly, it isn’t a voice that we, in our field, might be readily familiar with hearing and, for many, even worth taking seriously. The truth is that listening is worthwhile, as the changing demographic of the U.S. suggests that this perspective will remain, proliferate, and impact our understanding of Shakespeare. To quote (and absorb, adapt, and interpret) Cheech, “Mexican Americans don’t like to just get into gang fights/They like flowers, and music, and white [guys named Shakespeare], too.”

Notes 1 Throughout this chapter, I use the terms “Latinx” and “Chicanx” as identifiers for people of Latin American origin and descendants of the U.S. Mexico borderlands, respectively. The use of “x” in these terms, as opposed to “a/o” or “@,” affords gender-neutral designations that are inclusive of people who identify as transgender or queer. While I find value in this particular intervention surrounding these markers of identity, I am aware that others take issue with the use of “x” for an array of reasons. For more on the politics surrounding the uses of “x,” see Catalina M. de Onís (2017). 2 For sustained attention to this issue, see Charles Ramírez Berg (2002). 3 While this is true for film, there is a rich intersection between Shakespeare and Latinidad in theater, and Carla Della Gatta (2016) thoughtfully attends to this tradition. 4 For an engaging biography of Islas’s life, see Frederick Aldama (2005). 5 For more on the way the novel explores hybridity and identity politics, see Megan Obourn (2008). 6 “El Chuco” is a nickname for El Paso, Texas, and it is a diminutive of the term, “Pachuco” – a Chicano subculture associated with zoot suits and gangs that originated in El Paso. 7 On the issue of navigating language amid structures of oppression that favor English, see Carola SuárezOrozco and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco (2001: 135–36). 8 See Ayanna Thompson for attention to the manner in which perceptions of the way Shakespeare should sound often function to estrange actors of color (2011: 174). For a Latino actor’s candid exploration of his experiences with this particular issue, see Antonio Ocampo-Guzman (2006). 9 El Paso, Texas has a Latinx population of approximately 80%. 10 All references to Shakespeare are taken from the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare (Shakespeare 2016). 11 For a sharp study of the negotiation of Shakespeare’s cultural capital in appropriations of his work, see Christy Desmet (2008). 12 This film was originally posted on YouTube, but it has since been removed. Color Blind can now be found on BMETV.net. For attention to the unique promise and problematic nature of Shakespeare on YouTube, see Ayanna Thompson (2010), Stephen O’Neill (2014), and Espinosa (2017). 13 For sustained attention to the promise behind cross-racial coalitions, see Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres (2009).

References Aldama, Frederick Luis. 2005. Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1982. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chavez, Leo R. 2008. The Latino Threat: Constructing Citizens, Immigrants, and the Nation, 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cheech and Chong: Up in Smoke. 1978. Dir. Lou Adler. Perf. Cheech Marin, Tommy Chong. Paramount Pictures. Color Blind (a Romeo and Juliet Story). BMETV. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017, www.bmetv.net/video/1198/ color-blind-a-romeo-juliet-story

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Ruben Espinosa Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43.6: 1241–99. DOI: 129.108.9.184 de Onís, Catalina. 2017. “What’s in an ‘x’? An Exchange about the Politics of ‘Latinx.’ ” Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures 1.2: 78–91. DOI: 70.120.235.90. Della Gatta, Carla. 2016. “From Westside Story to Hamlet, Prince of Cuba: Shakespeare and Latinidad in the United States.” Shakespeare Studies 44: 151–56. Desmet, Christy. 2008. “Paying Attention in Shakespeare Parody: From Tom Stoppard to YouTube.” Shakespeare Survey 61: 227–38. DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9780521898881.017 Erickson, Peter, and Kim Hall. 2016. “A New Scholarly Song.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1: 1–13. DOI: 10.1353/shq. 2016.0008. Espinosa, Ruben. 2017. “Beyond The Tempest: Language, Legitimacy, and La Frontera.” In The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture. Eds. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes. New York: Palgrave. 41–61. ———. 2016. “Diversifying Shakespeare.” Literature Compass 13.2: 58–68. https//doi.org/10.1111/lic3. 12303. Guinier, Lani, and Gerald Torres. 2009. The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Islas, Arturo. 1996. La Mollie and the King of Tears. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Márquez, John D. 2016. “Juan Crow: Progressive Mutations of the Black-White Binary.” In Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader. Eds. Nada Elia, et al. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 43–62. Obourn, Megan. 2008. “Hybridity, Identity, and Representation in La Mollie and the King of Tears.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 80.1: 141–66. DOI: 10.1215/ 00029831–2007–065. Ocampo-Guzman, Antonio. 2006. “My Own Private Shakespeare; or, Am I Deluding Myself?” In Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance. Ed. Ayanna Thompson. New York: Routledge. 125–36. O’Neill, Stephen. 2014. Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard. London: Bloomsbury. Ramírez Berg, Charles. 2002. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Romeo + Juliet. 1996. Dir. Baz Luhrmann. Perf. Leo DiCaprio, Claire Danes. Bazmark/Twentieth-Century Fox. Shakespeare, William. 2016. The Norton Shakespeare. 3rd ed. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York: W.W. Norton. Skenazy, Paul. 1996.“Afterword: The Long Walk Home.” In La Mollie and the King of Tears. Ed. Arturo Islas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 167–98. Suárez-Orozco, Carola, and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco. 2001. Children of Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Ayanna. 2011. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. “Unmooring the Moor: Researching and Teaching on YouTube.” Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3: 337–56. DOI: 10.1353/shq.2010.0001.

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5 “TO APPROPRIATE THESE WHITE CENTURIES” James Baldwin’s race conscious Shakespeare Jason Demeter

Introduction: “a kind of bastard of the West” In an essay written in 1952, just before the publication of his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin describes his frustration, as a young African American writer, at being relegated by editors to assignments reviewing books about American race relations (1998a: 5). Unsatisfied with work he finds reductive, repetitive, and uninspiring, Baldwin writes, [i]t is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself . . . with nothing to be articulate about. (“You taught me language,” says Caliban to Prospero, “and my profit on’t is I know how to curse). The Tempest, 1.2.366–7, quoted in Baldwin 1998a: 7 Of course, Baldwin’s use of The Tempest to think through the consequences of Western colonialism is far from unprecedented. In doing so, he aligns himself with twentieth-century commentators such as Octave Mannoni (1990), Frantz Fanon (2008), Aimé Césaire (2002), and Roberto Fernández Retamar (1989), each of whom references Shakespeare’s late romance in their discussions of European imperialism. What makes Baldwin’s approach to the play, and to Shakespeare, distinct, however, is his self-conscious insistence on coming to the poet and his body of work from the avowed position of a cultural outsider. As a black writer living in twentieth-century America, Baldwin’s dialogic appropriation works actively to emphasize a sense of alienation that accompanies his encounters with Shakespeare. In keeping with broader tendencies within Baldwin’s non-fiction, the position he adopts towards the poet is to place his own race and identity in the foreground in full recognition of the ways in which his position as an African American inevitably informs his relationship with Shakespeare, his work, and his cultural legacy. In this way, Baldwin makes use of what can be considered a race conscious appropriative strategy. As Lawrie Balfour has observed, Baldwin’s essays are characterized generally by an overriding sense of race consciousness, a term she uses to describe the writer’s broad insistence on the centrality of race in American life and his attendant refusal to downplay the importance of racial identity in discussions of politics, culture, and aesthetics (2017: 20). Rather than framing Shakespeare typically as a transcendent avatar of shared human values and aspirations, then, Baldwin’s race conscious appraisal of Shakespeare is largely as a proxy for a Western cultural 59

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cannon to which he is denied full access on racial grounds. He makes this point clear as the essay continues: The most crucial time in my . . . development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in a subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, [and] Rembrandt . . . a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use – I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine – I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in the scheme – otherwise I would have no place in the scheme. 1998a: 8 In claiming a position outside the cultural margins, Baldwin laments the ways that a history of slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy has robbed him of the language and culture of his African ancestors. Yet given his literary inclinations and linguistic limitations, he sees no option but to make use of the tools at hand. As the above passage suggests, though this necessary concession is accompanied by a profound sense of loss for what might have been, Baldwin is simultaneously cognizant of the ways in which his cultural marginalization might be put to productive use in carving out a unique space from which to perceive, understand, and write about his world. Describing his ambivalence toward his position, Baldwin maintains that: “finally . . . the most difficult (and rewarding) thing in my life is that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some sort of truce with this reality” (1998a: 6). And, as his essay so earnestly suggests, part of this reckoning involves coming to terms with the apparent contradictions and tensions occasioned by the necessity of operating within a cultural and linguistic field that has been employed historically in the service of exclusion and white supremacy. In what follows, I consider Baldwin’s long and complicated relationship with Shakespeare over the course of several moments in his decades-long career. I examine the dynamics of his appropriative relationship with Shakespeare’s work and cultural legacy with an eye toward what Baldwin’s race conscious epistemology has to reveal about the poet’s broader import and racial signification within twentieth-century American culture and beyond. I argue that – far from the culturally transcendent universal poet prominent in various myths that continue to circulate within the overlapping spheres of popular, theatrical, filmic, literary, and academic culture – for Baldwin, Shakespeare signifies just the opposite, as encounters with the Bard’s work and image function to provoke a sense of discomfort, alienation, and loss. Informed by the energies and ideologies of the African American civil rights and Black Power movements, Baldwin’s Shakespearean appropriations highlight ways in which the poet’s work often fails to embody collective human values. Baldwin makes occasional use of Shakespeare’s plots, characters, and language as objects of narrative and rhetorical plunder, yet he does so always with a sense of unease and with an eye toward the poet’s perceived aura of racial exclusion. These tensions between Shakespeare’s appropriative utility and his perceived racial exclusivity remain unresolved in Baldwin’s writing, and his engagements with Shakespeare function as a potent illustration of how a prominent African American writer negotiated his often-vexed relationship with the language and literary traditions of his historical oppressors. 60

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With that said, it is worth noting from the outset that Baldwin’s work is far from singular among twentieth-century African American writers in voicing a distinct apprehension regarding Shakespeare; indeed, the appropriative examples considered herein are somewhat typical of broader tensions that can be perceived within the work of a good number of prominent twentiethcentury African American writers. W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), LeRoi Jones’s (Amiri Baraka’s) Dutchman and The Slave (1964), Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982) and Mama Day (1988), and August Wilson’s essay “The Ground on Which I Stand” (1996) are but a few examples of prominent texts by twentieth-century African American authors that grapple in distinct ways with Shakespeare’s work and legacy from a race conscious perspective. Such revisions and reconsiderations of Shakespeare from the cultural margins are often imbued with a distinct sense of generative potential, in which the perceived incommensurability between the source of the appropriated text and the identity of the appropriator work in tandem to create novel and unexpected meanings. As Peter Erickson notes of this potentially productive relationship, “in the hands of contemporary writers and visual artists, Shakespearean allusion relocates Shakespeare in a new environment that shifts, twists, torques, wrenches, and alters the meaning of his words” (2007: viii). Yet while each of the aforementioned texts has much to reveal about the ways that an artist’s racial identity might inform his or her relationship with Western and American culture, a broad consideration of Baldwin’s entanglements with Shakespeare is particularly timely. Though we have recently observed the thirtieth anniversary of his passing, Baldwin’s work is arguably just as relevant today as it was when he was writing. Indeed, in a contemporary climate that has witnessed increasing racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes, the ascension of the nation’s first black president and the backlash thereto, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the re-emergence of an ugly strain of white nationalism under the banner of the so-called alt-right, it is easy to see that Baldwin’s legacy as a writer and thinker is as secure today as ever. As Susan J. McWilliams observes, we live in an age in which “college students across the United States have . . . organized protests and occupied building and issued demands for greater racial diversity, equality, and sensitivity on their campuses” (2017: 1). Significantly, she notes, “these students are reading Baldwin, quoting Baldwin, [and] rediscovering Baldwin” (1). In short, argues McWilliams, we are living today in what can only be considered “a Baldwin moment” (1). As the wider culture continues to plumb Baldwin’s work and legacy for fresh insights into the tumult of our current age, the aims of the analysis that follows are similar, as we consider the ways Baldwin’s race conscious approach to Shakespeare can help us to apprehend better the complex and evershifting interplay between tradition, culture, language, and identity in today’s world.

Race consciousness: Baldwin, Du Bois, and the gift of second sight In a recent essay exploring the politics of Baldwin’s non-fiction, Lawrie Balfour describes the ways the writer’s essays are suffused with a distinct sense of “race consciousness,” a term with both descriptive and normative connotations Balfour employs to describe “the ways in which ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ are noticed (or not noticed)” (2017: 20). Observing how Baldwin’s work effectively “rejects the possibility of bracketing racial identity,” Balfour demonstrates Baldwin’s “insist[ence] . . . that appeals to race-blindness not only fail as a solution to racial inequalities but also condemn those to silence whose race gets noticed” (19). By “[p]robing the sources of race consciousness and tracing its effects,” she argues, “Baldwin reveals how even the most enlightened citizens are affected by life in a democratic society in which the persistence of racial hierarchy is simultaneously condemned and taken for granted” (20). It is precisely this strain of race conscious thinking that makes Baldwin’s Shakespearean appropriations so illuminating, as 61

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his unrelenting impulse to make race and its effects legible helps illuminate the cultural, ideological, and racial specificity that has long informed Shakespeare’s legacy in the West. Put simply, Baldwin’s perceptions of himself as an outsider and a culturally marginal figure allow him to access truths about race and identity that the white majority culture often cannot perceive. Of course, notions that African American individuals have special insight into the functionality of American power have an intellectual history that precedes Baldwin. Balfour makes this point specifically, observing the ways that Baldwin’s race conscious perspective draws upon similar ideological tenets as those underpinning W.E.B. Du Bois’s oft-cited notion of double consciousness. For Du Bois, African American identity is characterized by a distinct and elemental sense of division. “It is a peculiar sensation,” he writes, “this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (1986: 364). Du Bois is interested particularly in the psychic difficulties this presents, noting that “[o]ne ever feels his two-ness [as] an American [and] a Negro” (364). While Baldwin is largely silent on Du Boisian double consciousness as such, Balfour’s analysis demonstrates clearly how both writers similarly “exploit . . . the concept of twoness, discrediting dreams of racial transcendence and, at the same time, undermin[e] claims to racial authenticity” (2017: 20–21). Crucially, while similarly acknowledging the difficulties of reconciling “two warring ideas in one dark body,” Du Bois’s formulation also prefigures Baldwin in recognizing the epistemological advantages that are conferred by such a divided sense of identity (1986: 364–65). As Balfour notes, both Baldwin and Du Bois recognize the ways in which this persistent awareness of race and its cultural implications can function as both “a gift and a burden” (2017: 22). The same circumstances that foster a culture in which African Americans are afforded, in Du Bois’s formulation, “no true self-consciousness” have also “gifted [them] with second sight in this American world (1986: 364). And it is precisely from this vantage that Baldwin approaches Shakespeare. While he makes appropriative use of Shakespeare in his work and grapples with his legacy and significance in a number of essays, Baldwin’s second sight – his race conscious epistemology – leads to textual encounters with Shakespeare that are fraught with discomfort, the Bard acting as a persistent reminder of Baldwin’s perception that he exists forever on the outside of the cultural and linguistic milieu into which he was born.

“The rage of the disesteemed”: against Shakespearean universalism “Stranger in the Village,” another of Baldwin’s early nonfiction pieces, provides a vivid illustration of the perceived dichotomy between the writer’s identity as a black man and the Western cultural milieu to which Shakespeare belongs. Here, Baldwin describes his experiences in a remote Swiss village in the Bernese Alps, where he retreated over the winter of 1951–52 to complete work on Go Tell It on the Mountain. Narrated in a tone of bemused detachment, Baldwin’s account recalls how the local villagers, most of whom had never seen a black person, reacted to his appearance: All of the physical characteristics of the Negro, which had caused me, in America, a very different and almost forgotten pain were nothing less than miraculous – or infernal – in the eyes of the village people. . . . If I sat in the sun for more than five minutes, some daring creature was certain to come along and gingerly put his fingers in my hair . . . or put his hand on my hand, astonished that the color did not rub off. In all of this . . . there was certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder. 1998b: 119 62

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Feeling disaffected, he reflects upon the irony of his situation. Despite being well-read, welltraveled, and a native of cosmopolitan New York, these inhabitants of a remote, isolated mountain village can presume access to the legacy and monuments of Western culture in a way Baldwin feels that he cannot. “This village . . . is the west,” he writes (121). “These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they don’t know it,” all of which leads him back to Shakespeare. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, [and] Michelangelo. . . . Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory – but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive. 121 With an uncomfortable clarity, Baldwin’s assertions here act as a pointed broadside to the myth of the universal Shakespeare. From his position as a young American black man living in the immediate postwar era, Baldwin is confident that Shakespeare and the other avatars of white, Western culture he cites are both inaccessible to him and insufficient in speaking to his lived experiences. Most importantly, the art created by the Western high-cultural pantheon lacks what Baldwin terms “the rage of the disesteemed” (1998b: 121). “Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence,” he explains” (121); “this is a fact which . . . representatives of the Herrenvolk, having never felt this rage and being unable to imagine it, quite fail to understand” (121). A clear refutation of universalist sentiment, this is a theme to which Baldwin returns in “This Nettle, Danger . . .,” an essay written almost ten years later that represents the writer’s most detailed reflection on his vexed appropriative relationship with Shakespeare. The title of Baldwin’s essay is taken from a long soliloquy by Hotspur in Henry IV, Part I, in which Henry Percy imagines rebuking another would-be rebel for his relative cowardice. Responding to a letter warning him of the danger of his plotting against the crown, Percy argues that inaction would be a more dangerous course, contending that “out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety” (2.3.8–9).1 While the title’s relevance to Baldwin’s essay is opaque, it is likely that the reference is, again, reflective of the paradox occasioned when an individual from a traditionally marginalized culture uses the language and culture of the oppressor for subversive purposes – that is, there is danger in so doing, but perhaps the greater danger is to be silent. The essay opens with a pointed defense of the particular over the universal, as Baldwin argues that “[a] great writer operates as an unimpeachable witness to one’s own experience” (1998c: 687, emphasis added). This sentiment stands in apparent contrast to the doctrine of the Shakespearean universal, which works actively to minimize historical and cultural particulars in favor of the cultivation of an imagined transcendental perspective existing outside of time, circumstance, and identity. In the words of Kiernan Ryan, a recent proponent of universality: “[i]t’s precisely the profound commitment of Shakespeare’s drama to the emancipation of humanity that enables it to dramatize his age from the imaginative standpoint in the transfigured future human beings are still struggling to create” (2015: xiv). “What is universal about Shakespeare’s drama is not the plights and fates of his characters,” claims Ryan, “but the perspective from which they are depicted and from which we are invited to view them” (xiv). And here it is useful to note that this imagined future is nevertheless being conjured through the textual corpus of a white, sixteenth-century poet and his numerous editors and collaborators (or, perhaps more accurately, within the mind of a twenty-first-century scholar reflecting on the textual corpus of a white, sixteenth-century poet and his collaborators). What claims of universality often 63

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neglect to consider are the social dynamics of power and oppression. To assert that a text, an idea, or an aesthetic principle is universal is necessarily to project one’s perspective onto that of an unknown and unknowable group of others. And this we would do well to avoid, for as Iris Marion Young argues: [t]he social fact of structural privilege and oppression . . . create the possibility of falsifying projection. Damaging stereotypes and ideologies often mediate . . . relations between men and women, between Christians and Muslims, between European Americans and African Americans. These ideologies and images often function to legitimate the privileges of the privileged groups and to undermine the self-respect of those in oppressed groups. 1997: 48 With this in mind, it seems clear that the doctrine of Shakespearean universalism errs in its utopian assumption of a “generic point of view that cuts across the distinctions and divisions forged by history, nationality, race, religion, language, class, gender, and sexuality” (Ryan 2015: 13). As much as we might wish, there is, in truth, no such thing as a generic point of view, as individuals necessarily adopt views, values, and perspectives based on their identities and lived experiences. As Young cautions, “when members of privileged groups imaginatively try to represent to themselves the perspective of members of oppressed groups, too often those representations carry projections and fantasies through which the privileged reinforce a complementary image of themselves” (1997: 48). In other words, what is posited as universal is all too frequently just a recapitulation of the values of the dominant culture itself. While Baldwin’s race conscious approach to Shakespeare works actively to refute the universal qualities that have been claimed on Shakespeare’s behalf, this is not to suggest that he was averse to making use of the poet’s work or that he found no value therein. The very title of his essay suggests just the opposite. Indeed, his ambivalent valuation of Shakespeare is made even clearer by the revised title under which an abbreviated form of the essay was published just a few short months later: “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare.” While his preference for the particular over the universal remains intact, Baldwin seems at this point in his development to perceive an access to Shakespeare that is missing from earlier essays. Early in the piece, which was written in the weeks immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Baldwin wonders what insights Shakespeare might have brought to this present-day tragedy. “One can imagine, for example, that a Shakespeare, writing of the recent bloody events in Texas, would give a very different version of those events from that which is presently evolving” (2011: 687). For Baldwin, the imagined difference in Shakespeare’s perspective is not due to the poet’s unique access to humanity’s transcendent potential or his singular ability to envision a universal set of human values that we as a species have yet to come to embody. Quite the contrary: what Shakespeare knows is “what all artists know. That evil comes into the world by means of some vast, inexplicable and probably ineradicable human fault” (687).“The evil is ours,” he claims,“and we help to feed it by failing so often in our private lives to deal with out private truth – our own experience” (687). Baldwin’s perspective here is essentially a photonegative of the contemporary universalist view. While Ryan envisions Shakespeare speaking from “the anticipated future perspective of a genuinely universal human community no longer crippled by division and domination” (2015: 11), Baldwin sees the opposite: Shakespeare’s deep cognizance of humanity’s intractable evil. In some ways, this reads itself like an affirmation of the Shakespearean universal.

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What distinguishes Baldwin’s perspective from that of the universalists, however, is his insistence that such knowledge is hardly unique to Shakespeare but is rather one shared by “all artists” (2011: 687). The implications here are profound, because it allows Baldwin to celebrate Shakespeare for his writerly craft and for the aspects of his work in which he finds value, while avoiding bardolatrous assumptions that have so often been used to malign, marginalize, impress, and oppress. From Baldwin’s perspective, to knock Shakespeare off his pedestal is in no way to diminish his artistry. Indeed, the poet’s strengths, like those of all artists, comes from his ability to “bear witness” (691). “The people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them. That is why he is called a poet,” he concludes (691). Readers and audiences owe no inherent fealty to Shakespeare, claims Baldwin, except that which is earned by way of the poet’s ability to speak to them and their particular circumstances. And it is illustrative, finally, to consider what Baldwin himself finds most useful in Shakespeare’s work. He writes: I was listening very hard to jazz and hoping, one day, to translate it into language. Shakespeare’s bawdiness became very important to me since bawdiness was one of the elements of jazz and revealed a tremendous . . . respect for the body . . . which Americans have mostly lost and which I had experienced only among Negroes. 691 Baldwin’s formulation here challenges notions of the Shakespearean universal in its valuation of the poet’s deviation from what, for Baldwin, is the relative prudishness of white American literary culture. Shakespeare is worthy not because of the universal truths he portrays or embodies but because of the singularity and difference of his perspective. And while it is certain that Baldwin is neither the first nor final commenter to find value in Shakespeare’s celebration of raw corporality, his utilitarian approach is instructive in that it takes from the poet only what he finds useful, that which speaks to him in light of his position as a black man living in twentiethcentury America, and is free to disregard that which does not. Shakespeare’s power lies not in what he gives to us, but rather in what we take from him. Baldwin writes finally that “the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him . . . [but rather] he is responsible to them” (691). Baldwin’s formulation here reverses the polarity of the typical universalist argument, which implies that if an individual fails to connect with Shakespeare, then the fault is their own. Asserting the crucial importance of identity and experience, Baldwin contends that an artist must meet the people where they stand and that his or her greatness and achievement are a function of the degree to which their work connects with “the lives of the people” (691).

“. . . Not because they had read the play”: Shakespeare and alienation in If Beale Street Could Talk While the aforementioned essays are illustrative of what Shakespeare and his legacy represent for Baldwin, elements of his race conscious approach to the Bard are present as well in his fiction. Consider, for example, two fleeting references to Romeo and Juliet that occur in Baldwin’s fifth novel, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). Narrated primarily from the point of view of Tish, a nineteen-year-old black woman who has just discovered herself pregnant by her boyfriend Fonny, who is imprisoned and awaiting trial for a sexual assault he did not commit, the novel is a story of two young lovers and the obstacles they face. Early on, we learn that Tish and Fonny have grown up together as neighbors on the same Harlem street, having met when she was six and he was nine. As they mature, the pair evolve from being enemies to friends and, eventually,

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to lovers. Early in the narrative, Tish recalls what she considers later to have been their “first date” (1974: 26): Fonny asked me, one Saturday, if I could come to church with him in the morning and I said, Yes, though we were Baptists and weren’t supposed to go to a Sanctified church. But, by this time, everybody knew that Fonny and I were friends, it was just simply a fact. At school, and all up and down the block, they called us Romeo and Juliet, though this is not because they read the play. 17–18 Most salient about this glancing reference to the star-crossed lovers is the novel’s recognition of the perceived incommensurability of Shakespeare – an avatar of white, Western literary achievement if ever there was one – and “the block,” by which Tish means the area surrounding the Harlem housing project in which she and her family lived (30). Indeed, the novel is careful to highlight the obvious distance between Shakespeare’s Verona and Tish’s world. While acknowledging the long and seemingly inescapable shadow that Romeo and Juliet casts on any American author’s story of earnest young lovers struggling against social constraints that keep them apart, Beale Street is careful to hold its Shakespearean forebearer at arm’s length. Though members of Tish and Fonny’s community are apparently aware of the couple’s superficial resemblance to Shakespeare’s tragic lovers, Tish specifies that they had not actually read, or, presumably, seen the play in question. Indeed, the novel is silent as to what extent Tish or Fonny themselves are familiar with the play, and readers are left to assume that the couple have earned their sobriquet mostly by right of their being of the proper age (young), genders (male and female), and proximity to one another (they are frequently observed together on the block by members of their community). In this way, the novel alludes to Shakespeare’s dominance within the West without necessarily endorsing it. If one is going to write within the English literary tradition, it suggests, one must contend inevitably with Shakespeare. Yet as this allusion suggests – and this is especially true especially for writers from historically marginalized communities – Shakespeare’s ghost is not necessarily wanted nor welcome. Even as Beale Street’s initial reference to Romeo and Juliet admits to certain superficial parallels between the respective couples, it does so only to disregard them. Even if Shakespeare were able to shed some light on Tish and Fonney’s predicament, the fact that he goes unread by those on the block forecloses this possibility. And what prevents Shakespeare from being read by those on the block? The answer to this question might lie in the novel’s subsequent allusion to the play. This second and final reference to Romeo and Juliet occurs at a moment when Tish is operating distinctly outside of her comfort zone. Fonny picks up her up at her parents’ house, and the two take the train from Harlem to Sheridan Square in the West Village. Walking through the Saturday afternoon streets, filled with a young, diverse crowd, Tish admits “they frightened [her]” in light of her perception that “they knew so much more than [her]” (1974: 53). As the couple wander through the park, Tish describes the people they encounter as “strange,” “[un]friendly,” “hard,” and “frightening” (54, 55). They arrive eventually at a Spanish restaurant, and Tish notes: I hadn’t had much experience in restaurants, but Fonny had; he spoke a little Spanish too, and I could see that the waiters were teasing him about me. And then I remembered, as I was being introduced to our waiter, Pedrocito . . . that we had been called on the block, Romeo and Juliet, people had always teased us, but not like this. 56 66

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It is no accident that Shakespeare’s tragedy is referenced by Tish in a moment of high anxiety occasioned by feelings of cultural alienation. Though she is less than seven miles away from her home in Harlem, the bohemian West Village seems a different and, somewhat hostile, world. Though the atmosphere of the restaurant seems initially to offer some respite, as Tish admits to feeling “at home” because the waiters “were different from the people in the street,” so too is she disempowered by her unfamiliarity with restaurants in general and, especially, her linguistic difference (56). While she is certain the waiters’ jocular utterances – gentle and good-natured as they may be – are being made at her and Fonny’s expense, the unfamiliar language in which the joke is told obfuscates its precise nature. She thinks back to those on the block and their passing allusions to Romeo and Juliet. Tish is not quite sure if she, or those making the joke, are fully in tune with the reference; at the same time, she knows that encounters with this play inevitably make her feel self-conscious and condescended to.

Conclusion: “that is why he is called a poet” When taken together, these brief Shakespearean appropriations not only contest popular and academic claims of Shakespeare’s universality, but also present a pointed counterclaim in defense of the particular. They act as a potent check upon the tendency within American literary culture wherein the magnetism of Shakespeare’s cultural dominance is powerful enough to force subsequent stories into the poet’s orbit regardless of any resistance on the part of readers or even authors. I am referring here to the continued propensity for various stories to be understood, evaluated, and critiqued in terms of their superficial resemblances to scene, characters, and tropes found in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. As Baldwin’s uneasy appropriations demonstrate, this tendency reinforces Shakespeare’s position at the apex of Western literary culture while effacing real cultural and perspectival differences that are of key importance as we move about the world and interpret it. What the references from Baldwin’s novel ultimately reveal is that the tendency to view stories of young lovers in turmoil inevitably through the template of Romeo and Juliet deadens the cultural and historical specify that marks their vitality and makes them valuable in the first place. Baldwin’s narrative fiction challenges this notion in the ways it glories in the particular. This is apparent if we simply consider some of the disparate narrative voices he adopts within his novels: Tish in Beale Street; David, a white American in Paris embarked on a same-sex love affair, in Giovanni’s Room; Jessie, the impotent racist in “Going to Meet the Man”; or Leo Proudhammer, the famous black actor at the center of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. Despite their divergent thematics, what each of these narratives shares is an awareness of our subjective, and culturally informed, responses to the world around us. While life, love, pain, and tragedy may be widespread, Baldwin’s fiction insists that the ways we create, interpret, and respond to them are singular and tied inexorably to our social identities. For Baldwin, it is ultimately Shakespeare’s ability to tap into all that is singular, divergent, and atypical that marks his worth as an artist. Yet while his appropriations work often to challenge notions of the Shakespearean universal, they do so while celebrating that in which he finds more value: Shakespeare’s sense of the communal – the notion that runs throughout his work that, despite our divergent values, experiences, and opinions, our fates are ultimately connected and the knowledge that “whatever is happening to anyone was happening to him” (1998c: 691). It is worth remembering, then, that the essay’s title is itself derived from Henry IV, Part I, a play that shows a marked interest in cultural difference and the ways in which various social spheres inform, influence, and depend on one another. The events portrayed by Shakespeare during the play’s climactic Battle of Shrewsbury, for example, show how individuals of different social positions – the noble Hotspur, 67

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the disgraced knight Falstaff, his bedraggled troops – differ in their motivations and perceptions of the battle while acknowledging nevertheless that its outcome will impact the community as a whole. Such is the case for Baldwin’s race conscious appropriations, each of which functions ultimately to frame Shakespeare, not as an index of the values and experiences that we hold in common, but rather as a testament to the diversity of human experience and reflections of the true multiplicity of perspectives from which we might approach the world around us.

Note 1 The reference is to the Norton edition of Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., 3rd ed. (Shakespeare 2016).

References Baldwin, James. 1974. If Beale Street Could Talk. New York: Vintage. ———. 1998a. “Autobiographical Notes.” In James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: The Library of America. 5–9. ———. 1998b. “Stranger in the Village.” In James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: The Library of America. 117–29. ———. 1998c. “This Nettle, Danger . . .” In James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: The Library of America. 687–91. ———. 2011. “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare.” In The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. Ed. Randall Kenan. New York: Vintage. 65–69. Balfour, Lawrie. 2017. “ ‘A Most Disagreeable Mirror’: Race Consciousness as Double Consciousness.” In A Political Companion to James Baldwin. Ed. Susan J. McWilliams. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 19–46. Césaire, Aimé. 2002. A Tempest. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: TCG Translations. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A.C. McClurg. Erickson, Peter. 2007. Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art. New York: Palgrave. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. 1989. Caliban and other Essays. Translated by Edward Baker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jones, Leroi. 1964. Dutchman and The Slave. New York: Harper. Mannoni. Octave. 1990. Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. Trans. Pamela Powesland. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. McWilliams, Susan J. 2017. “Introduction.” In A Political Companion to James Baldwin. Ed. Susan J. McWilliams. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 1–15. Naylor, Gloria. 1982. The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Viking. ———. 1988. Mama Day. New York: Vintage. Ryan, Kiernan. 2015. Shakespeare’s Universality: Here’s Fine Revolution. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Shakespeare, William. 2016. The First Part of Henry the Fourth. In The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al., 3rd ed. New York: Norton. 1177–243. Wilson, August. 1996. The Ground on Which I Stand. New York: TCG. Young, Iris Marion. 1997. Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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6 BISHO¯NEN HAMLET Stealth-queering Shakespeare in Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet Brandon Christopher

In his third soliloquy, provoked by the First Player’s successful mimicry of the visible markers of emotional distress, Hamlet castigates himself, over the course of thirty-five or so lines, for his failure to act on the ghost’s instruction to avenge his father’s death. The speech ranges over a number of ways in which the actor’s performance outdoes Hamlet’s own demonstration of his commitment to his father’s memory and cause: Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul to his own conceit That from her working all the visage wanned, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? 2.2.510–161 When we reach this section of the play in Richard Appignanesi and Emma Vieceli’s adaptation of Hamlet for SelfMadeHero’s Manga Shakespeare, we find the list condensed to one sign: Is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, could force his soul to tears in his eyes? What would he do, had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have? Yet I, the son of a dear father murdered, prompted to revenge by heaven and hell, must unpack my heart with words! 2007: 72, emphasis in original The statement is a return to one of the play’s central themes – the difference between external “seeming” and internal “being,” to use Hamlet’s terms (Hamlet 1.2.76). In the play, it reasserts Hamlet’s inability or unwillingness to externalize his grief at his father’s death, the revelation of his uncle’s hand in his father’s death, and his mother’s “overhasty marriage” to that same uncle (Appignanesi and Vieceli 2007: 50). In the manga, though, the statement is nonsensical. Readers of Appignanesi and Vieceli’s adaptation have seen Hamlet demonstrate his grief in precisely this way earlier in the book, during his initial confrontation with his mother and Claudius in 1.2, 69

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with five panels (including two close-up images of Hamlet’s eye) spread over two pages depicting Hamlet’s tears (17–18).2 This is a characteristic moment in the manga’s adaptation of its source text, one which brings into focus the manga’s relationship with its Shakespearean hypotext, or original textual source. It is symptomatic, I argue, of a give and take throughout the manga between competing influences: on the one hand, the textual imperative of Shakespeare’s play and, on the other, the generic demands of the manga form. In this give and take, Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet lays bare a number of tensions inherent in comics, a form that Charles Hatfield calls, in Alternative Comics, an “art of tensions” (Hatfield 2005: 38), such as those between text and image, between high culture and low, and between acceptable and unacceptable reading material, especially for young people.3 In Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet, the dialogical relationship between these apparently oppositional positions works itself out through the effects of two types of what Gérard Genette calls “transtextual” relationships. “Transtextuality,” according to Genette, is “all that sets the text in a relationship . . . with other texts” (Genette 1997: 1). Of the five categories of transtextuality that Genette defines in Palimpsests, two – “architextuality” and “hypertextuality” – are pertinent to my analysis of Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet. Architextuality, according to Genette, comprises “the entire set of general or transcendent categories – types of discourse, modes of enunciation, literary genres – from which emerges each singular text” (2). Hypertextuality, which is the central subject of Palimpsests, is “any relationship uniting a text B (. . . the hypertext) to an earlier text A (. . . the hypotext)” (Genette 1997: 5). Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet is without question a hypertext of Shakespeare’s play, but it also exists within an architextual framework derived from the conventions of manga. For Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet, the tension between the manga’s hypertextual and architextual relationships finds its most obvious examples in moments where the manga, especially Vieceli’s art, deviates from traditional readings of Shakespeare’s text in ways that emphasize its manga-ness. Given that the manga appeared at a time during which manga was viewed with increasing suspicion by Western cultural institutions, these deviations have the potential to put the manga into particular tension with the style and content of its marketing. However, Manga Shakespeare’s marketing and self-construction as “bring[ing] life to one of the most important works of literature in the English language” (Appignanesi and Vieceli 2007: Back Cover) grants it, I argue, the latitude to imbue the story with the sort of sexual imagery for which manga had, in general, been viewed with suspicion in English-speaking countries. By reimagining the play within the architextual framework of shōjo manga, that is, manga aimed at a young female readership, Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet offers a reading of Hamlet, and of Hamlet, that emphasizes the play’s own affinities with precisely the types of sexualized violence commonly associated with manga. And, thanks to its Shakespearean pedigree, the manga is able to do so while establishing itself as a valuable cultural and educational artifact.

I Around the turn of the millennium, manga enjoyed a cultural status in English-speaking countries that was reminiscent of that of comics in the 1940s and 1950s. As early as 1940, not coincidentally soon after the film industry’s creation, under duress, of the Production Code Administration (Nyberg 1998: 3), the comics industry became the target of attacks in the national news media. Sterling North, writing in the Chicago Daily News, called the ubiquity of comic books among young readers “A National Disgrace” (North 1940). In his editorial, North denounced comics as “badly drawn, badly written and badly printed – a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems . . . their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child 70

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impatient with better, though quieter stories” (quoted in Nyberg 1998: 4). North’s objection, which, as Amy Nyberg points out, was one of many similar objections at the time, is grounded in conventional formulations of low and high culture, a spurious opposition between the sex and violence of comics and the more refined experience of “quieter” literature (3–4). A half-century later, editorials and columns in newspapers across the English-speaking world criticized manga for its worrying influence on its young readership in terms strikingly reminiscent of North’s. For instance, a 1990 article in The Washington Times informs its – admittedly ­conservative – readership that “popular Japanese comics bring sexism, violence to life” (Neilan 1990: A8). The headline to a 1993 article in The Independent warns of a “Cartoon cult with an increasing appetite for sex and violence” (Lister 1993: 10). The Independent’s headline is noteworthy for its combination of two types of alarmism. On the one hand, it joins the then-growing chorus of voices decrying representations of sex and violence – and the combination thereof – in manga. On the other hand, it enhances this concern by characterizing manga’s readership as a “cult,” imputing a colonialist impulse both to the texts and, I would argue, to Japanese culture more generally. The characterization of manga as “invading” Western society and supplanting Western cultural icons is a common one in articles from the time, as demonstrated in headlines such as: “Manga Mania: Cartoonists Eye America” (Washington Post, Sep. 5, 2002); “Tales of the Wild East: The Japanese Invasion Goes West” (Age, Mar. 29, 2003); and “Asterix Swept Aside as France Embraces Manga” (National Post, Feb. 4, 2004). Two years after the independent’s “cult” headline, the London Sunday Times would take this formulation even further, conflating the two concerns in the headline of its account of the growth of manga’s popularity in England: “Titillation in Virgin Territory” (Millar 1995: 8). In the article, Peter Millar contrasts Japanese culture’s acceptance of violence and sexuality with what he imagines is a typically Western response: “The demons, sorcerers and themes of violated innocence that are commonplace in manga . . . are alien to western Christian values” (9) He ends his article by drawing parallels between the slavophilic droogs of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (ascribed by Millar to Stanley Kubrick), the Japanese Yakuza, and “our children writ[ing] haiku poems in school” (9) It is in these final lines that Millar brings his argument back to the threat implicit in his headline’s invocation of “virgin territory.” That is, one of the major markets for manga in the U.K. and in most Western countries is children. Just as it had in its attacks on comic books in postwar America, the news media emphasized the dangers posed by manga to children physically, emotionally, and intellectually. The Globe and Mail asserted in 1997 that “There’s a dark side to the Sailor Moon phenomenon. Japanese comic-book characters appeal to every fantasy. Some sexualize pre-pubescent girls” (Weatherbe 1997: C16+). The Scottish Daily Mail dedicated a series of articles in 1995 to exposing and shutting down a London-based manga club that distributed anime films by mail. The series culminated in the paper declaring triumphantly “Mail gets action on video nasties; The Manga Club that sends sick videos to kids faces the axe” (Drury 1995: 29).4 Of particular concern for a number of critics of the form was the potentially deleterious educational effect of reading manga, for instance, one otherwise benign account of attempts to introduce manga into classrooms casting the inclusion of manga in the public-school curriculum as a violent affront to traditional education through the provocative combination of Dick-and-Jane-style phrasing and ostensibly manga-inspired violence in its headline: “See Janet Slaughter John” (Times, November 16, 2004). Even the New York Times joined in the criticism of manga’s influence, claiming that “Comic books account for 60 percent of printed publications in Japan, a reflection of low literacy rates” (Brooke 2002: A4+), a claim they corrected a week later when it was pointed out that Japan’s 99% literacy rate was higher than that of the United States (“Corrections” 2002: A2). 71

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II When Albert Kanter created Classic Comics, a line of comics that offered adaptations of classic literary works into the comics form, it was, as mentioned above, at a time when comics were the subject of much public consternation and scrutiny. In the face of this, Kanter presented his line of comics as a means to introduce readers to literary classics. Then, when the content of mainstream comics moved away from the superhero fare of the late 1930s and early 1940s and towards the sort of material Kanter was publishing, he changed the title of his line of comics from Classic Comics to Classics Illustrated, a move Rocco Versaci argues was intended to distance the line from other comics (Versaci 2007: 186). Indeed, as Versaci notes, Mysterious Island, the last comic issued under the old imprint, included a blurb that read “The name ‘Classics Illustrated’ is the better name for your favorite periodical. It really isn’t a comic . . . it’s the illustrated, or picture, version of your favorite classics” (quoted in Versaci 2007: 186). In addition, a statement was appended to the end of every story in the series advising readers: “Now that you have read the Classics Illustrated edition, don’t miss the added enjoyment of reading the original, obtainable at your school or local library.” Thus, the stated goal of the Classics Illustrated series, which included an adaptation of Hamlet, was not simply to present readers with classics, but to use those adaptations as a gateway to the “original” text. “Their essential endeavour,” as Joseph Witek puts it, “is to make themselves obsolete” (Witek 1989: 36). In the first decade of the new millennium, in a cultural moment reminiscent of the postwar comics scare in the U.S., Manga Shakespeare presented itself as a means of bridging the desires of educational institutions to control young people’s reading and the literary appetites of those young people.5 “Our goal,” writes SelfMadeHero founder Emma Hayley, is “to make manga more accessible to the mainstream while making Shakespeare more accessible through manga” (Hayley 2010: 276).6 The resulting framing of the series is thus somewhat contradictory. Although Hayley claims that she “wanted these mangas to be seen as entertainment rather than as primarily educational” (Hayley 2010: 269), SelfMadeHero produced, simultaneous to their launch of the line in 2007, “educational resources that teachers and students will be able to use alongside [the] books in the classroom” (276). In addition, reviews of the mangas appeared in a number of newspapers and school library and educational journals, the vast majority of which emphasized the books’ pedagogical potential. Manga Shakespeare is, according to reviewers, an excellent means by which teachers can engage young, particularly male, readers. “Once the graphic novel is completed,” writes William Brozo, in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, “the students break open the literature anthology and begin reading Romeo and Juliet with a newfound enthusiasm” (Brozo 2012: 550). “If it brings the Bard to a young audience,” argues Cameron Woodhead in the Melbourne Age, “that’s got to be a good thing” (Woodhead 2007: 25). Even the British government expressed its approval, as the Birmingham Post noted in June 2008: “The Government said the books should provide a great opportunity for fathers and sons to read together on Father’s Day” (“Manga Does Shakespeare” 2008: 1). In conjunction with these favorable reviews, the Manga Shakespeare line works, in the construction of the books themselves, to reframe manga as a product appropriate, even desirable, for the classroom. Much of this work is done on the front and back covers of the book. For example, readers examining the American edition of Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet might be forgiven for imagining that what they were holding was a full-text rendition of the play in manga form. The front cover of the book lists only two names: Emma Vieceli, the mangaka who illustrated the book, and Shakespeare, whose name, it should be noted, appears not in order to credit him as author, but rather across the top of the cover, as part of the trademarked name of the series: 72

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“MANGA SHAKESPEARE®.” It is assumed, it seems, that anyone holding the book will be aware of the name of author of Hamlet. The back cover clarifies (and muddies) the question of authorship, identifying, in a font of no more than 3.5 points in size (approximately 1.2 mm capitals),7 the adapter of the text as Richard Appignanesi. The blurb on the back cover, though, militates against Appignanesi’s claim to authorship, asserting that the book “Us[es] Shakespeare’s original text.” Setting aside the fraught description of any text of Hamlet as the “original text,” what the jacket copy does is work to erase the manga’s status as adaptation.8 Instead, the generic jacket copy that appears on all editions in the Manga Shakespeare line credits Appignanesi with editing the text. Given one of Manga Shakespeare’s target markets, that is, education, this is perhaps not surprising. “Much more fun than a study guide!” as the manga’s back cover informs the reader, the manga is designed not simply as a supplement to, but as a substitute for Shakespeare’s play. In order to do this, the manga works to obscure, if not to erase altogether, evidence of its difference from the “original” Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play presents Hamlet’s vengeance as an attempt to recapture an impossible, nostalgically pure past. In response to the ghost’s imperative to “remember” (1.5.91) Hamlet declares that he will wipe away all trivial fond records,/All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past/That youth and observation copied there/And thy commandment alone shall live/Within the book and volume of my brain/Unmixed with baser matter. 1.5.98–104 But, given that Manga Shakespeare’s raison d’être is precisely mixing the product of an exalted past with the “books” and “forms” of youth, with socially condemned “baser matter,” as it were, these lines are, unsurprisingly, absent from Vieceli and Appignanesi’s adaptation. Even as it uses the manga form as a means of gaining access to a lucrative market of readers, Manga Shakespeare’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, right down to its packaging, works diligently to erase the evidence of the form’s influence on its take on Hamlet. But, if the books do indeed “bring the Bard to a young audience,” what exactly are they bringing? What is the nature of the relationship between Appignanesi and Vieceli’s Hamlet and Shakespeare’s Hamlet? By definition, adaptation has to entail change of one kind or another. Adaptations, as Linda Hutcheon puts it, “are never simply reproductions” (Hutcheon 2006: 4). As an original-text adaptation, Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet relies heavily on the visual register to convey the fact of adaptation. That is, it is primarily through Vieceli’s images, not Appignanesi’s reworkings of the text, that the text changes from “Shakespeare” to “Manga Shakespeare.” The visual aspects of the form become virtually the sole bearers of the architextual influence, the means by which the manga-ness of the manga is conveyed. It is also through the visual register that the particular diegetic world of the story is brought into being. The text becomes, in this dynamic, supplemental to the image. Because it cannot be added to, it can only be adapted either by cutting it or ignoring it (as in the example with which I started) when it fails to conform to manga conventions. The manga Hamlet, like the manga Romeo and Juliet with which it was simultaneously published, deliberately styles itself, as Hayley has stated, in imitation of Japanese shōjo or girls’ manga. How, then, does it negotiate between these two transtextual relationships, between hypotext and architext, in Genette’s terms? If Vieceli’s art reshapes her Shakespearean hypotext according to the shōjo manga architext, it is in Hamlet himself that the mangaka’s commitment to the text’s status as manga, over and above its status as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, is most clearly demonstrated. Throughout the manga, the art makes visible erotic fantasies that are, at best, 73

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latent in the text of the play. From his appearance in what would be Act 1, Scene 2, of the play (his first appearance), Hamlet’s body is distinctly feminized, the contours of his face marked by a fineness that he shares with neither Claudius nor the ghost of his father, and his legs and hips striking in their length and curviness. Working hand in hand with this feminization is the persistent eroticization of Hamlet’s body, an eroticization that is repeatedly tied to its passivity. On the page in which Laertes warns Ophelia to beware Hamlet’s advances, the manga condenses thirty-nine lines of advice to about six and emphasizes, by its isolation and by its position on the page, Laertes’s assertion that Hamlet’s “will is not his own” (Manga Hamlet: 27). The layout of the page ties this statement unmistakably to Hamlet’s passive, eroticized body, as the exchange between Laertes and Ophelia is drawn over a background of Hamlet lying shirtless, blindfolded, and hooked up to an unseen machine. Though it isn’t directly evident in the image of Hamlet blindfolded, Hamlet’s erotic passivity is often characterized by a combination of violence and homoeroticism.9 When Claudius discusses sending Hamlet to England, the page presents an image of Hamlet, lying naked, being strangled by a black silhouetted figure that is straddling his prone body. In the two pages depicting Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, the manga populates the page with manifestations of Hamlet’s inner turmoil. Condensing the text of the soliloquy, the manga fragments the logic of Hamlet’s thoughts, effecting a form of parataxis whose gaps are implicitly filled in by images of Hamlet’s passive, eroticized body. Reversing the traditional hypertextual hierarchy of hypotext over hypertext, the pages’ full-page panels dominate, making the speech an illustration of the images. The existential question posed by the soliloquy becomes an expression of a crisis of gendered identity, with each page offering a doubled vision of an active, phallic-sword-­ wielding Hamlet dominating a passive, eroticized version of himself in a fantasy of homoautoerotic self-annihilation. On the page depicting Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is man” speech, the art situates Hamlet’s face between two extra-diegetic images (Appignanesi and Vieceli 2007: 78–79). Most of the page is dominated by two enormous angels, naked except for straps binding their wrists; the straps are notably reminiscent of the second page of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy. The bottom, right-hand corner of the page features a tiny inset image of Ophelia. Though the positioning of the image of Ophelia grants it a sort of primacy in that it punctuates the reader’s experience of the page, the disparity in size between the two images undermines, even ironizes, this relationship. Furthermore, in the text of the play, Hamlet’s statement that “man delights not me” is followed by him noting that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are smirking: “nor women neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so” (2.2.275–6). Thus, the answer to “man delights not me” is, in Hamlet’s mind, a specifically heterosexual response. Hamlet reads Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s response as a teasing suggestion that “man delights not me” implies that women delight him. Here, though, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern share a knowing, sideways glance after his claim that women are beyond his desires. The subtle shift reinforces the manga’s repeated subjection of Hamlet to, and ascription to Hamlet of, a specifically male homoerotic gaze. Significantly, in each of these instances but the last, the homoeroticization is produced exclusively by the art of the manga. Even the last example requires a subtle reordering of the play, enabled by cutting the text and thereby linking the action to a different statement. And, in that case, the minor textual emendation is prefigured by the previous page’s overwhelming privileging of the eroticization of the male body over that of the female body, which is effectively imperceptible in the panel featuring Ophelia. The marginalization of Ophelia in the “What a piece of work is man” page is representative of her place in the manga as a whole. In her account of the creation of the manga Hamlet, Emma Hayley notes that Vieceli had proposed, in the course of resetting the play in the twenty-second 74

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century, to re-imagine Ophelia. She writes, “Vieceli’s depiction of Ophelia started out as a spanner-wielding technician in an attempt to make her a dominant character, but this approach changed and she developed into a more feminine figure” (Hayley 2010: 271). Hayley rationalizes this by claiming that, in the manga, Ophelia’s power comes from her femininity. But in the manga Ophelia is not powerful; she is abused and/or controlled by virtually everyone she comes into contact with in the play – her father, her brother, the king, the queen, Hamlet. Her only escape is, of course, to drown herself. The manga’s image of the drowned Ophelia (Appignanesi and Vieceli 2007: 157) offers one of the few instances in which her body is displayed so as to emphasize her femininity in erotic terms, with flowing hair, legs exposed, and the shape of her body emphasized by her dress. The point of the image, though, is the inaccessibility of this body, distanced from the reader both by death and by the water that flows over her. The one character in the manga who seems to have been deliberately designed to appeal to a heterosexual male readership, Ophelia’s inability to signify sexually for Hamlet (and, I would argue, for the reader) becomes yet another indication of the extent to which his story has been cast in the manga as a crisis of gender identification. Through Vieceli’s art, with its repeated emphasis on his femininity and on his failure to desire Ophelia, Hamlet becomes a type of character known as a bishōnen, or beautiful boy, a male character drawn, as Andrea Wood puts it, “to emphasize [his] beauty and sensuality” (Wood 2006: 397); bishōnen characters are, again according to Wood, “androgynous, tall, slim, elfin figures with big eyes, long hair, high cheekbones, and pointed chins” (Wood: 398). Positioned outside of traditional heteronormative sexuality, the bishōnen offers, according to Sandra Buckley, a means of exploring a range of sexual and gender identities (Buckley 1991: 180). By characterizing Hamlet as bishōnen and by insistently returning to images of homoeroticism in moments of crisis, Appignanesi and Vieceli’s insertions, reorderings, and visual interpretations remake Shakespeare’s play into manga, not just in aesthetic terms, but in terms of the narrative as well. And, in the process of reimagining the play, the manga’s attachment of sexual, violent, and sexually violent images to Hamlet licenses precisely those aspects of manga that caused anxiety in the news organizations that denounced manga in the 1990s and early 2000s.10 I wrote earlier in this chapter that “the art makes visible erotic fantasies that are, at best, latent in the text of the play.” To be latent, though, is not to be absent, and I’d like to conclude this chapter with a consideration of what exactly this latency means, in order to get at what I think is most interesting about Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet. Vieceli and Appignanesi’s emphasis on the gendering of Hamlet is so pervasive that the shōjo manga architext overwhelms the Shakespearean hypotext. The result is a deliberate and effective queering of Hamlet, resulting in a hypertext which presents a specific interpretation and reworking of its hypotext. It might make more sense, then, to think of the manga not as an adaptation of the play, but as a full-text appropriation of it. As Erica Hateley puts it, appropriations, as distinct from adaptations, “offer the implied reader not only an understanding of a playtext, but also a model for reading that playtext” (Hateley 2009: 15). Put simply, Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet reads Hamlet as queer and does so in such a way that it also points out the play’s deeper connection with queerness. Lee Edelman links Hamlet’s feelings of revulsion toward at female sexuality and the place of queerness in a contemporary, heteronormative society. Edelman writes: Queerness, as I have argued elsewhere, occupies the place of the zero, the nothing, that invariably structures the logic of being but remains at once intolerable to and inconceivable within it. It follows that those who call themselves queer and think queerness is a matter of being must reject the negativity of queerness – and negativity tout court – as virulently as any other subject invested in survival. For queerness induces a peculiar 75

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and disturbing relation to survival, and to political fantasy as well, by underscoring a tension always at work within those terms. In associating queerness with the non-cognizable status of the zero, with the element inassimilable to the presentation of any order as such, I have argued that the zero obtrudes, nonetheless, in moments of traumatic jouissance that the One of the Symbolic attempts to survive by mobilizing a self-negating impulse, what Jacques Derrida refers to as an “autoimmunitary process,” inseparable from the death drive that queerness is conjured to conjure away from the norm. Edelman 2011: 149 Edelman’s analysis of the play crystallizes the subversive effect of the manga’s association of queerness and self-annihilation. In so doing, it demonstrates the way in which Appignanesi and Vieceli, rather than create an alternate reading of Hamlet, have instead illuminated links between two of the play’s central themes. Rather than obscuring the text, the illustrations reproduce the play’s (and its hero’s) queasy vision of heterosexual pairings and thus, as Edelman would have it, reject the heteronormative futurity embodied in those pairings.11 What we are left with instead is a reframing of that queasiness as a culture of eroticized self-annihilation, whose rejection of posterity and of futurity more generally finds its final, perhaps liberatingly nihilistic, expression in what is essentially a mass suicide at the end of the play. By the end of both play and manga, Denmark has, willfully and spectacularly, embraced the zero, so to speak. What the manga does is remind us of this, extrapolating from its hero the death drive of an entire society and making that drive sexy. As is typical, the content of the manga is at odds with its paratextual marketing materials. On its back cover, the manga, in an apparent appeal to an imagined male readership, presents itself as action-packed, with two of the three details from inside the book depicting or implying active, violent masculinity. The third, central image highlights one of the few moments, when taken out of context, of uncomplicated heterosexual flirting in the book. However, none of these images is representative of the content of the manga as a whole, in which the hero’s passivity figures significantly, and in which heterosexual desire is repeatedly set aside in favor of homoerotic fantasy. While the book’s cover hits all of its marks in terms of marketing the text as a youth-appropriate substitute for Shakespeare’s play, that same cover’s appeal to Shakespeare’s cultural and pedagogical capital obscures, both literally and figuratively, a text whose interpretation of its sanctified source-text challenges conventional ideologies of gender and sexuality. In short, what is presented as a canonical text whose appropriation of the style of a popular form enhances its cultural relevancy turns out instead to be the opposite: a culturally denigrated form whose appropriation of Shakespeare enables the dissemination of its subversive content through a pedagogical system designed to defend against it.

Notes 1 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Hamlet are taken from William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor for The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Thomson Learning, 2006. 2 Ironically, Hamlet’s reference to “the fruitful river in the eye” (1.2.80), which could be used to justify the appearance of tears, has been cut from the manga’s text. 3 It is worth noting that Hatfield’s list of the tensions inherent in comics could just as easily apply to the tensions at play in pop culture adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare. 4 The conflation of manga (books) and anime (film) is a common feature of these attacks.

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Bisho¯nen Hamlet 5 Following Christopher Pizzino’s argument in Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature (2016), it might even be argued that SelfMadeHero’s packaging and production of the Manga Shakespeare line is not only reminiscent of earlier anti-comics rhetoric, but indeed is fashioned in conscious conversation with the cultural legacy of that rhetoric. 6 Given the widespread cultural anxiety regarding manga at the time of Hayley’s creation of the series, her use of “accessible” here might reasonably be read as code for “acceptable.” 7 As a point of comparison, traditional 12-point fonts are approximately 4.23 mm tall. The main font size on the back cover of Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet is around 5.5 points, or 2 mm. 8 This is even more evident with the British edition of the manga, which removes any mention of Appignanesi as adapter. 9 Though it is perhaps implied by the penetration of his body by what are apparently electrical leads. 10 A number of those same news outlets published laudatory reviews of Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet when it was published. 11 Since the publication of Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive in 2004, his association of “reproductive futurism” (Edelman, No Future 23) with heteronormativity has been the subject of critical debate. See, for instance, José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), Angela Jones’s Introduction to A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias (2013), or Melissa Sanchez’s 2014 essay “ ‘What Hath Night to Do With Sleep?’: Biopolitics in A Mask.”

References Appignanesi, Richard, and Emma Vieceli. 2007. Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet. New York: Harry Abrams. Brooke, James. 2002. “Tokyo Journal: A Wizard of Animation Has Japan Under His Spell.” New York Times. 3 Jan. A4+. Brozo, William G. 2012. “Building Bridges for Boys: Graphic Novels in the Content Classroom.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 55: 550. Buckley, Sandra. 1991. “ ‘Penguin in Bondage’: A Graphic Tale of Japanese Comic Books. Technoculture. Eds. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 163–96. “Corrections.” 2002. New York Times. 10 Jan. A2. Drury, Paul. 1995. “Last Post for Kids’ Filth.” Sunday Mail [Scotland] 12 Feb. 29. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2011. “Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint.” Shakespeare Quarterly 62.2 (Summer): 148–69. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman, and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Hateley, Erica. 2009. Shakespeare in Children’s Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital. New York: Routledge. Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hayley, Emma. 2010. “Manga Shakespeare.” In Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Toni Johnson-Woods. New York: Continuum. 267–80. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Jones, Angela. 2013. “Introduction: Queer Utopias, Queer Futurity, and Potentiality in Quotidian Practice.” In A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias. Ed. Angela Jones. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lister, David. 1993. “Cartoon Cult with an Increasing Appetite for Sex and Violence.” Independent [London] 15 Oct. Home News sec.: 10. “Manga Does Shakespeare at a Primary School near You” 2008. Birmingham Post. 14 Jun. News sec.: 1. Millar, Peter. 1995. “Titillation in Virgin Territory.” Sunday Times [London] 3 Dec. S8+. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Neilan, Edward. 1990. “Popular Japanese Comics Bring Sexism, Violence to Life.” Washington Times. 20 Jun. A8. North, Sterling. 1940. “A National Disgrace.” Editorial. Chicago Daily News. 8 May. Nyberg, Amy Kiste. 1998. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Pizzino, Christopher. 2016. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. University of Texas Press.

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Brandon Christopher Sanchez, Melissa. 2014. “ ‘What Hath Night to Do With Sleep?’: Biopolitics in A Mask.” Queer Milton. Eds. Will Stockton and David Orvis. Special Issue of Early Modern Culture 10: 1–21. “See Janet Slaughter John.” 2004. Times [London] 16 Nov., Public Agenda sec.: 8. Shakespeare, William. 2006. Hamlet. Eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakepeare Third Series. London: Thomson Learning. Versaci, Rocco. 2007. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. New York: Continuum. Weatherbe, Steve. 1997. “There’s a Dark Side to Sailor Moon Phenomenon.” Globe and Mail [Toronto] 19 Apr. Arts sec.: C16+. Witek, Joseph. 1989. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Wood, Andrea. 2006. “ ‘Straight’ Women, Queer Texts: Boy-Love Manga and the Rise of a Global Counterpublic.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34: 394–414. Woodhead, Cameron. 2007. “Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet.” Age [Melbourne] 3 Mar. 1st ed. Books sec.: 25.

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7 EDMUND HOSTS WILLIAM Appropriation, polytemporality, and postcoloniality in Frank McGuinness’s Mutabilitie Barbara Sebek In Mutabilitie (1997), Irish playwright Frank McGuinness alludes to and cites specific works by William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. The play also more loosely appropriates Spenser and Shakespeare as participants in colonial and cross-cultural discourses: writers whose works and their reception are enmeshed in ongoing (post)colonial histories. Incorporating and departing from the facts of Spenser’s years as colonial administrator in Ireland in the 1580s and 1590s, McGuinness dramatizes the two writers as the staged characters Edmund and William.1 He weaves their late sixteenth-century world together with various Irish figures from what Nicholas Grene calls “totally different parts of the Irish mythological wood” (Grene 2010: 93). In so doing, McGuinness creates a polytemporal fantasia that blends multiple eras and narrative universes, what Michael Caven, the director of the 2000 Irish premier of the play, calls “historical mischief making” (Caven and Lojek 2002: 176). As his essay title, “Mutabilitie: In Search of Shakespeare,” suggests, like most critics of Mutabilitie, Grene focuses on McGuinness’s engagements with Shakespeare, leaving the appropriations of Spenser largely unanalyzed. In addition to borrowing his title from the Mutabilitie Cantos (Spenser 2007),2 the posthumously published fragments of the unfinished seventh book of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, McGuinness forces Shakespeare to share his status as appropriated precursor with a range of other figures, often with arch humor and a sense of play. Dethroning Shakespeare alone, McGuinness explores the possibilities for and demands on dramatists and poets during times of conflict, violence, and crisis. Scholars of global appropriation can learn much from McGuinness’s engagements with both Shakespeare and Spenser in Mutabilitie, given the questions he poses about hybrid identities and artistic complicity in oppressive power structures. McGuinness, in fact, engages in a project common to both appropriation and postcolonial studies: disrupting the binary between colonizer and colonized with polytemporal crossovers between early and contemporary, English, and Irish texts. Close examination of passages that interact intertextually with the two English writers’ works, such as Shakespeare’s Henry V and Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland, reveals how McGuinness triangulates Shakespeare with both Spenser and himself as authors, thus forcing Shakespeare to share the role of appropriated precursor. McGuinness dislodges Shakespeare from his pedestal as principal source for postcolonial literature, even as he raises more questions than he answers about the imaginative possibilities of cross-cultural collaborations and about the function of poetic drama as fuel for, or sanctuary from, violent conflict. 79

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Edmund Spenser’s years as a permanent resident in Ireland (1580–1598) witnessed continued escalation of English efforts at recolonization, as well as mounting resistance to English crown authority from Gaelic Irish lords and some of the “Old English,” descendants of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman settlers and colonists. Spenser came to Ireland when “New English” colonists were advocating a hostile, radical policy to put control of the country exclusively in the hands of English-born Protestants. Spenser arrived as secretary to Arthur Lord Grey de Wilton, who was appointed by Queen Elizabeth once she reluctantly endorsed the more hardline policy. Grey was recalled to England and resigned his post in 1582, given his failures to win quick, decisive military victories in his first few months as Lord Deputy. Some argue the queen might have stripped him of his post because of the extreme brutality of his actions at the “Smerwick massacre” of Spanish and papal troops after they had surrendered, which Spenser likely witnessed and which his “alter ego” character Irenius defends in Spenser’s prose dialogue, A View of the State of Ireland (1598/1633). After Grey’s departure, Spenser served in a variety of offices, eventually accruing large properties in Munster and Leinster, including Kilcolman castle.3 “The castle,” one of two principal locations that remain on stage throughout Mutabilitie, loosely corresponds to the Kilcolman estate where Edmund came to reside and where he was joined by his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, whom he married in 1594. Unlike Spenser, Shakespeare never went to Ireland. In Mutabilitie, McGuinness sends his William on this imaginary journey. Often treated by critics as exploring twentieth-century English-Irish conflicts, the play evinces what Helen Lojek calls “the double time of the history play” (Lojek 2010: 179). Melding medieval and sixteenth-century materials, the play also participates “obliquely and dialectically” (Lojek 2010: 180) in the intense political debates of McGuinness’s own era.4 Preceded by a staged reading at a Dublin conference in 1997, the theatrical premier of Mutabilitie was directed by Trevor Nunn at London’s Cottesloe Theatre later that year, a joint production of the National Theatres of Ireland and England. A plan to re-mount that production in Ireland never materialized, so director Michael Caven was able to direct the Irish premier at the Samuel Beckett Theatre at Trinity College Dublin in 2000. McGuinness began work on the play in the mid-1980s, at a time of intensifying, and seemingly intractable, sectarian violence. In an essay on teaching Shakespeare in northern Ireland, Ramona Wray summarizes key aspects of the legacy of Unionist rule in twentieth-century Ireland (the “Troubles”) that help contextualize the moment when McGuinness was writing: emotions unleashed by the deaths of hunger-striking IRA men brought hundreds of recruits into the IRA movement. . . . The Anglo-Irish agreement, which granted the Dublin government a voice in Northern policy, was signed in 1985, to the outrage of the majority community. In the years that followed, atrocities continued to be committed by all parties involved in the conflict, claiming in total more than 3000 lives. Wray 1997: 238 Mutabilitie does not offer direct links to events unfolding while McGuinness was writing the play. Similarly, it does not rework a specific Shakespearean play. Rather, it imagines a polytemporal present that unfolds less according to tightly plotted action than by poetic dream-work that integrates lines and scenarios from a wide range of intertexts. In addition to Shakespeare and the Spensers, Mutabilitie offers creative renderings of Ben Jonson and Richard Burbage, surnameless characters called William, Edmund, Elizabeth, Ben, and Richard. Ben and Richard had begrudgingly joined William’s expedition to Ireland, hoping to profit from introducing the novelty of theatrical performance and other lucrative opportunities 80

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in the colonial outpost. This plan immediately goes awry in the play’s opening scene when hooded figures forcefully abduct Ben and Richard, whilst William falls into a river, later to be rescued and hosted by Edmund. The group of English visitors is thus broken up, with Ben and Richard held captive by members of the entourage of the dispossessed Irish chieftain Sweney and Queen Maeve. Sweney comes from the Buile Shuibhne, “Sweney’s Frenzy” or “The Madness of Sweney,” which originates in the period of early Christianization. Maeve is the Connacht warrior queen Mebh from the Tain Bo Cuailnge, or The Cattle Raid of Cooley, recounted in the Ulster Cycle.5 McGuinness’s Hugh, the son of Maeve and Sweney, has been read as a fictionalized version of Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone who led the Nine Years War of 1594–1603, the Irish war of opposition against the Elizabethan re-conquest. Other members of Maeve and Sweney’s tattered court in Mutabilitie include the priest Donal, their daughter Annas and son Niall, and a female bard called the File, who, like their son Hugh, feigns conversion to Protestantism and serves as a spy pretending to be loyal servants in Edmund and Elizabeth’s castle. The play’s scenes alternate between its two principal settings, “the castle” and “the forest,” but both sets remain on stage throughout, and tidy opposition between them is thoroughly undercut over the course of the play. Even as McGuinness deviously and playfully takes up Spenser, Shakespeare, and a range of materials from Irish legend, he subjects to self-mockery his own abandoned fantasies of unlocking Shakespeare’s “secrets”: his queerness, the drama of the sonnets’ love triangle, and Shakespeare’s closeted identity as dissident Catholic. Describing these sought after grails in his Foreword to Shakespeare and Ireland (1997), McGuinness reports that, after twelve years of teaching Shakespeare in Maynooth (“for centuries the centre of Catholic learning in Ireland”) and failing in his naïve search for “a Catholic dissident, marvelously subverting the insecurities of Protestant England” (McGuinness 1997a: xi), he embarked on writing a play in which he exacts his revenge on Shakespeare for persistently eluding him: “I decided to create a play in which [Shakespeare] is confronted by an Irishwoman. The fight would be to the death, and she would win it. She didn’t.” McGuinness claims that Shakespeare is able to slip away because he “belonged to no tribe: In every scene that he appeared in he changed character and colour” (McGuinness 1997a: xii). Throughout Mutabilitie, McGuinness invokes and then challenges easy ascriptions of religious and national identity for many of his characters. A key example of this occurs when Edmund cites, almost verbatim, a famous line from Shakespeare: “what is my nation?” (McGuinness 1997b: 51). Putting this question in the mouth of Edmund, McGuinness refracts and scrambles the questions that Shakespeare’s Irish Captain MacMorris asks in Henry V: “What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?” (Henry V, 3.2.61–63).6 These are famous questions that, as David Baker notes in a recent essay about teaching the history plays, Shakespeare’s play just as famously leaves unanswered. Instead of the divided figure of Irish Captain MacMorris – both a dutiful servant in the English king’s foreign war and “an avatar of Irish ferocity and rebellion” (Baker 2017: 85) – McGuinness gives this question about national identity to his divided figure Edmund: husband, father, colonial administrator, zealous Protestant, worshipper of Queen Elizabeth, and, as his sense of national identity and colonial mission falter, increasingly delusional poet with a serious case of writer’s block. Edmund performs his “verbal hijacking”7 (Desmet 2014: 47) of Captain MacMorris’s questions during a conversation about his artistic struggles with his English guest William. Disillusioned with the English theater, where “the fashion is now subversive” (McGuinness 1997b: 50), William has come to Ireland with fellow theater men Richard and Ben to seek a post in the colonial civil service. Separated from his fellow travelers, William awakens to find himself in Edmund’s and Elizabeth’s castle, recovering from a fall into the aibhne (river), a bout of madness, and a supposed assault by some 81

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starving “savages.” William promptly answers Edmund’s question “What is my nation?” with a single word: “England” (McGuinness 1997b: 51). But in dramatizing a polytemporal mash-up that assembles English visitors, English settlers, and a dispersed Irish aristocracy, Mutabilitie – like the (post)colonial situation itself – undercuts both easy identifications and strict oppositions between self and nation, us and them, then and now. Depicting a variety of complex crossings and blurrings between the English and the Irish, Mutabilitie deconstructs binary oppositions such as colonizer/colonized and actualizes resistant features that are retrospectively discernible in the earlier “colonial” texts that it appropriates. William and Edmund are by no means the only characters in Mutabilitie who defy easy categorization. The play enacts a variety of thrillingly intricate alliances, conflicts, and boundary-­ crossings between the English visitors, the English settlers, and the displaced Irish. Spatial separations between the Spenser’s castle and the Irish forest morph and break down in scenes that stage elaborate, simultaneous cross-over conversations. Love affairs form and dissolve, such as a muted incestuous bond between Niall and Annas and a love affair between Annas and the English captive Richard. We witness William’s halting poetic efforts become cross-cultural collaborations: when he falters trying to compose Sonnet 87, Hugh helps fill out missing phrases (McGuinness 1997b: 72–73). During his recovery in the castle, William’s writing of Sonnet 18 requires the assistance of the File (McGuinness 1997b: 23–24), a female bard who is the character McGuinness initially conceived of as Shakespeare’s killer. In other scenes, bitter rivalries between Irish and English modulate into sexual liaisons, and vice versa; political debates morph into jointly conducted political or artistic strategy sessions, often resulting in savvy, hybrid figures. For example, in response to William’s praise for Hugh’s command of the English language and William’s assumption that Edmund has taught him well, Hugh replies, “He did not teach me. I was not unfamiliar with your language. I came from a family that valued learning. I also have much Latin and more Greek” (McGuinness 1997b: 68), a cheeky hijacking of Ben Jonson’s famous jab at Shakespeare, and perhaps a nod to Hugh O’Neill’s sixteenth-century education in England prior to taking up arms against the English in Ireland the 1590s. William persists as a kind of sex tourist, wishing for a taste of Irish song from Hugh: “Speak to me in your language,” William says, “Sing to me. Sing. Speak to me in your own language.” Hugh responds, “You are hearing my own language.” He then explains that when the English “destroyed us and our tribe,” the group vowed to accept the “loss over the government of our tongue. . . . I will not sing nor speak to you in Irish, Englishman” (McGuinness 1997b: 68). By addressing William as “Englishman,” Hugh’s refusal to indulge William’s desire for exotic linguistic spectacle reinforces a sharp distinction between Irish and English. At the same time, however, Hugh’s learnedness and his description of the self-conscious disavowal of the lost Irish language serves to insist on the hybridity and cosmopolitan scope of his cultural and linguistic heritage. From her first encounter with him when he emerges babbling from the river, the File takes William to be a prophesied savior and storyteller for the Irish. Initially conceived by McGuinness as Shakespeare’s antagonist, the File takes on McGuinness’s abandoned hope for William as dissident and potential liberator: “In this your theatre you will make our dead rise, William. You will raise our Irish dead, Englishman” (McGuinness 1997b: 61). Until William finally refuses the role, she takes him to be the man foretold in a recurring song that Grene calls a “runic refrain” (Grene 2010: 96): And a man shall come from a river, He shall gleam like a spear, like a fish, He shall kill and he shall feed us,

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He shall lie and he shall heed us, He shall give us the gift of tongues He shall do nor say nothing rash But shall sing the song of all songs, And a man shall come from a river. Bard meaning poet, River meaning aibhne, Bard meaning poet, River meaning aibhne. McGuinness 1997b: 2, 17, 24 We might read the hopes that the File invests in William (giver of the “gift of tongues,” both feeder and killer) as a send-up or gentle parody of Shakespearean creative appropriation in general. If the File misrecognizes William as Catholic believer and singer of Irish history, Edmund’s child initially takes William for a “monster,” briefly recalling and reworking the encounters between Shakespeare’s Caliban and his visitors from Italy. When Hugh pulls William from the river, the child greets him: “Peace be to you, good monster, in the name of God trouble us no more” (McGuinness 1997b: 3). Neither savior nor monster, William repeatedly strives to disabuse the File of the role she wishes to cast him in. Her hopes deflated at last by the end, William slips away. Richard and Ben are murdered by their Irish captors who, led by Sweney, bathe ritually in their blood. Faced with Sweney’s delusions and renunciation of his roles as father and king, Queen Maeve convinces her sons Hugh and Niall to slay her and Sweney. In yet another instance of reworking historical fact to dramatize self-destructive domestic and familial relations, Elizabeth orders Edmund to burn their castle but to say that “they [the Irish] invaded it” and “burned it to the ground” (McGuinness 1997b: 89); Edmund murderously threatens his son, whom he misrecognizes as his father. Having escaped his delusional father’s grasp, the lost child of Edmund and Elizabeth is hosted by the remaining Irish after Edmund and Elizabeth have fled and William has dropped out of the play. The child finds himself at play’s end fostered and welcomed to a meager meal with the File, Hugh, Annas, and Donal. William is markedly absent from this scene of tenuous reconciliation. In his reading of these closing moments of the play, Nicholas Grene notes that William has no contribution to make to the “postcolonial future represented by that Anglo/Irish inheritor” (Grene 2010: 100). Except for fathering the child whom he menaces and scares off, whom the Irish then welcome and feed, neither does Edmund. Despite exiling William and Edmund from the stage during this closing fantasy of a precariously peaceful postcolonial future,8 McGuinness nonetheless wrestles with Shakespeare’s and Spenser’s roles in shaping the histories that constrain this fictive future, including its poetry and drama. To better grasp the intricacy of McGuinness’s appropriation of Spenser, I turn now to two key moments in Mutabilitie that interact dialogically with material from A View of the State of Ireland. These illustrate how verbatim quotation of an appropriated precursor can be “loaded, deceptive, and misleading” (Desmet 2014: 46) and does not operate in a straightforward way.

Edmund channels Irenius, with a difference Being kept from manurance, and their cattle from running abroad, by this hard restraint they would quickly consume themselves, and devoure one another. The proofe whereof, I saw sufficiently exampled in these late warres of Mounster. – Irenius in A View of the State of Ireland

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Had I not saved them, Elizabeth, how could they save themselves? They cried at my door like animals begging for food and shelter. With hard restraint have they not proved themselves to be useful animals? I have saved them. Rejoice. Have they and I and you not seen these late wars of Munster? – Edmund in Mutabilitie

Spenser’s View is a prose dialogue between two speakers, Eudoxus, a politically engaged but somewhat uninformed Englishman, and Irenius, who represents a New English colonist with first-hand knowledge of the situation in Ireland. Irenius repeatedly rebuffs Eudoxus’s reformist, modest approach to “civilizing” Ireland, arguing in favor of the radical policy that Lord Grey and other New English supported. In echoing Irenius, McGuinness’s Edmund might seem to ratify a reading of Spenser’s tract that identifies Irenius with Edmund Spenser himself and likely encourages readers or audiences to equate Mutabilitie’s Edmund to Spenser as well. But in the above passage, Edmund both intensifies and fractures Irenius’s perspective. He echoes Irenius’s notion of Protestant English superiority but depicts the Irish as tamable, savable animals. In so construing them, he counters his wife Elizabeth’s claim earlier in this conversation (and Irenius’s arguments in View) that they are inherently duplicitous “savages.” In fact, a brutal policy of extermination as the only way to “save” Ireland from the accursed “mere Irish” that Irenius advocates in A View is not voiced by Mutabilitie’s Edmund but by Elizabeth. In the paired passages above, both Irenius and Edmund use the phrase “hard restraint” to describe how they or their English compatriots have dealt with the Irish. But unlike Irenius, who uses the phrase very specifically (“by this hard restraint”) to refer to the practice of preventing Irish agriculture (“manurance”) and cattle-grazing, Edmund uses the phrase more vaguely and generally to describe how he has worked to tame and “save” the Irish, transforming them into “useful animals” and the supposed beneficiaries of conversion. These are two sides of the same racist coin, perhaps: a brutal campaign of starvation and genocide, on the one hand, and an arrogant claim of having civilized and “saved” an inferior, dependent people, on the other. But McGuinness also chooses to excise Irenius’s assertion that he witnessed cannibalism amongst the starving Irish, who “devoure one another,” an excision he repeats a bit further on in this scene (discussed below). Through the use of near-direct quotation, McGuinness opens the way for Edmund to enact postcolonial fracturing of the colonizer as sole speaking subject. In the Spenser passage, Irenius is the singular subject, the sole witness of the examples of the self-devouring Irish in the “late warres of Mounster”; in McGuinness, Edmund’s subject is plural: it is not just “I” who witnesses the wars, but “they and I and you.” Set alongside his patronizing zeal to convert the Irish and put them to “use,” we can hardly read his plural subject as a gesture of inclusion and recognition of others’ perspectives. But his re-phrasing nonetheless loosens the hold of the singular “I” who sees and knows historical truth, opening the way for a more dialogic process that acknowledges diverse points of view. Because Edmund eventually degenerates into madness and violence (unable to write, misrecognizing his son as his father, threatening to kill his son, apostrophizing his castle before setting it aflame), the play suggests that, at least for someone like Edmund, who craves a condition of absolute devotion to his Protestant queen and his civilizing mission, the pluralized perspective becomes unsustainable and debilitating. The play thus challenges colonialist arrogance and justifications for occupation and economic exploitation. Edmund’s shift from the singular subject “I” to the plural “they and I and you” as witnesses to the “late wars of Munster” enacts an understanding of how colonialism affects poetic production, including Spenser’s great poem The Faerie Queene. McGuinness suggests that Edmund’s creative project depends on unwavering belief in the self as avatar of courtly values and promoter of 84

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militant Protestant nationalism, notions that the colonial situation in Ireland renders bankrupt. Edmund abandons his poem: “I have stopped writing,” he repeatedly tells William (McGuinness 1997b: 49, 50, 51). Mutabilitie exposes the falsehood of what Edmund claims about his dwindling mental powers in one of his prayers to Queen Elizabeth, whom he beseeches to allow him to leave Ireland: “The very soil of this corrupt land corrupts my brain, and my sick imaginings devour my sense and reason” (McGuinness 1997b: 64). Despite their fragmentariness, Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos insist that order subdues chaos and that eternal and timeless forces triumph over mutability. McGuinness’s play indirectly argues that such a stance is untenable in the colonial situation, where not just an all-knowing colonizing “I” witnesses struggle and violence, but “they and I and you” do as well. Not the “corrupt land” but the (post)colonial situation’s structuring dynamics distract and disable the poet. The recurrence of the phrase “late wars of Munster” at different points in Mutabilitie, sometimes spoken by Edmund and at other times by the File and Elizabeth, further enhances the play’s dramatization of this process of fragmentation.9 When Irenius uses the phrase in A View, it refers to a specific sixteenth-century conflict, the English Munster Plantation scheme (1585–1586), and campaigns of Irish resistance against it. As the phrase is repeatedly uttered by different characters in Mutabilitie, this specific topical referentiality is emptied out and the “moments” of the play’s setting multiply. Not only this late twentieth-century text scrambles temporal frameworks and troubles strict binary oppositions. We can discern these discursive operations as well in the sixteenth-century texts, particularly when read in light of the postcolonial appropriation. Phobic and belligerent, Irenius advocates brutal strategies for subduing the Irish in A View of the State of Ireland. He rebukes the “Old English” for intermarrying with the Irish, adopting Irish names, and “infecting” their offspring with the milk and language of Irish wet-nurses. But even Irenius fractures a clear-cut self/other hierarchy: Irenius and Eudoxus express admiration and even envy for the position and respect accorded to the Irish bards (Spenser 1997: 46, 75–77), a section of the dialogue that McGuinness echoes and scrambles in a conversation between Elizabeth, Edmund, and William (McGuinness 1997b: 46–48). The overt espousal of cultural genocide in A View also crumbles in Spenser’s complex depictions of civility and savagery in The Faerie Queene Book Five’s Artegall, Irena, and the Salvage Island and Book Six’s Calidore, Blattant Beast, Salvage Man, and Salvage Nation. McGuinness’s play helps call attention to the ambivalence of these figures in The Faerie Queene, just as it heightens awareness of the charged, ambivalent attention to internal differences amongst Henry V’s warring forces in Shakespeare’s play. The older, appropriated texts provide some of the raw material for the ways that McGuinness scrambles material in his appropriation. It is McGuinness’s Elizabeth who takes on whole passages of Irenius’s part of the dialogue. His Edmund, more reminiscent of Eudoxus, voices patronizing faith in the capacities of the Irish to be civilized and saved, but his arrogant faith in his role as their civilizer wavers, a wavering that comes to obstruct his ability to write his poem glorifying the virgin queen. He questions his own mission and his cultural identifications, absorbing qualities of dispossessed Mad Sweney (himself, as many critics note, a Lear figure) as he grows increasingly divided and delusional.

Anatomies of death: Edmund channels Irenius, with a difference, again The same province of Munster was a most rich and plentifull countrey, full of corne and cattle, that you would have thought they should have beene able to stand long, yet ere one yeare and a halfe they were brought to such wretchednesse, as that any stony heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and 85

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glynnes they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legges could not beare them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eate the dead carrions, happy where they could finde them, yea, and one another soone after, insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and, if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithall; that in short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentifull countrey suddainely left voyde of man and beast; yet sure in all that warre, there perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremitie of famine, which they themselves had wrought, in these late wars of Munster. – Irenius in View (excluding the italicized phrases) – Edmund in Mutabilitie (excluding the bolded phrases)

With the few discrepancies I note above, this passage appears both in A View of the State of Ireland and in Mutabilitie. Edmund channels Irenius in a conversation with Elizabeth early in the play, just after the passage discussed in the previous section. In this conversation, McGuinness excises the phrase in bold italics, adds the two phrases I have emphasized in bold, and modernizes the spelling of the words in italics. Although McGuinness excises the bolded phrase from Edmund’s utterance, the description of the starving wretches eating carrion, each other, and even corpses, he relocates the charge of cannibalism two scenes later when William responds to Edmund’s questions about how he came “amongst us” in Ireland. William says: We walked on foot, into a forest where all life seemed to have left. No birds sang. We watched the ground and all above us to save ourselves from the savages but they fell on us and bit our flesh like wolves. I thought they would have pierced my heart and drank my blood. McGuinness 1997b: 21 The implications of this displacement of the cannibalism reference are hard to discern precisely. Is McGuinness simply making mischief with the Spenserian intertext? By excising and then relocating the charges of cannibalistic savagery, is he making Shakespeare and Spenser share the burden of circulating such horrific projections and misrecognitions, calling out their complicity? Just as the cannibalism reference is given to a different character, so too is Edmund’s assertion that “any stony heart” would rue the spectacle of wretchedness. Hugh, after obeying Maeve’s order to kill her and Sweney, reports the act to his appalled compatriots and asks, “Do you think I heard her [Maeve’s] prayer with an easy heart? Stone itself would melt to hear Maeve’s plea of sorrow” (McGuinness 1997b: 95). Although the play poses more questions than it answers about the status and effects of the quotation from Spenser and its dispersal between different characters, Grene’s claim that McGuinness offers a “spot the quotation” game for the “better read among his audience” (2010: 94) trivializes the complex effects of the technique. Does McGuinness stage the “anatomies of death” passage as a form of projection/misrecognition, transforming it from the supposedly reasonable observation of Irenius into the delusional construct of Edmund, William, and colonialist ideology itself? Is the horrific spectacle of cannibalism and corpse-eating mere hallucination? McGuinness doesn’t shy away from staging violence when, at the end of act 4, Niall stabs Richard and he, Sweney, Annas, and Maeve bathe ritually in his blood before the group surrounds and murders Ben. The “anatomies of death” passage recurs during a play about the fall of Troy

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that William puts on by way of a spell/incantation (McGuinness 1997b: 78–79), again as direct quotation, but broken up into bits and partial phrases, not the whole chunk as in Edmund’s prior conversation with Elizabeth. Does Edmund’s utterance of fragments from the passage disrupt the Fall of Troy? Is it partially in that play and part of Edmund’s nightmare? Is he sleep-talking? Does the delusion dissolve? Or does it intensify? Lojek argues that the “what is my nation” line works whether an audience or reader recognizes the echo of Shakespeare’s MacMorris or not. Because I read Mutabilitie alongside A View of the State of Ireland, I am unsure if the same could be said about the Spenser material. In quoting Irenius, is Edmund channeling, thus hijacking and obliterating, Irenius? Is he hosting him, giving him a seat at the metaphorical table? Is Irenius an uninvited guest? A ghost? Might we posit the host/guest relationship (with all its etymological and cultural ambivalence)10 as a useful figure for appropriation itself? Because Mutabilitie raises more questions about appropriation than it answers – precisely because its appropriative aims and effects are so hard to pin down – I find it a brilliant teaching text, one to which students have responded thoughtfully and enthusiastically.11 Our discussions helped me realize how thoroughly McGuinness disrupts the binary pairings of himself and Shakespeare and himself and Spenser as authors, revealing the inadequacy of a model of appropriation as merely “two-way” traffic. By imagining William as Edmund’s guest, and making both characters share the play’s polytemporal present moment with reimagined figures from Irish myth and McGuinness’s own creations, Mutabilitie complicates a tidy dyadic model of the relationship between between appropriation and original. In much the same way, McGuinness aligns with postcolonial theory in pushing back against essentialist notions of national and religious identity and against binary configurations such as civilized/savage, colonizer/colonized. Through a “verbal hijacking” technique in which characters channel and scramble verbatim quotations of figures like Shakespeare’s Captain MacMorris and Spenser’s Irenius, Mutabilitie fractures the all-knowing, speaking subject of colonial history; exposes the contradictions entailed in militant nationalism; and reveals the hybrid formation of supposedly distinct cultures and identities. As my student James Sprague puts it in a close reading assignment for our Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures course: “When Edmund asks the question “What is my nation,” he is at once invoking the racialized dichotomy between English and Irish and (through comparison to MacMorris’s very same question) dismantling the notion of cultural dichotomy altogether.” In appropriating Shakespeare and Spenser, yet banishing William and Edmund from the precariously peaceful postcolonial future envisioned in Mutabilitie’s closing scene, McGuinness invites us to imagine alternative, albeit historically determined, futures, to join him in the creative, recursive act of appropriating history itself.

Notes 1 The characters’ names are Edmund and William, not Spenser and Shakespeare, as many critics mistakenly call them. I shall use the first names when referring to McGuinness’s staged characters in order to distinguish them from the historical persons and their texts. 2 In Spenser (2007), Hadfield and Stoll reprint the Title Page of the Mutabilitie Cantos from the 1609 edition of the The Faerie Queene, which gives the title Two Cantos of Mutabilitie. 3 In this paragraph, I draw on Canny (1990), Ní Chuilleanáin (1990), and Hadfield and Maley’s (1997) introduction to Spenser’s View. 4 See Caven and Lojek (2010). Lojek describes the contrasting uses of staging and program notes in the 1997 and 2000 productions (Lojek 2010: 188–89). 5 On the Irish materials, see Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (2002: 55–56), Claudia Harris (2001: 64), and Nicholas Grene (2010: 93).

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Barbara Sebek 6 All references to Shakespeare’s plays are to the third edition of the Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (Shakespeare 2016). All further references will be incorporated into the body of the text. 7 I borrow this phrase from Christy Desmet’s (2014) analysis of the complicated ways that direct quotation can function. Throughout this chapter, Desmet’s discussion of appropriation and matters of recognition informs my analysis of Mutabilitie. 8 For a reading of the mixed nature of the play’s ending, see Lojek (2010) and Csilla Bertha (2003). Bertha reads the ending of the play as “poetic dream solution” for lingering colonial relations (EnglishIrish, Protestant-Catholic). 9 Llewellyn-Jones offers a full account of McGuinness’s use of “third space” and its engagement with fractured subjectivity as enabling condition. Bertha offers a fine analysis of the ways in which the play works with and against an opposition, complicating many assumptions that pervade postcolonial theory. 10 The classic anthropological study of this topic is Marcel Mauss. Mauss notes the conceptual proximity between hosting and hostility in many languages. In Kwakiutl, for example, “there is no clear distinction between the meanings ‘to give food,’ ‘to return food,’ and ‘to take vengeance’ ” (1967: 105). It is just this blurry distinction that McGuinness presents in the closing scene, where the Irish offer “little milk” and where at least one of the characters regards the English child not as guest but as “hostage” (100). 11 Thanks to Tracy Pearce for first alerting me to the play, which she came upon in Palmer (2001) while researching her seminar paper for “Different Shakespeares.” For a description of that course, see Sebek (2014).

References Baker, David. 2017.“The Forgotten Map: Teaching Britain in Shakespeare’s History Plays.” In Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays. Ed. Laurie Ellinghausen. New York: MLA. 81–86. Bertha, Csilla. 2003. “ ‘They Raigne ouer Change, and Doe Their States Maintaine’: Change, Stasis, and Postcoloniality in Frank McGuinness’s Mutabilitie.” Irish University Review 33.2: 307–21. Canny, Nicholas. 1990. “Ireland, the Historical Context.” In The Spenser Encyclopedia. Ed. A.C. Hamilton. New York: Routledge. 404–7. Caven, Michael, and Helen Lojek. 2002. “A Director’s Perspective on Mutabilitie.” In The Theatre of Frank McGuinness: Stages of Mutability. Ed. Helen Lojek. Dublin: Carysfort Press. 175–94. Desmet, Christy. 2014. “Recognizing Shakespeare, Rethinking Fidelity: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Appropriation.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 41–57. Grene, Nicholas. 2010. “Mutabilitie: In Search of Shakespeare.” Irish University Review 40.1: 92–100. Hadfield, Andrew, and Willy Maley. 1997. “Introduction.” A View of the State of Ireland. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. xi–xxvi. Harris, Claudia W. 2001. “Frank McGuinness’ Mutabilitie: The Transforming Power of Theatre.” Text & Presentation 22: 57–73. Llewellyn Jones, Margaret. 2002. Contemporary Irish Drama and Cultural Identity. Bristol: Intellect Books. Lojek, Helen Heusner. 2010. “Playing Together: William Shakespeare and Frank McGuinness.” In Shakespeare and the Irish Writer. Eds. Janet Clare and Stephen O’Neill. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. 179–94. Mauss, Marcel. 1967. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. Ian Cunnison. New York: Norton Publishing. McGuinness, Frank. 1997a. “Foreword.” In Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture. Eds. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. New York: St. Martin’s. xi–xii. ———. 1997b. Mutabilitie. London and Boston: Faber and Faber. Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan. 1990. “Ireland, the Cultural Context.” In The Spenser Encyclopedia. Ed. A.C. Hamilton. New York: Routledge. 403–4. Palmer, Patricia. 2001. Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabeth Imperial Expansion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sebek, Barbara. 2014. “Different Shakespeares: Thinking Globally in an Early Modern Literature Course.” In Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters. Eds. Karina Attar and Lynn Shutters. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 103–19.

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Frank McGuinness’s Mutabilitie Shakespeare, William. 2016 Henry V. In The Norton Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. 3rd ed. New York: Norton. Spenser, Edmund. 2007. The Faerie Queene: Book Six and the Mutabilitie Cantos. Eds. Andrew Hadfield and Abraham Stoll. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. ———. 1997. A View of the Present State of Ireland. Eds. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Wray, Ramona. 1997.“Shakespeare and the Sectarian Divide: Politics and Pedagogy in (post) Post-ceasefire Belfast.” In Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture. Eds. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. New York: St. Martin’s. 235–55.

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8 SHAKESPEARE APPROPRIATION AND QUEER LATINX EMPOWERMENT IN JOSH INOCÉNCIO’S OFÉLIO Katherine Gillen Josh Inocéncio’s one-act play Ofélio, first performed in Houston, Texas, in 2017, tells the story of a queer Latinx student who visits a medical clinic after having been sexually assaulted by his instructor, a white graduate assistant. Before any dialogue is spoken, the doctor pulls a “little purple flower” from the mouth of Ofélio, the eponymous protagonist (Inocéncio n.d.).1 The flower affirms Ofélio’s connection to Shakespeare’s Ophelia, recalling the flowers with which she is so closely identified. Later called a pansy, the flower possesses additional Shakespearean resonances, both to A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s (Shakespeare 2017) love-in-idleness, which is wounded by Cupid’s arrow, and to the flower that grows from Adonis’s blood in Venus and Adonis. These secondary parallels highlight themes of sexual violence present, though muted, in Hamlet (Shakespeare 2016), and Inocéncio’s rendering of Ofélio asks us also to consider the patriarchal oppression that Ophelia herself faces. By invoking Ophelia to express the experience of a rape survivor, Inocéncio joins a feminist tradition of reproducing Shakespeare’s heroine to give voice to those who are marginalized or victimized. But as the shift in name from Ophelia to Ofélio suggests, Inocéncio’s protagonist is male and Latinx. As such, Inocéncio’s play interrogates the Anglocentrism and heteronormativity that have shaped interpretations of Ophelia’s story, of Hamlet, and of Shakespeare more broadly. Throughout the play, Inocéncio draws on queer and Latinx theatrical and cultural traditions to transform Ophelia’s victimization into a story of embattled survivorship and to engage critically with both Hamlet and its reception history. In so doing, I argue, he articulates a radical, queer of color agency – and a vision for Latinx theater – forged through resistance to hegemonic power structures.

Latinx Shakespeare and the critique of Shakespeare’s cultural status With Ofélio, Inocéncio contributes to a growing body of Latinx Shakespeare, a term Carla Della Gatta uses to describe “a textual adaptation or performance in which Shakespearean plays, plots, or characters are made Latino” (2016: 151). Latinx Shakespeare’s origins can be traced to West Side Story, which debuted in 1957, and this trend has grown rapidly in the last decade alongside the cultural influence of Latinxs in the United States. As Della Gatta contends, “These productions are not ‘intercultural,’ or demonstrative of cultural exchange, but ‘intracultural,’ indicative 90

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of current American culture and Shakespeare’s position in it” (2016: 152). Although Latinx Shakespeare is a broad tent, including works by Anglo writers and directors, I am interested in situating Inocéncio’s Ofélio within a tradition of Shakespeare appropriation specifically by Latinx playwrights who turn to Shakespeare to explore Latinx experiences and to interrogate Shakespeare’s cultural role. I use the term Latinx as it denotes a spectrum of gender identities; this shift in terminology reflects recent critical practice and is particularly apt for describing Ofélio’s queer politics and aesthetics. A self-described gay Latinx cultural worker, whose theater “focuses on queer and indigenous reclamations within Latina/o and Euro-American cultures” (Boffone 2016), Inocéncio appropriates Hamlet as a means of theorizing the relationship between hegemonic and subaltern cultural traditions. Latinx Shakespeare productions such as Ofélio reckon with Shakespeare’s cultural primacy, often regarded as an impediment to the flourishing of Latinx theater. Practically speaking, Shakespeare takes up space in repertories that could be filled by more diverse, living playwrights. Just as significantly, Shakespeare has come to represent the pinnacle of white Anglophone cultural expression. As Ayanna Thompson succinctly explains, “Shakespeare represents the epitome of Western culture because he represents the exclusivity of white culture” (2011: 41–42). For these reasons, Ricardo Bracho proclaimed in a 2004 roundtable of Latinx playwrights, My dream for North American English-dominant theatre is a year without Shakespeare. Still the best produced playwright in this country and this fact I think speaks most to the fact of the U.S.’s persistent sense of itself as an Anglo Colonial settler society than anything else. In his stead I advocate for the staging of new work by local playwrights in all those parks, stages and school auditoriums. By local I mean someone can walk, take public transportation or drive on less than a whole tank of gas to rehearsal and the proposed production site. Svich 2004: 10 For Bracho, disrupting Shakespeare’s prominence means disrupting the oppressive dominance of hegemonic Anglo society. Whereas Shakespeare represents cosmopolitan whiteness, Bracho calls for local productions that speak to the specific conditions of particular communities. In the same roundtable, however, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas offers a slightly different approach: [Y]ou know I love Shakespeare, I love Lorca. I want to see those plays all the time, except when I don’t. That’s the weird contradiction. I want all of that mess, all of those contradictions to be welcomed into the big, warm house of Latino all the time. Svich 2004: 14 Latinx Shakespeare responds to this call to bring Shakespeare into the “big, warm house of Latino,” insisting that Shakespeare contains something of value for Latinxs and that Latinxs can appropriate Shakespeare for their own purposes. For this reason, as Ruben Espinosa contends, gaining “a better understanding of Latino/a engagement with Shakespeare would ultimately lead to a more thorough understanding of his cultural capital” (2016: 51). Although Latinx Shakespeare does not reject Shakespeare in the manner advocated by Bracho, it does grapple with his place in colonialist Anglo culture and, in addition, often instantiates the local, community ethos for which Bracho calls. Inocéncio, in particular, is committed to this vision; as he states in relation to his efforts to support Latinx playwrights in Texas,“I want to see more localized theatre that cultivates sustainable living opportunities for homegrown playwrights and other theater artists. . . . There’s no 91

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reason why Houston and other cities can’t be theatre hubs like NYC or Chicago” (Szymkowicz 2017). Reflecting this local approach, Inocéncio grounds Ofélio firmly in the experiences of LGBTQ communities of color in Houston. His protagonist is a student at Rice University who lives in the hip EaDo (East Downtown) neighborhood. The play is overtly activist in nature, as it draws attention to the sexual violence and inadequate health care services that threaten the lives of LGBTQ people of color. In keeping with this activist orientation, Ofélio premiered at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston in April 2017 as part of the T.R.U.T.H Project’s sexual violence prevention campaign, which “educates and mobilizes LGBTQ communities of color and their allies through social arts that promote mental, emotional and sexual health” (The T.R.U.T.H. Project n.d.). Inocéncio cites queer Mexican American playwrights such as Luis Alfaro, Cherríe Moraga, and Virginia Grise as influences (50 Playwrights Project n.d.). With Ofélio, he also joins a tradition of queer Shakespeare adaptation, which draws on the erotics of the cross-dressed stage and the possibilities afforded by of early modern expressions of desire that had not yet been disciplined by modern regimes of gender and sexuality. Whereas much queer Shakespeare performance occurs in predominantly white, Anglo theaters, Ofélio is rooted the community-oriented tradition of Chicanx theater, which in many ways was born with El Teatro Campesino, the theatrical wing of the United Farm Workers. Describing people of Mexican and/or indigenous origins living in the United States, the term Chicanx arises from the Chicano movement for political liberation, with the more recent addition of the “x” connoting gender flexibility. Through community performances such as those produced by El Teatro Campesino, David Román argues, Chicanxs “reformulated their sense of identity from one of oppression and victimization to one of resistance and survival” (1997: 153). Ofélio enacts something similar, though with updated queer of color politics, reimagining Ophelia in a local, queer context to transform sexual and racial victimization into resistant survival. Inocéncio draws on this Chicanx theatrical tradition to interrogate Shakespeare’s cultural status as well as his perceived heteronormativity. As Elizabeth Klein and Michael Shapiro suggest, attending to local productions can challenge dominant understandings of “what ‘Shakespeare’ is or what ‘Shakespeare’ should sound like” (2005: 33), problematizing received notions of Shakespeare’s universality. In Ofélio, Inocéncio critiques the way in which Shakespeare has been weaponized in the interests of heteronormative, white, Anglo power. This power is manifested in the academic and medical institutions that inflict physical, emotional, and epistemological violence on Ofélio. By invoking Ophelia’s story to articulate the trauma of a young, queer, Latinx man, Inocéncio suggests that queer people of color can appropriate – and speak back to – Shakespeare in the interests of personal survival and collective liberation.

Challenging Ophelia’s reception history: from watery death to muddy survival Upon entering the clinic to seek treatment, Ofélio channels Ophelia, framing his rape not so much in terms of her limpid drowning but in terms of her “muddy death.” He recalls how “under the force of his/chest” the instructor “pressed me deeper into this/mud,” into “my own little cave in the ground.” Oppressed by this heavy weight and inhaling mud and water, Ofélio wonders “if/a purple pansy can/ever grow/again.” While Ophelia’s death is preordained by narrative fate, Ofélio exists in moment of liminal possibility. He is drowning, but he has carved out space in the mud, space that contains the potential for survival and regeneration. In its depiction of drowning, Ofélio engages with one of Western culture’s most iconic images. As Alan R. Young documents, visual renderings of Ophelia’s death, both before and 92

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after she enters the water, were popular throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and are still prominent today among both professional and amateur artists (2002; “Ophelia and Web 2.0” n.d.). The most famous rendering of Ophelia is John Everett Millais’s 1851/2 PreRaphaelite painting, which depicts the heroine’s drowning romantically, with her eyes closing, her heavy skirts billowing around her, a colorful garland of flowers floating by her side. Millais’s stylization of Ophelia has profoundly influenced our understanding of Ophelia’s character, and it is cited in Laurence Olivier’s (1948) and Kenneth Branagh’s (1996) cinematic renderings of her death. In each case, Ophelia’s death is highly aestheticized; her body is cleansed of its troubling sexuality, and the trauma of her suicide is mitigated by her innocent beauty. Other works complicate this tradition, often by granting Ophelia agency or by using her experience to make trenchant social commentary. Sujata Iyengar argues that, in the twenty-first century, “we see women and girls re-imagine Ophelia as a speaker and a subject,” often presenting her “as self-creating artist, not just as artifact” (2016: 166–68). Similarly, Iyengar and Christy Desmet contend that Ophelia “inspires young users of new media to become cultural producers through their identification with and critique of Shakespeare’s doomed maiden” (2012: 59). Many of these new media renderings reclaim and revive Ophelia by giving her voice and imagining alternate endings for her. This tendency is shared by recent novels such as Michelle Ray’s Falling for Hamlet, Lisa Fiedler’s Dating Hamlet, and Lisa Klein’s Ophelia: A Novel (Carniel 2016). The drowning trope remains prominent, however. While some of these works recreate what Alan Young calls the essential Ophelia trope, in which “Ophelia is beautiful in death, and death itself is seen as beautiful, however tragic” (“Ophelia and Web 2.0” n.d.), others critique the social conditions that contribute to oppression and marginalization. Such works include Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (Ophelia) (2001), which pictures a woman drowning in a flooded living room, overwhelmed by domestic tasks, and Tom Hunter’s The Way Home (2000), in which a drowned woman is depicted against an overgrown and alienating urban environment (Perni 2012; Rhodes 2012). While the majority of Ophelia appropriations feature female subjects, some shift her gender. Juan Pablo Ballester’s Based on Real Events (1997), for example, features a young man dressed as a mermaid, while Álex Francés’s Nueva Vida (1998) depicts a male figure lying face down in a river. In a move that resonates with early modern casting practices, these works queer Ophelia, while also asking us to think about diverse forms of oppression and marginalization. The traditional, aestheticized portraits of Ophelia – and to some extent the more radical, revisionist ones as well – rely heavily on Gertrude’s report of her death, in which she recounts what must have been a gruesome death in great poetic detail: There is a willow grows askant the brook That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream. Therewith fantastic garlands did she make Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies and long purples, That liberal shepherds give a grosser name But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them. There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke, When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up, Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds, As one incapable of her own distress, 93

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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. 4.7.164–812 In Gertrude’s rendering, Ophelia’s complicated, fragmented character is elegantly framed, objectified, and cut off from the messy patriarchal dynamics that led to her death. Gertrude paints a portrait of beautiful, natural femininity, Ophelia’s incongruously placid “mermaid-like” body surrounded by flowers as she is pulled to her “muddy death.”3 Ophelia’s sexuality is muted in this rendering, cleansed both by the water and the death. In addition to downplaying Ophelia’s emotional and physical distress, Gertrude’s description clashes with the play’s larger focus on the materiality of the body, its uncontrollable desires, and its decomposition in death. Although we are reminded of such corporeal materiality when Hamlet and Laertes fight in Ophelia’s grave, it is Gertrude’s aestheticized report that lives on in Ophelia’s artistic and literary reproduction. For Kaara Peterson and Deanne Williams, the drive endlessly to reproduce Ophelia’s death arises from the aporia left by Gertrude’s report: “Representations of Ophelia dying, a drowning death that is already a mediated representation, repeat and perform her initial textual elision, consistently allowing representation to substitute for the absence of real history/story” (2012: 1). Visual, literary, and theatrical artists make visible the body that we are denied in the text, fulfilling a desire to access the beautiful death. The cultural and psychological work accomplished by these supplemental renderings is essentially conservative. The intact female body, paradoxically purified and integrated only in death, deflects anxiety from the decomposing, devolving, and castrating effects that death wreaks on men (Peterson 1998: 18). The visual tableaux provides an opportunity for men to imagine themselves as contained, integrated, and pure, unthreatened either by female sexuality or by death, itself frequently figured in terms of sexual consummation. In addition, Peterson (1998: 19–20) argues, artistic renderings of Ophelia’s beautiful, intact body often refer not just to Ophelia herself – whose story, as Elaine Showalter (1985) contends, rests largely in the history of her representation – but to the text of Hamlet and to Shakespeare more generally. They present Hamlet, a sprawling and fragmented play, as unproblematically unified, idealize its earthy preoccupations, and affirm Shakespeare’s place at the pinnacle of Western culture. Inocéncio’s Ofélio rejects this history of whitewashing Ophelia and instead interrogates Shakespeare’s cultural supremacy and, more broadly, white Anglo hegemony. Like other appropriations of Hamlet, Ofélio returns to the moment of Ophelia’s drowning; however, he rejects Gertrude’s gloss and embraces the radical instability of this textual moment, using it as a means for his queer Latinx character to process his own sexual trauma. In contrast to the sanitation of Ophelia so common in the artistic tradition, Inocéncio’s Ofélio is intensely embodied. His “naked body” dug “in deep,” he is mired in mud that is both elemental and metaphoric, reflective of the related degradations of sexual assault and white supremacist heteropatriarchy. By refusing to deny Ofélio’s sexuality and the experience of his rape, Inocéncio joins a queer Latinx theatrical tradition that emphasizes embodied identity and denies the imperative to cleanse the queer body of its corporeality (Román 1997; Lockhart 1998). The focus on mud, rather than water, is central to this project. As Mary Douglass maintains, “Dirt offends against order,” and cleanliness often functions as a form of social control (2002: 3). As Will Stockton demonstrates, moreover, queer bodies are often deemed unclean and in need of purgation; they are “degenerate and wasteful by definition, differentiated from the reproductive telos of both 94

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historical and contemporary body politics, and produced by the purgative movements of a heteronormative social order” (2011: xix). A reclamation of this “dirt” has informed queer aesthetics and queer Latinx aesthetics in particular, where sanitizing efforts have colonial implications. In particular, Ofélio employs a version of lo sucio, translated as “dirt” or “filth,” which Deborah R. Vargas identifies as a queer Latinx analytic that resists neoliberal “hetero- and homonormative racial projects of citizenship formations, projects that seek to rid their sanitized worlds of filth and grime” (2014: 718). In this vein, Inocéncio rejects the ideal of the cleansing death, insisting that Ofélio (and perhaps Ophelia as well) need not be purified, sanitized, disembodied, or whitewashed in order to have value. In contrast to dominant associations of mud (like queer sexuality) with filth, Ofélio recasts it as a kind of balm, healing him from the “brush fire” of sexual assault: i coat myself in mud. i cool myself with the earth’s soil. my armor against the elements so that he doesn’t burn me anymore. Inocénio n.d. He imagines the mud as soothing, providing him with cooling armor against the ravaging fire. Like Ophelia, Ofélio is closely associated with nature; however, he infuses Hamlet’s Western paradigm with a more indigenous Mexican understanding of nature as salutary. Channeling the wisdom of the curandera, the Mexican folk healer, Ofélio transforms himself into “a creature native and endued/Unto that element,” though that element is mud, not water. This is not an ethereal, sanitized, white Ophelia but rather one that is embodied and integrated with the earth, drawing wisdom from his indigenous roots. Inocéncio writes in a 2016 essay, “Mixing the Culture Pot: Growing Up Gay and Austro-Mexican in Houston,” that he regards his ethnic heritage, especially the Mexican part, as “inseparable from my sexuality,” and he explains that “these cultures and their myths . . . shepherded my sexual orientation as a gay man.” A similar process of reclamation facilitates Ofélio’s healing. Rather than taking Gertrude’s aestheticized report for granted, then, Inocéncio’s play employs a queer Latinx perspective to recuperate Hamlet’s emphasis on the materiality of the body and its connections to the earth, recasting these aspects in a positive light.

The purple pansy: envisioning queer of color subjectivity By denying the need for a cleansing death, as is often granted to Ophelia, Ofélio abandons the belief that sexual purity is the foundation of virtue and instead forges a potentially liberatory queer of color subjectivity. Like Ophelia, Ofélio is a virgin, though in a postmodern context in which virginity’s ontological reality is questioned and in which queer sexuality can be imagined as revolutionary rather than sinful. He identifies as “an intellectual queer boy” with “All the theory, none of the experience” and speaks excitedly about queer utopian futures. Ofélio’s instructor, a graduate student, exploits this political exuberance and sexual inexperience. He 95

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scoffs at Ofélio’s reluctance to have sex, telling him, “There’s no such thing as virginity. Didn’t you pay any attention when you took my course? Get your head out of the patriarchal past.” The instructor’s comments recall Ophelia’s much-prized virginity, while at the same time rejecting it as a social construct and a remnant of the “patriarchal past.” Playing on the phrase “Get your head out of your ass,” the instructor suggests that the presumed anality of gay sex not only troubles but is also the means of supplanting these patriarchal norms. Yet the instructor’s focus remains phallically patriarchal, intent on penetrating Ofélio. He wields the postmodern discourses of the academy, as well as his white privilege and limited institutional authority, against Ofélio, sexually assaulting him in the name of finding “a place where simple sex acts are revolutionary.” Whereas Ophelia’s choices are circumscribed by the early modern reification of virginity as an empirically verifiable state, Ofélio’s agency and self-possession are compromised in the name of a white, queer, postmodern critique of virginity’s constructedness. Ofélio’s reasons for not wanting to have sex remain somewhat inarticulate – he says only “I don’t know what my hang ups are or why it’s taken me so long” – but they seem to reflect a desire to maintain selfpossession. Here, Ofélio resembles not Ophelia so much as Adonis, who resists sex not because he is concerned with his chastity but because he is young and uninterested in his pursuer. Yet the instructor’s emphasis on the fictiveness of chastity denies the validity of these concerns, and the sexual assault destroys the queer utopia that both Ofélio and the TA purport to embrace, showing that power differentials divide the queer community. The assault further suggests that, like antiquated heteronormative ideas of virginity, white queer perspectives may fail to fully account for the experiences and subjectivities of queer people of color. The violence of these white epistemologies is physically manifested in the rape, which leaves Ofélio bleeding and with searing abdominal pain. Although associated with violation, the purple pansy ultimately comes to signal a capacious queer agency, rooted in an embrace of an embodied self that has been oppressed but persists in survival. Although Ophelia does distribute pansies, representing “thoughts” (4.5.171), the purple pansy also recalls the flower into which Adonis is transformed in Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare 2006) and the love-in-idleness in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare 2017). Both of these flowers come into being through sexual violence. Although Adonis resists Venus’s advances, the consummation Venus cannot attain is enacted by a wild boar: “nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine/Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin” (ll. 1115–16). The “purple flower [that] sprung up, check’red with white” (l.1168) from Adonis’s blood reflects the violation Adonis has endured, as well as, perhaps, the more welcomed queer union of Adonis and the boar (Stanivukovic 2000: 90). The love-in-idleness in Midsummer reflects a similar mixture of violation and potentially liberatory queer eroticism. Another name for the European wild pansy, the lovein-idleness, acquires its purple markings when Cupid’s “love-shaft” (2.1.159) pierces it, having missed the maiden for whom he was aiming. Its coloring – “Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound” (2.1.167) – reflects the conventional imagery of heterosexual penetration, yet it also, like Adonis’s flower, contains queer potential. Distilled into the love potion, the flower precipitates erotic attachments that are queerly chaotic, indifferent to distinctions of gender or even species. By invoking these Shakespearean flowers, Inocéncio rejects the binary oppositions of chastity/ sexual promiscuity and phallic power/feminine passivity inherent to Gertrude’s comments about the long purples, generally interpreted either as orchids or wild arums, which “liberal shepherds give a grosser name,/But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them” (4.7.169–70). Ofélio’s flowers are neither phallic nor strictly gendered. Instead, the pansy – also, of course, a disparaging term for a queer or effeminate man – acquires an anal resonance, signifying the violence 96

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of the rape which leaves Ofélio with blood “Dried into my boxers this morning. Blood on the toilet paper, on my fingers.” Drawing on Guy Hocquenghem’s idea that the anus, rather than the phallus, functions as the site of private subjectivity, Jeffrey Masten (1997: 134) examines the early modern word “fundament,” meaning “rectum” but also “foundation or seat,” to reconsider the significance of anality, suggesting that it can be “imagined as originary: an offspring, beginning – and thus at some distance from the preposterous ends of other anal rhetorics” (see Hocquenghem 1993).4 In this potentially generative sense, then, the pansy becomes a sign of Ofélio’s queer self-possession and subjecthood. This sense of queer selfhood is shaped by Ofélio’s Latinx cultural and racial identity, and as such, it is usefully viewed through the framework of jotería studies. Stemming from the slang jota, an offensive term for a gay man that has been reclaimed by activists as a positive identity marker, jotería studies resists the tendency of Anglo queer theory to “extract sexuality or gender from all the other ways a person exists in her or his society” (Hames-García 2014: 139). Ofélio’s queer selfhood is not rooted in a sexual purity that cannot be disconnected from whiteness but instead accommodates the messiness of sexuality, of violation, of oppression, and of survival. He has not been “deflowered,” his white pansy stained with blood, so much as alienated from his own vibrant selfhood, an effect illustrated when the doctor pulls the pansy from his mouth in the opening scene. In contrast to Ophelia’s early modern chastity, therefore, Ofélio’s flower contains the potential to regenerate and multiply. When he wonders if “a purple pansy can ever grow again,” he holds open the possibility that he can renew a self that has been “scattered” though not necessarily shattered by rape and racial oppression.

Interrogating Shakespeare’s (white) supremacy and envisioning queer Latinx potentialities By rejecting a reception history that renders Ophelia whole and chaste in death, Inocéncio interrogates idealized assessments of Hamlet itself. If, as Peterson argues, depictions of the contained, dying Ophelia work to reify Hamlet as a perfectly integrated text, then Inocéncio’s violated, fractured, and resistant Ofélio indicates that the play is more troubling than we often acknowledge. By aligning, albeit catachrestically, Hamlet and the graduate instructor, Inocéncio forces audiences to reckon with the fact that sexual violence – not rape, but Hamlet’s mistreatment of Ophelia and deeply misogynist diatribes – lies at the heart of a play that is often considered the premier work of Western culture. In addition, by presenting an Ophelia who does not die, Inocéncio refuses to let Hamlet remain contained in the past, cut off from contemporary analysis and interpretation. The referent text, stripped of its sanitizing veneer, remains fragmented and incomplete rather than fully unified and is therefore open to commentary from those at the margins. Ofélio’s resistant, queer of color selfhood troubles the play, speaking back to the hegemonic power structures for which Hamlet has come to serve as a metonym. Moreover, Inocéncio aligns Hamlet with the academy that both energizes and oppresses Ofélio. As with the queer theory imposed on Ofélio by the graduate student, Hamlet is often understood as belonging to a historically white academic milieu. Although queer theory may seem cutting edge in relation to Shakespeare, the discourses are linked both through their assumed whiteness and through their potential to be reinterpreted from a queer of color perspective.5 Ofélio’s critique of hegemonic institutions extends to the medical establishment, which shames Ofélio and intensifies his sense of violation. The female doctor’s removed, institutional approach clashes with Ofélio’s intensely personal and poetic processing of his experience. This dichotomy is reflected in the play’s blocking: the doctor “stands, facing another direction” and questions Ofélio about his medical history; rather than answering, Ofélio ruminates over his rape 97

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in the language of Ophelia’s flowery death. The dual monologues, delivered by actors facing away from one another, underscore the speakers’ conflicting epistemologies and experiences. Queries such as “Who’s your insurance provider?” and “Are you up to date on all your vaccines?” (Inocénio n.d.) pale in comparison to Ofélio’s more pressing expression of crisis: “what can grow/in the wake/of his/brush/fire?” And terms such a “sexual activity,” “sexual partner,” and “STI testing” appear cold when juxtaposed with Ofélio’s thoughts. Whereas poetry, spoken in a manner reminiscent of Hamlet’s soliloquies, helps Ofélio articulate a language of survival, medical jargon alienates him from his body and sense of self. As the scene in which the doctor pulls the pansy from his mouth demonstrates, the doctor is an agent of this alienation rather than someone who can remedy it. Compounding her clinical language, the doctor’s exam induces a post-traumatic response in Ofélio, causing him to relive his assault. As the stage directions relate, “He bends over but not without a degree of resistance, and begins reliving the night before. The doctor stands behind him and puts on a rubber glove. Then proceeds to examine him” (Inocénio n.d.). The exam repeats the trauma of the rape. Ofélio does not fully consent to it but instead “mechanically” takes off his pants and acquiesces reluctantly to the doctor’s penetrating hand. He finds the situation “undignified/her cold plastic hand in/me.” The similarity between the rape and the exam is made visible in the staging: the doctor “dissolves” and the TA appears, taking the audience back to the events of the previous night. The primary difference between the exam and the rape lies in the doctor’s use of a prophylactic; rather than signaling safety or respect to Ofélio, however, her protective glove represents the alienating distance between himself and the medical establishment that views him as abject, as potentially diseased and untouchable. As he states, the glove is “For sanitation/I know/but only then/did I feel/dirty” (Inocénio n.d.). The visit to the clinic thus reinforces Ofélio’s sense of shame, its institutional violence reiterating the sexual violence he has experienced at the hands of a white man. Moreover, by setting this shaming in a Planned Parenthood clinic with a female doctor, Inocéncio suggests that white women are often complicit in the oppression of queer men and people of color. Ofélio likely visits the clinic because of its affordability and its liberal reputation. However, as a gay Latinx man, he seems out of place there. Although the doctor says nothing overtly homophobic, she seems unprepared to deal effectively with a queer man of color, and Ofélio is offended by the assumptions she makes and by her condescending manner. The doctor’s race is never specified, but she aligns herself with a historically white medical establishment that is often blind to questions of power and race. For example, when Ofélio confesses that he has been raped, she responds by asking, “Did you report this? To the campus police?” And when he says that he can’t do that because the perpetrator is “a friend,” she admonishes him, saying “Look, he’s not really a friend if he –” (Inocénio n.d.). The doctor’s response ignores vexed relations between queer Latinxs and the police as well as a history of racialized state violence, and she overlooks the complicated power dynamics involved in the relationship between Ofélio and his instructor. The doctor’s inattention to questions of queerness and race, coupled with her abstract medical discourse, thus contributes to Ofélio’s violation. Implicit in this portrayal of the Planned Parenthood doctor is a broader critique of the white feminist perspective that dominates revisionist portrayals of Ophelia. Ofélio shares with the feminist tradition a desire to give Ophelia a voice and rescue her from her beautiful, passive death. Many feminist responses to Hamlet, however, are primarily concerned with the patriarchal dynamics oppressing women, particularly white women, and they imagine the Danish court as an analogue to modern Western patriarchy. While these works reclaim Ophelia from patriarchal silence and often question the importance of sexual chastity, they do not usually foreground the racial identity of the heroine or the of Hamlet itself. Ofélio engages with this tradition 98

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somewhat critically. In addition to critiquing the epistemological violence of white feminist and white queer thinking, Ofélio destabilizes presentations of Ophelia as agentially autonomous, an approach that cannot account for the complex forces shaping Ofélio’s sense of self. Instead, Inocéncio recognizes the more contingent, subaltern modes of subjectivity forged by queer people of color. Rather than offering a salutary image of a fully recovered self, the play’s closing moments reflect the arduous journey Ofélio must undertake to heal from his sexual assault and to navigate a racist, heterosexist world. Ofélio does not imagine that he can return to a virginal purified state or that he can fully escape from trauma and oppression. Instead, he tells himself: don’t breathe my lungs. fill yourself with mud and water. maybe if i inhale only water and mud i can grow more flowers. maybe the other faggots won’t choke on the pansies as easily as me. Inocénio n.d. This prolonged submersion is precisely what is missing from Gertrude’s portrayal of Ophelia’s death, and it disrupts attempts to whitewash Ophelia’s story, whether by means of aestheticized patriarchal portraits or white feminist revivals. Ofélio’s resistance is painful, but it also contains seeds of hope; a selfhood born in abjection, he imagines, might also contain the potential for rebirth. Although mud and water never cease to be suffocating, and may even ultimately kill Ofélio, they nonetheless become generative, potentially allowing more flowers to grow – for beautiful, flourishing queer subjectivities to multiply. Here Inocéncio draws on Hamlet’s concern with the fundament – the earth, the anus, and the grave – to transform the discourses of disease and abjection espoused by the doctor into something potentially liberatory, articulating a version of queer subjectivity that, as Masten states, “merge[s] in a (to us) strangely active-passive, object-subject position” (1997: 135). This subject position is embodied in the pansies and helps to explain the liminal space that Ofélio occupies at the end of the play, caught between life and death, striving to articulate his own story but also embedded in, and increasingly indistinguishable from, the elements. Despite its suicidal imagery, Ofélio does not embrace death as a desirable alternative to the reproductive futurity critiqued by Lee Edelman (2004) but instead enacts a vision of queer futurity. As José Esteban Muñoz writes in Cruising Utopia (2009: 1), “The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house.” Although Ofélio’s present remains imprisoning he looks to his own experience – and to Ophelia’s – to imagine new potentialities, new modes of being that are difficult to fully articulate but that reside in 99

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his image of resistant, multiplying pansies. Although Ofélio remains submerged, unable to breathe, he hopes that his story will benefit his community, preventing his fellow queer people of color from experiencing the same humiliating suffocation. His wish that other “faggots won’t choke on the pansies” is linked syntactically to his desire to grow more flowers; even if a thriving queer of color identity remains out of reach for Ofélio, he hopes that his poetic articulation of it will serve his community. Inocéncio’s short play functions similarly, as it draws on Hamlet to critique hegemonic cultural, academic, and medical institutions and to imagine new modes of survivorship. The T.R.U.T.H Project, in which Ofélio participated when it premiered in Houston, aims to create an “Out Of the Box healing experience” for LGBTQ communities of color. Ofélio enacts this unconventional healing through art by taking possession of Shakespeare’s most famous play and placing it within a queer, ­community-oriented Latinx framework. Although Shakespeare’s Hamlet is imbricated in a colonialist history and is often wielded in the interests of white, Anglo supremacy, Inocéncio suggests that a queer of color critique can recover dissonant elements of the text and transform them into tools of collective liberation.

Notes 1 As this play is unpublished, my quotations from Inocénio’s Ofélio script throughout this chapter do not include page numbers. 2 This quotation and all quotations of Shakespeare throughout this chapter are taken from the Arden editions of the plays and poems, which appear in the References list. 3 Alternately, Sujata Iyengar (2016) reads Gertrude’s speech as elegiac and collaborative in its emphasis on Ophelia’s own artistic creation. 4 For early modern discourses of sodomy, with which Masten contrasts the discourse of the fundament, see Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). 5 In my use of the term “queer of color,” I draw on Roderick Ferguson’s “queer of color critique” (2004), which recognizes intersections of race and sexuality as well as the unique critical position of LGBTQ people of color.

References Boffone, Trevor. n.d. “50 Playwrights Project.” Accessed 1 May 2018, www.50playwrights.org/. ———. 2016. “Queering Machismo from Michoacån to Montrose: Purple Eyes by Josh Inocéncio.” Howl Round. 14 Jul. Accessed 31 Jan. 2019, http://howlround.com/queering-machismo-from-michoac-nto-montrose-purple-eyes-by-josh-inoc-ncio. Carniel, Jess. 2016. “Better off dead? The Creative Practice of Reviving Ophelia.” TEXT 36: 1–11. Della Gatta, Carla. 2016. “From West Side Story to Hamlet, Prince of Cuba: Shakespeare and Latinidad in the United States.” Shakespeare Studies 44: 151–56. Douglass, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Rpt. 2002. New York: Routledge. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Espinosa, Ruben. 2016. “Stranger Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1: 51–67. Ferguson, Roderick. Aberrations in Black: Toward A Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2004. Klein, Elizabeth, and Michael Shapiro. 2005. “Shylock as Crypto-Jew: A New Mexican Adaptation of The Merchant of Venice.” In World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. Ed. Sonia Massai. New York: Routledge. 31–39. Hames-García, Michael. 2014. “Jotería Studies, or the Political is Personal.” Atzlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 39.1: 135–42. Hocquenghem, Guy. 1993. Homosexual Desire. Trans. Daniella Dangoor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Queer Latinx empowerment in Ofélio Inocéncio, Josh. 2016. “Mixing the Culture Pot: Growing Up Gay and Austro-Mexican in Houston,” OutSmart Magazine. 1 Sep. Accessed 31 Jan. 2019, www.outsmartmagazine.com/2016/09/mixing-theculture-pot-growing-up-gay-and-austro-mexican-in-houston/. ———. n.d. Ofélio. Unpublished script. Iyengar, Sujata. 2016. “Gertrude/Ophelia: Feminist Intermediality, Ekphrasis, and Tenderness in Hamlet.” In Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality. Eds. Ania Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez. New York: Routledge. 165–86. Iyengar, Sujata, and Christy Desmet. 2012. “Rebooting Ophelia: Social Media and the Rhetorics of Appropriation.” In The Afterlife of Ophelia. Eds. Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams. New York: Palgrave. 59–78. Lockhart, Melissa Fitch. 1998. “Queer Representations in Latino Theater.” Latin American Theater Review 31.2: 67–78. Masten, Jeffrey. 1997. “Is the Fundament a Grave?” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. Eds. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio. New York: Routledge. 128–45. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Peterson, Kaara. 1998. “Framing Ophelia: Representation and the Pictoral Tradition.” Mosaic 31.3: 1–24. Peterson, Kaara L., and Deanne Williams, eds. 2012. The Afterlife of Ophelia. New York: Palgrave. Perni, Remedios. 2012. “At the Margins: Ophelia in Modern and Contemporary Photography.” In The Afterlife of Ophelia. Eds. Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams. New York: Palgrave. 193–211. Rhodes, Kimberly. 2012. “Double Take: Tom Hunter’s The Way Home (2000).” In The Afterlife of Ophelia. Eds. Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams. New York: Palgrave. 214–29. Román, David. 1997. “Latino Performance and Identity.” Aztlán 22.2: 151–67. Shakespeare, William. 2006. Venus and Adonis. In The Poems. Ed. John Roe. New York: Cambridge University Press. 85–146. ———. 2016. Hamlet. Eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2017. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri. Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Bloomsbury. Showalter, Elaine. 1985. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory.” Eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Methuen. 77–94. Stanivukovic, Goran V. 2000. “ ‘Kissing the Boar’: Queer Adonis and Critical Practice.” In Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality. Ed. Calvin Thomas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 87–108. Stockton, Will. 2011. Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Svich, Caridad. 2004. “Shaping the Future of the American Voice: A Roundtable on Potentiality, Difference and Community in the New Global Order (A Latino/a Playwrights’ Perspective).” Journal of American Drama and Theater 16.3: 5–18. Szymkowicz, Adam. 2017. “I Interview Playwrights Part 931: Joshua Inocéncio.” 30 Apr. Accessed 31 Jan. 2019, http://aszym.blogspot.com/2017/04/i-interview-playwrights-part-931-joshua.html. Thompson, Ayanna. 2011. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The T.R.U.T.H Project. n.d. Accessed 1 May 2018. www.truthproject.org. Vargas, Deborah R. 2014. “Ruminations on Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic.” American Quarterly 66.3: 715–26. Young, Alan R. 2002. Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709–1900. Newark: University of Delaware Press. ———. “Ophelia and Web 2.0.” n.d. Accessed 1 May 2018, www.opheliapopularculture.com.

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9 CALIBÁN REX? Cultural syncretism in Teatro Buendía’s Otra Tempestad Jennifer Flaherty

Created for Cuba’s Teatro Buendía, Raquel Carrió and Flora Lauten’s Otra Tempestad (Another Tempest, 1998) eventually toured internationally, with a stop at Shakespeare’s Globe in London as part of their “Globe to Globe” season in 1998. Otra Tempestad’s transition from performing for local audiences in the Caribbean to audiences from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds fits with the play’s approach to colonialism. By writing their Tempest as a study of globalization, Carrió and Lauten challenge the idea that postcolonial revision must also be an attack. Rather than emphasizing the binary opposition of colonizer and colonized, Otra Tempestad re-routes the postcolonial to demonstrate cross-cultural communication. Combining Yoruban mythology and Shakespearean drama with a Caribbean setting, the play explores the clashing and blending of the Old and New Worlds. Carrió and Lauten’s emphasis on cultural syncretism establishes their play as a hybrid text that demonstrates the mixing and merging of racial and national identities. Otra Tempestad incorporates textual and cultural elements from Africa and Europe to create a uniquely mestizo Caribbean Shakespeare, using The Tempest (Shakespeare 2004) to emphasize a multicultural postcolonial perspective. In describing impact of The Tempest in the Caribbean, Robert Nixon argues that the play “came to serve as a Trojan Horse, whereby cultures barred from the citadel of ‘universal’ Western values could win entry and assail those global pretensions from within” (1987: 578). Earlier postcolonial engagements with The Tempest, such as Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête (1969), emphasize the adversarial relationships between Prospero and Caliban, using the language of the colonizer to speak out against colonization. Otra Tempestad does not follow the example of Caliban in learning to curse in the language of the oppressor; instead, the play models the mixing and merging of identities that comes with colonization by creating an island world populated by characters from diverse cultural traditions. When asked to define the postcolonial agenda of her play, Carrió explains that it is no longer a matter of negating the language of the conqueror, but rather of investigating how, from the crossing of cultures and ethnicities comes another culture, a third language which not that of the victor nor that of the defeated but a product of their syncretism. Carrió quoted in Hulme and Sherman 2000: 159

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The Empire Writes Back, which defined postcolonial studies during the time that Carrió and Lauten were creating Otra Tempestad, defines syncretism as “the process by which previously distinct linguistic categories and, by extension, cultural formations, merge into a single new form” (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 14). Chantal Zabus, writing more than fifteen years after the first performances of Otra Tempestad, notes the continuing importance of “cultural syncretism and the creolization of language” in connection with the concepts of “comparing, converting . . . and utopia” to the future of postcolonial studies (2014: 1–2). Carrió and Lauten’s use of The Tempest goes beyond simply vilifying Prospero, focusing instead on the cultural mixing and identity building in Caribbean culture. Otra Tempestad de-centers the Prospero/Caliban dichotomy that dominates postcolonial studies of The Tempest by appropriating characters and plotlines from several other Shakespeare plays. The ship that wrecks on the island in the titular tempest contains not just Próspero and Miranda, but also Hamlet, Macbeth, Otelo (Othello), and Shylock (who was once Romeo when he was a young man). Ostensibly part of an expedition to investigate the rumors of “new ­continents” that have captured the imagination of their “Old World,”1 the Shakespearean characters are caught between dreams of the future and memories of the past as they explore the island. Each character arrives on the island with the cultural legacy of their Shakespearean source text, and each of them loses themselves to the echoes of their Old World stories even in the “brave new world” of the island. As the program notes in the Globe production explain, Carrió and Lauten have plundered the text, pillaged characters and ideas to make their own rough magic. They have broken textual boundaries so that Shylock can pour scorn on Próspero, Macbeth can feast upon the dead body of Miranda and Romeo the lover can become Shylock the merchant. Globe Library 2006: n.p. The addition of other Shakespeare characters from a variety of cultural backgrounds to the storyline works to shift Carrió and Lauten’s Próspero from the position of power that he holds in Shakespeare’s Tempest. Placing Próspero on the ship during the shipwreck scene also has a de-centering effect; rather than causing the tempest, Próspero is its victim. Taking Próspero’s place as the magical inhabitant of the island who causes the tempest is Sicorax. The character takes her name from Shakespeare’s Sycorax, but she is portrayed as a both a nature goddess with connections to Yoruban mythology and a mother goddess who gives birth to four powerful beings in the first half of the play. The second scene of the play, entitled “Isla,” begins with stage directions detailing the birth of Sicorax’s three daughters on the island: Sicorax rises from the sea. Movement of the waves (ritual dance of Yemayá). Birth of the daughters. They are three. They represent Oshún, queen of rivers, gold, and honey, goddess of love; Oyá, queen of the wind and the lightning, ruler of the Kingdom of the Dead; Eleggua, a god[dess] simultaneously childlike and ancient, the one who opens and closes the roads.2 Like their mother, Oshún, Oyá, and Eleggua are magical beings. They take their names and attributes from deities of Yoruban deities known as orishas. Their brother Calibán, who is born two scenes later, is described as the son of Sicorax and the Yoruban god Changó.3 By building a story out of Shakespeare characters and Yoruban deities, Carrió and Lauten draw on the

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syncretic nature of “Yoruba-based religions that exist in the Caribbean, in Central and South America, and, now, in the United States . . . places where mixtures of pre-existing religions have given rise to new religious forms that are both hybrid and distinctive” (Glazier 2001: 285). Calibán, Oshún, Oyá, and Eleggua exemplify the hybridity defined by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin as “a potentially radical state, one that enables such subjects to elude, or even subvert the binaries, oppositions, and rigid demarcations imposed by colonial discourses” (1998: 7). The overlapping mythologies of the Yoruban and Shakespearean characters present a hybrid connection that resists binary oppositions of colonizers and colonized, reordering identities and hierarchies. In Carrió’s program notes, she explains that adapting Shakespeare’s Tempest in connection with Yoruban orishas provides an “opportunity to confront two cultures, European and African, that are characteristic of artistic expression in Latin America” (Globe Library 2006: n.p.). Carrió and Lauten’s text replaces the strict colonizer/colonized power structure of Shakespeare’s Prospero and Caliban with a new dynamic in which European literary characters and African goddesses create their own new worlds on a Latin American island. The shipwrecked Shakespearean characters re-imagine the island in their own image. When Otelo and Shylock arrive on the island, they are both overwhelmed by the scents in the air: Otelo: Shylock: Otelo: Shylock: Otelo:

What a smell of spices! Clove! Banana! Cinnamon! Coconut!4

The fruits and spices Otelo and Shylock name are all found in the Caribbean, but each speaker turns to his own history to interpret their presence on the island. Otelo wonders if they have landed in Africa, while Shylock suggests they might have found the Promised Land or the Garden of Eden.5 The Shakespearean stories of the shipwrecked characters are also overlaid onto their interactions with the orishas, who take on the personas of Shakespeare characters and get caught up in their tragic memories. Otelo sees Oshún as Desdemona. Hamlet sees Oshún as Ophelia and Oyá as Gertrude. Oyá becomes Lady Macbeth, and Eleggua fills the role of Ariel when Próspero decides to create his utopian society. Shylock even uses Eleggua to act out the story of his youth, when he was Romeo. In Otra Tempestad, the radical state of hybridity shows that the colonizers and the colonized change each other until their contrasting storylines merge. Each attempt by the Shakespearean characters to ascribe meaning onto the island fails because as colonizers they are not removed from the story of the island – they are participants in a new blended culture. The identity of the island changes as the identities of the characters do, reflecting the hybrid nature of the new culture created by the arrival of the shipwrecked Shakespearean characters. The play’s message of cultural syncretism resonated in Cuba, where the production played “to much acclaim in small venues” while the government “tolerated” the performance (Hulme and Sherman 2000: 157). In presenting a hybrid Tempest in Cuba, Carrió and Lauten revisit the cultural legacy of local theorist Roberto Fernández Retamar, who introduced “the notion of mestizage, or miscegenation, to the discussion of Latin American cultural identity” in his essay “Caliban” (Galery 2006: 311). The emphasis on hybridity in the creation of a mestizo culture fits with the dual purposes of Teatro Buendía: the “production of theater spectacles” and the investigation of “Latin American and Caribbean cultural traditions” in their research center (Hemispheric Institute 2017: n.p.). Flora Lauten is known as “one of the most influential theatre 104

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artists in Latin America,” and playwright Caridad Svich compares her work as director of Teatro Buendía with “Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed [and] Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil” (Svich 2010: 30). Henry Godinez, the curator of the Goodman Latino Theatre Festival notes the importance of Lauten’s work with theatre: Teatro Buendía may well be one of the only truly functional idealistic theatre companies in the world. . . . It is a living, breathing art, like a rare orchid. It is an invaluable reminder to our field that theatremaking is at its best when the artistic vision drives the creation, when community is at its center, and when that community – whether it’s an ensemble or collective – shares and has a stake in the creativity. Godinez 2010: 32 The Buendía productions have a local power in Cuba, serving as a focal point for communitybuilding and national identity. As Maria Clara Versiani Galery notes, “Otra Tempestad establishes continuity with the poetics of mestizage devised by Retamar at the same time as it alludes to the socio-political climate of Cuban society in recent years” (2006: 318). Lauten, as a theatre researcher and practitioner, both studies and helps to shape the hybridity of Cuban artistic expression. Because Teatro Buendía is a touring company, Lauten’s work also has a global impact when she introduces her Cuban productions to audiences at theatre festivals from Columbia to Canada to England (Svich 2010: 31). Buendía’s appropriation of Shakespeare to address cultural hybridity made a good fit for the Globe to Globe season at London’s Globe Theatre, where the production played to full audiences and even “rapturous applause” during its initial tour (Spencer 1998: 24). London theatre critics were less eager to embrace the production, however; even the reviewers who described the production with compliments such as “wonderfully physical and imaginative” (Woddis 1998: 16) and “brilliant” (Goldstein 1998: 8) acknowledged that the play was a challenge to understand. While the actors were praised for their exuberance and athleticism, the production itself was dismissed as “linguistic soup” (Spencer 1998: 24); “a Cuban mishmash” (Curtis 1998: 48); and “rough magic, with ‘rough’ being the operative word” (Taylor 1998: 10). Simultaneously lamenting the density of the plot and the lack of plot, some of the reviews mentioned confusion with following the action (even after reading summaries of each scene in the program). Ian Shuttleworth admits that “without the programme’s scene-by-scene synopsis, I would have had little or no idea what was going on from moment to moment; even with it, there is no indication of why” (Shuttleworth 1998: 22). The Evening Standard’s Nick Curtis opens his review by declaring that after reading the synopsis of the play “three times now . . . I still don’t know what on earth it’s about” (Curtis 1998: 48). After summarizing the play, Charles Taylor worries that he is “in grave danger of making the show sound more interesting than it is” (Taylor 1998: 10). The integration of the Yoruban goddesses and the characters from other Shakespeare plays proved particularly perplexing for reviewers. Curtis refers to the play as a departure from “the usual grind where productions of The Tempest make sense and Shakespearean protagonists stick to their own plays” (Curtis 1998: 48), while Taylor wryly comments that “if Richard III had limped [onstage] in lascivious pursuit of a Yoruban spirit that had disguised itself as Juliet’s Nurse, I would not have turned a hair” (Taylor 1998: 10). The confusion of the critics goes beyond the comprehension issues that arise from reviewing a play in Spanish without supertitles, and it fits with accounts of the critical reception of other early Globe to Globe productions. W.B. Worthen notes a trend of representing the international touring companies at the Globe as “energetic, technically accomplished, visually stunning yet artistically and/or intellectually 105

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stunted” (Worthen 2003: 153), which Stephen Purcell connects with the “tendency . . . to marginalize the visiting theatre companies as . . . behind the times” (Purcell 2017: 167). Robert Ormsby observes that the work of visiting companies might be described as “entertaining and powerful in their different ways” by critics, but that “these works were deemed inferior, inauthentic, other” (Levenson and Ormsby 2017: 437). It is important to acknowledge that critical interpretations do not always correlate with audience response at the Globe, and that to assume so would “underestimate the diverse and international composition of Globe (and especially Globe to Globe) audiences” (Purcell 2017: 167). The confusions and questions addressed by the critics are important because they reveal a disconnect between the stated intentions of the production and its critical reception during its time at the Globe. Unable to discern a rhyme or reason to the confusing blend of characters and plot points, Shuttleworth states “this particular gallimaufry seems to have been put together for its own sake. It is eye-catching . . . but to no apparent end” (Shuttleworth 1998: 22). The questions of “why?” and “to what end?” surface frequently in the reviews, despite the fact that the program notes give a brief explanation of the way the writing and directorial choices relate to specific goals in adapting The Tempest. Several reviews make note of the Yoruban origins of the orisha characters, but only Judith Palmer of The Independent included background research on the impact of syncretistic religions in Cuba and quotes from the director about the relevance of these religions to the plot of the play. It is possible that the playwright’s explicitly stated message of cultural syncretism and hybridity did not resonate with some critics because it was not the overtly political message that they expected from a Cuban Tempest. Some critics were looking for a clear agenda and a coherent structure in the play (something perhaps more akin to Césaire’s Une tempête). The one plot point in the Globe performance that did register for theatre critics comes when a bearded Próspero attempts to establish a utopian society on the island. Quick to make the connection with Castro, critics peppered their reviews with comments such as “that beard of Próspero’s is quite Fidelista” (Shuttleworth 1998: 22) and “we are clearly being given political theatre that Castro’s regime would find it painful to bless” (Kingston 1998: 35). John Thaxter from The Stage gives a more detailed explanation: Orestes Perez’s gray-bearded Próspero, washed up on some transatlantic island, Cuba perhaps, finds a native population drugged up by Yoruba drums and deity worship. But his plan to found a republic based on More’s Utopia points a finger at Castro. And, whisper it not in the streets of Havana, when the locals discover this is a false dawn, they go into an orgy of vengeful retribution, crowning everyone in horned death masks. 1998: par. 3 But although critics were quick to make the connection between Próspero’s utopia and Castro’s Cuba, there was still confusion about exactly that connection means in the production. Paul Taylor argues that “what the show is trying to say became steadily less clear as the evening wore on. Any parallels between Cuba and Próspero’s Island (in respect of bearded dictators coming to the end of their rule) are not highlighted” (Taylor 1998: 10). In his assessment of the Globe to Globe productions, Stephen Purcell explains that “critics, looking for a political angle, found themselves frustrated by the production’s refusal to draw clear parallels between Próspero’s island and Castro’s Cuba” (Purcell 2017: 167). Given that Próspero’s republic lasts only a few scenes, any attempts to read the whole play as an extended allegory about Castro would be difficult to resolve with the rest of the plot points. Próspero is only one of several characters who have a chance to rule the island. Several characters fail at constructing their ideal island because the 106

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history of colonization is littered with failed utopias. Carrió and Lauten do not simply use Shakespeare’s Próspero as a way to critique Castro in particular. By reworking The Tempest, a master narrative of colonialism and utopian studies, Teatro Buendía challenges the very concept of constructing an ideal society. The program notes introduce the production as “a magical island under the control of an aging dreamer, a bearded magus stirring revolt. A man, a people, in search of utopia. . . . Many Tempests have blown through London before, but none as strange as Buendía’s” (Globe Library 2006: n.p.). These lines connect Próspero not only with Castro, but also King James, who ruled the island Shakespeare called home as he was writing The Tempest. Próspero’s island is not just Castro’s Cuba – it is any land upon which dreamers can “write” their utopian vision. The word “island”6 reverberates throughout the play; it is the final word of both the first scene and the last scene (where the word is one of many echoing “sounds of the island”7 that bring the play to a close). Robert Fraser maintains that “the island is the blank and confined space on which the form of the nation is inscribed” (Fraser 2000: 154). The Shakespearean colonizers of Carrió’s Otra Tempestad see their island and its inhabitants as blank slates which can be inscribed with their memories and utopian visions. While the orishas initially serve as conduits for the Shakespearean castaways to re-write their own stories, Eleggua, Oshún, and Oyá take active roles forming and failing new power structures, often controlling their Shakespearean partners. In a series of power transitions among the Shakespearean characters and the Yoruban orishas, control of the island passes rapidly from leader to leader. Sicorax begins the play in control of the island, but the arrival of the colonizers brings chaos. Próspero and Macbeth draw on the powers of Eleggua and Oyá to create their ideal societies on the island, both of which descend into dystopic destruction. When he sees Eleggua, Carrió’s Próspero immediately claims her as his Ariel, enlisting her help in creating his Utopian Republic. As Eleggua’s master, Próspero uses her powers to control the island and its inhabitants – Shakespearean and Yoruban. Otelo likewise makes a bid for power, using his prowess as a soldier to attempt an arranged marriage with Próspero’s heir Miranda, but he and Shylock both become transformed by magic when Shylock uses Eleggua to reveal Miranda’s love for Calibán. It is only when Próspero’s destructive oppression leads to the death of Miranda that he abjures his rough magic, leaving a power vacuum that is filled by Macbeth. Oyá takes on the role of Lady Macbeth, and the two of them take over the island in a bloody reign of destruction that ends in Macbeth’s death. Finally, Calibán inherits the island, fulfilling the prediction that Eleggua tells Próspero when he claims her as his Ariel: “when Sicorax dies, my brother will be king.”8 As Flora Lauten explains,“it’s very difficult to construct a Utopia” (quoted in Palmer 1998: 9). Carrió and Lauten build on the images of utopia in Shakespeare’s text, subverting those ideals when the new worlds constructed by the Shakespearean and Yoruban characters inevitably fail. In Otra Tempestad, the island functions as tabula rasa upon which Sicorax, Shylock, Próspero, Macbeth, Oyá, Otelo, Miranda, and Calibán inscribe their dreams of paradise, but each utopian vision is complicated by the characters’ pasts and replaced in a future scene. Explaining island imagery in colonial and postcolonial literature, Robert Fraser maintains that islands use the “enclosure and exploitation, erosion and possibility” of a land encircled by sea to “compose an image of a society of migrants deriving their identities from elsewhere and obliged, in the confined area of an island, to work out a common destiny, a nationhood” (Fraser 2000: 153). Carrió and Lauten’s revision of Próspero’s island is a fantastical exploration of this nation-building enterprise. Otra Tempestad undercuts the fantasy by making it clear that there are no new beginnings in the story – the colonizers, the island, and its inhabitants (even the newborn Calibán) all come with their own contexts and complications. Instead of a blank slate, the island becomes a kind of literary Purgatory where the characters can explore their own complicity in their tragic 107

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fates. The Shakespearean castaways are haunted by the specters of their previous plotlines as they interact with Sicorax and her daughters on the enchanted island. Although Carrió and Lauten remove these Shakespearean characters from the settings and the plots of their plays, they are each driven to return to reenact their earlier fate and come to terms with their tragic leanings. Carrió and Lauten build upon the image of the island that already dominates Shakespeare’s Tempest to challenge not only the practice of colonization, but the drive behind it. While Carrió’s play is not staunchly anti-colonial, images of colonization haunt the text. In one of Próspero’s first scenes exploring the island, he flourishes a handheld mirror, dangling it before Ariel and Calibán. When Ariel becomes entranced by the mirror, exclaiming “great are your powers,”9 the scene is eerily reminiscent of Montaigne’s description of early modern encounters between European colonizers and natives of the New World in “Of Coaches.” Montaigne describes natives “who for the wonder of the glistering of a looking-glass or of a plain knife, would have changed or given inestimable riches in gold, precious stones and pearls” (Greenblatt 2014: 295). Carrió and Lauten’s Eleggua becomes spellbound by a single mirror, agreeing to become Próspero’s Ariel. While the character of Caliban in Otra Tempestad retains a variation of his Shakespearean name even as he assumes the identity of the son of the Yoruban god Changó, Eleggua is given a distinct identity (separate from Ariel) as an orisha, taking the name of a recognizable Yoruban deity before accepting the persona of Ariel after entering Próspero’s service. As Monique Allewaert explains “Ariel, a figure for the elemental natural world that he personifies and for the subaltern human beings whom he approximates in his indentured servitude, anticipates the conjunction of the colonial natural world and colonized human beings” (2013: 7). Carrió and Lauten depict Eleggua (and therefore Ariel) as connected to the natural world, and Próspero exploits this connection to gain power and reimagine the government of the island. By the time that Próspero establishes his republic, Eleggua appears wearing new clothing and spouting propaganda: “The light of wisdom has arrived! The Republic is born!”10 Instead of moving with the strange, bird-like dancing and enthusiastic acrobatics that characterize Eleggua’s mannerisms when Próspero first meets her, Eleggua stands upright and marches as the voice of the Republic. Where Próspero’s mirror leaves Eleggua captivated (or captive), Carrió and Lauten’s Calibán resists when Próspero commands him to look with the words “¡Criatura, mira!” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 110). He turns away from his own image and runs offstage, only to encounter Miranda a few scenes later. He stares at her instead of staring at a mirror, and their simultaneous actions reflect each other: “They look at each other, smell each other, touch each other. They play together.”11 Shakespeare plays on Miranda’s name by giving Ferdinand the line “admired Miranda! Indeed the top of admiration, worth what’s dearest to the world!” (3.2.37–8).12 Carrió and Lauten’s text seems to draw similar inspiration from the similarity of Miranda’s name to the Spanish words mira (a command to look) and mirada (a gaze). The first action they perform together is “se miran,” and they stare at each other without reservation. While Shakespeare’s Miranda tells her father that Caliban is “a villain, sir, I do not love to look on,” Otra Tempestad’s Miranda is entranced by Calibán and cannot stop looking at him (1:2:312–3). The same Calibán who runs from Próspero’s mirror and the command mira is captivated by Miranda (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 110). As both a Shakespeare character and a relative of the Yoruban orishas, Calibán is a particularly hybrid character in a text that is already characterized by hybridity. While the Shakespearean character/Yoruban orisha interaction is characterized by the standard binaries of male/female and colonizer/colonized, Carrió and Lauten break away from these binaries in the relationship between Calibán and Miranda. Otra Tempestad depicts neither a gendered relationship in which Calibán has power over Miranda, nor a colonial relationship in which Miranda has power over Calibán. The love for each other transforms and inverts Miranda’s 108

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storylines from Shakespeare’s Tempest. Instead of falling in love with Ferdinand when her father wants her to (while believing that she is defying his wishes), Carrió and Lauten’s Miranda is shipwrecked like Ferdinand and falls in love with Calibán in a true act of rebellion that challenges her father’s plans for the island. In Otra Tempestad, Próspero tries to force Miranda into a politically advantageous marriage with Otelo (which also serves as an ironic inversion of the Brabantio/Desdemona conflict in Othello). It is Miranda rather than Calibán who proclaims her desire to “people this island with Calibáns!”13 Caliban’s line in The Tempest “leads straight to the gendered complexities of Caliban’s and Próspero’s respective claims to the island, for both men’s rights turn out to operate through women” (Seed 2000: 204). By giving these words to Miranda and undercutting the Shakespearean implication that Caliban can reclaim the island by claiming Miranda, Carrió and Lauten call attention to the ways that Próspero, Macbeth, and even Otelo seek to control the island through female characters. Próspero’s insistence on arranging “a fortunate marriage”14 for his daughter and his anger at Miranda’s love for Calibán are both contributing factors to the fall of his republic. Shylock, angry that “Próspero financed his Utopia with my money,” instead of delivering on his promises of returning Shylock’s investment with plains filled with “copper and gold” and waters containing the “Fountain of Eternal Youth,” demands justice.15 He then uses the story of Romeo and Juliet to reveal the secret love between Miranda and Calibán, which sets off a chain of events that ends the republic and costs Miranda her life. Jeremy Kingston of The Times expresses concern in his review over Shylock’s role in the tragedy: I am sorry to say that the villain in this earthly paradise is Shylock, and the use the play makes of him, secretly plotting the republic’s downfall, is ugly. His villainy may derive more from his greed for gold (some nerve coming from the descendants of Conquistadores) but his prayer shawl is a constant sign that he is a Jew. Kingston 1998: 35 There are numerous references to Shylock’s Jewish faith throughout the performance, including the shawl noted by Kingston, his lines about the Promised Land, and even the music that accompanies his actions at times. Carrió and Lauten also include lines that call attention to his love of wealth and lines that seem to be translated directly from The Merchant of Venice. The idea that Shylock was meant to be the villain of Otra Tempestad is unlikely, however. Shylock’s claim that Próspero is a “utopian charlatan”16 is backed up by the program notes, which state that the “images of subjection and songs of war” contradict the utopian promises that there will be no war in Próspero’s paradise (Globe Library 2006: n.p.). Próspero’s problematic republic and Macbeth’s cannibalistic reign of terror are both indicative of villainy, but neither they nor Shylock is presented strictly as a villain. All of the characters bring different perspectives to the island, and most of them cause destruction in one way or another as their visions for the island clash violently. As the leadership of the island changes more rapidly, the characters don masks representative of their personalities as they die or fade away. Otra Tempestad ends with Calibán standing alone in the center of the stage wearing or holding all the masks worn by the other characters. As Carrió explains, it is “an ending which warns us: ‘I have inherited a land razed by utopia and blood’ ” (Hulme and Sherman 2000: 158). This image is featured on the front of the program, which identifies this scene as “Caliban Rex” and provides the following summary: Sounds and images of suffocation, exhaustion, depletion, destruction. From the remains of the kings, Caliban, wearing all the masks, advances to the centre of the 109

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stage. Voices: “Take us to the land you promised us! . . . It will be a paradise of exotic birds! . . . Isla!” The sound of a boat. Caliban stays. King Caliban? Globe Library 2006: n.p., emphasis in original These are the words of utopia – promised land, paradise, island. The same words dominate the first scene, which depicts the Shakespearean characters leaving the Old World in search of new continents with “beautiful vegetation . . . trees . . . in the shape of stars. A paradise of exotic birds!”17 When these words are repeated in the final scene, Calibán is holding the masks worn by the characters who spoke these words earlier in the play. As the actress who plays Eleggua speaks the line “my brother will be,”18 a fragment of her earlier line telling Próspero that “when Sicorax dies, my brother will be king,”19 Calibán finally becomes Calibán Rex – a mestizo figure in a mestizo text. When Caliban takes the island kingdom, his ascension is haunted rather than triumphant, and he stands listening to labored breathing and voices of the fallen characters who came before him. The program notes explain the final scene by stating that “the play, like Beerbohm Tree’s 1904 production of The Tempest, ends with Caliban alone. King Calibán? But is the boat forever returning, the call of ‘Isla’ forever delaying the coronation?” (Globe Library 2006: n.p.). The distant sound of the boat suggests a recurrence of the first scene, in which a ship full of Shakespearean characters arrives in the new world, and the repeated lines from the first scenes add to the effect. Lauten explains in an interview that the characters “are eager to go to this new world and leave their pasts behind, but everything they left keeps coming again full circle. These things are all aspects of the human soul, and you cannot escape them” (quoted in Palmer 1998: 9). The recurring sounds and images of the scene emphasize that the patterns of colonization that Carrió and Lauten explore in the play are not specific to one time and place – they are part of the cycle of human experience. Despite the somber ending, Otra Tempestad does not use Shakespeare simply as a means of criticizing the impact of European colonization on the Caribbean. Instead, Carrió argues that “in the crisscrossing of references, echoes, and European and African images, there are no ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ but rather that interchange of rituals and actions which characterizes that cultural syncretism of Latin America and the Caribbean” (quoted in Hulme and Sherman 2000: 158). Welcoming the Teatro Buendía troupe to the Globe Theatre, artistic director Mark Rylance said, “We would like you to think of Shakespeare as a world poet. Most of his stories were set abroad, most of them were drawn from stories from other cultures” (Globe Archives 1998: n.p.). Rylance, like Carrió and Lauten, attempts to reconfigure the concept of “Shakespeare” as global rather than imperial. In Otra Tempestad, Shakespeare is not the voice of literary and cultural authority that must be undermined. Instead, he becomes a symbol of cultural hybridity and mobility – a point where diverse traditions can meet and merge.

Notes 1 “A nuestro Viejo Mundo ha llegado un rumor. ¡Existen nuevos continentes!” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 106). 2 “Sicorax surge del mar. Movimiento de las olas (danza ritual de Yemayá). Nacimiento de las hijas. Son tres. Representan a Oshun, reina del rio, del oro, y la miel, diosa del amor; Oyá, reina del viento y la centella, dueña del Reino de los Muertos; Eleggua, dios niño y Viejo a la vez, el que abre y cierra los caminos” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 106). 3 “Calibán, hijo de tierra, porque Sicorax desobedeció el oráculo y tuvo amores con Changó” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 109). 4 O: “Qué olor a especies!” S: “Clavo! O: A plátano!” S: “Canela! O: A coco!” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 111). 5 S: “Será esta la Tierra Prometida?” O: “Estaremos en Africa?” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 111).” 6 “Isla” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 133). 7 “Sonidos de la isla” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 133).

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Cultural syncretism in Otra Tempestad 8 “¡Quando Sicorax se muera mi hermano sera rey!” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 109). 9 “¡Grandes son tus poderes!” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 110). 10 “¡Ha llegado la luz de los sabios! ¡Ha nacido la República!” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 110). 11 “Se miran, se huelen, se tocan. Juegan juntos” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 115). 12 References to Shakespeare’s The Tempest come from the Norton Shakespeare (2004), edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. 13 “Quiero poblar esta isla de calibanes” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 120). 14 “Un matrimonio feliz” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 116). 15 The full passage: “El me prometió una buena tierra. En sus llanos hallabria cobre y oro. Y en sus aguas, la Fuente de la Eterna Juventud. Un juramento selló nuestro Pacto: si no hallaba El Dorado que me prometió una libra de carne de su corazón! Así fue como me enrolé en esta aventura y Próspero financió su Utopía con mi dinero!” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 122). 16 “Charlatán utópico” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 121). 17 “Una hermosísima vegetación . . . los árboles . . . en forma de estrellas. ¡Un paraíso de pájaros exóticos!” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 106). 18 “¡Mi hermano será!” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 133). 19 “¡Quando Sicorax se muera mi hermano sera rey!” (Carrió and Lauten 1999: 109).

References Allewaert, Monique. 2013. Ariel’s Ecology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 2002. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Carrió, Raquel, and Flora Lauten. 1999. “Otra tempestad.” Gestos: Teoria y Practica del Teatro Hispanico 14.28: 103–33. Césaire, Aimé. 1969. Une tempête. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Curtis, Nick. 1998. “Culture Clash in a Cuban Mishmash.” Evening Standard (London), 22 Jul. Fraser, Robert. 2000. Lifting the Sentence: A Poetics of Postcolonial Fiction. New York: Manchester University Press. Galery, Maria Clara Versiani. 2006. “Caliban/Cannibal/Carnival: Cuban Articulations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” In Shakespeare in the World of Communism and Socialism. Eds. Irena Makaryk and Joseph G. Price. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 307–27. Glazier, Stephen D. 2001. Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions. New York: Routledge. Globe Library Department. 2006. 7 Nov. “Scanned Programme.” e-mail Message to Author. Globe Theatre Archives. 1998, July. Video recording for the archive. Cuban theatre Company Teatro Buendía staged “Another Tempest” at the Globe. Adapted by Raquel Carrió, directed by Flora Lauten. Jul. 1998. GB 3316 SGT/ED/LIB/REC/1993–2001 Globe to Globe/OTem Godinez, Henry. 2010. “Toward a Revolution? A Reflection on Buendía.” American Theatre 27.5 (May/ Jun.): 30–32. Goldstein, Adam. 1998. “What a Mind-blowing Tempest from Cuba.” Morning Star (London), 31 Jul. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2014. Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection. New York: New York Review Books Classics. Hemispheric Institute Special Collections. 2017. “Teatro Buendía.” Hemispheric Institute. http://hemisphe ricinstitute.org/hemi/en/modules/itemlist/category/125-Buendía Hulme, Peter, and William H. Sherman. 2000. The Tempest and Its Travels. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kingston, Jeremy. 1998. “The Other Shakespeare.” The Times. Second section, 23 July 1998. Levenson, Jill, and Robert Ormsby. 2017. The Shakespeare World. New York: Routledge. Loomba, Ania, and Martin Orkin. 1998. Post-colonial Shakespeares. New York: Routledge. Nixon, Robert. 1987. “Caribbean and African Appropriations of ‘The Tempest.’ ” Critical Inquiry 13.3: 557–78. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/1343513 Palmer, Judith. 1998. “A Sea Change . . . Into Something Rich and Strange.” The Independent (review section). 22 Jul. 9. Purcell, Stephen. 2017. Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Seed, Patricia. 2000. “This Island’s Mine:’ Caliban and Native Sovereignty.” In The Tempest and Its Travels. Eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 202–12. Shakespeare, William. 2004. The Tempest. Eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

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Jennifer Flaherty Shuttleworth, Ian. 1998. “Significance Lurks Below the Surface”. London Financial Times. 23 Jul. 22. Spencer, Charles. 1998. “Magic Gets Lost in Linguistic Soup.” The Daily Telegraph. 23 Jul. 24. N.p. Svich, Caridad. 2010. “A Flower in Havana.” American Theatre 27.5 (May/Jun.): 30–32. Taylor, Paul. 1998. “Cuban Company’s Rough Magic Fails to Cast Its Spell.” The Independent (London, weekend section). 25 Jul. 10. Thaxter, John. 1998 “Otra tempestad.” The Stage. 30 Jul. N.p. Woddis, Carole. 1998. “Otra Tempestad.” The Herald (London). 29 Jul. 16. Worthen, W.B. 2003. Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Zabus, Chantal. 2014. The Future of Postcolonial Studies. New York: Routledge.

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10 FOOLING AROUND WITH SHAKESPEARE The curious case of “Indian” Twelfth Nights Poonam Trivedi

Shakespeare is perhaps the world’s greatest chameleon; he seems to be able to take on the shades of whatever location in which he is positioned. He has crossed over into almost all cultures of the world so that it is a truism to say that he is the most global and globalized author today. But even as we celebrate (the Globe to Globe Festival, 2012) and deliberate it too (qua this volume), and even though adaptation and appropriation are now being accepted as “fundamental to the practice and . . . enjoyment of literature” (Sanders 2006: 1), troubling and discomforting implications emerge. In the current widespread appropriation and relocation of Shakespeare’s plays in diverse settings and non-Europhone perspectives, particularly in a world of increasing transnationalities, of re-forming and liquid identities, one is compelled to ask, who is speaking for whom? And in whose voices? What positions do relocations emerge from and who are they directed to? How are they received in media and academic discourse? And is there a variance in receptions in different locations, and how do we account for these divergencies? Answers may be as various as the appropriations, especially as critical discourse is yet to accord all re-writings a level playing field. Hierarchies and differentials persist, interfering in the valuation of re-writings, especially of re-locations of Shakespeare’s plays into non-Anglophone milieus. The practice of re-locating Shakespeare, staging the play within a non-Elizabethan mise-enscène is not new, can be traced back to the Restoration and the eighteenth century when actors performed costumed in the dress of their own time; for example, Garrick played Macbeth in a wig and a frockcoat. This practice has become an acceptable convention and a norm as it seems to legitimize the universality of Shakespeare – for “all time.” More recently this practice has proliferated: “make-overs,” “remix,” “evocative fusions between setting and psychology,” “letting the play breathe afresh” are all phrases used to justify today’s experiments at relocation. A crucial distinction needs to be made, however, between relocations the world over, which function as a domestication, adopting and making the bard one’s own, and those in the Anglophone world, which would distance the plays into remote foreign lands to naturalize them. Such a practice implies a disconnect, an othering, which is a tacit acknowledgement that perhaps the 450-yearold Shakespeare is not so immediately universal and relevant after all, that the concerns of his plays do not readily fit the modern Western world without being tweaked round and given a topical flavor and coloring; hence, not all appropriations achieve the same threshold of success. The mixed motives and conflicting needs compromise these efforts, leading many to be received in muted terms, or debated for reinforcing old stereotypes. The gains of globalization often are 113

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negated in the emergence of new shades of orientalism and neo-colonialism. Relocating into a foreign milieu becomes doubly problematic. This chapter addresses these issues by foregrounding a set of performances, theatrical and cinematic, of Twelfth Night, produced in the U.K., the U.S., and Canada during the past decade or so, all of which have been located, somewhat surprisingly, in India, situated in either colonial or contemporary times. More than ten such productions can be identified, but why and wherefore these “Indianized” Twelfth Nights one is impelled to question? What are the motivations/lines of thought which lead to such an appropriation? Unlike in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there is no substantive reference to India in Twelfth Night – Toby’s throwaway compliment to Maria “my metal of India” (2.5.13–14)1 reflects the common Elizabethan association of India with extraordinary wealth, which occurs several times in Shakespeare. Then why should this very English rom-com, written in 1601 as a finale to the Christmas celebrations, and, as it is often conjectured, at the behest of Queen Elizabeth herself, and derived from Italian sources, suddenly be fooled around with to become more meaningful when relocated in India? Documenting and elucidating this so-called trend, this chapter will also compare these Indianized productions with Indian productions of the same to try to account for the “shades” of the “Indian” that attract and make sense in the West and how, conversely, we negotiate Twelfth Night for ourselves. Positionalities, perspectives on the “other,” evolving notions of the Indian, both stereotypical and dialogic, and voicing will be examined.

Illyria as India Performance histories of Twelfth Night note that after World War II the number of productions, as well as the diversity of their settings, increased exponentially. Location is always significant in a Shakespeare production, and as Elizabeth Schafer observes, “Illyria has often been a very forceful presence” the choice of which impacts mood, tone and characterizations and determines the comedic flavor that usually ranges from the festive to the permissive or repressive (2009: 31). Since the connotations of Illyria, “What country, friends, is this?” (1.2.1) are of an undefined, mythical/fictional place, directors have had a free hand in characterizing Illyria, and locations in performance have ranged from the south-western Balkans, to Spain, French Africa, Brazil, and even the Caribbean. But the reconfiguration of Illyria to a location as geographically remote and culturally different as India, is, one has to admit, a stretch; however, whether situated in historical-colonial, contemporary, Bollywoodian or multicultural India, this resetting can result in significant aesthetic and political shifts and alterations of meaning. Colonial India was by far the most favored period for relocation of the Indianized Twelfth Nights: most of these productions used the hierarchies of the Raj to polarize the elite masters, Orsino, Olivia, Toby and Aguecheek from their servitors, always Indian. The twins were either white and English, or brown and Indian depending on the period of the Raj. But the specificities of the Indian location and characters (their body languages and accents, for instance) was almost always seen from the outside, through British eyes, hence liable to an orientalist stereotyping. Issues of racism which inevitably emerge in this setting were, however, mostly suggested visually and not explored in an interventionist manner. All these productions were animated by a “safe” nostalgic view of the Raj and failed to pursue the relocation far enough to create provocative parallels with Indian situations. Of these the best known and most venturesome in its appropriation was Leon Rubin’s 2006 production for the Stratford, Ontario Shakespeare Festival, set in early colonial India. It had a bejeweled Indian Orsino and a turbaned Viola/Cesario pursing a white Olivia whose costumes changes – from restrictive corsets and bustles in black to bright silks, to a sari in the closing scene, 114

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bespoke a sexual awakening that was visually signaled as “going native.” The setting and casting, however, as noted by R.H. McKeown, sparked some disturbing moments: the pursuit of a white woman by an Indian and his rejection “edged uneasily around the racial implications” hinting at contemporary racial tensions which had been fed by the considerable Indian diaspora to Canada (2007: 105–6). The production, added McKeown, left a “slightly disconcerting aftertaste . . . it exploited Orientalist staging for exotic visuals [it opened and ended with colorful Bollywoodlike dance sequences] and never fully explored the tensions of the setting” – a view shared by other reviewers, too (2007: 105–6). The Raj context was exploited for another, more openly Orientalizing, purpose by another set of productions: in 2010 the reputed First Folio Theatre company in Chicago set their summer production of Twelfth Night directed by Michael Goldberg, again during the British Raj, to combine, as their program noted, “the beauty of 19 C. India with the glorious elegance of Shakespeare’s most romantic comedy . . . [providing] a thrilling ride through an exotic and wondrous land” (First Folio 2010). Despite Orsino, Viola and Maria being played by Asian actors, India, here, seemed no more than the colorful location of an erotic otherness. However, some nuances of the location did communicate: Kerry Reid, reviewing in the Chicago Tribune, found that it actually works pretty well as a commentary on shifting cultural and racial identities . . . less about same-sex attraction than it does the erotic allure of cultural otherness and the resultant revulsion at those who cross barriers . . . ‘should she fancy, it should be one of my complexion.’ 2010 Yet, as with all such productions, a negotiation with the fullness of the play was lacking. Reid missed, like some others too, the “edge of violence” that underpins the play and a production that could not communicate the “sense of danger” that accompanies racial transgression. In 2011, the Old Globe Theatre, along with the University of San Diego theatre program, also chose to set its Twelfth Night in 1920s India but was a bit more candid about its choice of India during the reign of the British as a location: “It’s actually kind of sexy,” said their director, Richard Seer, “there are what was presumed back then – the uptight Brits meeting face to face with a country that embraces the Kama Sutra and has a more sensual feel to it. This is very right for what happens in Twelfth Night” (quoted in Saenger 2011). Performed by students, this production especially looked to the costuming to enhance the consonance between the text and the setting: at the end Olivia appeared adorned in a red and gold wedding sari and jewelry, Malvolio was turbaned, and Feste was envisioned as a snake charmer, for an added oriental good measure (see Figure 10.1). Sensuality rather than power politics were emphasized, and here India, both erotic and exotic, performed a therapeutic role as well. The British Original Theatre Company attempted a different take on the Raj location in 2011, a more self-reflexive but nostalgic one that gave another twist to India as a location for Twelfth Night. Directed by Alastair Whatley, the British Original Theatre Company production was set in 1947 India during the last days of the Raj and was played by an all-white cast. An isolation and alienation born out of the location were conjured by the set of huge white wooden louvred doors through which the sharp tropical sun alternately poured in or was shuttered out. The stress and tension of the moment of history was emphasized, a melancholia of an impending end imbued the mood – only ample Toby Belch with his hedonistic ways was fit to be dressed native style in a white kurta-pajama and a short red waistcoat. This production was marked by its nostalgic look backwards – India was the troublesome location of British trials 115

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Figure 10.1 Feste as a snake charmer in the Old Globe and University of San Diego production, 2011 Source: Photographer: Jeffery Weiser. Courtesy of Michelle Hunt Souza, designer.

and successes. A similar version on this English abroad theme had been seen earlier in Michael Kahn’s 1989 production also set during the last days of the Raj that presented Toby and his crew as idle and bored expatriates/rulers. As was articulated by most reviewers, the political frisson provoked by the reconfiguration of Illyria as imperial India in all these productions failed to be fully exploited. While class differentiation between masters and servants might have made better sense set in the Raj context, the perspective was always a romanticized, Eurocentric one, scarcely voicing the other realities of colonialism, racial segregation, and oppression and violence. None of these productions risked a post-colonial comment like Baz Luhrmann’s version of Britten’s opera of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1993, often revived) which was also set in colonial (the lovers) and exotic India (blue painted gods and dancing fairies), but which dared to pull a punch and interpolated a tearing down of the imperial flag, shooting fireworks and rose-petal showers

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by the fairy world during Theseus’s wedding celebrations at the end, to imply independence from colonial rule too (Conrad 2003: 43). Another group of productions of Twelfth Night envisioned Illyria as not colonial but contemporary India. Stephen Beresford’s production Barvi Raat in London (2004) was a notable example and looked to India for a sociological engagement with the text. As the director confessed in his program note, Twelfth Night is a play of many contradictions and I wanted to find a world in which these could coexist, with modern people in a modern setting but living in a culture that’s rooted in its past – mysterious, religious and magical. An Elizabethan setting carries its own problems. If you want the freshness and sophistication of the play to come across, you’re setting yourself an uphill struggle by kitting out actors in ruffs. . . . Everything we discovered in India seemed to make sense of the play. Beresford 2004 The production was set in a contemporary Indian city; the stage design presented run-down shuttered houses on a street with rickshaws lashed with a monsoon downpour out of one of which scrambled a bedraggled Viola. It deployed an Asian/Anglo-Indian cast in modern Indian dress towards creating an authentic feel. Many critics were swayed by this idea; it was called a brave and “high risk [experiment] . . . in updating Shakespeare,” which “makes perfect sense both in Shakespearean and local terms. In particular, the parallels between 16th Century England and modern, caste-ridden India with its beggars and Maharajahs, became apparent with great clarity” (Fisher 2004). Lyn Gardner was especially enthusiastic: “This is the production that puts the Indian in Shakespeare, or perhaps reveals that Shakespeare was an Indian after all. Transposing the play to modern India is a terrific idea – the concept suits the drama perfectly” (2004). For Georgina Brown “It works like a charm . . . you can’t imagine why someone didn’t think of it before” (2004). Mourning and marriage rituals, the veiling, the devotion and the emphasis on music, more than the class divide, seemed to find believable equivalents now. Olivia was dressed in a black mourning sari with which she quickly dispensed; Orsino was a Harrow-educated melancholic; Malvolio a grumpy, officious, governmental bellboy with upwardly mobile desires; and Feste an itinerant Baul minstrel whose folk songs picked up the sweet and sour undercurrent of the play. India was transformed into Shakespeare’s location, another England, providing a “local” habitation and illuminating the contradictions of the play. The production, however, was faulted in its execution – acting and verse speaking – and again, paradoxically, for not having fine-tuned and pushed the post-coloniality of the relocation and made more substitutions to, as put by Laurence Wright, “release the foreign energies in the text” (2004: 74). A third group of Twelfth Night productions took a more lighthearted, festive view of the play and presented a distinctly colorful and Bollywoodized show interpolating songs and dances. In June 2012, the Austin Theatre Company at Austin, Texas, presented one such production, with a fair participation of diasporic Asians, interpreting Shakespeare’s story to be akin to Bollywood films with complicated story line, mistaken identities, and melodrama with larger-than-life characters. Earlier, in 2006 in Washington, DC, the Friendly Bombs Theatre Company had done a similar show. Fiona Pulford too, in Sydney in 2004, had directed a Twelfth Night with a mixed cast “inspired by the spirit of Bollywood musicals” presenting romance and action, though anachronistically set in colonial India of the 1890s (Pulford 2004). This discussion of the Indianized Twelfth Nights would not be complete without considering the first such Twelfth Night, a tele-film by Tim Supple broadcast on BBC Channel 4 in 2003 that

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was the most experimental and somber version of the play as a “comedy of menace.” It did not prove very popular and has largely been forgotten today. Supple, however, cast well-known Asian and black actors, gave a contemporizing political twist with Viola arriving in Illyria as an illegal immigrant (one of the so-called boat people), and had Sebastian and Antonio speak Shakespeare’s dialogue translated into Hindi for added authenticity. In this production the Indian elements of the changed location (color and linguistic coding) boldly and clearly referenced the political and racial tensions of post-empire intercultural Britain to make meaning of the situations and relationships of the play. Through the prism or pre-text of Twelfth Night, India, as a co-opted location in Anglophone productions, comes to signify multiply and contradictorily: a site of imperial British nostalgia, to the land of erotica and exotica, a parallel to Shakespeare’s London as well as the multicultural threat of today, and a carefree land of music, song and dance – all of which are meant to severally throw new and more meaningful light on Shakespeare’s ambivalent, and improbable comedy. While some of these productions may have been just caught up in the trend instigated by the success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Bombay Dreams in 2002, the success of crossover films like Monsoon Wedding (2001), and the accelerating buzz about and around Bollywood (Selfridges ran a month-long Bollywood promotion in the summer of 2002), others were attempting alternate and serious modes of naturalizing and elucidating the conflicts of the play. But apart from Beresford’s and Supple’s, they were neither investigative nor instrumental, failing to delve deeply into the power politics of the chosen location, interpreting neither colonial or contemporary India, except superficially or nostalgically. Issues of racism, something not usually suspected in the text of Twelfth Night earlier, were suggested and connected with the idea of migration and displacement, the opening theme, but not followed through. The Bollywoodian inputs, though promoting an Indian aesthetics, have been critiqued for peddling “fantasies,” also linked to a “nostalgia” and a looking to the past. Again, positionalities need to be considered – the popularity of Bollywood in the West has largely been spearheaded by the increasing Indian diaspora and is enmeshed with their nostalgia for the homeland – with a crucial difference that this diasporic nostalgia is a positive one, a harkening back to find roots in the present. Such re-locations would be welcomed, except that not only do they reinforce the common stereotypes about India, the same “India” here paradoxically comes to represent the ideal location for both somber historicized versions and the comic happy go lucky ones too! What is this multifarious India? And how did it acquire such instrumentality in the Shakespearean production of meaning? And what kind of “perfect sense” as felt by a reviewer of Beresford’s contemporary Indian Twelfth Night does it make?

India as Illyria To unravel some of these implications, we need to turn to other performance histories and look at a contrasting example of an unmistakably Indian Twelfth Night – Piya Behrupiya – directed by Atul Kumar for The Company Theatre from Mumbai in 2012 as a musical in Hindi translation. Commissioned and first performed for the Globe to Globe World Shakespeare festival in London, it was designed for the Globe audiences, shortened to 2 hours (the gulling of Malvolio was cut) and played in the round as interactive street theatre with live accompanists on the rear stage. It also took the “foolery” or “misrule” of the comedy to heart and turned out a colorful, comic, energetic and physicalized performance with eighteen songs and as many dances (see Figure 10.2). Piya has become significant, not only in global, but also in local terms. It has been continuously performed since its Globe premier in 2012, touring not just all over India, but also internationally, tallying at the latest count, 201 performances (Kumar 2018). It can safely be 118

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Figure 10.2  Piya Behrupiya with backdrop of Shakespeare as a blue-hued Indian god, 2012 Source: Courtesy of The Company Theatre.

held to be the single most popular Shakespeare production in an Indian language in modern times. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Parsi theatre companies toured the subcontinent with adaptations of Shakespeare in their repertoire. A version of Twelfth Night had proved popular, but with the lack of archival records, it would be hazardous to estimate the total number of its performances. Similarly, another musical Twelfth Night, Madannachi Manjari, part of the sangeet natak tradition, was also well received and continued in repertoire from 1965 to1995 with 161 performances, Piya clearly has outdone them all.2 Shakespeare comedies (apart from The Comedy of Errors) have not been so favored in India, and while there have been some translations and performances in several Indian languages, no other outstanding production of Twelfth Night can be listed. It does tilt the balance somewhat to juxtapose several Indianized productions with only one indigenous one, but Piya merits critical attention. At first experience, the performance seemed to be pandering to the Western notion of a Bollywood romp, reifying all neo-colonist stereotypes of what signifies as India: colorful, loud and energetic. Yet the production had more to offer. Firstly, its music and songs were a tourde-force, not just interpreting the Shakespearean theme of music as “the food of love” but also radicalizing it. Based on a quasi-nautanki style, a combination of classical, folk and pop genres, it gave a musical base to parts of the narrative and verse, amplifying, supplementing and even enhancing the moods and emotions of the play, functioning in a manner similar to songs in many Indian films. A particularly successful moment, for example, was when Olivia broke into song – in raag yaman, “roop chanda nain kajrare” (“beauteous like the moon, eyes lined black”), to voice her sudden attraction for Cesario, an awkward moment in the text for any actress to negotiate Olivia’s sexual awakening convincingly. Songs punctuated the comic stage business too, easing the slapstick and facilitating the foolery. But, the most inspired and innovative move was to stage the duel between Cesario and Aguecheek, always a comic challenge, as a qawwali, a devotional genre of music in which a group of singers compete with each other to reach a crescendo of praise, traditionally to god in allegorical and erotic terms. Often it can take on a competitive statement-and-riposte mode, and as transposed in Piya, Cesario and Aguecheek crossed swords in song. The rest of the cast quickly grouped behind them forming two choruses, and they fenced with tunes, scoring off each other with increasingly contentious lyrics and amplifying notes. The recognition scene towards the end, again a delicate moment in staging, 119

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utilized the improvisational mood of the performance and had the twins mirroring each other’s gestures and actions. Further, the production departed from tradition and used a colloquial Hindi register for its translation with a fair sprinkling of English words producing a racy street variant of the language which facilitated the comic business in performance. More crucially, the translation adaptation took a tongue-in-cheek post-colonial liberty and wittily worked in some trenchant potshots at Shakespeare’s structure, narrative and characterization. Sebastian was made to double as a narrator or sutradhar who provided expository links between the scenes. He would break out of the dramatic illusion to address the audience beginning with “this is a story about confusion . . .” (Piya Behrupiya 2012). The actor complained that Shakespeare had given far too few lines to Sebastian for him to make an impact, so he had transferred some of Antonio’s lines to himself as Sebastian while dispensing with Antonio part! And since the actor playing Sebastian was the translator too, the translator’s role as re-creator and re-locator was underlined when he complained that “no-one cares about the translator; you have all come to see the work of a renowned poet” (Piya Behrupiya 2012). The production in Delhi had opened with a large portrait of Shakespeare, visualized as the blue-hued god Krishna wearing a gold crown with a peacock feather, perched on a pink lotus but still wearing a green Elizabethan collar! A Shakespeare appropriated and localized with panache. The production simultaneously, but cheekily, both deified and deconstructed Shakespeare. The translation of the second title of the play, What You Will, not casual and literal, but metaphorical, as Piya Behrupiya (Trickster Beloved), was an encapsulation of its playful interpretation of the themes of illusionism, deception and trickery of the play. Behrupiyas, or impersonators, are well-known stock, Indian, solo, comic entertainers who put on a disguise to mock and entertain through satire and music and thus earn their living. This re-titling provided a link to a more indigenous form of the Indian comedy, of foolery and drollery, that is to be found especially in the folk tradition, where mockery is a means to laugh away the troubles of the world. The production ended on a festive note with the three couples garlanding each other (a matrimonial ritual) and Malvolio, the odd one out, “sick of self-love,” garlanding himself. In its somewhat relentless “misruling” mode, no space was found for any direct political, class or homoerotic interventions or allusions. Differentiations of regional identities, however, were affected, or rather vocalized, through the different accents and more creatively through the different regional styles and genres of music: Olivia’s higher status was signaled when she was given classical ragas (notes) through which to express her sudden love for Cesario; when Viola transmuted from a lady into a lad, a bouncy regional folk song was sung. Many registers and scales of music, each with their own associations and histories, were pressed into service and fine distinctions were voiced through music. Shakespeare’s “happiest comedy,” Twelfth Night, is, however, shot through with darker strains of death and melancholy and ends on Feste’s somber notes on the “whirligig of time brings in his revenges” (5.1.375) and “the rain it raineth everyday” (5.2.391). The adaptation’s seemingly over-the-top festive mood, especially as the gulling of Malvolio was cut, was however modulated, appropriately again through the music, by transposing the fool’s several songs into well-known verses from Kabir, an iconoclastic mystic poet of the fifteenth century who sang of the mutability of life versus unending desire, of the attachments of this world that is an illusion, a dream or an Illyria! The production closed with the somber verse, “maya mari na man mara/ mar mar gaye shareer/aastha, trishna na mari/kahgaye das Kabir” (“desire does not die nor does hope or thirst, even though bodies may die, says Kabir”), inflections of which, unfortunately, in the absence of subtitling, are apt to be missed by an Anglophone audience. Incidentally, a similar equation was suggested by Stephen Beresford when he wrote in his program note that Feste’s 120

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message of grief, pain and the redeeming power of music is “a very Indian philosophy” (Beresford 2004). He even quoted a verse from the Bhagavad Gita on the mutability of life which he said would not be out of place in Feste’s mouth! Despite its considerable fooling around with Shakespeare’s text and its highlighting of the topsy-turvy carnivalesque dimensions, Piya was able to articulate a felt consonance equally with both Shakespearean Plautine comedic traditions of mock inversions and with Indian theatre and music conventions. Predictably, Piya received mixed reviews in London, though the audiences seemed to have enjoyed it thoroughly despite the cold and the drizzle at the open-air Globe Theatre. Lyn Gardner (Gardner 2012) found it “cartoonish,” but Amelia Forsbrook, writing in Stage Impressions, called it “a bold powerfully casual piece . . . [that] pulls humour and life out of this old comedy” (2012). Elizabeth Schafer saw it as “salutary” and a “robust demolition job” on the current British pieties about the staging of Twelfth Night (2013: 69, 71). This vein of thought was further underlined by Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of The Globe, who raised a remarkable toast to the production’s inventiveness, finding it “likely the way that things worked in Shakespeare’s day.” He thanked the group for coming and “helping us remember how to do Shakespeare here at the Globe” (Dromgoole 2012). The reception in India too has been somewhat mixed, but for different reasons. Many in India also want their Shakespeare pucca and are not prepared for such a wholesale remake. “The foolery works where it must but the production as a whole seems to be only serving that end. Something more of essence is missing” was Deepa Punjani’s opinion in Mumbai Theatre Guide (2018). The music and the form, though not so novel at the home front, has nevertheless been the mainstay of its popularity; Indians have music on their pulse, and the show continues to be in demand six years after inception. Curiously, the popularity of the music has given rise to a charge of “commercialization,” like Bombay cinema, against it, but it remains a production which plays to the ear in more ways than one. It is imperative to put these differing performance histories and sets of productions into a conversation and see what may be gleaned interactively. The “Indianized” Anglophone productions revealed that in the Western imagination, which seems stuck in the grooves of a fantastical past, India continues to largely inhabit a space either of a lost imperial glory or an exotic and erotic space. Illyria as India may have been inspired, but its execution remained generalized, fanciful and unrelated to the real India: caste is not at all the same thing as class, nor do Maharajahs rule in the democratic republic any more. And “Bollywood” which is a development of the 1990s (though the Indian film industry began in 1913) was anachronistically clubbed with the colonial period. Indians watching these shows can only derive a consoling pleasure of an encounter with their home ambiences, albeit in a diluted form. On the other hand, India as Illyria, as embodied through Piya, was able to go where the other productions did not venture: it took a clear post-colonial stance and was up front about critiquing the translatorial and editing processes and by boldly appropriating the play and remaking it in its own notes and colors. By choosing an unfashionable interpretation, rejecting the somber repressive views of the play and focusing unabashedly on the comedic, festive aspect, it broke new ground. Its impact, qua Dromgoole, was seen in the 2016 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe, directed by Emma Rice which had a distinct “Indian” flavor with Bollywood-ish choric songs and dances interpolated, sitar music and the whole presided over by a Saraswati-like goddess figure, draped in marigold garlands, seated in the upper gallery. On the other hand, Piya, as a production has evolved from its experiences of international touring and a long run: in its latest avatar it is longer, its music and dances fine-tuned, and it may even incorporate some cross-gendering in its performative strategies, according to the director. Globalization has certainly given a fillip to a particular type of transnational appropriation of not just art forms and practices (compare Peter Brooks’s Mahabharata), but also of unlikely and 121

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remote locations that are picked up by Anglophones to revitalize old texts by startling juxtapositions. Kenneth Branagh’s film of As You Like It (2006), situated in late nineteenth-century Japanese garden and court, Dennis Kennedy’s theatre production of the same play located in post revolution Beijing (2005), and Tim Supple’s Dream (2006) with Indian actors and set in India are well-known, high-profile shows, accompanied by media hype and buttressed by sponsorships, but they produced mixed results.3 Apart from the novelty of the settings, these were productions which presumed to speak for their locations, on their behalves, but in fact stood outside, imposing an alien ethos on them. The politics of positionality needs to be recognized, particularly with regard to intercultural theatre, the trajectories of which have been muddied by new transnationalisms. All appropriations end up inscribing their own preoccupations in their re-writings: it is one thing to choose to translate Shakespeare and tell one’s own stories through him, but another to transplant him in a foreign location but still hope to hear the same local, home-grown notes. Juxtaposing Indianized versions emanating from the West with Indian versions by Indians, which are immersive expressions of the self, clarifies the positions of voicing and exposes the differences in their timbre as widely as base versus treble. The proliferation of the intercultural and the canonization of Global Shakespeare has ruffled spectatorship and muffled discourse. In the absence of established modes of reckoning with the cross cultural, the “interpreter’s agency” (Desmet 2017: 15) becomes paramount, but this itself has been challenged – there have been confessions of being the “uninformed theatre-goer” (Dobson 2013: 190) and becoming the “disoriented spectator” (Desmet 2016) when faced with the extravaganza of the Globe to Globe festival (2012) with thirty-seven plays in as many languages. It is not as if cross-cultural Shakespeare does not transport well, but with familiar knowledge and comforts receding, viewers need to be more sensitive to the nuances of other cultures. For example, all London reviewers completely missed the finer points of the various kinds of music, including their histories and inflections, incorporated into Piya, labeling it simply and crudely “Bollywood.” Illyria as India and India as Illyria have gone through many combinations and permutations and Globalized Shakespeare has “queered” meanings, i.e. interrupted and exposed the limits of perception and meaning making. The Arts world, both media and discourse, instead of pushing towards an aesthetics of more easily consumable and digestible presentations, needs to accept that more “fooling” or playing around with Shakespeare is needed so that alternate shades and sounds may be registered and acknowledged. Productions cannot mean just by being, like poems; they come into existence only through active engagement with the spectator.

Acknowledgments I am indebted to Elizabeth Schafer, who first alerted me to some of these Indianized Twelfth Nights, and to Atul Kumar for giving me time for interviews.

Notes 1 All quotations from Twelfth Night are from the Arden Shakespeare, ed. J.M. Lothian and T.W. Craik, 1985. 2 For the sangeet natak Twelfth Night, see Poonam Trivedi (2006). 3 For a discussion of Supple’s Dream, see Poonam Trivedi (2010).

References Barvi Raat. 2004. Directed by Stephen Beresford. Albery Theatre (London). Beresford, Stephen. 2004. “Twelfth Night, or Barvi Raat.” Program Notes. Collection of the author. Brown, Georgina. 2004. Mail on Sunday. 29 Aug. Rept. Theatre Record.

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The curious case of “Indian” Twelfth Nights Conrad, Peter. 2003. “Indian Summer” New Statesman. 27 Oct. 2003. 42–43. Desmet, Christy. 2016. Plenary address at the Asian Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference, New Delhi, 1 December 2016. Unpublished. ———. 2017. “Import/Export: Trafficking in Cross Cultural Shakespearean Spaces.” In Multicultural Shakespeare 15.1: 15–26. Dobson, Michael. 2013. “Foreign Shakespeare and the uninformed theatre-goer: Part I, an Armenian King John.” In Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment. Eds. Susan Bennett and Christie Carson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 190–94. Dromgoole, Dominic. 2012. “Dominic toasts the group from Mumbai.” Interview with Steve Rowlands. Accessed 30 Jun. 2012, www.shakespeareis.com/home-2/the-radio-project. First Folio Theatre. 2010. “Twelfth Night.” Accessed 1 Feb. 2019, https://firstfolio.org/?production= twelfth-night-%E2%80%A1. Fisher, Philip. 2004. “Theatre Review: Twelfth Night at Albery Theatre.” British Theatre Guide. 30 Aug, www.britishtheatreguide.info/. Forsbrook, Amelia. 2012. “Review of Twelfth Night.” Stage Impressions. Accessed Apr. 2012; link broken. Gardner, Lyn. 2004. “Reviews: Theatre: Twelfth Night: Albery, London 2/5.” The Guardian. 27 Aug. Accessed 12 Feb. 2019, www.theguardian.com/stage/2004/aug/28/theatre. ———. 2012. Guardian. 30 Apr. Accessed 12 Feb. 2019, www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/apr/30/ twelfth-night-shakespeares-globe-review. Kumar, Atul. 2018. Telephone Interview. 10 Oct. McKeown, R.H. 2007. Shakespeare Bulletin 25.1: 104–6. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 1993. Adapted by Benjamin Britten. Adapted and directed by Baz Luhrmann. Opera Theatre (Sydney, Australia). 1993. First performed 28 Jul. to 9 Sep. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 2016. Directed by Emma Rice. The London Globe Theatre. First performed 30 April-11 September. Piya Behrupiya. 2012. Dir. Atul Kumar. The Company Theatre (Mumbai). Originally Globe Theatre (London). Pulford, Fiona. 2004. “Twelfth Night.” Program Note. Collection of the author. Punjani, Deepa. 2018. “Piya Behrupiya Play Review.” Mumbai Theatre Guide. Accessed 4 Feb. 2019, www. mumbaitheatreguide.com/dramas/reviews/19-piya-behrupya-hindi-play-review.asp#. Reid, Kerry. 2010. “Colonial India is the setting for a skilled and sensitive ‘Twelfth Night.’ ” Chicago Tribune. 14 Jul. Accessed 12 Feb. 2019, www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-xpm-2010-07-14-ct-live0714-twelfth-night-review-20100714-story.html. Saenger, Diana. 2011. “Old Globe/University of San Diego Graduate Theatre Program presents Twelfth Night.” La Jolla Light (La Jolla, CA). 9 Nov. B7. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge. Schafer, Elizabeth, ed. 2009. Twelfth Night: Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge University Press. ———.  2013. “Technicolour Twelfth Night”. In Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment. Eds. Susan Bennett and Christie Carson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 68–72. Trivedi, Poonam. 2006. “ ‘Folk Shakespeare’: The Performance of Shakespeare in Traditional Indian Theatre Forms.” In India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance. Eds. Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz. New Delhi: Pearson India. 152–71. ———. 2010. “Shakespeare and the Indian Image(nary): Embod(y)ment in versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia. Eds. Poonam Trivedi and Ryuta Minami. New York: Routledge. 54–75. Twelfth Night. 2003. Dir. Tim Supple. BBC Channel 4. Twelfth Night. 2004. Dir. Fiona Pulford. Produced by Shaughna Carter. Bondi Pavilion (Australia). 5 Aug. 2004 to 28 Aug. 2004. Twelfth Night. 2006. Dir. Leon Rubin. Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Stratford, Ontario). Twelfth Night. 2010. Dir. Michael F. Goldberg. First Folio Theatre (Oak Brook, IL). Twelfth Night. 2011. Dir. Alastair Whatley. British Original Theatre Company. Twelfth Night. 2011. Dir. Richard Seer. Old Globe Theatre and University of San Diego Theatre Program. Wright, Laurence. 2004. “Bollywood Twelfth Night.” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 16.1. (Jan.): 74–75.

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PART II

Decolonizing Shakespeares

11 “FLIPPING THE TURTLE ON ITS BACK” Shakespeare, decolonization, and First Peoples in Canada Daniel Fischlin Decolonizing a global brand: Shakespeare in the aftermath Shakespeare’s ghost is to be found among the ruins of colonial inter-relations, circulating uncomfortably as an emblem of state hegemony, but also as a fugitive figure whose reclamation in the name of decolonization has served a purpose in storytelling from within a specifically First Nations aesthetic and political context. This dynamic is a long and complex story and deserves more attention than a book chapter like this can give. Haudenosaunee writer Alicia Elliott says, “It’s funny how Canada won’t take responsibility for upholding treaties to our people, but it will take credit for our artistic brilliance” (2017). The comment frames how, in Canada, appropriative strategies tied to the arts are part of larger dissimulative strategies of governance. These strategies substitute problematic frameworks of artistic standing, including celebrity and the brandification of cultural icons such as Shakespeare, for the actual allocation of meaningful resources to generate peace and reconciliation. Politics follows aesthetics in this scenario. Little more than a year after Elliott’s comment, when the supposedly First Nations-friendly ­Justin Trudeau-led Liberal government decided to buy the Trans-Mountain (Kinder Morgan) Pipeline – a more than sixty-year old, leaky vestige of a catastrophic technology, one that has impacted First Nations territories throughout Canada – the analogies with the practices Elliott describes were self-evident. Effectively, state self-interest in the allocation of resources reduces culture to symbolic events in which state officials engage temporarily with First Nations practices of civil encounter as a distraction, as in the case of Trudeau’s swearing-in ceremony in 2015 (Walker 2015; King 2017: 282). In the case of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, desperately needed billiondollar resources that could have been allocated to address longstanding needs of First Nations peoples throughout the country were instead allocated to an American corporation. Outrage erupted in social media over how a government that had proclaimed its desire to reconcile nation-to-nation could so violate the environmental ethics advocated by many First Nations across the country. How could a government seeking reconciliation subsidize and allocate a staggering amount of resources to an American corporation at a time when redressing such a long and disastrous colonial history required the allocation of actual resources to issues like potable water, access to jobs and education, systemic racism, and, especially, the long aftermath of racist contexts associated with, among others: the Residential School System, a colonial 127

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tool of assimilation that sent Indigenous children away from their families to boarding schools (King 2017: 131; Miller 2017); the Sixties Scoop, which involved the state-sanctioned kidnapping of Aboriginal children from their own families and placement with Euro-Canadian ones (“Sixties Scoop”; Hanson 2018); and the ongoing National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Women and Girls (NIMMWG) (“Fact Sheet” 2014)? Métis author and lawyer Âpihtawikosisân (Chelsea Vowel), for instance, tweeted that a 2011 “independent needs assessment” determined that “$4.7 billion would ensure that every person on reserve in Canada had safe drinking water, and systems would grow with FN [First Nations] populations for the next 10 years” (Âpihtawikosisân 2018). Following the lead of Âpihtawikosisân, who argues that “[w]hat Indigenous peoples do doesn’t have to be ‘traditional’ in order to be a legitimate part of our cultures” (Âpihtawikosisân 2018), I have sought out non-traditional sources for this chapter, as traditional academic sources have their limits and are largely not where the most crucial discussions I wish to focus on are happening. The interrelations between a global icon of Shakespeare’s magnitude and First Nations’ struggles to decolonize must be situated vis-à-vis the historical contingencies determinative of the relationship. Nishnaabekwe author Leanne Simpson underlines, “Indigenous Peoples whose lands are occupied by the Canadian state are currently engaged in the longest running resistance movement in Canadian history: indeed, one that predates the formation of Canada itself ” (Simpson 2008: 13). Encounter produced hybridization, unintended consequences, unpredictable collisions of cultural energy. Yet I hesitate over the term “hybridization” as it erases so many of the specific ways in which the singular specific histories, which current populations living in a state of so-called hybridity supposedly inhabit, emerged from complex material circumstances in which trauma, violence, and oppression were grounding realities. A collision of cultures took place – as did a collision of aesthetic practices, technologies, languages, governance structures, and understandings of the very biotic relations that are determinative of how one lives on earth. One of the resilient practices to have emerged out of these circumstances is a radical decolonizing project characterized by recuperation of lost languages, cultural practices, and elder knowledge(s) – and the re-introduction of these into the here and now. Another decolonizing vector is the vexed adaptation of “Shakespearean story” to First Nations contexts. I say this, again, with cautions. As I, and others, have argued in the scholarship on adaptation that has emerged over the last twenty years, Shakespeare himself was a shameless adaptor. The notion that stories Shakespeare penned are accurately described as “Shakespearean” is one with which I am uncomfortable – it took many precedent voices to produce the texts associated with Shakespeare. Just as “hybridity” reduces complex sources of heterogeneous difference and the extraordinarily complex ways in which that is produced over time to the convenience of a trope, the notion that “Shakespeare” has become a troubled metonymy for “story” generally, and especially so in a First Nations context where story is such an important form of identity and cultural production, seems highly fraught and worth reflecting on. First Nations post-encounter narratives translated through Shakespearean tropes and frameworks do serve as an expression of decolonization through rescripting the Bard’s iconic cultural presence via new frames of reference. But these rescriptings also bear the burden of the colonial referents and histories embedded, however fluidly, in the Shakespeare effect. As I have argued elsewhere (Fischlin 2017: l–lix), there is an analogy between the Shakespeare effect and resonant First Nations tropes associated with the wendigo, the never-satiated cannibal spirit. Native American scholar Jack Forbes associates wétiko psychosis with a general movement specific to how colonialism gave birth to modern industrialized, consumer-capitalist culture. Not only does the wendigo evoke intra-indigenous truths about spiritual destruction and conflict, not to mention the devastating material realities of surviving winter and possible 128

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starvation, but also of settler/colonial relations to First Peoples generally living in non-reciprocal relations of exploitation and dehumanization. The settler cannibalizes the indigene as a source of knowledge about the land and surviving in it, as a source of food and as a source of cheap labor, among many others. But predatory settler culture also doubly abjects the other, in a further act of tropological violence, as itself the source of cannibal culture. The all-consuming cannibal, whose acts of consumption are assimilative of all things spiritual and incarnate, is not far from one version of what Shakespeare might mean in Canadian First Nations’ decolonizing ­contexts – thus accounting for his relatively sparse cultural presence. And another version of adapted Shakespearean meaning might encompass members of indigenous communities exposing and remaking cannibalized narratives associated with settler culture in their own name. Across this continuum, reductive claims about the Shakespeare effect are chimeric – as are the ways in which that effect is tied to decolonizing, anti-appropriative aesthetic structures. Cross-cultural contagion and contamination are, always already, in place. Again, the wendigo serves as an apt vehicle for imagining the vast array of intercultural exchanges unleashed by encounter. Shawn Smallman, for instance, notes the exchanges among Indigenous traditions surrounding the wendigo, European werewolves, and “Christian symbols and ideas,” as “in the Mi’kmaw narrative of the Friendly Visitor, in which the community brought a priest to see the dying windigo” (Smallman 2014: 62). While recognizing that “[t]here had always been diversity within Indigenous traditions about the Windigo” (65), Smallman points to Kenneth Morrison’s work, which suggests that by including the Jesuit priest in this story the Mi’kmaw imagined “the new possibilities of morally transforming the incorrigibly individualistic Europeans” (Morrison 2002: 63). Important in this example is how stories adapt to circumstance. After contact with Christianity the wendigo, which never had uniform meaning across the multiple belief systems associated with First Peoples, was understood to have evolved over time from, in the case of the Cree and Ojibwa, an emblem of “spiritual transformation” to an “evil spirit” (Smallman 2014: 64). The capacity to remake narrative cuts both ways: at once an inevitable side effect of contextual shifts brought about by encounter, but also an interpretative intervention deployed self-consciously in circumstances where decolonization effects are at stake.

“But who to be?” Twitter artifacts and the politics of representing First Nations through Shakespeare The way in which this cultural energy, as made manifest through the Shakespeare effect, shapeshifts and impacts the politics of representation is tricky to trace. On the one hand, traditional academic discourses follow predictable imperatives about what is deemed canonical, even when searching out new works at the margins of hegemony. The danger of these works becoming too easily canonized, and therefore reduced to tokens or reductive touchstones because they have been incorporated into academic discourse, is palpable and real. On the other hand, new forms of representational flow have exploded through social media, alternative publishing, and generically fluid intermedial projects. So in the former case, one can look to identify specific instances of where First Nations cultures (re)do Shakespeare, as in all-indigenous adaptations of Shakespeare, such as Yvette Nolan’s and Kennedy C. MacKinnon’s adaptation of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Death of a Chief (2009); Yves Sioui Durand’s and J.F. Messier’s reworking of Hamlet from the perspective of cultural genocide in Hamlet-le-Malécite (The Maleceet Hamlet [2009]); and Daniel David Moses’s subtle echoing of Macbeth in Brébeuf’s Ghost [2000]. These are important works in their own right and worthy of attention for all sorts of reasons – and they already carry freight in an emergent canon of First Nations Shakespeare that is being written and produced in Canada. 129

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But there are other ways into the problem of how the Shakespeare effect circulates. In the case of Twitter artifacts, for instance, a recent search of that living, if not highly problematic archive under the keywords “Shakespeare” and “First Nations” yields a surprisingly short list of entries. The listing points, accurately, to the way in which Shakespeare can hardly be said to be essential to First Nations’ perspectives. Yet at the same time, the results also summarize a surprisingly coherent set of concerns that allows for a more expansive understanding of how the Shakespeare effect is, in fact, present in this particular configuration. As a truncated form of literariness, Twitter artifacts allow for access to shorthand texts in which the Shakespeare effect is active. So, for instance, a short thread addressing #LiesYourSchoolTaughtYou begins with Delores Schilling noting “That Native People were Dirty and uncivilized. FYI – Native People taught Settlers how to Bathe” (Schilling 2018). To which Rachel D. Rainey responds: I tried to ask students to compare what they have learned about the disgusting living conditions in Shakespeare’s times (as well as before) to the way First Nations people lived. It seemed like my students were having trouble trusting I was alright with them being honest. Then she clarifies: My questions [sic] was something like: Based on what you have learned about the living conditions during Shakespeare’s time, discuss how is it [sic] ironic that people claim they depicted themselves as ‘superior’ to Indigenous people when they came here. Rainey 2018 The notion of a “Shakespearean” early modern time out of which colonial encounter emerged centers these comments. And it is telling, as Shakespeare becomes a metonymy for encounter and colonial contact. Illusions of cultural superiority are also at stake in this exchange, especially with the delusory notion of settler superiority to indigenes. Shakespearean “times” are associated with racist assumptions, and the exchanges show these people trying to challenge these epistemes in a way that undermines and decolonizes entrenched narratives based on racist stereotypes. Another Twitter post from Erin E. Kelly (a self-identified Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria) asks, “What does it mean to teach Shakespeare in unceded First Nations territory? (Melissa Walter) #PNRS2017” (Kelly 2018), in response to the proceedings of the Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society 2017 conference held in Portland. Twitter user #jfssPreAP, as part of the online dialogue responding to a class assignment set by Ms. Truscello that involves identifying how Romeo and Juliet’s “big ideas” play in “world news,” opines: “In R&J, Shakespeare implies that forgiveness leads to success, while resentment causes death and failure (for ex Tybalt). Likewise, only by trusting and understanding one another can Indigenous Canadians and the public bridge the cultural tension” (#jfssPreAP 2018). Both comments, from quite distinct pedagogical contexts, acknowledge ongoing debates about fraught cultural values embedded in the teaching of Shakespeare. They suggest how Shakespearean storylines ostensibly provide lessons for reconciliation of an acknowledged “cultural tension.” Examples such as these point to struggles to accommodate the cultural, institutional baggage of Shakespeare as an unavoidable curricular component counterpoised against how to reconcile decolonizing epistemes in relation to that baggage. In September 2017, the CBC’s popular national talk show Cross Country Checkup, hosted by Duncan McCue – an Anishinaabe from Ontario – set the question: “Does making today’s English classes more relevant mean dropping some of the classics?” Val C. responds “So many 130

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issues at play, but can we agree that there is a place for both Shakespeare and contemporary First Nations lit in high school?” (2017). And in the Lambton Kent District School Board (Ontario), when parents were told that the “mandatory Grade 11 English course was being replaced with an indigenous literature course,” their responses often invoked that 500-year-old icon whose shadow still falls over all English writing. “So my kid doesn’t have to study Shakespeare?” was the common reply, said superintendent of education Mark Sherman. . . . “Hey, I love . . . Shakespeare,” Sherman said. “But really, we’re talking about 15th century Veronese landlords. . . . Does that resonate with Canadian kids?” Brean 2017 The anachronism of Shakespearean plays in relation to pressing concerns about how First Nations culture has virtually been erased from Canadian pedagogical contexts is clearly a problem for superintendent Sherman. By contrast, Thomas Usher, a theater director at Red Deer College (Alberta), advocates, To me, The Tempest has always been a New World play, and a connection to the world of the west-coast Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands) has always seemed a reasonable and respectful cultural metaphor to explore. With the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report on residential schools last year, the time and opportunity seemed ripe for this interpretation. Acted by a completely non-indigenous cast and conscious of the politics of doing so, Usher describes how we opened a dialogue with the local Native Friendship Society to address any issues of cultural appropriation . . . we invited Haida elder and master carver Reg Davidson to open our awareness to the diversity of messages possible. . . . Here, then, was the lesson we needed The Tempest’s Prospero to learn as well. Usher 2016 These examples are part of often contradictory, nuanced dialogues tying Shakespearean productions where aboriginal presence is evoked to struggles to educate and reconcile and to a necessary reset of the terms of encounter and understanding across cultural differences. Shakespearean presence is deployed both as a so-called “classic” brand associated with Eurocentric colonial values and also as a useful vessel for exploring difference and failed encounter models. So, Shakespeare serves along a continuum of cultural function: as a tool of assimilation to mark the abyssal line between colonial epistemes and the “other” abjected before those epistemes and as an example of the lessons to be learned from the very conditions that lead to tragic ends – as in what Romeo and Juliet teaches about the failure of parental culture to resolve the very disputes that make Romeo’s and Juliet’s love a foreordained exercise in tragedy or what The Tempest teaches about ways forward in the aftermath of colonial history: If The Tempest is indeed a New World story, then it follows that this is our story. . . . It is a chance to explore . . . retribution, reclamation, and reconciliation at a time when [Canada] is coming to grips with the sad failings it has perpetrated upon its first peoples. Usher 2016 131

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Multiple examples of Shakespearean productions invested in aboriginal identity across a range of amateur, regional, and national theaters exist in Canada. Hence, in Saskatchewan in 2015, The Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan festival and the Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company . . . [presented] Othello with a modern Saskatoon twist” featuring “some Cree language integration and Manitoba Cree actor, Michael Lawrenchuk, as the lead. “Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan” 2015 Lawrenchuck, when interviewed about why doing a First Nations interpretation of Othello matters, says: In this country, First Nations happen to be the Other, and I think a society always needs to look at how it treats the Other. I think it’s interesting in this play to watch a man considered the Other, who is a Cree, who sees through the eyes of a human being but is judged by what he looks like . . . immigrants that come [to Canada] are always the lowest of the low, according to people here. But what they always say is ‘at least we’re not Indians.’ Fuller 2015 Playing Othello in such a xenophobic context holds a mirror up to the foundations of intolerance and the systematic racism that First Nations have endured in Canada since colonization. Remember, in Canadian Parliament Conservative MPs Rosemarie Falk (Battlefords-Lloydminster, Saskatchewan; MP for the riding in which the infamous shooting of Colten Boushie, a Cree man from the Red Pheasant Nation, took place) and Dane Lloyd (Sturgeon River-Parkland, Alberta) high-fived each other in Parliament after voting against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act in May 2018 (“Tory MPs HIGH-FIVE” 2018). Just days later, an eleven-year-old member of the Kainai First Nation in southern Alberta had his braid snipped from behind at school, an act of bullying deeply at odds with cultural traditions in which a braid is only cut as an act of respect when mourning (Krugel 2018). In such ongoing racist contexts, the National Arts Centre’s all-aboriginal version of Lear, directed in 2012 by Peter Hinton, provided a unique opportunity to mesh one of Canada’s premier national theater sites, located just blocks away from Parliament, with First Nations voices. Arts reporter J. Kelly Nestruck observes, While Shakespeare’s plays are regularly relocated to Edwardian England, contemporary Italy, or postmodern fantasy lands, Canadian directors have been strangely reluctant to set them in Canada – let alone aboriginal Canada. . . . In 1961, director David Gardner toured what was billed an ‘Eskimo Lear,’ in which the king wandered into a snowstorm and ‘Poor Tom’ was genuinely cold. Lewis Baumander and Robert Lepage have staged first-contact-themed versions of The Tempest in outdoor theatres in Toronto and Quebec City, respectively. Director Hinton describes Lear about “governance, the division of land, and the measurement of land to love” while assistant director Lorne Cardinal, the first aboriginal student at the University of Alberta to earn a B.F.A. in acting, underlines how “In our story, the idea of dividing land has never been done before, because we were all a part of the land” (Nestruck 2012). Some four years after this production, the National Arts Centre announced the creation of a Department of Indigenous Theatre, the first such new department at the NAC since 1969. The move 132

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was welcomed by Michael Greyeyes, aboriginal dancer, professor, and artistic director of Signal Theatre, as a much needed step in the right direction. . . . For many reasons . . . our experience is very different from English- and French-speaking artists. . . . We are invisible in many, many ways. This is a way to give power to indigenous artists to create the kind of space and place for our theatre and our artists to flourish. Robb 2016 Invisibility is an assimilation strategy. Visible place, embodied performative acts in public, help to counter that invisibility. Huron-Wendat author, filmmaker, and dramaturg, Yves Sioui Durand, situates First Nations theater as “cultural re-appropriation . . . an attempt to address the fracture of dispossession and continuous assimilation.” Moreover, for Durand, cultural survival relies on . . . our capacity to make use of our myths ‘of thinking the world’ with what founds our deeper consciousness and our identity. We must generate an answer for ourselves. The inability to produce such an answer . . . constitutes . . . an existential angst so powerful that it can be devastating, cause illness, and even . . . death. This is what is currently happening in most of the indigenous communities in Canada where rates of violence and suicide are translations of the fundamental tension of theatre. . . . But who to be? Durand 2012: 57 Durand’s closing Hamletian echo – “But who to be?” – situates Shakespeare in this evolving discourse, where re-scripting is a means to survival. Reclaiming theater’s shamanic capacity to heal via such transpositions and the necessity of generating “an answer for ourselves” are at the heart of Durand’s project to undo the cultural “asphyxiation,” the erasures of traditional practices, and the dispossession faced by First Nations communities across Canada. Through these varied uses of Shakespeare’s texts, issues of cultural difference, compassion, ­ethical responses to sustained historic injustice, and performative acts of resistance that i­nevitably have the capacity to teach all these are unavoidably addressed. Delbert Riley Jr., responding to Canadian conservative pundit Conrad Black on Twitter, notes that Black “dismisses that First Nations have written languages older than Shakespeare. First Nations Cahokia civilization ­predates the bible” (Riley 2017). Riley’s concise historical reminder to Black, a historian with a penchant for writing sycophantic biographies of American presidents (including Nixon and Trump), marks a tense battleground between orthodox systems of knowledge (and who controls them) and epistemes that fall beyond or are “foreign” to those. Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls this split a matter of abyssal lines, giving as an example the way in which “modern science” is given a “monopoly” over the “universal distinction between true and false, to the detriment of two alternative bodies of knowledge: philosophy and theology” (Santos 2007: 47). One side of the line is occupied by sanctioned, hegemonic, and in this case Eurocentric and ignorant assumptions about the centrality of one’s own view to the exclusion of all else. On the other side of the borderline, falling beyond these, is a much more complex, diverse ecology of knowledges. The split is a critical component in the systematized entrenchment of racism, the inability to speak across difference, and the recognition that epistemic rhizomes involving crosscultural contact are far more active and important than monolithic systems acknowledge. Shakespeare clearly sits aligned with one side of de Sousa Santos’s analysis, but that is shifting as the Shakespeare effect is re-appropriated in the name of difference. Douglas Lanier argues 133

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how “A rhizomatic conception of Shakespeare situates ‘his’ cultural authority not in the Shakespearean text at all but in the accrued power of Shakespearean adaptation, the multiple, challenging lines of force we and other cultures have labeled as ‘Shakespeare’ ” (Lanier 2014: 29). To which we might add that the rhizomatic metaphor extends well beyond Shakespeare into, across, and through other epistemes that are distinctively non-Shakespearean in their forms of cultural production and in their historical contingencies. So, when Black asserts Shakespeare as the metonymy for cultural achievement generally, multiple things go wrong. Assuming that Shakespearean language is “our” language, or vice versa, neglects the multiple other components that have fed into modern English across multiple forms of English, diverse ethnicities, national sites, gendered identities, and so forth. Further, the assumption that Shakespearean linguistic achievement is the historical nec plus ultra ignores multiple global sites of linguistic achievement, including multiple lost or in-peril First Nations languages associated with Uto-Aztecan or Athabaskan cultures, to cite two such instances. Cree author Neal McLeod notes how Cree narrative memory is essentially open-ended, and different elements of a story can be emphasized during a single performance . . . a narrative can never be fully exhausted because the dynamics between the teller and the listener will also vary. . . . Such openendedness with the Cree poetic consciousness is the foundation of critical thinking. McLeod 2014: 97 This sophisticated consciousness that ties de-authorizing singular narratives to “critical thinking” predates what many might argue is a key practice in Shakespearean poetics and narrative. If the precession of cultural achievements is to be acknowledged and forms part of a rhizomatic ecology of knowledges, then marking diverse human achievements over multiple times and places becomes a critical part of ethical truth-telling when situating Shakespeare in these larger movements. Hence, when Riley rebuts Black by referencing Cahokia culture, he is pointing to the much larger frame in which epistemes operate. Anthropologist Timothy Pauketat, for instance, writes of Cahokia as an “American Indian drama . . . driven by violence, politics, and religion” (2017: 1–2). Cahokia (c. 1050–1350 ce) is “ancient America’s one true city north of Mexico – as large in its day as London,” which included “3200 acres of great pyramids, spacious plazas, thatched-roof temples, houses, astronomical observatories, and planned neighborhoods” (Pauketat 2009: 3). Shakespeare sits uncomfortably in this mix: a heavily freighted symbol of epistemes associated with European culture but also an emblem of the failure of that same culture to recognize First Nations’ vast pre-colonial histories and cultural contributions. Twitter user constitutionwalk opines, “Shakespeare is irrelevant to First Nations and those who advocate for First Peoples” (Constitutionwalk. 2017). But Matt Fillmore nuances things by arguing, “I studied First Nations lit. at uni., & it’s just as difficult as Shakespeare (maybe more). To bemoan Sh.’s ‘difficulty’ is . . . blind” (Fillmore 2017). And Vanessa Marshall notes cultural asymmetries by observing, “A poster of Shakespeare in the window of a First Nations Reserve house can only be described as bizarre” (Marshall 2010). Presumably, in the case of a Shakespeare poster in a reserve house, tensions between settler and indigene are not only part of the bizarreness of the intersection, but also perhaps the highly classed separations that make reserves uncomfortably dissonant sites of poverty, dispossession, and radical inequality. The common thread running through this search-engineered, random archive made possible by Twitter highlights the tension between appropriation not only of Shakespeare but also of First Nations culture in relation to Shakespeare. 134

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Twitter user William Hill’s handle includes the following expansive self-description, “Ongwehonwe Ninja, Oneida/Mohawk, Wolf Clan, Six Nations, Habs Fan.” In July 2013, he posted “A new venue for Shakespeare Festival in First Nations building” with no comment (Hill 2013). The shared link in the post takes readers to an article in a newspaper in Victoria British Columbia called the Times Colonist (and no, I am not making up that name). The article describes how “Camosun College’s Na’tsa’maht building promises an intriguing setting for Shakespeare,” which will play host to the Greater Victoria Shakespeare Festival for the first time this year [2013]. . . . Na’tsa’maht (which means ‘unity’ or ‘working together as one’) is structured around 18 large cedar logs that support its ceiling. Three tiers of wooden benches offer seating for 150 people. Chamberlain 2013 The article is remarkably free of any critical content that connects First Nations cultures to Shakespeare aside from the architectural reference, which also includes a sense of what the Salish term “Na’tsa’maht” means (“unity” or “working together as one”), perhaps a subtle hint at why playing Shakespeare in such a venue matters. Camosun College’s name was “an early name for Victoria. It is originally a Lkwungen (Songhees) name for an area of Victoria where different waters meet and are transformed,” and its approximately 19,000-strong student body is comprised of “[a]bout 1,000 Aboriginal students from 50 Nations including Métis and Inuit groups” (“Camosun College” n.d.). Here, the messaging includes, among others, a Shakespearean incursion into First Nations space (by a company playing in that season The Merry Wives of Windsor), the erasure of the ideological implications of doing so in overt terms, and the perhaps not so subtle hint at aspirational ways of thinking about Shakespeare in such a space as a precarious act of cultural unity – all this reported in a newspaper whose name references Canada’s colonial history. These juxtapositions are startling, perhaps a continuation of William Hills’s self-description as, among others, a ninja, Habs-loving, and Onkwehonwe (original people/indigenous; see kahntineta 2013; Alfred 2005). “The Montreal Canadiens,” otherwise known as the “Habs,” are one of Canada’s most iconic hockey teams, named after the country itself and playing out of Montreal, another Canadian/ Québécois site of exceptional cultural difference.“Habs” is an abbreviation of “les habitants” (literally the “inhabitants”) that is, the French settlers who lived on the banks of the St. Lawrence in what became known as Lower Canada. Such ironic collisions and radical juxtapositions of intercultural exchange are an inevitable consequence of what occurs in a post-encounter context, where acts of decolonization are as much about ferocious, overt resistance (as in the 1990 Oka crisis that saw a seventy-eight day stand-off between the Canadian military and Mohawk protestors protecting a burial ground designated to be turned into a golf course) as they are about subtle reclamations of territory and identity that involve making things over in one’s own image.

Coda: “when things are out of balance” – rescripting Shakespeare Since its inception in 2004, the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP 2007) has tracked encounters between First Peoples in Canada and the Bard via its Spotlight on Canadian Aboriginal Adaptations of Shakespeare (Fischlin 2004). There is a surprisingly large and growing archive of decolonizing work that retells traditional Shakespearean narratives through the multi-voiced storytelling perspectives of First Nations communities spread across Canada. As with Durand’s work, there is a strong sense that much of this theatrical work is part of a larger 135

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movement to right wrongs, address erasure, embody difference, reclaim public spaces, and give agency to First Nations activism. Métis actress Tantoo Cardinal, explaining her role as Regan in the all-aboriginal Lear discussed earlier, asserts “Colonialism has flipped the turtle on its back, and things don’t sit right. . . . People do crazy things – there’s fear and abuse – when things are out of balance” (Nestruck 2012). As a troubled site that anchors colonial value systems that have indeed “flipped the turtle on its back,” but also as a symbolic place to reclaim lost ground, Shakespeare offers both a way back and a way forward. In the current historical moment, Canada is riven by the challenges of addressing peace and reconciliation with its First Peoples in the aftermath of genocidal policies of assimilation and sustained strategies of governance that have disenfranchised, undermined, limited equitable access to resources for First Nations communities from coast to coast to coast. Shakespeare figures in this bleak scenario of neglect and injustice as a site where complex negotiations about identity, alternative forms of encounter and governance, and the reinvention of ossified storylines occur. Nestruck quotes Lorne Cardinal, whose work on the all-aboriginal Lear was cited earlier, and notes that he has never been able even to get an audition at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival – and believes for a long time a racist perception that aboriginal actors can’t handle the text’ has kept them from being cast in classical productions. “Now,” he says, “we get this chance to master this language – well, I say, master the language of the oppressors – and show that we are equal in skill and talent.” Nestruck 2012 Cardinal’s perspective calls out the gatekeeping at Canada’s premier site for Shakespearean performance. But it also suggests that (re)mastering the language of the oppressor is a legitimate strategy to be exercised through sites of Shakespearean production – meaningful precisely because Shakespeare remains at the forefront of cultural branding associated with hegemony and aesthetic achievement. In his 2003 Massey Lectures, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, acclaimed First Nations author Thomas King (Cherokee) – who was the first aboriginal author in the history of the lectures to give them – reminds us that, in an indigenous worldview, the earth is settled on the back of a turtle. When asked by a little girl what’s beneath the turtle, King playfully suggests that the turtle sits atop another turtle, with “turtles all the way down” (King 2017: 2), a rich, improvised image to supplement his much-cited observation that “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (2). Resettling the turtle off its back is an act of restoration, hospitality, and respect. And in this vein, Tantoo Cardinal’s vision of colonialism as having unsettled the turtle, flipping it on its back is a challenge to all forms of discursive, lived material practices to restore the balance; make good for wrongs done in a meaningful way; and reach across the abysses of institutional racism, erasure, and hurt to undo the increments of violence and oppression. Monique Mojica (Kuna and Rappahannock) and Ric Knowles note, “Doing Aboriginal theatre is about translation, building bridges, making reconnections. Each tiny fragment of research and creation contributes, accumulates, and adds up to something with which the disconnect brought on by la conquista can be healed” (2008: iii). In the same light, Algonquin dramaturg Yvette Nolan, discussing indigenous performance culture, suggests,“When someone talks about bad medicine, I understand the phrase to mean that someone is breaking something, a relationship, or a rule or a social contract. Good medicine . . . makes community” (2015: 1–2). Community making through theater is a vital part of the struggle to decolonize in these contexts. Sorouja Moll’s reading of Death of A Chief argues that “in the hands of Native practitioners,” a reversal of the “hierarchical and naturalized patterns 136

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of Western theatre practices” occurs, thus “[placing] the power squarely not only in the hands of the production’s directors but in those of each individual member of the cast and technical team” (2014: 386). Moll cites Métis actor and musician Jani Lauzon (Antony): “[We were told that] you cannot do Shakespeare unless you think through the colonial mind. . . . I won’t; I refuse” (386). This embodied refusal, which occurs in a radical act of overwriting, signals a decolonizing circulation of cultural energies where hierarchy, disconnect, and appropriation are refocused as connection and re-appropriation in the name of new epistemes. Intensely layered narratives are required to access a vexed truth that is always unsettled by the possibility of yet more narratives that remain to be told or unearthed – something implicit in King’s recursive image of turtles all the way down. It is precisely this approach to story that is at work in how Shakespearean narratives in Canada have been adapted, rescripted, and made to serve the wider project of decolonization. Shakespeare remains implicated, if not overdetermined, in a wider project of decolonization that redresses the world turned upside down through resilient and deeply insurgent strategies of performance, overwriting, and adaptation.

References #jfssPreAP. 2018. Twitter Post. 25 May. Alfred, Taiaiake. 2005. Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Âpihtawikosisân. 2018. Twitter Post. 29 May. Brean, Joseph. 2017. “Ontario school board tosses Shakespeare for indigenous writers.” National Post, 11 May. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/ontario-school-board-tossesshakespeare-for-indigenous-writers. C. Val. 2017. Twitter Post. 17 Sep. “Camosun College.” n.d. Wikipedia. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camosun_ College. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP). 2007. Accessed 22 Jul. 2018. www.canadianshake speares.ca/. Chamberlain, Adrian. 2013. “A new venue for Shakespeare Festival in First Nations building.” Times Colonist, 10 July. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/a-new-venue-forshakespeare-festival-in-first-nations-building-1.492945. Constitutionwalk. 2017. Twitter Post. 21 Jul. Cross Country Checkup. 2017. Twitter Post. 15 Sep. Durand, Yves Sioui. 2012. “Ondinnok: The First Nations Theatre of Quebec.” Trans. Meg Moran. Canadian Theatre Review 150 (Spring): 56–60. Durand, Yves Sioui, and J.F. Messier. 2009. “The Maleceet Hamlet [Hamlet-le-Malécite].” In A Certain William: Adapting Shakespeare in Francophone Canada. Trans. Henry Gauthier. Ed. Leanore Lieblein. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. 209–61. Elliott, Alicia. 2017. Twitter Post. 29 Jun. “Fact Sheet: Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women.” 2014. Ontario Native Women’s Association, September 24. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. www.onwa.ca/upload/documents/missing-and-murdered-factsheet.pdf. Fillmore, Matt. 2017. Twitter Post. 21 May. Fischlin, Daniel. 2004. “Spotlight: Canadian Aboriginal Adaptations of Shakespeare.” Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, University of Guelph. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. www.canadianshakespeares.ca/ spotlight.cfm. ———. 2017. “ ‘Signifying Nothing’ With a Difference: Macbeth in Canada.” In Macbeth. Shakespeare Made in Canada Series. Gen. Ed. Daniel Fischlin. Oakville, ON: Rock’s Mills Press. xv–lix. Forbes, Jack D. 2008. Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. New York: Seven Stories Press. Fuller, Cam. 2015. “Bard Meets Band: Festival Performs First Nations Othello.” Saskatoon StarPhoenix, 9 July. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. http://thestarphoenix.com/entertainment/bard-meets-band-festivalperforms-first-nations-othello.

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Daniel Fischlin Hanson, Erin. 2018. “Sixties Scoop.” Indigenousfoundations. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. https://indigenousfoun dations.arts.ubc.ca/sixties_scoop/. Hill, William. 2013. Twitter Post. 11 Jul. kahntineta [Kahn-Tineta Horn]. 2013. “Sell-Out Syndrome.” Mohawk Nation News, 9 May. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. http://mohawknationnews.com/blog/tag/ongwehonwe/. Kelly, Erin E. 2018. Twitter Post. 21 Oct. King, Thomas. 2003. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. The Massey Lecture Series. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. ———. 2017. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. The Illustrated Edition. Toronto: Doubleday Canada. Krugel, Lauren. 2018. “Son’s braid Cut at Calgary School: Indigenous Mother Hopes for Teaching Moment.” CBC, 3 Jun. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/sons-braid-cut-atcalgary-school-1.4689811. Lanier, Douglas. 2014.“Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 21–40. Marshall, Vanessa. 2010. Twitter Post. 17 Apr. McLeod, Neal. 2014. “Cree Poetic Discourse.” In Indigenous Poetics in Canada. Ed. Neal McLeod. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 89–103. Miller, J.R. 2017. “Residential Schools.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Rev. Tabitha Marshall, 24 Nov. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residential-schools/. Mojica, Monique, and Ric Knowles. 2008. “Introduction: Creation Story Begins Again.” In Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English, Vol. 2. Eds. Monique Mojica and Ric Knowles. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. iii–iv. Moll, Sorouja. 2014. “February 2008: The Death of a Chief: Translating Shakespeare in Native Theatre.” In Translation Effects: The Shaping of Modern Canadian Culture. Eds. Kathy Mezei, Sherry Simon, and Luise von Flotow. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 382–96. Morrison, Kenneth M. 2002. The Solidarity of Kin: Ethnohistory, Religious Studies, and the Algonkian-French Encounter. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Moses, Daniel David. 2000. Brébeuf’s Ghost. Toronto: Exile Editions. Nestruck, J. Kelly. 2012. “NAC’s all-aboriginal King Lear begins to take shape.” The Globe and Mail, 6 May. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/theatre-and-performance/nacs-all-aboriginalking-lear-begins-to-take-shape/article4104767/#articlecontent. Nolan, Yvette. 2015. Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Cultures. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Nolan, Yvette, and Kennedy C. MacKinnon. 2009. “Death of a Chief.” In The Shakespeare’s Mine: Adapting Shakespeare in Anglophone Canada. Ed. Ric Knowles. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. 379–427. Pauketat, Timothy R. 2009. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. New York: Penguin Books. Rainey, Rachel D. 2018. Twitter Post. 16 Feb. Riley Jr., Delbert. 2017. Twitter Post. 4 Aug. Robb, Peter. 2016. “NAC announces new Department of Indigenous Theatre.” Ottawa Citizen, 24 Mar. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/nac-announces-new-depart ment-of-indigenous-theatre. Schilling, Delores. 2018. Twitter Post. 15 Feb. “Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan and Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company team up.” 2015. CBC, 27 Jan. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/shakespeare-on-the-saskatchewanand-saskatchewan-native-theatre-company-team-up-1.2933569. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2008. “Oshkimaadiziig, the New People.” In Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of First Nations. Intro. Alfred Taiaiake. Winnipeg: Arp Books. 13–21. Smallman, Shawn. 2014. Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History. Victoria, B.C.: Heritage House. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2007. “Beyond Abyssal Thinking. From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledge.” Review 30.1: 45–89. “Tory MPs HIGH-FIVE after Voting AGAINST Indigenous People Bill.” 2018. YouTube, Jun. 1. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KmU0f7qmT4. Usher, Thomas. 2016. “Turning Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ into an aboriginal story.” TVO, 26 Aug. Accessed 10 June 2018. https://tvo.org/article/current-affairs/turning-shakespeares-the-tempest-intoan-aboriginal-story. Walker, Connie. 2015.“Justin Trudeau signals new approach to relationship with indigenous people.” CBC. 4 Nov. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018. www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/justin-trudeau-signals-new-approach-torelationship-with-indigenous-people-1.3304234.

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12 NOMADIC SHYLOCK Nationhood and its subversion in The Merchant of Venice Avraham Oz

Decades of contending with the text of The Merchant of Venice, comprising academic writing, teaching, and translating the text, culminated in my own stage adaptation of the play. My production, in which the plot is set in 1516, the year the Jewish Ghetto in Venice was inaugurated, opens with a caravan of Jewish refugees wandering from the Iberian Peninsula on the ways of Europe. It is an image that corresponds both to the myth of the “wandering Jew,” rampant in the popular imagination at the time (and later to be compared to the rootless or artist in general – see, for example, Nietzsche,1969, or Toller, 1978), and to the acute image of displaced refugees in today’s Europe. This affect (in Deleuzian terms) of deterritorialization, moving from the literal meaning of the term to its Deleuzian connotation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), may serve as an emblem to my reading of the play, informing my stage production of it, divided between Shakespeare and not Shakespeare. Just as the adaptive use of the Shakespearean text is ­rhizomatic, so is the position of the Jew in Venice, at the same time aspiring for constancy vis-à-vis its adopted territory (which rhizomatically adopts him in turn as a citizen/non-citizen) and insisting on its distinction and separation from its core and immersing into perpetual nomadism. This paper will move to and fro from an account of the production and its source of inspiration in what Douglas Lanier will conceive as the relation between Shakespeare and his cultural capital ­(Desmet et al. 2017: 171; and see Lanier 2014). The year 1516 stood at the center of another notable production of The Merchant of Venice. In Venice, a multinational production of the play celebrated the founding of the Jewish Ghetto, first of its kind in the world. Whether created due to protective or segregating motives, the Ghetto confined the Jews within non-transgressive, fixed boundaries. The rhizomatic reflection of the text was internal, such as the division of Shylock into five different character-images, all stemming from the closure of the stage circumscribed by the boundaries of Ghetto square. Our production attempted to emphasize the opposite view of Shylock and his tribe. It is that Deleuzian concept of nomadism which partly inspires my stage adaptation of The Merchant of Venice (2016), both in terms of reflecting reality and its implicit presence at the core of Shakespeare’s text. The opening procession enters the stage to the background of a modern text, Louis Aragon’s poem on the precarious life of the alien as permanent wandering, sung by Salarina, converted from Shakespeare’s male merchant commenting on the plot into the singer and media presenter accompanying the action and investigating its motives as an emissary of the spectators. Once the poem is done, the group of refugees, headed by Shylock, addresses Venice in the 139

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words taken from the traditional Yom Kippur prayer: “Open a gate for us, while the gate is closing, for the day has turned.” Their ensuing journey is to proceed throughout the play from their temporary residence in Venice, where their attempts to override their chosen preference to preserve their disjunction from the Christian community of Venice, by assimilating into the city’s mainstream economy and citizenship, fails to work, since by insisting on usury as their primal principle of economic conduct they breach the official code of “romantic mercantilism” upheld by Venice’s “Prince of merchants” and his associates; to their continual wandering into the realm of perpetual nomadism, which provides the play with open ending. It is the affect of the gate, the symbolic abode of passage, which governs the wandering subject, and it is from this stance that it addresses the seemingly stable inmates of the bordered land. This perpetual, rhizomatic voyage, subversively breaking from the outset the linear proceeding of the original action, involves not only its external perspective in moving between geographical locations, but the internal movement whereas the process of futile resistance to the external “superpowers,” controlling the realms of discipline and punish, is transformed into the realm of the subject itself. Thus, the major political conflicts implicated by the Shakespearean text find their dramatic expression through the progress of the individual subjects animating the performance, with Shylock and Antonio as the major axis of the play’s resistance to the external structures of discipline, informed by the two newly ascending frameworks of capitalism and nationhood. Both Shylock and Antonio undergo nomadic pilgrimage in which the stasis of their respective points of departure is put to motion through tests and experiments, to challenge through their subjectivity received ideas traditionally attached to them in the political or religious contexts of the play. Both start their voyage from conflicting stances: whereas Antonio, to use Raymond Williams’s terms, represents the “dominant” and Shylock the “residual,” while the latter demonstrates to the former the road to the phase of “emergent” (Williams 1997: 123). The traditional conflict ascribed to the Shakespearean text between rising capitalism and capitulating feudalism is transformed in the present production into a newly defined dialectics. Antonio’s romantic capitalism is informed by a Volponic worship of gold, an ardent economic faith in stable bullionism (cherished by many mercantilist writers of the time), and traces of spiritual trust in providential agency which will not fail one who shuns interest religiously: Commerce is art. I send ships on the water to hunt excitements, not profit. Interest, insurance, warranties all these are blasphemy. I send ships on the water to test my destiny. To carve my fortune from the circles of the world. I send ships on the water to seek my maker’s grace. Oz 2016: 12 Shylock’s dry, abstract capitalism, which turns objects into bonds and digits, for whom human flesh is differentiated from an animal’s just by their market value, and the proliferation of metal coins is identical to the procreation of living bodies. To accompany the nomadic pilgrimage of Shylock and Antonio into the core of their subjectivity, the external plot may be assisted by a few fresh readings of the Shakespearean characters and moves: a scheming Duchess of Venice, using her troops of pirates to abduct Antonio’s ships; a TV presenter accompanying the narrative as a sharp interviewer and cabaret singer; and a Tubal commonly accepted as an appreciated economic commentator providing historical insights and perspectives. With Antonio and Shylock’s conflict exemplifying the polarity of romantic and coarse mercantile capitalism, the plot of Shakespeare’s play, clad in modern imagery of golden capital, stock exchange fluctuations, political machination and biased media coverage, is grasped as the most palpable nucleus and blueprint for present day’s world. 140

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While reciting the opening lines of another famous Venetian – Ben Jonson’s Volpone adoring the deity of Gold – Duchess Benevolenta VII, an implicit adherer of contemporary Machiavelli, masters from behind the scenes all the secret moves that Shakespearean plot leaves to the working of blind destiny or the vagaries of human passion, from the abduction of Antonio’s ships by the Vivaldi family, her private pirates, to the abduction of the Princes of Morocco and Arragon by Bassanio and Gratiano for Bassanio to impersonate them and “test” the respective caskets before choosing the correct one. Before getting to the stage version of my contending with the play, let’s have a look at the topical materials the Shakespearean text has in store for its potential interpreters. Whether by direct influence or via general zeitgeist inspiration, the teachings of one of the greatest minds of the time infiltrated and infected any fictional text rising above the diminished level of individual psychology. Imagine this: a tired, if relentless Machiavelli, sitting at his desk, confined to his country farm at St. Andrea, about seven miles from the Duomo daunting central Florence. Machiavelli is detached from political life, to which he actively contributed for so many years, and from the ranks of Florentine administration to which he still desires to return, and yet of which he only may write his sharp observations owing to his forced detachment, and yet again to which he regards his present writings as the means whereby he might be granted readmission, which indeed he will never be granted. Thus, only from afar may he present his beloved city with the caveat against the barbarians which concludes The Prince. This complex dynamic of belonging, inherent in Machiavelli’s ambiguous position as a practitioner finding refuge in theory, craving to be reinstated as a practitioner to help put his theory into practice, seems to be symbolic of the subject matter of his work, namely, how to define the crisis and desire of belonging epitomizing a community of citizens, sharing a collective memory, in terms of the power of one representative individual chosen to lead them, whose power of representation derives from their choosing him while losing their legal (and moral) power of choice once he assimilated their will, expressed in their prerogative to elect him. Both structure and meaning are shaped in the form of a riddle, yet both shun a simple solution. Is this lack of solution inevitable, or is it politically, or culturally, premature? Does not this ambiguous and confused appeal to political solidarity correspond, in a nutshell, to the diversified, yet ever dialectical narrative of early European desire for nationhood, curbed by some ambitious princes, who in turn promoted that very ideology among their subjects when it appeared to sustain their will to power? Not fortuitously, the crux of the matter inheres in that charged term, “chosen.” Its religious overtones prompted Hans Kohn, who distinguishes between “voluntarist” and “organic” concepts of nationalism and other theorists of nationalism to prevent the term “nation” as a form of desire from being pushed back to the Middle Ages (Kohn 1945), and yet others, such as Hastings or Huizinga before him, would discern the desire for nationhood as already operating in the Middle Ages (Huizinga 1959: 105). Only few nowadays will dispute the viability of the desire for nation for a Renaissance humanist such as Machiavelli; some will argue that his nationalism, as reflected in The Prince, got the better of his republicanism (Langton and Dietz 1987). For the Machiavellian notion of nationhood, while not overriding the tension between the “voluntarist” and “organic” elements, means, in one sense, severing the Gordian knot connecting the religious overtones of the concept of election to their sanctified source and leaving the vagaries of power to the jurisdiction of goddess Fortune, who feels more at home in the Machiavellian halls of political realism than in the Augustinian shrines of faith (see Oz 2013 for a more detailed discussion of Machiavelli’s notion of nationhood). Is Machiavelli’s separating of religious tenets from political realism so different from positions taken by Raleigh or Bacon in Elizabethan England (see, for example, Raab 1965: 70–76)? Shakespeare, their contemporary, may be attempting to fashion a narrative based 141

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on such a vision of nationhood in his parable of Shylock the Jew, who presents the Venetian emergent notion of nationhood with a sharp riddle questioning the basic relation between the community and the individual, in evoking a crucial crisis of belonging and prophetically coercing it to relate to an inevitable factor shaping its future existence. To a modern political thinker such as Gramsci, Machiavelli is prophetic in his notion of “a new order” required of the Prince to constitute in his Epilogue to The Prince. For Gramsci, it is not the individual, but “the political Party,” the function of which is to establish the new order, namely, “a new type of State” (Gramsci 1968: 146). Accounting for Machiavelli’s appeal to Gramsci, Louis Althusser spells out the exact nature of this “new state”: The state that Machiavelli expects from the Prince, for the unification of Italy under an absolute monarch, is not the state in general . . . but a historically determinate type of state, required by the conditions and exigencies of nascent capitalism: a national state. Althusser 1999: 11 Machiavelli’s concept of nation is pragmatic: the need for nation derives from the economical need to create material and social market zones. Shylock, less of an individualist than Marlowe’s Barabas, is well aware of this, and while far from founding a Gramschian political party, he intends to make use of nationhood in another, more Machiavellian in nature. Venice, as he well knows, depends on an economy regulated by markets, and in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, a text attentive a great deal to Machiavelli’s advice to his Prince, this affects the legal system, which is crucial to Machiavelli’s political science as the core factor of regulating the welfare of the state. Following the gradual separation of the state from the economy differentiates between public and private law the individual subject is allowed to acquire “at least a core of private autonomy” (Habermas 1999: 109). For Machiavelli, collective memory is hardly an enshrined treasure. He doesn’t regard it as any more than a construct, of which the Prince is expected to take advantage as a vehicle for maintaining his power over his subjects. Less of an idealized narrative of republican solidarity, the nation is chiefly a social ploy, an ideology designed to serve the needs of its ultimate representative, the Prince, to maintain and enhance his power, the chief source and warranty of his subjects’ well-being. It is an early capitalist form of utilitarianism which prompts Fabrizio (Machiavelli’s alias in The Art of War) to provide his famous answer to the question of using a cannon from within the ranks of troops, that when cannons are moving they face in the opposite direction than that in which they fire: “the artillery marches in one direction and fires in the other” (Machiavelli 2003: 76). This dictum is what we may call today a Brechtian answer, involving both gestus and a moral: sometimes the obvious function of a strategic weapon, such as a cannon, or a nation, for that matter, should be dialectically suppressed, for the better achievement of a goal. Nationhood, like the cannon, is to be handled with caution and care, according to advantage and changing circumstances. By the same token, Machiavelli advises the Prince who seized a new province or city to appropriate collective memory and construct the citizens’ national memory as stemming from him (Machiavelli 1995: 26). The consolidation of the Prince’s power runs parallel to the creation of a new national construct and narrative (Machiavelli 1995: 7–14). In an age where religion becomes less of a dominant faith and more of a social institution, nationhood, both for Machiavelli and Shakespeare, serves as a surrogate political bond for the paternal strings whereby ancient and medieval religion embraced European culture in a grip of containment, repression, and servitude. The ancient narrative of the birth of the nation is the story of negating the tribal bonds of blood, namely, the desire of humanity to escape the terror of its unprotected, unmediated gaze 142

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into the face of nature. This is the source of Machiavelli’s attraction to antiquity, in which he seeks the protective power of cultural memory. What seems to be stated by Machiavelli is a sense of quantitative reading of collective morality: the larger body of individuals bonded together the interest of preservation served by an act of aggression caters for, the more justified is the measure of violence inherent in it. In 1603, a Scottish monarch ascended to the English throne, embarked almost immediately on Machiavelli’s advice to reconstruct performatively the national memory. James conferred knighthood on former compatriots and instructed his parliament, four years later, to consider that “Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English, divers in Nation, [were] yet all walking as Subjects and servants within [his] Court, and all living under the allegiance of your King” (Baker 1997: 45). The easiness whereby pure nationhood was thus slighted and transformed by the King aroused the indignation of traditional English patriots and could readily be associated with practices preached by Machiavelli to his Prince. Those, as I would like to argue, have been showing already in the former decade in Shakespeare’s treatment of nationhood. My stage production of the play suggests a tentative, experimental reading of Shakespeare’s more abstract concern with rewriting one thread of the national narrative, influenced by the practice advocated by Machiavelli the thinker but way apart from Machiavelli the Italian nationalist. In terms of content, it may rather anticipate Montesquieu’s observation that commerce should be fostered since it may ameliorate the manners of both individuals and nations and in particular “polishes and softens barbarous mores, as we see every day” (Montesquieu 1989: 338). It is located in a commercial republic such as Venice, where, unlike London, a Moor may become a General and a Jew a major banker, and yet it is a plausible reading of the play to view Shakespeare himself as toying with the idea that a national narrative can be expanded to contain or absorb the other. Central as is the issue of English/British nationhood, the tension between nationhood and capitalism is perhaps no less emphasized in early modern drama in terms of its representation of the ambiguous nationality of the Jew, presenting emerging nationhood with a test-case, questioning some of its crucial assumptions. It is, for sure, a subversion of the practical advice given by Machiavelli to the Prince, regarding the uses of rewriting collective memory: containing the barbarous within such forged narratives is hardly reconcilable with his political agenda. Yet Machiavelli himself, in a letter to Vettori from 1513, draws the line between his political understanding and his lack of economic one (Hirschman 1977: 41). Thus one does not expect to find in The Prince a thorough analysis of the way in which national politics is limited by economy. The issue here is a kind of investment in the welfare of the community. Indeed, using the example of Moses as a model of virtù, leading the enslaved Israelites towards liberation (Machiavelli 1995: 19), will hardly suit Shylock, let alone Barabas. Yet becoming a political force is one matter; joining an existing nation is another. Jews in the Renaissance often sought the latter form of recognition, neither for matters of faith, nor for political benefits, but mainly for normalizing their citizenship and economical existence. What is there for the Prince himself? Acting generously for generosity’s sake or sheer leniency are critically censured by Machiavelli. Nor does the need that the Prince keep his word (in our case, the commitment to grant equal justice to everyone) count at any price. What counts in the case of Shylock and the Venetians is the practical difficulty with which Shylock’s moral riddle has managed to present Venice. The moral predicament the Venetian prince (in our production Duchess Benevolenta VII) seems to have incurred is the effect of a law system affected by the market economy, allowing Shylock a measure of private autonomy. In order to preserve his virtù, the Prince is allowed by Machiavelli, in chapter 18, not to keep his word; this, indeed, is the kind of solution the Venetian ruler seeks, and finally gets, from the disguised Portia. However, Shylock may be regarded as offering the Duke another strategy for the acquisition of power for his principality, one which may allow him to be “a founder of a new society,” 143

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without going back on his word. It is a strategy that anticipates a more modern phase of “the inclusion of the other” within the nation-state, where economic forces were allowed to undergo a socio-political transformation. Is Shakespeare’s Venetian Prince, or, for that matter, his English counterpart, ready to meet such a revolutionary challenge, which, even if the historical Machiavelli will probably not approve of, is nevertheless legitimately derived from his own teaching? On 10 June 1593, about three years before Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, the Grand Duke Ferdinand I dei Medici, the ruler of Tuscany, issued a patent letter inviting “all nations” to come and settle in the new town of Leghorn (Livorno). In his letter, to which many Jewish conversos responded by coming to settle in Leghorn, the Duke guarantees safe conduct, religious liberties, a Tuscan citizenship, civil and partly criminal jurisdiction among the Jews, the right to own property, and the permission to return to Judaism (Tazzara 2017: n79). In 1550, Henri II of France issued an edict granting religious liberties and legal jurisdiction to the Jewish communities in the south-west, and this edict was ratified by Henri III in 1574. In Venice, back in 1475, following a blood libel, a manifesto was issued by the Doge, Mocenigo, protecting the Jews of the town. Shakespeare may or may not have been aware of such moves in the continent, yet the idea was in the air even closer home. At least one premature attempt to reach a similar understanding between the Jews and the English Crown was made during his lifetime, when in 1607 Sir Thomas Sherley, a former employee of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, unsuccessfully interceded with King James on behalf of a group of Levantine Jews who wished to settle in England, arguing for the economic advantage of a positive answer by the king. Has Shakespeare, through Shylock, and under the influence of Machiavellian practices, prophetically anticipated such an historical moment in which ideas of that sort hovered in the air? May we assume a reading of The Merchant of Venice in which Shylock offers to join the Venetian community rather than perpetuate his eternal otherness, and thus offers the Duke of Venice to rewrite, in Machiavellian terms, a national narrative, which, unlike religion, is pliable to change? Unlike Marlowe’s Machevill, he does not “count religion but a childish toy,” but he certainly never regards his faith as relevant to his aspired citizenship of Venice, of which he expects equality of legal and occupational rights (Prol. 14).1 The question of a Jewish nation, as distinct from a religion, has troubled ancient and modern minds alike. In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock refers to his native community three times as “my tribe” and three times as “my nation.” To these Jessica adds another somewhat awkward third category, when she accounts for Tubal and Chus as her father’s “countrymen.” This third category provided by Jessica, I would like to argue, is a major key to Shakespeare’s transformation of the ancient parable of the pound of flesh into a narrative charged by a desire for nationhood. In my stage version of the play, the character of Tubal is significantly enlarged to become the financial partner and aid of Shylock, as well as serve as commentator on general and Jewish economy to Salarina, the broadcaster in the service of the Duchess. Asked by Salarina to comment on Jessica’s evidence, – have Jews a country? – he answers: Yes, in fantasy. You wouldn’t let us be your countrymen nor be a nation. No matter how long we will reside here, no matter how many generations we’ll generate, you’ll consider us strangers. So yes, this is the word we use among ourselves. A kind of code. An imagined country. Jerusalem of the heart. Oz 2016: 26 Machiavelli’s advice to the Prince to reconstruct the national collective memory of his newly acquired community of subjects, or its biography, for advantage, assumes that such a collective 144

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memory is accepted by the given imagined community (Anderson 1991), recently conquered by the Prince, as a material cornerstone of its nationhood, and thus tampering with its past narrative will affect a future desired by the Prince. Shylock, representing an elusive community with a memory but no master narrative tying it up to any of the accepted material constituents of nationhood separated from religion, namely, ethnicity, language or territory, is significantly devoid of a biography, either collective or personal. As I have shown elsewhere, Shylock’s conspicuous lack of personal biographical details suggests that he partakes in the general, fairy-tale biography offered by the popular imagination for the cultural construct of the Jew (Oz 1995: 111). Such an exemplary biography is provided by Marlowe for his own Jew, Barabas, presented from the outset as an ardent follower of none else but Machevill. Whereas Machevill’s soul “but flown beyond the Alps,/And now, the Guise is dead, is come from France,/To view this land, and frolic with his friends,” Barabas’s colorful biography involves all the clichéd activities and occupations traditionally attributed to, or associated with the Jew, from well poisoning and killing sick Christians, through practicing “physic” to the detriment of his Christian patients, to usury (Prol. 2–4). Shylock’s wish to see his daughter “dead at [his] foot, and the jewels in her ear . . . and the ducats in her coffin” belongs to the same order of transgressive acts as Barabas’s murdering Abigail: both are simultaneously deeds and non-deeds, devoid of the necessity of representation (3.1.89–90).2 For in the case of that cultural construct turned dramatic character, we cannot easily separate the positive limits, the finitude of the subject, which in Foucault’s hostile description “is marked by the spatiality of the body, the yawning of desire, and the time of language” from the transgression of the subject, which suggests an absence of knowledge, or a knowledge of absence (Foucault 1970: 315). Barabas has done a lot of mischief, as he himself admits and as we get a chance to see for ourselves, and yet, regardless of what he has done, there is a permanent stock of evil, inherent in the cultural construct of the Jew and ever ready to be assigned to him in people’s minds with no need for factual evidence. Such an imaginary biography awaits, potentially, Shylock as well, but since, unlike in the case of Barabas, which Marlowe took pains to draw carefully to the last detail, it is not furnished in Shakespeare’s play with actual, reliable details, Shylock lives in the public domain of common fictionality. Technically, of course, Shylock is a dramatic subject as any other character in the play. But even in his asides, even when citing his dreams, he seems to be nothing more than an abstract measure, qualifying and defining the immanent constitution of the others. Shylock is the zero point of all the other identities in the play: signifying all, representing none. Unlike an individual case of transgression, such as an evil eye cast by a local witch, the Jew is not counted as a particular threat on a personal level. His effect is of a different, universal order. He is the archetypal Other whose desire structures the subject. For on the one hand he is the great menace, penetrating the dream of love and humanity offered by the play with his blunt discourse of vulgar rationality, his seemingly soluble riddles, to reduce a mystery of enchanting volume into an impoverished pageant of disenchantment, but paradoxically he also represents at the same time the secret, unconscious desire of all the rest for a momentary (or maybe eternal?) liberation from the fetters of “legitimate” discourse and official ideology. Shylock may not be the only one in Venice to dream of money-bags, but he is certainly the only one to admit it freely in public. Money-bags investing a dream, Jacob’s staff informing a fable or a swear, and even a vision of jewels in one’s dead daughter’s ear acquire a different symbolic resonance than “some more ducats” gilding a romantic elopement in plain reality. The plain monetary transaction that threatens to reduce the narrative of the play to the level of a fortuitous, if curious, court proceeding suddenly acquires an aura of poetic acuteness and necessity. Shylock, an archetypal representative of an elusive nation, may invest, if allowed, more than financial wealth, but rather invigorate its communal unconscious with fresh perspectives on the symbolic order of rising capitalism. 145

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How does Shylock offer to infiltrate the national narrative of a community for whom he is the constant Other? First, by holding the Venetians to abide by their republican law of commercial tolerance, which he pushes to its limit. Unlike his daughter, he is not welcome to blur the boundaries between nations and assimilate that easily into Venetian society. On the face of it, it is chiefly his religion which bars his way from being incorporated as a member of the Venetian nation. However, more complex in this context are the implications of Jessica’s aforementioned, obscure reference to Tubal and Chus as Shylock’s “countrymen.” Country, as a territorial signifier of nationhood, is a recent semantic development in the sixteenth century. Since Jews reached Europe through expulsion and gradual dispersion rather than conquest, colonization, or mass migration, they could possess no economic positions which depended on hegemonic power or expropriation of lands, as Marlowe’s Barabas confesses. Even where they could be in possession of land, like Barabas, they would deal with it as a means to make money (Wettinger 1985: 40). With the continuing practice of expulsion of Jews, which became widespread especially in Western Europe throughout the fifteenth century, such a prospect becomes a considerable factor in the Jewish own investment policy (Katz 1961: 47). The lack of lasting property, in Feudal and early modern Europe, meant a temporary status of citizenship and a perpetual state of alienation. In The Merchant of Venice, all the characters are identified by local habitation: Portia’s suitors are classified by their countries; there is a clear division, at the outset, between the Venetians and the residents of Belmont; Launcelot Gobbo defines himself as an Italian, and his father, who owns a horse and brings a dish of doves as a present, must own a plot of land in the country. Even “a poor Turk of tenpence” such as Ithamore would season his fantasy of marrying the courtesan with the vision of settling in “a country” (4.2.39). Whereas all the others may be referred to by their local habitation or country of origin, the Jew may cite a list of places where he visited for a purpose (Shylock’s Frankfort, Barabas’s Italy, France, etc.) or at best be related to his latest country of temporary residence, where, like here, he was residing in “hell.” Not even the ancient, spiritual locus of Jewish desire will do: “creep[ing] to Jerusalem” is brought up by Barabas as a mode of penance only when he shams a wish to become a Christian (4.1.62). Calling their fellow Jews “countrymen,” as do Jessica (who, whether she reports faithfully or lies about Shylock’s particular talk with Tubal or Chus, probably quotes her father’s habitual terminology) and Barabas, betrays aliens’ conspiracy rather than citizens’ local pride or patriotism. Shylock takes it from there, but the master stroke in his subversive transformation of the national narrative is only fully revealed in the subtle and creative manner in which he conducts his law suit in the Venetian court. Shylock’s covert claim for Venetian nationhood has solid roots in Venice’s practice of political economy, in the eagerness of merchants to participate and control the state’s decision-making, “especially if government was run as a corporation of merchant proto-capitalists” (Coleman 2000: 214–15). At the time The Merchant of Venice was written, capitalist political economy was making its first official moves: as a countermeasure to the decree issued in 1597, banishing the English Merchant Adventurers from the markets of the empire, Elizabeth reciprocated by throwing away the merchants of the Hansa, protecting the interests of her own merchants. National and commercial interests are thus interwoven, creating a new club that the Shylocks of London, if such would have been, would like to join. For in a similar vein, Shylock may prophetically regard his loan to Venice’s prince of merchants as a step further from his status as a tolerated alien, into one which may silently reconcile his major participation in Venetian economy with his elusive nationhood. In spite of Antonio’s admonition against Shylock’s practice of usury, he regards his loan to him as an act of kindness, namely, an act practiced between people belonging to the same kind, an act, as it were, of political kinship or solidarity. Thus, his demand for justice may not be regarded as an act of revenge, but 146

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rather pertaining to the new social order dictated by political economy, a Machiavellian agenda designed to claim his political belonging to the proto-capitalist Venetian nationhood.3 Having pushed his demand for equal justice beyond any moral limit, Shylock is defeated by Portia in court. But on what grounds, in what terms is he defeated? When any other strategy to make him give up his suit while remaining an Other, or stipulate his incorporation within the Venetian national community by religious conversion, fails, Portia uncovers a covert law, applicable to foreigners alone, the very presence of which in the allegedly liberal book of Venetian law problematizes the reputation of the commercial republic, that very reputation so often cited by Shylock as a warranty he could count on for being granted justice. In other words, the only way the republic of Venice may overtake the disastrous implications of Shylock’s moral riddle is to forego its liberality, namely, its much-advertised identity as a commercial republic. In this, it may practice an obvious Machiavellianism in adopting his advice to the Prince not to keep his word, but at the same time abandons a more implicit teaching of the prophetic Florentine thinker who, as Isaiah Berlin tells us, reveals pluralist values out of the tension between his pagan virtù and the doctrines of Christianity, which opens the way “to empiricism, pluralism, toleration, compromise” (Berlin 1980: 78). Whether or not his daughter’s flight induces Shylock to exact his bond upon Antonio, when talking with the Christians he stresses the personal aspect of her “rebellion” rather than proclaiming it a cause for religious revenge. And yet some tokens of ideological motivation are still betrayed in his behavior. “Shylock’s case is made in terms of his tribe” (Oz 2013: 130), while insisting on its legal resolution. Thus, his complaint cannot find any institutional outlet until his specific function within the trade-capitalist process, which moves Venetian economy, is directly addressed. Significantly enough, this opportunity occurs when emotion is mixed with business: the financial implications of courting Portia belong to the subversive parts of “pure” love in the same way that Shylock the alien is an inevitable constituent of the Venetian economic system. Once Shylock is allowed to interfere with the financial operations of Venice’s prince of merchants, the subversive process of rebellion is set to motion. Throughout the play Shylock is consistently urged to adopt a “gentle” attitude (“We all expect a gentle answer Jew” – 4.1.35). This is but another way of demanding him to embrace a “gentile” ideology, a demand that is finally imposed on him legally with the verdict of the trial which suddenly turns out to be his own. conform with what Deleuze and Guattari will call “post-signifying,” associated with the practice of capitalism. Shylock, however, resists this move by “counter-signifying”: his perception of the law of Venice is indeed “alien,” since the use he makes of the Venetian constitution rests on the word of the law but contradicts its spirit. It is, however, the very essence of Shylock’s proto-“terrorism,” for in an ironic move anticipating a Brechtian gesture, an act of mimicry, he consciously subverts the soul of Venetian order, namely, its book of laws, and turns it upon itself (See Oz 2013). The only countermeasure Venice could take against Shylock’s act of legal terrorism without subverting its own premises as a national community is to subvert the spirit of language on which the law rests to reinstate the normal procedure of justice and social order by which Venice’s mainstream national ideology abides. Not, however, that this peculiar countermeasure does not leave much room for ambiguity. Official order is reinstated, but Shylock’s moral riddle is far from being solved. For, as I suggest, his riddle turned on Machiavelli’s vision of nationhood, which is totally separated from the realm of faith. There is in store another solution to his moral riddle, which lies perhaps even beyond the flexibility of Machivelli’s vision, who would probably advise the Duke of Venice to resort to force in his dealing with the Jew: “Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus would not have been able to make their people obey their new structures of authority for long if they had been unarmed” (Machiavelli 1995: 20). According to the radical version alluded here, and in our 147

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production of the play, however, the Nation State of Venice could offer Shylock national rights without coerce him to convert his faith. Would Machiavelli himself accept this solution? Where I come from, over four centuries since Shylock presented his riddle to Venice, fear will not yet allow this vision to materialize. Nor did Shakespeare allow it, yet. Rather than transport our consciousness into an Apollonian dream beyond phenomenal contradictions, the official adoption of Shylock’s bond of jouissance by a hegemonic Venice’s court of law leaves us in a world in which culture is arranged by a multiplicity of discourses and identities, subject and other, desire and bonds. And it is significant, as it is curious, that this reinstatement through subversion is brought about by an “alien” of a different order: a woman disguised as a man, a country feudal who comes from afar in order and in time. An alienating riddle is cracked by a strategy of alienation. Our production ends with a gesture towards the Deleuzian complex concept of deterritorialization, at the same time nomadic and “counter-signifying.” Jessica, disenchanted by the cold shoulder reception she gets from Venice and Lorenzo, deeply immersed in his capitalist transactions and demanding of her the same “gentle” conformity, defies her new “country” and joins her father, Tubal, and the rest in a renewed voyage toward an unknown destination. This time it marks the simultaneous failure and triumph of marginality to the background of Leonard Cohen’s dark, subversive words of ironic conformity: “You want it darker. . . . I’m ready, my Lord.”

Notes 1 All references to Marlowe are from Cambridge Marlowe, edited Fredson Bowers (1981). 2 All references to Shakespeare are from Folger Digital Texts, edited Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (n.d.). 3 See Machiavelli (1997) and Smith (1985) for important discussions of republicanism and nationalism.

References Althusser, Louis. 1999. Machiavelli and Us. Trans. Gregory Elliot. London: Verso. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso Baker, David J. 1997. Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Berlin, Isaiah. 1980. “The Originality of Machiavelli,” Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. New York: Viking. 33–100. Bowers, Fredson, ed. 1981. The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Leonard. 2016. You Want It Darker. Columbia Records. Audio CD. Coleman, Janet. 2000. Renaissance. Oxford: Blackwell. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University Press of Minnesota. Desmet, Christy, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey, eds. 2017. Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock. Gramsci, Antonio. 1968. The Modern Prince, and Other Writings. Trans. Louis Marks. New York: International. Habermas, Jürgen. 1999. The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Eds. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hirschman, Albert O. 1977. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Huizinga, Johan. 1959. Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance. Trans. James B. Holden, and Hans van Marle. New York: Harper & Row.

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Nomadic Shylock Katz, Jacob. 1961. Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Kohn, Hans. 1945. The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background. New York: Macmillan. Langton, John, and Mary G. Dietz. 1987. “Machiavelli’s Paradox: Trapping or Teaching the Prince.” American Political Science Review 81: 1277–88. Lanier, Douglas. 2014.“Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 21–40. Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1995. The Prince. Trans. and ed. David Wootton. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 1997. Discourses on Livy. Trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella, and Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003. Art of War. Trans. and ed. Christopher Lynch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Montesquieu. 1989. The Spirit of the Laws. Trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. R.G. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books. Oz, Avraham. 1995. The Yoke of Love: Prophetic Riddles in “The Merchant of Venice”. Newark: University of Delaware Press. ———. 2013. “Early Mimics: Shylock, Machiavelli and the Commodification of Nationhood.” In Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist and Secular Dimensions. Eds. Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 107–35. ———. 2016. The Merchant of Venice: An Adaptation of the Shakespeare’s Play. Tel Aviv: Unpublished production script. [Hebrew] Raab, Felix. 1965. The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation, 1500–1700. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Shakespeare, William. n.d. The Merchant of Venice. Eds. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. http://folgerdigitaltexts.org. Smith, Bruce James. 1985. Politics and Remembrance: Republican Themes in Machiavelli, Burke, and Tocqueville. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tazzara, Corey. 2017. The Free Port of Livorno and the Transformation of the Mediterranean World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Toller, Ernst. 1978. Die Wandlung. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 2. Ed. Ernst Toller. München: Hanser. Wettinger, Godfrey. 1985. The Jews of Malta in the Late Middle Ages. Valleta, Malta: Midsea. Williams, Raymond. 1997. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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13 “WHAT COUNTRY, FRIEND, IS THIS?” Carlos Díaz’s Cuban Illyria Donna Woodford-Gormley

“¿Y qué haré yo en Illiria?”1 And what should I do in Illyria?2

Carlos Díaz, acclaimed Cuban director, recipient of the 2015 National Theater Award in Cuba, and founder of the theatrical company Teatro El Público, is known for his irreverent, unconventional, and sometimes shocking theatrical productions. His plays often comment on Cuba and make specific references to Cuba, even though many of them are not written by Cuban playwrights. He began his directing career with what he called his “North American Theater Trilogy,” featuring works by American playwrights Tennessee Williams and Robert Anderson, and he has since directed plays by Lorca, Sartre, and Shakespeare. His first experiment with Shakespeare was El Rey Lear [King Lear] in 1997, and more than a decade later, in 2010, he returned to Shakespeare with Sueño de un noche de verano [A Midsummer Night’s Dream]. The following year he staged Noche de Reyes [Twelfth Night], and in this play’s middle ground between great tragedy and light comedy, he found fertile soil for producing an undeniably Cuban Illyria. The program for the play contains fictional letters that imagine an exchange between Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare. The letter from Queen Elizabeth asks William Shakespeare to write something for the theater practitioners of the New World whose performances, she has heard, are rather scandalous. The musical elements stir the most libidinous desires. The New World theaters not only have men playing the women’s parts, but also women playing men, and there is so much cross-dressing and disguise that nobody knows who is who. They do not distinguish, the queen complains, between pleasure and excess, and she begs Shakespeare to establish some order and to make these actors see that “everyone ought to be what they are” (Program 2011).3 Shakespeare responds by calming her fears but also by suggesting that a new land needs to create a “New Theater,” and he says that “In one of these islands, in a few centuries, actors whose faces we cannot yet imagine will play at being you, at being me, and that will be the New Theater” (2011). Teatro El Público’s Noche de Reyes might appear an unlikely response to Elizabeth’s letter, since it is full of nudity, disorder, cross-dressing, disguise, and mistaken identities, but the play is, in fact, an exploration of identity, of how to be what one is, of how to be Cuban, and of how to create what the Program defines as “New Theater” (Program 2011). 150

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Elizabeth’s letter, of course, winks at Shakespeare’s original play, which is full of music, crossdressing, disguise, confusion of identities, and characters who want to be more than what they are. It also winks at the reputation of Carlos Díaz and Teatro El Público, both of which have been praised and criticized for their unconventional, taboo breaking theater. At the same time, this fictional letter alludes to the responses European and American critics often have to international adaptations of Shakespeare, focusing on the nudity, the sexuality, the color, and the music, and missing the heart of the performance. These critics still employ the “travelling tropes” that Ania Loomba and Jonathon Burton note have long been attributed by Europeans to foreign cultures (Loomba and Burton 2007: 20–22). The tropes may be attributed to productions and cultures around the world, but they are used to map racial difference and to distinguish these performances from European or North American productions, and such “alleged departure of non-Europeans and non-Christians from normative gender roles and practices, as well as their sexual exoticism and excesses, has historically erected boundaries, justified conquest, and consolidated normative categories of gender and sexuality at home” (Loomba and Burton 2007: 17). Placing these criticisms in the mouth of Elizabeth I gives Díaz the opportunity to respond to this interpretation of his work and stating his response in the voice of William Shakespeare gives him a unique authority with which to reply to these views. At the same time, this fictional exchange of letters gives Díaz the chance to take ownership of these travelling tropes and to use them to mark his production as not simply some generic racialized other, but as specifically, uniquely, and proudly Cuban. Though the 1959 Cuban revolution initially promised new openness and freedom in the theater, being, as it was, an art form available to the masses, during the 1970s the government began to define more narrowly what it meant to be revolutionary. This led to limitations of what was permitted in theaters, and even to one particularly harsh period of censorship known as the quinquenio gris, or five-year gray period (Ford 2010–11). Homosexuality and homoeroticism were among the subjects censored during this period, and even two decades later, homoeroticism was not commonly seen on the Cuban stage until Díaz began to break this taboo. He did this by staging repeat perfomances of Lorca’s homoerotic play El Público in 1994, 1996, and 1998, and by developing Cuban writer Senel Paz’s short story “El lobo, el bosque, y el hombre nuevo” into a play called Fresa y Chocolate. This play was later developed into a film by the same name, which is a landmark in Cuban film and the first Cuban film to feature an openly gay character (“Carlos” 2017). Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which involves much same sex attraction already, was another way of pushing against the parameters of the revolution while also playing with the common European and American interpretations of post-colonial productions as exotic and excessive. The fictional exchange of letters between Elizabeth and Shakespeare incorporates this taboo into a discussion of what the mysterious “New Theater” should be. Díaz is known for being unconventional and provocative. An article about Díaz on the Havana-Cultura website notes that “Carlos Díaz has made a career out of giving people[,] theatregoers, in particular, what they least expect” (“Carlos” 2017).4 In a video by Pavel Escariz for Cuba Absolutely, Díaz himself says that his theatrical company Teatro el Público has its own following and that, when people come to see one of their productions, they may not know what is going to happen, but they know what to expect. That is, they don’t know what surprising, unexpected things they are going to see, but they know to expect the unexpected. Díaz credits the long lines outside the theater to the company’s ability to choose their own repertory and their own style (Escariz 2018). Similarly, in the Havana-Cultura article, Díaz is quoted as saying that Teatro El Público, which he founded in the 1990s, “was a necessity . . . Cuban theatre needed some fresh air. . . . I think we’ve become a necessity for the Cuban public and we’re very happy about that” (“Carlos” 2017). His breaking of taboos was a means of pushing against 151

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the parameters of the revolution in order to let in fresh air, and controversy and taboo breaking have become trademarks of Díaz and Teatro El Público, which are themselves considered iconic examples of Cuban theater. Díaz has also noted that he thinks that “Cubans have a very particular way of speaking and moving” and he is constantly asking, “How do Cubans move? What kind of symbols and colours do they use? What does it mean to be Cuban?” (“Carlos” 2017). He tries to answer these questions, even when he directs works by non-Cuban playwrights. When, for instance, he staged Sartre’s The Respectable Prostitute, members of the audience were served Cuban rum and invited on stage to join in the Cuban tradition of a conga line (“Carlos” 2017). He has a similar approach to staging plays from a previous period. In a video made for Havana-Cultura, Díaz observes: I believe that when a work that is written in one period arrives in another period, it is the responsibility of the artists of that other period to present it in the most legible, most digestible form for this audience that is going to see it. I think that that problems that exist in Hamlet are the problems that are in the world of man today. “Carlos” 2014 This is not to say that Díaz believes merely in faithfully reproducing plays from previous periods. As one review of Díaz’s Noche de Reyes comments, “If you prefer classical Shakespeare, director Carlos Díaz’s El Público Theater is certainly not for you” (“El Público’s” 2012).5 What Díaz does believe in is using theater from any country and time to comment on the culture and identity of present-day Cuba, and with Noche de Reyes he begins this commenting in the letters of Elizabeth and Shakespeare. Díaz and Teatro El Público cleverly play with the themes already present in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, themes of identity and disguise, and they use the fictional letters of Elizabeth and Shakespeare to open a debate about national identity and how people can “be what they are” even if what they are is unexpected or unconventional (Program 2011). The Noche de Reyes [Twelfth Night] adapted by Norge Espinosa Mendoza and performed by Teatro El Público is presented as Shakespeare’s response to the queen’s request. The response, however, can hardly be less shocking than the works described in the apocryphal letter from Elizabeth. The play does, of course, contain all the cross-dressing, disguise, and gender confusion of Shakespeare’s original, but it also contains the nudity that is characteristic of El Público’s performances. Like Shakespeare’s play, this performance contains much music, but the music of this play includes Cuban son, nationalistic songs, and a conga line finale. The homoeroticism of Shakespeare’s play is emphasized even more in El Público’s Noche de Reyes, as is often the case in Díaz’s productions. And in this delirious mix there are numerous references to Cuban culture and life, including revolutionary slogans and identity cards. Díaz’s Noche de Reyes is scandalous and irreverent, but it also allows for a playful and enlightening conversation between Shakespeare, Díaz, Elizabethan England, and contemporary Cuba, suggesting that in both lands people want to dream that they can be what they will. The conversation begins in the program, where the side by side letters of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare appear beneath the phrase “UN NUEVO MUNDO LLAMADO ILLIRIA” [A New World called Illyria] (2011). These letters likewise appear in the lobby of the theater, allowing the audience a preview of the issues that will be explored on stage. This epistolary conversation is, of course, particularly appropriate for an adaptation of Twelfth Night, a play which itself famously features a trick involving a letter and a great deal of confusion about the identities of both the sender and the recipient. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the trick is inspired by the desire of Toby, Mariah, Andrew, and Feste to show the steward Malvolio that he is no better than 152

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they are. Although the play is full of people who are acting like something they are not, whether by cross-dressing, social climbing, disguise, or deception, Malvolvio’s desire to rise above his station in life, to be “any more than a steward” stands out because his aspirations interfere with other people’s festivities and pleasures (2.3.105.6). He believes, as Toby jeeringly notes, that because he is “virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale” (2.3.106–7). Maria, herself in the process of marrying up the social ladder and becoming something she is not, is an astute enough observer of character to see that Malvolio is the best persuaded of himself, so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all who look on him love him. And on that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause to work. 2.3.135–141 She works on this vice by impersonating Olivia, at least in so far as she writes a letter, in a handwriting which she knows will be mistaken for her mistress’s, and leaves it for Malvolio to stumble upon, trusting to his pride and his ambition to interpret it as proof that Olivia loves him. When he picks up the letter, he is already prepared to believe it. Even before he starts to read it, he is busily imagining his life once he is Olivia’s husband, rather than her steward: To be Count Malvolio. . . . Calling my officers about me, in my branched velvet gown, having come from a daybed where I have left Olivia sleeping. . . . And then, to have the humor of state and, after a demure travel or regard, telling them that I know my place as I would they should do theirs, to ask for my kinsman Toby – 2.5.30; 42–44; 47–49 His fantasy is as much about his rising in the world and being able to order servants and Toby around as it is about Olivia, who he is content to leave sleeping in this daydream, and his conviction that he belongs in this place of superiority makes him ready to believe that Olivia loves him, even before the letter spurs him on. The letter trick allows Maria and her companions to make a fool out of Malvolio, and it pulls the audience of the play into complicity, allowing us to laugh at the foolish steward who dreams of being “Count Malvolio” even as we indulge in the aspirations of the other characters. Only later do we perhaps begin to perceive that the joke has gone too far and that Malvolio is being cruelly punished for the same disguise, deception, and ambition seen in nearly all other characters in the play. A trick is, in this sense, played on Malvolio and on us. A similarly complex trick occurs in the letters between Elizabeth and Shakespeare in the program for Noche de Reyes. Prior to her criticisms of the scandalous behavior of the New World theaters, Elizabeth begins the letter by complaining about the part she has to play for ambassadors and consuls, and how much she would like to sit herself before the stage, or even “to rise myself to interpret a Juliet, a Desdemona, or a Hermia on any summer’s night” (Program 2011). She bemoans the anxieties that belong to the office of the Queen and how much she at times misses the laughter or tears cried on the “shoulder of a romantic hero” (2011). She finds her role of Queen constricting, and she longs for a part that would allow her to display a wider range of emotions. Then she quickly moves into a discussion of the news she has received from the New World, which includes accounts of the sometimes-scandalous practice of theater both by New World natives and by recent arrivals to the New World. Their plays, she complains, are accompanied by music with “rhythms which call to the most libidinous desires.” Furthermore, in addition to men 153

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playing the parts of women, as is typical in Elizabethan England, the women in the New World play the parts of men, and there is so much cross-dressing and wearing of strange masks that it is difficult to tell who is who. She therefore pleads with Shakespeare to impose some order and to write some pieces for these new lands that “make these improvised actors see that each person should be what he is” (2011). Elizabeth concludes by admitting to her confusion, and asking for Shakespeare’s help in understanding: In these lands so recently discovered, the people don’t distinguish between pleasure and excess, and at times I think with a little healthy envy of the innocence of such beings. What to do, William? Couldn’t you write a work that illustrates for me how to understand my subjects’ deeds and misdeeds in these points on such a fresh map? 2011 Her letter thus moves from her complaints about the restrictions on her own behavior and identity, to a criticism of behavior and identities that she cannot fully understand, and finally to her request for Shakespeare’s help in understanding these New World actors, whose freedom to take on new roles she envies even as she finds it scandalous. Shakespeare’s letter responds to all of these concerns. He admits that he has heard, from the sailors and actors who come and go from his theater, of similar reports, but he begs Elizabeth to be merciful and understanding in her response to them. He reminds her that “all new lands want to interpret independence in their own way, and they dream of being a new Eden” (2011). He admits that their plays are a bit scandalous and confusing, and he agrees to write works that will both represent the New World inhabitants and calm them, but he asks Elizabeth to “let them dream, especially on Twelfth Night, that all is possible, and that bodies have their own ways of amusing themselves” (2011). He then invites her to the theater to see one of these plays, and play one of the parts: Come to the theater to see this new work, and dare to interpret one of our characters, man or woman, maiden or young man; rip the veils of this office that hold back your laughter, and shine your grandeur on us. We will write drama and comedies for this new land. In one of these islands, in a few centuries, actors whose faces we cannot yet imagine will play at being you, or at being me, and this will be the New Theater. 2011 His letter suggests that disguise and acting, rather than being a wickedness, can in fact help people, a theater, and a nation, to discover who they are. Just as Maria’s trick in Twelfth Night fools Malvolio but also pulls the audience in, making us complicit in a trick that becomes a cruel joke, so this exchange of letters between Elizabeth and Shakespeare works on multiple levels. We may at first see and laugh at the contradictions in Elizabeth’s letter. Her simultaneous desires to escape her own role as queen and to insist that everyone should be what they are appear as laughable as Malvolio’s desire to marry Olivia and lord it over Sir Toby. We might easily dismiss these comments as typical of the “travelling tropes” attributed by a European queen to the New World inhabitants she wants to mark as different and other. However, the matter is complicated by the fact that many Cuban critics, bloggers, and theater aficionados focus on and write about the same aspects of the theater that Elizabeth found so scandalous, and, of course, even the words attributed to Elizabeth are in fact the creation of Teatro El Público. 154

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“Disfraz, oh difraz, grande es tu seducción, y tu malicia”6 Disguise, thou art a wickedness.7

One of Elizabeth’s primary complaints about New World theatrical practice is the excessive cross-dressing and disguise: “they cross dress and change masks with such a lack of rigor that nobody knows who is who” (Program 2011). Of course, anyone familiar with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, knows that these are important elements of the play, in which Viola disguises herself as Cesario, Feste disguises himself as Sir Topas, Olivia disguises herself with a veil, Malvolio wears yellow stockings and cross garters, and all of this disguise does indeed result in much mistaken identity and in nobody knowing who is who. But if the Noche de Reyes is supposed to be Shakespeare’s response to this concern, then it would seem to only exacerbate the problem. This New World version of the play still contains just as much disguise and cross-dressing as Shakespeare’s original play, and the moments when the actors are not cross-dressing do little to diminish the “scandal” that Elizabeth might have perceived, since those who are not crossdressing are frequently not dressing at all. Nearly all of the reviews of Noche de Reyes mention either the elaborate costumes designed by Roberto Ramos Mori, or the notable lack of costumes, that is, the nudity of the actors. Carlos Espinosa Dominguez, in “Un Shakespeare procraz, irreverente y festivo” asserts “Roberto Ramos designed a wardrobe that is a true splurge of imagination, and to which the staging owes much of its dazzling visuality” (Espinosa Domingues 2011). Likewise, Dania del Pino in her review of the play in La Jirabilla exclaims: And what about the costumes, Carmela! Roberto Ramos Mori combines colors and forms of current fashion, with styles from the Elizabethan period to, as usual, present a dazzling catwalk in which actors become models and interact with viewers. This is costume designing: to create in a costume piece the thesis that a director holds or that an actor defends in the scene. One only needs to recall the costumes of Viola, which reinforce the ambiguity of her identity, or the rabbit costumes that allude to the Playboy industry and dialogue with the period dress that Olivia uses to keep mourning for her brother. 2012 The costumes become an integral part of the play, whether they are commenting on the Playboy industry or emphasizing the idea that identity, even gender identity, is ambiguous and can be both disguised and performed. But if the costumes are eye-catching, the lack of costumes also draws a great deal of attention. Pablo Pascual Méndez Piña, in a review on Cubanet, comments not on the elaborate costumes but rather on the nudity that some theater fans find offensive even though others see it as an attempt to normalize homoeroticism and combat homophobia: Nudity and sex characterize the theatrical stamp of Carlos Díaz. However, some lovers of the genre – who recognize his quality as a director – reject this model, calling it unwarranted and abusive; although its dramatic handling represents, for many, a protest against homophobia, there are always those who get up and leave the theater, or do not buy a ticket to sit in its stalls. Méndez Piña 2011 155

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Although the nudity, like the costumes, may be used to emphasize important themes in the play, some Cuban theater goers still find it as scandalous as the program’s fictional Queen Elizabeth finds the New World theater. Other Cuban theater critics and fans are less critical of the use of nudity in the play but still focus on it and on the elaborate costumes. Isabela Cristina, in the post “Noche de Fiesta” on her blog Universo Cultural Cubano, describes both the costumes and the nudity as being attractive elements of the production at Teatro Trianón, the venue of Noche de Reyes: The viewer of the Trianón stands in front of a well-stocked stage of young bodies. Some wear the amazing outfits created by Ramos Mori, others bring with them the designs of Mother Nature. In both cases, the heterogeneous public finds a reason to open their eyes wide. Cristina “Noche” 2011 Far from finding the nudity scandalous or offensive, one of the respondents to her blog wonders why there is not more of it: I don’t understand why, if in the play there is so much masculine nudity . . . in the scene in which the supposed eunuch reveals herself as a woman, the character does it with her back to the public. Cristina “Noche” 2011 The comment provoked a debate on the blog, with some suggesting that this decision was due to the age of the actresses and the wisdom of the director who didn’t push them too far beyond their comfort zones. In a follow-up post, “El No Desnudo Femenino en Noche de Reyes,” Cristina responded by saying: I don’t know why the character of Viola reveals her feminine gifts with her back to the public. I think this would have to be asked of the director, or better, of the actresses who play the part, because what I do know for certain is that Carlos Díaz loves the beauty of bodies, regardless of the sex. Cristina “No Desnudo” 2011 She then proceeds to recount the times he has directed nude actresses on stage, and concludes by noting that the nudity in Díaz’s productions is always done “with dramatic intention, as a means of expression that moves the senses of the spectator, or simply as a reflection of the soul” (Cristina “No Desnudo” 2011). The nudity is not, she argues, merely gratuitous, but artistic and important. Díaz himself, when asked about the frequent use of nudity in his plays, commented that the interest in the human body exists in many art forms, and he stated that “In order for there to be people who are dressed, there have to be some who are naked. . . . I think that the Cuban feels a need to undress the dressed and to dress the undressed” (Carrasco 2015). He ties his use of nudity to his perception of a specifically Cuban identity. He understands that some people find the nudity offensive, and he says it is their right not to come, but he also notes that he has had groups of grandparents attend his plays and leave quite pleased with the productions. The only thing that bothers him is when people call the theater to find out if there will be nudity so that they can come to see it. He has no desire to have people coming just to see nudity, but he also seems puzzled by all the attention paid to nudity, observing that “to see someone naked is the 156

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simplest thing a human mind can comprehend” (Carrasco 2015). Likewise, in an interview for Portal Cubasí, speaking of his trademark emphasis on the visual, which includes both nudity and elaborate costumes, Díaz declared: “I am a director who loves the visual. And I believe much more in the power of an image . . . than in a text or a phrase. A phrase can lie. An image, no” (2018). The images that Díaz uses, whether through costumes or nudity, help to reveal the truth about “New Theater” and Cuban theater (Program 2011). The letter exchange in the program is thus more than a joke about Elizabeth’s prudishness and more than just a simple reference to the racialized markers used by Europeans to distinguish themselves from the exotic and excessive eroticism of the New World inhabitants. Elizabeth’s focus on scandal, excess, and disguise is echoed by Cuban audiences and embraced by Díaz himself. We, like Malvolio, have been subjected to a complex letter trick. Just as Malvolio stumbles upon a letter which appears to be from Olivia, so we have a letter, supposedly from Elizabeth, dropped in our path. This letter levels the common, racialized markers of nudity and excess at the New World stage, but also give Díaz a chance to respond, not by denying them, but by making them his own. He makes the nudity and colorful costumes his trademark, and not something to be ashamed of or to reign in. In thus taking ownership of these travelling tropes, Díaz is following in the footsteps of noted Cuban poet and essayist Roberto Fernández Retamar, who, in his landmark essay “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” appropriated both the character of Shakespeare’s Caliban and the charges of New World cannibalism often asserted by European colonizers and turned them into markers of power and resistance, rather than of savagery (Fernandez Retamar 1974).8 Like Retamar, Díaz embraces what had been seen as negative, and turns it into a positive. Speaking of the troupe’s tendency to explore the shocking or unconventional, Díaz says: In the 1990s El Público was labelled an upstart, and became known for its unconventional approach. . . . We weren’t able to shake that perception, but neither are we unhappy with it. We’ve never done anything other than work hard and try to challenge certain taboos that until only recently were in place in the theater. “Carlos” 2017 He has routinely done this with his use of the elaborate costumes, nudity, and his willingness to challenge taboos such as homoeroticism, but in the case of Noche de Reyes, he highlights his taboo breaking by placing the letters of Elizabeth and Shakespeare in the program and lobby and using the play as a chance to respond to Elizabeth’s charges of excess by showing that he is not unhappy with it. He uses the letter, and the play, of one upstart crow to assert that he and his company are content to remain upstarts themselves.

“Si la música es alimento de amor, tocad, siempre”9 If music be the food of love, play on.10

Elizabeth also complains that the New World theaters involve “rhythms that stir the most libidinous desires” (Program 2011). This comment could easily be directed at Shakespeare’s own play. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s more musical plays, full, as it is, of Feste’s songs; Toby and Andrew’s dances and revelry; and Orsino’s command, “If music be the food of love, play on” (1.1.1). The play may well have been the one performed on Twelfth Night in 1601 at Queen Elizabeth’s court by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which the guest of honor, Don 157

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Virginio Orsino, described as “a mingled comedy, with pieces of music and dances” (Greenblatt 2016: 1908). But if Shakespeare’s play was full of music that fed the lovesick Orsino’s emotions and encouraged Toby and Andrew in their drunken revels, Carlos Díaz’s production is no less musical. The type of music, however, has changed to include revolutionary songs, Cuban son, and a conga line. Shakespeare’s Orsino might declare that music is the food of love, but Elizabeth suggests that this music is the food of lust. As Carlos Espinosa Dominguez says: Music, on the other hand, has come to be a natural and even unavoidable component of a production that recreates the work of Shakespeare as a revelry, as a wild party that concludes with a final apotheosis to the rhythm of a conga. This corresponds furthermore to the conception of the director, who asserts the idea that “the theater should never be boring, that one should never forget its sense of celebration or cease to take advantage of it.” 2011 Whatever else it was, Díaz’s Noche de Reyes was certainly not boring, and definitely maintained its sense of celebration and wild party. Díaz, following his own advice, takes advantage of every amusing, festive, or absurd moment in Shakespeare’s comedy, and then exaggerates those moments, adding rabbit costumes, nudity, overtly sexual content, references to Cuban culture, and, yes, a conga line, in order to make this play into a party and a very Cuban party. Ismael Almeida begins his review, “Noche de Reyes a lo Cubano” by asserting that “The English have taken Havana again,” but he concludes the review by stating that the production is “a true theatrical party in Cuban style” (2012). While the English may have taken Havana because a Shakespeare play is being performed there, it could as easily be said that Cuba has taken Shakespeare and used him to create the “New Theater” hinted at in the program. But while much has been changed, adapted, and Cubanized in this play, Díaz’s production is still in a close conversation with Shakespeare. The letters in the program and lobby, of course, present one dialogue, but Díaz’s play is also involved in an ongoing debate with Shakespeare because it incorporates many of the same ideas, and laughs at the same human foibles, as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Shakespeare, as Barbarella D’Acevedo notes, was always ready to laugh at people and customs, and that tradition is continued in Díaz’s Noche de Reyes: Shakespeare, it seems, was always looking for someone to laugh at in his works. Here he makes us laugh at the gentlemen and the conventional manners of behaving, even in matters of love. He laughs at a woman who falls in love with a woman and at a man who cannot resist the enchantment of a young man who turns out to be a woman. He laughs also at the servants who wants to be like these lords. But finally he speaks of the profound essences of the human souls and of the love that can exist beyond gender and roles. D’Acevedo 2011 Díaz, like Shakespeare, laughs at human behavior, but like Shakespeare, he also looks beneath the absurdity and confusion to reveal the “profound essences of the human souls,” and he explores how disguise and revelry can, rather than creating confusion about who is who, actually help to establish a more nuanced understanding of identity. In Noche de Reyes, Díaz portrays a “New Theater” in which Elizabeth need not be confined to the single role of queen and in which everyone is free to dream that they can be what they will (Program 2011). 158

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Though Shakespeare’s letter may not present the answer Elizabeth expected, Noche de Reyes does provide an answer. It shows Elizabeth, and all of us, that anyone can dream of the freedom to play another role. By incorporating Cuban music, Cuban references, and the trademark elements of Carlos Díaz and Teatro El Público while taking ownership of the “travelling tropes” so often employed by European colonizers and by European and American theater critics, Noche de Reyes provides a clear answer to Viola’s question, “What country, friend, is this?” This is Un Nuevo Mundo Llamado Ilyria – This is the “New Theater” of Cuba.

Notes 1 Espinosa Mendoza (2011), 1.2.3. 2 Shakespeare (2016), 1.2.3. All English quotations from Shakespeare are taken from the Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, 3rd edition. 3 All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 4 All quotations from this article are taken from the English version available on the web. The translation is not mine. However, the YouTube video interview which was posted by Havana-Cultura and which is linked to this article on the website is available only in Spanish. The translations provided of this interview are mine. 5 All quotations from http://lahabana.com are taken from the English edition. The translation is not mine. 6 Espinosa Mendoza (2011), 2.3.13–14. 7 Shakespeare (2016), 2.3.26. 8 For further discussion see Woodford-Gormley (2013). 9 Espinosa Mendoza (2011), 1.1.1. 10 Shakespeare (2016), 1.1.1.

References Almeida, Ismael. 2012. “Noche de Reyes a lo Cubano.” Enfoque Cubano. 8 Jun. Accessed 15 May 2018, http://enfoquecubano.blogspot.com/2012/06/noche-de-reyes-lo-cubano.html “Carlos Díaz [Havana-Cultura].” 2014. YouTube. 10 Mar. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018 www.youtube.com/ watch?time_continue=3&v=tWULWSaBldo “Carlos Díaz. Theater Director.” 2017. Havana-Cultura. Havana-Club.com. 30 Mar. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018, https://havana-club.com/en-ww/havana-cultura/carlos-diaz Carrasco, Jorge. 2015. “Carlos Díaz: “Ese desnudo no está justificado.” OnCuba. 29 Jan. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018, https://oncubamagazine.com/cultura/carlos-diaz-ese-desnudo-no-esta-justificado/ Cristina, Isabel. 2011a. “El no desnudo feminine en Noche de Reyes.” Universo Cultural Cubano. 30 Sep. Accessed 16 May 2018, https://universoculturalcubano.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/el-no-desnudofemenino-en-noche-de-reyes/ ———. 2011b. “Noche de fiesta.” Universo Cultural Cubano. 27 Sep. Accessed 16 May 2018, https://universo culturalcubano.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/noche-de-fiesta/ D’Acevedo, Barbarella. 2011. “Descargas, reposiciones y noches shakesperianas. El caimán barbudo: la revista cultural de la juventud cubana.” 12 Jan. Accessed 16 May 2018, www.caimanbarbudo.cu/artes-escenicas/2011/12/ descargas-reposiciones-y-noches-shakesperianas/ del Pino, Dania. 2012. “Noche de Reyes, por Teatro el Público ¡Que se va el vapor!” La Jiribilla: Revista de Cultura Cubana. 12–18 May. Accessed 1 Jul. 2017, http://epoca2.lajiribilla.cu/2012/n575_05/575_53.html. “El Público’s homoerotic Twelfth Night reaches 100.” 2012. Lahabana.com. May. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018, www.lahabana.com/content/el-publicos-homoerotic-twelfth-night-reaches-100/ Escariz, Pável. 2018. “1.8 Teatro El Públic + Carlos Díaz (Director): Spicing up Cuban theater” YouTube. 30 Mar. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD8UYJ9hSnc Espinosa Domínguez, Carlos. 2011. “Un Shakespeare procaz, irreverente, y festivo.” Cubaencuentro: Cultura, 12 Sep. Accessed 30 May 2018, www.cubaencuentro.com/cultura/articulos/un-shakespeare-procazirreverente-y-festivo-271390 Espinosa Mendoza, Norge. 2011. Noche de Reyes. Theatrical script. Accessed 17 Oct. 2016, www.teatroel publico.cult.cu/ [link broken]

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Donna Woodford-Gormley Fernandez Retamar, Roberto. 1974. “Caliban: Notes Towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America.” Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly Of Literature, The Arts And Public Affairs 15.1–2: 7–72. Ford, Katherine. 2010–11. “Sounds and Silences of the Habanero Stage: Theater and the Cuban ‘Quinquenio gris’ (1971–1976).” Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 8–9: 353–70. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2016. “Introduction to Twelfth Night.” In The Norton Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. 3rd ed. New York and London: Norton. 1907–13. Loomba, Ania, and Jonathan Burton. 2007. Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Méndez Piña, Pablo Pascual. 2011. “Teatro El Público: Noche de Reyes.” Cubanet, 12 Dec. Accessed 30 May 2018, www.cubanet.org/articulos/teatro-el-publico-noche-de-reyes/ Portal Cubasí. 2018. “Entrevista a Carlos Díaz, director de Teatro el Público.” YouTube. 22 Jan. Accessed 15 May 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkp4RMmf3sM Program for Noche de Reyes at Teatro Trianón, Havana. 2011. cta0067000017. Lillian Manzor Theater Collection. Cuban Theater Digital Archive, University of Miami. Accessed 16 May, http://ctda.library. miami.edu/digitalobject/16670 Shakespeare, William. 2016. Twelfth Night. In The Norton Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York: Norton. 1917–71. Woodford-Gormley, Donna. 2013. “Devouring Shakespeare: Cuba, Cannibalism and Caliban.” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 29: 131–48.

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14 INHERITING THE PAST, SURVIVING THE FUTURE Adele Seeff

South Africa, one could argue, has been global from its first entanglements with Dutch and then British imperial efforts.1 The narrative of European colonization begins with Van Riebeeck’s establishment of a fueling station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, a change of hands three times in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (British, Dutch, British), followed by successive permutations from Colony to Republic, both in and outside the British Commonwealth. The establishment of a democratic South Africa in 1994 marks a milestone in the history of South Africa. Changes in the landscape of South African affairs of state and public dialogue will undoubtedly continue, however, even as South Africa today appears to be on the brink of decolonization. From the first moment of contact with Europeans, South Africa was constituted by many locals: many different ethnicities with different histories, different languages and creoles, different notions of culture, and different nationalisms.2 This pluralism and fragmentation shattered the notion of any whole; heterogeneity spawned a multiplicity of identities marked by difference. Paradoxically, the country’s very character as a multiethnic, multilingual site has contributed to the survival of Shakespeare as a body of texts for study and production. Shakespeare’s enormous cultural capital has been enlisted to help forge national identities through the use of a particular language metonymically standing in for an ideology and a nationalism. A British cultural import dispatched by the imperial master not long after David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769, Shakespeare survived in South Africa partly through a willingness to serve any master. Harnessed by the English in the nineteenth century to advance English nationalism, drafted by Sol Plaatje – an early black nationalist – to save the Setswana language in the 1930s, co-opted by the forces of Afrikaner nationalism to showcase the relatively new literary language of Afrikaans in 1947, transposed to a creolized Kaaps and burlesqued by André Brink in 1970 as a vehicle for representing an inclusive métissage South African identity, and finally, appropriated by the new post-freedom black elite, Shakespeare’s texts have proved malleable and amenable to revisioning. I argue that race and class division haunt South Africa to the present day despite the 1994 liberation. These divisions have been sharpened by racialized language policies, particularly policies enacted by the apartheid regime. Thus, the language practices of individuals and groups are as much a marker of division as race and class, to which they are closely allied. Further, in a raced, classed environment like South Africa, the very indicators of liberation – diversity of ethnicity 161

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and linguistic practice – when staged, may be subverted by the pressure of the past. To put this another way, the search for a mimetic, singular South African identity is liable to shatter in the face of a history that all are attempting to transcend. Since 1994, many South Africans have been forced to rethink their identities on a number of levels. But nation-building and the search for a singular South African identity in such a diverse, heteroglossic setting remains elusive and fraught. Ironically, democracy has complicated the formation of a national identity as South Africa’s heterogeneity takes center stage. Adding nine vernacular languages to the roster of official languages returned South Africa to its original multilingual state and offered an opportunity for democratic language rights, as yet unrealized.3 However, the choice of a particular language remains portentous because of the separatist, raced, classed oppression inherited from a past that hovers over the present. Equally, the establishment of constitutional rights for all South Africans, however partial and skewed, offered a corresponding opportunity, however constrained, for full democracy. Nonetheless, multiethnicity and multilingualism continue to characterize the country, as they have since 1652. If multiethnicity and multilingualism serve as the outward signs of liberation, the media and theater directors have been quick to embrace them as rhetorical strategies and production values, particularly for Shakespeare performance. While multilingual, multiethnic (perceived abroad as “colorblind” casting) casting might be (and might be received as) celebratory and affirming, these directorial decisions may unwittingly but subtly recall many different painful pasts. On the other hand, for critic Laurence Wright, distinctively South African Shakespeare, should relate Shakespeare performance precisely to those painful pasts: the “toxic mix which has informed South Africa’s tragic history over the past century” (Wright 2009: 5). By “toxic mix,” Wright is invoking the “colonial or neo-colonial economic and territorial ambition, military force, religious aggression, cultural certitude, racial delusion, technological superiority, social confusion, [and] political adventurism” (2009: 8). Authentically South African performance – politically attuned Shakespeare – would, according to this formulation, emphasize some combination of indigeneity, ethnic heterogeneity, and multilingualism, the very elements that colonialism and apartheid engineering sought to suppress. When applied to Shakespeare production, however, particularly to Global Shakespeare production (that is intended for elsewhere), there are constraints on this production style. These constraints take several forms: international audiences’ thirst for the exotic, particularly when the production is presented on the tourist circuit (see Kennedy 2018); the collision between global expectations and the complex locals being portrayed; the fact that apartheid’s fictional structures continue to define identity; and the vexed relationship to history which inevitably seeps through the representation, inadvertently subverting performative and cultural practices, inadvertently conveying the difficulty of the quest for wholeness. Furthermore, because every global performance stages an ethical and political relation to the alterity of the Other, “every international . . . event necessarily has cultural/political consequences” (Phillips 2010: 235). These consequences are expressed through questions about audience reception, however slippery that concept may be. I am using reception in Worthen’s sense of “seizing the performance” (Worthen 2011: 313). Desmet, in offering a critique of the terms “global” and “local” in relation to Shakespeare production, notes that we should look for answers in interpreting practices and the “interpreter’s agency” (Desmet 2017: 15). Is the representation of the “local” subject to a test of authenticity? What qualifies as authentically “foreign” for the cultural tourist? (I am aware of the tautology in this argument. It is, however, the case that individual South African directors invoke the “local,” which is then read as “foreign.”) How is the embodiment of complex locals or markings consumed by a worldwide audience hungry for what they read as exotic? 162

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Three productions, among many candidates, seem to me to exemplify performance styles intended to signal to a global audience an “authentic” South African Shakespeare performance and an integrated South African identity, free from fragmentation and free from apartheid’s separatist classifications. Janet Suzman’s 2006 Hamlet at the RSC; SeZar, Yael Farber’s 2001 adaptation of Julius Caesar; and uGugu no Andile, filmmaker Minky Schlesinger’s made-for-television adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, all had global/local dimensions. All three aspired to valorize the complexity of South Africa’s multiple locals. All three blended – to different degrees – ethnic, linguistic, performative, and ideological “difference” as a matrix through which to represent local elements for an international audience. These elements are inextricably intertwined. For purposes of my argument, I shall focus where possible on multiethnicity first and then take up multilingualism, reflecting on identity formation as I go. Seen entirely from the vantage point of its overseas audiences at the Swan Theatre, Stratford, Suzman’s multiethnic Hamlet was, by most accounts, a success. The production debuted at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2005, appeared briefly at the Baxter Theatre, Cape Town before transferring to Stratford-upon-Avon for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works Festival (April 27–May 6, 2006). In South Africa, however, it was a made-for-elsewhere production that was highly ambiguous. The production was received as distinctively South African in flavor precisely because “it vividly reflects the ‘rainbow nation’ of South Africa” (Blair 2006, italics added). “Janet Suzman,” wrote the theater critic for The Telegraph, is directing a cast that perfectly reflects the rainbow nation. There is a black Claudius (Kani), a white Gertrude (Dorothy Ann Gould, Emilia in Suzman’s 1987 production of Othello and Tamora in Doran’s 1995 production of Titus Andronicus), and an Indian Hamlet (Vaneshran Arumugam). Blair 20064 Michael Billington (2006; The Guardian) and Kate Bassett (The Independent) were in agreement.5 In fact, John Kani played both Claudius and a black Ghost; Kani, in an interview, alluded to the ancestors: “Hamlet embraces the culture of the people. In Hamlet, to think that a ghost can speak is easy in South Africa, where we speak to the ancestors, and thus the culture permits the conversation to take place” (quoted in Gordon 2012: 125).6 Royston Stoffels took the part of Polonius, and Roshina Ratnam played Ophelia. Following apartheid’s classification, Janet Suzman cast one Indian, one Xhosa, one WESSA (a white English-speaking South African; see Natasha Distiller and Melissa Steyn 2004), and two coloreds. There was also an Afrikaansaccented Grave Digger. Colored? Clearly, part of its appeal for a wider world was the exoticism that multiple ethnicities made available. However, it is no small irony that in choosing “one of each” ethnicity (Indian, black, white, and colored) Suzman (together with the theater critic) was re-inscribing apartheid’s categories,7 what The Telegraph’s theater critic described as “the wicked absurdity of apartheid.” Purveying the “Rainbow Nation,” which by 2006 in South Africa had already begun to fade and was regarded by many as an unrealistic aspiration, in this self-conscious way, in no way represents the quotidian experiences of inequality of residents of Langa, Khayelitsha, and Mitchell’s Plain, just miles outside the city of Cape Town.8 A discourse of race tied to resistance has been appropriated here by theater professionals for a global audience. The clichés would be risible if they did not read like brand merchandizing. In another gesture towards brand merchandizing, outside my brief in this discussion, Hamlet appeared before Claudius clothed as a prisoner, thereby adding yet another “vividly South African hue. . . . South Africa is, after all, a nation governed by former prisoners.”9 163

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Hamlet, however globalized at the Swan, had its own very local history. That history touched, unwittingly through a paratext, on the different domains of ethnicities, cultures, and dialects through its presentation to two separate, local South African audiences, one in Grahamstown, the other in Cape Town. Production elements differed from location to location. When the production opened very briefly at the Baxter in 200510 before its transfer to Stratford, a review appeared by journalist Igsaan Salie which cultural critic Colette Gordon labeled a “fascinating, and troubling, cultural document” (2012: 124–26).11 To enter the contested terrain of this review is to grasp immediately the power, not only of the splintered, raced, classed diversity of South Africans, but the power and reach of the “locals” that hold sway over any public event,12 particularly one of such cultural cogency as theater. A passage from Gordon merits citing in full. Describing Igsaan Salie’s interview with white actress Dorothy Ann Gould13 (Gertrude) and John Kani, regarding audience “participation,” Gordon writes: Gould observes: “They [the audience] seem to be very happy when John (in his role as Claudius, of course) dies. They shout at him”; Kani confirms: “At one show, several ‘aunties’ . . . near the front shouted ‘vrek, vrek, julle vullis’ (die, die you rubbish)” and [Kani] recalls an audience member answering for Gertrude when Claudius asks her what’s wrong: ‘Sy’s bang vir jou, stupid’ (she’s scared of you, stupid). Gordon 2012: 125, italics added Gordon, as I am sure she is aware, is reaching far beyond her stated brief of writing about current theater reviewing practices in South Africa, both in print and online. She, in fact, catches in her net the history of slavery in South Africa, a condition amongst others that gave rise to a diverse ethnic group – the “Cape Coloreds” – with an originary history that includes European colonizers, indigenous Khoisan, and Xhosa peoples, and slaves from India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Madagascar, and Mozambique.14 The term “Cape Colored” (neither black, white, nor Indian), as an apartheid classification has carried severe socio-political penalties (see Wicomb 1998; Erasmus 2001; Yarwood 2006). Today, colored (mixed-race/métissé) identity, by no means homogeneous, is hotly and painfully debated in the face of continuing racist stereotyping, very much on display in the Salie review. The audience members referenced by Gould and Kani are as noisy and unsophisticated as witness Salie: “The current production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . . . has captured some of the Elizabethan spirit,15 with rowdy audience members yelling at the actors during the play” (quoted in Gordon 2012: 124). What is “Elizabethan” about the essentializing, racist stereotyping of “Cape Colored” audience behavior underpinning Igsaan Salie’s review, which serves, with the assistance of Kani and Gould, to sustain an image of “Cape Coloreds” (frequent theatergoers to the Baxter’s repertoire of comedies) as naïve, primitive, disorderly (drunk?)? “Jump Jim Crow” and the language of blackface comes to mind. The “local” (members of an audience in this instance) triggered centuries of persecution even as the actor playing Hamlet dressed for his mad scenes in a Coon Carnival minstrel costume for the Cape Town performance.16 The gap between the implications of the local and the global continues to widen. There is a parallel, undoubtedly unconscious, on the part of these two internationally known, experienced actors Gould and Kani, between Kaaps and the stereotyping language of blackface burlesque. The language of blackface, invented by whites as “nigger fun” by British actor Charles Mathews, was transported around the globe wherever racial tensions existed. Here Kaaps, constructed by slaves as a creolized half-English, half-Afrikaans dialect, is invoked as a demeaning racist identity. Yael Farber’s SeZar, commissioned by the National Festival of the Arts, Grahamstown in 2001 and only later invited abroad, was widely praised as a breakthrough in South African 164

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Shakespeare productions for its fidelity to African politics.17 Farber’s use of a Khoisan Soothsayer seemed to Wright to suggest someone speaking for the dispossessed of the dispossessed: the nomadic Khoi-San, indigenous peoples of Africa, some 100,000 of whom today struggle for cultural survival in the semi-desert areas of southern Africa. That the Khoisan Soothsayer uttered her warnings from the audience after first sweeping the stage in true “domestic servant” fashion, signaled a heterogeneous ethnicity at one with the audience. Locating the production firmly in South African cultural history and theatrical tradition in this way, grounded it in a performance history of ritualistic dance and drama that goes back, according to anthropologists, over 6,000 years (Wright 2001: 63). The director’s decision to use half of Shakespeare’s early modern English text, combined with Sol Plaatje’s 1937 Tswana translation of Julius Caesar, Dintshontsho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara, and workshopped vernaculars from Zulu-, Pedi-, and Tswana-speaking cast members also served to stretch the production over time, histories, place, and language.18 The production extended its trajectory from the early modern England of Shakespeare to postmodern South Africa. It achieved this extended reach in two significant ways. The production referenced the polymath Sol Plaatje himself, the first General Secretary of the South African Native National Congress, later the ANC, and it did so linguistically, via comment on the efforts of two dramatists – Shakespeare and Plaatje – to wrest language away from the classical markers of Latin and Greek, in the first case, and, in the second, to bolster a “national” language (Setswana) in which works of the imagination could flourish. In an interview with a reporter for The Irish Times, Farber stated: “Iambic pentameter and Elizabethan verse have a rhythm and vitality that ignites when stripped of its civility” (could “civility” be code for received British pronunciation?) (Mulrooney 2002). In her program notes, Farber spoke of the way in which “vernacular languages invade” English (Wright 2004a). She represented South Africa’s ethnic diversity and multilingualism with a polyglot, polyvalent performance that effaced class – Tsotsitaal, the gangster argot of the townships, was also included – and race. I would leave it to those who speak South African vernacular languages to evaluate the veracity of Farber’s claim that, “In Zulu and Se Tswana they use deep idioms, which contemporary English doesn’t anymore. . . . [S]witching from Elizabethan English in the iambic pentameter to one of the vernacular languages was one of the most natural transgressions to make” (Mulrooney 2002). Denise Mulrooney did comment that the production “seemed saturated with all the rhythm that characterizes iambic pentameter at its best” (2002). Sharae Deckard of the Oxford Daily Information grasped the appropriative linguistic strategies at work: Farber’s multi-lingual [sic] text also sets up an encounter with the extraordinary heterogeneity of African culture: we must negotiate the different tongues and accents of the characters, and open our ears to the layers of poetry – the melding of iambic pentameter with the complex rhythms of African song, drumming and speech. 2001 Wright’s comment that “the South African nation’s fragile sense of itself . . . is faithfully rendered” (2004b) in this production, which blended extravagant gesture with coherent multilingualism, returns us to the “toxic mix” for which South African directors should aim. Deckard wrote: I have never seen a Julius Cesar so raw, so seething with the dynamics of power and betrayal. . . . [T]he audience is directly confronted with political turmoil and the violent modernity of modern African life. They are literally spattered with blood – offal arching through the air as SeZaR swings aloft an offering of organs and flesh. 165

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Thurman agreed and in terms that bear consideration: “local,” “distinctive,” “relevant,” “vital.” Thurman focused on the production’s code-switching (translating) from Shakespeare’s text to Zulu, Pedi, and Tswana by cast members fluent in those vernaculars, thus “forging brief linguistic and cultural connections between Shakespeare’s world and that of the actors and audience” (2015: 100). In this instance, multilingualism did confer power on those who previously were powerless. Farber’s non-specific ethnicity and coherent multilingualism can be compared usefully with filmmaker Minky Schlesinger’s made-for-television, award-winning appropriation of Romeo and Juliet, uGugu no Andile, made in 2007 and broadcast as part of the 2008 Shakespeare in Mzansi series.19 Workshopping from English to Zulu (both argot and classical) and Xhosa was a key component of adapting (neither transposing nor translating) Shakespeare’s language into the street idiom of 1993 Thokoza (a township south of Johannesburg) since language use there mirrored the ongoing political conflict. In this case, language use indicated resistance or empowerment (Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004: 4). Her choice of languages flowed logically from the specific political context. Because the languages used were isiXhosa and isiZulu, the ethnicities were Xhosa and Zulu and the conflict reflected very real tension between the two groups just before the elections in Thokoza where a “Third Force” guerrilla war was staged to divide the population in the hope of subverting the elections. Scripts were written in English and then workshopped into the street language of Thokoza: Zulu and Xhosa, a time-consuming process. Kani’s praying in Xhosa, by contrast, seemed intrusive and cosmetic. Anchoring the adaptation historically this way and using a documentary cinematographic style located the Romeo and Juliet conflict in South Africa’s 1993 pre-democracy struggle. Looking back from the vantage point of 2008 when the programs aired allowed viewers a sense of healing, the aim behind the creation of this drama series. History and production style merged in a unified whole. In an interview with Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Minky Schlesinger made it clear that she was “using” Shakespeare, and not the other way around (Fireworxmedia 2010). She was, she admitted, using Shakespeare to construct a South African identity as fluid and shifting rather than reductive or commodified.20 “Shakespeare” as high cultural, iconic dramatist, troping Englishness and Britain, was ideally suited for the lead role in a nationalistic, ideological global project at the Cape Colony when the very first purpose-built theater in Africa was constructed there in 1801 under the British administration. But time brings in its changes and the democratic South Africa of 2005–2006 bears little resemblance to the British Cape Colony of 1801. However, the “cultural cringe” anxieties put in place by the concepts of “over there” (South Africa) and “over here” (Britain), seen from an imperial perspective, and the stress on the superiority of British actors to local amateur actors first seen at the Colony in 1832 (South African Commercial Advertiser 1832)21 has left lasting effects.22 One result of these lingering feelings of inferiority in relation to the erstwhile metropolitan center is that some South African companies avoid the “Shakespeare is too mighty” problem altogether and perform only for a British audience. uVenas no Adonisi, commissioned and largely funded by the Globe to Globe Festival in 2012, is one example. The production did not, however, avoid frustration over the theatrical depiction of aspects of South African history or cultural identity to a “global” (in this case, British) audience (see Cocks 2013; see also Gordon 2013). Small wonder that productions intended for a global audience, like Suzman’s Hamlet, seek to woo a global audience and, in so doing, use ethnicity and multilingualism to unexpected ends in order to “package” an image of South Africa for global consumption that might be at odds with the lived experience on the ground. Antony Dawson claims that “If Shakespeare is global, it is because his work enables us to inhabit so many locals” (2008: 157). It behooves us then 166

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to interrogate the authenticity of those locals, especially when they are intended for a global audience. Much has been written about the global cultural tourist circuit and the requisite funding that facilitates touring international Shakespeare productions. Dennis Kennedy’s Foreign Shakespeare (1993); Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan’s collection, Shakespeare in Asia (2010); Bennett and Carson’s Shakespeare Beyond English (2013); and several essays in the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare in Performance (Bulman 2017) provide a very small sample.23 Can a multilingual, multiethnic production, marked by indigenous costume, dance, actors, settings, performance styles, and cultural representations, including, for example, a sangoma, be received as authentically “Other” from a global reception point of view? Or are these visual performance signs simply a mechanism for satisfying an audience appetite for cultural “difference”? Who authorizes images of South Africa for consummation by cosmopolitan audiences? Since these productions currently hail from very many different “locals” but are intended for global audiences and stages, could we finally acknowledge that it is the local that holds sway over the global? Or, do we capitulate and declare the mimetic “local” a fantasy? The frameworks of local and global, national and transnational, and “the ever blurry lines of (inter)cultural theatrical production and reception” (Hoxworth 2012: 114) impose their own expectations on theater artists. Their negotiations of cultural materials demonstrate the fraught challenge of producing theater within local-global systems of theater production, which perhaps inevitably inform and shape audience reception in ways beyond the control of individual theater artists. Thus, while these theater artists attempt to “write back” to European (neo)-colonial powers, at the same time, they draw on performance vocabularies that re-inscribe “difference” in pre-digested, easy-to-swallow bites. Given the histories of colonialism, apartheid, nationalism, and potential decolonization, what can South African Shakespeare mean locally and globally? What kinds of global-local performances can do justice to the variegated histories, languages, and ethnicities that constitute South Africa? “How does a use of Shakespeare – as a collection of texts and as cultural capital – affect a theorizing of South African cultural identity?” (Distiller 2003: 21) For theater artists, the question remains. How can that South African cultural identity be represented in an authentic way on world stages?24

Notes 1 My thanks to Natasha Distiller (2008) for my title. Her article, “Surviving the Future: Towards a South African Cultural Studies,” has been immensely clarifying. 2 See Leon de Kock (2001) for an elucidation of South Africa’s heterogeneity. 3 English was declared the official language at the Cape Colony in 1826, and Afrikaans was added in 1925. See Mesthrie (2002: 11–26) for a sociolinguistic overview of the history of South Africa’s major languages. Since 1994, there are eleven official languages: English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, SiSwati, Tsonga, Tswana, and Venda, not to mention at least eighty-five dialects. This does not include vernaculars like Kaaps and Tsotsitaal, nor the different varieties of spoken White English or Black English. 4 According to reviews quoted on the British Universities Film and Video Council website (2016), Simon Godwin’s 2016 production marked the first time that a “black actor had played Hamlet” on the RSC stage (Accessed 1 Feb. 2019, http://bufvc.ac.uk/shakespeare/index.php/title/av76953). 5 “[Suzman] seems to lack an interpretative point, though one should doubtless celebrate the multi-ethnic and colour-blind casting of South Africa’s Rainbow Nation,” wrote Bassett, perhaps reluctantly (2006). 6 There is sensitivity in South Africa to the assumption of a cultural “we” just as there is sensitivity to the “Rainbow” concept with its neatly delineated colors. 7 Suzman is, of course, an easy target. See Deborah Posel (2001), Kate Manzo (1995), David Goldberg (2000), de Kock (2001), and the work of any number of cultural theorists who assert the stranglehold

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Adele Seeff of apartheid classifications on South Africa to the present day. This is not merely a matter of taxonomy. As noted above, unimaginable poverty, lack of access to education, absence of affordable housing, and increasing illiteracy all contribute to the growing inequalities of apartheid conditions for millions of South Africans. 8 See Smith (2014) for an analysis of Mandela’s legacy. 9 See David Blair, theater critic for The Telegraph. Thabo Mbeki was never imprisoned; neither was Cyril Rhamaposa, at time of writing the current president. Obviously, David Blair could not have foreseen Rhamaposa’s presidency in 2006. Blair gestures here towards a liberation myth with Shakespeare as hero. See Schalwywk (2013) and Holland (2016). 10 At the Baxter, Hamlet was performed by Vaneshran Arumugam, who suddenly replaced Rajesh Gopi because of the latter’s poor reviews in Grahamstown. 11 Salie’s piece appeared in the Weekend Argus, July 27, 2005. 12 At a Stellenbosch “wine harvest festival” in February 2017, it was noteworthy that all participants were classed according to apartheid’s classifications. The speakers were white; nobody represented the wine harvesters, all colored, although they were being feted. 13 Whatever unconscious racism her comments conveyed, it sits oddly with her other endeavors such as the Shakespeare acting troupe for the homeless she was directing in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, at time of writing. 14 The slave population at the Cape Colony was, according to historian Robert Shell, one of the most diverse in the history of slavery and one consequence was their lack of a common language. Kaaps, or kombuis taal, was invented as a shared language among the slaves and between slave and master. It is spoken only by this marginalized population. 15 What one critic has referred to as the “Elizabethanisation” of South Africa because of “its violence, lack of regulation, and its belief systems.” See Thurman (2015: 88). 16 I refer the reader to the entire article by Gordon. Space prohibits my doing justice to the entire range of her insights. 17 See Wright (2001) and Thurman (2015). 18 See Bloom et al. (2013), for a discussion on how performance extends the past into the future. 19 Schlesinger made a feature film in addition to the television series. The film won three awards at the African Movie Academy Awards in Nigeria, was screened at the London African Film Festival, and was selected for the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2010. As Mark Thornton Burnett (2013) and Kevin Murray (2013) will attest, Schlesinger’s work bears no marks of the “made-for-export” production style. Locally on SABC1, the series had the highest audience ratings of any drama on South African television: 4 million viewers – or almost one tenth of the total population – every week. Each episode – a half-hour in length – aired weekly for six weeks. 20 See C.L.R. James for his notion that Shakespeare’s intense engagement with the issues of his day has provided entry points for adapters to engage with the burning issues of their day (Taylor 1999). 21 “Shakespeare is too mighty, too difficult for amateurs” (South African Commercial Advertiser 1832, quoted in Seeff 2018: 36). 22 See Seeff (2009) for the coded, racist terms South African theater reviewers use when Shakespeare’s lines are spoken with a regional accent, e.g., black South African. See Bennett (1996) for the way British received pronunciation dominated Shakespeare performance until recently. 23 See especially the essays by Christie Carson, Alexa Alice Joubin, Dennis Kennedy, and Robert Ormsby. 24 See Patrice Pavis (2016: 19) for a discussion of what Pavis terms “an authenticity effect (as Barthes talked about the ‘reality effect’).” However, it must be noted that Pavis does oppose authenticity to exoticism and orientalism (19).

References Basset, Kate. 2006. “Hamlet, Swan, Stratford.” The Independent. 7 May. Accessed 1 Feb. 2019, www.inde pendent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/hamlet-swan-stratford-362605.html. Bennett, Susan. 1996. Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. London: Routledge. Billington, Michael. 2006.“Hamlet.” Review. The Guardian. 6 May. Accessed 16 Feb. 2019, www.theguardian. com/stage/2006/may/04/theatre.rsc. Blair, David. 2006. “Shakespeare, the Storyteller of Africa.” The Telegraph. 19 Apr. Accessed 7 Jul. 2018, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3651690/Shakespeare-the-storyteller-of-Africa.html. Bloom, Gina, Anston Bosman, and William N. West. 2013. “Ophelia’s Intertheatricality, or, How Performance is History.” Theatre Journal 65.2: 165–82.

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Inheriting the past, surviving the future British Universities Film and Video Council. 2016. “Hamlet.” Accessed 1 Feb. 2019, http://bufvc.ac.uk/ shakespeare/index.php/title/av68353. Bulman, James C., ed. 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burnett, Mark Thornton. 2013. Shakespeare and World Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cocks, Malcolm. 2013. “U Venas No Adonisi.” In Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment. Eds. Susan Bennett and Christie Carson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 31–34. Dawson, Anthony. 2008. “Cross-Cultural Interpretation: Reading Kurosawa, Reading Shakespeare.” In A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. Ed. Diana E. Henderson. London: Wiley-Blackwell. 155–75. Deckard, Sharae. 2001. Oxford Daily Information. Rpt. Internet Shakespeare Editions. 25 Sep. Accessed Mar. 2018, http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/Criticism/shakespearein/sasz4.html. De Kock, Leon. 2001. “South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction.” Poetics Today 22. 2: 263–98. Desmet, Christy. 2017. “Import/Export: Trafficking in Cross-Cultural Shakespearean Spaces.” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 15.1: 15–26. Distiller, Natasha. 2003. “South African Shakespeare: a Model for Understanding Cultural Transformation.” SSA 15: 7–21. ———. 2008. “Surviving the Future: Towards a South African Cultural Studies.” Cultural Studies 22.2: 273–83. Distiller, Natasha, and Melissa Steyn, eds. 2004. Under Construction: “Race” and Identity in South Africa Today. Johannesburg: Heinemann Publishers. Erasmus, Zimitri. 2001. Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Fireworxmedia. 2010. “Ugugu No Andile Continues to Claim Space on the International Stage.” Interview. Accessed Apr. 2010, www.fireworxmedia.co.za/archives/240 [link broken]. Goldberg, David. 2000. “Heterogeneity and Hybridity: Colonial Legacy, Postcolonial Heresy.” In A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Eds. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray. Oxford: Blackwell. 72–86. Gordon, Colette. 2012. “Critical Conditions: Reviewing Shakespeare in South Africa.” Cahiers Elisabéthains 81.1: 117–26. ———. 2013. “Shakespeare’s African Nostos.” In African Theatre 12: Shakespeare In and Out of Africa. Eds. Martin Banham, Jane Gibbs, and Femi Osofisan. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer. 28–47. Holland, Peter. 2016. “Review of Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare by David Schalkwyk.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1: 138–40. Hoxworth, Kellen Lewis. 2012. “Tour(ist)ing Post-apartheid South African Theatre: The Works of Brett Bailey, Yael Farber, and Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom.” MA thesis. University of Pittsburgh. Kennedy, Dennis, ed. 1993. Foreign Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ———. 2018. “Global Shakespeare and Globalized Performance.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Ed. James C. Bulman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 441–57. Kennedy, Dennis, and Yong Li Lan, eds. 2010. Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Manzo, Kate. 1995. “The National Question: South African Identities at Home and Abroad.” Transition, An International Review 5.4: 116–32. Mesthrie, Rajend, ed. 2002. Language in South Africa. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mulrooney, Deirdre. 2002. “The African Julius Caesar.” The Irish Times. 11 Oct. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019, www.irishtimes.com/culture/the-african-julius-caesar-1.1098839. Murray, Kevin. 2013. “World Cinema: A Critical Overview,” Literature Compass 10.4: 369–82. Pavis, Patrice. 2016. The Routledge Dictionary of Performance and Contemporary Theatre. New York: Routledge. Pavlenko, Aneta, and Adrian Blackledge. 2004. “Introduction: New Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts.” In Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts. Eds. Aneta Pavlenko and Adrian Blackledge. Clevedon: Cromwell Press. 1–33. Phillips, John W.P. 2010. “Shakespeare and the Question of Intercultural Performance.” In Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance. Eds. Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 234–52. Posel, Deborah. 2001. “Race as Common Sense.” African Studies Review 44. 2. 87–113. Schalkwyk, David. 2013. Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury. Seeff, Adele. 2009. “Othello at the Market Theatre.” Shakespeare Bulletin 27.3: 377–98. ———. 2018. South Africa’s Shakespeare and the Drama of Language and Identity. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave/ Springer.

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Adele Seeff Smith, Stephen W. 2014. “Mandela: Death of a Politician.” London Review of Books 36.1 (9 Jan.): 17–19. South African Commercial Advertiser. 1832. 11 Jan. N.p. Taylor, Lee Scott. 1999. “The Purpose of Playing and the Philosophy of History.” Interventions 1: 373–87. Thurman, Chris. 2015. “ ‘After Titus’: Towards a Survey of Shakespeare on the Post-apartheid Stage.” In New Territories: Theatre, Drama, and Performance in Post-apartheid South Africa. Eds. Greg Homann and Mark Maufort. Brussels: Lang. 76–103. Wicomb, Zöe. 1998. “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa.” In Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995. Eds. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worthen, W.B. 2011. “Intoxicating Rhythms: Or, Shakespeare, Literary Drama, and Performance (Studies).” Shakespeare Quarterly 62.3: 309–39. Wright, Laurence. 2001. “Confronting the African Nightmare: Yael Farber’s SeZaR.” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 13: 102–4. ———. 2004a. “Shakespeare in South Africa: Alpha and ‘Omega.’ ” Postcolonial Studies 7.1: 63–81. ———. 2004b. Shakespeare in South Africa: Yael Farber’s SeZaR. Internet Shakespeare Editions. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019, http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/Criticism/shakespearein/sasz1b.html. ———. 2009. “Introduction: South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century.” The Shakespearean International Yearbook, 9: Special Section, South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century. Eds. Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, and Laurence Wright, special guest editor. Farmham, Surrey: Ashgate. Yarwood, Janette. 2006. “Deterritorialized Blackness: (Re)Making Coloured Identities among Youth in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Accessed 17 Feb. 2019, www.studienverlag.at/bookimport/oezgArchiv/ media/data0472/4264_oezg_2006_04_s155_172_yarwood.pdf.

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15 THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN SHAKESPEARE Jane Plastow

Introduction Africa is a continent of fifty-four nations, more than five thousand languages, and an equally myriad set of histories and cultures. Any one article can therefore obviously only encompass limited perspectives. My writing here focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, which is the region I have been associated with for more than three decades, and it will not consider Shakespeare in relation to South Africa, both because the large number of Anglophone settlers in that country make it anomalous in relation to the rest of Africa and because existing scholarship on Shakespeare and South Africa far exceeds that from all the rest of the continent.1 My central contention in this chapter is that, though Shakespeare was imported to Africa alongside British colonialism, and has in many times and places on the continent been an important site/sight of cultural contention, for most young Africans today his work is seen as a historical irrelevance. In seeking to explain why this is the case – and why it has not always been – I will focus on four aspects of the African encounter with Shakespeare, all of which are significant because they are relevant to a number of nations, playwrights, and directors and because they point to how Shakespeare in Africa has been not just a cultural icon but a site of political struggle. This chapter will therefore look at the British colonial use of Shakespeare; translations of Shakespeare plays in to African languages for nationalistic purposes by African writers; the adaptation and tradaptation of Shakespeare’s stories to critique colonialism and post-colonial African governments and raise issues relating to social malaise; and finally, the continuing neo-colonial imposition and manipulation of Shakespeare by white people in relation to Africa. My analysis forms part of a “cultural materialist” tradition in that it “champions counter-hegemonic appropriations of Shakespeare and (ab)uses of Shakespeare in the service of dominant power” (Lanier 2014: 24).

British colonial Shakespeare Significantly, Shakespeare arrived in British colonial Africa in the early twentieth century, along with the government education system. In his memoir, pre-eminent Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe describes life in the 1940s in one of the elite government boarding schools set up across the British colonies to create a cadre of young Africans who would be thoroughly inculcated with imperial values and culture. In these schools, students were heavily penalized if they spoke 171

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any word of local languages or engaged in indigenous cultural activities. They were taught an entirely British curriculum to a very high level, largely by Oxbridge graduates, and activities such as ballroom dancing and productions of Shakespeare were part of school life (Achebe 2013). Remarkably similar experiences have been described by other leading African writers, such as the Kenyan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) and even Ethiopia’s leading playwright Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, who attended the colonial style, British-run Wingate School within his uniquely, at the time, independent African nation in the late 1940s (Pankhurst 1986: 181). There is evidence of abridged Shakespeare stories being taught in mission and state schools to younger children,2 but it was the colonial high school and later colonial institutions of higher education where this icon of high British culture flourished. It is apparent that Shakespeare was not an easy area of study for African students. In 1929 John Sykes, an English teacher at East Africa’s first university, Makerere in Uganda, wrote: In English the most difficult work undertaken has been the reading of a play by Shakespeare. It must be confessed however that the standard of English as yet reached by even the best students is not yet high enough to enable them to understand or even to read Elizabethan literature with any felicity. quoted in Macpherson 1964: 13 Teachers refused to be daunted by such difficulties, and in the late 1940s and early 1950s, regular, full-scale productions of various plays were mounted. Notably, the 1949 production of Julius Caesar at Makerere featured the man who would become Uganda’s first President, Milton Obote, in the title role (Macpherson 1999: 25). Similar activates took place across the British African Empire throughout the colonial period, and in one sense there might be nothing surprising or sinister in this enterprise. Elite colonial British African subjects were taught exactly the same curriculum in high schools and colleges as their British counterparts were; this was British education, wherever geographically it might happen to be taking place. However, one has to take into account the active suppression of African cultures, languages, and histories in these same institutions. The British had a somewhat schizophrenic attitude toward African cultures. On the one hand, they declared that no such thing as African culture existed – hence, the claim for the British “civilizing” mission, but on the other, they manifested terror that, if African cultures were allowed to flourish, they would become a focus for dissent and rebellion, as indeed would happen in numerous anti-colonial struggles from the 1950s to the 1990s. In his Decolonising the Mind, the Kenyan novelist, playwright, and cultural critic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o discusses what he calls the “cultural bomb,” the process whereby the colonized subject is brainwashed into believing that his/her culture is inferior to that of the colonizer and that aping colonial behavior, values, and culture is the route to civilization (1986: 3). Ngũgĩ builds on the anti-“apemanship” arguments of Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek in his Song of Lawino (1966), and Frantz Fanon’s description of the stages a colonized intellectual must go through to rid themselves of cultural brainwashing in his seminal essay “On National Culture” (1968). Like most African intellectuals concerned with both Shakespeare and their own cultural productions, these writers have little time for international post-colonial theorizing but write rather from the engaged position of cultural activism and personal experience: in Ngũgĩ’s case an experience that encompassed growing up in great poverty; family members committed to armed liberation struggle; education in elite colonial boarding schools and colleges; and post-independence imprisonment, torture, and exile because of his radical theatre-making (Plastow 2014: 77). What such writers came to understand was that Shakespeare, as the pre-eminent poet and playwright of the Anglophone world, was taught not just as a great writer but as an emblem of the 172

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superiority of British culture. To be able to understand, appreciate, and perform his works was seen as a marker of the achievement of civilization by the African, which simultaneously implied that this pinnacle of artistic excellence far outstripped the sophistication of anything Africa could offer and should lead to the humble acceptance of, and gratitude for, British tutelage.

Translating Shakespeare With the achievement of independence, those same young men3 who had been given such a strong understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare demonstrated that this had not resulted, in all cases, in an uncritical acceptance of British cultural superiority by translating selected plays for their own nationalistic purposes. The playwrights discussed below all have a genuine love for Shakespeare and want to share him with their people who have no access to the English original, but this is not their only intention in undertaking translation. Over a time period ranging from the immediate post-colonial 1960s right up until 2012, the translation of Shakespeare has been seen as an important tool of nation-building, with local languages replacing English in the assertion of indigenous African linguistic excellence. My examples range from across the continent. The Kiswahili used by President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania is today the most widely spoken indigenous African language on the continent. Nyerere’s ardent championing of the tongue, in opposition to colonial English, has much to do with this. His translations of Shakespeare were part of a project to demonstrate that Kiswahili, and by extension the people who speak it, are just as sophisticated and their language as wonderfully supple as could be any Elizabethan wordsmith. All my other examples are of playwrights using not just African languages, but ones often despised by domestic as well as international elites as impure, even bastard, tongues. So for his 1961 translation of Julius Caesar, Thomas Decker utilized Sierra Leonean Krio, a local creole that is spoken by nearly all citizens but historically had lower status than English. Similarly the Juba Arabic spoken in the version of Cymbeline put on at the London Globe Theatre in 2012 is the nearest thing there is to a lingua franca in this country of over sixty languages, though classical Arabic scholars would see it as far from “pure.” On the tiny island of Mauritius, through accidents of multiple colonizations, English, French, Hindi, and Chinese battle for linguistic dominance, while the local language dominantly spoken by the black African population, Mauritian Creole, or MC, has until recently barely been recognized at all as a “proper” language. The Mauritian playwright Dev Virahsawmy is the most prolific African translator and adaptor of Shakespeare in Africa, with some twelve titles to his name.4 All of these have been written in Mauritian Creole. Virahsawmy is a genuine Shakespeare lover who says: “I have been greatly influenced by the works of Shakespeare as a student and a teacher. Some of the Shakespearean characters inhabit my imagination” (Wilkinson 2001: 112). He also argues that “Shakespeare belongs to humanity” (Beesondial 2013: 99). However, the original inspiration to translate, as opposed to his later adaptations of the plays, came when Virahsawmy was a student at Edinburgh University. Here he learned of the preceding work of Decker and Nyerere, both of whom were Edinburgh alumni. He also became aware that they had produced their translations primarily to demonstrate to a Eurocentric, linguistically chauvinist, world that African languages were capable of poetic beauty and sophistication equal to the genius of anything English could offer. Inspired by these men, in 1981 he wrote his Zeneral Makbef (General McBeef ), principally “to show that Mauritian Creole is capable of expressing ‘great thought’ ” ’ (Wilkinson 2001: 111). Nyerere and Decker were both “writing back” to the English language and Western cultural supremacists in interesting relation to claims by some English-speaking critics that Shakespeare is “all about the language” (Cavanagh 2014: 197). They also sought to hearten their newly 173

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independent citizenry to realize that now they were released from the colonialism that had continually sought to make them believe they were inferior subjects, they could take on the best the world could offer – in this case culturally, literarily, and linguistically – on equal terms using indigenous resources. Virahsawmy was positioned in a firmly post-colonial world and was challenging a group of arguably “colonized minds” in a country where French is and was the language of the elite. He explains: “The Mauritian intelligentsia of the sixties and seventies were dead against any form of promotion of MC. . . . They would argue that the profound thoughts in Shakespeare could never be said in MC. I had to prove them wrong” (Walling et al. 2013: 87). Nyerere’s translations had sought to help unite a nation with over a hundred indigenous languages and promoted Kiswahili as a way of bringing all these people together in a national imaginary (Anderson 1983) that asserted African independent pride. Virahsawmy too sees his work as crucial in bringing together a heterogeneous population, but here with an even more difficult task because creoles have often been seen as particularly inferior – not worthy of the label of being a “proper” language. I find it interesting that in Sierra Leone, Mauritius, and more recently in Lusophone Cape Verde, with the work of Joao Branco, a Portuguese national who has “adopted’ ” a local creole identity (Ferreira 2013), translations of Shakespeare into local creoles are being used repeatedly to assert that the vernaculars of the people, previously seen as oral rather than literary languages, must be accepted as sophisticated national tongues. A recent example of translating Shakespeare for purposes of nation-building is the South Sudanese Theatre Company’s Cymbeline, commissioned for the London Globe to Globe Festival in 2012. When invited to take part in the event, Africa’s newest nation had to create a theatre company and drew on actors from many South Sudanese ethnic groups, utilizing the dance and music forms of a range of indigenous cultures in an exercise of “unity in diversity.” However, the play was translated into a single local vernacular, Juba Arabic. For her article about the production, Christine Matzke interviewed a number of company members and they repeatedly referred to seeing the project as a means of building national unity. As Matzke argues, “the South Sudan Theatre Company had begun to embody the idea of a new South Sudan” (Matzke 2013: 71). As a final word on translation, I am by no means asserting that all African playwrights have undertaken the task as a political act. In Ethiopia, there are multiple translations of a range of Shakespeare plays in the languages of Amharic and Tigrinya, which have been, and remain, enormously popular. The first Amharic Shakespeare translation of Romeo and Juliet (Romewana Julyat: Teater), by poet and playwright Kebede Mikael, dates back to 1953. The first edition was so popular that it was republished the next year. It was adopted at once as a school textbook and had numerous amateur and professional productions (Pankhurst 1986: 179). An Amharic Othello by Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin ran for three years in the 1980s (Plastow 1996: 222). And when, in February 2015, I asked a young Ethiopian theatre academic in northern Ethiopia what the appeal was for him of a recent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in his language of Tigrinya, he spoke of his enjoyment at in being immersed in a different worldview and imagination.

Adapting Shakespeare It is notable that certain Shakespeare plays have attracted far more interest in Africa than others. Jane Wilkinson counted versions of Julius Ceasar in Arabic, Sierra Leonean Krio, Ewe and Nzema from Ghana, Nigerian Yoruba, no less than three versions in Ethiopia’s dominant Amharic and versions in eight South African languages (Wilkinson 2001: 113), to which I would add Tanzanian Kiswahili. Other prolifically translated and adapted plays include Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest. These are, of course, all major plays, and 174

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ones that African students are likely to have encountered in school or college, but that does not account sufficiently for their dominance. Rather, these are plays with themes that have spoken, politically and socially, to contemporary realities in many African nations and have been adapted more or less freely to make political points. I will look at versions of just one of these plays to illustrate how the work has been adapted across the continent. The Tempest is perhaps not a surprising work for playwrights of African origin to have focused on; ideas of ownership of land, civilization, and race resonate powerfully in nations battling histories of racism, colonialism, and neo-colonial influences. Although each of the adaptations I consider speaks to a particular historical moment, they are united above all in their celebration of the character of Caliban. Rejecting the label of “savage” given him by Prospero, Caliban is re-visioned, or as the playwrights might argue, revealed, as the voice and embodiment of beautiful, articulate, black society, whether in Mauritius, Nigeria, France, or across the international black diaspora. He is also unquestionably the legitimate owner of his island, in contrast to the highlighting of Prospero’s illegitimate “colonial” claims. An early adaptation of The Tempest was by Aimé Césaire. A Caribbean writer from Martinique, who strongly identified with his Igbo, Nigerian roots, Césaire was a renowned Francophone poet and politician, a leading critic of colonialism and a founder of the negritude movement that contested European notions of cultural superiority from the 1930s onwards. His Une tempête (1969) was first performed in Tunisia in 1969 and then in Paris in 1970, with numerous subsequent revivals. Une tempête, subtitled “an adaptation for a black theatre,” draws on a range of discourses asserting black power while debunking the notion of the “white man’s burden.” The play is set in the Caribbean. The black rights politics of Malcolm X are associated with Césaire’s revisioning of Caliban, while Ariel is given aspects of Martin Luther King Jr. The Nigerian gods, Eshu and Shango, are invoked, and the first word uttered by Caliban is the Kiswahili word for freedom, uhuru. Caliban is embraced as the real owner of the island, and Prospero’s arrogance, ignorance, and enslavement of the indigenous population are castigated and equated with European racist colonialism. Colonialism itself is conceived as a dehumanizing disease, one that “decivilizes” the colonizer (Crispin 2001). An even more radical tradaptation of Shakespeare’s play is Dev Virahsawmy’s 1991 version, Toufann (1999). In this wildly playful and imaginative revisioning, Kalibann (Caliban) is an intelligent, handsome, twenty-five year-old metis (mixed race) man who wins the love of Prospero’s daughter, marries her, and by the end of the play is set to become ruler of the island. Aryel (a robot) and Ferdinand are homosexually attracted, and although it is not specified in the play, Virahsawmy told his British producer, Michael Walling, that Prospero should be seen as a rich Hindu because, as he further explained in an interview, the play is “a ‘disguised message’ to local Hindu leaders that abuse of power can be detrimental” (Beesoondial 2013: 100). In this post-colonial re-working, the target is not colonialism but the complex, racially inflected class and caste system operating in this island nation. The large population of Indian origin is seen as arrogantly holding financial and political power, while the mixed race descendants of slavery are pictured as the oppressed “real owners” of the land. Sycorax, the Nigerian playwright Esiaba Irobi’s version of The Tempest, was originally commissioned by but eventually not put on for the Oregon Festival Theatre in the U.S. and was only published posthumously in 2013. Irobi offers a meta-theatrical re-visioning, putting both Shakespeare and the Director on stage and interrogating their authority at every stage. This feminist, anti-patriarchal, anti-Western version is typical of the sizzling, intellectual creative fury that drove a man constantly raging at Western arrogance and at what he saw as the world’s failure to recognize his brilliance (Oguibe 2014). Irobi presents his play within a loose carnival structure, invoking a spirit of African festival and drawing on music, dance, and drink to involve 175

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the audience in the action in a manner he sees as demonstrating the inclusivity of Nigerian Igbo performance, as opposed to the exclusivity of Shakespeare productions in the West that are made for an elite middle class. He says that he draws on “indigenous aesthetics and acting styles that are unknown to the Western trained playwright, theatre director, actor, or choreographer” (Irobi 2013: 4). In this version of the play, racial and sexual stereotypes are constantly inverted in order to point out the absurdities of Western myopia and inability to see the human in the “other” (Said 1978), and Caliban is willing to blow up both himself and Prospero in order to free the world from the tyranny of the dominance of Western knowledges (Diala 2012). Like many other African playwrights, Irobi saw his work as a vital revivification for his time and place of a theatrical tradition otherwise heading for irrelevant oblivion. His Sycorax explains: “Shakespeare’s plays are not museum pieces. We cut and paste. We improvise. We change the narrative. We give The Tempest a new structure. A new imagination. A new life” (Sycorax 2013: 34).

White folks promoting Shakespeare in contemporary Africa In a recent article looking at African productions for the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival in London, for an event that showcased versions of all Shakespeare’s plays from across the world, each in local languages as part of the cultural Olympiad, leading Nigerian playwright, Femi Osofisan, argued that The significance of the city [London] as a vast cultural melting pot . . . was to be marked jubilantly not in terms of its unusually opulent cosmopolitanism, but rather, in terms of its role as a site for the expression and exhibition of the English cultural hegemony in today’s global market. And who better than Shakespeare to serve as a symbolic marker for this purpose? Osofisan 2013: 6 Globe to Globe was sponsored in part by The British Council5 and the Commonwealth Foundation,6 and in all five cases for the “African” productions, the festival paid for new translations, for rehearsals, for bringing the relevant companies to London, and as for all the plays, for two showings at The Globe – a matinee and an evening performance. However, to my knowledge only one of these plays, the Nigerian Yoruba version of The Winter’s Tale, was ever shown in its home country, and then only for two performances. The German director and two Zimbabwean actors of the glorious Shona language version of Two Gentlemen of Verona made considerable efforts to find funding to take the play to Zimbabwe, where it would have been the first ever Shakespeare play in an indigenous language, but to no avail (Pohlmeier et al. 2013: 84). Three of the five countries concerned – South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria – are Commonwealth members, and all have British Council representation, but in no case did either The Globe or these funders apparently consider that it might be have been worth investing in assisting these plays to be seen in the cultures from which they originated. In contrast to the translations by African nationalists discussed above, here it appears that translation has been invoked as a tool of post-colonial cultural conquest and exoticization, providing titillation for London audiences who could, fraudulently, be led to believe that Shakespeare was flourishing and beloved in local language translations across the globe, when in fact, these translations attracted no local audience or investment in their countries of origin. Moreover, there are questions to be asked about the commissioning process. The Kenyan, South African, and Zimbabwean productions had white European directors, all of whom had an established presence in the U.K. Just how hard did The Globe look for African partners, and 176

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did it not think that Africans could direct African language Shakespeare? In the case of Mark Dornford-May, the director of the South African Isango Ensemble’s version of Venus and Adonis, did they have no concerns or knowledge that Dornford-May has been repeatedly the subject of actor protests and been outed in the South African press as massively exploiting his township actors? (see Gordon 2013: 44.) The Globe to Globe Festival was by no means unique in the contemporary period in continuing the old tradition of invoking Shakespeare for projects of cultural supremacy in relation to Africa. I would concur with Alexa Alice Joubin’s contention that contemporary “Britain uses Shakespeare . . . to flaunt its soft power and cultural heritage” (2016: 1096) in ways very similar to those it has exploited for hundreds of years. This exploitation happens both in Britain and in the ex-colonies. In the same year as the Globe festival, the Royal Shakespeare Company mounted an acclaimed version of Julius Caesar, set in “contemporary Africa” with black British actors and a white British director, Greg Doran. One can imagine the critical uproar if a Chinese company put on a Shakespeare set in “the Americas” or an Indian troupe performed a “European” version. The reductive ignorance informing such claims would be totally unacceptable, yet in England it is apparently still acceptable to view the African continent as an homogenous whole, as a simple canvas against which to set an exotic new production of an old classic. The extent to which such bland arrogance is still acceptable is evidenced further in the review of the production by highly respected theatre critic Michael Billington, writing in the country’s leading liberal newspaper, The Guardian: The African setting doesn’t simply give a new edge to the ethical debate about political murder. It also reminds us that this is a play filled with prophecies, portents, dreams and, incidentally, leonine images. Even if Africa is not alone in its belief in the power of spirits, the soothsayer here becomes a magical force who acts as a ubiquitous shaman. Billington 2012 Note that: “even if African is not alone.” Not only is Africa – apparently the entire landmass as well as its constituent peoples – subject to superstitious beliefs, but simultaneously, Billington demonstrates a nervousness about appearing racist by assuring us that he recognizes that in other parts of the world as well as there may be people with such quaint, outmoded understandings. I am not alone in my concerns. The British director of the inter-cultural theatre company Border Crossings said of the RSC’s interpretation: “I just worry about productions for Western audiences that construct a fantasy of modern Africa as ‘how the West used to be in more barbaric times’ ” (Walling et al. 2013: 95). It is one thing for white directors to fantasize about their dreams/nightmares of Africa while sitting in London, but it must be of concern when these are exported unreflectively to the continent itself. It should be noted that this is not an argument against inter-cultural partnership; rather, it is a worry about exploitation based on notions of superior cultural – and financial – capital. In 2003, British director Kate Stafford mounted what she called The African Hamlet in Malawi, with Malawian actors, as the first of a series of Shakespeare productions in that country. With a lack of thought similar to Doran’s, she casually made a claim that one of the smaller, poorer, and more isolated counties of the continent could adequately represent its cornucopia of cultural riches. Returning to work made in relation to The Globe, the world tour of Hamlet carried out between 2014 and 2016 smacked uncomfortably of similar neo-colonial “exhibitionism.” When I first worked in Africa in the early 1980s, it was commonplace for a then rather more generously funded British Council to tour a small cast of Shakespeare as flag-waving exercises 177

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in soft diplomacy. I had thought such unimaginative expressions of British exceptionalism well outmoded, but the Hamlet tour reprised exactly the same cultural supremacist thinking. It is true that many shows were offered free and that there were some special shows for schools, refugees, and so forth, but the vast majority were given, just like the old British Council shows, as one-offs to impress the great and the good in the worlds of local diplomacy and culture. In my recent travels around East Africa, I made a point of asking theatre people what they made of the performances. Everyone admired the acting skill, and many enjoyed the play, but notably no one spontaneously brought up the subject of the tour and no one saw it as either particularly significant or momentous. In a continent crying out for skills training and international cultural exchange, the lack of imagination involved in simply carting Hamlet around when the company could have been engaged in meaningful processes of mutual learning and cultural exchange strikes me as stupendously banal.

Conclusion In conclusion, I return to my opening contention that today most young Africans find Shakespeare irrelevant. Only a few African countries still require school pupils to study Shakespeare in the original English.7 I was in one of those countries, Malawi, in 2015, speaking to university students who had chosen theatre studies for their degree course. This group, if no other, might be expected to be receptive to the study of Shakespeare, yet there were universal groans when they were asked about their school experience. No one could see any relevance or had any interest in the plays, which they engaged with simply in order to obtain a necessary exam pass. However, this same group were at the time working on a translation of Romeo and Juliet into Chichewa by local leading poet Stanley Onjezani Kenani and were workshopping the play with British director Amy Bonsall. The group showed enthusiastic engagement with the process. All agreed – and all were fluent English speakers – that the Chichewa translation made the play far more accessible and relatable to their own experiences. They also joined in enthusiastic debate about how aspects of the play engaging with ideas about romance, sex, inter-family disputes, class, and death could be theatrically represented, meaningfully and sensitively, for a Malawian audience. In short, Shakespeare came alive in translation, as he had not in English, even without any substantial adaptation (Bonsall 2017). Given the struggles of even very many British school students with their first literary-based encounters with Shakespeare, it should come as no surprise that Shakespeare in the original, especially when very few get the chance to see any live performance, is seen as utterly irrelevant by most young Africans. As my chapter has shown, problems with archaic English language, let alone the remoteness of the political and cultural concerns of Elizabethan England, have proved huge barriers to engagement from early colonial days. Moreover, as Irobi argued, texts seen as “sacred” and unchangeable – as Shakespeare himself knew very well, given all his own tradaptations – can benefit greatly from culturally appropriate recreation if they are to be made meaningful to new audiences in different cultural contexts. My discussions at university level around the continent have come up with some interesting ideas about how and where he remains a playwright of relevance. First, Shakespeare has some chance of coming alive when he is translated by really good bilingual writers. The Malawian students loved the poetry of Stanley Onjezani Kenani’s translation, and in Ethiopia, similarly, I was told by several interviewees about the glorious poetry of the translations by the country’s most famous playwright, Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin. Second, many people enjoyed the power of the stories, but even more than this of certain characters: Othello, Iago, Macbeth, and Falstaff being prominently mentioned. The primary interest for many playwrights and directors – as it was indeed for Shakespeare in 178

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his time – lies in taking fabulous tales and reinterpreting them, freely and audaciously, to regain local relevance. I want to conclude by suggesting to British directors, actors, and companies that want to negotiate an engagement with Shakespeare and Africa that they stop pedalling the old, neo-imperialist, lazy lie of the universalism of the bard and the homogeneity of a continent, and instead start partnering as equals with exceptional African theatre makers to exchange skills and enjoy the journey of learning how specific African imaginations, languages, and performance forms can revision, reimagine, and reawaken contemporary engagements with Shakespeare.

Notes 1 See, for example, the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa as well as Distiller (2012), Desai (2012), Schalwkyk (2013), and Thurman (2014). 2 See the discussion in Chapter 2 of Edward Wilson-Lee (2016) on the use from 1867 to 1972 of the Kiswahili Hadithi za Kingereza (Stories from the English), used in many East African schools, which consisted of translations of four of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. 3 Colonial education at the secondary level and beyond was very seldom available to young women, which is one reason why all the African playwrights I refer to are men. 4 Virahsawmy’s translations and adaptations of Shakespeare to date are: Zeneral Makbef (General McBeef ), 1981, Macbeth; Toufann (The Tempest) 1991, adaptation, translated into English 1999; Enn ta senn dan vid (Much Ado About Nothing) 1994, adaptation, Hamlet II 1995; Dokter Hamlet 1997; Trazedji Makbess 1997; Sir Toby 1998; Zil Sezar (Julius Caesar) 1999, adaptation; Dernie Vol (The Last Flight) 2003, an adaptation of Anthony and Cleopatra; Prezidan Otelo 2003; Tabisman Lir (Lir’s Estate) 2003, an adaptation of King Lear; and Ramdeo ek so Ziliet (Romeo and her Juliet) 2012, adaptation. 5 The British Council is a U.K. government-funded body promoting British culture and education, similar to the French Alliance Française or the German Goethe Institute. 6 The Commonwealth Foundation is an organization emanating from the Commonwealth. An association of nations previously colonized by the U.K., it is funded by member states to support the grassroots promotion of democracy and at times gives grants for cultural activities. 7 Other African countries still teaching Shakespeare in the original Elizabethan English in schools include Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda.

References Achebe, Chinua. 2013. There was a Country: A Memoir. New York: Penguin. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Beesoondial, Ashish. 2013. “ ‘Sa bezsomin Shakespeare la’ – The Brave New World of Dev Virahsawmy.” In African Theatre: Shakespeare in and out of Africa. Ed. Jane Plastow. Oxford: James Currey. 98–110. Billington, Michael. 2012. “Julius Caesar – Review.” The Guardian, 7 Jun. Bonsall, Amy. 2017. “Exploring Intercultural Shakespeare Production for a 21st Century Malawian Audience.” Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds. Cavanagh, Sheila. 2014. “In Other Words: Global Shakespearian Translations.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 193–209. Césaire, Aimé. 1969. Une tempête, Paris: Editions de Seuil. Crispin, Philip. 2001. “Aimé Césaire’s Une tempete: A British Premiere at The Gate Theatre.” In African Theatre: Playwrights and Politics. Eds. Martin Banham et al. Oxford: James Currey. 139–43. Desai, Ashwin. 2012. Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island. Pretoria: Unisa Press.

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Jane Plastow Diala, Isidore. 2012. “Destabilising the European Classic: Sycorax, Esiaba Irobi’s The Tempest.” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 24: 25–45. Distiller, Natasha. 2012. Shakespeare and the Coconuts. Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Ferreira, Eunice S. 2013. “Crioulo Shakespearano and the Creolising of King Lear.” In African Theatre: Shakespeare in and out of Africa. Ed. Jane Plastow. Oxford: James Currey. 111–33. Gordon, Colette. 2013.“Shakespeare’s African Nostos: Township Nostalgia and South African Performance at Sea.” In African Theatre: Shakespeare in and out of Africa. Ed. Jane Plastow. Oxford: James Currey. 28–47. Irobi, Esiaba. 2013. Sycorax. Enugu: ABIC Books. Joubin, Alexa Alice. 2016. “Boomerang Shakespeare: Foreign Shakespeare in Britain.” In The Cambridge Guide to the World’s Shakespeare: 1660-present. Vol. 2. Ed. Bruce Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1094–101. Lanier, Douglas. 2014. “Shakespearian Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 21–40. Macpherson, Margaret. 1999. “Makerere: The Place of the Early Sunrise.” In Uganda: The Cultural Landscape. Ed. Eckhard Breitinger. Kampala: Fountain Publishers. 23–36. ———. 1964. They Built for the Future: A Chronicle of Makerere University College, 1922–1962. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matzke, Christine. 2013. “Performing the Nation at the London Globe – Notes on a South Sudanese Cymbeline: ‘We Will Be Like People in Other Places.’ ” In African Theatre: Shakespeare In and Out of Africa. Ed. Jane Plastow. Oxford: James Currey. 61–82. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. 1986. Decolonising the Mind. Oxford: James Currey/Heinemann. Oguibe, Olu. 2014. “Esiaba Irobi: The Tragedy of Exile.” In Syncretic Arenas: Essays on Postcolonial African Drama and Theatre for Esiaba Irobi. Ed. Isidore Diala. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 3–19. Osofisan, Femi. 2013. “Shakespeare, Africa, and The Globe Olympiad.” In African Theatre: Shakespeare In and Out of Africa. Ed. Jane Plastow. Oxford: James Currey. 1–12. Pankhurst, Richard. 1986. “Shakespeare in Ethiopia.” Research in African Literatures 17.2: 169–96. p’Bitek, Okot. 1966. Song of Lawino. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Plastow, Jane. 2014. “Interrogations of Law and State Legitimacy in the Theatre and Life of Ngugi wa Thiong’o.” Moving Worlds: African Arts: Contemporary Forms. Eds. Shirley Chew and Jane Plastow. 4.1: 77–95. ———. 1996. African Theatre and Politics: The Evolution of Theatre in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Pohlmeier, Arne, with Michael Walling, Juwon Ogungbe, Kate Stafford, and Dev Virahsawmy. 2013. “African Shakespeares: A Discussion.” In African Theatre: Shakespeare in and out of Africa. Ed. Jane Plastow. Oxford: James Currey. 83–97. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Schalkwyk, David. 2013. Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury. Thurman, Chris, ed. 2014. South African Essays on ‘Universal’ Shakespeare. Pretoria: UINSA Press. Virahsawmy, Dev. 1999. Toufann: A Mauritian Fantasy. London: Border Crossings. Walling, Michael, with Juwon Ogungbe, Arne Pohlmeier, Kate Stafford, Dev Virahsawmy. 2013. “African Shakespeares – A Discussion.” In African Theatre: Shakespeare in and out of Africa. Ed. Jane Plastow. Oxford: James Currey. 83–97. Wilkinson, Jane. 2001. “Interview with Dev Verahsawmy, and Michael Walling: Staging Shakespeare across Borders.” In African Theatre: Playwrights and Politics. Eds. Martin Banham et al. Oxford: James Currey. 109–24. Wilson-Lee, Edward. 2016. Adventures with the Ever-Living Poet: Shakespeare in Swahililand. London: William Collins.

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16 DA KINE SHAKESPEARE James Grant Benton’s Twelf Nite O Wateva! Theresa M. DiPasquale

James Grant Benton’s uproarious Twelf Nite O Wateva! hit the stage in Honolulu on December 26, 1974.1 Preserving Shakespeare’s plot while reworking his setting and characters, Benton’s play translated Twelfth Night, or What You Will into Hawai‘i Creole English (HCE), a language called “Pidgin” by those who speak it (Sakoda and Siegel 2003: 3). Benton’s script is largely what Thomas Cartelli calls a “proprietary” appropriation that undertakes “an avowedly ‘friendly’ or reverential reading of ” Shakespeare, but Benton also engages in “transpositional appropriation” that “identifies and isolates a specific theme,” bringing “it into [the] . . . interpretive field” of his own culture and “confrontational appropriation” that “directly contests the ascribed meaning or prevailing function of a” passage from Shakespeare “in the interests of an . . . alternative social . . . agenda” (Cartelli 1999: 17, 18). Benton’s use of Shakespeare is most remarkable, however, in that it contributes to a transvaluation of Hawai‘i Creole English language and culture. Modeling what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has defined as “globalectics” – an artistic and interpretive discourse born of dialectical exchange between the local and the global (2012: 8) – Twelf Nite advances a philosophy of linguistic and cultural rapprochement. It pulls together Pidgin, Hawaiian, Early Modern English, and twentieth-century English; topical allusions to the Honolulu of the 1970s; and a pointed, class-based critique of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Together, these elements form what Ngũgĩ calls “a mutually affecting dialogue, or multi-logue” (2012: 8). In order to appreciate the richness of Benton’s globalectic multi-logue, one must understand that the story of Hawai‘i Creole English is an important part of the Hawaiian Islands’s larger social history. After 1810, when Kamehameha I – king of the “Big Island” (Hawai‘i) – deployed British naval and military technology in conquering the chieftains of the other islands and forging the archipelago into a single kingdom, most members of the ruling ali‘i class became enthusiastic appropriators of English language and culture. But by the late nineteenth century, many less exalted members of the indigenous population – along with immigrants from North America, Asia, and other parts of the Pacific – were speaking a new language: Hawai‘i Creole English (HCE). Much maligned as a sub-standard dialect of English and for many decades banned from schools, HCE has slowly gained traction as a language with its own cultural, literary, and theatrical tradition. It was finally recognized by the United States Census Bureau as one of the official languages of Hawai‘i in 2015 (Burnett 2015). Benton’s globalectic appropriation of Shakespeare was a watershed in HCE’s road to cultural recognition.

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Most speakers of HCE call it “Pidgin,” and this leads to some confusion. In linguistics, a “pidgin” is a “new language that develops in a situation where speakers of different languages need to communicate but don’t share a common language”; it is “usually used only in limited circumstances,” is “learned only as a second or auxiliary language and not spoken as a first or native language,” and – in “the early stages of its development” – has a “simplified” grammar and vocabulary (Sakoda and Siegel 2003: 1–2). Over time, a pidgin may develop into a “creole,” a language with “a full range of functions, a complex grammar, and a community of native speakers” (Sakoda and Siegel 2003: 2).2 The language known as “Pidgin” in Hawai‘i is thus technically not a pidgin, but a creole. Its origins are difficult to trace, but linguists have established that it is probably descended both from a pidginized version of Hawaiian that plantation workers and overseers spoke during most of the nineteenth century and from Hawai‘i Pidgin English, which developed in the 1870s (see Bickerton 1977, 1998, 1999; Bickerton and Wilson 1987; Day 1987; Roberts 1999; and Drager 2012). HCE is one of many creole languages for which English is the “lexifer,” the language from which it takes the majority of its vocabulary; but it derives its grammar, syntax, and a significant portion of its vocabulary from other languages, including Hawaiian, Cantonese, Portuguese, and to a lesser extent, Japanese. Like other creoles, it includes a “basilect” version that differs radically from the lexifer, a mid-range “mesolect,” and an “acrolect” that involves “only the local accent” and some words not used by English-speakers. Linguists also study variations in Pidgin from region to region and its development over time (Sakoda and Siegel 2003: 6–14, 19–20, 108). Benton’s 1970s Pidgin is distinct from English in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. The playwright denied that he was “an authority” on the language he used in translating and adapting Shakespeare, but he insisted on the script’s linguistic authenticity: “It has to be right; I lived it. . . . I grew up in Nuuanu. . . . The pidgin sticks” (quoted in Harada 1974: B4). In mentioning the Pidgin-speaking O‘ahu neighborhood where he grew up, Benton was laying claim to his status as a “local.” But defining local identity in Hawai‘i was and is a fraught undertaking for many reasons. It involves not only long-time residency and – for many – having grown up speaking Pidgin, but ethnicity, race, and class as well. People who are descended from several generations of forebears in Hawai‘i – whether Polynesian, Asian, European, African, or American in origin – often identify as locals, but the term is also associated with being of working-class status and no more than part haole (“Caucasian”).3 Local culture features boisterous ethnic humor that produces and regulates identity through “processes of self-­definition and othering” (Labrador 2004: 297); participating in that humor is a key aspect of local identity. Introducing his Pidgin lexicon Da Kine Dictionary (DKD), “Da Pidgin Guerilla” Lee A. Tonouchi discusses the inclusion of “words dat [aren’t] politically correck” (2005: vii); he decides to include them because “da word exists so we shouldn’t exclude ’em” and “People get da power for reclaim words” (2005: vii). He has in mind terms like “Pākē” (“One Chinese person or somebody who’s tight” [that is, tightfisted, miserly] [DKD, attrib. Mishan Suiso: 71]) and “Pocho” (“Person who is Portuguese” [DKD, attrib. Delton Ng: 72]), often represented by “Podagee jokes” as absurdly unintelligent. The stand-up comedy of such local legends as Frank De Lima and Andy Bumatai has featured such humor from the 1970s to the present, and it played a prominent role in the sketches produced by the Pidgin comedy troupe Booga Booga, the founders and original members of which were Benton and his friends Ed Ka‘ahea and James Kawika Piimauna “Rap” Reiplinger. As his friend Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak recalls, Benton was of mixed race heritage with a “long list” of ethnicities that “included Chinese and Japanese and Filipino, and maybe Korean; . . . A number of generations in Hawai‘i with a lot of mix.” And he was most certainly working-class. University of Hawai‘i (UH) theatre professor Terence Knapp, an Englishman 182

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who had come to Hawai‘i in 1970, recalls that, in the same year, a “mustachioed, gangly lad . . . trotted into my office, . . . announcing himself as Jim Benton and demanding to know if I was the ‘Shakespeare Wallah of Hawai‘i.’ ” Benton proceeded to explain that he wanted to “understand Shakespeare” but that “he couldn’t afford to” register to “take classes.” He begged Knapp to form an extra-curricular Shakespeare reading group, and when the professor reluctantly agreed, Benton recruited other locals – “the Booga Booga lot,” as Knapp puts it – to join the group (Knapp 2005; 2011). During the reading sessions, Knapp told his students that comic characters in Shakespeare are “quite often played in dialect of various kinds” and urged them to read comic passages from the plays aloud “in Pidgin.” They were shocked; “da teachas don’ like . . . Pidgin,” they explained. But Knapp dismissed their hesitation with a characteristic “bugger that.” When they did as he asked, he recalls, “they were rolling around with delight within minutes. I mean, they were wetting themselves, right? And not only that, but they were finding the meaning of the script!” (Knapp 2010). The best, however, was yet to come: in the fall of 1974, Benton came to Knapp’s office and handed him an original script: his Pidgin adaptation of Twelfth Night. The play was first staged December 1974 in a Kumu Kahua production co-sponsored by Leeward Community College and performed at UH’s Kennedy Lab Theatre; Knapp directed.4 In the decades since, Benton’s play and its successors have made “Da Kine Shakespeare” a beloved staple of local theatre culture in Hawai‘i.5 Written in a tongue that, even today, “remains primarily a spoken language” (Sakoda and Siegel 2003: 19), Twelf Nite O Wateva! is a work of “orature” in that it deploys “the multiple media of words, music, dance, drama, and ritual” as well as “story” and “riddle,” each of which “constitutes a performance genre” and often features audience/performer interaction (Ngũgĩ 2012: 73, 74, 80, 81). Benton’s script is thus informed by an “oral aesthetic” that Ngũgĩ identifies as a key component in globalectic resistance to literary imperialism and that Haunani-Kay Trask celebrates as central to Native Hawaiian culture (Trask 1999a: 167). As a pioneering Pidgin writer, Benton no doubt found Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night attractive partly because it highlights its own investment in such an “oral aesthetic.” Thematizing a professional entertainer’s relationship with his audiences, Shakespeare’s play is packed with songs, dances, and riddling. In translating it, Benton activated these late Elizabethan “performance genre[s]” for a late twentieth-century community, allowing the “content and themes” of Shakespeare’s text to “form a free conversation with other texts of [his own] time and place, the better to make it yield its maximum to the human” (Ngũgĩ 2012: 60) and the better to demonstrate the richness of Pidgin culture. Benton translates Shakespeare both linguistically and culturally. His Twelf Nite transforms the timeless Illyria – designed to appeal to Elizabethan audiences – into the easy-going O‘ahu of a mid-1970s daydream. But it involves far more than “local” color. Benton’s script is a joyfully rebellious globalectic translation that “[breaks] open the prison house of imagination built by theories and outlooks that would seem to signify [that] the content within is classified, open to only a few”; it targets “national and linguistic” barriers (Ngũgĩ 2012: 61) that would place both Shakespeare and the Hawaiian language beyond the Pidgin-speaker’s ken. For Benton was not only a student of Shakespeare but of Hawaiian language and performance; though he was not himself Hawaiian, “he spoke quite a bit of Hawaiian” and was “attracted to traditional forms of Hawaiian performance” (Wichmann-Walczak 2015). Benton did not, however, use the Hawaiian language in an “attempt to replace and thereby obliterate . . . indigenous” voices (Trask 1999a: 169), for his script lays personal claim neither to Shakespeare’s English nor to Hawaiian. Rather, it literally places both of these languages into a fruitful dramatic dialogue with Benton’s own mother-tongue, Pidgin. 183

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Benton’s knowledge of and appreciation for Hawaiian is immediately apparent in Twelf Nite’s dramatis personae (Benton 1983: 187). The Latinate name Malvolio becomes Malolio in order keep the sound more or less intact while dispensing with the letter “v,” which does not exist in the Hawaiian alphabet. Benton also renames Maria, the “r” of her name being non-existent in Hawaiian; but rather than choose the lyrical Hawaiian equivalent “Malia,” he calls her “Kukana,” perhaps because it sounds more whimsical to English-speakers or perhaps – since the Hawaiian word kūkāne means “male” – because she is a virago. Even more interestingly, Viola becomes Lahela, which allows Benton to link his play’s two romantic heroines through an anagrammatic echo similar to the one Shakespeare uses in naming Viola and Olivia. For Twelf Nite’s Olivia goes by the elegant name Mahealani, “Māhea-lani” being “the night of the full moon.” The name “Lahela,” then, echoes some of the sounds in Mahealani’s name and, as with Olivia/Viola, juggles their order.6 Sir Andrew Aguecheek becomes Mahealani’s Filipino suitor, Andy Waha, who – despite being a visitor from Manila – has a Hawaiian surname that means “mouth” or “one who talks too much.” And Sir Toby Belch becomes Count Opu-Nui, whose name is Hawaiian for “Big Belly.” Benton’s most interesting naming strategy, however, is his decision to turn Twelfth Night’s Orsino into Prince Amalu, a character Benton himself played in the original production. For Honolulu theatre-goers at the time, the name alone would have generated a smile. The notorious Sammy Amalu (1917–1986) was one of the most well-known Honolulu personalities of the 1970s. A native Hawaiian con-man and raconteur, Amalu was also a journalist, a biographer of the great chiefs of Hawai‘i, and a native Hawaiian who claimed to be of royal blood (Jividen 1972: 30). In late 1955, he wrote historical accounts of Hawaiian royalty for The Honolulu Advertiser, and his own escapades were legendary; they ranged from impersonating an officer to routinely writing bad checks and, most famously, masterminding a multi-million-dollar real-estate scam. When Sammy returned to Honolulu in September 1970 on parole after serving prison time in California, “Newspaper reporters, photographers and television crews” greeted him at the airport (Jividen 1972: 2), and in the years that followed, he became the toast of Honolulu. He also continued to write for the Advertiser; so, in 1974, every reader of that paper would have understood Benton’s remark, “I play a character called Prince Amalu, a takeoff on Sam[m]y Amalu” (Harada 1974). But a key difference between Benton’s Amalu and the “real” Sammy is that Sammy avoided Pidgin. Reminiscing about their childhood, a friend noted that “The rest of us spoke pidgin. . . . But not Sammy. He always spoke impeccable English” (Jividen 1972: 146). In creating a “Prince Amalu” who does speak Pidgin, Benton appropriates for local culture two royal English speakers: Shakespeare’s imaginary aristocrat Orsino and Honolulu’s real-life royal flâneur Sammy Amalu. Both Twelf Nite O Wateva! and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night open with the lovesick lord’s rapturous response to music. Prince Amalu’s prose poem pulls Orsino’s blank verse speech from an imagined Illyria into a fantasized Hawai‘i: If music going be da food of love, go play on, gimme mo den extra, so dat appetite going get sick and go make. Oooh, dat vamp again. It had one dying beat, and wen come ova my ear like da sweet sound dat breathes on one bank of pakalana, stealing and giving odor. Nuff, pau already. Da baga not as sweet as was befo. . . . Auwe! So full of different forms is love dat, by himself, he is one unending purple dream. Benton 1983: 188 This passage signals Twelf Nite’s status as a work that will tap all the resources of Benton’s culture as it emulates and challenges the text it translates. 184

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Shakespeare’s opening line – “If music be the food of love, play on” – lends metrical weight to the Duke’s plea for protracted sound, ending with what is usually performed as a spondee and thus prolonging the duration of what would otherwise be a five-beat iambic line (1.1.1).7 Benton takes that sonic expansion one step further. Liberally translating Orsino’s subjunctive “be” and his imperative “play” by inserting the Pidgin future markers “going” and “go,” he lengthens Shakespeare’s line: “If mus|ic go|ing be|da food|of love|go play|on.” Amalu’s first line, performed by the playwright himself in the original production, thus preserves the feeling of Orsino’s opening line while insisting – from the word “go,” so to speak – that the language being spoken is not Shakespeare’s English blank verse but Benton’s rhythmic Pidgin prose. Benton’s localized poetics intensifies as the speech continues. Where Shakespeare’s duke commands, “Give me excess of it that, surfeiting,/The appetite may sicken and so die” (1.1.2–3), Amalu plunges deeper into Pidgin, “gimme mo den extra, so dat appetite going get sick and go make.” When the prince uses the word “make,” which is pronounced “MOCK ay” and means “dead” in Pidgin (Pidgin To Da Max, henceforth PTDM) or “die” in Hawaiian, his identity as a local is cemented for local audience members and readers. And the non-Pidgin-speaking reader finds that Shakespeare has become Benton’s translator rather than vice versa; for such a person will “get” Benton’s line without the assistance of a Pidgin dictionary only by comparing it to Shakespeare’s. The next sentence of Amalu’s speech translates Shakespeare’s “strain” (l.4) into the jazz slang “vamp,”“dying fall” (l.4) into the modern English “dying beat,” and “came o’er my ear” (l.5) into the Pidgin “wen come ova my ear.” Shakespeare’s “sweet sound/That breathes upon a bank of violets” remains, except that “violets” are replaced with pakalana, a flower brought to Hawai‘i by Chinese immigrants (“Heavenly” 2001). Then, suddenly, Amalu breaks from his reverie with the brusque command, “Nuff, pau already,” thus “deflating the mood with a burp of pidgin” (Carroll 1983a). But even the “burp” harmonizes with Shakespeare, for what is Orsino’s “Enough, no more” but a pinprick deflating his own mood? The duke’s abrupt shift from musical ecstasy to insisting that “’Tis not so sweet now as it was before” (Twelfth Night 1.1.8) anticipates Act 5, in which he will swing instantly from delight in Cesario/Viola to jealous anger. Benton’s translation – “Da baga not as sweet as was befo” – brings this implicit personification and foreshadowing to the surface; for in Pidgin, as in English, the word “baga” (also spelled “buggah” and “bugga”) can be either insulting (“pest”) or affectionate (“Guy, friend”) (PTDM). Finally, transmuting Orsino’s “fancy/ . . . alone is high fantastical” (Twelfth Night 1.1.14–15) into language that echoes the lyrics of the popular song “Deep Purple,” Benton’s Amalu concludes that “love . . . is one unending purple dream.” Like the lover in the song – whose “love lives on when moonlight beams” as he and his beloved will “always meet/Here in [his] deep purple dreams”8 – Amalu, hopelessly in love with a princess whose name evokes the light of the full moon – languishes eternally in amethyst-hued desire. Throughout Twelf Nite, Benton continues to make Shakespeare’s text his own both by quoting directly from it and by weaving in local color. The first technique allows Benton to expand his characters’ mesolectal Pidgin vocabulary by tapping Shakespeare for words that he and his Nu‘uanu buddies were unlikely to have used growing up: words such as “pestilence,” “capacity,” “foolery,” and “valor” (Benton 1983: 188, 205, 210, 213). These moments anticipate Tonouchi’s more programmatic assault on the idea that a Pidgin-speaker who uses “hybolics” – “Intellectual kine words” (DKD, attrib. Tonouichi: 43) – is “haolefied”: “not Local kine no mo’ ” (DKD, attrib. Kat Kam: 39; see Tonouchi 2001). Benton’s occasional use of “hybolic” words drawn directly from the text of Twelfth Night Pidginizes those words rather than haolefying the surrounding Pidgin. The second technique, the addition of Hawai‘i-specific details, is especially effective in lines that intensify Shakespeare’s gently satirical treatment of Orsino. Where the duke uses the Actaeon trope found in innumerable Petrarchan sonnets to compare his “desires” 185

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to “fell and cruel hounds” (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 1.1.21), Amalu refers to “savage pig dogs” – hunting dogs used to track down invasive feral swine (Benton 1983: 188). And Orsino’s claim that he can love more deeply than a woman becomes, “[N]o wahine’s heart so big to hold so much; . . . Dea love is like one pupu platter, and mine is like one luau!” (1983: 205). Thus, while Shakespeare pokes fun at aristocrats (making Orsino as ridiculous as Malvolio), Benton further levels the playing field by making the noble characters speak the same working-class language as their servants. The ethnic humor so central to Pidgin culture is also essential to Benton’s script. For example, when the Filipino Andy Waha attempts to flirt with the “Portagee maid” Kukana, ethnically charged hilarity ensues. Shakespeare’s Andrew Aguecheek greets Maria with the ill-advised, “Bless you, fair shrew” (Twelfth Night 1.3.43). But Benton’s Andy flashes his Filipino identity: “Hui, and how you stay, my little pork adobo? Ooo, spicy.” This line and Waha’s promise to give Lope “two fighting chickens” mark him as “one dumb . . . bukbuk” (Benton 1983: 190, 199), that is, as a “male immigrant who is fresh off the boat” and who “speaks with a ‘heavy Filipino accent’ ”; also labeled manong, the bukbuk “often . . . has poor word choice” (Labrador 2004: 300). He is, in short, the made-to-order Hawai‘i equivalent of Shakespeare’s Andrew Aguecheek: a foreign, flashily dressed coxcomb who prides himself on his skill as a dancer. The stereotype is captured in comedian Frank De Lima’s song “Filipino Purple Danube”: “who drives Cadillac, buk buk, manong/. . ./who wears silver pants, . . ./goes out disco dance” (De Lima 2001). And in Pidgin to Da Max the illustration for “bukbuk” is a cartoon Filipino dude in black bell-bottoms, platform shoes, and ruffled tuxedo shirt; his pose conveys his belief that he “get one flashy backstep hula stronger den any man in Hawaii,” to quote Andy Waha (Benton 1983: 191). Benton’s Andy is, like Shakespeare’s Andrew, an audience favorite. Reviewing a Filipino actor’s portrayal of Andy in a 2013 production, local actor and director Troy Apostol (himself a second generation Filipino) used a blend of Pidgin and Tagalog to praise the actor’s hilarious embodiment of the “Manong” stereotype (Apostol 2013). A cornucopia of allusions to the local culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s complete Benton’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s text. The characters drink ’okolehao (a Hawaiian moonshine) and Primo (a locally produced beer), and through an allusion to a favorite local delicacy, Benton makes his most interesting departure from Shakespeare, “declar[ing] an adaptive distance from” Twelfth Night and “stak[ing] out an independent place from which to return the . . . look” of Shakespeare’s text (Kidnie 2009: 65, 67). In Act 2, Scene 3, of Benton’s play, a reference to the dried plum snack called li hing mui reworks the class dynamics of Shakespeare’s corresponding scene. When Malolio attempts to silence Opu-Nui’s reveling, the Count responds with an attempt at camaraderie: “Malolio, ass all you do, o wat? Go around and check up on peopo. I mean, our R.O.T.C. days are ova. Hia, come have a pound of Li Hing Mui!” (Benton 1983: 201). The Count implies that, when they were in school, they were both in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, a program that subsidizes tuition in return for commitment to military service after graduation. The acronym R.O.T.C. is pronounced – as I recall from my own college years – “Rots-ee.” Inviting Malolio to leave behind the high-stepping spit and polish of “rotsy” discipline, Opu-Nui sweetens the pot with a peace offering of li hing mui, which Pidgin to Da Max defines as “Pake munchies” – that is, a Chinese snack – “dat give you cho cho lips,” lips pursed out in response to what food blogger Pomai Souza describes as a “salty-sweet-tart blast on the tongue” (Souza 2010). By inserting an offer of li hing mui, Benton changes the mood substantially from that of Twelfth Night (2.3), in which Uncle Toby makes no such gesture, but rather taunts the enraged Malvolio with, “Go, sir, rub your chain with crumbs” (110–11), telling him to get back to polishing the

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insignia of his petty authority. Obscuring the class boundaries Shakespeare emphasizes, Benton provides his local audience with a treat meant just for them, not for malihini (strangers). Susan Schultz goes so far as to use crack seed as an example of local culture’s distinctive otherness: responding to a mainland editor’s facile praise of a Pidgin writer for speaking “a language we all know in our heart of hearts,” Schultz asks, “Do we all know this language? . . . How many of us understand references like . . . ‘li hing mui’?” (Schultz 2005: 175). Only those who do can get a taste of what Opu-Nui is offering to Malolio. And only by noticing that nothing like that offer exists in Shakespeare’s text can a Shakespeare fan appreciate Benton’s careful expurgation of the class-bias that motivates Toby in Twelfth Night. In Shakespeare’s play, Malvolio speaks pretentious English larded with circumlocution: “Sir Toby, . . . My lady bade me tell you that, though she harbors you as her kinsman, she’s nothing allied to your disorders” (Twelfth Night 2.3.88–90). The audience is invited to find such selfimportant diction intolerable and to share Toby’s sneering disdain for this audacious servant: “Art any more than a steward?” (105–106). When Maria’s trap closes upon Malvolio, it is clear that the play frames his desire to rise above his station as a comic flaw meriting punishment. Benton – intent, like Malvolio, on acquiring goods assumed to be beyond his reach – refuses to endorse this aspect of Shakespeare’s text. His Malolio is a malaprop, absurd not because of his desire to rise in rank but because of his laughably inadequate attempts at haolefied speech. Many of his mistakes – such as “fork-knowledge” for “foreknowledge” and “flavor” for “favor” – are funny, but the most uproarious is when he says to Mahealani, the object of his sexual and social ambition, not “Here, madam, at your service” (Twelfth Night 1.5.281), but “Hia, madam, at your cervix” (Benton 1983: 195, 197, 237). These errors mark Malolio as the only thing more contemptible than a haolefied local: that is, a local who aspires unsuccessfully to haolefication. His fault is not so much ambition as failure to appreciate the language and culture that Benton’s play celebrates. Like Malvolio, however, Malolio cares immensely about how people perceive him; to prove that Opu-Nui does not out-class him, he rejects the merry count’s offer of tasty crack seed with, “[N]o try sway me wid your Li Hing Mui, ’cause I have my own stash!” (Benton 1983: 201). Displacing the class-based insults hurled at Malvolio by Toby in Act 2, Scene 3, of Twelfth Night with the li hing mui exchange, Benton demonstrates that he is no mere steward of Shakespeare’s estate, but a guy with his own stash of theatrical li hing mui – his own tasty blend of savory, tart, and sweet that is as much a critique of Shakespeare as a celebration. Confirming Ngũgĩ’s observation that postcolonial literary appropriations are “not derivatives,” but “a synthesis forged in resistance” (Ngũgĩ 2012: 43), he extends his challenge to the Bard through his handling of a famous passage that appears three times in Twelfth Night, or What You Will: the litany of greatness. In Shakespeare’s play, we hear the passage first in Maria’s letter as Malvolio reads it aloud: “In my stars I am above thee, but be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em” (2.5.125–28). Maria encourages Malvolio to believe that, while Olivia was “born great,” he can “achieve greatness” by responding to the letter’s instructions, actively accepting the “greatness” that Olivia wishes to “thrust upon” him. He assumes her favor will remain ineffectual unless he conveys his grateful acceptance, so he comes to Olivia duly clad in hideous “yellow stockings” and absurdly “cross-gartered” (3.4.46–47). Egged on by Maria, he directly quotes and compliments the letter that he believes Olivia wrote: “ ‘Be not afraid of greatness.’ ’Twas well writ. . . . ‘Some are born great.’ . . . ‘Some achieve greatness.’ . . . ‘And some have greatness thrust upon them’ ” (3.4.36, 38, 40, 42). Finally, in the play’s last scene, Feste quotes the letter back to Malvolio with vindictive glee: “Why, some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them” (5.1.358–59).

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Benton not only Pidginizes but edits and streamlines the language of the false letter when Malolio first reads it out: “In my stars, I am above dee, but no go be afraid of greatness. Some get greatness trown on some of dem” (Benton 1983: 208). Abbreviating the letter’s commentary on greatness so as to preserve only the third item in Shakespeare’s three-part list, Benton reserves the full catalogue for the scene in which Malolio quotes the letter: “ ‘No go be afraid of greatness.’ Dat one was sharp. . . . ‘Some stay born great.’ . . . ‘Some get some greatness.’ . . . ‘And some get greatness trown on some of dem’ ” (Benton 1983: 216–17). The change makes it seem that Malolio rather than Maria introduces the possibility of a low-born man “get[ting] some greatness” for himself. When Lope quotes the letter in the play’s final scene, the text is altered again, this time into a garbled conflation of accomplishment and unearned bestowal: “Why ‘some stay born great, some achieve greatness trown upon dem’ ” (Benton 1983: 237). These variations demonstrate that the Pidgin playwright – like his characters when they quote from the text of Kukana’s letter – feels no need to adhere with exact fidelity to an authoritative “original.” Benton also revises Feste’s final, mildly melancholy song of wind, rain, and apatheia. In Benton’s Twelf Nite, Lope’s final song evokes a sunny setting and a carefree approach to status: “You’re in and den you’re out,/But wat are you worrying about?/Go have some crack seed,/ We’re a new breed.” The lines offer the li hing mui of a new generation, inviting them to join in what the song calls “an ol Hawaiian feeling/. . ./a kind of laid-back breathing.” This feeling is aloha: “love, affection, compassion, mercy, sympathy, . . . charity.” Given the popular belief that “haole” means “without breath,”9 the song’s insistence that the “laid-back breathing” runs “through us all” is an offer to de-haolize non-locals, inviting even tourists to breathe with the aloha “That makes someting” – such as the belief that English is superior to Pidgin, or the equally restrictive belief that no haole should ever try to speak Pidgin – “look pretty small.” At a conference on HCE, Wichmann-Walczack recalls, the playwright argued passionately against the latter view; he argued that a non-Pidgin speaker’s “attempt to speak Pidgin is an act of aloha” and that “an act of aloha should be met with aloha” (2015). Benton’s use of the term aloha in his defense of non-local Pidgin and the reference to “an old Hawaiian feeling” in Lope’s song may legitimately be read as “the cheap misuse by the tourist industry . . . of Hawaiian cultural values” (Trask 1999a: 168). Benton most certainly aspired to be a part of that industry; at the time he wrote Twelf Nite, he was “wait[ing] tables . . . to pay his rent” and hoping that his play would “be merchandiseable on the Waikiki circuit”; he told journalist Wayne Harada that he felt “tourists should be exposed to this genre of Hawaii’s charms” (Harada 1974). In making such a remark, Benton was eliding the distinction between Hawaiian native identity and non-indigenous “local” identity in ways that may be characterized as “identity theft” (Trask 1999a: 169). As Trask points out, the marketing of Hawaiian culture to tourists often prostitutes that culture and the land itself; for this reason, Trask urges tourists not to visit Hawai‘i (1999b: 140, 146). Naïve as Benton may have been in his desire to market his play for tourist consumption, however, his Twelf Nite has been enthusiastically embraced by Pidgin-speaking audiences that include both Native Hawaiians and non-Native locals. As Native Hawaiian scholar and activist George Kanehele has argued, “non-Hawaiians have always played a large role in preserving and perpetuating Hawaiian culture and ideals” (Kanahele 1979). And Pidgin itself was instru­mental in helping to preserve indigenous culture. In an authoritative report to the U.S. Department of the Interior, Hawaiian language scholar Larry Kimura argued that Pidgin had been a valuable linguistic resource for Native Hawaiians who, before the Hawaiian cultural renaissance that began in the 1970s, grew up cut off from opportunities to learn and speak Hawaiian:

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The development of pidgin assured the cultural survival of Hawaiians and those who chose to identify with them as locals, when the only alternative seemed to be to completely give up a cohesive Hawaiian identity that relied on the existence of a unifying language. Kimura 1983: 200 Describing the role Pidgin played in his own personal and cultural development, Hawaiian Studies pioneer and Native sovereignty activist Kanalu Young evokes the spirit of the language in terms that help to clarify why Benton’s Pidgin adaptation of Twelfth Night is so deeply beloved by Native and non-Native locals alike. When you are “Trying to make a place for everything and everything in its place inside of you,” he says, Pidgin can make you feel “that you do belong. You can connect. You will communicate, and you can smile doing it” (Booth 2009). Young’s remarks resonate with the closing song of Benton’s Twelf Nite O Wateva!: “You’re in and den you’re out,/But wat are you worrying about?/Go have some crack seed” (Benton 1983: 238). Smilingly advancing Benton’s own philosophy of linguistic and cultural aloha, the song is a fitting conclusion to a text that explores the relationship between Hawaiian language, English, and Pidgin; that takes on issues of class and ethnicity central to local culture in the 1970s; and that successfully challenges the notion of Shakespeare as a high-culture commodity reserved for educated haoles. The play’s original production in 1974 did not, however, include the song with which Benton’s script concludes. The show instead ended with “the whole cast” singing the popular Hawai‘i-inflected blues number “Livin’ On Easy” (Donnelly 1974). This traditional song had been the title track on a 1969 album by slack key guitar masters Gabby Pahanui and Atta Issacs; it creates what Ngũgĩ calls “a mutually affecting . . . multi-logue,” beginning with bluesy English slang (“I’m a-livin’ on easy/With a bottle of whiskey”) and continuing with jokes that depend on a mix of slang and elevated English diction (“She is so porky./She has a personality/To suit my genealogy”). The final verses start with the traditional Hawaiian refrain “Ha‘ina ‘ia mai ana ka puana” [“Tell the summary refrain”]10 and end by slipping into a nearly unintelligible globalectic hodge-podge of Hawaiian, Pidgin, and English that swears off all “hana” (work), declaring the singers “shua” of their laid-back “prosperity” (Pahanui and Isaacs 1969). With the jubilant performance of this song, Benton’s globalectic script brought down the house.

Notes 1 The program and publicity poster for the production describe it as “A Slack Key Version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Adapted into Pidgin by James Grant Benton. Devised and directed by Terence Knapp.” “Slack key,” as the OED explains, is “a style of guitar-playing originating in Hawai[‘]i, in which the strings are slightly relaxed to produce strong bass resonances.” 2 For a more detailed overview of pidgins and creoles, see Todd (2001). 3 Definitions of Hawaiian words are taken from Pukui and Elbert (1986). While haole is now used primarily with reference to Caucasians, it “formerly” meant “any foreigner” or – as an adjective – “foreign, introduced, of foreign origin.” For varying accounts of “local” identity, see Desmond (1997: 106n4); Lum (1998); Kahanu (2005); Nordstrom (2015). 4 Kumu Kahua Theatre was founded in 1971 by University of Hawaii theatre professor Dennis Carroll and a group of graduate students; it was “established solely for the encouragement of Hawaii’s playwrights” (Carroll 1983b, ix). On Kumu Kahua’s history and mission, see also Kumu Kahua Theatre (n.d.) and Carroll and Carroll (1976). 5 The expression “Da kine” is “the keystone of pidgin” (Simonson, Sasaki, and Sakata, 2013); it “can take da place of any kine word. . . . Can have any kine connotation depends on how you say um wit” (Da

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Theresa M. DiPasquale Kine Dictionary 2005: attrib. Jason Nomura 21). See also Carr (1972: 135–36). Subsequent quotations from Simonson, Sasaki, and Sakata’s (2013) Pidgin To Da Max, an unpaginated illustrated dictionary, are cited parenthetically by the abbreviation PTDM. Tonouchi’s Da Kine Dictionary is cited as DKD by contributor’s name and page number. 6 See Kimura on the Hawaiian rhetorical practice of taking “a single word, name, or phrase and develop[ing] a speech around it by complicated play with connotations” involving not etymology, but sound (1983: 176–77). 7 Quotations of Twelfth Night are quoted from the Norton edition (Shakespeare 2016) and cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number. 8 Mitchell Parish wrote the lyrics for the perennially popular “Deep Purple” in 1938; the piano score had been composed several years earlier by Peter De Rose. Nino Tempo and April Stevens’s 1963 recording hit #1 one on the pop charts and won the duo a Grammy (“ ‘Deep Purple’ by Nino Temple and April Stevens” n.d.). 9 Bumatai (2015), for example, says Native Hawaiians gave this name to white Europeans in the eighteenth century because they did not greet one another, as Hawaiians did, by touching noses and inhaling each other’s breath. 10 See Pukui and Elbert (1986), “puana,” noun, transitive verb, 1.

References Apostol, Troy M. 2013. “Some Get Greatness Trown On Some of Dem.” Hittingthestage.com. Accessed 6 Aug. 2013, link broken. Personal communication. Benton, James Grant. 1983. “Twelf Nite O Wateva!” In Kumu Kahua Plays. Ed. Dennis Carroll. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. 187–238. Bickerton, Derek. 1977. “Pidginization and Creolization: Language Acquisition and Language Universals.” In Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. Ed. Albert Valdman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 49–69. ———. 1998. “Language and Language Contact.” In Multicultural Hawai‘i: The Fabric of a Multiethnic Society. Ed. Michael Haas. New York: Garland. 53–66. ———. 1999. “Pidgins and Language Mixture.” In Creole Genesis, Attitudes and Discourse: Studies Celebrating Charlene J. Sato. Creole Language Library. Vol. 20. Eds. John R. Rickford and Suzanne Romaine. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 31–43. Bickerton, Derek, and William H. Wilson. 1987. “Pidgin Hawaiian.” In Pidgin and Creole Languages: Essays in Memory of John E. Reinecke. Ed. Glenn G. Gilbert. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 61–76. Booth, Marlene. 2009. Pidgin: The Voice of Hawai‘i. New Day Films. Kanopy Streaming, 2015. Bumatai, Andy. 2015. “Hawaiian Pidgin 101 – Ethnicities.” 27 Nov. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, youtu.be/ e_LVtykh09w. Burnett, John. 2015. “Census Bureau Recognizes Pidgin as ‘Official.’ ” Hawaii Tribune-Herald. 14 Nov. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2015/11/14/hawaii-news/census-bureaurecognizes-pidgin-as-official/. Carr, Elizabeth Ball. 1972. Da Kine Talk: From Pidgin to Standard English in Hawaii. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii. Carroll, Dennis. 1983a. “Twelf Nite O Wateva! Editor’s Note.” In Kumu Kahua Plays. Ed. Dennis Carroll. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 185. Carroll, Dennis. 1983b. “Introduction.” In Kumu Kahua Plays. Ed. Dennis Carroll. Honolulu: Univesrity of Hawaii Press. ix–xxi. Carroll, Dennis, and Elsa Carroll. 1976. “Hawaiian Pidgin Theatre.” Educational Theatre Journal 28.1: 56–68. Cartelli, Thomas. 1999. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. London: Routledge. Day, Richard R. 1987. “Early Pidginization in Hawaii.” In Pidgin and Creole Language: Essays in Memory of John E. Reinecke. Ed. Glenn G. Gilbert. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 163–76. “ ‘Deep Purple’ by Nino Temple and April Stevens.” n.d. SongFacts.com. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, www. songfacts.com/facts/nino-tempo-april-stevens/deep-purple. De Lima, Frank. 2001. “Filipino Purple Danube.” Silva Anniversary 25 Years of Comedy. Pocholinga Productions. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, youtu.be/MhN27WySR7Q. Desmond, Jane C. 1997. “Invoking ‘The Native’: Body Politics in Contemporary Hawaiian Tourist Shows.” TDR 41.4: 83–109.

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James Grant Benton’s Twelf Nite O Wateva! Donnelly, Dave. 1974. “ ‘Twelf Nite or Wateva’ One Funny Buggah.” Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Undated clipping in Kumu Kahua Theatre archives. Drager, Katie. 2012. “Pidgin and Hawai‘i English: An Overview.” International Journal of Language, Translation and Intercultural Communication 1: 61–73. Harada, Wayne. 1974. “Shakespeare with a pidgin Bent(on).” Honolulu Advertiser. 23 Dec. B4. “The Heavenly Fragrance of Pakalana.” 2001. Hawai‘i Horticulture 4.12 (Dec.). Hawaii Horticulture: A Blog About Gardening and Plants in Hawaii. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, hihort.blogspot.com/2012/11/theheavenly-fragrance-of-pakalana.html. Jividen, Doris. 1972. Sammy Amalu: Prince, Pauper, or Phony? Honolulu: Erin Enterprises. Kahanu, Noelle M.K.Y. 2005. “The Question.” Ōiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal, Huliau/(Time of Change) 3: 150. Rpt. in Nordstrom 2015: 328. Kanahele, George S. 1979. “The Hawaiian Renaissance.” Polynesian Voyaging Society Archives 1978–1984. The Kamehameha Schools Archives. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, http://kapalama.ksbe.edu/archives/pvsa/ primary%202/79%20kanahele/kanahele.htm. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. 2009. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Kimura, Larry L. 1983. “Language Section of Native Hawaiians Study Commission Report.” Rpt as “The Hawaiian Language”: Part B of the section on “Native Hawaiian Culture” in Part I of the Report on the Culture, Needs and Concerns of Native Hawaiians. Native Hawaiians Study Commission. U.S. Department of the Interior. 23 Jun., 173–203, 216–23. Knapp, Terence. 2005. “Director’s Notes.” Program for Twelf Nite O’ Wateva. Adapted by James Grant Benton from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Dir. Terence Knapp. Kennedy Theatre. Honolulu, HI, Apr./May. ———. 2010. Personal Interview. 9 July. ———. 2011. Interview.“Terence Knapp: Hawaii’s Adopted World Class Actor.” Long Story Short with Leslie Wilcox. PBS Hawaii. 18 Oct. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, www.pbshawaii.org/long-story-short-with-lesliewilcox-terence-knapp/. Kumu Kahua Theatre. “About Us—Mission and History.” http://www.kumukahua.org/mission-history. Labrador, Roderick N. 2004. “ ‘We can laugh at ourselves’: Hawai‘i Ethnic Humor, Local Identity and the Myth of Multiculturalism.” Pragmatics 14.2/3: 291–316. Lum, Darrell H.Y. 1998. “Introduction: Local Genealogy: What School You Went?” In Growing Up Local. Ed. Eric Chock et al. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press. 11–15. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. 2012. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York: Columbia University Press. Nordstrom, Georganne. 2015. “Pidgin as Rhetorical Sovereignty: Articulating Indigenous and Minority Rhetorical Practices with the Language Politics of Place.” College English 77.4: 317–37. Pahanui, Gabby, and Atta Isaacs. 1969. Two Slack Key Guitars: A Livin On A Easy. Tradewinds Records. TS 1124. Vinyl LP. Spotify 2008. Pukui, Mary Kawena, and Samuel H. Elbert. 1986. Hawaiian Dictionary. Rev. ed. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Ulukau Hawaiian Electronic Library. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, wehewehe.org. Roberts, Sarah Julianne. 1999. “The TMA System of Hawaiian Creole and Diffusion.” In Creole Genesis, Attitudes and Discourse: Studies Celebrating Charlene J. Sato. Creole Language Library. Vol. 20. Eds. John R. Rickford and Suzanne Romaine. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 45–70. Sakoda, Kent, and Jeff Siegel. 2003. Pidgin Grammar: An Introduction to the Creole Language of Hawai‘i. Honolulu: Bess Press. Schultz, Susan M. 2005. A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Shakespeare, William. 2016. “Twelfth Night, or What You Will.” In The Norton Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. 3rd ed. New York: Norton. 1917–71. Simonson, Douglas (Peppo), Pat Sasaki and Ken Sakata. 2013. Pidgin to Da Max 25th Anniversary Edition. Honolulu: Bess Press. Souza, Pomai. 2010. “Li Hing Everything,” The Tasty Island Honolulu Food Blog. 18 Jan. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, tastyislandhawaii.com/2010/01/18/li-hing-everything/. Todd, L. 2001. “Pidgins and Creoles: An Overview.” In Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics. Eds. R. Mesthrie and R.E. Asher. Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier. 524–29. Tonouchi, Lee A. 2001. Interview.“Da Pidgin Guy: Lee Tonouchi Reclaims His Native Language.” aMagazine: Inside Asian America. Book Dragon. Jun. 1. Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, smithsonianapa.org/bookdragon/da-word-by-lee-a-tonouchi-author-interview/.

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Theresa M. DiPasquale ———. 2005. “Introduction.” In Da Kine Dictionary: Da Hawai‘i Community Pidgin Dictionary Projeck. Ed. Lee A. Tonouchi. Honolulu: Bess Press. iii–viii. Tonouchi, Lee A., ed. 2005. Da Kine Dictionary: Da Hawai‘i Community Pidgin Dictionary Projeck. Honolulu: Bess Press. Trask, Haunani-Kay. 1999a. “Decolonizing Hawaiian Literature.” In Inside Out: Literature Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific. Eds. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 167–82. ———. 1999b. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Rev. ed. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Wichmann-Walczak, Elizabeth. 2015. Personal Interview. 8 June.

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PART III

World pedagogical Shakespeares

17 “MAKE NEW NATIONS” Shakespearean communities in the twenty-first century Sheila T. Cavanagh

“Global Shakespeare” has become a common phrase in twenty-first-century academic discourse, but its meaning remains controversial and often ill-defined. From a generic, common knowledge perspective, “global” often corresponds with a notion of “national” identities, but this kind of homogenizing label can obscure relevant complexities. As Alexa Alice Joubin reminds us, for instance, “market” forces are as dominant in “Global Shakespeare” as they are in other areas of international commodification (2017). Differences in language, ethnicity, religion, and other identifying markers also undermine efforts to categorize people according to constructed political boundaries. Contested areas can be found throughout the world, as Israel, Quebec, Cyprus, and Kashmir illustrate. Although the term “Global Shakespeare” links geographical spaces with the study and performance of these plays, conventional cartographic borders do not fully encapsulate the distinctive and evolving communities that are creating and responding to Shakespeare today. Tim Cresswell astutely recognizes a frequent tendency to suggest “that particular places have singular unitary identities – New York means this, Wales means that” (Cresswell 2014: Kindle location 2503), but he rightly cautions about the reductive understanding that often results from such restrictive perspectives. In this chapter, I will discuss some international Shakespearean communities that do not comfortably conform to categories focused too narrowly on national identities. Some of these groups form lasting partnerships, while others come together more fleetingly. Whether or not they endure, however, they challenge common assumptions about the centrality of “nationality” in Global Shakespeares and open up exciting avenues for research, performance, and pedagogy. “New” Shakespearean “nations” often do not correspond to traditional perceptions of nationhood. The problems inherent in conventional understandings of so-called Global Shakespeares emerge often. Shakespeare’s Globe, for example, recently undertook a two-year Hamlet tour initially designed to present this iconic play in “all nations on earth.” This remarkable project offered a significant opportunity to explore this classic drama in a variety of settings, as detailed through the admittedly uneven account offered in 2017’s Hamlet Globe to Globe: Two Years, 193,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play, by Dominic Dromgoole, former Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe. While significant, the Globe Hamlet endeavor inevitably fell short of its ambitious goal, however, since “all nations on earth” are far less fixed and definitive than this phrase suggests and not all geographical locations are accessible to roving players, as the Globe 195

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performers learned when they tried to visit North Korea (Dromgoole 2017: 342). The admittedly impressive goal of the tour, therefore, raises innumerable questions when subjected to conceptual scrutiny. People do not always agree with the way their land is politically demarcated, as the Hungarian-speaking areas of Transylvania in Romania and the long-running dispute over the name “Macedonia” suggest (Harlan 2018). In addition, as Cresswell reminds us, “the early 1990s also witnessed a number of violent place-based uprisings usually fired by the desires of oppressed minorities for nationhood or some other form of regional autonomy” (2014: Kindle location 2215). Such tensions undermine any attempt, including the Globe’s, to name and visit all nations, particularly since the locations chosen by the Globe are not synonymous with the countries they represent. The Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC, for example, one American venue chosen for the Globe tour, clearly does not represent all Americans. Nor would it claim to do so. This bastion of Shakespeare in the U.S. capital marks a significant, but not definitive, “American” location, just as the Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) site cannot symbolize all of India. In Cresswell’s terms, “to think of places as simply points on a map or even as ‘Toronto’ or ‘Bombay’ is a very shallow conception of place” (2014: Kindle location 1107). The unavoidably controversial and restricted nature of cartographical divisions illustrates the importance of recognizing Shakespearean endeavors that may incorporate geopolitical constructs, but whose “global” aspects expand beyond sociopolitical identities. This discussion will not, therefore, undertake an examination of Shakespeare in “all nations of the world,” nor will it suggest that international Shakespearean communities invariably share common traits. Instead, it will explore a range of Shakespearean endeavors in diverse realms, many of which do not fit neatly within definitions circumscribed by political nationality. The Shakespearean projects considered here are illustrative, however, of the ways that twenty-first-century Global Shakespeares sometimes embrace, but also regularly resist, identification through artificial geographical boundaries. In Cresswell’s formulation, such demarcations result from frustrated desires to circumscribe land and peoples: “Geographers have long been exercised by the problem of defining regions, and this question of ‘definition’ has almost always been reduced to the issue of drawing lines around a place” (2014: Kindle location 2486). Geography can be helpful in furthering Shakespearean study, but its limits need to be acknowledged. The endeavors considered here employ geography as only one identifying facet within Global Shakespeare. The World Shakespeare Project (WSP), for example, was established at Emory University in Atlanta, taking advantage of modern technology in order to create international Shakespearean partnerships. With expert assistance offered by Emory’s Classroom Technology Division, the WSP typically uses videoconferencing and other computer technology to redesign traditional classroom encounters, although site visits and student exchanges are also supported, whenever possible. In some electronic sessions, participants from multiple venues participate in performance modules designed to recreate theatrical rehearsal processes. Other times, students and arts practitioners in places as widely dispersed as Buenos Aires, Casablanca, and Tokyo join conversations that range from Shakespearean textual analysis to cultural exchange and discussions about educational, historical and familial differences related to Shakespearean drama. The WSP offers one example of the ways that modern technology can expand educational opportunities across geographical and other significant divides. While such benefits are clearly not exclusive to Shakespeare, this drama appears to offer compelling ways to engage people from multiple cultures, something that the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival (and this collection) illustrate magnificently. The WSP responds to an impulse Anna Lawenhaupt Tsing describes as “aspirations for global connection and how they come to life in ‘friction,’ the grip of worldly encounter” (2005: 1). Notably, given the Shakespeare community’s fraught relationship with the concept of universality, Tsing introduces this term in a context resonant with the goals of the WSP: 196

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Capitalism, science, and politics all depend on global connections. Each spreads through aspirations to fulfill universal dreams and schemes. Yet this is a particular kind of universality: It can only be charged and enacted in the sticky materiality of practical encounters. 2011: 1 While universality remains a challenging concept, it highlights aspects of humanity that radically different communities can share. The WSP encourages performative and literary responses reflecting the backgrounds of our students, whether they reside in North America, Eastern Asia, or any of the other areas with whom we partner. This framework allows students to integrate Shakespeare within their own disciplinary and cultural experiences, thereby facilitating deep learning about the drama while sharing relevant regional and personal knowledge with their collaborators. This structure corresponds with what Geneva Gay terms “culturally responsive teaching,” by using the “cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate and effective for them; it teaches to and through the strengths of these students” (Gay 2018: 26). It similarly correlates with what prominent theorist Mary Louise Pratt, among others, describes as “transculturation” (2007). In Terry Huffman’s formulation, this term denotes “the process by which an individual can enter and interact in the milieu of another culture without the loss of a person’s native cultural identity and ways” (1990: 170). Pratt introduces a more vexed interpretation of the concept: “Ethno­ graphers have used this term to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (2007: 6). Huffman’s conceptualization of transcultural theory, however, more closely reflects the goals overarching WSP collaborations. As he suggests, this concept imagines ways for diverse students to “engage in the process of learning the cultural nuances found in mainstream education while retaining and relying upon their cultural heritage to forge a strong identity and sense of purpose” (1990: 170). We include international, non-Shakespearean, texts into the conversation as often as possible and maintain an atmosphere of respectful curiosity. Discussions introduce difficult subjects at times, but such challenges have not yet impeded our ability to work together well. Although Shakespeare is undeniably a “dead white male,” we conceive of these sessions as opportunities to expand international academic and cross-cultural explorations in ways that appropriately include contentious topics, such as colonialism, patriarchy, and socioeconomic and educational disparities. The collaborations described here, which represent only a few of our partnerships, illustrate the pedagogical benefits embedded in these encounters. Students at Sido Kanhu Murmu University, a tribal college in Dumka, Jharkhand, India, for instance, experience transformative Shakespearean engagements that are particular to their specific environment. The WSP collaborates with these students through the cooperation of the Shakespeare Society of Eastern India, a long-time WSP partner. Dumka, situated in a fairly new state of India that regularly contends with disruption by Maoist rebels, represents just one distinctive region in a large and diverse nation. Performing the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice in their native Santali dialect, these first-generation learners share childhood stories of watching their parents being beaten by local moneylenders and discuss how these memories help shape their representation of Shakespeare’s Shylock. As a 2014 article in The New York Times suggests, aggressive moneylenders are an unavoidable part of life in this region. Speaking about the widow of a farmer who committed suicide to avoid insurmountable debts, the Times reports: Like nearly every one of her neighbors, [this woman] is locked into a bond with village money lenders – an intimate bond, and sometimes a menacing one. No sooner did 197

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they cut her husband’s body down than one of them was in her house, threatening to block the cremation unless she paid. Barry 2014 For typical American undergraduates at places like Emory, moneylenders are largely invisible. Although it would be naïve to presume that American students all come from benign circumstances, it is unlikely that many of them have experienced situations comparable to what is common for their colleagues in Dumka and other rural Indian WSP partners. Merchant of Venice becomes a play with more immediacy in these cross-cultural conversations, particularly since none of these Indian undergraduates have ever met someone Jewish, an ethnic and religious identity common on Emory’s Atlanta campus. The large Jewish population in the United States, therefore, provides as unique a perspective for the students in Dumka as the Indian students’ direct experience with ruthless moneylenders outside official banking establishments illuminates the text in new ways for the Americans. The Merchant of Venice, therefore, facilitates important cross-cultural dialogues, even as students gain increased facility with Shakespearean drama. Remarkably, one of the Dumka students involved in these discussions is now a graduate student at Georgia State University in Atlanta, so this collaboration has taken a welcome, but unexpected, turn for the future. Such transcultural and literary conversations are further expanded through WSP connections with Dr. Kok Su Mei’s students at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Unlike Dumka, a location largely unknown outside its region, Kuala Lumpur is a major metropolitan city. Our discussions make it clear, however, that Emory undergraduates have extremely limited knowledge about Malaysia. Our joint exploration of Merchant of Venice, therefore, raises a number of significant cultural and textual issues. Although Kuala Lumpur is the capital and largest city in Malaysia, the Muslim Master’s students there with whom we share classes have no more experience with Americans or Jews than the undergraduates in Jharkhand. In advance of our most recent videoconference, both Americans and Malaysians watched the controversial Israeli production of The Merchant of Venice performed by Habima Theatre for the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival. All the students read accounts of the protests against this production, including a letter from Mark Rylance, Emma Thompson, and others, asking that the Globe’s invitation to this company be rescinded (Aukin et al. 2012) as well as the equivalent request penned by a group of Israeli arts practitioners (Pfeffer 2012). One of those involved in the Israeli letter was prominent playwright Joshua Sobel, who has previously participated in WSP videoconferencing discussions with Emory students. In this instance, I was hoping that he would meet electronically with students in both Malaysia and the United States in order to present the reasons behind the protests, but he declined, stating curtly and dismissively,“It is quite a conventional interpretation of the drama, and I have hardly anything to say about it” (Sobel 2012), although he actually had quite a few critical perspectives that we considered in class. As part of the discussion about The Merchant of Venice and this particular performance, the cultural and educational significance of this kind of interaction came sharply into focus. While some audiences might be closely familiar with the vexed relationship between Malaysia and Israel, Emory’s undergraduate participants in this conversation were not. Similar to what students learned about the modern moneylenders in Dumka, this new knowledge about Malaysia brought new meaning to the play. The Master’s students explained that Malaysia has never established diplomatic ties with Israel and that Malaysian citizens have not been able to travel there legally until quite recently. Even now, such entrance to Israel is limited to Christian Malaysians visiting for religious purposes. Notably, however, trade is permitted between Israel and Malaysia, even though it is not officially recognized, and Israeli/Malaysian business ties are significant 198

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particularly in areas related to information technology (Adkins 2014). This background knowledge sparks discussions about the considerable economic engagement, but cultural distancing, currently established between Malaysia and Israel that enlivens the play for contemporary students. Like the Christians and Jews in Shakespeare’s Venice, these modern states interact financially, even if they do not acknowledge each other formally. These conversations introduce a number of topics related to the play and to modern international economics, politics, and religion. Though the American students do not end up as “experts” about Malaysia, they leave the sessions interested enough that they watch out for related topics in the news and in their other courses, thereby fulfilling one of the dominant goals of these electronic interactions. The Malaysian students have also had an opportunity to discuss Jewish life with students they would not encounter during a typical day in Kuala Lumpur. American WSP students also gain important insight into current events through their interactions with Assistant Dean Katherine Hennessey’s students at the American University of Kuwait. In advance of their electronic meeting, students in each location watch the same production and write essays in response to identical assignments, most recently focused on Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre’s Arabic Richard III, available through the MIT Global Shakespeare site (MIT) (Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre 2007). This production raises a number of pertinent questions about Shakespeare and the Middle East and gives students invaluable opportunities to share their comparative expertise. None of the American students (and only some of the Kuwaiti students) involved thus far are fluent in Arabic, but they are keenly aware of and curious about the differences between the spoken Arabic lines and their apparently shorter English translations. The Emory students are also struck by the number of times the audience laugh at scenes that are not immediately comic to American viewers. Students in Kuwait have been eager to discuss aspects of the play that were lost in translation, many of which included humor. Since the students all write essays about the same production, they have lots of insights to share, although the American students are understandably less attuned to the modern political aspects of this Richard III, which the Kuwaiti students are happy to explain. The students all arrive at the sessions ready to discuss the play and the production in detail and come away with significant new insights into both. The students in Kuwait and those in Atlanta seem comparable in many regards. They dress similarly and appear to have compatible senses of humor and levels of interest in contemporary political affairs, although we do not know whether that would also be true with Kuwaiti students at another institution there. In each of our inter-collegiate interactions, we spend time learning about the particular backgrounds of our collaborators, but always note that they are not representative of anyone beyond themselves. This helps students resist any temptation to believe that they are now knowledgeable about these other countries or people in any substantive way. These sessions offer valuable introductions, but only occasionally lead to longer-lasting communications. Still, even the shorter collaborations offer relevant insights, since students in each location bring distinctive perspectives to the conversation. As Creswell notes: place is also a way of seeing, knowing, and understanding the world. When we look at the world as a world of places, we see different things. We see attachments and connections between people and place. We see worlds of meaning and experience. 2014: Kindle location 685 One of the significant learnings that the WSP has offered Emory students, for example, is the realization that Muslim students in our partner institutions represent a host of backgrounds, clothing preferences and social beliefs. The WSP’s current collaborations with a range of African 199

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partners further demonstrate the complexity – and richness – of bringing together students from broadly disparate backgrounds, who nonetheless resemble each other in pertinent ways. Currently, we enjoy partnerships with academic institutions and arts practitioners in several African countries, including Morocco, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Nigeria. The students we work with in Uganda illustrate some of the unexpected benefits of these interactions. Our undergraduate collaborators there study with Professor Eve Nabulya at Makerere University in Kampala, the most prestigious institution of higher learning in the country. The students come from diverse socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. Many of them work during the day and take evening classes. Of all the international groups the WSP has been fortunate enough to partner with, these students have prompted the most surprise among our Emory students, repeatedly challenging their expectations. If Malaysia is unknown and Kuwait is obscure in the experience of Shakespearean undergraduates in Atlanta, Uganda is even further outside their prior understanding. I must admit that I also had very little knowledge of Uganda post Idi Amin, until I was fortunate enough to connect with the literature and drama faculty and students at Makerere. What makes these students so remarkable is the combination of their erudition, their unbridled enthusiasm, and their complex tribal backgrounds. In our initial meeting, they were spending the entire term studying Hamlet, so were well-versed in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglo-American criticism about the play. Eager to debate what they perceived as the strengths and weaknesses of psychoanalysis, new historicism, feminism, and so on with respect to Hamlet, they raised challenging questions in a rapid-fire manner that both charmed and intimidated the students at Emory. The Emory students admittedly were startled to find out how well read their Ugandan counterparts clearly are. While their surprise partially demonstrates the Emory students’ American-centric perspective, it is likely that many other undergraduates would share their ignorance about Ugandan higher education. Humanities programs at African universities are frequently not well known internationally. Whether or not the world is “shrinking,” our perspective on education outside traditional realms seems to remain largely unchanged. These students, however, demonstrated a depth of knowledge that highlighted significant differences between the Shakespearean studies associated with each group. Few American students spend an entire term studying the same play (although Emory has, in the past, offered similar semesterlong courses on Hamlet), so their knowledge of related criticism is unlikely to correspond to that attained by their Ugandan counterparts. In addition, while many of our international partners express intellectual and personal dynamism during our interactions, the Ugandan students introduce an irrepressible enthusiasm, which Emory undergraduates do not anticipate. As Tsing suggests, however, “tentative and contingent collaborations among disparate knowledge seekers and their disparate forms of knowledge can turn incompatible facts and observations into compatible ones” (2011: 89). While Tsing is not discussing international student collaborations, her point resonates during these sessions. The Makerere students not only bring considerable literary critical background to their study of Shakespeare, however. Like other WSP international collaborators, their local knowledge invigorates their discussion of the issues raised in these plays. As noted, Makerere students come from diverse communities, frequently from outside Kampala. Tribal identifications appear to dominate over their sense of national identity, but conversations in person and through videoconferencing indicate that these Ugandan students are not necessarily familiar with the traditions and practices of their fellow undergraduates. This lack of shared knowledge means that Ugandan students can learn as much from each other in these cross-cultural conversations as the students do in Atlanta. In the study of Hamlet, this became most apparent during conversations about the Gravedigger and speculation about Ophelia’s possible suicide. Ugandan students expressed personal understanding of the responses raised in Shakespeare’s play, as they shared stories about 200

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what happens in their villages when people end their own lives. One response appears typical: if a person hangs himself, for example, the body is beaten and covered with cow dung, then buried and abandoned in a shallow grave. The students agree that suicide is commonly interpreted as shameful to a person’s family. While these Ugandan students may not represent the religious background presented in Hamlet and clearly cannot speak for all students from their region, they demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the social and religious ramifications of Ophelia’s death as expressed in Act Five of the play that leads to complex and productive conversations about the text. The sophistication of these students’ tertiary education, combined with the tight social structures represented by the villages of their childhood, prepare them well to address some of the challenging ethical and moral issues presented in early modern drama. A similarly astute combination of local African knowledge and international level education has been shared with the WSP and some of its collaborators (including the now defunct Global Shakespeare Program in the U.K.) through an ongoing collaboration with Wole Oguntokun, who directed the Nigerian Winter’s Tale at the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival in London. Oguntokun has joined these discussions both in person and through videoconferencing and has also exchanged written correspondence about his Yoruban Winter’s Tale with the incarcerated students we work with at Monroe Correctional Facility near Seattle with long-time WSP collaborator Steve Rowland, Director of Shakespeare Central (Shakespeare Central 2018). Oguntokun’s educational and professional background is impressive. A trained lawyer and member of the bar in Lagos, he has received innumerable awards in his capacity as Artistic Director of the Renegade Theatre Company, including the chance to present the first Nigerian production offered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the invitation that led to the Renegade presentation on the stage at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. The Yoruban Winter’s Tale, which is available for purchase or rent on the Globe Theatre website (Shakespeare’s Globe 2014), may confuse those familiar with Shakespeare’s rendition. Here, Yoruban gods replace the main characters and the action begins in the middle of Shakespeare’s text. The opening scenes, in which Leontes’s jealousy triggers the dissolution of his family, are presented in flashbacks, and the role of Time is filled by a singer/narrator who fulfills a vital role in this explosion of Yoruban music and dance. The production is memorable for its energy, its vibrant colors and its surprise ending. Greg Hicks and Kelly Hunter met in London with the same group of Global Shakespeare students who conferred with Oguntokun to discuss The Winter’s Tale they starred in at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2009. During this meeting, they emphasized the importance of Hermione forgiving Leontes. The Nigerian Hermione (substituted for by Oya, the Warrior Spirit of the Wind) has a different response to her Leontes (here, Shango, God of Thunder). Forgiveness, which the Nigerian Director says would not be plausible in his culture, does not occur (Oguntokun, 2012a). This Yoruban Winter’s Tale is fascinating and helps illustrate some of the issues mentioned at the start of this chapter. Last year, I arrived in my Shakespeare class to discover that I had a theatre major from Nigeria enrolled. I was thrilled that there would be someone with “first-hand knowledge” of the theatrical, cultural, and religious background of this production. This student is not Yoruban, however, so has no more insight into this Winter’s Tale than any of the other undergraduates in the course, despite spending her youth in Nigeria. In addition, in Lagos, the Renegade Theatre Company always performs in English, so the company members were not all versed in the language being presented. The director, as noted, is highly educated, with a broad knowledge base that incorporates both Shakespearean and Nigerian cultural backgrounds. He is able, therefore, to bring these diverse realms together into a fascinating production that alternately keeps and changes aspects from each of these distinctive sources. The resulting performance introduces facets of Yoruban culture, as well as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s romance, 201

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but it does not “accurately” encapsulate either “Nigeria” or “Shakespeare.” Many of the recent travelogue-style representations of international Shakespeare, including Dromgoole’s Hamlet volume and Andrew Dickson’s 2016 Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe suggest that Global Shakespeare is too broad a topic to enable anything but snapshot-size portrayals of the remarkably diverse work being done. Nevertheless, the chapters in this volume illustrate the importance of this critical category even as they inevitably confirm its conceptual shortcomings. In the interest of space, I will not discuss the WSP collaboration with Ethiopia at length, other than to note that Samara University represents one of our most remote and challenging partners. Located on the site where anthropologists discovered “Lucy” in the 1970s (“Lucy’s Story” 2018), Samara is a new university being built in a bleak area consisting predominantly of a truck route from the small country of Djibouti to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. The faculty and undergraduates there contend with extremely limited resources and little access to the world outside Samara. Like their counterparts in Jharkhand, these students regularly remark that they have never before met a foreigner. Ethiopia is in the midst of substantial construction and is adding numerous new universities. This WSP collaboration has met with more difficulties than usual, however, presumably in response to this rapid growth. The administration at Samara is eager to develop these electronic interactions in a meaningful fashion, but the current infrastructural limitations and the exponential increase in faculty responsibilities have impeded this process. I mention Samara here, while only in passing, in order to acknowledge some of the problems that can preclude international collaborations, even when they are eagerly sought. There is also insufficient room to adequately discuss an important cadre of other international Shakespeare groups, except to note that they further disrupt the category of “global,” since their performers and/or audiences prominently place matters of inclusivity above nationality. The International Opera Theatre (IOT), for instance, has been presenting world premiere Shakespearean operas in Umbria, Italy, for more than a decade. In 2016, the IOT (under the direction of Karen Saillant) partnered with the WSP to produce Sogno Di Una Notte Di Mezza Estate (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) with an ensemble drawn from over a dozen different countries. One of the new features of the production that year was the company’s concurrent collaboration with Laboratorio Terrarte, an art studio in Città della Pieve that works with young students living with Down’s Syndrome and other intellectual and emotional challenges (Laboratore Terrarte n.d.). These artists spent several months learning about the play and creating costume designs that were then built in the United States before being transported to Italy. Like Blue Apple Theatre in Winchester, U.K. (actors with Down’s Syndrome and Asperger’s Syndrome); dog and pony, Washington, DC (sensory performances for deaf and blind audiences); the Flute and Extant Theatres in London (performances for audiences with autism and presentations by visually impaired performers, respectively); and other theatre companies focused on inclusivity, this aspect of the IOT’s remit introduces the importance for conceptualizations of “global” Shakespeare to recognize that many international groups place significantly more emphasis upon qualities other than geopolitical identity. Just as national boundaries frequently offer inadequate or misleading categories for the identification of individuals or groups, they can also diminish in significance when juxtaposed with other compelling organizing principles. Flute Theatre, for instance, performed recently in the Catalan language in a politically disputed part of Spain. As the field of Global Shakespeare refines its theoretical perspectives, this is the kind of production that demands closer attention. Flute Theatre presents itself as a company focused on “inclusive” performances, although it remains vague about what categories fit under this proposed “umbrella” of inclusivity, particularly in a case like this where audience members are gathered on the basis of a common, though diffuse, diagnosis and a contested political identity.

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Other conventional academic markers may also get in the way of inclusive and/or Global Shakespeare, including a common demand for performances to include early modern English, which can create issues for a number of the groups included here, even though many of them incorporate this vocabulary. Shakespeare’s “language” is sacred to many academics. Accordingly, when the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced its initiative “Play On,” whereby they commissioned 39 playwrights and 39 dramaturgs in order to translate Shakespeare’s plays into “modern English,” they elicited howls of outrage (2017). “Play On.” Critics of this endeavor have been loud and insistent that this project is a bad idea, as James Shapiro from Columbia University indicates: “Shakespeare is about the intoxicating richness of the language. It’s like the beer I drink; I drink 8.2 percent IPA. And by changing the language in this modernizing way, it’s basically shifting to Bud Light” (quoted in Pollack-Pelzner 2015). As I acknowledged in The New Republic when this controversy first erupted (Cavanagh 2015), I require my students to read Shakespeare in the original language and have been gratified to experience many WSP collaborators in the United States and internationally grappling effectively with iambic pentameter and Shakespeare’s often challenging vocabulary. I am concerned, however, by the implications of arguments that Shakespeare can and should only be presented in the language found in the First Folio or other early modern texts. In this era where Shakespeare is enjoying new life in diverse communities around the world, it seems misguided to reinforce a hierarchy that privileges Shakespeare’s original language to the extent that it marginalizes or undermines wide-ranging interpretations and adaptations. The WSP partnerships demonstrate the parallel importance of contending with Shakespeare’s original language and linking his plays with other cultures through a variety of linguistic and conceptual alterations. Renegade Theatre’s The Winter’s Tale is clearly not the play as Shakespeare envisioned it, but neither is the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company’s recent production nor the Royal Shakespeare Company performances. However talented Judi Dench, Kenneth Branagh, and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Greg Hicks and Kelly Hunter may be, their productions are all interpretations; they invariably make distinctive production choices and adapt or cut the language to a greater or lesser degree. Arguments against adapting Shakespeare’s language falter, moreover, in light of how many changes to the plays are made regularly. Despite Benedict Cumberbatch’s popularity, for instance, his recent rendition of Hamlet, with its toysoldier motif, is as much an interpretation of the play as the productions presented in languages other than English at the Globe to Globe Festival (Cumberbatch 2015). Even the 1623 First Folio, which some scholars and practitioners treat as though it were “definitive” Shakespeare, clearly cannot claim uncontested textual accuracy. As the field of Global Shakespeare Studies continues to flourish, there are a number of issues to keep in mind, some of which have been introduced here. “Global” can mean many different things. The expansion of our focus to international endeavors can be exciting and beneficial, but needs additional conceptualization in order to avoid reinforcing undue misrepresentations or restrictive definitions. As we consider “new nations,” we can expand our scope beyond geopolitical boundaries into arenas, such as inclusivity, regional awareness, and the acknowledgement of geographic and cultural zones of contention, that open productive possibilities for vigorous interpretation and innovative performances.

References Adkins, Jacob. 2014.“Malaysia Favors Palestinians But Buys from Israel.” The Times of Israel, 14 Sep. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.timesofisrael.com/malaysia-favors-palestinians-but-buys-from-israel/.

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Sheila T. Cavanagh Aukin, David, Poppy Burton-Morgan, Leo Butler, et al. 2012. “Dismay at Globe Invitation to Israeli Theatre.” The Guardian, 29 Mar. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/29/ dismay-globe-invitation-israeli-theatre. Barry, Ellen. 2014. “After Farmers Commit Suicide, Debts Fall on Families in India.” New York Times, 22 Feb. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/world/asia/after-farmers-commitsuicide-debts-fall-on-families-in-india.html. Blue Apple Theatre. Accessed 10 Oct. 2018, http://blueappletheatre.com/. Cavanagh, Sheila T. 2015. “Does Translating Shakespeare Into Modern English Diminish Him?” The New Republic, 28 Oct. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, https://newrepublic.com/article/123256/does-translatingshakespeare-modern-english-diminish-him. Cresswell, Tim. 2014. Place: An Introduction. 2nd ed. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018. Cumberbatch, Benedict, Perf. 2015. Hamlet. Directed by Lyndsey Turner. National Theatre. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/ntlout27-hamlet. Dickson, Andrew. 2016. Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe. London: Henry Holt. dog & pony dc. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, https://dogandponydc.com/. Dromgoole, Dominic. 2017. Hamlet Globe to Globe: Two Years, 193,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play. London: Grove Press. Extant Theatre. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.extant.org.uk/. Flute Theatre. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.flutetheatre.co.uk/. Flute Theatre, Orange Tree, and English Touring Theatre. 2018. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Directed by Kelly Hunter. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.flutetheatre.co.uk/a-midsummer-nights-dream/. Folger Shakespeare Theatre. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.folger.edu/folger-theatre. Gay, Geneva. 2018. Culturally Responsive Teaching. 3rd ed. New York: Teachers College Press. Harlan, Chico. 2018. “Macedonia Agrees to a New Name, Ending a 27 Year Old Dispute with Greece.” Washington Post, 12 Jun. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/macedoniaagrees-to-a-new-name-ending-a-27-year-dispute-with-greece/2018/06/12/9558b668–6e68–11e8b4d8-eaf78d4c544c_story.html?utm_term=.b6b19c4f0fe5 Huffman, Terry. 1990. “The Transculturation of Native American Students.” Faculty Publications of George Fox University. http://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/soe_faculty/113/. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018. International Opera Theater. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, http://internationaloperatheater.org/. Joubin, Alexa Alice. 2017. “Introduction: Global Shakespeares in World Markets and Archives.” Borrowers and Lenders 11.1. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.borrowers.uga.edu/783688/show. Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.facebook.com/BranaghTheatre/. Laboratore Terrarte. n.d. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.facebook.com/Associazione-Laboratorio-Terrarte421551861229943/. “Lucy’s Story.” 2018. Arizona State University Institute of Human Origins. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, https:// iho.asu.edu/about/lucys-story. Oguntokun, Oluwole. 2012a. Personal Communication. Oguntokun, Oluwole, director. 2012b, The Winter’s Tale. Shakespeare’s Globe. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www. shakespearesglobe.com/discovery-space/previous-productions/the-winter-s-tale-3. Oregon Shakespeare Festival. 2017. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.osfashland.org/prologue/prologuespring-2017/prologue-spring-17-play-on.aspx. Pfeffer, Anshel. 2012. “Hath Not an Israeli Theater Company Eyes? Does it Not Bleed?” Haaretz, 18 May. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.haaretz.com/.premium-hath-not-an-israeli-theater-company-eyes-doesit-not-bleed-1.5159200. Pollack-Pelzner, Daniel. 2015. “Why We Mostly Stopped Messing with Shakespeare’s Language.” The New Yorker, 6 Oct. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-we-mostly-stoppedmessing-with-shakespeares-language. Pratt, Mary Louise. 2007. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Royal Shakespeare Company. 2009. The Winter’s Tale. Directed by David Farr. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, www.rsc.org.uk/the-winters-tale/past-productions/david-farr-2009-production. Shakespeare Central. 2018. Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, http://shakespearecentral.org Shakespeare’s Globe. 2014. “Globe-to-Globe Hamlet.” Accessed 21 Jun. 2018, http://globetoglobe.shake spearesglobe.com/ Shakespeare, William. 2005. Hamlet. Eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Bloomsbury Arden. Sobel, Joshua. 2012. Personal Correspondence.

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18 APPROPRIATING SHAKESPEARE FOR MARGINALIZED STUDENTS Jessica Walker

As violence against African Americans has rocked the United States over the last few years, many who work in academia feel a pressing need to incorporate social justice activism into our working lives. These traumatic events are a significant source of stress for our African American students, many of whom who already struggle with economic and educational barriers to completing their degrees. Because “[n]otions, constructions, and performances of race continue to define the contemporary American experience, including our conceptions, performances, and employments of Shakespeare,” many students in our Shakespeare courses feel a pressing need to speak out about, and deepen their understanding of, current political issues (Thompson 2011: 3). Finding a place for such discussions can seem difficult when our course content addresses racism infrequently (with the exception of what Erickson and Hall call an early modern “race canon of sorts” – works like Othello and Titus Andronicus) and does so from a perspective far removed from twenty-first-century America (2016: 7). By actively centering students’ perspectives and adapting the course’s approach in response, however, instructors can appropriate the Shakespearean text to provide marginalized students with an opportunity to both deepen their understanding of his work and to speak and think critically about the forces that shape their lives. While lack of privilege produces significant barriers to studying Shakespeare, the knowledge and experience that underprivileged students bring to the classroom can also prepare them for deep, meaningful analysis of his work. This chapter draws primarily upon my previous experience as a white, middle-class academic teaching at an HBCU (historically black college or university) with an 87% admissions rate, where about a third of the students are the first in their family to attend college and about 70% receive the Pell Grant (federal grant money primarily awarded to students whose total family income is below $20,000). After broadly examining the relationship between privilege and academic success for today’s American college students, this chapter will consider the strengths marginalized students bring to analysis of Shakespeare, with particular attention to the role African American students’ acute understanding of power dynamics and social hierarchies can play in their analysis of his work. To demonstrate one possible approach, I will conclude by exploring how pairing Shakespearean plays in which injustice is a significant theme with Quentin Tarantino’s slavery-era revenge fantasy Django Unchained allows the class to explore how Shakespeare’s era and our own have responded to the limitations of justice. For those teaching in higher education, initial pedagogical training typically takes the form of a graduate assistantship at a selective university, working with pupils who usually fit the popular 206

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image of the college student: white, middle-class teens without family responsibilities or fulltime jobs, whose upbringing and secondary education have prepared them for the challenges of college-level work. The availability of positions at such institutions has, of course, rapidly shrunk over the last several years; research universities now comprise only about 7% of American postsecondary institutions, with a mere 5% of instructors considered research faculty (Carnegie Classifications 2018; “Enrollment, Staff, and Degrees/Certificates” n.d.). Available jobs are much more likely to be found working with students who lack access to the privileges of those studying at elite institutions. Today’s student body is approximately 40% age twenty-five or older (“Fast Facts: Back to School Statistics” n.d.); 42% non-white (“Total Fall Enrollment” n.d.); and about 24% “low income, first-generation students” – that is, students whose parents did not complete four-year degrees (“Moving beyond Access” 2008). Half of all American postsecondary institutions either have an open-admissions policy (requiring only a high school diploma or equivalent certificate) or are considered less selective, admitting 75% or more of their applicants (“Characteristics of Postsecondary Institutions” n.d.). Students at community colleges (open-admissions, two-year institutions serving primarily underprivileged and older/working students) make up at least a third of today’s student body (“Postsecondary Institutions and Cost of Attendance” 2018). Increased access to college, however, does not necessarily mean increased chance of academic success. Due to racial and economic inequality’s impact on primary and secondary education in the U.S., students from low-income and/or non-white backgrounds often attend “underserved or underperforming schools” that inadequately prepare them for college-level work (Williams 2014). The result is a wide “achievement gap”: compared to 31% of white students, 37% of Latino/a students and 41% of African American students require remedial college courses (Williams 2014). Compared to 59% for the general population, the six-year graduation rate is 46% for Latino/a students, 38% for African American students (Tate 2017), 39% for students who start their degrees at a two-year college, 32% for students at open-admissions schools (“Fast Facts: Graduation Rates” n.d.), and only 11% for first-generation students (“Moving Beyond Access” 2008). Factors that negatively affect educational preparedness, such as race, income, first-generation status, and geographical region, frequently impact students at historically black institutions. Located primarily in the former slaveholding states of the American South, HBCUs were established during the period between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement to provide opportunities for African American students at a time when many colleges refused to admit them (although HBCUs now admit students regardless of racial background). While they make up only about 2% of higher ed. institutions in the U.S., HBCUs serve about 9% of the black student population (“Fall Enrollment, Degrees Conferred, and Expenditures” n.d.). Known for producing some of the country’s most prominent African American figures (such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Oprah Winfrey, and Spike Lee), they nevertheless often struggle with financial strain and low graduation rates (Clay 2016; Jealous 2013; Nazaryan 2015). Many students at HBCUs find themselves pursuing their educations despite enormous challenges presented by racial discrimination, economic stress, and a lack of academic preparedness and support – distinct but overlapping issues affecting many of today’s college students, particularly African American and Latino/a students, students from low-income backgrounds, older students, and students at rural schools and community colleges. The difficulties that underprivileged students face can make the challenges of college seem insurmountable. Without the benefit of a strong secondary education or guidance from family members who attended college, they may lack familiarity with key aspects of the college experience, such as why purchasing textbooks and attending class regularly are vital to success; 207

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how to take notes, prepare for tests, and use resources such as computers and libraries; and what terms like “syllabus,” “office hours,” or “exam schedule” mean. Educational gaps can have particularly significant impact on the study of Shakespeare: difficulties with reading comprehension affect their ability to engage successfully not only with complex literary texts but also with the academic speech of textual glosses, secondary sources, and communications from their instructor; deficiencies in geography, history, and literature make Shakespeare’s early modern contexts, European settings, and classical allusions particularly daunting. In addition to setbacks experienced before entering college, underprivileged students continue to face serious challenges throughout their academic careers: they are more likely to work long hours; bear significant responsibilities towards immediate and extended family; and lack access to necessary resources such as textbooks, school supplies, computers, libraries, transportation, and even secure food and housing (Goldrick-Rab et al. 2017). The ways in which our culture associates Shakespeare with white, upper-class, educated privilege can create significant psychological barriers for students of color: Arthur Little, in asking “Is Shakespeare or the Renaissance/Early Modern Period White Property?” notes that “[i]t’s no accident that Shakespeare and the Renaissance have so often been invoked as memes of the best of Western literacy, and it’s no accident that this same literacy has been so thoroughly identified, in America at least, as white property” (2016: 88); Vanessa Corredera observes that “[p]eople of color can often feel as if Shakespeare’s position as the apotheosis of elite, educated, white culture excludes them” (2016: 45). A lack of access to the basic tools considered necessary for studying Shakespeare, however, is an equally pressing issue. Instructors whose prior experience in the Shakespeare classroom consists of their own relatively privileged education or their work as a teaching assistant among similarly well-prepared pupils will likely encounter difficulties using the same approaches with underprivileged students. Adapting the course approach to our students’ perspectives, on the other hand, provides them with a much-needed space for self-expression in academia, as well as a more effective way of studying Shakespeare. If we truly wish to promote equality and diversity in our field, we must acknowledge that “academia” includes undergraduates, regardless of their institution’s selectivity or their likelihood of pursuing academic careers; acknowledge the barriers between Shakespeare and underprivileged students; and consider not only what we can do remove those barriers, but how Shakespeare himself might aid us in their removal. This requires a pedagogy that responds to students’ needs rather than our own assumptions, uncovering and relying upon the strengths students bring to class rather than focusing on the deficiencies. In striving to provide my students with an accessible, inclusive, socially conscious, useful Shakespeare, I consider what approaches will benefit them in their college courses, postgraduate careers, and participation in society; how to design the course around what they bring with them to the classroom, rather than what they lack; and how to create a more socially conscious space that centers and values their experiences and views rather than further contributing to their marginalization. In a “nation wrestling with great issues, Shakespeare’s works [have] allowed Americans to express views that may otherwise have been hard to articulate” (Shapiro 2014: xxi). We have long employed his work for political and social ends, “appropriat[ing] Shakespeare into a variety of formats to serve [our] own cultural needs,” particularly to address “important issues such as independence, slavery, war, immigration, gender, civil rights, and multiculturalism” (Ziegler 2016: 231, 229). Teaching Shakespeare is always, consciously or unconsciously, an act of appropriation: the choices we make in constructing our courses serve to explore our own interests (and potential research topics); promote our preferred academic methodologies and political views; perpetuate our field by creating future academics; and, of course, earn our paychecks. Shakespeareans “are not impervious to the cultural biases and strategies deployed within white 208

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dominance that set up a contentious relationship between diverse racial groups”; despite our best intentions, the choices we make in approaching a text our likely to reflect our own personal preferences, cultural and academic backgrounds, and social positions (Smith 2016: 118). Rather than simply permitting a space for students to express their viewpoints, instructors must actively create it by deliberately decentering themselves and centering the students’ point of view as the lens through which the class studies the text. In performance, Shakespeare’s work can be adapted to represent the realities of a diverse modern-day America; as Colombian actor Antonio Ocampo-Guzman writes, If Shakespeare is a paragon of human creativity, we all have a right to access him from our own identities. If Shakespeare holds the mirror up to nature, it ought to reflect our current cultural spectrum and the sounds and colors of our contemporary culture. quoted in Espinosa 2016: 54 The instructor can guide students in uncovering the “sounds and colors” of a class in order to adapt the course text into one that “reflects” them. Students should be allowed to take the lead in this process, since instructors, particularly socially privileged ones, can make well-intentioned but misguided (and sometimes insulting) assumptions about their students’ worldview and how to best connect it to the material. (A particularly apt comic rendering of this phenomenon occurs on the series 30 Rock when a private detective played by Steve Buscemi, who poses as a female high-school teacher, declares, “Boy, Jay-Z and Shakespeare have nothing in common . . . or do they?” before smugly hitting play on a boombox [“Game Over” 2006]). Instructors do not need to “tell a marginalized individual how to connect with Shakespeare” but rather to “listen when that individual explains what makes him or her connect and why this happens” (Espinosa 2016: 56). This practice works best when undertaken repeatedly and consistently at multiple points throughout the semester or, at the very least, for each individual class; otherwise, the instructor risks forming a generalized, uniform impression of the student body when in fact each group of students will prove unique, their responses varying and unpredictable. Therefore, the student-guided approach requires flexibility on the instructor’s part: shaping the course focus around the class’s interests; making room in the schedule for discussions inspired by, but not focused strictly on, the text so students have an opportunity to explore issues they feel strongly about; taking time to uncover and address confusion about unfamiliar vocabulary and references; and seeking out (under the students’ guidance) contemporary texts that help them contextualize their era in comparison with Shakespeare’s. This approach also means putting aside the teacher’s favorite topics in favor of what catches the class’s attention, forcing us to examine our assumptions about what one “should” get from a Shakespeare course (assumptions that often develop in the highly privileged atmosphere of graduate programs). This deliberate decentering of our own perspectives can be challenging, particularly for instructors who themselves feel marginalized in some way or whose egalitarianism conflicts with fear of having their authority undermined – as may be case, for example, for white women (particularly young white women) working with students of color. It can also be jarring to see our own unexamined privileges and prejudices laid bare in class discussion. My approach generally involves presenting the class with a series of questions inspired by the text’s themes, to be discussed in groups and then as a class before we begin to study a text. Preparation for Romeo and Juliet, for instance, could include “What responsibilities do individuals have towards serving the needs of their communities, and what responsibilities do communities have towards nurturing the needs of individuals?” and “At what point do children’s identities become separate from that of their parents?” Before reading 1 Henry IV, students might consider 209

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“Do you ever find yourself acting differently based on where you are, who you’re with, and what you want?” and “How should a person behave if they want to get ahead in the world?” The class then discusses their responses, which familiarizes the instructor with students’ interests and perspectives and guides his or her approach in teaching the text. (A particularly energetic discussion of the first question, for instance, would result in time spent looking closely at what sense of responsibility individual characters in Romeo and Juliet feel towards their families, and vice versa.) The exercise has the additional benefit of alerting students to what the text’s significant themes will be, easing an often difficult reading process. These discussions reveal the intellectual strengths students bring to the classroom rather than focusing on rectifying deficiencies. Certain questions will catch their attention, and the ensuing discussion reveals areas of inquiry to which they have given serious thought. Results will vary widely from one class to the next, and their perspectives will not necessarily differ from those of their more privileged peers, but marginalized students are often eager to use this opportunity to articulate how inequality shapes their lives and connect their observations to the course texts. Addressing questions of power, hierarchy, identity, and otherness prevalent in Shakespeare’s work with privileged students often means devoting substantial class time to explaining what privilege means, how social structures support discrimination, and how different identities intersect. At best, their understanding of these issues, lacking personal experience, may be abstract and vague; at worst, they may argue at length about whether discrimination exists. Conversely, students whose lives have been profoundly affected by such forces come to the classroom prepared to discuss them and are keenly interested in and incredibly skilled at doing so, usually having considered these issues in more depth and with greater nuance than their privileged professors. The students with whom I have worked while teaching at an HBCU have been exceptionally skilled at analyzing issues salient to Shakespeare’s work, including how one’s place in social hierarchies shapes their experiences, and the potentially dangerous consequences of resisting such structures; the ways in which justice can prove fallible and subject to human prejudice, and how religion and community offer conflicting lessons on how to respond to injustice; that trauma persists generationally, and how community and individual identity can be formed in response to trauma; that how one is categorized may be influenced by a combination of genetic factors, social roles, and visual indicators; that an ability to self-fashion, particularly through language use, profoundly affects one’s opportunities; and how tensions can emerge between where one comes from and where they hope to go. Being familiar with the ways in which race, economic class, educational background, and social mobility are often connected and overlapping, they make ready connections between the impact of power structures in their lives and in those of Shakespeare’s characters, providing opportunities to discuss race even when it is not a principal topic in the play at hand. Our age and Shakespeare’s are not two completely separate compartments to keep strictly disconnected. . . . The conceptual formulation of early modern race studies necessitates that we go all the way back to consider the role of race in the medieval and Renaissance eras. Erickson and Hall 2016: 6–7 Because Shakespeare writes at the dawn of British imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade, studying his work offers African American students an opportunity explore how early modern ideas about power, inequality, and identity, even when not obviously connected to race, set the stage for American colonialism and slavery and shape the ways we think about race today. 210

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Social class in early modern England can prove a particularly fruitful topic of discussion in relationship to race in modern-day America. As Corredera notes, the early modern period used “race” to connote lineage rather than color or ethnicity, and “religion, familial ties, and bloodlines” were “more important signifiers of othered identity than bodily markers such as skin color” (2016: 31). While its meaning has shifted, early modern race-as-class and modern raceas-color share “strongly similar conceptual features” (Bovilsky 2016: 116), and racism in early modern drama often employs the language of classism (Howard 2016). The strictures of social class in Shakespeare’s time are often daunting to twenty-first-century American students; classlessness is such a deeply ingrained ideal to Americans that we often struggle to conceptualize and articulate ideas about economic hierarchies. Moreover, in comparison to Shakespeare’s age, class in twenty-first-century America is often ill-defined and fluid, arguably shaped by capital as much as origin. Racial identity, on the other hand, emerges from overlapping categories of lineage, culture, and appearance; it is typically fixed at birth, but not without the possibility of passing as, or pursuing opportunities associated with, another race – characteristics we could also apply to class in the Renaissance. These similarities give African American students a nuanced understanding of class issues that surfaces in Shakespeare: competing social pressures to remain in your community of origin, or advance socially by associating with a more privileged group; how one’s speech (particularly dexterity with code-switching), education, and clothing can affect the likelihood of social advancement; the tension between how one identifies and how one is perceived by others; and the expendability of marginalized lives, particularly within the justice system or in times of war. The challenges presented by Shakespeare’s diction offer particularly rewarding opportunities for students to think critically about the relationship between culture, status, and language in Shakespeare’s work and their own lives. African American students are frequently bidialectal, speaking African American Vernacular English (AAVE) with friends and at home and Standard American English (SAE) at school. AAVE has a rich social and literary history and is considered significant to African American identity, but opinions on its use vary among speakers who face significant discrimination for using it. They may find their frustration at reading Shakespeare’s language (common among undergraduates, regardless of background) exacerbated by the way our culture treats his speech as superior to their own. This gap can be bridged, however, by focusing on the role social status plays in students’ language use and in Shakespeare’s work. None of us speaks at home as we speak in the classroom, any more than working-class theatergoers of the Renaissance spoke the exalted verse of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. By starting from students’ experiences with standard and nonstandard Englishes, we can move to consideration of Shakespeare’s use of prose and blank verse, malapropism, and bombast; of how some characters switch more ably between verse forms than others, and how facility with language affects their chances of accomplishing their goals; of our culture’s exaltation of verse-heavy tragedy over prose-heavy comedy. Discussing the role blank verse plays in aiding the memorization of long texts also takes Shakespeare’s words off the pages of textbooks or out of the pen of a legendary figure, placing his language instead in the mouth of an actor in a repertory theater, a workingclass figure juggling multiple roles and struggling to recall written material upon demand (not unlike the modern college student). In the last few decades, scholars have expressed reservations about tracing connections between modern life and early modern literature. Navigating the space between Shakespeare’s time and our own is a fraught issue in early modern race studies; Erickson and Hall outline the paradoxical way in which both “[o]veremphasis on anachronism” and its “critical polar ­opposite – the motif of universality” are employed to shut down conversations about race (2016: 4–5). Universality erases difference in favor of a “narcissistic colorblindness” that subsumes the 211

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reader’s culture under one that is not actually universal but, rather, Eurocentric, white, and educated (Thompson 2011: 42). Conversely, historical contextualization that emphasizes differences between Shakespeare’s time and our own certainly lends itself to a more nuanced understanding of the period, but shifts in how we think about race over the last few centuries have led to a reluctance to discuss it at all, for fear of misapplying modern ways of thinking to an earlier period. At worst, “[f]etishizing historical accuracy” becomes a means to “disguise resistance to race work” (Smith 2016: 120), evidence of a “pathological averseness to thinking about race under the guise of protecting historical difference” (Erickson and Hall 2016: 2). Whatever the outcome of this debate in the pages of academic journals and the hotel ballrooms where national conferences are held, this “excessive academic caution” that “effectively stifles or rejects race as a legitimate early modern issue” has no place in the undergraduate classroom” (Erickson and Hall 2016: 4). Historical context is vitally important, but it is disingenuous to behave as if undergraduate English courses function primarily as a pipeline to graduate programs (nor should they, given the scarcity of available jobs for PhDs) and must therefore conform to the same methodologies. Obviously, we should not teach inaccuracies deliberately, but when our students face real barriers in connecting with and mastering course material, the potential risks of encouraging them to make connections between their lives and those of Shakespeare’s characters – such as overgeneralizing a topic or accidentally creating a ­misapprehension – are well worth the rewards. Belaboring what separates them from Shakespeare simply because we are overly cautious about imparting an imperfect understanding of the Renaissance can only serve to alienate students of color. While calling a text “relatable” is often the highest form of praise from undergraduates, the concept seems to invite almost visceral revulsion from instructors, who dismiss students as too lazy, self-centered, or sheltered to engage with the more unfamiliar or uncomfortable parts of the text (as if we did not all, at one point or another, fall in love with books because they spoke to us across time and space with the familiarity of friends). “Relatability” may be better suited for some pedagogical contexts than others, but it seems uniquely cruel to dismiss marginalized students’ desire to see themselves reflected in canonical literature when we can instead “refus[e] a false delineation between race ‘then’ and ‘now’ ” to “more logically invite expressly relevant discussions and allow innovative pairings” (Corredera 2016: 49). Rather than telling students they are just like Shakespeare (or vice versa), we can allow them to start a conversation in which they then invite Shakespeare to participate, teasing out common threads and exploring ways in which early modern life diverges from theirs. Students therefore uncover how the human experiences that connect them to Shakespeare’s characters operate in social contexts very different than their own, discovering that, though early modern beliefs about otherness and inequality may strike them as bizarre, the period’s preoccupation with those issues feels very familiar and that their own way of thinking and talking about these issues has a long and compelling history. An example of such an approach could include a semester devoted to the theme “Shakespeare and the Limitations of Justice,” in which the class studies Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice before watching Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. This film’s narrative, which concerns the enslaved hero’s revenge against both an individual slaveowner and the institution of slavery itself, holds significant resonance for African American students living in a time in which many feel the justice system has failed them. Tarantino’s revenge films (particularly Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained) employ many elements of Shakespearean revenge tragedy: a wronged party powerless against a corrupt, ineffectual justice system seeks retribution for harm done to a loved one, haunted by ghosts and emblems symbolizing the crime and employing disguise, subterfuge, or playacting to get close to the subject of their vengeance. But while Shakespeare takes a cautious attitude towards revenge 212

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and focuses on wronged members of privileged classes, Tarantino’s films emphasize marginalized viewpoints and celebrate vengeance. Shakespeare’s revengers, accustomed to the privileges of birth and often connected to the antagonist through family or social ties, find themselves betrayed by a system that heretofore supported them, while Tarantino’s protagonists are targeted as members of an underprivileged group; they seek revenge not only against a specific wrongdoer but also symbolically against an oppressive power structure, obliterating the machines (car, cinema, plantation) that perpetuate it. Shakespeare’s plays show sympathy for those who desire revenge but ultimately condemn it as a destructive force that inevitably leads to the revenger’s moral decay, madness, and death. Tarantino wrestles with these concerns to an extent (particularly in Django Unchained, in which the protagonist must turn a blind eye to his fellow slaves’ suffering in order to maintain his performance), but committing violence against the villains, even by adopting some of their key characteristics, is not called into question. Django, like most of Tarantino’s revengers, survives and triumphs, serving as a pattern to be emulated rather than a warning against retribution. At the beginning of the semester, students work in groups on questions that consider fundamental issues in Shakespeare’s work, while also providing them with an opportunity to express their beliefs about issues of political import. They are asked to define “justice”; consider how race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality affect one’s access to justice; and examine what actions a wronged party can or should take when denied justice. After they complete the plays and view the film, closing questions address individual characters’ relationships to their setting’s power structure; how the aforementioned factors affect their access to justice; how the text, and we as readers, feel about their actions; how these characters might deal with the challenges facing them today; how they use the tools at their disposal (their influence, the legal system, physical or military power, metadrama); and how relevant or useful the texts’ lessons may be in relationship to contemporary social justice issues. Class discussions on this topic have included whether one should respond to personal injustice by refusing to let insults go unanswered in order to maintain one’s standing in the community, or by leaving such matters up to a higher power as dictated by strongly held religious beliefs; whether Django’s actions are morally acceptable or psychologically healthy, particularly in light of the negative effects that pursuing revenge has on Shakespeare’s protagonists; the relationship between identity and loyalty (and whether the ties of shared racial, economic, or regional background can compare to the ties of kinship); and how the measures to fight injustice seen in Shakespeare’s and Tarantino’s work compare to those taken during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the social justice movements of recent years. The conversation revealed blind spots as well as areas of knowledge; students conscious of racial and economic injustice, for instance, might be less familiar with examples of discrimination based on religious belief, sexual orientation, or gender identity. While shared assumptions about the reality of racism underscored the conversation, opinions about causes, effects, and ways to respond varied widely, resulting in spirited debate. The resulting conversation illuminated how far we have come, and how far we have still to go, in addressing racial injustice. As a revenge fantasy, Django Unchained pushes the possibilities of punishing injustice to their utmost limits, helping to underscore the comparatively conservative nature of Shakespeare’s plays; his work cannot always adequately address current issues of racism and racial justice. Even if the arc of our moral universe bends toward justice, it may be that Shakespeare’s moral universe does not bend far enough to go the distance needed now. Erickson and Hall 2016: 10 213

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Howard, in considering Aaron’s fate in Titus Andronicus, is reminded of “the black men and boys, shot by police, whose bleeding bodies, dead or alive, no one is allowed to approach” (2016: 112), while Little “think[s] about Michael Brown and Julius Caesar,” whose bodies “have much to teach us about those bodies we mourn and those we do not” (2016: 103). Shakespeare only portrays a few black lives, but we can also consider his Jewish lives, working-class lives, the lives of women in relationship to the ills that plague our society. We see some compassion for their fates, but little resolution or redress for the wrongs done them. Their bodies, alive and dead, are missing, unaccounted for, disrespected. Shylock vanishes from a play that spends its last act celebrating Portia’s cleverness in using the forces of homosocial patriarchy, classism, and antisemitism to beat men at their own game. Henry V takes twenty lines to list the “royal fellowship of death” on the enemy side but cannot be troubled to name any of the twenty-five commoners (“all other men”) who gave their lives for his imperialism – a sentiment echoed 400 years later in the rallying cry demanding recognition of the black victims of police violence, “say his/her name” (Henry V, 4.8.82–102, 107).1 An unknown figure watches Ophelia drown (eerily reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina), leaving her body to be debated over by the armchair theologians digging her grave and the jealous men fighting in it; Hamlet eventually apologizes to Laertes, but never for the role he played in driving Ophelia to suicide. And while Aaron and Tamora surely deserve punishment for their crimes, the role Rome’s misogyny, racism, and imperialism played in creating these monsters goes unpunished. Comparisons of Shakespeare’s texts with modern ones thus show us the limitations of a worldview formed before many of the revolutionary justice movements we have witnessed over the last few centuries. In “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” James Baldwin writes of his initial resentment “that a black man should be forced to deal with the English language at all” (2011: 65). While living in France, however, learning a new language leads him to reevaluate his relationship to English; having once felt that it “reflected none of my experience,” he comes to realize “the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it” (2011: 67). He finds himself drawn to “Shakespeare’s bawdiness” because “bawdiness was one of the elements of jazz and revealed a tremendous, loving, and realistic respect for the body, and that ineffable force which the body contains” (2011: 68). Baldwin concludes: The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. . . . It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it – no time can be easy if one is living through it. I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw: his public streets and his private streets, which are always so mysteriously and inexorably connected; but he trusted that connection. 2011: 68–69 To employ Baldwin’s phrasing, one could say that to appropriate is not to imitate, but to use, to claim Shakespeare for one’s own purpose. The “public streets” of the classroom and the “private streets” of our students’ lives connect at every point, and just as we can lead our students through Shakespeare’s streets, we can join as they lead him through their own.

Note 1 These citations from Henry V are to the Penguin edition edited by John Russell Brown and Sylvan Barnet (Shakespeare 1988).

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References Baldwin, James. 2011. “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare.” In The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. Ed. Randall Kenan. New York: Vintage. 65–69. Bovilsky, Lara. 2016. ““The Race of Shakespeare’s Mind.’ ” In Shakespeare in Our Time: A Shakespeare Association of America Collection. Eds. Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett. London: Bloomsbury Arden. 114–18. “Characteristics of Postsecondary Institutions.” n.d. National Center for Education Statistics. Accessed 7 Jul. 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/Indicator_CSA/COE_CSA_2013_04.pdf. Clay, Gregory. 2016. “New Tactics Needed to Fix Low HBCU Graduation Rates,” 14 Sep. Accessed 7 Jul. 2018, https://theundefeated.com/features/new-tactics-needed-fix-low-hbcu-graduation-rates. Corredera, Vanessa. 2016. ““Not a Moor Exactly’ ”: Shakespeare, Serial, and Modern Constructions of Race.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1: 30–50. “Enrollment, Staff, and Degrees/Certificates Conferred in Degree-granting and Non-Degree-granting Postsecondary Institutions, by control and level of institution, sex of student, type of staff, and level of degree: Fall 2015 and 2014–15.” n.d. National Center for Education Statistics. Accessed 7 Jul. 2018, https:// nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_301.10.asp?current=yes. Erickson, Peter, and Kim F. Hall. 2016. “ ‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1: 1–13. Espinosa, Ruben. 2016. “Stranger Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1: 51–67. “Fall Enrollment, Degrees Conferred, and Expenditures in Degree-granting Historically Black Colleges and Universities, by Institution: 2014, 2015, and 2014–15.” n.d. National Center for Education Statistics. Accessed 7 Jul. 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_313.10.asp. “Fast Facts: Back to School Statistics.” n.d. National Center for Education Statistics. Accessed 7 Jul. 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372. “Fast Facts: Graduation Rates.” n.d. National Center for Education Statistics. Accessed 7 Jul. 2018, https:// nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40. “Game Over.” 2006. 30 Rock. Little Stranger. Goldrick-Rab, Sara, Jed Richardson, and Anthony Hernandez. 2017. “Hungry and Homeless in College: Results from a National Study of Basic Needs Insecurity in Higher Education.” Accessed 7 Jul. 2018, http://wihopelab.com/publications/hungry-and-homeless-in-college-report.pdf. Howard, Jean E. 2016. “Is Black So Base a Hue?” In Shakespeare in Our Time: A Shakespeare Association of America Collection. Eds. Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett. London: Bloomsbury Arden. 107–14. Jealous, Benjamin Todd. 2013. “Lessons From an HBCU’s Demise.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 Sep. Accessed 7 Jul. 2018, www.chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/09/09/lessons-from-anhbcus-demise Little, Arthur L., Jr. 2016. “Re-Historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean Property.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1: 84–103. “Moving Beyond Access: College Success for Low-Income, First-Generation Students.” 2008. The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. Accessed 7 Jul. 2018, www.pellinstitute.org/ downloads/publications-Moving_Beyond_Access_2008.pdf. Nazaryan, Alexander. 2015. “Black Colleges Matter.” Newsweek, August 18. Accessed 7 Jul. 2018. www. newsweek.com/black-colleges-matter-363667. “Postsecondary Institutions and Cost of Attendance in 2016–17; Degrees and Other Awards Conferred, 2015–16; and 12-Month Enrollment, 2015–16.” 2018. National Center for Education Statistics. Accessed 7 Jul. 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017075rev.pdf. Shakespeare, William. 1988. Henry V. Eds. John Russell Brown and Sylvan Barnet. New York: Penguin Books USA. Shapiro, James, ed. 2014. Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now. New York: The Library of America. Smith, Ian. 2016. “We are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1: 104–24. Tate, Emily. 2017. “Graduation Rates and Race.” Inside Higher Ed, 26 Apr. Accessed 7 Jul. 2018, www.inside highered.com/news/2017/04/26/college-completion-rates-vary-race-and-ethnicity-report-finds. The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. n.d. Accessed 2 Jun. 2018, http://carn egieclassifications.iu.edu. Thompson, Ayanna. 2011. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. New York: Oxford University Press.

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19 BEYOND APPROPRIATION Teaching Shakespeare with accidental echoes in film Matthew Kozusko

Unlike North American classroom standards such as She’s The Man or 10 Things I Hate About You, which make deliberate, sustained use of Shakespeare, the two films considered in this chapter – Rowdy Herrington’s Road House (1989) and Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One (1997) – are marked by accidental echoes and parallels. Because the connections I suggest between Shakespeare and contemporary film are generally not deliberate, the challenges of defining, mapping, and assessing appropriations can largely be sidestepped here.1 My object is not to argue for a film’s status as an appropriation but to make use of accidental echoes in order to offer introductory students a foothold on the sheer face of the Shakespearean text. Indeed, at the level of structural analysis, as discussed below, the notion of narrative homologies linking Shakespeare to contemporary film is the starting point of an argument, not its end. Nor is the idea of an accidental appropriation new, since inquiry into Shakespeare and film has always recognized submerged parallels like those I pursue here. For example, Tony Howard has pointed out both the inadvertent and deliberate echoes of King Lear in The Godfather and The Godfather Part III (Howard 2000: 299), and Douglas Lanier has traced echoes of Hamlet in his account of the 1945 film Strange Illusion (Lanier 2014: 32). Somewhat further afield, Christy Desmet discusses the notion of “accidental appropriation” in the appearance in a Shakespeare troupe’s costumes of Seminole Indians at a peace talk with their opponents (Desmet 2014: 53).2 What separates my account here of accidental appropriations is the provisional, manufactured, and even strained status of the Shakespeare connections. My suggestion is that found analogs in contemporary films can be useful in teaching Shakespeare to introductory students. I offer two examples. The first is Road House, in which an itinerant bouncer advocates nonviolence as an approach to the troubles that come with being a “cooler” at a rowdy bar. The film reproduces characters and scenarios from Hamlet and is useful for introducing students to the notion of character function or characters as actants. The second is Air Force One, in which characters’ private, personal desires come into conflict with public duty, allowing for a reading of Romeo and Juliet focused on character motivation and character consistency. The analogs in the second case are far more tenuous, and the comparison suggests ways of finding Shakespearean echoes in films in which parallels are not easily discovered. For both examples, sketching narrative homologies involves looking at actions or events and at the characters or agents who enact them. This chapter thus involves an

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overview of some basic concepts and movements in twentieth-century structuralism and narrative theory. I close by suggesting that accidental appropriation can both demystify Shakespeare’s artistry and help celebrate its complexity.

Road House: the Patrick Swayze Hamlet “To Be Nice, or To Not Be Nice?” The split infinitive will no doubt rile purists, but this is Road House we’re talking about, not Shakespeare. Besides, “to not be nice” is a proper verb in Road House. You either “be nice,” or you “not be nice,” and knowing which of the two is appropriate is the central question facing the film’s protagonist, Dalton, played by Patrick Swayze. For Dalton, an overeducated, abstemious bouncer with an inclination toward fairness, to be nice is to suffer the slings and arrows and various violent outbursts of drunken bar patrons and to offer, politely, to walk them to the door. To be nice is to buy a trunkful of spare tires along with a used car in anticipation of the inconveniences that life will send your way as you do your job cooling off thugs at closing time. It is to smile as you serve Jack Daniels to the sneering bad guy at the bar. It is to observe decorum and treat with decency the people you have to tolerate because it lends you an ethos of unimpeachability when you finally crack and decide it’s time To Not Be Nice. At one point, a bouncer in the crew actually asks Dalton how you’re supposed to know when it is time to not be nice. “You won’t,” Dalton says, “I’ll let you know,” but in a pretty general sense, the movie is all about Dalton arriving at the moment where he accepts that it’s time to not be nice. Hamlet eventually comes to terms with the “not to be” option, and he seems to have accepted it entirely when, at the start of act 5, he observes that “the readiness is all.” Dalton never really says much, but it’s clear that he crosses the line shortly after his friend and mentor, Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott), is killed. Hamlet is a revenge tragedy. Sometimes it is difficult for students to see that underneath all that abstract ratiocination and soliloquizing, Shakespeare was working with a formula: ghost of murdered man charges son with revenge; son uses antic madness as a kind of smokescreen while he plots intricate, poetic revenge; everybody dies in the end. Shakespeare transformed the formula by having his revenger reflect on revenge – on the best way of getting it, but also on a whole series of ethical and philosophical and religious questions. From Margreta De Grazia’s (2007) comprehensive “Hamlet” Without Hamlet to Stephen Greenblatt’s “strategic opacity” argument (2004), recent critical work on Hamlet has refocused assessment of the play on Hamlet as a transformation of the character type Shakespeare inherited with the story. As James Phelan notes, “one of Shakespeare’s great gifts as a creator of character is his ability to fill the mold of type with individuality” (Phelan 2006: 229). While Dalton doesn’t quite recreate the noble despair of Hamlet, he works in that tradition, and Road House clearly wants to be more than a genre-bound thriller like Death Wish. As a revision of its genre, in fact, Road House has Hamletlike scope and imagination. No kidding. But there are also plenty of specific parallels and analogues. First, Dalton has only a last name. Or maybe a first name; it’s not entirely clear, but like Hamlet, he’s got only one name. “Who is that guy?” everyone in the film keeps asking. “It is I, Dalton the Dane!” He also has a degree in philosophy from NYU, which might as well be Wittenberg, as far as the town of Jasper is concerned. He is a thinking man among drinking men, preferring black coffee over alcohol at work, though given his life in the bar business, he is certainly native there and to the manner born. Like Hamlet, he is beloved of the distracted multitudes, especially the women who

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populate the margins of the bar scenes. He is laconic and brooding and aloof. He does tai chi in his garden, which works as the equivalent of fencing and which comes in handy when he gets into a duel down by the river that separates his rented loft from the estate of evil patriarch Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara). Wesley, the Claudius analog, sends a henchman to dispatch Dalton, leading to a set piece mixed-martial-arts fight in a sandpit by the river. The henchman eventually produces a handgun – like Laertes, he is determined to win a fair fight by being unfair – but Dalton disarms him and then uses his bare hands to tear out the henchman’s throat. The laconic reserve turns to fury. The animating observation of my argument about accidental appropriation is that the basic continuity of plot points and character types between early modern drama and modern popular entertainment is an excellent way into Shakespeare for beginning students. Character type, plot, tropes, and topoi are remarkably stable in Shakespeare, and if students can be brought to a basic grasp of these elements of Shakespearean narrative before they approach a new play, they can spend less time worrying about what is happening and focus their attention instead on how it is happening. Because one of the joys of Shakespeare is in following how the plays tweak formula in order to transform the formulaic into the poetic and fascinating, starting with the formula can give students a working foothold. But because establishing a formula in Shakespeare can be made difficult by the stressful torque the plays put on that formula, it can help to start with easier, more familiar and accessible deployments of similar narrative formulas in contemporary film. So if the suggestion that Road House actually has ambitions and imagination seems too generous, consider that using contemporary film to teach early modern drama doesn’t mean teaching important (which usually means challenging) films or even particularly good ones. One of the joys (and upsides) of teaching a film like Road House is that it is so easily mocked: its surface simplicity, its dated gender politics and heteronormativity, its deployment of cartoon-like villains, its casual regard for plausibility – in short, its 1980s profile – are all features that make it easier to tackle critically. And while all of these features can be complicated in the course of a deeper reading – in fact, challenging students to make the case that Road House is worthy of more serious study is a great follow-up writing assignment – at the outset, using a film that can be reflexively dismissed for its campiness, cringe-inducing politics, and simplicity presents students with a relatively easy analytical task. Starting students with a narrative they can master critically allows them to bring that mastery to a more difficult narrative coded in Shakespeare’s challenging and archaic syntax and diction.

Narrative theory: actants versus characters In narrative theory terms, Road House can be used to teach Hamlet because both draw on the same basic narrative functions. The contours of both plots are dictated by genre, and their characters can be approached in terms of their structural roles as actants whose actions ultimately reflect what the story needs them to do. As a preliminary move to set up the more interesting and subtle work of close reading, the outlines of story and character in Road House and in Hamlet can be drawn at the outset to establish expectations. It may be helpful in introducing this premise for students to give an overview of relevant narrative theory or even to cover a few short readings. Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1968) is easily covered in summary in other introductory readings. Snippets of Aristotle (actions comprise character, which in any case is secondary in importance to plot) can work well, and John Fiske’s Television Culture remains a

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useful and insightful summary of defining theoretical scholarship on how stories work and how to read them critically. The character-vs-action debate can be pursued further, through Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955) (“The Structural Study of Myth” is approachable and engaging) to later structuralists, such as Tzvetan Todorov and Roland Barthes. Along with Fiske, Mieke Bal’s Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative is an excellent companion for advanced study. It is also one of the few resources that makes room in the discussion for questions of gender, which makes it especially valuable. Fiske’s table-format simplification of Propp’s thirty-one “Functions” is compact and commonly used, but a prose summary, such as this one from Roger Silverstone, can capture the basic idea and of structural analysis when the goal is to consider formula: The scene is set by the absence or death of significant members of a family, by the arrival of a villainous character or by various acts of deception, stupidity or disobedience. The story proper begins with either a villainy or the experience of a loss (lack) – in other words, through the assertion of disequilibrium, which it is the purpose of the following action to remedy. The hero or searcher would then leave home and become involved in a series of adventures which test him and which lead, perhaps with magical help, to a successful resolution; either he finds what he is looking for or he triumphs over the villain. The triumph is marked; the hero has some evidence of it and he returns home though pursued. His arrival may be something of a shock, for he will not be recognised as the hero and will subsequently have to test his status against the claims of a false hero. Once this has been achieved and he has gained his full recognition, the hero can be rewarded with marriage or gifts. In any event the equilibrium has been re-established, the lack redeemed, the villainy resolved. Silverstone 1981: 87 Road House establishes disequilibrium by showing us, in sequence, a broken night club that needs fixing and then a functional night club whose cooler is ready to move on. It shows us later that Dalton has his own internal disequilibrium, a struggle with a violent past to which his pacifist “be nice” strategy is an incomplete solution. This interior struggle, the external expression of which we see in Dalton’s habit of tearing out people’s throats, is resolved only when Dalton opts not to kill Wesley in the film’s final fight sequence. Pushed to violent revenge by the murder of his friend and mentor, but pushed also to the verge of losing his love interest, he chooses mercy and nonviolence, and the film establishes equilibrium. Road House thus has an Ophelia parallel in Dalton’s girlfriend, Doc (Elizabeth Kelly Lynch). She lives at the end, in part because Dalton doesn’t actually kill Claudius/Polonius/Wesley. Had he done so, the formula would require Doc to drown herself in the river, grieving the loss of her father figure at the hands of her boyfriend. But death in Hamlet is itself a function of the genre, and one of the most significant differences between Road House and Hamlet is that Road House isn’t a revenge tragedy. Dalton decides to not be nice, but his vengeance falls short of casual slaughter. Hamlet, on the other hand, does and says some pretty nasty things, which means that, for Hamlet to establish equilibrium at the end, all those who have violated or ignored the rule of law must be removed, leaving Fortinbras in charge. Inviting students to find examples of film that bend the conventions of genre can be helpful in unsettling the notion that a formula is inviolable, but exceptions help brings rules into focus. Combining Silverstone’s summary with the labels typically applied to Propp’s catalogue, we might chart Hamlet and Road House like this:

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Function (Propp/Silverstone)

Hamlet

Road House

Preparatory section/scene setting Complication/villainy and disequilibrium Transference/hero leaves

Denmark and Norway feud; questions of succession Claudius murders Hamlet Sr.; ghost discloses murder Hamlet feigns madness and plots revenge Hamlet defeats Claudius Hamlet exchanges forgiveness with Laertes, enjoins Horatio to clear his wounded name Fortinbras arrives to restore order; Horatio lives to tell Hamlet’s story

The Double Deuce is beset; Dalton is recruited Wade Garrett is killed; Doc is threatened Dalton decides to not be nice

Struggle/triumph of hero Return/subsequent testing

Recognition/reward and equilibrium

Dalton defeats Wesley Doc rejects Dalton’s violent ways; Dalton elects not to murder Wesley Dalton wins Doc and is celebrated; Jasper is freed from oppression

The reading of “character” in this model follows the narrative approach of structuralism. The focus is on the character’s function, on what it does in and for the story, rather than on a character’s personality or psychological unity or inwardness. Character in this sense is an effect of action; it is the location and the means of action, not an occasion for exploring motive or interiority or growth and change. From the structuralist tradition of Propp, we can take some basic terms and ideas, approaching characters as actants or actors. An actant, in paraphrase, is one of a set number of structural positions or functions in a story, and an actor is the particular device who (or that, or which) occupies that position and/or carries out that function. The structuralist approach depends fundamentally on the function of the actant as a position that can be filled by any number of different actors. Mieke Bal distinguishes between actor and person: it is not surprising that one class of actors comprises more than one actor. The reverse, the fact that one actor stands for several classes, can only be understood if one disconnects the concept of ‘actor’ from that of ‘person’: this is the reason why the term ‘person’ is avoided when discussing actants and actors. Bal 2009: 208 Using Propp’s “Spheres of Action,” we could assess Hamlet and Road House in terms of the villain (Claudius/Brad Wesley) and the hero (Hamlet/Dalton), who is assisted by a friend (Horatio/ Wade Garrett) and a principle or a plan (“The Mousetrap”/“Be Nice”). A love object (Ophelia/ Doc) contributes to the hero’s drive, which is properly established by a dispatcher (Ghost/Frank Tilghman). There are, of course, other ways of distributing the roles and actions in either story (for instance, the more obvious “dispatcher” in Road House would be the revelation to Dalton that Wesley has killed Wade and is threatening Doc). It can be satisfying and helpful to chart such comparisons, but the exercise also efficiently reveals its own limits, and the critique of structural approaches to understanding narrative is both valid and relevant here. A Proppian approach, which pertains properly to folktale and is applicable more widely only after adaptation, aims primarily to identify basic structures. In drawing parallels between Hamlet and Dalton, we move well beyond the functional and the structural. Characters are typically more complex than devices for a series of actions required by the plot,

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in Hamlet as well as in Road House, and when we approach characters as functions or actants, we can register only what they do for the story. We can say little about who they are, and even if “who they are” is relatively banal, we lose some compelling points of connection if we cannot move beyond basic function. For example, it is interesting that both Hamlet and Dalton reject debauchery, which in both stories is linked to villainous excess. If debauchery can be reduced to a component of “function,” it is also what Roland Barthes, whose later work attempts to account for the dynamics and dimensions of characters beyond their basic function, would call a “seme” – a unit of meaning that, when repeatedly associated with the proper name of an actant or function, begins to create “character” (Barthes 1974: 67). Barthes initially explores characters via the “indices” or “indicators” that attach to them in narratives: “instead of referring to a complementary or consequential act,” as do “functions,” indices refer to “a more or less diffuse concept which is nonetheless necessary to the story: personality traits concerning characters, information with regard to their identity, notations of ‘atmosphere,’ and so on” (Barthes 1975: 246–47).3 Here, Barthes is not concerned specifically or exclusively with character, but rather with a narrative unit that, when predominant in a story, would distinguish, for instance, “popular tales” from “ ‘psychological’ novels”: the former are “predominantly functional,” meaning that their characters are mere reflections of the functions or actants of the class to which they belong, while the latter are “predominantly indicial,” meaning they feature characters whose dominant function is not to advance the narrative (Barthes 1975: 247). Fiske likens the difference to soap operas (indicial) versus action/adventure shows (functional) (Fiske 2011: 142). Later, in S/Z, Barthes turns to a subtler, and far more complex, approach in which character is created “when identical semes traverse the same proper name several times and appear to settle on it” (Barthes 1974: 67). The value here of sketching Barthes’s evolving account of character is in establishing a difference, and even a polarity between “character” as a personality, on the one hand, and, on the other, what Barthes calls the “figure,” a kind of cultural stereotype or character in the sense of Theophrastus: “the figure,” he says, is “not a combination of semes concentrated in a legal Name, nor can biography, psychology, or time encompass it: it is an illegal, impersonal, anachronistic configuration of symbolic relationships” (1974: 68).4 We can use reductive models of character to establish parallels and analogs at the structural level, after which the more complex question of character can be tackled. Shakespeare’s characters have sustained centuries of intense and heated academic inquiry, partly because of the dynamic ways they both derive from and supersede the types on which they are modeled. Falstaff, for instance, who is basically a Vice figure, can also be understood in terms of the miles gloriosus or Theophrastus’s “Coward,” and so forth. But, he is more than any or all of the types or figures that could be included in his dramatic heritage. He is both constrained by the fundamentals of the Vice, whose function is to persist in villainy while the hero reforms himself, and a freeform transformation of the Vice: Falstaff would not be Falstaff if he set aside his dissolute ways, but even the Vice’s traditional favor with the audience cannot account for Falstaff ’s beloved status, in Shakespeare’s day or in our own.5 Indeed, you don’t have to be A.C. Bradley to see that Shakespeare’s characters are arguably the perfect example of why mapping out a story using basic structural analysis to slot characters into functions or actants can only ever be a starting point for critical response. My second test case turns on this question of actant versus character. It requires that we think about what links and what separates characters across 400 years and about whether Shakespeare manages to conceal the artifice whereby what a character wants is plausibly coterminous with what the play needs a character to want.

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Air Force One: of mice and cookies There is a significant literary allusion in Air Force One (1997, dir. Wolfgang Petersen), but not to Shakespeare. It involves the 1985 classic If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond. In the children’s story, a mouse is given a cookie by a young boy sitting outside his house. The mouse then excitedly draws from the boy a series of contiguous or associated concessions – a glass of milk, some nail scissors, a broom, etc. – that ultimately return the story to its starting point, another cookie. In the film, the president, Harrison Ford’s James Marshall, quotes the book’s opening line during an emergency phone call to the White House. He is hiding in the cargo bay of a hijacked Air Force One, trying to explain to his vice president, Glenn Close’s Kathryn Bennett, why it would be useless to agree to the hijackers’ demands: “Kathryn, if you give a mouse a cookie . . .” the president says. “He’s gonna want a glass of milk,” she responds, finishing the quotation and indicating that she accepts Marshall’s intuition about the terrorists who have taken over Air Force One. They have asked for the release of a villain who is in the custody of the heroes, and Marshall thinks meeting one demand will merely lead to others. The allusion to If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, however, is awkward. To begin with, at no point do the terrorists indicate that they are whimsical or distractible, like the mouse in the story, or that their initial demand is a ruse, or that they are anything but entirely focused on their mission: to secure, by the American president’s order, the release of the villain. By contrast, the mouse in If You Give A Mouse a Cookie wants a glass of milk to go with the cookie, and then he wants to have a look in the mirror to see whether he has a “milk moustache” (never mind that he drinks the milk from a straw), and looking in the mirror leads him to want to trim his whiskers, and so on – but hijacker/terrorist Egor Korshunov (Gary Oldman) only ever wants the one thing. The film is so clear about Korshunov’s focus on his goal, in fact, that Korshunov reduces pretty easily to a character type. For all of the complexities of character we might sense in Oldman’s embodied representation of the scripted lines, Korshunov ultimately collapses into what in Barthes’s terms we might call a “figure”: the Communist Ideologue from cold war cinema, complaining about “this infection you call ‘freedom’ ” and slouching into a gleaming reverie as he broadcasts the Russian anthem “The Internationale” over the hijacked plane’s intercom. Yes, he does decline to honor his promise to free his captives once the villain has been released, noting their usefulness in advancing future demands, but this behavior, like the wistful pride Korshunov takes in hearing “The Internationale,” outweighs his individuality and turns him into a mere function, an actant. To put it another way, Korshunov turns his mind toward future demands not because, like the hero in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, he is enthusiastic and distracted, moving from one point of intense focus to a contiguous or associated object, but because he is the villain, and the villain never sets the hero free. Korshunov wants what the plot of Air Force One requires him to want. Both the mouse and Korshunov are best understood in the sense that their characters are functions of the plot: both stories are functional, rather than indicial, narratives. The character of President Marshall, however, further highlights this functionality, opening up an interpretive angle that suggests an alternative literary parallel for the film: Romeo and Juliet. The opening sequence of Air Force One goes out of its way to set up a defining observation about Marshall: he is the politician who’s done being political, done playing games, done negotiating with terrorists and the militant dictators they support. Early on, Marshall ditches a scripted political speech and gives instead a self-critical talk in which he announces his new resolve, and the country’s new policy, to do the right thing, even if it is politically inconvenient. Marshall thereby also approaches a character type, the Refreshingly Honest Politician. But the film then pushes him

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through a succession of other character types, some of which require contradictory behavior: it ultimately needs an action hero, but in order to present us with that figure, it has to have Marshall betray the other figures as he moves from honest politician to private citizen to selfless hero. He announces that there will be no more negotiations with terrorists and casts himself as the committed leader who will see this new policy into action. Faced with the imperative to leave Air Force One in the escape pod, however – an imperative dictated by the notion that this singular person with a singular vision also has the singular power to see it through – he refuses, explaining that he won’t abandon his family: the bold public leader (actant A) becomes a domestic figure, choosing private life over public responsibility (actant B), and so forth. Marshall effectively “has no chronological or biographical standing; he has no Name; he is nothing but a site for the passage (and return) of the figure” (Barthes 1974: 68). As he works to save family and friends in danger, he is forced to betray his promise – a personal choice that sets private life before public good puts enormous stress on the structure the film erects in its opening moments. Whether Air Force One wants to critique formulae as it makes this move is debatable. But in giving us a hero who fails to honor the promise he himself articulates, Air Force One gives us a wonderful contemporary analog to Romeo and Juliet. Passing silently beyond the huge, rich mass of Romeo and Juliet appropriations that can focus classroom discussion on star-crossed love, fate, pointless social feuds, bad parenting, teen suicide, and so forth,6 this pairing brings us to the social obligations that accompany subject positions in an early modern setting versus the very different, but nonetheless analogous obligations and positions that structure Air Force One: Marshall’s choice to value the personal, private, and domestic over his obligation to the public, to the greater good, indexes the stakes of Romeo and Juliet’s behavior. Like Marshall, they put personal desire above social obligations to their respective houses. And while those obligations are a problem, not a solution (the play begins in line three to lecture us about the perversity of the ancient grudge that makes the love affair illicit), the lovers’ behavior only makes sense if it is at odds with what they understand to be their duty; it only makes sense if what they desire and pursue is proscribed. Romeo and Juliet cannot disclose their love to their families, even though we know all along that such a move is precisely what is needed to establish the equilibrium we eventually get in the wake of their deaths. An exchange between Capulet and Tybalt in 1.5 crystalizes this point: scolding Tybalt for wanting to rough up Romeo, Capulet notes that Romeo is well behaved and respected in Verona as “a virtuous and well-govern’d youth” and then commands Tybalt not to disparage him. The play quickly turns the moment into a battle of Capulet’s authority versus Tybalt’s youthful impudence (“It is my will, the which if thou respect/Show a fair presence. . . .”),7 but first it establishes for us the frustrating prospect of an alternative scenario in which the lovers’ union would be blessed by the two families’ elders. Like Gertrude’s striking disclosure in Hamlet that she had expected Ophelia and Hamlet to marry, however, this moment can only be read as a narrative device that provokes in the reader/audience a frustrated anticipation of a happy ending that in fact is never available and that cannot be read as a genuinely missed alternative. The play here requires Capulet to celebrate Romeo so that we can mourn the loss of an alternative we also know was never viable. The injunction forbidding Romeo and Juliet from making their love public has to be at once binding and mistaken in order for the story to unfold and for the play to work. In this sense, President Marshall’s series of required betrayals are a guide for understanding how Juliet and Romeo’s pursuit of private, personal desires is a betrayal of their public, social obligations. Their choices mark the intersection of plot and character, the needs of the one dictating the major moves of the other. If the richness of Shakespeare’s characters is more interesting than the clinical requirements of the story – it is to me – the value in sketching structural analogs, whether 224

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at the thematic level of private versus public obligations, or at the level of ­characters-as-functions, is a matter of providing a foundation for further class discussion. Why don’t they just tell their parents that they are in love? The obvious answer – because then we’d have no play – is unhelpful, or at least incomplete. Using accidental appropriations, we can offer a better answer that addresses how narratives work and what makes stories the same as well as different. Accidental appropriation can be helpful at the macro level in uncovering the formulaic structures Shakespeare’s plays simultaneously deploy and disrupt, but perhaps also, ironically, in focusing classroom discussion of appropriations that aren’t accidental. Some students will reject the idea that Juliet and Romeo are like Marshall, pointing out that the lovers do not chafe against the requirements of the plot, since in Shakespeare’s telling, the functional value of their decisions never comes into conflict with the continuity of their characters. We might send such students directly to Alan Sinfield’s (1992) fantastic account of failed continuity in Shakespeare’s strong female characters, Olivia, Lady Macbeth, Desdemona: they all fall disappointingly silent under the weight of convention, or whatever term we want to use for the assertion of ideology.8 But whether through Sinfield, who doesn’t bother with narrative theory, or Barthes, who doesn’t bother with Shakespeare, we come in a roundabout way back to the issue of Shakespeare’s greatness. If students are unlikely to be convinced that Air Force One is comparable to Romeo and Juliet, they can at least begin to see Shakespeare in terms of the storytelling devices common to all narratives. And this, in turn, brings us back to the question that dominates appropriation studies today: how can we approach echoes of Shakespeare in contemporary art and entertainment in a way that doesn’t organize discussion around Shakespeare as the source of meaning and significance? If academics have managed to move away from fidelity as the dominating criterion of assessment in appropriation studies, the academic work discussed at the outset of this chapter shows clearly that the “Shakespeare” mythos is still a defining presence whose gravity pulls appropriations into its orbit. What I think we can see when we set Shakespeare next to contemporary analogs like Road House or films with parallels further afield, like Air Force One, is an opportunity to ground Shakespeare’s artistry in the conventions that also reveal its limits: Shakespeare’s characters may manage their obligations more nimbly than those we find in popular action films, but there is here an excellent opportunity to discuss Shakespeare’s singular genius, not by bracketing it off, as we might do when trying to pull appropriations out from Shakespeare’s shadow, but by working at a kind of inverted appropriation. Such an approach shows through the routineness of incidental echoes the quotidian artifice of something as powerful and sacrosanct as “Shakespeare.”9

Notes 1 Many schemes are available for sorting and assessing Shakespeare films, but scholarship on appropriation has been moving steadily away from Shakespeare even as an organizing principle. See, for example, Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (Joubin and Rivlin 2014); Shakespearean Echoes (Hansen and Wetmore 2015); and Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare (Desmet, Loper, and Casey 2017). 2 The incident has been frequently discussed in a variety of contexts. Desmet points out that “the spark of recognition necessary to appropriation” was presumably absent from the encounter (2014: 53). 3 Barthes’s “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” was first published in Communications 8 (1966). Here I cite the 1975 English translation. 4 Commentary on Barthes typically emphasizes the differences between his early and his later approaches to character, though the polarity sketched here is implied all along. 5 For a fuller consideration, see Matthew Kozusko,“Why are Shakespeare’s Characters So Relatable?” (2015). 6 For a good recent overview of Romeo and Juliet and appropriation, see the introduction to Shakespeare/ Not Shakespeare (2015), especially pp. 7–9; see also Jim Casey’s contribution to the volume, “Hype­ Romeo & Juliet: Postmodern Adaptation and Shakespeare” (2017).

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Matthew Kozusko 7 Romeo and Juliet, 1.5.76–81. The reference is to the Folger edition, edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine (Shakespeare 2011). 8 See Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (1992), especially Chapter 3. 9 With affectionate thanks to Eric Mallin, whose undergraduate Shakespeare and film course at the University of Texas at Austin is the origin of this pedagogical and critical work.

References Bal, Mieke. 2009. Narratology. 3rd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. 1975. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” Trans. Lionel Duisit. New Literary History 6.2: 237–72. Casey, Jim. 2017. “HypeRomeo & Juliet: Postmodern Adaptation and Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. Eds. Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey. New York: Palgrave. 59–75. De Grazia, Margreta. 2007. “Hamlet” without Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Desmet, Christy. 2014. “Recognizing Shakespeare, Rethinking Fidelity.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 41–57. Desmet, Christy, Natalie Roper, and Jim Casey, eds. 2017. Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave. Fiske, John. 2011. Television Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2004. Will in the World. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Hansen, Adam, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. 2015. Shakespearean Echoes. New York: Palgrave. Herrington, Rowdy, dir. 1989. Road House. MGM. DVD. Howard, Tony. 2000. “Shakespeare’s Cinematic Offshoots.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Ed. Russell Jackson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 295–323. Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Elizabeth Rivlin. 2014. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. New York: Palgrave. Kozusko, Matt. 2015. “Why are Shakespeare’s Characters So Relatable?” In Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage. Eds. Catherine Loomis and Sid Ray. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickson University Press. 39–51. Lanier, Douglas. 2014. “Shakespearean Rhizomatics.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 21–40. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1955.“The Structural Study of Myth.” The Journal of American Folklore 68.270: 428–44. Peterson, Wolfgang, dir. 1997. Air Force One. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. DVD. Phelan, James. 2006. The Nature of Narrative. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Propp, Vladimir. 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press. Shakespeare, William. 2011. Romeo and Juliet. Eds. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon & Schuster. Sinfield, Alan. 1992. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press. Silverstone, Roger. 1981. The Message of Television. London: Heinemann.

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20 TEACHING GLOBAL SHAKESPEARE Visual culture projects in action Laurie E. Osborne

Colby College is a small liberal arts college in central Maine, located in the little city of Waterville. Nevertheless, the school has been increasingly successful in offering its students global experiences. Throughout my twenty-nine years at the college, upwards of three-quarters of our students have taken a semester abroad in their junior year, and many of our faculty and programs have embraced research in the communities beyond the “Colby bubble” and beyond the U.S. In its recent “transformational” capital campaign, the college identified global connections and universal student experiences as two key themes. One key consequence has been the creation of “DavisConnects [which] provides Colby students global, internship, and research experiences regardless of personal networks, connections, and financial means” (DavisConnects n.d.). Essentially, the college has reimagined the standard career center as an access point to experiences beyond and after Colby, most significantly enabling global encounters. In line with these aspirations, EN412: Global Shakespeares, in both its incarnations, took on the complex task of negotiating the necessity of preparing college students for their interactions with the wider world beyond a semi-rural northeastern U.S. community. This chapter illuminates the crucial ways that world cinema and art proved an effective means of addressing that task. Despite the global initiatives on which my college prides itself, teaching Global Shakespeare poses several significant challenges: our students’ limited knowledge base in foreign languages and cultures, the obstacles in accessing versions of his works within those cultures, and the necessity of learning about several cultural and historical contexts in addition to studying the plays themselves. The first and last of these require highly motivated students. For many, Shakespeare’s plays alone pose enough difficulty without the additional labor of studying wideranging cultural interactions with those works. One obvious strategy is limiting the number of cultures, perhaps singling out Shakespeare in a few countries; indeed, one course iteration did involve something like a focused comparison, implying the wider influence of Shakespeare. However, my larger solution to these issues of complexity and motivation was to involve students with visual culture projects that not only incorporated and spurred their own research but also enabled collective insights. As Nicholas Mirazoeff observes, visual culture, critically defined as “the assemblage of visualities, images, and ways of seeing in a given place and time,” operates more generally as “a method and form of comparative interpretation in a variety of disciplines” (2013: xxix). In the specific context of this course, “visual culture” refers to transmedial adaptations of Shakespeare that 227

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emphasize visual representation legible both within and beyond the immediate cultural context of their creation. By transforming Shakespeare (see Iyengar 2017: 11), visual culture Shakespeare not only adapts his works in predominantly image-based representations, but also simultaneously embeds those representations in specific national historical circumstances and releases them from those contexts. The images and visual meaning-production translate more readily across different cultures than do text- and language-based adaptations, whose linguistic artistry is locally accessible but often impenetrable to non-native-speakers. By approaching Global Shakespeare through these artworks, students are empowered to explore both the global influence of Shakespeare and the influence of other cultures on his ongoing artistic importance. Basically, this course invited them to investigate Shakespeare within collaborations across cultures in ways comparable to Diana Henderson’s arguments for Shakespearean adaptation as collaboration with the past. However, the “Shake-shifting” envisioned by these classes involves “the delightful and uneasy results of collaborating” across cultures as well as “with the past” (Henderson 2006: 1). In line with the transmedial adaptations that Henderson explores, my 2013 Global Shakespeares course centered around world film, while the 2016 incarnation evolved to include developing an exhibit in the Colby Museum of Art. The contrast between these two courses underscores the opportunities and drawbacks involved in using Shakespearean film and art as a means of helping students explore how many different cultures have interacted with and reinvented Shakespeare’s plays. While balancing materials is undoubtedly the most significant challenge, my course suggests that visual culture projects not only enrich our understanding of Global Shakespeares beyond the classroom but also motivate deeper engagement with the plays themselves. Teaching a “Global Shakespeares” course initially and logically propelled me towards film. Not only do early silent films operate across national boundaries, but also the silent film era offers numerous Shakespearean possibilities. However, the course’s real focus soon became the many non-Anglo-American Shakespeare films that have been produced and earned critical attention since the mid-twentieth century. From Grigor Kozintzev’s Gamlet (1964) and Koril Lir (1972) to Alexander Abele’s Makibefo (1999) to Don Selwyn’s Maori Merchant of Venice (2002) to Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara (2006), my choices for our group film screenings were intended to show my students how distinctively different cultures have transformed Shakespeare within films set in their own social and cultural contexts. Students also presented and reviewed “partner films” from another nation for each play to intensify the comparison and extend our cultural reach. Initially, my hopes were not high. Earlier attempts to include foreign language films in my Shakespeare on Screen course had met with scant success. Those students tended to consider such films off topic, given their interests in the canon of “truly” Shakespearean film. Much to my pleasure and surprise, my Global Shakespeares students fully embraced the broad array of films we watched collectively. They led fascinating discussions on their assigned “partner films”; they wrote articulate and interesting reviews; they even embraced surprisingly varied research topics at the end of the course. The early readings in the course helped to set expectations and orient them for the work ahead. We read Laura Bohannan’s well-known “Shakespeare in the Bush” (1966), as well as subsequent critiques such as Michelle Scalise Sugiyama’s “Cultural Variation is Part of Human Nature: Literary Universals, Context-Sensitivity, and ‘Shakespeare in the Bush’ ” (2003). Our first play and film, Selwyn’s Maori Merchant of Venice, viewed in conjunction with reading Julie McDougall’s “Maori Take on Shakespeare” (2011), encouraged them to resist envisioning Shakespeare’s plays as the standard against which to judge these films. Instead, they began to examine them as collaborations between Shakespeare’s plays and non-Anglo-British cultures, as interactions between cultures that mutually enrich each other’s artwork. Because none of the students really had the linguistic skills to engage the verbal dimensions, even in languages they 228

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had studied, the visual features of these films became their richest source of interpretation and analysis. Watching the rituals in Alexander Abele’s Makibefo (1999), tracking the native dances and folk clothing in Ivàn Lipkies’s Huapango (2004), and observing visual representations of class in Korol Lir (1972) not only enriched their insights into Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear, respectively, but also exposed the particularity and richness of the visual in global appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays. For these films, as for Selwyn’s, critical reading proved especially important. Mark Thornton Burnett’s “Applying the Paradigm: Shakespeare and World Cinema” (2010), as well as several individual analyses of particular films, provided contexts that students lacked, and they undertook research for their final project with enthusiasm and greater confidence as a result of reading these scholars. Three assignments in my 2013 class particularly inspired and empowered their work. One was our roundtable discussion of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool (2004) and Xiaogang Feng’s Ye Yan/The Banquet (2006). We drew on “Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective (2010),” an array of essays edited by Alexa Alice Joubin for Borrowers and Lenders and specifically designed for classroom use. My students came to class as the critics for a roundtable discussion of “their” work. Beforehand, we collectively devised questions to guide the panel discussion: What cultural details or context do you as your critic supply that helps to illuminate the film(s) in question and how useful are these contexts? What does your analysis add most effectively to an understanding of specifically Asian Shakespeare beyond the local interest in the particular film(s) under consideration? What perspective or concept that you as the critic bring up would you consider useful to our broader consideration of global Shakespeare? By that point, we had screened or talked about Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara (2006) and Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), as well as the two films represented in the articles, so the class was fully engaged with the materials. The purpose of this staged discussion was twofold: first, our collective exploration of varying arguments about each film effectively forestalled any tendency to offer a monolithic interpretation of their significance, and second, having the students embody a particular critic’s position enabled both vigorous representation of each critical position and meaningful testing of them. The results exceeded my expectations in valuable ways. Performing as the critics liberated students to explore their own ideas further, sometimes stepping out of character to disagree with their “previous” position. Our debate bolstered their confidence about participating meaningfully in research and dialogue about worldwide performances of Shakespeare. In our second roundtable discussion, each student analyzed and presented to the class a brief film adaptation from Herbert Fritsch’s hamlet_X (2001), an online site whose performance innovations have new media and intermedial implications for Global Shakespeares. Fritsch’s artistic process involves deliberately dividing an important German text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Schlegel/Tieck translation, into over a hundred pieces. Taking each fragment as a starting place, Fritsch plans to create 111 separate, distinct films. To insure the multiple voices, “No actor was to appear twice, and every video film was performed in a different genre” (Wiens 2006: 228). Fritsch ultimately envisions “a large electronic mosaic, a labyrinth of scenes, conversation reflexes, interviews, portraits of people” (Fritsch, quoted in Wiens 2006: 225). This collision of genres, as much as the individuality of the films, illuminates the complexity of Fritsch’s growing network of Shakespeare, German culture/popular culture, and cinematic performance. Before asking students to explore the films on their own, we analyzed four specific filmlets together: Die Hielige Familie (The Holy Family), Tatort (Crime Scene), Pflegeeltern (Fosterparents), 229

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and Pasternoster. My goal was to help them recognize that the individual films use distinctive yet accessible cinematic strategies to realize elements of Hamlet. For example, Die Hielige Familie (The Holy Family) depicts a child Hamlet orchestrating a kitchen table encounter between his mother, the ghost of his father, and Claudius (Fritsch 2004: DVD: II; www.hamletx.de/filme row 6, col. 6) and combines almost verbatim the language from the closet scene (Act 3, Scene 4) and imagery based in other language from the play. Of the four characters, only young Hamlet arrives in this domestic scene conventionally through an opening door. Fritsch uses special effects to fill the other seats at the table. First, Old Hamlet is pieced together at the head of the table from a swirl of black fragments, a process that reverses when he walks out and hits the door, shattering into black fragments that fall to the floor. Arriving next, “like Niobe, all tears,”1 Gertrude in a lacy wedding dress solidifies from a growing, multi-colored droplet that falls from the ceiling into her chair opposite Old Hamlet. Claudius, who appears last, basically inflates in his seat and possesses so little identity that that he can barely sit upright. Throughout the sequence, he topples from his chair, his head slides over onto Gertrude’s shoulder, and his eyes roll back in his head. The wedding feast in front of them soon literally becomes the funeral baked meats, covered in maggots and rotting on the table. The constraints of this ultra-short film become its advantages: it can use an array of special effects with no need to sustain them over a full-length project. Just as important, this sequence’s visual treatment of Hamlet’s nuclear family differs totally from the other representations through hamlet_X, each of which takes on a different set of generic markers. As a whole, Fritsch’s “projekt” suggests that, for global internet audiences, these styles inhabit a liminal space between the familiar and the unfamiliar, and not just because the textual Hamlet recurs throughout the web project. While many of the films resonate with Volksbühne, a Berlin theater group strongly aligned with late twentieth-century radical aesthetics, and draw on its actors (Wiens 2006: 223), one of Fitsch’s filmlets, Tatort (Fritsch 2004: DVD: III; www.hamletx.de/filme row 1, col. 1), performs part of Hamlet within the familiar television genre of the crime show. However, in Tatort (Crime Scene), Fritsch’s strategy of “putting different film genres over the existing material – as in a frame or filter” engages its viewers most fully in nationally specific ways (Wiens 2006: 229). As Birgit Wiens explains, Fritsch’s film alludes to a specific German TV series: Tatort is a well-known German crime series that was filmed using television actor detectives, Dominic Raake and Boris Aljinovic. In the hamlet_X variant, the actors appeared in their detective roles as the Shakespearian characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – but looking as they did in the television series, unshaven with their leather jackets. They request the File Polonius, interrogate the temporarily arrested Hamlet about where Polonius might be, and report to Claudius using a telephone. Wiens 2006: 229 Even lacking familiarity with this particular crime show, students discovered that they could readily grasp how the contemporary generic features of the crime drama can meaningfully frame facets of Shakespeare’s play. Because Fritsch insists that each film segment draw upon a distinct, separate performance genre, “for example, as a thriller, a game show, a fashion show, or a commercial” (Wiens 2006: 228), these styles are also broadly recognizable, like Tatort’s Hamlet-as-crime-show. However, German audiences have a better chance to grasp the full, multi-level implications of the casting and genres that Fritsch provides. Although Birgit Wiens praises the multimedial effects that Fritsch creates, with “[i]ronic reinterpretations of well known images from other media [that] 230

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constantly keep popping up,” the example that she offers, “a distorted test pattern for the television station named Helsinger TV,” also suggests that full complexity in Fritsch’s project is most accessible for German, perhaps even Berlin, audiences (2006: 228). Although test patterns are common in many nations, the specific test pattern that Fritsch deploys is a national rather than a universal marker for testing television signals, simultaneously foreign and oddly familiar for U.S. students. Moreover, the genre frameworks, functioning within “contradictory design interests,” often push the narrative fully beyond the language of the play, even in the Schlegel/Tieck translation. For example, Fritsch incorporates “Portraits, or interviews” with characters that include “the gynecologist of Gertrude, the gatekeeper of the castle, the investment advisor of Claudius, or the fencing coach of Hamlet” (Fritsch 2004: DVD: I; Projekt 4). Some such film fragments multiply their levels of humor, significant design, and insight in ways that directly challenge the efficacy of translated access through subtitles, which are available on the DVDs. One film, Pflegeeltern (Fosterparents), depicts Laertes and Ophelia’s foster parents, apparently interviewed by a news reporter in search of the scoop about Ophelia’s suicide (Fritsch 2004: DVD: II; www.hamlet-x. de/filme row 4, col. 2). Sitting on their couch behind a collection of wine glasses, candles, and beer bottles, they share their thoughts about Polonius’s parenting and Ophelia’s actions, display their home and their cooking skills, and show pictures of the siblings. Meanwhile, a superimposed small crown, presumably a TV station logo, rotates in the upper righthand corner of the screen, and a news ticker scrolls periodically across the bottom of the screen. The news ticker’s first appearance draws the audience’s attention because its unusually ornate frame sweeps up and down over the interview before listing the relative rise and fall of several characters’ personal “stocks,” followed, on the same scrolling news ticker, by the recipe for “Dänische Fischsuppe (Für 4–6 personen)” that the foster parents then make. The HelsingDow then returns to let the viewer know that Gertrude is at 11.7%, down 4.6 and, after another narrative intrusion, lists the “gains” of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Fortinbras, and Horatio. By including screen superimpositions (news tickers, the logo), musical interludes, and interview conventions, Pflegeeltern demonstrates the importance of multiple layers of local and generalizable visual markers. In this film, the multitasking demanded by new media occurs at the level of the audience’s attention to dynamic composition within the screen image. Needless to say, these overlapping codes speak directly to students embedded in their own multitasking video culture. Another of Fritsch’s filmlets, Pasternoster (Fritsch 2004: Vol. I; www.hamlet-x.de/filme row 4, col. 3), uses the particularity of Berlin architecture to register an intriguing and complex cinematic nostalgia that both Shakespearean and non-Anglophone components of the film illuminate. On one level, Pasternoster invokes the paternalism of Shakespeare’s play in its title, which alludes to pater noster, “Our Father,” in Latin; at the same time, however, the title also refers to the film’s unusual setting, the paternoster elevator in the Berlin finance ministry. Since paternosters are significantly more common in Europe than in the U.K. and do not exist in the U.S., the setting itself is Eurocentric and dated; moreover, this particular paternoster operates in Berlin. Thus, title and setting intertwine, yoking Shakespearean themes with continental, national, and even urban specificity. Moreover, while the name of the device supposedly refers to the Catholic context of saying one’s paternoster on rosary beads, the rise and fall that turns the elevator mechanism into a cycle harkens back to early modern imagery of Fortune’s wheel. The film’s single character, an unnamed friend of Hamlet and Horatio from Wittenberg, rides up and down, sometimes appearing directly opposite himself or jumping out and in of elevator cars or even briefly in the elevator car itself, as he speaks about Hamlet’s fascination with magic and Horatio’s interest in the “zombie – the living dead – the one who returns.” The speaker’s account of Horatio’s rising 231

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fortunes and Hamlet’s problems strongly reinforces the imagery of Fortune’s Wheel, especially in his final comments about their relationship and his situation in the elevator: “This cycle? It doesn’t stop, does it?” (Fritsch 2004: DVD I, English subtitles). At the same time, Pasternoster very strongly alludes to the history of celluloid filmmaking by representing, visually and aurally, its literal mechanisms. The nonstop circulation of the paternoster recalls the movement of the filmstrip through a projector, as the continuous cycling of the elevator cars become the equivalent of sequential film frames. While the cyclical movement of the elevator car “frames” evokes film, Fritsch reinforces that parallel in several ways. By accelerating or decelerating the elevator’s movement, he simulates under-cranking and over-cranking, special effects that date from early filmmaking. At the same time, several “hiccups” in the flow of images and bursts of static suggest the filmstrip slipping cogs during a screening. These representations of both intentional and accidental features in celluloid filmmaking become even more noticeable when Fritsch reorients the screen image so that the vertical rise-and-fall of the paternoster suddenly appears as horizontal movement, which pans the figure in the elevator from feet to head and then head to feet. This section of the film, the only one that explicitly uses horizontal movement, enacts the transformation created when the vertical, cyclical movement of early filming and film projection produces screen images in which horizontal movements predominate. Fritsch’s playful representations of celluloid filmmaking in Pasternoster are all the more intriguing because, as my students observed, his films are wholly digital. Like “alten Hamlet” or the zombies that supposedly fascinate Horatio, historical forms of filmmaking haunt this most forward-looking of film experiments and illuminate the ways in which the project engages current and past media forms. Though the subsequent roundtable, during which the students individually explored other filmlets, was somewhat less successful than our group analysis of my examples, hamlet_X helped students understand what multinational Shakespearean visual culture contributes to thinking about cinema as both a local and a transnational phenomenon. As these small films suggest, Fritsch’s project showcases important connections not only between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and world cinema but also between the deepest structures and memories of past cinema and the new media interconnections that such web projects enable. Though my students were somewhat daunted by the avant-garde filming and only grasped the rich possibilities with more prodding than I had hoped, Fritsch’s web installation proved to them how readily the transnational can also become transmedial. The aspect of the course that most deeply engaged my students unexpectedly became a web-based project itself. Given the scope of their work, my students were enthusiastic about sharing research at Colby’s Undergraduate Research Symposium (n.d.). They wrote excellent final research papers on topics ranging from Laura Rosenthal’s “Global Shylocks: An Analysis of Post-Holocaust Productions of The Merchant of Venice”(2013), to Alex Gucinski’s “Resistance, Place, Dialogue: The Adaptational Concerns of Contemporary Latin American Shakespeares” (2013), to Justin Lutian’s analysis of a very popular Philippine theatrical run of Romeo and Juliet, “Pinoy Shakespeares: Extracting a Unique Filipino Identity from Ricardo Abad’s Sintang Palisay” (2013). Unfortunately, the final projects’ due date precluded sharing those final essays at the Colby symposium. However, their ongoing efforts as insightful reviewers of films from several nations also represented their work on Global Shakespeare, so we planned a world map poster that marked the locations for our many films with bubbles linked to highlights from their reviews. Technological challenges led us to an alternative, partially inspired by Fritsch. We developed the interactive version of our collective reviews and film origins available on Google Maps.2 The virtual pushpins linked not only to the films’ titles, directors, and dates of issue but also to complete student reviews of the films in question. 232

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Whereas the physical poster was limited in how much information it could convey, the Google project fascinated visitors and literally put Global Shakespeares on the map at the Colby Undergraduate Research Symposium. While our work on hamlet_X succeeded in exposing transnational insights into visual meaning-making, this final group project led to fascinating discussions about Alexander Abele’s triple placement on our map. As a French expatriate living in England, Abele posed difficulties for their definition of his “originating culture.” Furthermore, he filmed his Makibefo in Madagascar with indigenous amateur actors. For these students, film proved an admirable medium for approaching Shakespeare’s influence in various cultures, but the investigations into Fritsch’s hamlet_X and their map presentation most deeply engaged students and enriched their knowledge. Both convinced me that involving students themselves in visual culture projects helps them engage materials and approaches beyond their cultural context and enables them to enact the kinds of collaboration that reflect the artistic engagement of global adapters. Student enthusiasm for the relatively minor exhibition in their Google Maps project inspired me to take up a longstanding offer to work with the Colby Museum of Art for the next version of the course. Lauren Lessing, the Mirken Director of Academic and Public Programs at the Colby Museum of Art, had informally shared some of the museum’s Shakespeare prints with my first Global Shakespeares students. For the second group of students, I transformed the course into one of Colby’s Humanities Labs, “innovative courses [that] promote experiential learning in the arts and humanities. They include hands-on observation, experimentation, and skill-building” (Humanities Labs n.d.). My 2016 students designed and curated an exhibition of selected prints from Shakespeare Visionen, a rare collection of German prints issued in 1918 by the Marees-Company. The Colby Museum of Art had housed, but never displayed, these prints since 1964, when Mr. and Mrs. Philip Sills donated the folio. Few of the fifty numbered copies that were printed survived World War II; Colby’s deluxe folio is number 47. The images represent various printing techniques, color palettes, and levels of German Expressionist and theatrical detail. In addition to several abstract prints referring to drama or tragedy, the collection includes images of ten plays from all genres, including a few surprises, such as three prints representing Cymbeline. Introduced as “Shakespeare visions of modern artists,” thirty-seven prints represent the work of twenty-four different important German Expressionist artists. While we had preliminary identification of which plays each image represented, students were in charge of selecting which prints to display, researching the moments represented in the chosen prints and creating all the exhibit materials. Since they wrote up commentaries for individual items, they also had to explore the history of Shakespearean printmaking, drawing on Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s (2003) superb but untranslated three-volume work Die Shakespeare-Illustration (1594–2000). Between this resource and the folio’s written materials, we soon needed a skilled translator, so Will Qualey, a senior German major recommended by his department, joined the effort. He gamely translated not only materials from HammerschmidtHummel’s encyclopedia but also Gerhardt Hauptmann’s introduction to Shakespeare Visionen for the exhibit. As this array of tasks suggests, balancing the study of the plays and engagement with Global Shakespeares proved an even greater challenge in the 2016 course. Though I cut back on film screenings and related assignments, students had the added work of curating the art exhibit, a task for which none of us was fully prepared and that required us to grapple with non-­Shakespearean and non-global information. Not only did we have to grasp the differences in printmaking practices, but also we had to learn the principles of exhibit creation and how to write exhibit tags (see Serrell 1996). Debates about everything from the exhibit title to the image choices to the fonts and wall colors took far more class time than expected. Students faced the daunting 233

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task of creating a meaningful exhibit with a clear core idea, while planning a display of prints on six walls in a space more resembling a foyer for the elevator than a full exhibition room. Moreover, since our “exhibit hall” could not accommodate all thirty-seven prints, students had to choose and group prints. The limitations set on our choices dismayed the students, who had with difficulty reduced the collection in half for their exhibit. Their arguments for particular choices involved close analysis of both the plays and the images and proved sufficiently persuasive that we incorporated two freestanding display cases. The resulting exhibit, From Stage to Page: Shakespeare in German Expressionist Prints (2016), gave students a fuller appreciation of the ways in which Shakespeare has inspired artists around the world since the 1600s and allowed them to share their insights with the college as a whole and the larger community of the Colby Art Museum’s summer visitors. At the entrance, a partition featured the exhibit name and two prints – Sommernachtstraum, by Karl Caspar, which represents several elements of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Max Unhold’s Das Volk, an apparent workers’ gathering that my students felt could stand in as the audience. This title wall for the exhibit also hosted our “Big Idea” sentence, the focused statement of an exhibit’s purpose and design: “Shakespeare’s emotionally complex characters and theatrical situations inspire rich comparisons across cultures and historical periods.” The students set up this wall as the visitors’ introduction for maximum visual impact and clear focus on the comparatist insights we had gained in developing the exhibit. On the reverse of the title wall, Lainey Curtis emphasized artistic contrast in two lithographs of Caliban, under two lines from that character in The Tempest: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/Is I know how to curse” (Tempest 1.2.363–64). Roughly centered under the line about learning, Alfred Kubin’s Caliban presents him as cowering and servile, crouching under his burden of logs, while Rudolf Grossman’s Caliban I portrays the character’s more threatening guise, still struggling with bearing a bundle of wood but ominously towering over the rest of the image. The second image clearly represents him in a mood to curse. This focus on a single character immediately foregrounded the students’ discovery that different artists within the same cultural milieu register textual complexities comparable to those they found in their reading. The adjacent wall explored resonant images of Shakespearean anguish in four prints, roughly in a semi-circle around an iPad that allowed visitors to scroll through all the exhibition’s images and read the appropriate Shakespearean language that they represented. Sophie Kaplan, who designed and argued for this unusual array, chose a wholly appropriate title quotation: “I am bound/Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears/ Do scald like molten lead” (Lear 4.6.42–44). The group of images included Olaf Gulbransson’s Othello, Wilhelm Jaeckel’s Hamlet, and Felix Meseck’s Lear, and Sophie quickly proved to us that her fourth print, Karl Hofer’s Masken, also represented Lear, with Goneril and Regan as the ones bearing masks and Lear’s abandoned crown in the lower left corner (see Figure 20.1). We dubbed this array the Wall of Pain because it revealed these artists’ common interests in emotional extremity. The next exhibit wall, curated by Rachel Bird and entitled “All the men and women merely players” (AYLI 2.7.140), underscored the ways in which these prints use Shakespeare to represent gendered identities. From Thomas Theodor Heine’s eerie etching of Lady Macbeth sleepwalking (see museum page) to Walter Teutsch’s wood engravings of Othello and Imogen, featuring Othello and Jachimo, respectively, violating Desdemona and Imogen on their beds, these prints offered visitors the opportunity to explore gendered comparisons and closed with Oskar Kokoschka’s lithograph Sturm, our only print including Shakespearean text, “We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep” (Tempest 4.1.156–58). 234

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Figure 20.1 Karl Hofer, Masken, 1918, lithograph, 17 in. × 12 3/4 in. (43.18 cm × 32.39 cm), Colby ­College Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Sills, 1964.105A Source: Courtesy of the Colby College Museum of Art.

However, the gem of this south wall was Hans Freese’s lithograph, Ophelia (Figure 20.2) displayed above a 1976 German facsimile of the Cranach Hamlet (1976), opened to the page representing Hamlet greeting the players (Figure 20.3). The original Cranach Hamlet, published in 1928, featured woodcuts that Edmund Gordon Craig based on his 1911–1912 Moscow production of Hamlet and worked on over the course of seventeen years. Craig’s work in German theater and theatrical design helps to explain the way 235

Figure 20.2 Hans Freese, Ophelia, 1917, lithograph, 10 in. × 9 1/2 in. (25.4 cm × 24.13 cm), Colby College Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Sills, 1964.105V Source: Courtesy of the Colby College Museum of Art.

Figure 20.3 Edward Gordon Craig, Hamlet. 1928 Source: Courtesy of the Edward Gordon Craig Estate and Colby College Libraries, Special Collections, Waterville, Maine, USA.

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in which Freese’s Ophelia echoes the posture and the angularity of Craig’s influential Hamlet image. Both the students and I were delighted both with the gender reversal in Freese’s image and with the evidence that we could display of transnational visual influences inspired by Shakespearean performance that included both Britain and Russia. The students transformed the problematic next wall, which was interrupted by the elevator door and the doors to the museum staging area, into the most interactive space of the exhibition. They took advantage of several images that appeared in both plain and hand-painted prints in the deluxe Shakespeare Visionen. In addition to revealing the unexpected color palette favored in early twentieth-century Germany, these different versions, especially the woodcut prints of Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Winter’s Tale, demonstrated that hand-painting the images also interpreted them. To involve museum visitors with this dimension of collaborative interpretation, the class decided to offer the Colby community members an opportunity to incorporate their own color choices. Before the exhibit opened, they ran a coloring contest, inviting faculty, students, and staff to interpret the complex scene of Valentine catching Proteus with Silvia in the forest in the Franz Jansen’s Die Beiden Veroneser. The curators awarded prizes at the exhibit opening and included the coloring contest entries on an iPad available under the plain and hand-painted versions of Jansen’s print from Shakespeare Visionen. The students then suggested that we display Jansen’s Wintermarchen (The Winter’s Tale) as the second image on the same problematic wall and offer coloring sheets for visitors to take away with them. With these strategies, the class openly embraced the fact that successive exhibits of prints like those in Shakespeare Visionen represent collaborations not only with the past but also with other cultures, a process that they invited the museum visitors to join. Slyly signaling both the end of exhibit and the comparative absence of Shakespeare in the prints he chose, Lev Pinkus entitled the final wall “The rest is silence” (Hamlet 5.2. 336). Drawing on his Art/English double major, he foregrounded German Expressionist print techniques by incorporating Wilhelm Kohlkoff ’s lithograph Das Drama, Max Beckmann’s etching Mord, and, fittingly, Otto Schubert’s lithograph Finale. The glass case beneath this array allowed us to display the hand-painted version of Wintermarchen, as well as the original Folio that contained the prints, and Gerhardt Hauptmann’s introductory remarks about the prints side by side with Will Qualey’s translation. As my students designed it, From Page to Stage offered visitors a rich tour of the prints and different ways to understand them in their historical, national, and literary contexts. The hard work of mounting this exhibit ended up benefiting not only the students’ understanding of Shakespeare’ s influence on art beyond the borders of Britain but also the many visitors who came to see it over its three-month installation. Lauren Lessing’s review suggests how important such visual culture projects have become to Colby’s mission and to our students’ learning: From Stage to Page exemplifies what a teaching exhibition can achieve at an academic art museum. It was cross-curricular, allowing both the student-curators and museum visitors to make complex connections across disciplines. It was historical, embedding artworks in a rich contextual web. It was aesthetically powerful, allowing the studentcurators to learn to how to make an impact through color and design. It was accessible and engaging, and was almost constantly filled with viewers. It provided curators and faculty with a model to use in the future. Lauren Lessing 3 July 2017 Most important, from my point of view, the process of developing the exhibit allowed my students to participate in the collaborations that bring Shakespeare into art around the world. 237

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While I credit the success of both Global Shakespeares courses to the significant level of student engagement in visual culture projects, the difficulties in balancing such projects with careful study of the plays were considerable. The extra research and critical material necessary for students to grasp the nuances of either cinematic or artistic adaptations of his plays compounded these challenges. When differences in cultural contexts coincide with the specificities of visual culture adaptation, flexibility combined with careful planning become all the more important. Despite the inevitable frustrations of web collaborations and mounting art exhibits, our visual culture projects enriched study and engagement with world Shakespeare in ways that made the students’ research and writing all the more meaningful. More important, such projects give them their own place in the world-wide collaboration with Shakespeare and his works.

Notes 1 Hamlet, 1.2.149. All references to Shakespeare’s plays are to the Norton edition (Shakespeare 2016). Future references are included in the body of the text. 2 Google Maps: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1yXucmwvgNIU0IySAcg6nxipiAVo&usp=sharing.

References Bohannan, Laura. 1966. “Shakespeare in the Bush.” Natural History 75.7: 28–33. Burnett, Mark Thornton. 2010. “Applying the Paradigm: Shakespeare and World Cinema.” Shakespeare Studies 38: 114–22. Colby Undergraduate Research Symposium. n.d. Colby College. Accessed 29 Jun. 2018, www.colby.edu/clas/. DavisConnects. Colby College. n.d. Accessed 29 Jun. 2018, www.colby.edu/davisconnects/. Fritsch, Herbert. 2001. Hamlet_X. Accessed 28 Jun. 2017, www.hamlet-x.de. ———. 2004. Hamlet_X. DVD: Vols. I, II, & III. Film Galerie. From Stage to Page: Shakespeare in German Expressionist Prints. 2016. Colby Museum of Art. 5 May4 Sep. Accessed 30 Jun. 2018, www.colby.edu/museum/exhibition/shakespeare-visionen/. Gamlet. 1964. Dir. Grigor Kozintzev. Lenfilm/Lion Film. Greenblatt, Stephen, et al. 2016. Norton Shakespeare. 3rd ed. New York: Norton. Gucinski, Alex. 2013. “Resistance, Place, Dialogue: The Adaptational Concerns of Contemporary Latin American Shakespeares.” Unpublished student paper. Hamlet. 1976. Illustrated by Edward Gordon Craig. 1928; facsimile, Cranach Press. Hammerschmidt-Hummel, Hildegard, ed. 2003. Die Shakespeare-Illustration (1594–2000): Bildkünstlerische Darstellungen zu den Dramen William Shakespeares: Katalog, Geschichte, Funktion und Deutung: Mit Künstlerlexikon klassifizierter Bibliographie und Registern. 3 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz; Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur. Henderson, Diana. 2006. Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Huapango. 2004. Dir. Iván Lipkies. Vlady Realizadores. Humanities Labs. n.d. Colby College. Accessed 29 Jun. 2018, www.colby.edu/centerartshumanities/ arts-and-humanities-labs/. Iyengar, Sujata. 2017. “Shakespeare Transformed: Copyright, Copyleft, and Shakespeare after Shakespeare.” Actes des congres de la Societe franchise Shakespeare 35. DOI: 10.4000/shakespeare.3852. Joubin, Alexa Alice, ed. 2010. “Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2. Korol Lir. 1972. Dir. Grigor Kozintzev. Lenfilm/Artkino. Lessing, Lauren. Personal email. 3 Jul. 2017. Lutian, Justin. 2013. “Pinoy Shakespeares: Extracting a Unique Filipino Identity from Ricardo Abad’s Sintang Palisay.” Unpublished student paper. Makibefo. 1999. Dir. Alexander Abele. Blueeye Films/Epicentre Films. Maori Merchant of Venice. 2002. Dir. Don Selwyn. He Taonga Films. Maqbool. 2004. Dir. Vishal Bhardwaj. Kaleidoscope/Yash Raj.

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Teaching Global Shakespeare McDougall, Julie. 2011. “Maori Take on Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice in Aotearoa/New Zealand.” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation, and Performance 8: 93–106. Mirazoeff, Nicholas. 2013. “Introduction.” In The Visual Culture Reader. Eds. Richard Howells and Joaquim Negreiros. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Omkara. 2006. Dir. Vishal Bhardwaj. Shemaroo/Eros. Rosenthal, Laura. 2013. “Global Shylocks: An Analysis of Post-Holocaust Productions of The Merchant of Venice.” Unpublished student paper. Serrell, Beverley. 1996. Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach. New York: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Shakespeare Visionen. 1918. Berlin, Marees-Company. Deluxe folio no. 47. Sugiyama, Michelle Scalise. 2003. “Cultural Variation is Part of Human Nature: Literary Universals, Context-Sensitivity, and ‘Shakespeare in the Bush.’ ” Human Nature 14: 383–96. Throne of Blood. 1957. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Toho/Kurosawa. Wiens, Birgit. 2006. “Hamlet and the Virtual Stage: Herbert Fritsch’s Project Hamlet_X.” In Intermediality in Theatre and Performance. Eds. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 223–36. Ye Yan/The Banquet. 2006. Dir. Xiaogang Feng. Huayi Brothers/Dragon Dynasty.

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PART IV

Regional, local, and “glocal” Shakespeares

21 OTHELLO IN POLAND, A PREVAILINGLY HOMOGENEOUS ETHNIC COUNTRY Krystyna Kujawin´ska Courtney Introduction In his Lindberg lecture, “Post-Racial Othello,” given at the University of New Hampshire, Professor Douglas Lanier attempts to explain why select film adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello avoid its racial aspects (2010). Since the majority of these movies were produced outside AngloAmerican culture, which has been preoccupied with issues of race for centuries, Lanier suggests that, since Shakespeare went global, his Othello has been interpreted through the prism of local issues, for example, identity, politics, class, love, eroticism, and homosexuality. Glocalized cultural politics, in a way, reject the racial discourses that comprise the “Grand Narrative” – to borrow a phrase used by Jean-François Lyotard (1984) in a different context – of Shakespeare’s play. In other words, different cultures have appropriated his play, rebranded its message and erased the question of race. Inspired by Lanier’s lecture, my chapter presents “post-racial” theatrical adaptations of Othello in Poland, a country which has been a homogeneously ethnic country since the end of World War II, both under the communist regime and now, as a democratic country since 1989. Acting as a barometer of contemporary political and social events, Polish theater has been an educational and patriotic instrument that has influenced, and even shaped, its audiences’ sense of moral, philosophical, and civic responsibility. As early as at the end of the nineteenth century, Józef Narzymski (1871: 185) succinctly summarizes this phenomenon: “The stage is neither a church pulpit, nor a university chair, nor a political tribune, but it consists of all functions while fulfilling an important social and moral role.”1

Othello and Poland: the partitions As the history of Shakespeare’s reception in Poland indicates, his works have assumed the role of a contemporary critique for decades, providing commentary on national culture and drawing attention to its predicaments or idiosyncrasies. The plays’ interpretations have always reflected Polish cultural, political, and social perspectives on issues such as time, place, religion, age, and gender. And these perspectives have not been stable but have been shaped and molded in the workshop of indeterminacy and contingency of meaning. In the case of Othello, for the most 243

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part, Polish directors have consistently avoided such issues as racism, evasiveness, exclusion, reclamation, and otherness. Yet this approach to Othello does not reflect the beginning of the play’s career on the Polish stage, which openly reveled in the question of race. This was because the play was brought to Poland by Ira Aldridge, the first African American Shakespeare tragedian (1807–1867). Poland, at that time, was not an independent country. It had lost its independence in three territorial divisions (1772, 1793, 1795) perpetrated by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Consequently, Aldridge played in towns and in theaters that were under the control of the occupying powers. Aldridge presented the play in Szczecin, Poznań, and Wrocław during his 1853 European tour (Kujawińska Courtney 2009). Though his first staging of the play, as well as those during his later visits (1854–1867), were done first in English, and later in German, theaters were packed with Polish audiences who admired his acting and were intrigued by his race.2 Racial thinking of the time in Europe distinguished between dark-skinned sub-Saharan Africans, often called “Negroes,” and lighter-skinned so-called “Moors,” and falsely associated fixed personality characteristics with these phenotypes. Some reviews therefore wondered at Shakespeare’s audacity in writing a play wherein “the proud daughter of a Venetian senator falls in love with ‘a black devil’ ” (Czas 1854); others drew attention both to his alien body with “features, ugly according to the European standards of beauty” and to his acting, which presented “the untamable jealousy of the Moor” (Gazeta Wielkiego Xsięstwa Poznańskiego [GWXP] 1853).3 They debated concepts of race, ethnicity, and otherness, yet a general consensus of whether Othello was a black African or a Moor could not be reached, probably because his outbursts of violence, usually attributed to black Africans, were always creatively subordinated to artistic representation. Aldridge’s acting was described as reflecting an “impeccable refinement of form, a deep thoughtfulness of stage positions, meticulous study of the represented personality, clever arrangement of the role, and striking truthfulness” (Durylin 2014: 110–11). In the second half of the nineteenth century and on into the early decades of the twentieth, productions of the play largely followed Ira Aldridge’s interpretation.4 In Andrzej Żurawski’s opinion, the tone of Polish theaters during this time was dependent on the artistic achievements of eminent actors and actresses (2003: 51). Shakespeare was most often staged classically, but the renditions of his plays reflected the significance of the nineteenth-century stars. Several outstanding Polish actors (for example, Bogusław Leszczyński, Bolesław Ładnowski, Roman Żelazowski, and Kazimierz Junosza-Stępowski) played Othello in blackface, and the racial problematics of the play constituted one of the main critical issues in its more than twenty stagings in Poland (Żurowski 2003: 318). Thus, we might suspect that its popularity was closely associated with multi-ethnicity, which was frequently discussed in the context of alienation and exclusion.

Othello and Poland: the interwar period From 1918–1939, about a third of the total population of Poland, which had just regained its independence, were minorities, including 5–6 million Ukrainians, over 3 million Jews, 1.5 million Belarusians, and some 800,000 Germans.5 The most eminent Polish university professors of that period, Roman Dyboski, Władysław Tarnawski, and Andrzej Tretiak, discussed the ongoing debate surrounding Othello’s origin in their monographs. They based their opinion on historical and linguistic studies of the play’s original text. Unfortunately, their research had no influence on popular attitudes to the play (Stanisz 2011: 111–231). Both Othello’s skin color and cultural otherness were the subjects of fierce debates – “is he a Negro or a Moor?” (Boy-Żeleński 1926: 258). This controversy was, to a certain extent, kindled by Kazimierz Junosza-Stępowski’s rendition of Othello, which he played as a supposed “Negro”: 244

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his face was very black while “his eyes were widely enlarged with trust” (Szletyński 1975: 181). His interpretation undermined Leszczyński’s, who was a member of the Polish troupe that played with Aldridge. Leszczyński followed Aldridge’s passionate and violent style of acting as a so-called “Moor”: “In the climactic parts of the play, [Leszczyński’s] way of pronouncing “r” turned him into a roaring savage animal, which was intensified with the rolling of the whites of his eyes.” This presentation of Othello frightened both the actors on the stage and the people in the audience (Dąbrowski 1947/48: 14). Junosza-Stępowski’s Othello was different; he is “a noble and good character,” a stereotypical African with a childlike trust who did not know intrigues and easily fell “into traps set by Iago” (Brumer 1926: 12). At the end of the production, he sat huddled and in pain uttering “I am not alive. He says these words as a man who suffered, not as a man who triumphs or a jealous husband” (Udalska 1993: 219–20). It was generally accepted that Junosza-Stępowski’s interpretation supported the belief that Shakespeare’s Othello was a Moor, endowed with grandeur and nobility, neither cruel nor naïve. Though not widely known in Poland, this attitude followed Edmund Kean’s interpretation, who, according to his first biographer, “regarded it a gross error to make Othello either a negro or a black, and accordingly altered the conventional black to the light brown which distinguishes the Moors by virtue of their descent from the Caucasian race” (Hawkins 1869: 221). Accordingly, it was recognized that Othello, as a Moor, should be of an olive complexion, revealing a romantic nature and, to a certain extent, subtlety and impeccable virtue.6 The difference between Othello as a “Negro” and Othello as a “Moor” is confirmed by the international attitude to so-called Negroes in the first decades of the twentieth century and popularized in Polish newspapers: A Negro has become a flat reality. Treated with a limitless contempt in America and used for lower jobs in Europe, he has recently been promoted from a Negro to a star in a jazz band, yet he does not possess any attributes of the sword and love, which the poet [Shakespeare] presented as his Othello. Boy-Żeleński 1926: 261 Between the wars, Polish theater followed world theaters. The apogee of the most negative racial epithets and descriptions of black people could be found in translations and critical reception of the play from 1920–1939. Poland, represented by the Maritime and Colonial League, was struggling on the national and international arena to reclaim some former German colonies in Africa as a part of reparation for World War I. In addition, frequent street demonstrations and widely read publications voiced demands to create Polish overseas settlements in such countries as Peru, Brazil (Parana), Liberia, in French possessions in Africa, and in Portuguese Mozambique and Madagascar (Hunczak 1967).

Othello and Poland: communism The Polish response to Othello changed after World War II when the country became ethnically homogeneous. The concept of homogeneity, introduced during the late 1940s, resulted from the Grand Alliance between the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. Formally ratified at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, this agreement included a westward shift of Poland’s borders. As a result, the National Repatriation Office forced millions of Poles to leave their homes in the eastern “Kresy” (“Borders’ ”) region and settle in western regions that had formerly been German, while about 5 million Germans were forcefully ousted and moved to their original motherland. Ukrainian, Belarussian, Armenian, Lithuanian, and other minorities 245

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who had been living in prewar Poland found themselves mostly within the borders of the Soviet Union. Those who opposed this new policy were forcefully suppressed by the end of 1947. In addition, the majority of Polish Jews had been killed in the Holocaust.7 Consequently, the question of race or ethnicity disappeared from official social, political, and cultural discourses for many decades. When Poland’s Shakespeare Theater Festival was organized in 1947 to demonstrate both Poland’s connection to Western Europe and to reclaim its pre-World War II international status, Othello was one of the plays entered. Though the National JJry praised the Festival’s important cultural role, it did not find the Krakow staging of Othello to be a significant artistic achievement (Kujawińska Courtney 2017). This was because it lacked innovation and followed prewar interpretations of the play in which the main character was played in blackface. The imposition of Social Realism as the only politically correct artistic ideology (1949) subjected dramaturgical and theatrical forms to those supposedly close to the hearts of the working class. Yet Othello did not easily lend itself to the propagation of Marxist ideology. Under the communist regime, many Polish productions of the play, as Lidia Mielczarek (2015: 154–68) rightly indicates, followed Jan Kott’s critical approach; in his interpretation, the question of race is of a minor importance. Instead, he focuses on political scheming and struggles for power.8 (Kott 1965: 87) maintains “[i]f we strip Othello of romantic varnish . . . the tragedy of jealousy and the tragedy of betrayed confidence become a dispute between Othello and Iago; a dispute on the nature of the world.” “[T]he world is as Iago sees it,” Kott continues, “and Iago is a villain.” As an example of a ruthless politician, Iago was frequently treated as the main character of the play, usually presented as a Machiavellian stage-manager who destroys the noble and honest life of others. Yet the productions of Othello did not comment on Polish reality. The play did not assume the role played by Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest, or Measure for Measure, for example, the stagings of which served as an implicit commentary on current political events by means of theatrical allusions and metaphors, while still operating within the communist infrastructure (Kujawińska Courtney 2006). In their stagings of Othello, Polish theaters did not present subversive ideologies or meanings. Nor was the play staged during political crises (such as in 1956, 1968, 1970, or 1981), which usually capitalized on Shakespeare’s texts to vent the anger of a multiplicity of voices muted or suppressed under communism, while still entrenching the regime in its current political situation. Kott’s interpretation of the play did not prompt any directors to use Othello as a commentary on the post-1956 the political situation when the changes introduced by the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party that had denounced Stalin and Stalinist crimes were forgotten and new corrupted politicians came to power. Kott (1965: 87) observes: Shakespeare’s world did not heal itself after an earthquake. The same is true of ours. It [Othello’s world] is as ours. It has remained as non-cohesive as has our world. At the end of Shakespeare’s Othello everyone loses. Though Polish interpretations of Othello focus, as one critic notices, on the context of the “intrigue of history,” frequently presented in Polish communist regime interpretations of the play, they did not comment, for example, on the 1968 anti-Semitic mobilization and purges which made “the others,” at least 13,000 Poles of Jewish origin, emigrate (November 4, 1975). The question of race and otherness is absent in Polish productions of the play. This policy is visible as early as in 1948 when Teatr Wojska Polskiego staged Othello in Łódź. Kott (1961: 234) classifies both the play and its production as “A victory over the racial prejudices.” 246

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Othello and Poland: post-communism Although Shakespeare’s plays have received new interpretations since Poland emerged from its totalitarian shackles in 1989, Othello has maintained its marginal position. Between 1989 and the present, the other Bradleyan tragedies have been far more popular: Hamlet has been staged nineteen times; Macbeth, sixteen times; and King Lear, ten times (Bradley 1904). In none of the eight productions of Othello is the question of race acknowledged. Their texts are based on translations by either Maciej Słomczyński or Stanisław Barańczak and have been heavily adapted to reflect their various directors’ intended messages, usually focused on jealousy, in which Othello’s racial or ethnic provenience is not central. Indeed, in these productions, Othello is not even presented as a man of color: his role is not staged in blackface. The first Polish post-communist staging of Othello was in 1996 in Elbląg. Its interpretation follows that of the previous decades. Iago assumes the main stage as the representation of an evil of demonic dimensions.9 Ten years later, director Jacek Głomb (Legnica, 2006) focuses his production on the loneliness of a man whose good intentions and noble heart bring him to destruction at the hands of another’s insidious obsession with power and control. In this adaptation, the sexual yearning for a woman – Desdemona – replaces the desire for power and political domination present in Shakespeare’s Othello. His production depicts the painful confrontation between honesty and immorality present in human nature and visible in all world cultures, regardless of customs or epochs. The main message of Głomb’s adaptation is intensified by being set in a confined space and in isolation: on board the ship “Esperanza” sailing to New World. The restricted space is used to justify the outbursts of passion and emotion. Yet, as some critics have said, this, unfortunately, turns Shakespeare’s play into a theatrical version of the film Pirates of the Caribbean. The entire cast is white. Desdemona’s uncle – a clergyman – takes her father’s place (Przekrój 2006). Maciej Sobociński’s Othello (Cracow, 2007) imposes a framing structure on the original plot. Though the director does not admit it, his structure follows, to a certain extent, that of Orson Welles’s film Othello (1951). It starts with Othello’s murder of Desdemona, while flashbacks introduced throughout the play makes, as Mielczarek (2015: 171) notes, “the audience think about the inevitable fate.” The scene in which Othello cannot part with his wife’s dead body, cuddling it and carrying all over the stage, serves, as one critic says, as a repetitive motif of the performance (Trybuna 2007). Othello is white, yet the tattoos that cover his body introduce the issue of alterity. As a single man of integrity and uprightness in a morally degenerated world dominated by career-oriented individuals, traitors, and schemers, he is bound to lose under Iago’s destructive manipulations. The National Polish Theatre (Warsaw, 2008) presents Othello as a psychological-emotional study on female-male relationships. As its director Agnieszka Olsen reveals in one of her interviews (Nasz Dziennik 2008), it also shows human nature motivated by entangled sexual desires, in which the main white character seems lost in a maze of intrigues triggered by complicated female-male relationships. Though Olsen does not explain her reasons, she follows the text of Verdi’s opera, in which the first act, so important in Shakespeare’s play, is omitted. Consequently, the Warsaw audience does not receive any information on Othello’s race or cultural background so potently juxtaposed with that of the Venetians in Shakespeare’s text. They are unaware of Desdemona’s father’s opposition to Othello and her marriage to him, particularly because of his race. Desdemona and Othello’s elopement, as well as their love and intimacy, disappear. To a certain extent, this justifies the director’s demonstration of Othello’s treatment of his wife in the ensuing scenes in Cyprus: whenever alone with her, he behaves like an abusive tyrant. Moreover, Iago’s hatred of privilege, revealed and enforced by his racist language, is omitted. In the Warsaw 247

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production, the stage is covered with various Plexiglas boards that multiply the settings and intensify the perplexing maze of human emotions. Agata Duda-Gracz, who directed the play in Łódź (2009), re-titled her production Othello: Variations on Its Theme. It is, as she explains, her conversation with Shakespeare’s play (Przegląd 2009). The main subject of her adaptation is a study in the marriage between an elderly white man and a younger white woman half his age. Yet, Duda-Gracz’s Othello is still physically and intellectually strong, a famous and respected general of Venice, though he uses a walking stick in many scenes and resorts to the assistance of his younger soldiers. Presented as a very young woman, Desdemona, balancing between childhood and adulthood, does not even attempt to understand her husband. A long coat made of little white teddy bears, which she wears at the beginning of the performance, intensifies her infantile character (Express Ilustrowany 2009). Her behavior in Cyprus, when she appears dancing on a beach in a bikini, causes one critic to compare her to Paris Hilton or a young teenager on an MTV program: inexperienced, but aware of her body and status (Gazeta Wyborcza 2009). Jealousy infects the minds of almost all the characters. Iago is jealous of his wife. Duda-Gracz presents Emily, his wife, cheating on him with Cassio, his best friend. Not surprisingly, Cassio is brutally murdered by Iago, who also breaks his wife’s neck. There is also the issue of jealousy between Othello’s other young ancillaries, whose preoccupation with presenting themselves as honest and trustworthy subordinates hide their real aim of advancement in the Venetian army, be that at the expense of their colleagues’ careers or even their lives. The play also addresses the question of professional responsibility, duplicity, and dishonesty in private and public life (Teatr 2009). The racial problematics disappear and are replaced by issues created by the different life experiences and the different perspectives from which the main characters evaluate themselves and their marital roles. Developing the psychological aspect of Shakespeare’s text, the director demonstrates how the human condition, regulated by passion and personal experiences, differentiates individuals, turning them into outsiders in their own cultural milieu. At the end of this adaptation, Othello strangles Desdemona, but he does not commit suicide. He is alone on an empty stage, with nothing; he has lost his wife, his position, and his dignity. Paweł Szkotak’s staging of Othello (Poznań, 2013) is also centered on the issue of jealousy, yet Othello and Desdemona’s love and subsequent tragedy are only a pretext to discuss freedom and the preservation of one’s identity in a wider political and civilizational context. Though possessed by passions and fascinated with their otherness, the lovers initially disregard the consequences of their upbringings. However, the influence of other people and their own cultural differences eventually intensify the question of jealousy, which centers on the division between Western and Eastern civilizations – between European and Middle Eastern cultures. In addition, the Poznań adaptation comments on current antagonisms between Islam and Christianity. The contemporaneity of the political and cultural issues in Szkotak’s staging is assisted by modern scenography and costumes. Venice is presented as present-day London, while Cyprus becomes the Middle East, where Othello is sent to fight against terrorism.10 At the beginning of the play, Desdemona, as a woman who represents Western European values, is dressed in haute couture mini-skirts (Gazeta Wyborcza 2013). Conversely, when in Cyprus, a location culturally closer to her husband’s origin, she attempts to dress according to local expectations. The handkerchief becomes a hijab and, to a certain extent, a symbol of her love for Othello, but finding the correct way to wear it is a constant problem. Thus, the handkerchief/hijab can be also understood as a sign of Desdemona’s modesty and religious integrity in a country dominated by her husband’s cultural and religious customs. In other words, by setting Desdemona’s alleged infidelity against Othello’s Islamic culture, Szkotak changes its meaning.

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Her supposed “dishonesty” might have given Othello reason to read her behavior as a subversion of his civilization, and it demonstrates the potential consequences of culturally and religiously mismatched marriages. Though initially treated as one of the best representatives of Venetian culture, Othello later reveals himself to be a stereotypical Arab who displays his uncontrollable violence under Iago’s manipulations. He becomes loud and fanatic in his convictions and possessive and vulgar in Cyprus. This interpretation helps justify Othello’s brutality and violence against Desdemona during the tragedy’s finale, which is presented as a vision of his subconscious. Focusing on cultural stereotypes, Szotak’s production raises urgent cultural and political questions in a world engulfed by war, yet, as many critics notice, it approaches tolerance and respect for otherness in a formulaic way and is not openly interested in the issue of race. The same stereotypical attitude toward Othello is present in Waldemar Raźniak’s production (Gdynia, 2015). His Othello, who has a large brown blemish on his face and neck, is also distinguished from the other characters by his clothes and behavior. A certain tawdriness permeates his attire. Attempting to behave like a European, he seems to be interested in fitness and practices tai chi to help him meditate. Initially, Othello’s military heroism gives him a distinctive social position and helps him achieve general admiration and recognition. As Raźniak reveals in one of his interviews, his interpretation of Othello is a response to the 2015 political situation in Europe. Upon reading Shakespeare’s text, he recognized a “current analogy to the problems encountered nowadays in the European Union.” He compares Othello’s role to the role played by Islam in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission (2015). Raźniak observes that Europe has lots of problems with its multiculturalism, especially since the third generation of immigrants, a group of very young people, have been returning to the Middle East to fight in the name of a religion or ideology that should be alien to them. In such a cultural climate, people like Othello may be the only panacea (Gulda 2015). In this way, his production critically evaluates all the cornerstone ideologies of modern Europe – multiculturalism, political correctness, democracy, and tolerance (Radio Gdansk 2015). Following Shakespeare, whose plays never give easy answers, the play confronts various points of view. Raźniak shows, as some critics observe, how the Moor’s scintillating career was put to an end by the private plots and intrigues of an envious European Iago (Kurier Gdyński 2015). Othello is always the other, both physically and metaphorically conceived, someone who is permanently excluded. At the end of the play, the backdrop of the stage displays the kind of abusive, racist graffiti that is frequently found in Poland along with statements of racial hatred directed at people of color, especially black persons, on the internet.

Black Othellos in contemporary Poland? The Polish post-communist regime productions have all been adaptations. The directors frequently “play” with Shakespeare’s drama, introducing their own texts or excerpts taken from his other works. They demonstrate the inspirational possibilities of Shakespeare’s works, interpreted through the prisms of different cultural experiences, and they reflect heterogeneous artistic methodologies and practices. Yet, one would search these adaptations in vain for any political allusions to Polish or world concerns; it was as if cultural otherness, racial prejudice, and distrust towards the other were solved long ago. Prima facie, the absence of black Othellos, even in blackface, in these productions may seem to reflect a Polish lack of interest in people of color or of a different ethnicity. After all, as the national consensus of 2015 indicates, Poland is the most ethnically homogeneous country in the European Union, with foreign citizens constituting just 0.3% of its population.11 Moreover,

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none of the reviewers of post-1989 productions have attempted to justify the directors’ strategic tempering with the original drama, although one explains the absence of Othello’s race as meeting the demands of political correctness. “The suggestion,” as one critic states, “that a Negro [sic] could kill because of jealousy – would be, as our politicians say – an evil-minded insinuation” (Teatr 2009). Is it possible that these responses to Othello in post-communist Poland demonstrate a general conviction that the issue of racial discrimination is too dangerous or too far from daily problems to introduce it into social, political, and cultural discourse? The comedy Czekając na Otella [Waiting for Othello] staged in the Cultural Center (Białołęka) may help to explain the current Polish response to Shakespeare’s play.12 In the text written and directed by Jan Naturski (2015), two Polish actors compete for the role of Othello. Their rivalry is complicated since both graduates of Higher Theatrical Schools are not only incredibly talented but also of African provenance: Amin’s father is Tunisian, while Michał’s is Ethiopian. They know the text of the play very well and have acted its fragments in various interpretations, yet their unassailable assets, as they believe, are the color of their skin and their facial features. The play, full of comic and tragic moments, becomes a deep reflection upon identity and racial origins, which, in the case of the actors, includes two continents – African and European. In addition, the play straightforwardly presents the actors’ experiences of racial discrimination, something people of color meet with daily in contemporary Poland. There are also references to the question of patriotism and the status of refugees. Michał, one of the actors, explains that black actors are not given any roles in Polish theaters because it would introduce the question of race and, consequently, dilute other aspects of the texts. Omar Sangare is, however, of a different opinion. In his monograph, Biały z zazdrości: “Othello” Williama Szekspira (2010), this black actor, born and educated in Poland, describes his failed attempts to play Othello in Polish theaters. Living in Poland, Sangare experienced a kind of synthesis with the Shakespearean character. He writes: “Othello’s tragedy was played under the watchful observation of the ‘Venetian audience’, while mine [in Poland] was played under the attentive eyes of my Polish compatriots.” Sangare further states that his otherness drew everyone’s attention: “Othello lived as I do, or better said, I live as the character did. It [our black race] is the fate which has made our lives similar” (Sangare 2010: 85–86). The ending of Czekając na Othella confirms Sangare’s experience. The role in Shakespeare’s tragedy is given to a mediocre white Polish actor who is known from popular TV sit-coms and romantic comedies. Although in the play Amin’s and Michał’s efforts are not appreciated, in real life, Sangare’s artistic standing is internationally recognized. He has played Othello successfully in Broadway theaters, where his acting has been received with the great acclaim. The characters of Czekając na Otella have had similar experiences, but they do not wish to be classified in their professional life as “Negro actors.” Unfortunately, in monochromatic Polish society, their appearance on the stage always classifies both them and the characters they play – be it Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Molière’s Tartuffe or Beckett’s Vladimir – as a racial other. Polish inexperience with a population of people of color is historically grounded. We did not have any colonies, and very few individuals of color have visited or come to live in our country. In the nineteenth century, when Othello evoked violent discussions about race in Great Britain, Poland did not exist on the map of Europe. The political, cultural, and social problems which constituted the main subject of its citizens’ concerns were effectively different from those which distressed Great Britain, the greatest colonial empire at that time, or the U.S., which was torn apart by attitudes toward slavery. Hence, many people believe that racism as such does not exist in Poland. But is this really the case? Yet the reality based on daily experience, and written about in the news, points to

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a different situation. As Amin and Michał demonstrate, people of color are exposed to name calling in public places and have been the victims of violent assaults on the streets or on public transport. Admittedly, this is usually done by members of various nationalistic parties or groups and cannot be said to represent the opinion of all Poles.13 Nevertheless, it is part of the experience of the “other” in homogeneous Poland.

Conclusion It difficult to say if Othello can help solve contemporary issues regarding immigrants and refugees in Poland. However, as the history of theater demonstrates, Shakespeare played a significant role in helping Poles to become politically conscious under the communist regime. Therefore, I believe that current stagings of Othello could do the same and help us become aware of racial discrimination, of our treatment of the other, and of ourselves as human beings. Maybe Shakespeare’s text, as it has done in Poland for centuries, will bring Poles together to discuss, analyze, and subvert the complex political, social, and cultural problems and situations connected with our current attitude to people of a different color.

Notes 1 Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine. 2 The first translations of the play into Polish were ignited by Aldridge’s stagings. It was presented by him with a Polish troupe for the first time in 1862. 3 Press clippings come from the personal collection of the author or from a range of archives in Poland. For more detailed information about the Aldridge archive in Poland, consult Kujawińska Courtney (2009). 4 This was not surprising since some of the actors played with Aldridge during his Polish tours. For example, Czas (March 3, 1872), a Cracow journal, praises Leszczyński for his continuation of Aldridge’s acting style. 5 Norman Davis (2001: 2–38) also enumerates Russians, Lithuanians, Czechs, Armenians, Tartars, and Gypsies. He stresses that the situation of these ethic groups was a complex subject and changed during that period. This motivated Ludwig Zamenhof, a physician living in Białystok, a prevailingly multiethnic town, to constructed Esperanto as a universal language to better communicate with his patients (Romaniuk and Wiśniewski 2012: 10–15). 6 Barbara Everett (2000: 64–81) is of the same opinion. Analyzing the political context and literary background of Shakespeare’s own times she states that Shakespeare created Othello as a Moor. 7 By 1931 Poland had the second largest Jewish population in the world, with one-fifth of all the world’s Jews residing within its borders (approximately 3,146,000). 8 Kott’s chapter “Two Paradoxes of Othello” was absent in his first edition of Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964). 9 Since the stagings mainly followed interpretations of the play typical during the communist regime, I present it in passing. The Ministry of Culture only sponsored ambitious and intellectually challenging productions, meaning that many theaters had to receive money from promotional materials. The Elbląg program includes advertisements for locally produced meat and sausage products. 10 Reviewers of the production note that the director was inspired by “Quentin Tarantino’s movies (e.g. the stick-up in masks and guns),” and they generally appreciate his innovative solutions for scenography and costumes. For example, the Venetian legation arrive in Cyprus/the Middle East by helicopter (Gazeta Wyborcza April 8, 2013). 11 Just slightly more diversified are Romania (0.4%), and Croatia, Lithuania, and Bulgaria (each 0.8%). 12 A 2015 performance of the play can be viewed on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnqce SEbKVw (Accessed 10 Sep. 2017). 13 The three categories of minorities currently recognized in Poland represent exclusively white races. They include nine national minorities (Belarusians, Czechs, Lithuanians, Germans, Armenians, Russians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, and Jews); four ethnic minorities (Karaites, Lemkos, Roma, and Tatars); and one regional linguistic minority (Kashubians).

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References Boy-Żeleński, Tadeusz. 1926. Flirt z Melpomeną: Wieczór Szósty. Warszawa: Gebertner i Wolf. Bradley, A.C. 1904. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. London: Macmillan. Brumer, Wiktor. 1926. “Otello Junoszy-Stępowskiego.” Życie teatru 5: 10–12. Czas. 1854. 9 Nov. Clipping. Personal Collection of the Author. N.p. ———. 1872. 3 Mar. Clipping. Personal Collection of the Author. N.p. Davis, Norman. 2001. Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dąbrowski, Stanisław. 1947/48. “Otello na scenie łódzkiej w XIX wieku.” Łódź teatralna 8: 12–16. Durylin, Sergei, N. 2014. “Ira Aldridge.” In Essay on Sergei Nikolaevich Dyrulin. Trans. Alexei Lalo. Ed. Viktoria N. Toporova. Trenton: Africa World Press. 117–18. Everett, Barbara. 2000. “ ‘Spanish’ Othello: The Making of Shakespeare’s Moor.” In Shakespeare and Race. Eds. Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 64–81. Express Illustrowany. 2009. 9 Feb. Clipping. Personal Collection of the Author. N.p. Gazeta Wielkiego Xsięstwa Poznańskiego (GWXP). 1853. 29 Jan. Clipping. Personal Collection of the Author. N.p. Gazeta Wyborcza. 2009. 9 Feb. Clipping. Personal Collection of the Author. N.p. ———. 2013. 8 Apr. Clipping. Personal Collection of the Author. N.p. Gulda, Przemysław. 2015. “Raźniak i Grzymisławski o ‘Otellu’: Współczesne Analogie u Szekspira Nasuwają Się Same.” Gazeta Wyborcza Trójmiasto. 24 Mar. Hawkins, Francis, W. 1869. The Life of Edmund Kean. London: Tinsley Brothers. Hunczak, Taras. 1967. “Polish Colonial Ambitions in the Inter-War Period.” Slavic Review 4: 648–56. Kott, Jan. 1961. Szkice o Szekspirze. Warszawa: PIW. ———. 1964. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Trans. Bolesław Taborski. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. ———. 1965. Szekspir współczesny. Warszawa: PIW. Kujawińska Courtney, Krystyna. 2006. “Krystyna Skuszanka’s Shakespeare of Political Allusions and Metaphors in Communist Poland.” In Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism. Eds. Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price. Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press. 228–45. ———. 2009. Ira Aldridge (1807–1867): Dzieje pierwszego czarnoskorego tragika szekspirowskiego, (Ira Aldridge (1807–1867): A Story of the First African American Shakespeare Tragedian) Kraków, Poland: Universitas. ———. 2017. “The Cultural Role and Political Implications of Poland’s 1947 Shakespeare Festival.” Text Matters: A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture 7: 183–93. Kurier Gdyński. 2015. 17 Mar. Clipping. Personal Collection of the Author. N.p. Lanier, Douglas. 2010. “Post-Racial Othello.” Lindberg lecture, University of New Hampshire. 29 Apr. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScroEtGwmOQ Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington, and Brian Massumi. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Mielczarek, Lidia. 2015. Polska recepcja “Otello” William Szekspira w świetle studiów krytycznoliterackich i adaptacji teatralnych. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. Narzymski, J. 1871. “Słówko o teatrze, znaczeniu tegoż i o moralności scenicznej.” Tygodnik Wielkopolski 15: 185–86. Nasz Dziennik. 2008. 28 May. Clipping. Personal Collection of the Author. N.p. Naturski, Jan, dir. 2015. Czekając na Otella. Białołęka: Białołęka Cultural Center. 15 Aug. Accessed 28 Jan. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnqceSEbKVw. Przegląd. 2009. 25 Feb. Clipping. Personal Collection of the Author. N.p. Przekrój. 2006. 6 Oct. Clipping. Personal Collection of the Author. N.p. Radio Gdańsk. 2015. 25 Mar. Clipping. Personal Collection of the Author. N.p. Romaniuk, Zbigniew Romaniuk, Tomasz Wiśniewski. 2012. Zaczęło się na Zielonej. O Ludwiku Zamenhofie, jego rodzinie i początkach esperanta. Łódź: Dom Wydawniczy Księży Młyn. Sangare, Omar. 2010. “Othello” Wiliama Szekspira: Biały z zazdrości. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Nowy Świat. Stanisz, Elżbieta. 2011. Kierunki polskiej szekspirologicznej myśli krytycznej w dwudziestoleciu międzywojenym. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adama Marszalek. Szletyński, Henryk. 1975. Szkice o aktorach. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Artystyczne i Filmowe. Teatr. 2009. 1 Apr. Clipping. Personal Collection of the Author. N.p.

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22 SHAKESPEARE IN IRELAND 1916  to 2016 Nicholas Grene

The “Year of Shakespeare” website documents productions of Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare related shows from across the globe. Click on a continent on the map – Asia, Africa, Oceania, Europe, North and South America – and you can check out any of the more than seventy productions staged in the U.K. in 2012, in what was billed as “the biggest intercultural Shakespeare festival the world has ever seen” (“Year of Shakespeare” n.d.). So, for example, Henry VI, Part I, came from Serbia, Part II from Albania, and Part III from Macedonia. There was an Argentinian Henry IV, Part II, a Brazilian Romeo and Juliet. A  Midsummer Night’s Dream from South Korea and a Richard II from Palestine further illustrated the extent of the penetration of Global Shakespeare. Each country appropriated the plays as they related to their own culture. Among the European nations, however, one was significantly missing: there was no production from Ireland. English-speaking Ireland, Britain’s oldest colony and nearest neighbor, has had an uneasy relationship with Shakespeare in modern times. The aim of this chapter is to examine the history of that relationship in the century since 1916, when Ireland’s definitive movement towards independence began. How have Irish theater practitioners negotiated with Shakespeare and how far have Irish productions succeeded in making the plays their own? To understand this story, it is necessary to look at the initial colonial context and then a number of productions in successive periods since the establishment of the Free State in 1922. In April 1916, just weeks before the Easter Rising, there was a production of Hamlet at the Abbey Theatre. The production was mounted by the British Empire Shakespeare Society (Dublin Branch) [BESS] as part of their program of events to mark the Tercentenary of the death of Shakespeare. There had been an angry editorial in The Irish Times at the lack of such a program: The tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death is at hand, but no hint has reached us that Dublin intends to take any formal notice of it. The proper celebration would be, of course, a week of Shakespearean drama, performed by a good company, at one of our principal theatres. . . . It is quite probable that the tercentenary of “unser Shakespeare” will be celebrated in Berlin . . . but not on the boards of any theatre in Ireland. . . . At this time, the whole Empire is fighting for ideals that Shakespeare, more than any other human being, helped to shape and glorify. Irish soldiers are bleeding and dying for those ideals. Is it wholly impossible that at such a time we in Dublin should render 254

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thanks to Shakespeare, on the three hundredth anniversary of his death, by a worthy performance of his greatest play? “Shakespeare in Dublin” 1916: 4 The BESS was quick to respond: they had organized a whole series of events, and they would be mounting Shakespeare’s greatest play, Hamlet, from April 6 to 8. However, whether it was a worthy performance of that play was open to doubt. The Irish Times itself, Unionist paper that it was then, began its review by saying, It is a matter of regret that the Dublin Branch of the British Empire Society did not cast their net further afield for players in ‘Hamlet’ . . . it seems strange that more amateur players of experience were not called upon to take part. “Hamlet” at the Abbey Theatre 1916: 6 Could it be that the editorial writer was one such “amateur player of experience” who was not asked to audition? A bit surprisingly, the nationalist Freeman’s Journal was less critical in its reaction, saying that “the performance was by no means unworthy of the subject.” However, it was observed that “the Abbey Theatre was in some respects, at least, hardly an ideal place for the experiment” (“British Empire Shakespeare Society” 1916). Indeed. What was the BESS doing producing the work of England’s national bard in the Irish national theater? Ireland had, of course, a long history of producing Shakespeare. There is a database of Shakespearean productions in Dublin from 1660 to 1904 with nearly 5,000 entries, including a 1696 staging of Othello at Smock Alley with George Farquhar in the title role (“Shakespeare’s Plays in Dublin” n.d.). The blacked up Farquhar would have been a Trinity College dropout all of nineteen years old at the time. However, the Dublin branch of BESS, established in 1907, had a specific cultural and educational mission: • To promote greater familiarity with Shakespeare’s work among all classes throughout the British Empire; • To help the rising generation not only to study Shakespeare’s works but to love them. • To form Shakespeare Clubs and Reading Societies or help those existing in London and the provinces and in the colonies; •  To encourage the study of Shakespeare by prizes given yearly for the best reading, recitation, and actual scenes from his plays and by essays on Shakespeare by members and associates of the Society. “Dublin Shakespeare Society” n.d. The first meeting was presided over by J.P. Mahaffy, the formidable Trinity Classicist, teacher of Oscar Wilde, who subsequently became Provost. He was rabidly anti-nationalist. “It was a mistake,” he said of Ulysses, “to establish a separate university for the aborigines of this island – for the cornerboys who spit into the Liffey” (quoted in Ellmann 1966: 59). Edward Dowden, who succeeded Mahaffy as Chair of the BESS, was the first holder of the Trinity Professorship of English literature established in 1867. He was a great Shakespeare scholar and a friend to the young W.B. Yeats, but he opposed the cultural nationalist movement that Yeats was to lead and remained a Unionist all his life. Mahaffy and Dowden were both Irish: they would certainly have been offended if you called them anything else. They would have seen Shakespeare as part of the great cultural heritage that could be shared by everyone within the English-speaking 255

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British Empire. And they would have believed, like the Irish Times editorial writer, that “Shakespeare, more than any other human being, helped to shape and glorify” the ideals of Empire. The Irish national theater movement represented the antithesis of all of that. It began just ten years before the BESS, with the manifesto of the Irish Literary Theatre, drawn up by W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Edward Martyn. This aspired to “bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland” (quoted in Gregory 1972: 20), setting itself free from the hegemony of London and metropolitan theater. It represented a program for cultural nationalism, just as the BESS represented a project of cultural imperialism. The Abbey, therefore, might well seem to The Freeman’s Journal as hardly the “ideal place” for the BESS to stage its Hamlet. (The Abbey management, hard strapped as they were for cash in the middle of World War I, with lucrative tours to the U.S. ruled out, would probably have been glad to take any bookings they could get from outside companies.) But there was perhaps another dimension to this inappropriateness. By 1916, the Abbey had established its own house style. In its small, 500-seat auditorium, most of the plays the theater staged were set in country cottages or pubs, intimate spaces that encouraged the low-key realistic performances for which Abbey actors had become well known. Shakespeare would then have almost always been presented at the Gaiety or the Theatre Royal, much larger venues, and been identified with the British actor-managers who brought their touring productions to Dublin, stage stars famous for their eloquent delivery of the great Shakespearean parts. The Abbey was an unlikely place to mount Shakespeare, therefore, for both theatrical and ideological reasons. In the hundred years since 1916, Shakespeare has tended to be a difficult presence in Irish theater. Irish theater professionals have shown an anxious awareness that this is the great canonical playwright of the neighboring island, where generation upon generation of actors have been schooled in the playing of his specially dense and difficult poetic language. And as a postcolonial, or post-imperial country, for Ireland Shakespearean politics has remained an issue. A sample of productions across the century may be used to illustrate the various ways in which the relationship between Shakespeare and Ireland has played out in the theater.

McMaster and the Gate In Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, the actor father James Tyrone, in spite of his son’s derisive mockery, sticks to his conviction that Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic: “So he was. The proof is in the plays” (O’Neill 1988: 793). There has been an extended scholarly controversy over whether the playwright may or may not have been a covert Catholic, but only a besotted Irish American bardolater like Tyrone could make a case for him being an Irish Catholic. The Irish do not get a good press in Shakespeare – in fact, they do not get much of a press at all. They are mostly “rough rug-headed kerns,”1 rebels who call kings and generals away from England to deal with the trouble they cause. The one identifiably Irish character, the much-discussed Captain MacMorris who appears in just one scene in Henry V, seems to have been one of the first ever stage-Irishmen, or perhaps more accurately the original Paddy the Irishman of the Paddy the Englishman, Paddy the Scotsman, Paddy the Welshman jokes. The Irish elements in Shakespeare have been a distinct disappointment to postcolonial critics hoping to show that his imaginative sympathies went out to our marginalized and oppressed nation. That, of course, has not prevented Irish men and women from becoming outstanding Shakespearean actors from James Quin, the most famous eighteenth-century Falstaff, down to Kenneth Branagh and Fiona Shaw in our own day. The situation in the early twentieth century in the period after Independence was a peculiar one, however. Shakespeare was delivered in Ireland at the time largely by fit-up touring companies made up of English actors, the most famous 256

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being that of Anew McMaster. McMaster’s company was doing what you could call cultural missionary work, bringing the great masterpieces of the English theater to the remotest parts of Ireland. But there is an oddity in the McMaster enterprise in the need felt by two of the principals involved to Hibernicize themselves. Anew McMaster came from Merseyside, the son of a Liverpool docker, and he had worked as a West End leading actor before starting his own touring company. But in his bios, he moved the place of his birth to Monaghan and implied an Irish childhood (Fitz-Simon 1994: 16, 20). This was as nothing in comparison to the reinvention of identity achieved by McMaster’s brother-in-law. Alfred Willmore, from Kensal Green, was a boy star on the London stage who appeared with Noel Coward in the pre-World War I production of Peter Pan before taking the lead role in a stage adaptation of Oliver Twist. Having gone to Gaelic League classes in Irish in London, he re-surfaced after the War as Michéal Mac Líammoír, the inspired Celtic actor and stage designer who came from the city of Cork. McMaster did at least have an Irish family background and had been to Warrenpoint as a child. Alfred Willmore’s only previous experience of Ireland before he emerged from his Willmore chrysalis to become the butterfly Mac Líammoír was on a touring production of Peter Pan (Fitz-Simon 1994: 27). And then there was Mac Líammoír’s life-time partner, Hilton Edwards. They met in 1927 when McMaster, in the middle of an Irish tour, had been forced to rush to London to replace his leading man (Fitz-Simon 1994: 16–17). He came back with Edwards, an already experienced Old Vic actor, and introduced him to the company, including his brother-in-law Michéal. They went on to found the Gate Theatre and, for nearly half a century, were much cherished as Ireland’s most famous openly gay couple. Edwards did not Hibernicize himself. He remained identifiably English, even if he upgraded his class by writing in a Cambridge education he never had (Fitz-Simon 1994: 36). But for a generation and more, Edwards and Mac Líammoír at the Gate, McMaster with his touring company gave Ireland their Shakespeare, using a British theatrical training but camouflaged by a mask of Irishness. A key part of the Gate’s repertoire was Shakespeare. This could become complicated at times as to the question of what or whom they were representing when they went abroad. Richard Pine shows how the Gate’s 1939 performances in Belgrade and Sofia were subsidized by the British Council and shows that this was a politically strategic foreign policy decision. In the runup to what was to become World War II, the British wanted to make as many friends as possible in that politically sensitive part of Europe. Performances of the British national playwright by the Gate Theatre could be built into that campaign. While in Ireland, the Gate was criticized for taking a subsidy from the British; in Britain questions were asked in the House of Commons about the cost of that subsidy – it came to £7,056.1.8d – and there were English press attacks on the British Council for having supported the Gate’s tour (Pine 2004: 167–69).

The Abbey and Shakespeare The Abbey, Ireland’s National Theatre, tended to fight shy of Shakespeare in the early part of its history. Their first Shakespeare play did not come until twenty-four years after their founding, with a production of King Lear directed by the playwright Denis Johnston in 1928. Johnston was inspired by European avant-garde theater and used a futurist set design by Dolly TraversSmith (Figure 22.1). F.J. McCormick took the lead as Lear. McCormick was an outstanding comic actor, well known for his creation of the part of Joxer, opposite Barry Fitzgerald as the Captain, in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. Lear gave him the opportunity to show what he could do in a major tragic role (Figure 22.2). 257

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Figure 22.1  King Lear: 1928, Abbey Theatre, set design by Dolly Travers-Smith Source: Courtesy of Abbey Theatre.

It is one of the perpetual frustrations of theater history that it is impossible to know what a performance such as this was actually like. Everyone who saw it thought it remarkable: Lady Gregory called McCormick “magnificent” (quoted in Hunt 1979: 143); Joseph Holloway, the architect of the Abbey and inveterate theater-goer, said that “every line of the part was thought out and lived on the stage” (Hogan and O’Neill 1968: 44). All we can see in the photograph is what looks like a poor stage wig and beard. However, this Lear seems to have been something of a one off for the Abbey. There was a Macbeth in 1934, and a Coriolanus in 1936 directed by the English director Hugh Hunt, but after that there was to be a gap of thirty-five years before the Abbey again staged one of the tragedies. It was again Hugh Hunt, who had directed the 1936 Coriolanus, who produced Macbeth in 1971, having returned to the Abbey as Artistic Director in 1969 after a successful career in British theater. The main occasion for the production was the opportunity to bring the Irish actor Ray McAnally back from a successful career in England to play the lead. However, in explaining why he chose Macbeth, Hunt in his program note hinted at its special appropriateness at the time: of all Shakespeare’s plays this legendary Celtic story is the closest to the literature of Ireland. . . . It is also a play that has considerable relevance to contemporary life with its portrayal of political ambition, the horrors of civil war, and the slaughter of innocent victims.  Macbeth 1971: 8 In 1971, Hunt was clearly thinking of the growing violence in Northern Ireland with his reference to the horrors of civil war and the slaughter of innocent victims. The Celticism of the story was brought out with Bronwen Casson’s set of “granitic dolmens or stone and bronze 258

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Figure 22.2 F.J. McCormick as Lear, 1928 Source: Courtesy of Abbey Theatre.

castellations” (Kelly 1971: 10). The more contemporary references did not seem to have been apparent to the reviewers. Instead, the production produced a catty reflection from one critic on the impossibility of an English director trying to stage Shakespeare with an Irish cast: “Poor Mr. Hunt . . . when he attempts to produce Shakespeare with the Abbey company he is like a potter who has handled peat instead of clay with which to mould his design” (quoted in Hunt 1979: 223). It was again an English director who staged the first Shakespeare production with a fully explicit political relevance in the Abbey, and then the reference point was not Ireland but something that had happened 12,000 miles away. Michael Bogdanov’s Hamlet in 1983 was very obviously inspired by the Falklands War. The cue was Fortinbras’s Polish expedition “to gain a little patch of ground/That hath in it no profit but the name” (Hamlet, 4.4.18–19), for which yet, in the name of honor, Fortinbras and the Poles were prepared to sacrifice 20,000 lives. Bogdanov, who had learned his trade when a student in Trinity College Dublin in the 1960s, has always 259

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liked modern dress, up-to-the-minute Shakespeare, and the Captain’s speech about the Polish campaign from act 4, scene 5, rang bells for him in 1983. The program prepared you for the style of production you were about to see, opening with a quotation from Charles Marowitz, the 1960s avant-garde theater director, continuing with a passage of Jan Kott on “Hamlet – the modern experience,” and ending up with a piece by Brecht on Hamlet. The political values of the play were made evident from the second scene, where Niall Tóibín as Claudius appeared in a white Generalissimo’s uniform, evidently on the balcony of the Presidential palace, addressing the crowds in the square below through a microphone. No doubt here about the coup d’etat that had taken place. Stephen Brennan as Hamlet was a naive young idealist caught up in a vicious world of political catch-as-catch-can that was beyond him. This was very much the Brechtian view of Hamlet. Bogdanov made his topical point unmistakable with the entrance of Fortinbras in the last scene, a shock attack by assault troops through the Abbey auditorium with the sound of helicopters overhead. The production had its strengths. I remember particularly some very funny satirical court scene, with Claudius having taken one too many drinks over dinner snoring through the dumbshow, which explains why he is not alerted to what is coming in The Murder of Gonzago. But Stephen Brennan as Hamlet was left high and dry with his soliloquies. He delivered them well, but in the context of the production as a whole, his existential soul-searching seemed simply irrelevant and had no purchase on the action of the play.

Irish comedies With the tragedies, Irish theater for years seemed to be reliant on English directors like Hunt and Bogdanov and on a sense of political relevance coming from outside the country. In the case of the comedies it has been different. Gerry Stembridge’s wonderfully funny version of The Comedy of Errors in the Abbey in 1993 was in part a send-up of politically “relevant” Irish Shakespeare. For this production, there was a splendid parody of a Fintan O’Toole contemporary reading of Shakespeare in lieu of a program note. O’Toole had established himself as a leading critic and cultural commentator in the 1980s, someone who brought a left-wing political inflection to his work as theater reviewer for The Irish Times, as well as having reported on the long labyrinthine exposure of local Irish corruption that was the Beef Tribunal, one of a series of public investigations of the time. This spoof program note consists of a series of quotations of what “my good friend and colleague Fintan O’Toole might say”: The disenfranchised youth of Darndale and Tallaght, need the telling indictment that is THE COMEDY OF ERRORS to speak out for them in a theatrical world that is all too complacent. The recurrent imagery of Meat through the play is in itself a reminder of the beef tribunal and the inherent corruption that Shakespeare fought so hard against. The notion of twins is significant also – Different yet the same, like our principal political parties, or of a society which looks both ways at the same time. The powerful figure of the nun in the final act, reminds us all of the continuing power and influence of the church. Comedy of Errors 1993 The Stembridge Comedy of Errors was an Irish staging of Shakespeare, adapted as a Country and Western musical set in a motel “somewhere between Navan and Nashville” (Nowlan 1993). It was wickedly successful in its satire on all the corny ploys of the musical – in microphones conveniently discovered in bouquets of flowers, action put on pause while the hero sings his 260

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sentimental song. The pink neon motel, designed by Monica Frawley and Johanna Taylor, was a marvellous mock-up of the tacky, tasteless adobe-style confection that planning authorities in Ireland were prepared to approve without a blink. The absurd farce of The Comedy of Errors was made the occasion for a great night out mocking Irish foibles: the unaccountable popularity of Country and Western music in Ireland, Ireland’s gimcrack imitations of an imagined America. Shakespeare provided a vehicle to send up the tendency within postcolonial Ireland, while shunning the culture of the former colonizer, to adopt instead a reach-me-down version of Americanism. The 2006 Rough Magic staging of The Taming of the Shrew again gave an early Shakespeare comedy an Irish setting, but to somewhat different effect. The set designer here was also Monica Frawley, and she took her inspiration from the period picture-postcard scenes of John Hinde, specifically his images of the Irish Butlin’s Holiday Camp. The long traverse stage space became the lounge bar of a provincial pub owned by Baptista, played by Barry McGovern, father of Katherina and Bianca. It could be turned into an imagined ballroom by the descent of a revolving crystal ball. Katherina herself, re-conceived as an Irish Caitriona, was to be seen depressedly wiping down tables, a sort of latter-day Pegeen Mike, the shrewish heroine of The Playboy of the Western World. The Synge reference made imaginative sense of the figure of Katherina within an Irish dramatic context, placing the shrew as the sharp-tongued, bossy publican’s daughter who is at the same time lonely and vulnerable (Figure 22.3). The patriarchal world of Baptista cutting deals on marriage and dowries for his daughters was made credible by its association with a pub-and-market ambience of all-male bargaining. What was most striking was the way the Hibernicization brought the original language freshly alive. While Parker placed the action in a realistically rendered 1970s Ireland, she made no alterations to the text to domesticate it to that changed setting. Padua remained Padua and Verona Verona, those Italian places that Shakespeare also took over wholesale when transplanting his source story to the English stage. Shakespeare’s Elizabethan verse lines, his clotted and allusive

Figure 22.3 Pauline McLynn as Katharina in Rough Magic production of The Taming of the Shrew, 2006 Source: Photographer: Patrick Redmond. Courtesy of Rough Magic.

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prose, were spoken by the Irish actors effectively and unselfconsciously without any attempt to “Irish” them up. Instead, however, the casual oaths and profanities that are part of the ordinary stuff of the characters’ language – “Would to God,” “God be blessed,” “O mercy” – which sound merely inert and lifeless in most modern stagings of Shakespeare took on a new credibility as uttered by these Irish midlands characters. For such people, as one suspects for Shakespeare’s own contemporaries, these pious lardings of speech were testimony to an accepted faith that shaped popular discourse while not in any significant way informing their behavior. Shakespeare’s text felt more alive not just because it had been displaced to a familiar Irish setting for an Irish audience, but because the original play written over 400 years ago in another country was once again tuned into a living language. Irish speakers of English in this production were in some sense Shakespeare’s linguistic heirs.

Histories and tragedies Irish directors have found means to stage the comedies in significantly Irish productions that work to enhance the plays by their settings and styles. With the histories and the tragedies, there remains more of a problem. The history plays were quite frequently performed in Ireland in the colonial period, but very rarely since 1922. One can see why. The two sequences of plays that represent the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard III can be interpreted as England’s national epic. Why should audiences in independent Ireland take an interest in the matter of which English monarch knocked off which other claimant to the throne in the fourteenth and fifteenth century? The triumphalism of the English victory at Agincourt – if that’s what it is in Henry V – would hardly be to Irish tastes, with Captain MacMorris, our only representative, appearing for just one scene. And yet, the Galway-based Druid Theatre Company was prepared to take on Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V and adapt them into the seven-hour marathon that was the 2015 DruidShakespeare. Druid had created a market for daylong marathon performances, first with the Leenane Trilogy of Martin McDonagh; then with DruidSynge, their production of all six of his plays; and in 2012 with three plays of Tom Murphy played together. Still, these were all Irish works and all within an idiom of heightened Irish realism. Shakespeare’s histories were something else again. The director Garry Hynes commissioned a slimmed-down adaptation of the four plays by the Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe. Played with a cast of just thirteen actors, including woman actors in the lead parts of Bolingbroke/Henry IV and Prince Hal/Henry V, it was a huge success for the company, winning rave reviews from Irish, British, and American critics alike and multiple awards in the national theater awards sponsored by The Irish Times. Unfortunately, as against this chorus of praise, I felt distinctly underwhelmed by the production. It has to be said that I saw it in less than ideal conditions. The play had been designed originally for the intimate space of the company’s Galway Mick Lally Theatre, where the bare earth floor and very basic backdrop would have helped to enforce the sense of theatrical urgency. Instead, I saw it on a booth stage in an open-air venue in Kilkenny, where high winds kept threatening to blow the set away altogether. What is more, because of the unavailability of one cast member, who had played both John of Gaunt and Glendower, they cut altogether the crucial Act 3, Scene 1, of 1 Henry IV, where the rebels fall out over the literal carve-up of Britain. I could not really see the value of the gender-blind casting of the two kings, other than to make a reasonable enough protest against the lack of major parts for women in Shakespeare’s histories (Figure 22.4). Research for Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays involved my watching many serial productions of the plays, both live and on the screen (Grene 2002). This one seemed to me, by comparison, a cut-down, underpowered version. 262

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Figure 22.4 Derbhle Crotty as Henry IV and Aisling O’Sullivan as Prince Hal in 1 Henry IV, Druid Theatre Company production of DruidShakespeare, 2015 Source: Photographer: Matthew Thompson. Courtesy of Druid Theatre.

Fiach Mac Conghail, shortly after his appointment as Artistic Director of the Abbey in 2005, committed the theater to mounting one Shakespeare play a year. This was a brave policy decision to combat the tendency of the Irish National Theatre to shy away from Shakespeare. There were, accordingly, productions of several of the tragedies: Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and in 2016 Othello. The director was Joe Dowling, recently retired after a long and extremely successful spell running the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. For the Dubliner Dowling, it was a return home to the Abbey where he had been Artistic Director as a young man in the 1970s and 1980s. The lead was taken by Peter Macon, an experienced African American actor with whom Dowling had worked before and who made a suitably strong and dignified Othello. (It was a long way from the nineteen-year old George Farquhar from Derry playing the part.) For this production, Dowling had his designer Riccardo Hernandez reduce the playing area on the Abbey stage to a single raised polygon of black and white marble, with rows of onstage seating on two sides. All around there was wooden panelling that exactly simulated the panels of the Abbey auditorium to heighten this effect of a stage within a stage. This was to be an intimate Othello, stripped down to its interpersonal emotional core. Dowling explained his intentions for the production. He wanted to release the “fast-paced, energy-driven thriller” in the play (Conroy 2016). That not only meant modern costuming; it meant a lot of cuts, particularly through the first half of the play. With contemporary army uniforms, where the soldiers had sheath-knives at best, there was no way Othello could still the brawl in Act 1 with his famous line, “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them” (Othello, 1.3.59). The uneasy reaction of Othello to Desdemona pleading to be allowed to go with him to Cyprus was taken out: “I therefore beg it not/To please the palate of my appetite . . . But to be free and bounteous to her mind” (1.3.261–65). Cut also was Cassio’s 263

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extraordinary Ave-like salute to Desdemona when she lands in Act 2: “Hail to thee, lady; and the grace of heaven,/Before, behind thee, and on every hand,/Enwheel thee round” (2.1.85– 87). Othello and Desdemona were just a nice young couple, happily in love in spite of all the prejudice against them. This, though, had the effect of making it Iago’s play. There was a touch of stereotyping in giving Marty Rea a Northern Irish accent as Iago – the only obviously Irish figure in the play – but he was brilliantly in control throughout: as the cynical, aggressive confidant of Roderigo, as the deferential but indignant subordinate officer with Othello (Figure 22.5). And he emphasized the improvisatory character of the soliloquies, making up Iago’s plots as he went along. He completely naturalized the figure; the lines were left out that suggest Iago’s radical hatred of the goodness of his targets: “Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago” (1.1.57);

Figure 22.5 Marty Rea as Iago in Abbey Theatre production of Othello, 2016 Source: Photographer: Sarah Doyle. Courtesy of Abbey Theatre.

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Cassio “hath a daily beauty in his life/That makes me ugly” (5.1.19–20). This made Othello no more than Iago’s dupe, a more serious version of the gullible Roderigo. Peter Macon is a fine actor, and he became a powerful presence in the second half of the play, but the trajectory of the production was to turn him from an uncomplicated big man, uncomplicatedly in love with his wife, into a raging bull driven to fury by the darts of the skilled picador Iago. The murder of Desdemona, the destruction of Othello carried none of the tragic force of the defeat of goodness and innocence by evil. We lost the power of the play, which is so much more than the merely domestic tragedy it is sometimes wrongly supposed to be. Othello in this production was reduced Shakespeare, as (in my view) was Druid’s version of the histories. There may be still in Irish stagings of the tragedies and the histories an inability to express the fully amplified sense of their significance. Or, in the case of Druid, it may be simply that they do not have the resources to mount the sort of huge production that Michael Boyd (an Irish director, also, it needs to be said) did with his complete staging of the histories cycle for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2007. Generalizations about national traditions of theater are always problematic: so many factors, local and logistical, go into the staging of any given play. Let me conclude, then, with this much. Shakespeare does not belong to England, he belongs to the world: that is axiomatic. He is translated, reinterpreted, adapted in as many ways as there are languages, nations, theaters in the world. Ireland is as entitled to him as any other country – more so, perhaps, in that we speak a version of the same language in which he wrote. However, as Britain’s ex-colony, theater makers in Ireland in the hundred years since 1916 have found Shakespeare hard to deal with. In some cases, as with McMaster and Mac Liammóir, they have masked the Englishness of their origins and their theatrical background under an assumed Irish identity. The plays have been staged, with more or less success, by English directors such as Hunt and Bogdanov, bringing political emphases from outside. In a situation where fully professional acting training in Ireland has been quite a late development, our best actors have been more at home in the naturalistic style of modern Irish drama than in Shakespearean verse. Within such a context, the comedies have come off better than the tragedies and histories. But hopefully, we are well on our way to getting over whatever postcolonial anxiety we may have had about staging the great playwright from the island next door.

Note 1 Richard II, 2.1.156. All references to Shakespeare’s plays come from the second edition of The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Herschel Baker et al. (Shakespeare 1997). Future references will be included in the body of the text.

References “British Empire Shakespeare Society: ‘Hamlet.’ ” 1916. Freeman’s Journal, 8 Apr. Comedy of Errors. 1993. Abbey Theatre programme, personal collection. Conroy, Catherine. 2016. “ ‘There’s a whole group of black actors who won’t do Othello.’ ” Irish Times. Jun. 1. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019, www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/there-s-a-whole-group-of-blackactors-who-won-t-do-othello-1.2667200. “Dublin Shakespeare Society.” n.d. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017, www.dublinshakespearesociety.ie/about/ artistic-policy/. Ellmann, Richard. 1966. James Joyce. 1959. London: Oxford University Press. Fitz-Simon, Christopher. 1994. The Boys: A Double Biography. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Gregory, Lady [Augusta]. 1972. Our Irish Theatre. 1913. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe. Grene, Nicholas. 2002. Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. “ ‘Hamlet’ at the Abbey Theatre.” 1916. Irish Times, 8 Apr.

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23 SHAKESPEARE’S PRESENCE IN THE LAND OF ANCIENT DRAMA Karolos Koun’s attempts to acculturate Shakespeare in Greece Tina Krontiris In May 1964, Karolos Koun’s theater company participated in the London festivities for the celebration of Shakespeare’s 400th birthday with a performance of Aristophanes’s The Birds. Harold Hobson wrote in London’s Sunday Times about the performance: I had expected to have to treat The Birds with respect. After all, they are Greek and originally spoke in the most supple and musical of languages, and they have endured for a very long time. Westminster Abbey is to them only a precocious junior and Shakespeare a writer in this month’s magazines. What I had not reckoned on is the spontaneous enjoyment, the exhilaration and the swift pleasure which this entertainment gives. Hobson 1964 I am citing this quote here in order to introduce Koun from the outside, as it were, and to ask the logical question: if Koun could resurrect the Greek classics in such a way as to bring them alive after almost two and a half millennia, could he not do the same with Shakespeare, who lived only four hundred years back? How did he stage the admittedly few Shakespearean plays that he presented to the Greek public at various times? Before turning to these and related questions, I shall first give an overview of Shakespeare’s course in Greek theatrical history, for Koun’s work on Shakespeare is part of a cultural narrative.

Shakespeare in Greece Shakespeare entered Greece in the nineteenth century through the itinerant companies of selftaught actors, who adapted the bard’s plays freely for popular audiences and thus challenged his European image as representative of high culture (Sideris 1964: 36–38; Yanni 2005: 61). However, with the establishment of the Royal Theater of Greece by the monarchy in 1901, Shakespeare rose sharply in the social ladder. The extravagant performances of this institution, which featured expensive period costumes and historical realism in the settings, were attended 267

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by the social elite and aspiring members of the urban middle class. After the closing of the Royal Theater in 1908, and throughout the 1920s, the privately owned theater companies offered a plainer, more accessible form of Shakespeare to popular audiences, but the association of the bard with the educated and the socially privileged kept its hold (Mavropoulou 2007: 251). This association continued into the 1930s, when the newly established National Theater of Greece (NTG) held sway. The pre-eminence of Shakespeare at NTG was signaled by the fact that, for a long time after the inaugural production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in March 1932, Shakespeare headed the national repertory of almost every new theatrical season. Some of the finest performances of Shakespeare (nine in all, mostly tragedies) were produced at the NTG in its prewar period (1932–1940), under the direction of Fotos Politis in the first two years and Dimitris Rondiris later. Yet the NTG’s approach to the classics reinforced the association of Shakespeare with high culture. The long, full-text productions, which featured period costumes, elaborate stage designs, and realistic effects, could only be attended by those who had patience and learning or leisure and fine clothes. The ostentatious neoclassical building that housed the NTG would also be likely to intimidate the common Greek at a time when social inequalities ran high. After 1932, all theaters used demotic Greek (the popular language) in their Shakespeare productions; yet the linguistic idiom was not enough by itself to make the performances accessible to the ordinary Greek. Indeed, it is quite likely that some demotic translations, like the extreme form Rotas employed, would confuse the spectators (Krontiris 2005: 213–15). Furthermore, the use of the demotic language on the aristocratic Italian-style stage of the NTG would have sounded incongruous at least to the first comers among the audience. In the prewar period, the privately owned theater companies competed with the NTG, trying to show that they too can stage high-quality Shakespeare; they were not equipped to pursue in practice an attractive alternative that would contemporize Shakespeare and would make him accessible to the masses. In early 1945, just a few months after the withdrawal of the German forces from Greece, the demand for democratization and renewal of the stage was voiced with a sense of urgency, and a corresponding activity gathered momentum in Athens. Shakespeare was called upon to spearhead several experiments (Krontiris 2007a: 102–27), which, however, proved hurried and short-lived due to the political turmoil and the ideological polarization that lead to civil war (1946–1949). During this period the NTG, headed by Rondiris, reverted to its prewar practices. Its repertory still included one Shakespeare play every year, except that the emphasis was now on comedy due to the lack of tragic actors (Krontiris 2007b). In the privately owned theaters, Shakespeare was all but absent in the late 1940s, mainly because many talented actors had been exiled to barren prison-islands, persecuted for their socialist/communist beliefs. While in exile, some of these actors did successfully put into practice their ideas, reclaiming Shakespeare and other classics for the people (Krontiris 2014). In mainstream theater, however, all hopes of seeing a liberated bard after the war were crushed. From 1950 to the mid-1970s, there were several individual instances of attempts to bring Shakespeare closer to the Greek people, but they do not form a consistent or persistent narrative. As we shall see, Karolos Koun is part of this discontinuous narrative.

Koun and Shakespeare Karolos Koun, a man who grew up in Constantinople when it was part of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, made several “turns” in his artistic life. In the 1930s, shortly after his settling in Athens, he turned to Greek Popular Expressionism.1 He experimented on stage with a wide range of classic authors (Aristophanes, Euripides, Shakespeare, Hortatsis, Moliere), trying to combine expressionistic elements of popular (folk) Greek culture with modern stylization 268

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techniques (Spathis 2003: 459). This he did with his students at Athens College and at the Popular Stage (1934–1936), which he founded with the painter Yiannis Tsarouchis and the journalist Dionysis Devaris. In 1939, Koun set aside Popular Expressionism to pursue a new type of theater for Greece, focusing on modern drama. In his passage from amateur to professional theater, he collaborated briefly with commercial companies, including that of the overpowering Marika Kotopouli. Disappointed by what he saw around him and influenced by the so-called “Stanislavski System” of theater practice, he established his own Art Theater (1942), an ensemble company that challenged bourgeois theater in all aspects (Kangelari 2010: 119). It thus stood opposite the classicist hegemony of the NTG and the competitive protagonism of the commercial companies. Starting with Ibsen’s Wild Duck, Koun’s Art Theater put into practice its founder’s idea of an organic theater, whose purpose is the search of inner truth, for actors and spectators alike, in a communal atmosphere of theatrical magic.2 For a long time after 1942, Koun’s Art Theater was associated with contemporary drama. With the exception of Aeschylus’s Choephori (1945), it had not staged any of the old classics. Then in 1957, two years after the establishment of the Athens and Epidaurus Festivals by the Greek state, Koun made yet another turn – or rather a re-turn – to the Greek classics with Aristophanes’s Pluto, to be followed shortly by his famous Birds (1959). While he continued to stage contemporary drama (including Greek), his principal attention was now focused on ancient Greek dramatists. Spatially, he moved to large, open-air theaters; aesthetically, he came back to Greek Popular Expressionism but from a more sophisticated perspective, subordinating the expressionistic elements to an overall artistic purpose (Maggiar 1990: 210). Koun never quite made a “turn” to Shakespeare. Yet he did produce six professional performances of five different Shakespearean plays, in addition to the college productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1936) and The Tempest (1938). His professionally staged Shakespeare includes A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1952, 1971); Twelfth Night (1956); Romeo and Juliet (RSC, 1967); Measure for Measure (1968); and Troilus and Cressida (1973). As Mavromoustakos notes (2008: 29), this is a small number in comparison to his total output; yet, if we consider that Shakespeare is the only classic European playwright to have been included in the repertory of his Art Theater, this small corpus of Shakespearean performances acquires special significance in conjunction with the fact that Koun was one of the few foreign directors to have been invited to direct the RSC at Stratford-upon-Avon. In view of the above facts, the following questions arise: (1) How did Koun stage the Shakespeare plays he engaged with and what did he aim at in his performances? (2) Did he include any of the innovations attributed to him in the staging of ancient drama? (3) Why did he not produce more Shakespeare? In the rest of this chapter I will be arguing that Karolos Koun felt ill at ease with Shakespeare; he tried to indigenize the English bard but eventually gave up the attempt for a complex number of reasons, such as the cultural distance he felt from Shakespeare, the desire to invest his energies in the revival of attic drama, and the lack of resources to train his actors in the performance of Shakespearean drama. The amateur productions of the Dream and the Tempest at Athens College show clearly that Karolos Koun initially understood the adaptation of Shakespeare in terms of both the force of modernization that had begun in Europe and also the indigenous elements of Greek culture. As Glytzouris (2014) shows, Koun’s college productions evince a clear departure from the tradition of pictorial illusion and spectacle-oriented realism used up to that time to represent Shakespeare on the Greek stage. The modern dress, the stylized setting, the use of a single set throughout with few allusive props (recalling the Elizabethan conventions), the contrived stylistic uniformity, as well as the stylized gestures of characters that had become stereotypes – all these indicate that Koun adopted a modernist approach to Shakespeare, which was certainly new in Greece at 269

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the time. Yet this was not all. Koun was equally interested in acculturating Shakespeare: inserting Greek popular elements into the performance of his plays. Indeed, in the 1930s, it was the combination of modernity and tradition that constituted the core of Koun’s theatrical explorations (Kangelari 2010: 117). In his 1936 Dream (see Figure 23.1), Koun alluded to the exotic east and the Ottoman influence on popular Greek culture. For example, in the scenes of the fairy-world, he dressed a couple of the fairies in long, cross-striped dresses, draped a Turkish-looking kerchief over their heads, and put a tabor in their hands. In the scenes of the mechanicals, he alluded to the cruder, peasant aspect of the Greek popular culture, without yet managing to subordinate it to an overall artistic concept. Speaking generally about Koun’s handling of the popular element, Socrates Karantinos noted critically: “he brought it whole onto the stage, with the huge knees and the peasant cape, as he saw it in the village, in the refugee neighborhood and in the pictures of Karagiozis” (Karantinos 1936: 9). In his 1938 Tempest, Koun incorporated the Greek elements more organically into the performance. For one thing, he used a 1913 translation by Corfu poet Iacovos Polylas, whose language, though poetic, included several idiomatic phrases that occasionally startled the Athenian spectators (Anon 1937: 18),3 reminding them of their country’s different cultural layers. The language of the translation imparted a strong demotic accent to the whole production (Sideris 1965: 22). The same was true of the music by Kyrazis Haratsaris, who sang Ariel’s songs to the accompaniment of Greek demotic tunes (Anon 1937: 18). An allusion to ancient Greek drama was also inserted in the dance of the Naiads or Nymphs, who are called by Iris in the Fourth Act “to celebrate/A contract of true love” (4.1.132–33). Rather than looking merry, Koun’s Nymphs appeared “like priestesses in mournful costumes and in even more mournful masks” (M.K. 1938: 11). In this performance, Koun had skillfully managed to incorporate coherently the indigenous Greek elements into Shakespeare’s play within an overall modernist aesthetic. The success of the specific production was recognized even beyond the College: three performances of The Tempest were given for extra-collegiate audiences (as opposed to the usual

Figure 23.1 Scene from Karolos Koun’s 1936 student production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, showing the fairyland and its inhabitants Source: Courtesy of HAEF.

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one), and Prince Paul, later King of Greece, was among those who attended the performance (Kangelari 2010: 48). Considering Koun’s success in the college productions, it appears very likely that had he continued at a professional level what he started in the late 1930s with the students, he would have made a major contribution to Greek Shakespeare. However, the war experience and the resistance movement against the Nazis had created an atmosphere of urgency among artists to do things here and now. Koun was anxious to make an immediate impact on Greek theater. Continuing with Shakespeare would have meant taking the long and costly way with uncertain results. Furthermore, he came to adopt a rather disabling idea of cultural geography. In 1964, Koun wrote a brief essay on Shakespeare for the Athenian periodical Theatro, which dedicated its late-summer issue to the 400th anniversary of the bard’s birth. In this essay, indicatively entitled “Shakespeare, the Privilege of England,” Koun explains his concept of Shakespeare’s Englishness, which is different from that discussed today in such volumes as This England, That Shakespeare (Maley and Trudeau-Clayton 2010). Koun acknowledges Shakespeare’s greatness and the fact that there are many foreign elements in his works, yet at the same time he attributes to him an “absolutely Northern and specifically English and Elizabethan” perspective: Perhaps few great authors used in their works so many foreign myths and characters a Shakespeare did. Nevertheless, the viewing-point of their conception, the symbols, the rhythm, the figures, their psychological makeup, project themselves as boldly Elizabethan. Koun 1987: 62 The idea of natural geography as a function of cultural geography was central to both Koun’s revival of ancient Greek drama and his distance from Shakespeare. For Koun, natural geography (the soil, the sun, the weather, the mountains, the sea) is an important constituent of peoples’ cultural identity because it contributes to the formation of their moods, gestures, sensual perceptions, attitude toward one another and view of life. This, in turn, has an impact on the reception and stage representation of a classic author in his native land after a great lapse of time. As a Greek, Koun felt that he had an advantage over foreign artists in staging the Greek classics. Conversely, he felt that he had a disadvantage vis-à-vis his English colleagues in staging Shakespeare, for as modern inhabitants of the same land, the English are receptors of the same “climatological, natural, biological, and psychological influences” as their poetic predecessors (Koun 1987: 63). Although these views were voiced in 1964, they undoubtedly lingered in Koun’s mind long before then. This explains perhaps why from 1938 to 1967, in approximately thirty years, he made only two attempts to stage Shakespeare professionally. Both attempts show that as a professional director, Koun felt ill at ease with Shakespeare. His first professional staging of Shakespeare took place at the National Theater of Greece, where he served as guest director for the period 1950–1953, when his own Art Theater was temporarily shut down for economic reasons. The play he staged at NTG, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was one of his favorites; yet the decision to do Shakespeare at all was probably not entirely his own, as it was part of NTG’s policy to include a Shakespeare play in its repertory at regular intervals. Yiorgos Theotokas, its new Director General, sought a change towards a new aesthetic on the national stage (one that would signal a clear break with the previous establishment under Rondiris), and he hoped that this change could be achieved with the work of Koun. Supported by designer G. Vasileiou, Koun certainly offered a new outlook in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: an unencumbered stage that played with colors and textures; a woodland that was only suggestively represented on painted hangings; an unromantic notion of fairyland with 271

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untypical fairies (Oberon appeared as a lead soldier, wearing a helmet rather than a crown); and an updated language in a new translation by Yiannis Oikonomidis that sounded more contemporary to the Athenians than the demotic of Vassilis Rotas. (Only the heavy chandelier, overhanging throughout the performance, would remind the spectators of the old-style Shakespeare at NTG.) The interpretation of the Dream in this modern aesthetic was opaque. Koun consciously undermined the play’s comic element (Mouzenidou 2003: 380), but it was not clear what he wanted to show. Working on the large, traditional stage of the NTG with a group of actors who were set in their individual acting styles, he did not probably have much freedom to experiment and to connect with his earlier attempts to indigenize Shakespeare. Only in the scenes with the Mechanicals did the director insert a distinctly Greek element. He portrayed Shakespeare’s craftsmen realistically and, through the rebetico music of Manos Hadjidakis, placed them firmly in the culture of the Greek working class.4 It was the only part of the performance that reviewers approved unanimously.5 Koun’s second professional attempt at Shakespeare, made with Twelfth Night four years later, was at his own Art Theater, which had meanwhile moved to its permanent home in the basement of Orpheus cinema in central Athens. In itself, the decision to produce a Shakespeare play on a three-quarter round stage suggests a flirtation with the idea of including the bard in the project of revitalizing the theatrical experience. Although on the international scene postwar stage innovations had not yet been applied to Shakespeare on a large scale, Koun was undoubtedly aware that outside Greece, the Elizabethan dramatist was being claimed by the open-stage and contemporization movements, both of which had gained force after the war. But what did he purpose to do with Twelfth Night? The choice of Vassilis Rotas as translator and Yiannis Tsarouchis as stage and costume designer may suggest that Koun aimed to accommodate Shakespearean comedy in the Greek popular tradition, as he had subtly attempted in the school performances of the late 1930s. Indeed, in an interview he gave to theater historian Yiannis Sideris several years later, Koun said that his Twelfth Night at Art Theater in 1956, the mechanicals’ scenes in the Dream of 1952, and his early productions at Athens College “were characterized by the same directorial line, the difference being in the people that he had to work with each time” (Sideris 1965: 22). Yet, whatever Koun’s purpose may have been in Twelfth Night, the available evidence shows that this production did not constitute a committed experiment in the blend of the indigenous and the modern. On the one hand, Koun succeeded in presenting a new outlook of the play on a stage that was associated in the audience’s mind with modern drama. Assisted by Tsarouchis, the director presented a minimalist stage, eliminating all stage sets and using only a few objects to designate the location of scenes, which were incorporated into the play’s action (an anchor symbolized the port and an open door the road, while a wooden railing stood for greenery and open space). On the other hand, the only indigenous element was the language of the translation, demotic Greek. As discussed earlier, when the language was harmonized with the stage aesthetic, the allusion to popular culture worked successfully, as it did in the school Tempest of 1938. In the production of Twelfth Night, there seem to have been no visual allusions to popular culture. Furthermore, Koun did not manage to integrate the modern stage aesthetics with the demands of Shakespearean verse (Varikas 1956). His actors were unable to deliver Shakespeare’s lines with an appropriate articulation, rhythm, and pace. Long accustomed to performing contemporary psychological drama, they lacked the training, the experience, and the flexibility required to shift to a more declamatory style. As a result, the spectators were confused about the action that transpired on stage (Terzakis 1956). Koun himself, reflecting later, saw a completeness in his Twelfth Night; yet he also admitted that his company “was not entirely ready at that time to mount a Shakespearean play” (Koun 1987: 57). 272

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Both the 1952 Dream at the NTG and the 1956 Twelfth Night at the Art Theater evince that in the 1950s Koun did not feel comfortable or confident in staging Shakespeare. He was awkwardly trapped in a net of obstacles surrounding the bard. Some of the obstacles, like the idea of a cultural distance between a northern Elizabethan dramatist and a Greek director, were conceptual; others, such as the particularity of the theatrical stage and the training of actors in a new style, were practical and economic (Shakespeare plays demanded larger casts and longer periods of training). Koun’s long, almost exclusive preoccupation with modern drama created a pattern that appears to have been hard to break. Koun acquired greater freedom and confidence in staging Shakespeare after his European tours and international acclaim in the performance of ancient Greek comedy, and especially after his 1967 experience in Stratford where, as already mentioned, he directed the RSC in a production of Romeo and Juliet. I shall not comment on this production because it falls outside the scope of my chapter: it was performed outside Greece by an English company and for an English-speaking audience. Suffice it to say that Koun brought into this youthful Shakespearean tragedy certain elements from Greek tragic drama; for example, he emphasized the idea of tragedy as unavoidable fate and restored the function of the chorus as a citizens group that “loom[ed] over the proceedings” (Jackson 2003: 38). In Greece, however, Koun did not apply to the production of Shakespearean comedy the approach he had used in the performance of Aristophanes, where he had emphasized expressionistic elements of popular Greek culture in characters and situations. He seems to have kept ancient and Elizabethan drama separate. His mature Shakespeare productions (Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida) coincide both with Koun’s high achievements in the performance of attic drama and with the period of Greece’s military dictatorship (1967–1974). Yet the Shakespearean comedies produced in this period do not bear the marks either of topical politics or of Aristophanic influence. They are characterized by the predominance of the modern/global and an almost complete absence of the indigenous/local. In 1968, a year after his Stratford experience, Koun produced Measure for Measure, a Shakespearean “problem comedy,” which had never been performed before in Greece. In the specific political context, the choice of a play that focuses on the government of a new ruler (Angelo), who tries to impose law and order with severity when he himself is morally impeachable, could be seen as a gesture of resistance against the fascist regime, and in a general sense it was. As an ideologically progressive man, Koun was deeply concerned about the violation of democratic rights, but the regime’s heavy censorship on all theaters made him cautious; he was not willing to provoke the shutdown of his theater. Hence, Koun avoided an overtly political interpretation of the play. For example, he did not exploit the play’s popular element. “The few times that Koun brought onto the stage the people of Vienna (for example, at the welcoming of the Duke), he showed them rosy-cheeked and happy, jumping around carefree, without any dire presence amongst them,” one critic remarked (Kritikos 1968). Of course, the political associations would not go unnoticed among the audience. During the dictatorship, spectators who went to such performances were especially sensitive to the reception of political messages, and this was especially true of those who went to Koun’s “basement.” Director, actors, and spectators shared the same unspoken knowledge. Even so, Koun’s purpose in staging Measure for Measure does not appear to have been primarily political. Although the relevant records are lacking in details, it appears that in this production Koun sought to “re-theatricalize” Shakespeare according to the new European trends. In a reservedly positive critical reception, at least one reviewer placed Koun’s Measure for Measure in the context of such artists as Peter Brook and Peter Zadek (Doxas 1968). All critics agreed, however, that despite its evident boldness, the production presented the play without exaggerations 273

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or extremes, without breaking completely the traditional boundaries. The costumes and stage props were simple, light, and suggestive within an overall modernist outlook that was culturally unidentified. The only distinctively Greek element was the language of Vassilis Rotas, whose translations Koun had used in all of his Shakespearean productions. It is evident that after Stratford, Koun had given up the idea of acculturating Shakespeare by infusing Greek cultural elements into his stage aesthetics. It is also evident that in producing Shakespeare for a Greek audience he was beginning to adopt the international stage language of his avant-garde European colleagues. This became more evident in his next Shakespearean undertaking. The use of an international stage language is especially evident in Koun’s most successful Shakespearean production, his 1971 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (see Figure 23.2). Like Measure for Measure which preceded it, his third production of the Dream shows Koun’s abandonment of his earlier attempts to incorporate indigenous elements of Greek culture into Shakespeare plays. It also shows the influence of European theater artists, especially Peter Brook, on the Greek director. Visually, the semi-circular stage of Art Theater on which Dream was “mounted” looked both familiar and new. It looked familiar in that, as in previous productions, it was kept simple and uncluttered. The few props that were used – ladders, swings, hemlocks, rugs, pits – were highly suggestive and often functional. The plain, black-and-white costumes, differentiated by the variation in their fabric texture, provided visual coherence and contributed to the overall outlook of a stylized simplicity and symbolic suggestion that dominated the performance and gestured slightly towards Asiatic theater (Kritikos 1971). This last gesture was new. The whole production was informed by a new approach, which shifted the focus from language to action and abolished the separation between audience and performance spaces, erasing

Figure 23.2 Scene from Karolos Koun’s 1971 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, showing Bottom/Pyramus and Starveling/Moonshine Source: Courtesy of the Art Theater.

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the traditional demarcation line between actors and spectators. Some of the props were placed in areas very near the audience seats. Indeed the play’s action was spread all over the theater, including the passageways and the space beyond the seating area, creating the impression of an overflowing theatrical fair rather than a stage show (Georgousopoulos 1971). The fairies, played by the same actors who performed the human roles (shifting into their exotic attire right on stage), differed much from the other characters and, according to one critic, looked more like hippies than like creatures of a supernatural world (Thrilos 1981: 250). The forest scenes were highly stylized and quick to change: wooden ladders stood for trees, a green flokati rug on the stage floor indicated the scene’s location in the forest or green world, a brick-colored flokati stood for Theseus’s palace, and a yellow flokati served as the bed for the flowers of Titania. A huge tray of lighted multi-colored candles was brought in near the end to suggest the festive atmosphere of the wedding celebrations. Perhaps the greatest change introduced by Koun was in the portrayal of the mechanicals or craftsmen, whom he transformed into circus clowns. Through the clown-mechanicals (dressed in black and white rather than motley), Koun enhanced the play’s theme of multiple transformations and alluded to the circus, the world of physicality, artistic dexterity, and popular entertainment. This treatment of the mechanicals signaled Koun’s distance from his earlier versions of Dream, where he had used this group both as a unifying element for the whole play and as an opportunity to insert culturally specific allusions. The demotic translation of Rotas linked the play to Greek popular/folk culture, yet none of the translation’s cultural links were incorporated into the performance. The production was received enthusiastically by the public and the critics, who praised it for its freshness, artistic elegance, and clarity of vision (Esslin 1971; Kritikos 1971). This was not entirely Koun’s Dream in 1971, as Mara Yanni also notes (2017: 224). In the previous year, Peter Brook had directed the RSC in a production of the same play that was heralded by The New York Times as “a historic staging” (Barnes 1970). Brook’s production, which opened in Stratford on 28 August 1970, had moved to London’s Aldwych Theater in early 1971, and Koun would have had a chance to see it there or, in any case, read extensive reviews of it in the world press. A comparison with Brook’s Dream (Williams 1997: 224–34)6 shows that Koun borrowed several techniques: the idea of a circus, applying it to the mechanicals rather than to the fairies; the allusion to the hippies or “flower children”; the use of candles on a tray (a modified version of Brook’s several candle-trays) to signify the festivity in the end; the doubling up of roles to reduce the cast and suggest the similarity between the human and the metaphysical world; and the idea of extending the stage action into the audience to create the image of a community and erase the traditional demarcation line between actors and spectators. These borrowings do not lessen Koun’s achievement in producing a successful performance of one of Shakespeare’s best-known comedies on the small stage of Art Theater. They do suggest, however, that Koun was not a leader in doing something new with Shakespeare in Greece. He could present an international English bard to a select Greek public; he could not put a Greek signature on his plays and offer them to the masses, as he had done with Aristophanes’s comedies. Almost two years later, in June 1973, Koun followed a similar approach in his production of Troilus and Cressida, yet another “first” for the Greek public. The play was performed on the open-air stage of a temporary theater, which Art Theater had leased for its two summer productions in that year (Troilus and a Greek play about the popular Karagiozis). With Troilus, Koun probably wanted to join in the celebration of the victory of the international antiwar movement, which had protested for almost a decade against American military involvement in the war of Vietnam, finally forcing the U.S. government to stop its combat operations in January 1973. The Greek director interpreted Troilus and Cressida as grotesquely anti-heroic, emphasizing the 275

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degradation of war heroes. This was done through bizarre gestures in the movement of the actors, as well as through the grotesque element in the props and costumes. Dressed in antiheroic uniforms, the play’s Greek “heroes” fought with ridiculous-looking weapons against a caricatured representation of the walls of Troy. As in his recent Dream, so in the production of Troilus, Koun blended stage and audience spaces by using the front part of the auditorium (an extension of the semi-circular stage) and the auditorium isles as performance spaces (Margaritis 1973; Angelomatis 1973). This was done not only to suggest the spectators’ involvement in the theatrical action but also to manage effectively the crowd of forty actors who took part in the performance. While Koun’s Troilus and Cressida succeeded in communicating its antiwar message, it failed to elicit a warmly positive response, and certainly it fell short of the kind of sensation that his Dream had created. This was partly due to the fact that both critics and public were unfamiliar with the specific play. Yet it was also due to shortcomings in the way the play was represented. The majority of critics praised Koun’s skillful handling of the play’s large crowds on stage, but their spending most or all of their review space on summarizing the plot suggests a certain numbness or awkwardness. One critic spoke more directly about the problem that had plagued nearly all of Shakespeare productions at Art Theater, namely, the intruding interference of modern drama through the actors, who had not learned how to adapt their speaking styles to early modern verse (Georgousopoulos 1973). Koun had invested a great many resources in this production, whose impact was not commensurate with the cost. He probably realized at this point that, if he were to make an original contribution to Greek Shakespeare, he would have to make another major turn, training his actors (and the Greek critics) in this particular kind of drama. Yet such a turn was not congruent with his life-long commitments or his financial means. Understandably, until his death in 1987, Koun never performed Shakespeare again.

Conclusion Karolos Koun produced competent performances of several Shakespearean plays, yet he did not re-invent Shakespeare for the Greeks in the way he reinvented Aristophanes. It is true that he made few attempts at the bard. It is also true that he lacked the financial resources required to train his actors in the performance of Shakespearean drama. Yet the kind and amount of Shakespeare he produced are linked primarily to cultural factors and historically determined personal priorities. The cultural distance Koun felt from Shakespeare did not allow him to unleash his creativity in the staging of the bard’s comedies. When he “turned” to Shakespeare in his mature years, he did so by way of apology to his English colleagues, who had honored him with an invitation to direct Romeo and Juliet in the bard’s own hometown. Koun’s heartfelt commitment in the latter part of his career was to classical Greek drama. Presenting Aristophanes on the stage of ancient Epidaurus and London’s Aldwych Theater signified for Koun more than recognition of his artistic talent. In recreating for the modern Greeks the unique fusion of East-West that he saw in Aristophanes and the other ancient dramatists, he was disclosing his own identity as a western Greek from the Asiatic shores. Furthermore, by broadcasting his resounding message to the Greeks and the Europeans, through the masses that attended his performances, he was contributing to Greece’s own cultural identity and history. How does Koun’s example fit into the overall picture of Shakespeare in Greece? First, it illustrates the awkwardness that Greeks have always felt around Shakespeare. Although now globalization has eased this feeling, before postmodern times the bard in Greece was considered both ecumenical and xenos, foreign (Mouzenidou 2003: 379). Second, the discontinuous pattern of Koun’s engagement with Shakespeare explains the lack of a home-grown tradition around him 276

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in the land of Sophocles and Aristophanes. The Greeks have not managed to essentially accommodate the bard in their culture, a fact that is probably related to the development of Greek theater and the earlier treatment of the bard as the privilege of the few. Koun’s example has also certain implications for the thematic category of European Shakespeare. It challenges the widely held assumption, voiced by Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo, that European cultures have used the bard as a cultural and political frame of reference (2008: 5). Undoubtedly, from the early nineteenth century onwards, Shakespeare held a prominent position on the stages of Europe, often heading the national repertories, as he did in Greece for many years. The variety of his themes, the fluidity of his plays, the abundant references to a common Greco-Roman heritage, and the irenic values he espouses – all of these have appealed to the Europeans, who have appropriated him for different purposes across the old continent. Yet to show Shakespeare’s appropriation in various European countries, even at critical historical moments, is not to prove that he has served as a cultural and political point of reference in those countries. In order for any foreign poet to be used as reference by a certain culture, he must first go through a continual and substantial process of adaptation that will secure him a place in the national traditions. For this to happen, a need must be created for him, as it was created for Shakespeare in Germany in the early nineteenth century, when the Germans naturalized the English bard to help them create a national literature and theater that could unite them “in a common, utopian resolve” (Kennedy 1993: 3). In that instance, Shakespeare was called upon to fill a gap left by the absence of an existing tradition. Greece, however, had a powerful literary and theatrical tradition that went back to classical times. Its main cultural goal as a modern nation was to establish continuity with its pre-Ottoman past and hence to re-claim the ancient heritage. Shakespeare did not fit into this cultural narrative.

Notes 1 By this term, Koun meant the artistic appropriation of aesthetic elements that derived from native Greek culture,“as it was manifested in the authentic life of villages and islands, in our demotic songs and, further back, in the Byzantine hagiographies and on ancient urns” (Koun 1981: 23–24). 2 See Koun’s aesthetic manifesto, originally expressed by him in a lecture he gave on 17 August 1943, reprinted in Koun (1981: 13–30). 3 This review was based on dress rehearsal. The first public performance of The Tempest was on January 30, 1938. 4 Rebetico is a popular type of song that originated in late nineteenth-century Greek prisons and was developed in the first half of the twentieth century. It has always been associated with the socially underprivileged (workers, refugees, immigrants), though today it experiences a revival across all social classes. 5 Performance reviews, photographs, and other data concerning this production can be found on the relevant page of the digitized archive of the Greek National Theater, at www.nt-archive.gr/playDetails. aspx?playID=699. 6 See also the RSC photo archive for Brook’s Stratford performance: www.rsc.org.uk/a-midsummernights-dream/past-productions/peter-brook-1970-production.

References Angelomatis, Chr[istos]. 1973. “Apo to Theatron: ‘Troilos kai Chyseis,’ ” review of Troilus and Cressida, dir. Karolos Koun. Estia. 1 Jul. N.p. Anon. 1937. “ ‘E trikymia’ tou Saixpir sti skini mas,” review of The Tempest, dir. Karolos Koun. O Athineos [Athens College student magazine], 23 Dec. 18. Barnes, Clive. 1970. “Theater: Historic Staging of ‘Dream,’ ” review of Midsummer Night’s Dream, dir. Peter Brook. The New York Times. 28 Aug. N.p. Doxas, Angelos. 1968. “Sto Theatro Technis ‘Me to idio metro’ tou Saixpir,” review of Measure for Measure, dir. Karolos Koun. Eleftheros Kosmos. 31 Oct. N.p.

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Tina Krontiris Esslin, Martin. 1971. “Esslin: me magepse ‘To oneiro’ tou Koun,” open-letter to Karolos Koun on the performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ta Nea. 22 Oct. N.p. Georgousopoulos, Kostas. 1971. “To ‘Oneiro kalokairinis nyktas’ tou Saixpir,” review of Midsummer Night’s Dream, dir. Karolos Koun. To Vima. 17 Oct. ———. 1973. “Theatro Technis: ‘Troilos kai Chrysida’ tou Saixpir,” review of Troilus and Cressida, dir. Karolos Koun. To Vima. 26 Jun. N.p. Glytzouris, Antonis. 2014. “Karolos Koun in the 1930s and the Birth of Modernist Shakespeare in Greece.” New Theatre Quarterly 30.1: 40–50. Hobson, Harold. 1964. Review of Aristophanes’ Birds, dir. Karolos Koun. Sunday Times (London). 17 May. N.p. Hoenselaars, Ton, and Clara Calvo. 2008. “Introduction: European Shakespeare – Quo Vadis?.” In The Shakespearean International Yearbook 8. Eds. Graham Bradshaw and Tom Bishop. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. 3–14. Jackson, Russell. 2003. Shakespeare at Stratford: Romeo and Juliet. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson Learning. Kangelari, Dio, ed. 2010. Karolos Koun. Athens: Educational Foundation of the National Bank. Karantinos, Socrates. 1936. “K. Koun, Saixpir: ‘Oneiro therinis nyktos,’ ” review of Midsummer Night’s Dream, dir. Karolos Koun. Neoellinika Grammata 4 (26 Dec.): 9. Kennedy, Dennis. 1993. Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Koun, Karolos. 1981. Karolos Koun gia to theatro: keimena kai synedefxeis [Karolos Koun on Theatre: Texts and Interviews]. Ed. Giorgos Kotanidis, with Prologue by Marios Ploritis. Athens: Ithaki. ———. 1987. Kanoume theatro gia tin psyche mas [We Do Theater for Our Soul]. Athens: Kastaniotis. Kritikos, Theodoros. 1968. “Sto Theatro Technis ‘Me to idio metro’ tou Ouilliam Saixpir,” review of Measure for Measure, dir. Karolos Koun. Acropolis. 14 Nov. N.p. ———. “ ‘Oneiro kalokairinis nyktas’: ena mnemeio kallitechnikis diavgeias,” review of Midsummer Night’s Dream, dir. Karolos Koun. Acropolis. 28 Oct. N.p. Krontiris, Tina. 2005. “Translation as Appropriation: Vassilis Rotas, Shakespeare and Modern Greek.” Shakespeare Survey 58: 208–19. ———. 2007a. O Saixpir se kairo polemou, 1940–1950 [Shakespeare in wartime, 1940–1950]. Athens: Alexandria Publications. ———. 2007b. “Shakespeare and Conservatism during the Greek Civil War (1946–1950).” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 25.2: 195–212. ———. 2014. “The Staging of the Merchant of Venice and Othello by Greek Political Exiles (1951–1953): Shakespeare in Extremis.” In Renaissance Shakespeare, Shakespeare Renaissances. Eds. Martin Procházka, et al. Lanham, MD: University of Delaware Press and Rowman & Littlefield. 249–61. Maggiar, Michael.1990. “Karolos Koun and the Theatro Technis.” PhD Diss., City University of New York. Margaritis, Alkibiadis. 1973. “Kritiki: ‘Troilos kai Chrysida,’ ” review of Troilus and Cressida, dir. Karolos Koun. Ta Nea. 19 Jun. N.p. Mavromoustakos, Platon, ed. 2008. Karolos Koun: oi parastaseis [Karolos Koun: The Performances]. Athens: Benaki Museum. Mavropoulou, Theodora. 2007. “Oi parastaseis tou Saixpir kai oi koinonikes kai ethnikes zymoseis stin Ellada (1900–1950)” [Shakespeare Performances and Socio-national Negotiations in Greece, 1900– 1950]. PhD Diss., Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. M.K. 1938. “ ‘E trikymia’ tou Saixpir,” review of The Tempest, dir. Karolos Koun. Neoellinika Grammata 62 (5 Feb.): 11. Mouzenidou, Agni. 2003. “Skiniki prosegisi tou Saixpir sta kratika theatra: To oneiro kalokairinis nychtas” [Approaches to Shakespeare in the State Theaters: The Dream]. In Praktika B’ Panelliniou Theatrologikou Synedriou [Proceedings of the 2nd Pan-Hellenic Theater Conference]. Ed. Constantza Georgakaki. Athens: Ergo. 375–91. Sideris, Yiannis. 1964. “O Saixpir stin Ellada IV: skinothetes kai ermineftes ston 19o Eona.” [Shakespeare in Greece IV: Directors and Interpreters in the 19th century] Theatro 16 (Jul.–Aug.): 28–38. ———. 1965. “O Saixpir stin Ellada VIIIa: skinothesies ta teleftea 25 chronia” [Shakespeare in Greece VIIIa: Stagings in the last 25 years]. Theatro 20 (Mar.–Apr.): 21–34. Spathis, Dimitris. 2003. “Karolos Koun: e poreia pros to Theatro Technis” [KarolosKoun: On the Way to Art Theater]. Istorika 39 (Dec.): 451–78.

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Shakespeare in the land of ancient drama Terzakis, Angelos. 1956. “E ‘Dodekati nychta’: Theatro Technis,” review of Twelfth Night, dir. Karolos Koun. To Vima. 4 Mar. N.p. Thrilos, Alkis. 1981. To elliniko theatro [Greek theater], vol. 12. Athens: Kostas and Eleni Ourani Foundation. 249–50. Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret, and Willy Maley, eds. 2010. This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on ­Englishness and the Bard. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Varikas, Vasos. 1956. “E ‘Dodekati nychta’ sto Theatro Technis,” review of Twelfth Night, dir. Karolos Koun. Ta Nea. 13 Mar. N.p. Williams, Gary Jay. 1997. Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Theater. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Yanni, Mara. 2005. Shakespeare’s Travels: Greek Representations of Hamlet in the19th Century. Parousia Journal monograph series, no. 66. Athens: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. ———.  2017. “A Midnight Summer’s Dream in Modern Athens.” In Shakespeare and Greece. Eds. Alison Findlay and Vassiliki Markidou. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury. 217–42.

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24 “TO BE/NOT TO BE” Hamlet and the threshold of potentiality in post-communist Bulgaria Kirilka Stavreva and Boika Sokolova

Hamlet was first staged in Bulgaria in 1906, when the young state, barely twenty-eight years out of Ottoman rule, sought opportunities for strengthening its sovereignty and identity while maneuvering a transition from petty agriculture and manufacturing to the new capitalism. This was the year of the first major labor strike and mass student protests against the autocratic regime of the Crown Prince Ferdinand, a time when the surge of patriotic enthusiasm was already yielding to bitter partisanship, rampant corruption, and the plundering of state assets by political opportunists (Bozhinova 2009: 28–29). In such a time Savremenen teatar (Contemporary Theatre), a traveling company with a reputation for social engagement, produced a substantially cut version of Hamlet and took it to some major cities (36–37). It was the first among theatre troupes to choose the European classic in order to shed light on Bulgarian social hopes and social rot (38). For the rest of the century, productions of Hamlet would map significant shifts in the civic engagement of Bulgarian theatre, while the Bulgarian public’s encounters with the play “would mark pivotal shifts in spiritual and social attitudes” (187). In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, when social elation – this time, about democratic changes after the fall of the Berlin Wall – was suffocated in the morass of a forestalled transition, the theatre again reached for Hamlet to provoke reflection upon the historical moment and the audience’s part in history. These post-communist transformations of the play, to use the terms of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, deployed both repetitions (of Shakespeare’s familiar play) and stoppages (unexpected caesuras, elisions, and redirections of the play’s plot), to free what he calls the poetry of potentiality from the foreclosures of prosaic spectacles and standardized narratives of sovereignty (2004: 316–17). Four productions of Shakespeare’s tragedy form the focus of this study: a documentary film about a failed attempt to put on Hamlet on a high mountain top (a project started in 1999 and completed in 2008); a drama sequel, Wittenberg Revisited, by the experimental theatre Sfumato (2011); a celebrated production for the National Theatre, “Ivan Vazov” (2012); and a staging of the play for the grassroots Shakespeare festival in the village of Patalenitsa (2017). To their spectators, these productions offered new expressions of artistic ambition and optimism, they dramatized of the collapse of harmony, faith, and reason, the soiling of ideals and their stoic, paradoxical assertion. In line with such disruptions of the unexamined logic of both spectacle and ideology, the analyses below are primarily informed by Agamben’s concept of potentiality, which refers to the complex inseparability of doing and not-doing, acting and not-acting, being and not-being.1 This 280

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concept underpins our discussion of the Bulgarian artist and intellectual in The Hamlet Adventure and Wittenberg Revisited. In addition, our treatment of Hamlet staged at the National Theatre and in Patalenitsa relies on Agamben’s notion of the gesture as facilitating the birth of new communities. Gesture, for him, suspends the separation of “life and art, act and power, general and particular”; it is a “pure praxis” with “neither use value nor exchange value; . . . it is the other side of the commodity” (2000: 79). Deploying a rich new palette of expression, all four productions redefine notions of political theatre; together, they contribute to the revival of the Bulgarian theatre’s civic mission. To understand the extraordinary conviction, fierce creativity, and perseverance needed to challenge contemporary Bulgarian theatre-goers to ponder the effort of ethically engaged citizenship, it is important to be aware of the extent of the crisis to which these productions of Hamlet respond. Around the turn of the millennium, even as Bulgaria adopted the political discourse of Western democracy, finalized the restitution of property to pre-World War II owners, carried out large-scale privatization of government assets, and took decisive steps toward Euro-Atlantic integration, it also got caught in the vicious circle of post-communism. The post-­communist condition has been defined as a forestalled democratic transition whose ultimate goals of freedom, justice, and economic prosperity have been hijacked by oligarchic groups. Bulgarian post-communism has generated a façade democracy, marked by a vast divide between haves and have-nots, a feeble middle class, and pervasive corruption that have resulted in a devastating demographic crisis, civic apathy and desperation (Todorov 2013: 31). Most of the economically deprived and politically disenfranchised Bulgarians, including the intellectual class, perceive the “transition to democracy as . . . a free fall into philistinism and absurdity . . . recognized as degradation and experienced as depression” (Sugarev 2014). Social stratification has reduced to basic survival a disturbingly large number of people. Conversely, the apparatchiks of the rebranded Communist Party (now called Socialist), having secured ideological control over the political center, reaped the benefits of privatization and swiftly morphed into the new oligarchy. Today it wields “a new form of totalitarian control over society through the structures of a formally democratic, but essentially elitist paternalistic state” (Minchev 1995: 21–22). Among the most repulsive debasements of civility in the post-communist state is the glorification of the criminal, “the embodiment of an archaic kratos, the brutal pre-political natural force” (Manchev 2004–2006), and his political empowerment through the fusion of the mafia with the political elite. In one election after another, members of Parliament turn out to be the straw-men of oligarchs with ties to shady businesses, crime rings, and the security networks of the old communist state. Many of them flaunt the iconic markers of a successful lifestyle – luxury clothing, expensive cars, macho sexuality – a lifestyle propagated by the multi-media industry of chalga entertainment, which has become a fixture in public life, including political campaigns. While a discussion of the pervasive cultural phenomenon of chalga is beyond the scope of this study, suffice it to say that chalgaization has become a recognized neologism in Bulgarian, signifying the elevation into a cultural norm of profanization, brazen acquisitiveness, and moral turpitude.2 With the arts and the theatre starved of funding, they, too, have been pressed into generating the entertainment commodities favored by the new elites. Such is the political and cultural context in which Bulgarian Hamlets of the post-communist era challenge their audiences to reflect on the decay of civility, morals, and spiritual values and to imagine possibilities for setting right a disjointed history and society.

The Hamlet Adventure: from aesthetic utopia to art as world formation3 In 1999, two years after the nadir of Bulgaria’s economic and political crisis of 1996–1997, a filmmaking team of seventy attempted to scale an artistic and natural summit. Their ambition 281

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was to create a unique aesthetic object, based on Hamlet as the epitome of artistic and philosophical achievement. The vastly different final film, instead, offers a mode of lived art best described as a collective world formation. In Agamben’s terms, while the desired aesthetic object failed to actualize, it brought its (im)potentiality into a new actuality, the result of the stoic effort of the creative team. The very existence of this work is a denunciation of post-communist consumerism. Led by the Bulgarian screenwriter and producer Stanislav Semerdjiev and the American inventor of Virtual Cinema Greg Roach, the team set out to represent Hamlet’s story as a selfsacrificial journey by defying environmental, artistic, social, and financial challenges. Shooting took place over 8,000 feet above sea level, by seven glacial lakes beneath the highest mount on the Balkan Peninsula. The loftiness of the artistic vision matched the location. The screenplay comprises nine soliloquies written by Semerdjiev, their number condensed to seven in the final film cut. Enfolded in them are twenty-two lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Delivered in voice-over, this twice-wrought poetry is interwoven with music by composer Mark Snow (The X-Files, Millenium, Smallville); folk-metal guitarist Kiril Yanev; and the experimental string quartet StringS. These interface with other media: dance; shadow theatre; computer graphics animation; and stunning photography of mountain vistas, sky, and water. Beleaguered by financial and logistical problems and near-catastrophes, this production, originally entitled I, Hamlet, failed to actualize. Nine years later, the failure was memorialized in The Hamlet Adventure (dir. Greg Roach and Ivaylo Dikanski), announced as a “spiritual documentary” in the DVD credits. Through surviving footage from I, Hamlet, collaged with interviews with cast and crew, the film gives new life to the original aesthetic project. Furthermore, The Hamlet Adventure offers a candid social commentary on the rapacious times that brought down I, Hamlet, while portraying the formation of a “Hamletized” creative community (albeit one that by 2008 was dispersed around the globe). “Adventure” in the film’s title is semantically loaded. On one level, it suggests the thrill of a romantic affair. Potently symbolic, the mountain and Shakespeare’s play exert an irresistible pull on the filmmakers. The camerawork shows the mountain as a mysterious place set between earth and sky where, dwarfed by sublime and capricious nature, the individual subconsciously reaches for the beyond. Extreme long shots caress rugged mountain vistas and hypnotic blue lakes, gliding by the human figures, and returning to them almost unwillingly. In turn, it was the cultural status of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that attracted the filmmakers. Semerdjiev compares its status to that of myth in classical drama: Hamlet’s story is similarly open to transformations resonant with a specific historical moment, yet recognizable in its fundamental structure and character set (Semerdjiev 2013). He imagined a performance on a grand scale, where the audience was to be flown by helicopter to the mountain top and seated on the rocks by the highest of the Seven Rila Lakes (Kisyova 2008: 9). A meeting with Greg Roach led to a more feasible, cinematic plan. In their collaborative vision, the camera was to take audiences to the mountain and the spiritual heights it embodies. Another significance of “adventure” is “hazardous endeavor.” On camera, participants describe the development of trust among crew members clambering up the treacherous path, tied together on a lead rope like a “bridge . . . between the real world and the upper world of the stage.” Fogs rolling in from the lakes rendered perfectly the otherworldliness of the location but could make shooting impossible within minutes. Cameras had to be anchored and ballet lifts performed in the rarified air on the edge of precipitous drops. At the end of the workday, the endurance of the team was further put to the test, as power and water were only intermittently available in the chalet where they were housed.

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Assistant director Edmond Scott Lobo recalls “that this production took place in a time of political instability, economic chaos, and social unrest.” In the midst of this turmoil, the budgeted funding was abruptly cut. Still, the team, overtaken by what Lobo calls “the madness of Hamlet,” persisted. Actors worked “till they dropped.” When instead of the light-weight aluminium rods for the pyramid topping the stage (a crucial design component), the supplier delivered heavy steel ones, the entire team – dancers and all – applied themselves to the ropes to hoist the two-and-a-half-ton structure. When it turned out that the imported ballet slippers were being held in customs for absurd bureaucratic reasons, team members took off their socks and gave them to the dancers to fold over their toes instead of points, so that shooting could be completed. At the end of the day, Greg Roach washed the women’s feet. Some setbacks though were impossible to mitigate. The fatal blow to I, Hamlet was dealt when, days before the team was to return for a final filming session the following spring, they learned that the stage had been vandalized (Kisyova 2008: 15). These almost bathetic stories, narrated against the ironic background of jaunty folk music, offer a scathing commentary on the chaos in the country, the dysfunction of its institutions, and the erratic behavior of socially alienated and demoralized people. Above all, The Hamlet Adventure rings with profound disillusionment about the marginalization of art in post-communist social life. Indeed, the theme of betrayal is central to the film. In two memorable dance scenes, Gertrude and Ophelia appear as agents of the court’s naturalized deceit, and as its victims. Each woman is tangled in a spiderweb-like skirt which is pulled tighter and tighter by obsequious courtiers. In the last frame of Gertrude’s scene, the Queen’s body, spinning like a top in the gathering fog, dissolves; her lifeless upward stare merges into the design of her costume, turning her into an extension of the political cobweb. Ophelia, on her part, offers some resistance; yet as the camera zooms out in a top shot it reveals how the web of perfidy has re-drawn the symbolic pattern of spiritual order, drawn on the stage floor. The Hamlet Adventure may be suffused by the trauma of artists whose work has been marginalized and sabotaged, but it also dramatizes the transcendence of trauma, which brings forth the ancient meaning of “adventure” as “wonder.” Transcendence is first suggested by the natural setting of clear lakes, soaring rocks, and dazzling light and emphasized by the cinematic framing of the stage. Positioned on a lakeside behind which two slopes meet, their outlines and reflections forming an hourglass, the stage is an emblematic conduit between experiential and mythical time. Even when it is engulfed by fog, it is difficult to forget that the betrayals and murders in Hamlet take place in the eye of the cosmos. The trauma of betrayal is also transcended through the artistic decision to portray Hamlet’s transformation from a revenger into a redeemer, a process restoring cosmic harmony. Having climbed to the second highest of the lakes, he repents his usurpation of divine justice. As he clutches Ophelia’s letters and a dagger used for the sacrifice of vanity, the camera aligns his introspection with the sightline of the Eye Lake. Cinematically, his spiritual transformation results in an artistic creation of a new kind: the screen explodes with colorful flame-like shapes rendering the two-dimensional patterns on the stage floor in three dimensions. Artistic stoicism endures in The Hamlet Adventure. In the film’s last scene, Semerdjiev wistfully reflects on the consuming temptation of the project, yet concludes: “In the end, perhaps all that is left is to ask ourselves, ‘Shall we be or not’. And if there is an answer, I think that it is, in spite of everything, ‘to be’.” As his lonely figure retreats across a snowy plane underneath a pyramid of refracted sunrays, Hamlet’s voice/the voice of the film crew on the mountain affirms Hamletizement as a world-forming force: the intoxicating artistic capacity to create new worlds, sacrifice, reflect, and inspire.

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“The undiscovered country” in Wittenberg Revisited: actualizing (im)potentiality4 Trauma and its transcendence are also central to Wittenberg Revisited, Georgi Tenev and Ivan Dobchev’s sequel to Hamlet, written and produced for the 2010–2011 Shakespeare Program of the experimental theatre Sfumato. Set in the deepest dungeon of Denmark, the play features characters who survive the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy only to find themselves living a national catastrophe: “one of the central topoi of Bulgarian identity,” according to Tenev (Theatre Press Conferences 2011). Within the context of post-communism’s long crisis, Tenev and Dobchev’s play combines a reimagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with a trenchant analysis of the state of Bulgaria and the toll that a dysfunctional polity takes on the intellectual. It culminates in a moving effort, on the part of its protagonist Horr (short for Horatio, as well as Bulgarian for “chorus”), to claim an identity unadulterated by politics through a leap into a mysterious new state – ­dramatizing what Agamben calls the actualization of (im)potentiality. This state involves the dissolution of distinctions between the individual and the loved one, the here-and-now and eternity. Identity in this play is not a given, “but something that requires intellectual and moral effort” (Lozanov 2012: 30–31). Wittenberg Revisited poses the question whether the Danes/Bulgarians can meaningfully alter their history and, if so, what choices they may have. Various possibilities are suggested – intellectual monasticism in the rarefied bubble of Wittenberg, armed resistance, escape to the New World – then abandoned in favor of a mysterious transcendental resolution. On the stage, Denmark is a dungeon where the only signs of life are the sounds of dripping water, clanking metal doors, and the distant barking of dogs. In the “darkness visible” of Daniela Oleg Lyahova’s minimalist set – a black floor submerged under a sheet of water – Horr pores over a trunk of books, burns papers, handles the cup that Hamlet prevented him from drinking so that he would “tell [his] story” (Hamlet, 5.2.291).5 Suggestive analogies, mirrorings, and the enigmatic negotiation between the here-and-now and the otherworldly, familiar from Shakespeare’s play, hint at new explanations to the events in it. The anchor of a narrative marked by a Beckettian resistance to forward movement is Horr, the chorus turned protagonist. Instead of telling Hamlet’s story, this taciturn and unwilling narrator is packing to return to Wittenberg. As various friends come to say good-bye, each fractionally pushes forward a story blocked by his monosyllabic answers. The rattling of dungeon grilles accompanied by the familiar “Who’s there?” starts the action. However, the answer, “A Dane! Long live Denmark!”, signals a political difference: loyalty to king has been replaced by loyalty to country (Tenev and Dobchev 2011: 2). In comes Berndt to take his leave and inquire whether Hamlet indeed willed the Danish crown to Fortinbras the Norwegian, which Horr confirms. He then offers as a parting gift one of Hamlet’s books. Berndt is happy to have it, not to read, but as an expensive object his children would show off as their legacy. A map of Wittenberg is to be passed on to young Marcel(lus) who had been curious about the place. The symbolic props of the book and the map, loaded with a meta-theatrical significance, signal that this Hamlet is an appropriation of a cultural myth in a new imaginative economy. Evoking the events of Shakespeare’s play, Berndt soon brings in Marcel and the Gravedigger who report a strange discovery: Ophelia’s grave is empty, yet without a trace of vandalism. Still, the action remains focused on the contingencies of political sovereignty. Characters struggle to make sense of the loss of their country to a foreign ruler without losing a war and of the will of their dead prince. A startling version of the Danish history of collapse and loss of national identity is put forth by Reyn(aldo). Once Polonius’s spy, now a self-appointed organizer of an armed resistance, he 284

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comes to urge Horr to head a rebellion against the foreigners. After all, he mysteriously adds, “Denmark is not without an heir!” Disconcertingly, Reyn’s zealous speeches envisage a “new Denmark,” freed from the baggage “of poisoners, sickly courtiers . . . of Hamlet’s Denmark” (Tenev and Dobchev 2011: 124). For him, victory over the foreigner, as well as the sweeping away of the legacy of Claudius’s rotten regime, can only be achieved through cleansing acts of extreme violence. Reyn’s patriotic fervor confronts the audience with questions about historical memory and the nation’s future. Is his zeal an attempt to cover up his own work in Polonius’s secret service? How far will he go in his xenophobic vision of “Denmark for the Danes”? As Reyn envisions violence as the hallmark of an identity tied to the nation-state, Horr’s silence debunks such sovereignty. The spectators are also puzzled by contradictions to the received knowledge of Horatio’s character: why is everyone so intent on having him lead the rebellion; how come Denmark is not without an heir? The mystery clears with the appearance of the English Ambassador who has descended into the dungeon to offer Horr an escape to England because in Wittenberg he is known as Hamlet, having for years covered up for the Prince’s truancy (Tenev and Dobchev 2011: 133). Sidestepping Horr’s silence, the Englishman changes the subject to his war wounds and the visible scar on the young man’s chest – a sign of physical trauma and the identity crisis of a patriotic Danish soldier now disgusted with violent Danishness. The Englishman uncovers yet another aspect of Horr’s character: he is Hamlet’s illegitimate brother and the reason for the feud between Denmark and Norway. He even proposes an escape from such weighty history to a New Eden – vast, sparsely inhabited, where the natives are yet uncorrupted by the European God. The Englishman dreams, For them our religious disputes are unfathomable, our wars suicidal, our treaties deceptive, our gold incomprehensible, our clothes unnecessary. . . . Europe cannot be saved. Europe has to be abandoned. . . . New people, new territories. New blood, new race, with new features. Horr declines the escape (Tenev and Dobchev 2011: 134). His stasis between chorus and hero, the exposure to disparate tensions, none of which fully express his current sense of self, ring with anxieties over Bulgarian identity in the new millennium. As in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a Ghost pushes the protagonist into action: Ophelia’s return shakes Horr out of his torpor. As details of her story unfold, her narrative begins to resonate with that of Christ’s resurrection. In a quietly brilliant staging, she appears at the structural center of the play – a scene involving two ghostly presences. First, Horr is confronted by the Ghost of Wittenberg, come to dare him to drink the cup like a true Stoic. As he speaks, a pale shadow emerges in crepuscular lighting upstage. Wreathed with faded flowers, Ophelia comes back from the dead, and the Ghost of Wittenberg vanishes. She is finally reunited with the man who had sent her poetic love letters in Hamlet’s name. As the lovers passionately embrace, Andrei Avramov’s hauntingly beautiful music creates theatre magic out of Virgil’s “Amore, more, ore, re” (“by love, by manner, by word and deed”), a vow that dissolves the divide between the living and the dead. Ophelia’s character seems to point a path beyond the alternatives of destruction and utopia, to an “actual life [whose] territory is love” (Kapriev 2011). As Reyn, Marcel, and Berndt leave to fight for Denmark, Horr locks the dungeon gate, drinks the cup, and embraces Ophelia, covering them with the map of Wittenberg. This symbolic spectacle denaturalizes sovereignty as given through nation-state ideology and literary canon. The lovers put out into uncharted waters: Ophelia’s redeeming love heals Horr’s traumas as they enter a state, not subject to any apparatus 285

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of power. “The readiness [that] is all” (Hamlet, 5.2.160) has transformed political impasse into radical resistance. The result is a mesmerizing, visionary experience of pure potentiality, a fulfilment of identity freed from nationalist and materialist matrices. Though transcendentally resolved, Wittenberg Revisited enjoins viewers to consider important questions about their here-and-now. What is it to be of a nation? Is national catastrophe a state of the body politic, or of the conscience of the citizen? If Denmark is dead and Wittenberg – an illusion, what keeps the individual going in a profane world? The play dramatizes devastating social trauma, but subverts the existentialist suicide cliché by portraying Horr’s choice to join Ophelia as a cathartic act of moral transcendence. Tenev and Dobchev’s play recalls a scenario imagined by Agamben: “At the moment you perceive the irreparability of the world, at that point it is transcendent” (1993: 105). His notion of the irreparable entails irreverence to worldly affairs and institutions, to naturalized thinking, to literary canons, to prescribed social roles. In Wittenberg Revisited, such are the state of Denmark and the identities of the avenging son, the patriotic Dane, the self-exiled scholar, the cynic. The play reminds us that dispiriting as this actuality may be, it is secondary to a larger, multi-actionable potentiality.

Hamlet at the National Theatre “Ivan Vazov”: a gesture toward cultural survival The idea of “the irreparable” also informs Javor Gardev’s production of Hamlet, which opened a year after Wittenberg Revisited. The director’s note in the theatre program announces that this is “not Hamlet of Despair, but Hamlet of Salvation.” The urgency of this message is reflected in the choice of translation. In Bulgarian, Hamlet’s famous question, “To be or not to be,” can pertain to either the individual or the collective. In 2012 Gardev chose Alexander Shurbanov’s new translation, which uses the collective “we,” to address Bulgaria and Bulgarians from the main stage of the National Theatre.6 In Agamben’s terms, the production can be described as a gesture of “pure mediality,” which embeds the audience in the dramatic action to create a temporary community (2000: 59). The discursive disjunctions in this production – misdirected speeches, jarring voices, clashing stylistic registers – deliver “a disjointed poem about a broken world” (Gardev 2013: 39). Blank verse is juxtaposed to contemporary music, poetic rhythms cohabit with pop-music beats, the sound of translated poetry rubs against karaoke-style projections of song lyrics in English. Visually enticing, this Hamlet mixes classical theatre with multi-media and dance, to draw in “pundits” and “punks” alike. Yet this is no commodity, but rather, a new form of political theatre. Gardev’s conceptually unified work provokes the audience’s full engagement. Central to the production is the fragility of the individual in a violent and indifferent world. A glimmer of hope nonetheless shines from the power of theatre, dramatized as communitas and a place of artistic truth.7 The set comprises a system of dynamic hurdles: ramps and pits, shifting metal constructions, rising and falling platforms, and lots of water. Sound escalates to aural fury, video effects are on a cinematic scale. Yet, in the midst of this sensory maelstrom is a place of stillness centered on the audience. The action unfolds in an immersive environment where stage, orchestra pit, and auditorium form a continuum; Hamlet is both theatrum mundi and theatrum bulgaricum; the audience is in the eye of tumultuous action. The set layout suggests a crossroads or a crucifix. A black drapery with a gaping doorway reduces the depth of the auditorium. Facing it, a red curtain with a similar opening blocks the proscenium arch. The apron stage and the shallow orchestra pit almost merge with the auditorium. This is where Elsinore’s interpersonal dramas play out. A row of red swivel chairs in the color of the auditorium seats trace the proscenium 286

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frame, relegating the world of politics to the upstage. Conversely, the unexpectedly tender teenaged Ghost inhabits the domain of the audience. He appears on a metal gangway, slightly above the spectators’ heads. Here, too, throbs the heart of the production: from here, with the house lights on, Hamlet proclaims the mission of theatre to “hold . . . the mirror up to nature,” even if the audience is “capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise” (3.2.20, 10–11). With the curtain raised, the gangway extends upstage to a precarious metal structure of stairs and ramps, designating the political world. Here a fearsome “Mousetrap” plays out on a huge raised platform, the characters resembling ancient actors in masks. A maniacal dance renders the interaction of the Player King and Queen to the sounds of eerie deep strings and relentless percussion. The scene culminates with the raising of a body from a bath full of blood, while a projection on the back wall adds merciless visual intensity. As the Player King spreads his bloody arms, Claudius turns around calling for light, only to face the Ghost conducting the Player’s movement. Here is a theatrical gesture of triumph, a visual “exhibition of a mediality” (Agamben 2000: 58). The nervy, youthful Hamlet frantically negotiates the pitfalls and hurdles of his world irreparably twisted “out of joint” by messy human motives and political intrigue (1.5.189). A modern young man with the face of a Christ, he vents his frustration through progressively manic behavior. As he sheds more of his clothes, his vulnerability is further exposed. Poised between an impossible moral task and his despair that this profane world can never be set right, he stands on the threshold of the irreparable. The ending posits three characters on this verge. Projected on the screen is Hamlet’s body, already turning into a cinematic memory detached from the almost invisible body of the actor upstage. On the line connecting the stage to the Ghost’s realm sits Horatio, his back to the bloody endgame in Elsinore, his gaze beyond the audience. Fortinbras, Hamlet’s near double in appearance, sits dejectedly off-center. The three young men could be a collective portrait of a generation. Hamlet fulfilled the bidding of the Ghost and brought down old Denmark but was crushed by it. The resuscitation of the polity remains a task for Fortinbras to whom Hamlet’s voice was genuinely given. Horatio gazes toward the undiscovered country. As the lights go up, audience and actors face each other, while on the screen the images of Ophelia and Hamlet appear in a sequence, joining and displacing each other. Theatre-goers now exit into their own Denmark, face its uncomfortable truths, and brood over its fate, or try to change it. At stake is the future of the Hamlets, Ophelias, and Horatios of the post-communist world. Is Fortinbras the only actuality?

Hamlet at a village theatre festival: enduring community While Gardev’s Hamlet relies on the gesture of pure mediality to create a temporary community, which suspends the division between theatre and life, the yearly performances of Shakespeare in a village schoolyard succeed in creating enduring community. Tucked in the green foothills of the Rhodope Mountain, the village of Patalenitsa (population ca. 1,500), has for two decades been the site of a grassroots Shakespeare festival. Started in 2000 by two theatre professionals as an after-school program to counter the psychological devastation of post-communism, it has blossomed as a feature of community life. This is a community at once open to the world and rooted in local tradition, tied to the yearly cycle of festival and an example of a present imbued with “the possibility of change and transformation” (Salzani 2011: 46). What began as an extracurricular school program has transformed into the Shakespeare Theatre School “Petrovden,” which attracts young Bulgarian and international directors and actors.8 Among its productions are two of Hamlet, directed by Todor Dimitrov, most recently in 2017. 287

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Offset by white curtains fluttering in the evening breeze, the world of this Hamlet is as stylish as it is unstable. A small water pool backstage conjures up rites of baptismal cleansing only to dash them to pieces. Here, Hamlet plummets, face down, having determined how to “catch the conscience of the King” (2.2.524); it is the site of a loving interaction between him and Ophelia and of his violence against her. In the water, she deplores the loss of Hamlet’s reason and performs her heart-rending songs. In the finale, the audience is left with the strong feeling that something good has been irreparably lost, though not without a glimmer of hope. It comes from a gentle Fortinbras, performed by a local schoolgirl, who orders the Prince’s funeral rites. As Hamlet is borne out to haunting music, her open manner, genuine sadness, her young unactorly voice, point to the dissolution of the line between art and life. The play comes to a close, the audience climbs onto the stage, the fictional world merges with the life of the spectators, some of whom have witnessed the evolution of the production during its open rehearsals as part of their afternoon strolls, youthful flirtations, or tending to toddlers in the shady schoolyard. Inscribed into communal life and now the ecology of Bulgarian theatre, Patalenitsa Shakespeare dramatizes the concerns and aspirations of the polity, unifying a community that identifies with Bulgarian historical bonds and a globally open culture represented by Shakespeare and the creative crews. Its latest Hamlet is part of a joyful celebration of creativity that overturns the constraints of dispiriting reality and liberates the imagination. Spectators and creatives alike return to Patalenitsa every year to renew and experience communitas under the summer stars. The Hamlet productions and adaptations analyzed above testify to the growing civic engagement of Bulgarian theatre during the post-communist era. Unaffiliated with any particular political agenda, these are, nonetheless, productions of a new political theatre. They deploy Shakespeare’s cultural status, narratives, and language to offer uncompromising reflections on the state of society. They push back against garish consumerism, demystify nationalist narratives, tame existentialist despair through spirituality, create and celebrate community. Against the odds of a survival economy and the collapse of social values, Bulgarian Shakespeare now lives in the alpine wilderness and the experimental theatre studio, on the mainstage of the National Theatre and in the village schoolyard. To its diverse audiences, it offers intellectual and emotional challenges, the delight of innovative artistic syncretism, and the hope, nay, the urgent call to keep renewing communitas.

Notes 1 See “On Potentiality,” in Giorgio Agamben (1999: 177–84), and “Potentiality and Law,” in Agamben (1998: 39–48). 2 On chalga as a socio-cultural syndrome of Bulgarian post-communism, see Boika Sokolova and Kirilka Stavreva (2017b: 7–14). 3 For a fuller discussion of the film, see Sokolova and Stavreva (2017a: 1–14). 4 For a fuller discussion of the production, see Sokolova and Stavreva (2017d: 1–13). 5 All quotes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet are from The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. (Shakespeare 1997). 6 For a fuller discussion of the production, see Sokolova and Stavreva (2017c: 1–11). 7 We use communitas to refer to an element of social anti-structure, shared through a rite of passage (Turner 1974: 273–74). 8 For the history of Patalenitsa Shakespeare, see Sokolova and Stavreva (2017e: 1–13).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hordt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Hamlet in post-communist Bulgaria ———. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Hleer-Rozan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1999. “On Potentiality.” In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 177–84. ———. 2000. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2004. “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Trans. Brian Holmes. Ed. Tom McDonough. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 313–19. Bozhinova, Bozhidara. 2009. Bulgarskiyat Hamlet: XX vek [The Bulgarian Hamlet: The 20th Century]. Sofia: Kralitza Mab. Gardev, Javor. 2013. Interview by Keva Apostolova. Teatar 1.3. Kapriev, Georgi. 2011. “Mezhdu razruhata i utopiyata. Otvud tyah [Between Collapse and Utopia. And Beyond].” Kultura [Culture weekly] 39. 18 Nov. Accessed 28 Jan. 2019, www.kultura.bg/bg/article/ view/19017. Kisyova, Maya. 2008. Slovesni repetitzii [Verbal Rehearsals]. Sofia: Iztok-Zapad. Lozanov, Georgi. 2012. “Purvi red e za mladite [Front Row for the Young].” Dramaturgia ASKEER, 2012: Nominatsii za suvremenna bulgarska dramaturgia [Playwriting ASKEER, 2012: Nominations for Contemporary Bulgarian Plays]. Sofia: Fondatsia ASKEER. 29–32. Manchev, Boyan. 2004–2006. “Violence and Political Representation: The Post-Communist Case.” In Kultura i kritika, Chast IV: Ideologiyata – nachin na upotreba [Culture and Criticism, Part IV: Ideology – A Means of Consumption]. Eds. A. Vacheva, et al. Varna: Liternet. Accessed 28 Jan. 2019, http://liternet. bg/publish2/bmanchev/violence_en.htm. Minchev, Ognyan. 1995. Stupki po putya [Steps along the Road]. Sofia: University Press “Sveti Kliment Ohridski.” Salzani, Carlo. 2011. “Coming Community.” In The Agamben Dictionary. Eds. Alex Murray and Jessica Whyte. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 44–46. Semerdjiev, Stanislav. 2013. Personal interview with Boika Sokolova. Sofia, Bulgaria. 1 May. Shakespeare, William. 1997. “Hamlet.” In The Norton Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York and London: Norton. Sokolova, Boika, and Kirilka Stavreva. 2017a.“Art Scaling Trauma: The Hamlet Adventure, Directed by Greg Roach and Ivaylo Dikanski (2008).” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 60. Accessed 28 Jan. 2019, http://sites. utoronto.ca/tsq/60/index_60.shtml. ———. 2017b. “ ‘The Readiness is all,’ or, the Politics of Art in Post-Communist Bulgaria.” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 60. ———. 2017c. “ ‘Shall we be, or not?’, or Hamlet as an Axiom for Cultural Survival: Hamlet, directed by Javor Gardev (2011).” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 60. ———. 2017d. “ ‘The undiscovered country’: Wittenberg Revisited by Georgi Tenev and Ivan Dobchev, directed by Ivan Dobchev (2011).” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 60. ———. 2017e. “Time out of Time in the ‘Open Theater’ of the Bulgarian Village of Patalenitsa,” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 60. Sugarev, Edvin. 2014. “Po sledite na izgubeniya prehod [Tracking the Lost Transition].” Dnevnik. 14 Nov. Accessed 28 Jan. 2019, www.dnevnik.bg/analizi/2014/11/14/2418366_po_sledite_na_izgubeniia_ prehod/?ref=topicoftheday. Tenev, Georgi, and Ivan Dobchev. 2011. Wittenberg Revisited. Unpublished translation by Angela Rodel. Theatre Press Conferences. 2011. “Wittenberg Revisited – Theatre Workshop Sfumato.” Teatralnow. 7 Oct. Accessed 28 Jan. 2019, http://sites.google.com/site/teatralnow/teatralni-preskonferencii/vitenberg. Todorov, Anton. 2013. Balgarite sreshtu oligarhiyata [Bulgarians against the Oligarchy]. Sofia: Iztok-Zapad. Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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25 WHAT’S IN A NAME? Shakespeare and Japanese pop culture Ryuta Minami

Ubiquitous Shakespeare in Japan “Shakespeare in Japan” has almost always been represented uncritically either by stage productions such as Yukio Ninagawa’s samurai-style Macbeth and Tadashi Suzuki’s The Tale of Lear or by movies like Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985), thus mistakenly, or sometime deliberately, failing to recognize a plethora of Shakespearean adaptations, quotations, and references on various media platforms of Japanese mass/popular culture (see Minami et al. 2001). Actually, Shakespeare has provided many media products with an inexhaustible repertoire of plots and characters to be appropriated or utilized and circulated in variegated forms in Japan. Shakespeare has been featured or mentioned in TV commercials in a parodic manner: AU, a mobile network operator, featured the balcony scene with Juliet addressing Romeo and Brutus in a 2008 TV commercial, and “Shakespeare” appeared in Hitachi’s 2015 commercial for a washing machine. Benesse Corporation featured a school production of Romeo and Juliet in a manga brochure to promote its correspondence courses for junior high school students in 2011. One can easily find Shakespeare-inspired or -related episodes in manga (Japanese-style graphic novels), anime (animation films and TV programs), and video/mobile games (see Minami 2016). Many Japanese children encounter “Shakespeare” for the first time via manga or anime: there were Shakespearean episodes in Pokémon TV series, such as its 69th episode “Pokémon the Movie!” (1998) or its 100th episode “Nidoran’s Love Story” (1999), broadcast as in the U.S. as episodes 71, “Lights, Camera, Quacktion!” (1999), and 102, “Wherefore Art Thou, Pokémon” (2000), respectively. The 42nd episode of Pocket Monster Advanced Generation (2003), first broadcast in Japan on September 11 as “Barubeat and Illumise! Dance of Love!” and broadcast in the U.S. on 16 October 2004 under the title of “Flight of Love,” features Romeo and Juliet (see Bulbapedia 2005; Pokémon Wiki n.d.). Many Japanese girls probably learnt about Romeo and Juliet for the first time in the 37th episode (2004) of Futari wa PreCure (translated as Pretty Cure outside Japan), in which its two heroines play Romeo and Juliet at their annual school festival, though their “stage performance” is disrupted during the balcony scene. In the 12th episode of Yes! PreCure 5 Go-Go (2008), one of the leading characters challenges the others to a contest of cultural/Shakespearean literacy (see Minami 2017).1 Shakespeare is still used or mentioned in various episodes of anime and manga today. Japanese teenagers are also more likely to come across Shakespearean characters, thoroughly 290

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decontextualized and fragmented, in mobile games for smartphones such as Monster Strike, originally created in Japan in 2013 and later released in China, Korea, North America, and Taiwan, in which players can get characters such as Romeo, Juliet, Macbeth, and Shakespeare (“Romeo,” “Juliet,” “Macbeth,” n.d.). These media products, which utilize Shakespeare in their content, are not only transnationally distributed but also transmedially recreated from one platform to another, as is well illustrated by the Pokémon franchise. Here “Shakespeare” is a resource, bits of which are repurposed as part of content that flows across multiple media platforms in what Henry Jenkins calls “convergence culture” (2008: 2–4). Jenkins refers to convergence as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.” In the glossary, he defines “media convergence” as “a situation in which multiple media systems coexist and where media content flows fluidly across them” (2008: 2, 322). According to Jenkins, “spreadability” is a term that describes “forms of media circulation” or “how we all engage with media texts.” He defines “spreadability” as “the potential – both technical and cultural – for audiences to share content for their own purposes, sometimes with the permission of right holders, sometimes against their wishes” (2013: 3). In other words, such “spreadable” media content functions as a vehicle for Shakespeare to be consumed, annotated, remade, and recirculated across media, thus confirming the “spreadability” of Shakespeare as a collection or aggregate of various texts and characters (2013: 3–9). The following sections on Shakespearean manga and anime demonstrate how Shakespeare has been used as source material in creating manga and anime works, while the last section considers the presence and insignificance of Shakespeare in mobile and video games. This chapter offers an overview of how Shakespeare, in variegated forms, permeates the contemporary mediascapes of Japan, where manga, anime, and video/mobile games occupy a significant place in Japanese culture as popular forms of entertainment in everyday life.

Writing Shakespeare anew: Shakespeare and manga Comic-book Shakespeare is nothing new to readers in English-speaking countries. Since Julius Caesar was published in 1950 with illustrations by H.E. Keifer as the first Shakespeare play in the Classics Illustrated series, not a few publishers in the U.S. and the U.K. have published Shakespearean comic books in series such as Famous Authors Illustrated, Pendulum Illustrated Classics (later called Saddleback’s Shakespeare), Livewire Shakespeare (later called Shakespeare Graphics), No Fear Shakespeare, Classical Comics, Manga Shakespeare, and Shakespeare the Manga Edition. What is common among these Shakespearean comics is that they all mean to be educational tools (see Jensen 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2011; Hueman and Burt 2002; Jones 2011; Shakespeare Comics n.d.; SparkNotes n.d.). Sonia Leon’s Japanized pop Romeo and Juliet (2007) and Emma Vieceli’s fascinating sci-fi Hamlet (2007), as well as other subsequent Manga Shakespeare works from the publisher SelfMadeHero, can be read purely as manga in visual terms, yet fastidiousness about the original texts could dim the pleasure of reading them as manga. This educational intention is clearly indicated in the editor’s preface to each volume of Shakespeare: The Manga Edition. The editor, Adam Sexton, writes: A note on authenticity: . . . the writers and editors of The Manga Editions have cut words, a practice almost universal among stage and film directors. We have never paraphrased the playwright’s language, however, nor have we summarized action. Everything you read in The Manga Edition was written by William Shakespeare himself. 2008: 3; emphasis added 291

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With the prevalent belief that the beauty of Shakespeare lies in the language rather than the plot, the comic book Shakespeare can still be criticized for “dumbing down” the Bard (Clark 2007), even if some of these Shakespearean comic books with authentic texts are accompanied by teacher’s books or online educational resources, such as Manga Shakespeare Learning (n.d.).2 In Japan, where Shakespeare has no place in any part of the government’s curriculum guidelines for elementary and secondary education, it is not fidelity to Shakespeare’s plays but the logic of manga that is prioritized in recreating Shakespeare’s plays as manga. This is in part because, with numerous versions of Shakespearean texts available in the vernacular, artists and writers can take literary license in creating a new artifact on any media platform. Also, as Mark McWilliams maintains, manga makes full “use of sequenced images without relying on much text to advance the plot” (2015: 7); very few manga Shakespeare in Japanese are expected or required to be meticulous about the words of their original plays. Hence, intriguingly enough, most of Shakespearean manga in Japan are not adapted from but inspired by Shakespeare’s plays, probably because most manga artists intend not to introduce their audiences to Shakespeare but to utilize Shakespeare’s plays as a source for creating their own new work. Manga in Japan has developed its own style and conventions in the latter half of the twentieth century. The earliest manga rendering of Shakespeare was done by Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989), a legendary manga artist with a “special talent as an innovative borrower” (Phillipps 2015: 75). Tezuka, who had already been well-known for a series of Tetsuwan Atom (that is, Astro Boy or Mighty Atom, 1952–1968), published a modernized version of The Merchant of Venice in 1959 as a separate-volume supplement to an education monthly magazine for junior high school students. In this work, Bassanio is a young doctoral student who asks Antonio for financial support. Though he completely omitted the subplot of Jessica and Lorenzo, Tezuka retained the famous casket scene, the trial scene, and the ring plot between Portia and Bassanio so as to follow the original main plot as faithfully as possible. Also intriguing is that Shylock is not depicted as a Jew but just an evil character. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the same characters appeared in Tezuka’s works, as if he had a kind of real theater company, and those characters were usually typecast in different works. The official site of Tezuka Osamu provides a character-directory for the “theater troupe” with a detailed explanation of each character (“Characters,” n.d.). In Tezuka’s The Merchant of Venice, Antonio is played by a character called Ken’ichi, a young hero figure who “has a strongly developed sense of justice and responsibility, and does his utmost not only for his friends, but also for world peace.” Shylock, on the other hand, is played by the character Acetylene Lamp, a villain who “murders people without showing the slightest touch of remorse” (Phillipps 2015: 78). Such typecasting might give a shallow impression of this Shakespearean adaptation, yet it was indispensable to present The Merchant of Venice in only forty pages. Tezuka, who depicted robots with human feelings in his successful Astro Boy, adapted Romeo and Juliet as “Robio and Robietto” (1965), an episode of the robotic manga. Tezuka later created Nanairo Inko (Rainbow Parakeet, 1981–1983) which features a genius actor-thief, four of whose forty-seven episodes unfold around Hamlet, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew, respectively. Though not as obviously educational or enlightening, Tezuka provides readers with an idea of Shakespeare’s play in the course of each manga episode in order to familiarize readers with Shakespeare’s plays (Tezuka 2017). In the 1970s and after, Shakespeare was mostly adapted or recreated by artists of shōjo manga (manga for girls). Shōjo manga, a subgenre in manga, developed its own sophisticated visual and verbal expressions to convey the interiority of each character with emotional nuances. According to Deborah Shamoon, shōjo manga

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inherited from prewar girls’ magazines a narrative style that emphasized emotional interiority; . . . this expression of emotion became an exploration of psychological interiority. This narrative emphasis on the deep self-found expression in the visual style, which used a layered panel arrangement to create the illusion of depth. Shamoon 2014: 144; see also Takahashi 2014 Shōjo manga recreated Shakespearean plays from female characters’ perspectives according to its own conventions. Ryoko Ikeda’s Othello (1969, rept. 1976), Kumi Morikawa’s Twelfth Night (1978), Koi Kishida’s Romeo and Juliet (1985), Yumiko Igarashi’s Romeo and Juliet (1995), and Harumo Sanazaki’s Macbeth (2001) and Romeo and Juliet (2001) are notable examples in that they reconstruct the plays from the heroines’ point of view, while faithfully following the plotlines and keeping the original settings. Ikeda, for example, starts her Othello with a scene which shows Desdemona travelling to Othello’s place by gondola. At the bottom of its first page, Desdemona’s interior monologue goes: “Dear father, please do forgive me. I cannot but love Othello by any means. Even if this were against your wishes, I would marry him” (Ikeda 1976: 120). Or Igarashi’s Romeo and Juliet begins with a scene of Juliet sitting at the window, with the words “This is a girl’s story of love” (Igarashi 1995: 6).3 Morikawa eloquently depicts Viola’s thoughts and feelings with visual and verbal manga idioms in her Twelfth Night, thus illustrating her close and careful reading of the comedy. Transfocalization also plays a significant role in Harumo Sanazaki’s Macbeth (2001) and Romeo and Juliet (2001). Sanazaki adapted the plays following the conventions of a subgenre called “Lady’s Comics,” a manga for mature female readers. In her Romeo and Juliet, for example, Sanazaki recreated the play from the perspective of Juliet’s mother who has an affair with Tybalt and, after Juliet’s death, reveals her envy toward her daughter’s love relationship with Romeo. Lady Capulet’s feelings of apprehension about her indifferent husband and fading beauty, which Sanazaki depicted alongside the eponymous young lovers, not only drew her target readers into the inner world of Lady Capulet but encouraged them to see the world of Romeo and Juliet from Lady Capulet’s point of view. In Macbeth, Sanzaki gives back Lady Macbeth her real name “Gruoch.” Describing Macbeth as a good king, Sanzaki avoids any possibility of demonizing Lady Macbeth/Gruoch in her Macbeth and instead depicts her as a happy woman who remarried and found a real love, thus implicitly problematizing the deletion of Lady Macbeth’s name in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Sanazaki’s renderings demonstrate how important it is to explore the interiority of principal female characters in recreating Shakespeare’s plays. These manga adaptations with girls or women as target readers foreground Desdemona, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, and Lady Capulet as the artists write Shakespeare’s plays anew through transfocalization so as to question the conventional or general understandings of the plays. Some well-known Shakespearean scenes are repeatedly referred to in manga. Scenes from Romeo and Juliet, in particular, are most frequently (mis)quoted and (ab)used when manga depicts leading characters’ school productions. Takahashi has used the balcony scene twice as a farcical setting in episodes of her manga, Urusei Yatsura (The Return of Lum, 1978–1987). Notable are the cases where Romeo and Juliet is manipulated as a site for expressing same-sex desires or fears of them. In the farcical rendering of the scene in the “Juliet Game” episode of Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma 1/2 (1987–1996), the leading character, Ranma, who turns into a girl when water is poured over him, is compelled to play Juliet in a school production, though “he” was originally cast as Romeo. In its disrupted farcical production, the boy-turned-girl becomes an object of desire, and some boys rush onto the stage to play Romeo to “her.” While this gender-bending is the essence of this farcical manga, it could also be read in relation to the gender-bending

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in Shakespearean plays. In a school production of Ryoko Takahashi’s Tsuraize Bokuchan (It’s a Tough Life, 1974), a boyish heroine playing Romeo trips and falls down to kiss the “dead” Juliet lying on a bed. Mistaking the heroine for a boy, a head teacher scolds “him” for indecency, but as soon as her identity is revealed, he acquits the heroine, regarding this accident as “safe.” Intriguingly, unlike in manga for boys, a same-sex kiss was seen as “safer” than a heterosexual one in early shōjo manga. In Mutsumi Tsukumo’s Moonlight Flowers (1991), Sahoko, a woman in her late twenties, recollects a school performance of Romeo and Juliet in which she played Juliet to a Romeo performed by a female classmate whom she admired. The school production is presented as an occasion for Sahoko to recognize her same-sex desire, and Moonlight Flowers ends with Sahoko getting divorced and starting a new life with the female ex-classmate. Aya Kanno’s Bara-ou no Souretsu (Requiem of the Rose King, 2013–) is a historical manga inspired by Shakespeare’s first tetralogy. In this work, Kanno features Richard, the third son of the House of York, as an intersexual person with no bodily deformity. As was the case with Sanazaki’s renderings, manga for female readers can address contentious or controversial issues in contemporary Japan (see Shamoon 2014: 139–44). Shakespeare, the playwright, also appears as a character in manga. Matsuri Akino’s As You Like It (1997–1998) features Jacqueline, a duke’s daughter and Queen Elizabeth I’s niece, who joins a traveling troupe called “Globe Company” in the guise of a poor boy named Jack. The traveling company, led by a Shakespearean figure, stages As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night, and Jack/Jacqueline sometimes appears on stage as a female character played by a “boy” actor. Here Shakespeare is a kind of mysterious genius who knowingly helps the heroin throughout her travel. Although Shakespeare is treated in a parodic manner in some manga and anime, Harold Sakuishi’s Shichi-nin no Shakespeare (Seven Shakespeares, 2009–) is notable in that it attempts to re-create a biography of Shakespeare by filling his “lost years” as well as creating his daily life as an ambitious young playwright. While referring to some authoritative biographies of the playwright, Sakuishi recreates William Shakespeare as a kind of intermediary who wrote plays in collaboration with six other people with different backgrounds such as a former Catholic priest, a well-read bookseller, and a Chinese girl with a talent for poetry. Along with a list of references published at the end of each volume, a short essay about Shakespeare’s England by a Japanese leading scholar of British history follows each episode as if not only to be informative but also to blur the line between the fiction and the historical facts. Among Shakespearean manga, Zetsuen no Tempest (Shirodaira et al. 2010–2013) is different from the preceding Shakespearean manga in that the artists manipulate Shakespearean quotations without adopting the plot of any Shakespeare’s plays. Significantly enough, the first episode starts and ends with the quotation from Hamlet, “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite/ That ever I was born to set it right!” (FTLN 0928–9).4 The narrative of Zetsuen no Tempest (Shirodaira et al. 2010–2013) begins with a young witch being expelled and left alone on a desert island, suggesting an apparent similarity to The Tempest. Yet in the course of the story, the leading characters repeatedly quote from and refer to Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear as well as The Tempest without following the plot of The Tempest. Such references and quotations are meant to provide its readers with keys to understanding those characters’ interiority and also to add a kind of profoundness to this manga. As the story unfolds, it turns out that the relationship between the three leading characters, Yoshino, Mahiro, and Mahiro’s sister Aika, is somewhat similar to that of Hamlet, Laertes, and Ophelia, while these characters sometimes project themselves upon Shakespearean characters such as Hamlet, Macbeth, and Prospero. As if to encourage its readers to consider possible meanings of Shakespearean quotations, whenever Shakespeare is quoted, detailed sources in Japanese are given in the margins. 294

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A scene in the 37th episode of Zetesuen no Tempest, for example, illustrates how Shakespearean citations could influence its readers’ appreciation of this manga. Aika, a strong witch and Mahiro’s sister, quotes some lines from Hamlet and The Tempest before she kills herself. She mentions from which play she quotes, tacitly reminding readers of the significances of the quotations: Aika: Oh, dear. Things will never go as one wishes. “There are more things between Heaven and Earth, Horatio. Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” [FTLN 0905–6] Oh, this is Hamlet’s line. Yoshino would get offended at Hamlet’s words. Here I should be quoting from The Tempest. “At picked leisure, Which shall be shortly, single I’ll resolve you, Which to you shall seem probable, of every These happened accidents; till when be cheerful, And think of each thing well.” [FTLN 2263–67] Please do understand me, Yoshino and Mahiro. Shirodaira et al. 2010–2013: Vol 8., 162–63 This manga, like a whodunnit, develops around the leading characters’ investigation of the murder of Aika. The Shakespearean quotations are addressed to both her stepbrother Mahiro and her boyfriend Yoshino. Soon after this, Aika kills herself. The words of Hamlet here reflect Aika’s angst and awareness that neither Mahiro nor Yoshino could understand her intentions. The following quotation from The Tempest, on the other hand, foretells the ending of the narrative, where the video message that Aika left for Mahiro and Yoshino clears up all the mysteries about Aika’s death. Quoting from Shakespeare’s plays, Aika and other leading characters utilize not only the literal meanings of the lines but their contextual meanings so as to convey their thoughts and feelings along with the verbal or visual meanings. Here the sources of quotations given on the margins help readers read between the lines, or between the panels of manga. From the first Shakespearean manga by Tezuka, adapting, recreating or quoting Shakespeare in manga was not meant to be an enterprise of its upward cultural mobility or its own cultural legitimation. While some Shakespearean manga were intended to familiarize young people with famous world literature, Shakespeare’s plays are more likely to be treated as a source of inspiration for creating new works, just as Shakespeare turned to various sources and drew from an extensive range of texts.

Shakespeare not adapted but fragmented into anime Shakespeare’s plays have been mentioned or partially used in many episodes of TV anime, yet they had not played so significant a part as in Romeo × Juliet (2007) and Psycho-Pass (2012). These two anime use Shakespeare in different ways: the former adopts the storyline of Romeo and Juliet as a frame narrative without quoting from any of his plays, the latter is a non-­Shakespearean science fiction that unfolds itself while using Shakespearean quotations like Zetsuen no Tempest (Shirodaira et al. 2010–2013). These two works illuminate two notable ways of using Shakespeare in creating anime. Also intriguing is that anime audiences appear more likely to resort to various fan communities on the internet than are manga readers so as to enjoy anime in participatory ways. 295

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Romeo × Juliet is a sci-fi anime rendering of Romeo and Juliet by an animation studio, GONZO. The story is set in an aerial city called “Neo Verona.” Along with the characters taken from Romeo and Juliet, its audiences are expected to notice that some of the other characters are brought from other famous Shakespeare’s plays such as Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest.5 Many Japanese spectators are somewhat encouraged to find the origins of those Shakespearean names and their significations in Romeo × Juliet by its fan sites, blogs, and its official fanbook (2008). Some went on to read Shakespeare’s plays mentioned in order not only to confirm the associations between the anime and Shakespeare’s plays and find out their possible significations but to share the findings and opinions in fan communities. Ophelia, for example, looks after the “Great Tree Escalus,” Neo-Verona’s Tree of Life, and her flowery and vegetational images apparently owe something to John Everett Millais’s famous painting of Ophelia as well as to the original character in Hamlet, and Cordelia, a sympathetic caring servant, is presented as an honest girl with a keen sense of justice. Audiences could find some trajectories of the original Shakespearean characters projected on to their counterparts in Romeo × Juliet, though that does not necessarily influence the pleasure of watching the anime. Yet what is notable about the uses of Shakespearean characters in Romeo × Juliet is that this work is created in a character-oriented way and the story is in a secondary position. In other words, the principle of creativity revolves around characters, which in turn encourages extensions by not limiting anime worlds to one particular story. Part of the value of widely popular anime series arises precisely from the flexibility in adapting characters and worlds across a wide range of media. Condry 2013: 83 This applies to Romeo × Juliet, the narrative of which develops, around “flexible” Shakespearean characters, into derivative artifacts on different media platforms such as novels, manga, audio dramas, and radio programs. Its audio drama, for example, puts Romeo, Juliet, and Hermione in a triangular relationship so as to explore possible narratives deriving from the anime, though this audio drama is not relevant to Romeo × Juliet, much less to Shakespeare’s tragedy.6 The ways familiar characters interact with each other in a different context (or an alternative world) play a key role in creating derivative transmedial objects, putting the story in a secondary or minor position. Characters are thought to be removable from their original contexts in order to create a new derivative work featuring the characters. Yet such a “character” is not of fixed nature: it functions somewhat as an empty container where one can put any character elements in order to revise, renew or simply re-create another with the same name. In Romeo × Juliet, for example, “Juliet” ’ is presented as a “beautiful fighting girl in male clothes,” a repository that contains various visual and personality elements commonly found in similar heroines of existing popular anime and manga. Hiroki Azuma expounds this way of creating and consuming such characters in terms of database: each character in anime, manga, and games is an end product of the arbitrary permutations and combinations of diverse character/personality elements, phraseologies, and behavioral patterns collected from various databases. This is not limited to character creation. When creating a new work, one will combine elements taken from diverse databases of character/personality elements, set phrases, appearances, scenery, narrative elements, and so on (Azuma 2010; Booth 2010; Condry 2013; Minami 2017). Hence, in anime or games, a Shakespearean character could retain nothing of its originating character except for its name, because such media lack the consistency or internal logic of an overall storyline. This is also true for video and mobile games. 296

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Shakespeare is used in anime called Psycho-Pass in a different way. Psycho-Pass is a sci-fi detective story set in a dystopian Tokyo of 2112, where all citizens have their criminal tendency factor measured as numerical data and are controlled by the Welfare Ministry according to those numerical values. Obviously, this idea comes from George Orwell’s 1984 and the concept of “thoughtcrime.” Psycho-Pass also refers to or quotes from numerous literary, philosophical, filmic, and animated works such as Dostoevsky’s Demons, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Titus Andronicus, Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Ortega’s The Revolt of the Masses, Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Scott’s Blade Runner, and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix as well as animation films such as Oshii’s The Ghost in the Shell and Otomo’s Akira, to note a few. Episodes 6 to 8 of Psycho-Pass feature a serial murderess, Rikako, who mutilates victims’ bodies and displays their dismembered bodies in public as if artworks. Rikako has been killing her juniors with the support of Makishima Shogo, a mastermind of the cruel murders, like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. When Makishima gets rid of Rikako, he speaks a mosaic of quotations from Titus Andronicus: MAKISHIMA: So should I rob my sweet sons of their fee: No, let them satisfy their lust on thee. [Tamora: FTLN 0856–7] The hunt is up, the moon is bright and gray, The fields are fragrant and the woods are green. Uncouple here and let us make a bay. [Titus: FTLN 0649–51] . . . Listen, fair madam. Let it be your glory To see her tears, but be your heart to them As unrelenting flint to drops of rain. [Demetrius: FTLN 0816–18] So, now go tell, an if thy tongue can speak, Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and ravished thee. [Demetrius: FTLN 0985–6] Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so, An if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe. [Chiron: FTLN 0987–88] . . . Her life was beastly, and devoid of pity, And, being dead, let birds on her take pity. [Lucius: FTLN 2567–68] Urobuchi and Fukami 2013 Makishima quotes the lines addressed either to Tamora or to Lavinia in order to highlight the two conflicting aspects of Rikako, both vicious murderess and helpless victim. In Psycho-Pass, audience members are expected to know or find out the quotations’ original contexts and significations so as to understand their meanings in their new contexts. This holds true for the anime adaptation of Zetsuen no Tempest (Shirodaira et al. 2012–2013). When these anime programs were broadcast, audiences turned to search engines, Yahoo Answers, and fan community sites to find out sources of quotations and references. A young student, for example, asked on the Japanese site of Yahoo Answers which of Shakespeare’s plays he should read to appreciate 297

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Zetsuen no Tempest (Yahoo Answers 2012). Unlike Shakespearean manga where citations appear in footnotes or endnotes, Shakespearean anime requires its audiences to learn about citations, though one can easily find lots of comments and annotations about the uses of and references to Shakespeare on fan community sites in both Japanese and in English, such as the fan-forums on Romeo × Juliet (n.d.), Zetsuen no Tempest (n.d.), and Psycho-Pass (n.d.). Unlike straightforward adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, these anime, such as Romeo × Juliet and Psycho-Pass, expect recipients to be familiar with Shakespeare to appreciate or consume them; this is in part why official fanbooks of or guidebooks to these three anime were published to supplement knowledge about Shakespeare and his plays. Shakespearean anime as such would have been almost impossible to create if their producers could not expect that their audiences would use search engines or access fan sites when they needed information about Shakespeare. As more information on any given topic is stored on the internet, appreciation and consumption of such Shakespearean anime has become a collaborative process (Jenkins 2006: 4), particularly in Japan where people have few opportunities to familiarize themselves with Shakespeare in formal education.

Deceptively Shakespearean games and other media objects One of the most globally famous Japanese video game series is the role-playing video game (RPG) Final Fantasy franchise (1987–). Some Final Fantasy installments have characters named after Shakespearean characters, such as Puck and Duncan (humunahumuna 2011). Many fans on the internet claim that Final Fantasy XV is influenced by or connected to Hamlet (“Final Fantasy and Shakespeare” 2017; “Shakespeare meets final fantasy” 2016; Crabtree 2013; “Final Fantasy XV Plot” 2013). In August 2018, BanG Dream (2015–), a mobile game that centers around a high school student’s daily life, featured a school production of Romeo and Juliet. Shakespearean characters prevail in recent video/mobile games in Japan. Yet, unlike in their American counterparts (Bloom 2015), in many Japanese games, it is almost impossible to find anything Shakespearean in those characters except for their names.7 Romeo vs Juliet (2013) and its sequel Romeo & Juliet (2014) are video games classified as otome (“maiden’s”) games for PlayStation Portable. The overall narrative of the games is set in “Verona” where human beings and vampires have been fighting against each other for ages. Romeo is a prince of vampires and Juliet the head of a vampire-hunters’ family, and, as such, leading characters are remade with various popular character elements such as “vampire,” “beautiful fighting girl,” and “nun-like costume.” In the games, while all the other characters are given set lines pre-recorded by professional voice actors, Juliet has no voice, because the character Juliet is to be played by the game player. The player of the games is expected to develop a romantic relationship with Romeo, overcoming various obstacles, and its player can choose an ending of her or his own choice, tragic or not, regardless of the original plot of Shakespeare’s play. Intriguingly enough, in Romeo & Juliet, the player can change not only the character’s name but also build a romantic relationship with characters other than Romeo, thus allowing the player to remove/ delete both Romeo and Juliet from the world based upon Romeo and Juliet. Here Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet functions as a frame that is remotely related to the games’ narratives, and even the nominal presence of the tragedy could be wiped out from the game. These games are packaged with various derivative manga and short stories, some of which have no references to the game’s Romeo or Juliet, nor to Shakespeare’s tragedy. This absence tellingly illuminates not only how character-oriented creativity produces such transmedial texts but how their producers

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encourage recipients and fans to create and circulate derivative works on the internet as well, such as the scores of novels and illustrations on the Japanese community site Pixiv (n.d.). Shakespearean characters also appear in mobile games such as Divine Gate (2013–), Monster Strike (2015–), and Fate/Grand Order (2015–). Divine Gate has “Scripts of Sacred Drama,” a collection of Shakespearean characters, which contains Macbeth, Othello, Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, and Shakespeare. What makes these characters Shakespearean is nominal. The information available on the internet makes them sound more “Shakespearean” than they appear: the character called “Macbeth,” for example, has skills called “Walking Shadow,” “Scottish Play,” and “NonWoman-born,” and “Shakespeare” has skills called “Hathaway,” “Tempest,” and “Shake Scene.” In Monster Strike, there are also Shakespearean characters like Romeo, Juliet, Othello, and Macbeth. Here, “Evolved Othello” is called “Othello, the Incarnation of Jealousy.” In Fate/Grand Order appears a “William Shakespeare” who says, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse” in the game (Richard III, FTLN 3718). In Fate Apocrypha (2017), one of the anime in the Fate franchise, William Shakespeare also appears and quotes Shakespearean lines such as “The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind” (FTLN 1533); “It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on” (Othello, FTLN 1799–1800); and “When sorrows come, they come not single spies/But in battalions”(FTLN 2982–3).8 Yet these Shakespearean associations lead nowhere within the narratives of these mobile games. In these games, Shakespearean characters are just like empty containers with Shakespearean name tags, with no trajectories of the Bard or his plays except for the names. Creators can put any visual or verbal character elements into those empty containers to make up attractive characters for game players. Those Shakespearean names might add a little glamour to the games, yet “Shakespeare” is nothing but a hollow, insubstantial, or nominal presence. This “hollow” Shakespeare is getting more prevalent on video-sharing websites as well as in mobile games that use Shakespearean characters. HoneyWorks is a popular group of creators that specializes in producing songs with Vocaloid, a singing synthesizer software, for video sharing sites. When HoneyWorks released the song “Romeo” on the internet in February 2017, it went viral in Japan and overseas soon after (HoneyWorks 2017; Chibi Subs 2017).9 The title of the song might ring a bell, yet, as its lyrics suggest, fans of HoneyWorks would neither care where the name comes from nor be required to know Shakespeare’s tragedy. Another Vocaloid song, “Romeo and Cinderella,” released in 2009 on the internet, was soon dubbed, covered, and circulated in various languages, including English and Chinese (Hatsune 2009). The song starts with the phrase “Please don’t let my love turn out to be such a tragedy as Juliet’s,” introducing a girl who wishes her love to be happily fulfilled like “Cinderella’s,” not like Juliet’s. Here its audiences were expected to know something about Romeo and Juliet, otherwise the significance of replacing Juliet with Cinderella would be missed (Minami 2017). The slight changes in the expected knowledge of Romeo and Juliet between these two songs seem to illuminate what has happened to Japanese pop “Shakespeare” over the last decade. In HoneyWorks’ song, “Romeo” is used as a well-known boy-in-love figure that is readily available, though it appears the Shakespearean title has little significance for consumers of this “Shakespearean” song. Just as Final Fantasy, a Japanese media franchise, has “few traces of [its] cultural origins,” many Japanese Shakespearean media objects are culturally “odorless” (Iwabuchi 2002: 25–27). The media objects discussed in this chapter are readily consumed not because they use Shakespeare but because they are already popular media products, whether Shakespearean or not. Shakespeare’s plays are nothing but a handy resource for giving some flavor or widely known names to media content. Shakespearean names are somewhat like tags that show the provenances of product ingredients, yet their recipients need not to know or even care about their origins.

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Such an insouciant attitude to Shakespeare has brought about the recent proliferation of hollow Shakespeares on various media platforms in contemporary Japan.

Adaptive, derivative, and nominal Shakespeares Ever since a newspaper caricature published by Asahi on 7 December 1932 depicted Baron Shidehara, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, as a Hamlet-like figure in his hesitation to step in as the Acting Prime Minister after the Prime Minister had been seriously injured by a right-wing assassin, Shakespeare’s plays as well as Shakespearean characters and quotations have been utilized in various forms in Japan, from newspaper caricature and manga to anime and video/mobile games (Minami 2012). Shakespeare’s plays and his life were and still are narrative sources or sources of inspiration for creating new manga and anime works. Apart from such narrative-oriented recreations of Shakespeare, some Shakespearean anime and video/mobile games are character-oriented with little respect or regard for Shakespeare. Between the two extremes of adaptive and hollow Shakespeares lie narrative-oriented Shakespearean works and various character-oriented derivative artifacts with nominal references to Shakespeare. Some of these Shakespearean artifacts are media-specific and others are intermedial, floating from one media platform to another, changing their forms and staying further away from their provenance known as Shakespeare. Many Shakespearean artifacts on so many media platforms owe much to the absence of definitive Shakespeare texts in Japanese. With more than a few versions of Shakespeare’s plays always available in Japanese translation, selecting and adjusting Shakespeare’s text to one’s purposes is the first necessary step towards producing Shakespeare on any media platforms. For recipients of various Shakespearean objects on today’s popular media platforms, on the other hand, Shakespeare is still part of “shared knowledge” as it used to be. Here, however, “shared” means “available on the internet” rather than “widely read and appreciated,” just as audiences and players of Shakespearean anime and games go to related websites rather than to the plays to find out possible Shakespearean meanings, if any. Shakespeare is ubiquitous on Japanese popular media platforms, yet the “Shakespeare” presented here is nothing but hollow and nominal.

Acknowledgments This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)) Grant Number 253703 07.

Notes 1 For more information in English about the Pretty Cure series, see the websites “Futari wa Pretty Cure episodes” (n.d.), https://prettycure.fandom.com/wiki/FwPC37, and “Yes! Pretty Cure 5 GoGo!” (n.d.), https://prettycure.fandom.com/wiki/YPC5GG12. 2 On Manga Shakespeare, see Hayley (2010). 3 Minami (2007) gives a more detailed description of Tezuka’s The Merchant of Venice, Igarashi’s Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and some others. For a close reading of Morikawa’s Twelfth Night, see Minami (2010), which also demonstrates how to read the visual expressions of shojo manga. 4 Line-references to Shakespeare’s plays are Folio through-line numbers (FTLN) from the Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Edition (Mowat et al. n.d.). 5 For detailed information about the characters, see the Wiki site (in English as well as Japanese, n.d.). For a close reading of this anime, see Cavallaro (2010). 6 Romeo x Juliet was also adopted as the theme of a Pachinko machine, a Japanese pinball derivative (Yoshiara 2013; Minami 2017).

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Shakespeare and Japanese pop culture 7 Lollipop Chainsaw by Kadokawa Games (2012–) might be one of the globally circulated video games with its heroine called Juliet, though it has nothing to do with Shakespeare. See http://lollipopchainsaw. com/ (n.d.). 8 Information about Shakespearean characters in these mobile games is available in Japanese and English (Divine Gate Wikia n.d.; Monster Strike Wiki n.d.; Fate/Grand Order Wiki n.d.; “Romeo” n.d.). 9 English lyrics are available on the site below: http://vocaloidlyrics.wikia.com/wiki/%E3%83%AD%E3%83%A1%E3%82%AA_(Romeo) (Accessed 20 May 2018).

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Ryuta Minami Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Rev. ed. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Jensen, Michael P. 2007a. “The Comic Book Shakespeare, Part I.” Shakespeare Newsletter 56.3.270: 81–82, 97, 104, 113, 118–19. ———. 2007b. “The Comic Book Shakespeare, Part II.” Shakespeare Newsletter 57.1.271: 2, 4, 8, 38–40. ———. 2008. “The Comic Book Shakespeare, Part III.” Shakespeare Newsletter 57.2.272: 42, 62, 66, 68, 78–80. ———. 2011. “Shakespeare and the Comic Book”. In The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts. Eds. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete, and Ramona Wray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 388–405. Jones, William B. 2011. Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History. 2nd ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. “Juliet.” n.d. Monster Strike Wiki. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019, https://monster-strike-enjp.fandom.com/wiki/ Juliet. Kishi, Tetsuo, and Graham Bradshaw. 2005. Shakespeare in Japan. London: Continuum. “Lollipop Chainsaw.” n.d. Accessed 23 Jan. 2019, http://lollipopchainsaw.com/. “Macbeth.” n.d. Monster Strike Wiki. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019, https://monster-strike-enjp.fandom.com/ wiki/Macbeth. Manga Shakespeare. 2007. Series. London: SelfMadeHero. Manga Shakespeare.com Learning. n.d. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019, www.mangashakespeare.com/free_ resources.html. McWilliams, Mark W. 2015. “Introduction.” Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime. Ed. Mark W. Mac Williams. London: Routledge. 3–25. Minami, Ryuta. 2007.“Shakespeare in Japanese Comics.” In Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture. Ed. Richard Burt. 2 vols. Vol. 2. Greenwood Press. 813–17. Minami, Ryuta, Ian Carruthers, and John Gillies. 2001. Performing Shakespeare in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. “Shakespeare for Japanese Popular Culture: Shojo Manga, Takarazuka and Twelfth Night.” In Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance. Eds. Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 109–31. ———. 2012. “Shakespeare as an Icon of the Enemy Culture in Wartime Japan, 1937–1945.” In Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, Identity. Eds. Irena R. Makaryk and Marissa McHugh. Toronto: University of Toronto. 163–79. ———. 2016. “Hello, Sha-Kitty-pear? Shakespeares Cutified in Japanese Anime Imagination.” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 16.3: 116–37. ———. 2017. “ ‘The Very Basics for All of Us’: Fragments of Shakespeare in Japanese Anime and Manga.” In Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys: Critical Encounters, Cultural Geographies, and the Politics of Travel. Eds. Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Judy Celine Ick, and Poonam Trivedi. London: Routledge. 239–54. Monster Strike Wiki. n.d. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019, https://monster-strike-enjp.fandom.com/wiki/Shake speare. Mowat, Barbara, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles, eds. n.d. “Shakespeare’s Plays, Sonnets and Poems.” Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019, www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. Phillipps, Susanne. 2015. “Character, Themes, and Narrative Patterns in the Manga od Osamu Tezuka.” In Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime. Ed. Mark W. MacWilliams. London: Routledge. 68–90. Pixiv. n.d. Website. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019, www.pixiv.net/novel/tags.php?tag=%E3%83%AD%E3%83%9 F%E3%82%AA%26%E3%82%B8%E3%83%A5%E3%83%AA%E3%82%A8%E3%83%83%E3%83%88. Pokémon Wiki. n.d. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019, https://pokemon.fandom.com/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Wiki. “Psycho-Pass.” n.d. Myanimelist. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019, https://myanimelist.net/anime/13601/Psycho-Pass/ forum. QuinRose Under Garden. 2013. Romeo vs Juliet. Game, PlayStation Portable. ———. 2014. Romeo & Juliet. Game, PlayStation Portable. “Romeo.” n.d. Monster Strike Wiki. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019, http://monster-strike-enjp.wikia.com/wiki/ Romeo.

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Shakespeare and Japanese pop culture Romeo × Juliet. 2007. Dir. Fumitoshi Oizaki. Gonzo Studios. “Romeo × Juliet.” n.d. Myanimelist. Accessed 10 Jun. 2018, https://myanimelist.net/anime/1699/Romeo_x_ Juliet. Romeo × Juliet Visual Fanbook. 2008. Tokyo: Shinkigensha. Romeo × Juliet Wiki. n.d. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019, http://romeoxjuliet.wikia.com/wiki/Romeo_X_Juliet. Sasayama, Takashi, J.R. Mulryne, and Margaret Shewring, eds. 1998. Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sexton, Adam, and Tintin Pantoja. 2008. Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Manga Edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing. Shakespeare Comics. n.d. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017, www.shakespearecomics.com/. “Shakespeare meets final fantasy.” 2016. Caffeine for Nerds. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019, http://caffeinefornerds. blogspot.com/2016/09/shakespeare-meets-final-fantasy-ffxv-is.html. Shamoon, Deborah. 2014. “Situating the Shojo in Shojo Manga: Teenage Girls, Romance Comics, and Contemporary Japanese Culture.” In Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime. Ed. Mark W. Mac Williams. London: Routledge. 137–54. Shirodaira, Kyo, Sano Arihide, and Ren Saizaki. 2010–2013. Zetsuen no Tempest: The Civilization Blaster. 9 vols. Tokyo: Square Enix. DVD. SparkNotes. n.d. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017, www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/. Tezuka, Osamu. 2017. Osamu Tezuka’s Works Inspired by Shakespeare’s Plays. Tokyo: Jitsugyo no Nipponsha. Takahashi, Mizuki. 2014. “Opening the Closed World of Shojo Manga.” In Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime. Ed. Mark W. MacWilliams. London: Routledge. 114–36. Urobuchi, Gen, and Makoto Fukami. 2013. “And Then, Silence.” PSYCHO-PASS: No cut Scenario book #8. Supplement to PSYCHO-PASS Vol. 3. Tokyo: Fuji TV. DVD. Yahoo Answers. 2012. 9 Dec. Accessed 25 Jan. 2019, https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_ detail/q1098459400. “Yes! Pretty Cure 5 GoGo!” n.d. Pretty Cure Wiki. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019, https://prettycure.fandom.com/ wiki/Yes!_Pretty_Cure_5_GoGo! Yoshihara, Yukari. 2013. “ ‘Tacky “Shakespeares’ ” in Japan.” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 10.25: 83–97. “Zetsuen no Tempest.” n.d. Myanimelist. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019, https://myanimelist.net/forum/?animeid= 14075.

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26 “SUBJUGATING ARAB FORMS TO EUROPEAN METERS”? Shakespeare, Abu Shadi, and the first translations of the sonnets into Arabic David C. Moberly Scholars of Shakespeare and the Arab World increasingly use the term “Arab Shakespeares” to describe the multifaceted and diverse adaptations of Shakespeare and his works that arise from or bear some relationship to Arab culture. Arab culture, in this case, is a term used to describe the culture associated with speakers of Arabic and is not an ethnic term, nor is it associated with any particular religious group, as there are Arab Christians and Arab Jews, as well as Arab Muslims (and, for that matter, non-Arab Muslims). This chapter utilizes “Arab Shakespeares,” rather than “Arabic Shakespeares” or Shakespeare in the Arab World,” as it better includes adaptations that are not performed in the Arabic language but are clearly part of Arab culture, such as early versions of Sulayman al-Bassam’s Al-Hamlet Summit, which were performed in English, as well as Arab adaptions of Shakespeare that arise outside of that geographic region.1 This chapter uses the adjective “Arabic” to modify linguistic or literary terms specific to the Arabic language (“Arabic poetry,”“Arabic language”), whereas it uses the adjective “Arab” to modify descriptions of persons or places associated with Arab culture (“Arab poets,” “Arab World”). Western Shakespeare scholarship has significantly expanded its understanding of Arab Shakespeares in the wake of a resurgence of interest in global adaptations of his plays, yet little attention has been paid in the West to Arabic translations and adaptations of Shakespeare’s sonnets (Ghazoul 1998; Bayer 2007; Hanna 2007, 2016; Litvin 2011; Al-Bassam 2014; Carlson and Litvin 2015). This is despite the fact that, in recent years, Arab scholars from Egypt, Syria, and Iraq have published four separate translations of Shakespeare’s complete sonnets, through publishers in Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates (Shakespeare 2006, 2012, 2013, 2016). Thus, in the midst of rising interest in dramatic Arab Shakespeares in the West, many Arab scholars have turned a new eye to translating and researching his poetic works. With this surge of activity, now is the time to examine the circumstances in which Shakespeare’s sonnets were first adapted into the Arabic language, a topic that has only rarely been touched on by either Western or Arab scholars.2 Though many of Shakespeare’s plays were translated into Arabic as early as the 1890s, the sonnets did not enter the language until the late 1920s, when Lebanese and Egyptian poets began to adapt the poetic form to their own uses. The first author to write at length on the form of the sonnet was Ahmad Zaki Abu Shadi (Ahmad Zakī Abū Shādī), who, in a two-part essay ˙ ˙ published in 1928, outlined not only the history of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but also their place 304

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within Arabic poetic traditions and methods. Abu Shadi was well aware that in discussing Shakespeare’s sonnets in Arabic, he entered uncharted territory. He himself stated in his essay: “When [I looked into] what has been written about Shakespeare in the Arabic language, [I] did not find a single instance of any discussion on his anāshīd, or sonnets, particularly” (Abu Shadi 1928a: 8). The Lebanese poet and associate of Abu Shadi, Ilyas Abu Shabaka (Ilyās Abū Shabaka), had published the first Shakespearean sonnet in Arabic in his 1926 collection of poetry (Shabaka 1926). Shabaka, however, provided no commentary on his attempt, leaving it up to Abu Shadi to make this foray. Abu Shadi, an Egyptian, published his essay in Cairo’s highbrow periodical al-Siyāsa alUsbu‘aiya (Weekly Politics), a journal that catered to the literary-minded, educated elite and devoted itself to reporting and discussing recent developments in Egyptian theater, poetry, translation, and politics (Abu Shadi 1928a: 8–9; Abu Shadi 1928b: 26). The piece is the first to debate in Arabic issues such as Shakespeare’s sexuality, his poetry’s relationship to medieval Arabic poetic forms, and the difficulty of translating the meter of Shakespearean sonnets. Thus, it marks the beginning of an Arabic-language conversation surrounding the adaptation of Shakespeare’s sonnets and their relationship to Arabic literary culture that continues to this day. This chapter examines the foundational work of Abu Shadi in introducing the Shakespearean sonnet into the Arabic language formally and publicly. In his essay, Abu Shadi not only situates the sonnet form within traditional genres and modes of Arabic poetry, he argues for the creation of an Arabic Shakespeare Sonnet, a new poetic form that adapts or (to use his term) “acclimatizes” Shakespearean sonnets to Arabic poetic tradition (n.d.: 139).3 In the Shakespearean sonnet, he sees echoes of the unshūda, sometimes also written as nashīd or nasheed, a traditional form of Arabic poetry often devoted to giving expression to the search for something long lost and deeply desired. In the process of situating the sonnet within this Arabic poetic genre and composing (rather than simply translating) his own sonnet in Arabic, Abu Shadi also uses Shakespeare himself as his model of the ideal “translator” or “adaptor” in his ability to perfectly Anglicize Italian forms. Thus, Abu Shadi presents not only his “Arabic sonnets,” but also himself, the translator/adaptor, as an adaptation of Shakespeare.

The sonnets as ana¯shı¯d Abu Shadi, a progressive-minded Egyptian, spent ten years in England studying literature and medicine prior to writing his essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets, from 1912–1922. There, he developed a love for the English Romantic poets and strong ties with English culture. He married an Englishwoman whom he took with him on his return to Egypt, by this point armed with an English education and expertise in medicine, agriculture, and beekeeping, as well as literature and poetry. Throughout his life as a prolific writer, he regularly published collections of poetry and essays outlining and demonstrating his attempts to translate not only English poetry, but the poetry of a variety of different cultures from around the world into the Arabic language (Badawi 1975: 116–29). In doing this, he was part of a larger group of European-educated Lebanese and Egyptian poets who, in the early twentieth century, sought to introduce new forms, meters, and styles of poetry into the Arabic language. These poets found the traditional meters of Arabic poetry too strict; saw their culture’s literary norms as in need of revitalization and renewal; and aimed to, in their view, breathe new life into Arabic literature by experimenting with foreign forms (Jayyusi 1977: 379–81). In this vein, Abu Shadi confronted a major issue at the very beginning of his 1928 essay that had discouraged other Arab scholars from taking Shakespeare’s sonnets seriously: their status as lyric poems, rather than as epic or narrative poems. Many Arab poets like Abu Shadi, who had 305

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been educated in Western schools, or, to put it in another light, those who were more likely to attempt the translation of Shakespeare’s work, had inherited from their time at English universities a poetic hierarchy that placed epic poetry at the top and lyric poetry at the bottom (Moreh 1976: 128). Thus, epic Western works, such as The Iliad, had already been translated into Arabic, but famous Western lyrical poems had remained on the shelf. Facing this reluctance on behalf of his contemporaries to translate lyric poetry, Abu Shadi prominently renders the word “sonnets” as anāshīd, entitling his essay “Shakespeare’s Anāshīd” rather than “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” (Abu Shadi n.d.: 138). In doing so, though Abu Shadi does not directly suggest that the sonnets are epic poems, he does nudge them in the direction of the epic on the scale of the poetic hierarchy of his day. Anāshīd, (or unshūda, in the singular) are and were often associated with religious poems sung in praise of God or of the deeds and lives of great Muslim leaders of the past, such as Muhammad (Hinds and Badawi 1986: 862; Waugh 1989: 114–16; Khan 2013: 176; Thibon 2014: 294–98; Dema 2013: 211). At the time of his essay’s publication, many poets, including Abu Shadi himself, composed patriotic anāshīd in praise of their country and its history in a mode that resembled the praises of heroes in epic poems (Gershoni and Jankowski 1987: 226–27). The similarities between the anāshīd and the classical epic, in fact, were striking enough that Sulayman al-Bustani (Sulaymān al-Bustānī), when he published the first translation of The Iliad into Arabic in 1908, referred to it multiple times in his introduction (from which Abu Shadi quotes in the essay) as an unshūda (Homer 1904: 185). Strictly speaking, of course, anāshīd are not epics at all, but an entirely different genre and mode of poetry coming out of a different culture of poetics. Still, association of sonnets with anāshīd, rather than with aghānī (“songs” or “lyrics”), served Abu Shadi’s purposes in making them more respectable in the predominant Arabic poetic culture of his day. Although many anāshīd, especially in contemporary Arabic pop music, feature full, melodic lyrics with a variety of instruments, traditional anāshīd are not melodic and feature no musical instruments, but are more like rhythmic and artistic chants or recitations accompanied only by a drum. Among many conservative Muslims, this form of performance is less problematic than music and respects the purported hadīth, or saying, of the Prophet against many kinds of musical instruments, which ˙ reads: “There will be among my followers those who make allowable (halāl) fornication and adultery, the wearing of silk (for men), taking intoxicants, and (Ma’āzif [musical string and wind instruments])” (Philips 2005: 218). In characterizing Shakespeare’s sonnets as anāshīd, Abu Shadi also parallels the work of Ilyas Abu Shabaka (Ilyās Abū Shabaka) (1903–1947), the only poet to write a Shakespearean sonnet in Arabic prior to Abu Shadi (‘Abdul-Hai 1976: 140). Abu Shabaka, an American-born Lebanese poet and translator, devoted much of his life to translating French literature into Arabic as part of his call for the modernization of Arabic literature (Badawi 1975: 145–57). He once wrote: We want a new literature of our own which carries the imprint of our souls and which stands on the basis of a revolution in our thinking and in our institutions and traditions. We want a literature which departs from the rules set down by our forefathers, however violently we may be attacked. quoted in Badawi 1975: 151 Abu Shabaka thus associated himself with the same poetic movement of Arab poets as Abu Shadi: those heavily influenced by European romanticists and who devoted themselves to translating

306

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Western, European poetic forms into Arabic in an effort to modernize and revolutionize Arabic poetry. In fact, Abu Shabaka would later, in the 1930s, directly align himself with the famous “Apollo Group” organized by Abu Shadi by contributing to Apollo, the main periodical of the movement (for which Abu Shadi served as both editor and figurehead) (Badawi 1975: 128). In 1926, shortly before the publication of Abu Shadi’s more lengthy treaty on Shakespeare’s sonnets, Abu Shabaka published a fourteen-line poetic translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71 (“No longer mourn for me when I am dead”) in his first book-length collection, Al-Qīthāra (The Lyre). This was the very first published translation of a Shakespeare sonnet into Arabic, and is entitled “Ughniyat al-Mawt” or “The Song of Death”: ‫أسمعيني لحنَ الردى اسمعيني  فحياتي على شفار المنون‬ ‫ي فبعد الموت ال استحلُّ أَن تبكيني‬ َّ ‫واذرفي دمعةً عل‬ ‫ت الردى على العشرين‬ ِ ‫يا سليمى وقد اثار مخولي  كامنا‬ ‫ي كي يحملوني‬ َّ ‫ما تقولين عندما تنظرين القو َم جاءوا ال‬ ‫الحمام فوق جبيني‬ ِ ‫وانا جئةٌ بدون حراك  وخيال‬ َّ ‫ان من عاش فيه عمراً قصيراً  كالذي عاش فيه بعض قرون‬ ‫ وكم انادي سليمى  فاسمها بلس ٌم لقلبي الحزين‬,‫يا سليمى‬ ‫لك عندي وصيَّةٌ فاحفظيها  هي بعد الممات ان تنسيني‬ ‫رغم    وشا َء الودا ُد ان تذكريني‬ ِ ُ‫واذا ه ّزك التذكر بال‬ ‫فخذي في الظالم قيثار وحيي   واقصدي القبر في ظالل السكون‬ ‫وانقري نقرةً عليه يس ِّمعْك انينا ً كزفرتي وانيني‬ ‫ إِيْ واحنيني‬,‫ذاك قيثار صبوتي وشبابي  واحنيني اليه‬ ‫ت هذي    ومراراً أنشدتها في جنوني‬ ِ ‫يا سليمى أُغنيَّةُ المو‬ .‫ب  فقريبا ً يحين يوم الدين‬ ٍ ‫فاسمعيني اعيدها عن قري‬ (٩٢٢ ‫ سنة‬١‫ ت‬٢٥ ‫)في‬ Hear me a death tune, hear me, For my life is on the edges of doom. Shed a tear for me, for after death you may not cry for me, O Selima, and pass on my gift, As the forces of death are many. Do not say when you look at the place where they came to bear me away – I, motionless, coming, The shadow of death over my head – That he who lived in that place was short-lived, For he who lived in it, lived some centuries. O Selima, how many times shall I call, “O Selima”? For her name is a balm to my sad heart For you, I have a request. Therefore, remember it. It is, after death, that you forget me. And if memory upsets you with desire And willingness . . . wishes, to remember me, Take a lyre in the darkness and bring me to life; Approach the tomb in silent shadows; Knock insistently on it until you hear a sigh like my moan, my groan. The lyre holds my childhood, my youth And I yearn for it, ay, I yearn

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O Selima, for this song of death. Repeatedly I seek for it, I chant it in my madness. So hear me, I yield to it soon And soon comes the Day of Judgment. (October 25, 1516) Shabaka 1926: 123 The Arabic word translated here as “I chant it” – unshidatuhā – comes from the same trilateral root, n-sh-d, as anāshīd. Furthermore, “I chant it” is paralleled within the last few lines with “I yearn for it,” “I seek for it,” and “I yield to it,” with “it” referring to the “song of death” or, in other words, both to death and song. This expression of a deep longing for and seeking after something (the song of death, or death itself, metaphorized as song), a common theme of anāshīd poems, demonstrates that Abu Shabaka, like Abu Shadi, saw and called attention to a connection between the Italian (i.e. Petrarchan) sonnet tradition and the Arabic poetic nashīd tradition. In the very beginning of his essay, prefacing his own attempt to translate a Shakespeare ­sonnet, Abu Shadi points out the well-known distinction between anāshīd and aghānī, saying, If we consider that the word anāshīd is not synonymous with the word aghānī [songs], then there is nothing wrong with allowing it for consideration first as a translation of the word “Sonnets” and second as a translation of the word “Songs.” Abu Shadi n.d.: 152–53 In Italian, of course, the word sonetto literally means “little song,” and compositions and performances by the likes of Rufus Wainwright reveal that they can work quite well as popular song (Wainwright 2010). In the English tradition, however, the sonnet is not typically sung aloud, but read or recited, as many anāshīd are, thus Abu Shadi’s careful distinction between anāshīd and aghānī. After making this distinction, he continues, moving from the performance style of anāshīd versus that of aghānī, to the cultural value associated with each: While ughniya (song) is usually a small musical form formulated to please the tuned ear, it is not often intended to provoke thought, but for recreation and general musical interest. Therefore, ughniya is beloved by the masses, while the sonnet is the joy of the educated. 138 Again, Abu Shadi shifts Shakespeare’s sonnets to a higher position along the poetic hierarchy by distancing them from musical song. Musical song is intended to please the masses, but sonnets, or anāshīd, are for the morally and culturally refined elite. Abu Shadi, then, draws a distinction between Shakespeare’s sonnets and musical or lyric poetry by pointing out the differences between anāshīd and aghānī in terms of both their mode of performance and their effect on the audience. And yet, setting aside this comparison for the sake of clarity, at the most basic level, an unshūda is a poem, song, hymn, or anthem (Cowan 1979: 1132). Traditionally, as demonstrated by Abu Shabaka’s translations, these poems or songs express a longing for or seeking after something lost, whether it be an object; a person (Muhammad and other prophets or heroes); or a place (an ideal Islamic society, often Al-Andalus, or Palestine in contemporary anāshīd) (Shiloah 1995; Thibon 2014: 294–98). The word unshūda, in fact, derives in the Arabic language from the same trilateral root as the verb nashada, which means to seek, look, search for, sing, or recite (Hava 1899: 761). Thus, in referring to Shakespeare’s sonnets as anāshīd in his title, Abu Shadi not only nudges them into a higher position 308

“Subjugating Arab forms to European meters”?

on the poetic hierarchy, but also calls attention to the thematic echoes and connections that reverberate between the sonnets and the nashīd poetic tradition. These connections become apparent as one compares popular anāshīd in Abu Shadi’s day with Abu Shadi’s creation of an Arabic Shakespeare sonnet. I begin by producing a translation of “Nashīd al-Amal,” or “The Chant of Hope,” a popular nashīd sung by Um Kalthoum in an Egyptian film produced not long after the publication of Abu Shadi’s essay. This nashīd is a prime example of the searching, longing, anguished themes of many anāshīd that continue to exist even to this day in the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and the songs of Egyptian munshids (chanters of anāshīd): Oh, glory! How I longed for you! And spent sleepless nights waiting for you. And wished in my heart for you to bring me happiness. And hear the nashīd of hope. I sang sad songs. And the world shared with me this sadness. Oh, how I hoped and longed for the happiness of my sad heart. As hearts joined in love, I sang to find my lover who brings happiness to my heart. To spend all my life with him And forget about all dreams. As long as I attain his content and find in it everything I wish.  Nashīd al-Amal 1937 As is common with many nashīd, “Nashīd al-Amal” is directed at some lost, desired object for which the singer or munshid is searching, in this case, glory, personified as a male lover sought by Amal, the lead female character in the film whose name literally means “hope.” Not all of Shakespeare’s sonnets feature this pattern, but some bear remarkable similarities. For example, a comparable sense of longing to that found in “Nashīd al-Amal” can be found in Sonnets 27–31, as the poet “beweep[s] his outcast state,” and “sigh[s] the lack of many a thing [he] sought” (Shakespeare 2014: 164–73). A particularly strong example of the possible parallels between the anāshīd form and Shakespeare’s sonnets lies in Sonnet 27: Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed, The dear repose for limbs with travail tired; But then begins a journey in my head To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired: For then my thoughts, from far where I abide, Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee, And keep my drooping eyelids open wide, Looking on darkness which the blind do see; Save that my soul’s imaginary sight Presents thy shadow to my sightless view, Which like a jewel hung in ghastly night Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new: Lo, thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind, For thee, and for myself, no quiet find. Shakespeare 2014: 164–734 309

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In this sonnet, the subject is ostensibly an actual lover, rather than a lover as a personification of a desired attribute. The sense of searching and longing common to anāshīd, however, remains. Furthermore, Abu Shadi himself highlights Shakespeare’s expression of a lover’s longing and desire in his own summary of the content of the sonnets. As he says: “In most of these sonnets there are lovely gestures toward faithfulness from a distance, toward the lover’s passion and his longing in the night” (Abu Shadi n.d.: 145). He later adds that Shakespeare “disseminat[ed] in these emotional poems his private spirit on subjects of love, longing, heartbreak, torment, and subservience” (149). Thus, it is this aspect of Shakespeare’s sonnets – a sense of longing and torment in seeking for something that has been lost – that comes through most clearly in Abu Shadi’s own Arabic Shakespeare sonnet, which I have translated into English. Here is the sonnet: ‫يا حياة (الحبّ ) كيف الحيا ْه‬ ‫بعد ما ضاعت عهو ُد الحبيبْ ؟‬ ‫صدَا ْه‬ َ ‫ت يحكى‬ ِ ‫ما جما ُل الصو‬ ! ْ‫ال وال الطّبُّ ظنونَ الطبيب‬ ْ‫إنما الذكرى المثلى عذاب‬ ‫بليل بهي ْم‬ ٍ ‫تُ ِش ْبهُ النّو َح‬ ْ‫مثلما َح َّن لماضى الشباب‬ ‫دائ َم الوج ِد ه ُِسنُّ سقي ْم‬ ‫هكذا الطائ ُر ل َّما بَك َى‬ (ْ‫ما فاتَه ِحسٌّ بآتى (الرَّبيع‬ ‫لكنها قلبى إذا ما اشتكى‬ !‫بحصن منيع‬ ‫كمسجون‬ ‫يشكو‬ ٍ ٍ ‫ب) وهو البعي ْد‬ ِ ‫ما خيا ُل (ال ّح‬ !‫اال تباري ُح الفؤا ِد ال َع ِمي ْد‬ O life, love, how is life After the covenants of the lover are lost? Is there any beauty in the voice that speaks in love’s echo? No! Nor does the doctor have medicine for suspicion! The memory of love is a torment Resembling mourning in a pitch-black night, Like one who craves for the youthful past As a sickly old man in unending, agitated passion! Thus is the bird when it cries. What is its death, but the feeling of the coming of spring? But death is denied me. My heart, if it complains, Complains as a prisoner in an impenetrable fortress. What a fantasy love is, when it is far off – Nothing but the heart’s tormenting of the head. 156 Abu Shadi’s creation here features a noble attempt to preserve the sonnet form of fourteen lines, along with the rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet, complete with a closing couplet (which rhymes, for example al-b‘aīd, “far off,” with al-‘amīd, “the head”). The iambic pentameter, however, remains elusive (though he comes somewhat close). Thematically, this sonnet also combines the longing and tormented sighs of Sonnets 27–31 with the aspects of the nashīd form 310

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found in Abu Shabaka’s translation of Sonnet 71 and in “Nashīd al-Amal.” Like Amal, the poet directly addresses an abstract concept (“life” and “love”) in his complaint, which centers on a search and a crying out for something lacked by the speaker. Then, in a twist, the poem centers its search on relief from what is addressed: life and love. What is sought, and what remains unachieved in the end, is death. With this translation, Abu Shadi concludes his essay.

Abu Shadi’s legacy After its publication in 1928, Abu Shadi’s translation and commentary on Shakespeare’s sonnets bore some influence in closed literary circles within Cairo, though only for a limited amount of time. Three years after the publication of this essay in al-Siyāsa al-Usbu‘aiya, another scholar by the name of Taha Abd al-Hamid al-Wakil (Taha ‘Abd al-Hamīd al-Wakīl) published three ˙ ˙ ˙ Shakespeare sonnets translated into Arabic – one on May 3, 1930, and two more on July 14. Al-Wakil publishes his sonnets in the same periodical as Abu Shadi and, like him, refers to them as anāshīd. Another sonnet bearing Abu Shadi’s influence, translated by Sayyid Ali Hasan (Sayyid ‘Alī Hasan), appears three years later in Apollo, the literary periodical for which Abu ˙ Shadi served as founder and editor. Alongside this periodical, he formed an Arab literary group called “Apollo’s Society,” otherwise known as the “Apollo School.” This group featured highly influential and distinguished poets of the time, including those well-known for their contributions to Arabic adaptations of Shakespearean works, such as Khalil Mutran and Ahmed Shawqi. Abu Shadi, then, held some influence as a key figure in the introduction of the Shakespearean sonnet into Arabic poetic culture through the late 1920s and early 1930s. As the 1930s progressed into the 1940s, however, opponents cast Abu Shadi as politically radical and dangerous, in part because of his success and outspokenness, and in part because of his European ties and English wife. As a pro-worker socialist who refused to unite with any of the most prominent political parties of his time, he became vulnerable to a multitude of attacks. Enemies portrayed him as pro-English (both politically and artistically) and as a physician who dabbled in poetry with little true skill or genius. Thus, in 1946, after the death of his wife, Abu Shadi and his children emigrated to the United States as exiles. He continued his career as a writer and activist, but separation from his home country hampered efforts to build on his following there. On April 12, 1955, he died in Washington, DC (Badawi 1975: 116–29). In large part because of his exile, Abu Shadi’s early efforts to introduce the sonnets into Arabic poetics have been all but forgotten. No other translator of the sonnets into Arabic since 1930 has mentioned Abu Shadi or his pioneering role in introducing the form to the language at all. Not Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā in his groundbreaking 1983 translation of a selection of twenty Shakespeare sonnets, not fellow-Egyptian Badr Tawfīq in his 1988 translation of the complete sonnets, nor Kamāl Abū Dīb, ‘Abd al-Wāhid Lu’lu’a, or Muhammad ‘Anānī in their translations ˙ in the last decade. In each of these works, despite their impressive and often lengthy introductions and commentary on the history of Shakespeare’s sonnets in the Arab World, Abu Shadi remains unmentioned.

Conclusion Despite his lack of recognition, Abu Shadi remains the first Arab poet to wrestle publicly with the multitude of issues involved in situating the Shakespearean sonnet within the Arab World. He strives to preserve what he sees as the core themes of the form and its mechanics while also making it more palatable to an audience of Arab poets and litterateurs by adapting it to the well-known nashīd genre. In undertaking this project of adaptation, Abu Shadi makes it clear in 311

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his essay that, for him, the ideal model for the work of poetic adaptation, or for transferring a poetic form from one language and culture into another, is none other than Shakespeare himself. Near the beginning of his essay, Abu Shadi expresses admiration for the work of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt, “who copied the meter of the sonnets into the English language” (139). As he says of these two men: “They had lived for some time in Italy and had tasted Italian literature to the point that they became passionately fond of it. And yet they struggled much in the beginning and did not fully succeed in their implementation” (139).5 And, Abu Shadi warns, Arab poets will come up short for the same reasons as Wyatt and Surrey “if we desire to subjugate Arabic forms to European meters” (139). For the adaptation of the Italian sonnet into the English language, this subjugation, says Abu Shadi, continued for some time, as Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Drayton, and others followed [Wyatt and Surrey] in most of [their] poetry for a long time in refining, trimming, and substituting until it was possible for the sonnets to inhabit the English environment and be subjected to the rules of its language and dialects. 139, emphasis added For Abu Shadi, then, the subjugation of Arabic poetry to European meters is not the answer. Instead, what is required in such adaptive work is to make it possible for the foreign form to “inhabit” the new cultural environment. The exact word Abu Shadi uses for “inhabit” is istawtan, a ˙ word that also means to take root in; to live in permanently; to become acclimated or naturalized; to fully become a part of a new watan, or homeland (Cowan 1979: 1265). This state of naturaliza˙ tion, he says, was not achieved in English for Italian sonnets until Shakespeare wrote his sonnets. He makes this especially clear when he states that “When the epoch of Shakespeare came, it became possible, through his genius borne of total innovation, to detach from all of the conservative formalities on one theme, which had been the foundational idea of the sonnet” (n.d.: 139). In the end, then, Abu Shadi argues that Shakespeare “cemented the sonnet form’s place in the English language” by doing away with the strictures of the form that did not suit the natural expressions of an English mind, Shakespeare’s (140). This poet, though “influenced . . . by the original, Italian [i.e. Petrarchan] sonnets,” revised the metric form so that it was “specific to him” and his needs, and put within it a natural expression of his “emotional life” (139–40, 148). This, says Abu Shadi, is exactly what the modern, Arab poet should do in bringing the Shakespearean sonnet into the Arabic language. As he says, “each novel addition to our language’s substance, or to the meters of our poetry, or to the methods and patterns of our lines is a treasure for us, without a doubt” (149). Attempts to translate or adapt a new poetic form into a new tradition are, he argues, “near to Shakespeare,” and must be taken as “evidence” of both the ability and the desire to create a new sonnet that suits the new language (150). In his conclusion, he argues: Let us look, then, at the suitability of the sonnet . . . whether it is near the original or different. . . . Let us dare to translate into Arabic, if possible, or invent, a new kind of poem that suits us. . . . For among the reasons for the backwardness in our poetry is a loss of this boldness and a submission to poetic forms, instead of subduing forms for the purposes of the poet. 1–50 Thus, for Abu Shadi, the work of translating and adapting the sonnet into Arabic is part and parcel of approaching Shakespeare’s genius. In Abu Shadi’s mind, Shakespeare dared to bend and 312

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ply the Italian sonnet tradition to suit his needs, rather than subjugating himself to it. Shakespeare enriched his language with new poetic treasures from other lands, acclimatizing them and naturalizing them to his own. So, also, would Abu Shadi “dare to translate” or “invent” an Arabic Shakespeare sonnet in the same vein. Abu Shadi himself, then, becomes an adaptation of Shakespeare in his own mind as he undertakes this work of adaptation.

Notes 1 For examples of the usage of this term, see Hennessy and Litvin (2016). 2 A few works that have discussed the topic, usually in passing, include Abd al-Hayy (1982); Badawi (1985); Dobson (2002); and Jaradat (2015). 3 Future references to Abu Shadi’s undated essay will be cited parenthetically by page number within the text. 4 Throughout the text I am using the 2014 Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as indicated in the References. 5 Wyatt did go to Italy in his role as ambassador, but we now know that Howard never went to Italy, although he studied and translated Italian humanist literature. Abu Shadi does not appear to have been aware of this.

References Abd al-Hayy, Muhammad. 1976. “A Bibliography of Arabic Translations of English and American Poetry (1830–1970).” Journal of Arabic Literature 7: 120–50. ———. 1982. Tradition and English and American Romantic Poetry: A Study in Comparative Literature. London: Ithaca Press. Abu Shabaka, Ilyas. 1926. al-Qīthāra (The Lyre). Beirut, Lebanon: Maktabat Sadir. ˙ mad Zaki Abu Shadi. Cairo, Abu Shadi, Ahmad Zaki. n. d. “Anāshīd Shiksbīr.” In Masrah al-Adab. Ed. Ah ˙ ˙ Egypt: Maktabat al-Mu’id wa-Mut˙abi’atihā. 138–56. ˙ ———. 1928a. “Anāshīd Shiksbīr.” al-Siyāsa al-Usbu‘aiya 100: 8–9. ———. 1928b. “Anāshīd Shiksbīr.” al-Siyāsa al-Usbu‘aiya 103: 26. Al-Bassam, Sulayman. 2014. The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Badawi, Muhammad Must afa. 1975. A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge ˙ Press. ˙˙ University ———. 1985. “The Arabs and Shakespeare.” In Modern Arabic Literature and the West. Ed. Muhammad ˙ Must afa Badawi. London: Ithaca Press. 191–220. ˙˙ Bayer, Mark. 2007. “The Merchant of Venice, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and the Perils of Shakespearean Appropriation.” Comparative Drama 41.4: 465–92. Carlson, Marvin, and Margaret Litvin, eds. 2015. Four Arab Hamlet Plays. New York: Martin E Segal Theatre Center. Cowan, J Milton, ed. 1979. Hans Wehr: A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. 4th ed. Urbana, IL: Spoken Language Services. Dema, Sunarwoto. 2013.“Dakwah Radio in Surakarta: A Contest for Islamic Identity.” In Islam in Indonesia: Contrasting Images and Interpretations. Eds. Jajat Burhanudin and Kees van Dijk. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 195–214. Dobson, Michael. 2002. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gershoni, Israel, and James P. Jankowski. 1987. Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930. New York: Oxford University Press. Ghazoul, Ferial J. 1998. “The Arabization of Othello.” Comparative Literature 50.1: 1–31. Hanna, Sameh F. 2007. “Decommercializing Shakespeare: Mutran’s Translation of Othello.” Critical Survey 19.3: 27–54. ———. 2016. Bourdieu in Translation Studies: The Socio-cultural Dynamics of Shakespeare Translation in Egypt. New York: Routledge. Hava, J G. 1899. Arabic-English Dictionary. Beirut, Lebanon: Catholic Press. Hennessey, Katherine, and Margaret Litvin, eds. 2016. “Special Issue: Arab Shakespeares.” Critical Survey 28.3.

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David C. Moberly Hinds, Martin, and El-Said Badawi, eds. 1986. Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic. Cairo, Egypt: Libraire Du Liban. Homer. 1904. Iliyādha. Trans. Sulaymān al-Bustānī. Dar al-Halal, Cairo. Jaradat, R.W. 2015.“The Sonnet in the Modern Arab Poetry.” Studies in Literature and Language 10.3: 13–17. Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. 1977. Trends and Movements in Arabic Poetry. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Khan, M.G. 2013. Young Muslims, Pedagogy and Islam: Contexts and Concepts. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Litvin, Margaret. 2011. Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’ s Ghost. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moreh, Shmuel. 1976. “Al-Sh‘ir Al-Mursal (Blank Verse) in Modern Arabic Literature.” In Modern Arabic Poetry: 1800–1970. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1976. 125–56. Nashīd al-Amal. 1937. Dir. Ahmed Badrakhan. Perf. Om Koultoum, Salwa Abaza. Sharikat Aflām al-Sharq. Philips, Abu Ameenah Bilaal. 2005. The Fundamentals of Tawheed (Islamic Monotheism). Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: International Islamic Publishing House. “Shakespeare in the Arab World.” 2010. MIT Global Shakespeares. Global Shakespeare Video Archive. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019, http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/arab-world/#. Shakespeare, William. 2006. Al-Qasāid: Shakwa H abība, al-Jawāl al-Adhūb, al-Anqa wa-al-Hamāma. Trans. ˙ Dār al-Wathāiq ˙ al-Jāmiya. Tawfīq Alī Mansūr. Cairo, Egypt: ———. 2012. al-Sūnītāt al-Kāmila: bi-al-‘Arabiya wa-al-Inklīziya. Trans. Kamal Abu-Deeb. Beirut, Lebanon: Dār al-Sāqī. ———. 2013. al-Ghana’iyāt. Trans. ‘Abd al-Wahid Lu’lu’a. Dubai, United Arab Emirates: Kalima. ———. 2014. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. ———. 2016. Sūnītāt Shīksbīr. Trans. Muhammad ‘Anānī. Cairo, Egypt: Mutabi‘a al-Hay’a al-Misriyya ˙ ˙ ¯ ma lil-Kitāb. al-‘A Shiloah, Ammon. 1995. Music in the World of Islam: A Socio-Cultural Study. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Thibon, Jean-Jacques. 2014. Muhammad in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia of the Prophet of God. Eds. Coeli Fitzpatrick and Adam Hani Walker. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. 294–98. Wainwright, Rufus. 2010.“Sonnet 20.” All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu. New York: Decca Label Group. Audio CD. Waugh, Earle H. 1989. The Munshidīn of Egypt. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

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27 SHAKESPEARE’S ANA¯SHI¯D Ahmad Zakı¯ Abu¯ Sha¯dı¯ (translated by David C. Moberly)1 ˙

Part 1 If we consider that the word anāshīd is not synonymous with the word aghānī [“songs”] then there is nothing wrong with allowing it for consideration first as a translation of the word “sonnets” and second as a translation of the word “songs.”2 Anāshīd, then, is the demarcation we will utilize hereafter. However, we prefer a literal translation, and so it pleases us to speak of Shakespeare’s sūnītāt, because the sonnet is ordered according to a special pattern and has various alternating rhymed couplets not exceeding fourteen lines. Fourteen lines, though, is the length for which it is best known, as well as for its basis in love and high, emotional themes, which attract to it litterateurs and cultured people. While ughniya [“song”] is usually a small musical form formulated to please the tuned ear, it is not often intended to provoke thought, but for recreation and general musical interest.3 Therefore, song is beloved by the masses, while the sonnet is the joy of the educated. The sonnet originated in Italy in the fifteenth century and left its home at the end of that century, reaching the height of its musical beauty in the lines of Petrarch and Dante.4 The Italian sonnet has a tinge of song, as is to be expected in that artistic nation which shelters melodies within it. The theme of the sonnet, whether ancient or modern, only includes one topic. The poet mentions his conclusion at the start of his lines, then explains it in two full lines at the end in a way that takes into account the ingenuity of the verse, considering the craftsmanship of the opening lines. Credit is due to both the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt in the beginning of the sixteenth century, who copied5 the meter of the sonnets into the English language. They had lived for some time in Italy and had tasted Italian literature to the point that they became passionately fond of it.6 And yet, they struggled much in the beginning despite their excesses and flexibility and did not fully succeed in their implementation, as we should in our present condition if we desire to subjugate Arab forms to European meters. Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Michael Drayton, and others followed them in most of their poetry for a long time in refining, trimming, and substituting, until it was possible for the sonnets to inhabit7 the English environment and be subjected to the rules of its language and its dialects. When the epoch of Shakespeare came, it became possible, through his genius borne of total innovation, to detach from all of the conservative formalities on one theme, which had been 315

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the foundational idea of the sonnet. He shortened it to fourteen lines, while writing in his own special meter that is near to our language [that is, Arabic] – if we permit ourselves to compare them – and to our extended meter (bahr al-madīd) forms, in that they are delightful, gripping, ˙ and diverse.8 This comparison is close by nature, and I will return to a study of this point shortly. Shakespeare’s sonnets were truly famous, though not due to their versification, as they were influenced in this respect by the original, Italian sonnets. Instead, it is the glittering essence of their basic meanings, the beautiful message, and the deep expression of the emotion and psychology of this high poet that are immortal in influence and memory. Still, Shakespeare preserved a special spirit in his poetic forms. As Milton did, this venerated poet returned to the Italian spirit, as he was influenced by his knowledge of Italian literature, and made some of his own, special amendments to it. When Milton died, the sonnet was entombed for over a century until it was brought to life by the innovative nature poet Wordsworth, when he imparted to it a beautiful new life through his mastery. Since his time, the sonnet has been a subject of attention and study, and the aim of affectional poets is toward this form, which has gained for itself a home in literary history. When we looked into what has been written about Shakespeare in the Arabic language, we did not find a single instance of any discussion on his anāshīd,9 or sonnets, particularly. We believed that it was possible to Arabize the form into innovative meters like those of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Rosetti, Mrs. Browning, Spenser, and others who adopted the major form of these anāshīd in English, whether they were imitators or innovators. For this work of adaptation, we would like the help of our poets skilled in the Italian language. *** That Shakespeare was the greatest of the dramatists in his age is a truth known in all the ends of the earth. And yet, unknown to most of us is that he was an admirable versifier of sonnets, even one who cemented the sonnet form’s place in the English language. Also unknown to many of us is that he was, in addition, the one who made the theater an exhibition of his poetry – that he aimed to prioritize poetry over acting. The greatness of his creative activity, then, was in his poetic gifts. Thus, if he was not the greatest dramatist of his age, he remains numbered among the most excellent poets of his generation, as Prof. Hariford has said. Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets appeared for the first time in the year 1609 but were disregarded until the last century. They have inspired a group of students of Shakespeare who continue to discuss their meanings, their different senses and intentions, and to whom (he or she) they were dedicated. But their poetic value is and remains above all under discussion and is still numbered as the highest of what has been composed in its domain, without excepting the sonnets of Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Milton, or even Wordsworth.10 It is undeniable that some of these sonnets refer to what is understood as the presence of a covert, feminine relationship, but the soul of the poems predominantly indicates otherwise. Rather, it points to a great poet’s passionate friendship directed at a beloved young man. And indeed, Shakespeare made indications in regards to a woman described as “the bad angel,” while this youth is described as “his good angel,” as if he divided his love between them and gave the last the largest share of affection.11 Shakespeare historians indicate that this passion – that is, love between two men – is not an English passion, but is of Greek origin, has its basis in harmony of inclination and purpose, and is one of the results of the literary revival (the Renaissance) as well as of the influence of Platonism.12 Therefore, the substance of these sonnets shines with spiritual love, tremendous sweetness of expression, depth of feeling, and beauty of language. Thus, the sonnets became – despite their being free from new philosophy or from a national social spirit or such like – accepted as jewels among the treasures of English literature and as a treasure trove of friendly emotions. The greatness of this 316

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love in the mind of Shakespeare is a cipher for his great, humanistic power, which pushed him to study the young man, understand him, and guide him. We have seen similar greatness in the lyrical poetry of Thomas Hardy. It is the scale of Hardy’s love for humanism that brought about his artistic, immortal miracle, The Dynasts13 – the pure, spiritual love that does not stumble in lust and is devoted to immortal beauty. Whoever appreciates beauty in a purely intellectual manner appreciates, with Shakespeare, all greatness in life. Shakespeare’s art inspires these more excellent and eternal feelings, for beauty directs discovery, and love is its permanent attraction. *** Sir Sidney Lee mentioned in a history of the English sonnet14 that he traces the appearance of many of Shakespeare’s anāshīd to relations with the royal court. Indeed, it was common in most of the sixteenth century for poets in France and Italy to compose in the sonnet form and address their sonnets to the men and women of power. This literary phenomenon also appeared from time to time in England in that age. We point especially to the contribution of the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt in the establishment of the English sonnet in the age of King Henry VIII, and it is necessary that we also call attention to the effort of Thomas Watson when Shakespeare was a young boy. Then, in the year 1591, a new breakthrough in English literature occurred in the printing of a collection of poetry entitled Astrophil and Stella, which consisted of a sublime group of sonnets that were composed by Sir Philip Sidney, the appearance of which drove poets to the poetic form of these anāshīd. After a few years, more of this type of form were produced than had been in any other time.15 It became common for high born men and women in the time of Queen Elizabeth to encourage poets’ praise and appreciation in the style of the sonnet. And so, when Shakespeare realized this trend, he plunged into it with all his power, distinguished by incredible intelligence and an authentic poetic nature. It was common for all poets who sought to aspire to fame to draw attention to one of the great men or women and to take up him or her as a focus of his praise in his anāshīd. This was much like the distinguished Arab poets in that time, who sought fame, and money also, in orienting themselves in their poetry toward the kings and the great officials. It is no surprise, then, that Shakespeare sought to draw attention to himself by using the sonnet form when he first started writing poetry. We find the sonnet in the opening of Romeo and Juliet, as well as in other of his plays. We also find that several sonnets steadily emerge especially after the year 1593, when Shakespeare was successful in gaining the patronage of one of the nobles when he published his story, Venus and Adonis. The study of most of the surviving sonnets indicates that most of those that remained uncorrupted were composed by someone middle-aged. In their poetic style, their fantasy, and their language, these sonnets are marked by Shakespeare’s stamp, without doubt, as has been indicated by comparative criticism between their composition and the style of his plays. Indeed, Shakespeare remained for some time a devotee to the sonnet form, until he won the most attention as a dramatic author. These sonnets were then and still today remain numbered among the highest examples in English literature for their musical sweetness, abundance of feeling, thought, emotion, imaginative power, and warmth of bouncing, beautiful expression. Yet this does not negate the presence of a number of them having a tinge of colorlessness, weakness, and submission to the strictures of the form, instead of subjecting the form to the power of the affectionate expression of the emotional feeling. These tendencies are rarely handled in a stentorian way in the West or the East. Perhaps a great genius like this can shift between power and weakness and even bouts of lukewarm work. The custom in that time was not to publish sonnets, as they were a private form. So Shakespeare only distributed their manuscript texts. Still, their secret beauty was publicized, and this 317

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made many men of letters eager to see them. It is plausible that one of the poets of that time influenced the style of the sonnets, and in the forefront of them is the gentle poet, Richard Barnfield, who issued his sweet poetic collection in 1594 and 1595.16 This collection was praised by the contemporary literary critic Francis Meres.17 When the text of these sonnets was distributed, Thomas Thorpe was emboldened to publish it without Shakespeare’s permission, because there was no copyright law forbidding such publication and circulation, even great, widespread circulation. The author had no power over it! Indeed, Shakespeare was sidestepped in this. He did not even care when printers falsely ascribed to him works that were unknown to him. All they intended was to profit from his literary fame! His disregarding this encouraged pretenders and thieves of literature. At their vanguard, it was Thorpe who set precedents like this. Most particularly noteworthy is his printing of a composition of the poet Marlowe’s without his permission! And it is amazing – despite the passage of centuries – that a counterpart to this situation is seen close at hand in Egypt today, except that we have this kind of mayhem from heroes such as Shakespeare and Marlowe, and our share is diminished by thieves of literature and lovers of Syrian writers in the new world!18 Shakespeare’s forms and literary works were exposed to such thefts by pretenders in all their bravado. In addition, a portion of other authors’ work that had nothing to do with him was attributed to him, even while he was indifferent to all this. It is no wonder, then, that there emerged from this many deceptions and several historical errors in later studies and conclusions.19 *** Among Shakespeare’s anāshīd are eighty that are thought to be directed to his male friend, whose name he does not declare. It is thought that he is the Earl of Southampton. Among the rest of the sonnets, a few clearly address the dark lady,20 whom he extolls21 and because of whom he suffers. Otherwise, the remainder of his anāshīd revolve around very general topics. As for the first section of these anāshīd directed toward his friend, it is not without contradictions. He calls for him, for example, to marry in order to immortalize his beauty in his seed. Then, the poet returns to boasting that his poetry alone is what will earn his friend immortality, and he repeats this! In most of these sonnets there are lovely gestures toward faithfulness from a distance, toward the lover’s passion and his longing in the night, toward the lover who ignores the beauty of spring or summer when he is separated from its beauty and the beauty of his lover.22 In some of them he rebukes his friend for being carried away by his passions, and at other times, he scolds him for his courtship with the poet’s mistress (i.e. Shakespeare’s mistress) during a recent absence and announces his pardon of him. . . . Sometimes we see a dark tinge in these anāshīd as he complains about the scandals of his time, rebukes himself and describes carnal trespasses, and declares his weariness and his dissatisfaction with his acting career.23 He predicts/prophesies his approaching death! He often refers to this friend of his as a friend who cares for his poetry and indicates that he was reproved once for his lyrics by a rival poet.24 In the second section of these anāshīd – which is stripped of speech directed to the man and his wooing25 – the poet praised the beauty of his dark mistress, who is thought to be the wife of Mr. Davenant, an innkeeper in Oxford.26 He praised her black hair and her eyes, while expressing severe displeasure in another part of the anāshīd with her pride and her contempt for his love, her unfaithfulness, and her relationships with many men, especially seducing his aforementioned friend! And in several of the sonnets, he does not neglect to mock other poets’ flattery of the gentle sex!27 Public opinion, then, is that these sonnets collectively constitute a psychological biography28 of the poet and his emotional life. Some historians deny this, such as Sir Sidney Lee – whom 318

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we rightly and frequently rely upon in quotation and perspective – arguing that Shakespeare was a great, dramatic author and that drama was his preoccupation. It was his emotional nature that caused invention and innovation to gain ascendancy in his composition.29 Such versification of private affairs was especially unfamiliar in the era of Shakespeare. His doctrine was dramatic invention and, following the spirit of the art, uninfluenced by private affairs. This is what causes some critical historians to believe that the aforementioned transmissions are but a demonstration of the imaginary only, as is common of Shakespeare, and as is the predominant spirit in the versification of the sonnets in that age. In other words, these sonnets, despite their verbal and artistic beauty, were models of the poetic trade and exhibited the fantasies of the poet. And in this judgement there is not a bit of contradiction. If it is true that, in that age, the sonnets as a group were free from sincere emotion, and that they only existed to demonstrate literary skill in an effort to draw closer to people of influence, then it is our right not to be ashamed of Arab poets who also imitated at length in a similar manner prior to the Elizabethan period, and before the time of Shakespeare, as well. This is to say nothing of some Arab poets’ continued fellowship with Shakespeare in this our own time. It warrants us, then, to say, unpoetically,“The human race is almost identical throughout the world!” And as our poets were in previous eras, who boasted about and took pride in their ability to plagiarize, so too was it the case for the composers of the sonnets in the Elizabethan Age, where this shame was not limited to drawing from Italian and French literatures, but extended to a traffic of intellectual thefts, especially among English poets. There are found examples of literary honesty among Watson and Spenser (who had many translations of Du Bellay and Petrarch, even being given the nickname by his friend, the critic Gabriel Harvey, “England’s Petrarch” out of appreciation for his great gifts). Also Drayton, unlike Lodge, for example, who did not acknowledge including quotes from Ronsard and Aristo, and unlike William Drummond, who quoted profusely from the poetry of the sixteenth century, like Guarini, Bembo, Marino, Tasso, etc., to say nothing of poor, plundered Petrarch. . . .30 No wonder, as long as the impulse is imitation and the sonnet form is free of vulgar emotions and resembles the ghazal,31 which opens with praise in Arabic poetry, and is even used in some political and social compositions in this our own time! William Drummond’s imitative ghazal were doomed to severe criticism or blame from writers, thinkers, and thoughtful critics in this time, such as Francis Bremont, Chapman, and Sir John Davies. Shakespeare himself, in some of his plays, makes sarcastic references to composers of imitative sonnets (see his play entitled Two Gentlemen of Verona and also his Henry V, etc.), and this is what makes us tend to believe that Shakespeare was genuine in his own composition, and that his anāshīd – which include many specific references to specific events – are not devoid of truth, and that there are many which belong purely to the imagination and to Platonic philosophy, and other things familiar to poets at that time. *** The summary of what is important to us to know from the presentation of this research overall is: 1 The emergence centuries ago in European literature of a kind of philosophical ghazalī composition dealing with emotions, generally called the “sonnet” is unparalleled for us. 2 The “sonnet” is restricted to specific, beautiful meters, with some leniency in the feet as it is translated from language to language, and it is restricted to a limited number of lines and a special structure in the arrangement of its images. 3 The sonnet form branches out from Italy to become common to all of cultured Europe, preserving its exquisite musicality and the attractive themes that are traditionally bestowed on it, although the form was marred at times by imitative poets. 319

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4

5

The representation of Shakespeare’s sonnets is mostly a translation of his emotional life, so that his linguistic expression and his poetic genius are made beautiful as they are subject to the form that is specific to him, whether by the strength of the revised meter which he invented or the artistic beauty in his imagery and expression. Studying the metrics of these sonnets, because their musicality is closer to our souls than to the souls of the English, as we try to follow its pattern in our language, brings into being this kind of innovative form for Arabic.

The echo An example of a lyrical sonnet, where the hemistich takes the place of a line:32 O life, love, how is life After the covenants of the lover are lost? Is there any beauty in the voice that speaks in love’s echo? No! Nor does the doctor have medicine for suspicion! The memory of love is a torment Resembling mourning in a pitch-black night, Like one who craves for the youthful past As a sickly old man in unending, agitated passion! Thus is the bird when it cries. What is its death, but the feeling of the coming of spring? But death is denied me. My heart, if it complains, Complains as a prisoner in an impenetrable fortress. What a fantasy love is, when it is far off – Nothing but the heart’s tormenting of the head. 33

Notes 1 The original Arabic essay this piece translates is Abu Shadi (1928). 2 Abu Shadi here begins his argument that anāshīd is a better translation for the word “sonnets” than ughniya, or “song.” Traditionally, the two words overlap in meaning. The word anāshīd can refer to song, but it also refers to rhythmic, performative recitations of poetry undertaken by those who believe that Muhammad preached against song and singing. 3 Here, Abu Shadi appears to be anticipating objectors who may point out that the literal translation of the word sonetto in Italian is “little song.” 4 Abu Shadi gets this and many other ideas regarding the history of the sonnet for from Sidney Lee (1904). 5 For “copied,” Abu Shadi uses the versatile verb naqala, which in Arabic not only means to copy, transcribe, or to render literally, but also to translate and to transfer (Cowan 1979: 1165). 6 Lee (1904: xxvii–xxix). 7 Here, Abu Shadi’s text reads tastawtan, which variously means to inhabit, to live in permanently, to ˙ become naturalized or acclimated to. 8 The extended meter (bahr al-madīd) form of is one of sixteen traditional metric forms in the Arabic ˙ eighth century by the poets al-Farahidi and al-Akhfash. As Abu Shadi says, language, established in the the extended meter form is similar to the iambic pentameter form of the sonnet in terms of its effect – that it is “delightful, gripping, and diverse” – not in terms of its mechanics. Whereas iambic pentameter consists of ten syllables, extended meter consists of eleven, and whereas iambic pentameter follows a steady, stressed/unstressed pattern. With “~” representing an unstressed syllable and “/” representing a stressed syllable iambic pentameter could be expressed as ~/~/~/~/~/. Extended meter in Arabic roughly follows a similar pattern of alternation between stressed and unstressed beats, but with some

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Shakespeare’s ana¯shı¯d variation: /~/~/~//~/~. This comparison is complicated, however, by the fact that the syllable is not the fundamental unit of traditional Arabic poetry. It uses other units of its own definition that do not correlate one-to-one with Western poetry. 9 From this point on, Abu Shadi uses the words anāshīd and sūnītāt, or “sonnets,” interchangeably. From here on, I use the term “sonnets” in my translation whenever the original does not use the word anāshīd. 10 Abu Shadi refers specifically to the work of both George Brandes et al. (1898) and Sidney Lee over the course of his essay, naming both authors by name directly. In this case, since Brandes talks at length about Michelangelo’s sonnets, whereas Sidney Lee does not, this reference appears to belong to him. 11 A clear reference to reference to Sonnet 144, “Two loves I have of comfort and despair.” 12 Brandes et al. (1898: 342). 13 A three-part drama written by Hardy and published in 1904, 1906, and 1908, dealing with the Napoleonic Wars. 14 A direct reference to Sidney Lee’s 1904 Elizabethan Sonnets. 15 The following four paragraphs pull most, if not all, of their information from Lee’s biography of Shakespeare (Lee 1916). 16 A reference to Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepherd. 17 Francis Meres (ca. 1565–1647) praises Barnfield’s poetry alongside Shakespeare’s in his 1598 Palladis Tamis: Wit’s Treasury. 18 It is unclear which writers Abu Shadi is referring to here, or what he means by “new world.” What is apparent is that Abu Shadi was disgusted with piracy problems that he saw in Egypt in his own day. 19 Another reference taken from Lee (1916). 20 Abu Shadi’s translation of the “dark lady” as al-sayida al-samrā’, or literally “the brown/tawny lady,” set a precedent that continues to this day. Most Arab scholars still use the same terminology. 21 The word Abu Shadi uses here is taghzal, which means to celebrate, extoll, laud, or praise a woman in poetry (Cowan 1979: 788). The word derives from the same root as ghazal, a form of Arab poetry in which the poet describes the virtues of a woman whom he desires. Abu Shadi draws a direct comparison between Shakespeare’s sonnets and Arab ghazal poetry later in the essay. 22 This appears to be a reference to Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” 23 Apparent reference to Sonnet 23: “As an unperfect actor on the stage.” 24 Lee mentions the rival poet (1916: 98–99). 25 Here again, Abu Shadi uses the term ghazal, which means “wooing,” as well as, in Arabic, “extolling in poetic verses.” 26 It is unclear where Abu Shadi came across this theory. Sidney Lee doesn’t believe the sonnets are ­biographical, and Brandes believed the Dark Lady was Mary Fitton. 27 Taken from Lee’s biography (1916: 99–100). 28 The word translated here as “biography” is, in Arabic, tarjama. The same word can also mean “translation.” Thus, Shakespeare’s sonnets could be seen both as a psychological biography and as a “translation” of his psychology, according to Abu Shadi. 29 Taken from Lee’s biography (1916: 109). 30 In this paragraph, Abu Shadi lists a number of British, French, and Italian sonneteers and poets, including Thomas Watson (1555–1592), Joachim Du Bellay (ca. 1522–1560), Edmund Spenser (who purportedly published two sonnet sequences entitled Visions of Bellay and Visions of Petrarch, formerly translated in The Theatre of Worldlings (1569), though this authorship has been disputed), Gabriel Harvey (ca. 1552–1631), Michael Drayton (1563–1631), Thomas Lodge (1556–1625), Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585), Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), William Drummond (1585–1649; known in his time as the “Scottish Petrarch”), Giovanni Battista Guarini (1538–1612), Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), and Torquato Tasso (1544–1595). Many of these figures appear to come from Lee’s biography (1916: 100–6). 31 See notes 20 and 24. 32 In much of Classical Arabic poetry, each line contains two hemistiches separated by a break. In this poem, Abu Shadi uses each “hemistich” as its own, separate line in order to mimic the sonnet form more accurately. 33 In the original Arabic, Abu Shadi’s sonnet has the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet: ABABCDCDEFEFGG. Each line contains ten syllables as well (though not in iambs) and appears to follow the extended meter (bahr al-madīd) form of Arab traditional poetry, cutting off the final syllable so that each line contains ten syllables, rather than the eleven syllables that would be typical for extended meter. The poem also features a volta in line 8, where the passion of despair crescendos, then quiets in line 9.

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References Abu Shadi, Ahmad Zaki. 1928. “Anāshid Shiksbīr.” al-Siyāsa al-Usbu‘aiya 100 (11 Feb.): 8–9. ˙ William Archer, Mary Morison, and Diana White. 1898. William Shakespeare: A Critical Brandes, Georg, Study. London: Heinemann. Cowan, J. Milton, ed. 1979. Hans Wehr: A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. 4th ed. Urbana, IL: Spoken Language Services, Inc. Lee, Sidney. Elizabethan Sonnets. 1904. 2 vols. London: Westminster, Archibald, Constable & Co. ———. A Life of William Shakespeare. 1916. New York: The Macmillan Company. Meres, Francis. 1598. Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury. London: Cuthbert Burbie.

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28 PAUL ROBESON, MARGARET WEBSTER, AND THEIR TRANSNATIONAL OTHELLO Robert Sawyer

The year is 1924. British-born Margaret Webster is in England appearing with Sybil Thorndike in The Trojan Women, performing the following year as one of Queen Gertrude’s ladies in the London revival of John Barrymore’s Hamlet. In the same year, Uta Thyra Hagen, born in Göttingen, Germany, moves with her family to the college-town of Madison, Wisconsin, in the United States, where she later appears in productions of the University of Wisconsin High School and, during the summers, performs in plays with the Wisconsin Players. José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón, who grew up in a small town on the coast of Puerto Rico, is studying at an exclusive boarding school in Switzerland before entering Princeton University where he matriculated in 1933, five years before he and Hagen wed. Paul Robeson, a Rutgers University and Columbia Law School graduate, grants an interview in July of that same year to the New York Herald Tribune, explaining why he left his practice of law to become a singer and actor. Robeson believed that as a black entertainer, he “had less to buck against than as a [black] lawyer” (6 July 1924). But even at this stage of his career, and even after his hugely successful performances in two plays written by Eugene O’Neill – All God’s Chillun Got Wings and The Emperor Jones – the thought of one day playing Shakespeare’s most famous Moor was already starting to consume his consciousness; however, he also realized that in 1924, he wasn’t quite ready for such a role: “When a negro does any good work as an actor everyone begins to talk of ‘Othello.’ Of course, I think about ‘Othello,’ but as a sort of culmination” (6 July 1924). It is this transnational cast of actors, Robeson, Hagen, Ferrer, and Webster (playing Emilia as well as directing) who would come together in 1943 to mount the most successful production on Broadway of any Shakespearean play in history. Their understanding of the global dimensions of this dramatic production affected every decision they made in dealing with their appropriation of Shakespeare’s text. Moreover, the diversity of the cast in the Shubert Theatre on Broadway, which extended to the audience when the play toured the country, created a type of “third space” quality articulated by Homi K. Bhabha (1994: 54). These “hybrid spaces” of production complicate the “the structure of meaning and reference” for cultural identity, showing it to be “an ambivalent process” and challenging and “displac[ing] the narrative of the Western nation” (Bhabha 1994: 54). Both local and global, then and now, such spaces “challenge [any] sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force” (Bhabha 1994: 54). Edward Soja’s reading is even more relevant to my argument, since for him,“Third spaces” occur 323

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when a “real and imagined space” collide, such as in the theatrical performance on which I’m focusing, and it often generates contradictory but energizing possibilities (1996: 24). As Carl Lavery explains, a theatre’s spatiality “always engages with whatever locality or environment it finds itself in” (2014: 193); in the case of Othello, this involves a play about racial identity and culture, being performed on and off Broadway.1 I would also argue, however, that the relationship between theatrical performance and cultural mores is more dialogic in such “third space” locales than is usually assumed. In short, the Webster-Robeson production created a “third space” before such third spaces were cool.

Background While I’m limited by the length of this chapter to focus on only Webster’s and Robeson’s backgrounds, their lives are essential for my discussion, particularly when comparing Robeson’s first attempt, albeit faulty, to play the role of Othello in 1930 to the blockbuster hit in 1943 directed by Webster. Although she had only moved to the U.S. five years earlier, in that short time, Webster had already directed a series of very successful Shakespeare productions on Broadway, including Richard II (1937); Hamlet (1938); and Henry IV, Part I (1939). The following year she directed Helen Hayes and Maurice Evans in a celebrated version of Twelfth Night, performed by the Theatre Guild, which would also sponsor her Othello. Margaret, known as Peggy to her friends and family, also felt the lure of Hollywood filmmaking, and a Variety reporter claimed she would become a “feminine Orson Welles,” after she signed a contract with the “Story Department” of Paramount Pictures in 1939 (quoted in Barranger 2004: 104). Although her tenure in Hollywood was short-lived due to what she termed the “factory” environment (Webster 1972: 53), Webster’s time there added to her growing experience as a director of later stage performances, particularly Othello, in part because she appropriated the visual and audio elements she learned in Hollywood to enhance a live dramatic performance by an actor such as Robeson. Robeson’s father, a former slave, had moved the family to the North on the Underground Railroad from North Carolina following the Civil War, and he became an ordained minister in 1909 and was appointed to be pastor of the St. Thomas A.M.E. Church in Somerville, New Jersey, close to Princeton. Two years later, Robeson enrolled as one of just two black students in the local high school; fortunately, however, two teachers took a special interest in him, and their twin influences remained important throughout Robeson’s life. The music instructor, Miss Vosseller, encouraged his singing skills, while Anna Miller, his English teacher, not only introduced him to Shakespeare, but also cast him in the lead role in the school’s production of Othello. Robeson entered Rutgers in the fall of 1917, and he excelled in both athletics and academics. Soon after he arrived on campus, he tried out for the varsity football team, but encountered harsh racism from the other players, a point to which we will return. Once he was accepted by his fellow players, however, his performance on the football field was also superb, and he was picked by Walter Camp as an All-American player in 1917, and he was selected again as an AllAmerican in 1918. By the time he graduated in 1919, he had won fifteen varsity sports letters at Rutgers. Inside the classroom he also excelled; Robeson was especially fond of Dr. Charles H. Whitman, his Professor of English, who invited the student to accompany him to New York City, where he saw his first Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice (Duberman 1988: 573, n.16). But his excellent grades were not limited to the humanities, so he was not only elected to membership in Cap and Skull, the honorary society for Rutgers seniors, but he was also selected as one of four undergraduates (out of a class of eighty) for the national Phi Beta Kappa Society. During his senior year, he was elected class valedictorian and was asked to deliver the Commencement Oration at graduation. 324

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After moving to Harlem in 1920, he entered Columbia Law School, and the same year he first acted on stage, almost as a lark, at an amateur production of Simon the Cyrenian, staged at the Harlem YMCA. A number of cast members of the esteemed Provincetown Players saw him perform, came backstage to congratulate him, and encouraged him to develop his acting voice and skills. The following year, and while still a law student, he performed in April in a production of the play Taboo; that summer he jumped at the chance to sail to England to perform in the same play (although it was renamed Voodoo for the London run). His co-star in the English version of the play, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, complimented him on his skills by telling him she thought he was “a real artist,” and according to Robeson’s letter to his wife Essie, Campbell also suggested he “would make a marvelous Othello.” Robeson was motivated enough to immediately buy a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, and he also vowed in the letter to “look over any Shakespearean acting I see” (quoted in Robeson Jr. 2001: 65). Although he returned to his law studies that fall, and graduated from Columbia in 1923, by all accounts his heart (and head) were not particularly interested in the legal field, and by his last semester he seemed satisfied to make mostly C grades. He even took a job after graduation in a well-known law firm, but when a secretary allegedly claimed she would “never take dictation from a nigger,” he left the firm after consulting with Louis Stotesbury, a Rutgers alumnus, who had hired him; Robeson never once regretted his decision to turn his back on the law profession to become a professional entertainer.2 The Provincetown group decided to open the 1924 season with O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, mentioned earlier, and Robeson was selected to play the lead character, a black law student who is married to a white woman. But two events intervened to delay the opening, not entirely unrelated. The printed version of the play had been promised to the American Mercury magazine (the same publication Orson Welles used when naming his theatre), so the issue of copyright and timing had to be resolved. More significantly, during the postponement the press got wind that the drama involved an interracial marriage, which it did, and salacious sexuality, which it did not. Still, letters of protest poured in, an anonymous bomb threat occurred, and the leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia went so far as to threaten the life of O’Neill’s son.3 To distract the media from the alleged scandal, or perhaps to capitalize on it, the Players decided to mount an older play, The Emperor Jones, for a one-week revival, also starring Robeson. In May of 1924, Robeson was doubling dramatic roles, just not ones in the same play.

Preparing Othello: “the artist must take sides” When The Emperor Jones reopened in New York in August, the play was greeted many nights by a standing-room audience. Later in the month, one of the seats in the auditorium was occupied by Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Russian director and actor. As Essie wrote excitedly in her journal, the Russian agreed to “give Paul regular acting lessons,” and they agreed to “go over Othello together,” with Stanislavsky “suggesting [ideas and methods] and Paul learning the part” (quoted in Robeson Jr. 2001: 81). According to Robeson’s son, working with the renowned Russian actor “was the first decisive step in Paul’s lifelong and ever-deepening relationship to Shakespeare’s tragic Moor” (Robeson Jr. 2001: 81). Other events were also preparing Robeson for the role of Othello. While he was in London for the production of The Emperor Jones, both Paul and Essie were invited to meet Amanda Ira Aldridge in her home. Not only did she give them the stage earrings her father had worn when he performed his celebrated version of Othello,4 but she also complimented Robeson on his voice; she was after all a teacher of diction, who had studied under Jenny Lind. On 17 October 1925, two days before the visit, she wrote a letter to Essie after hearing Paul sing on the 325

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radio: “How wondrously beautiful Mr. Paul’s voice sounded just now. And how absolutely distinct his softest tones in both singing and speaking were. . . . It is a most beautiful voice” (emphasis in the original, quoted in Robeson Jr. 2001: 95–96). Robeson’s performance in the London Othello, which opened in May of 1930 at the Savoy Theatre, has been routinely dismissed as a mere apprenticeship to the extremely successful Broadway version of Othello produced in 1943, but the earlier version did anticipate and articulate racial issues back in the United States. In a New York Times interview on 22 May 1930 entitled “Robeson May Alter Role Here,” which appeared the day after the first reviews of the play, the actor “admitted he could not play ‘Othello’ in New York,” the way he was acting it in London, particularly during the interracial scenes with the white Desdemona, played in 1930 by Peggy Ashcroft: If any one does object to our love making, the objection almost certainly will come from America. They certainly wouldn’t stand in America for the kissing and for the scene in which I use Miss Ashcroft roughly. I wouldn’t care to play those scenes in some parts of the United States. The audience would get very rough; in fact, might become very dangerous. 22 May 1930, quoted in Swindall 2010: 31 His assessment was proven prescient almost immediately by at least one Southern newspaper. Seemingly responding to the interview, a writer for the Times Enterprise, printed in Thomasville, Georgia, declared that Robeson “knows what would happen” if he kissed a white woman onstage in the U.S., “and so do the rest of us. This is one form of amusement that we will not stand for now or ever. This negro has potentialities for great harm to his race” (quoted in Duberman 1996, 27 May 1930). Fifteen years later, and even following his successful run on Broadway, Robeson could vividly remember his own hesitation in having a white woman play his wife onstage: “For the first two weeks in every scene I played with Desdemona that girl couldn’t get near to me. I was backin’ away from her all the time. I was like a plantation hand in the parlor, that clumsy” (Van Gelder quoted in Foner 1978: 152). Robeson’s growing global awareness, however, now took center stage. In 1933, for example, he acted in a benefit performance of All God’s Chillun for Jewish refugees, a concert he would later claim “marked the beginning of his political awareness” (Foner 1978: 30). The same year he also decided to study foreign languages, enrolling in the School of Oriental Studies at London University; at home he “supplemented his course work” of new languages “using gramophone recordings he had collected of the folk songs of many cultures” (Duberman 1996: 170). The following year was also significant for Robeson’s increasing activism. Not only did he extend his folk music repertoire to include Scottish and Mexican folk songs, but he also delved into Russian culture, becoming so enamored of it, that he decided to travel to the country to meet with Sergei Eisenstein in order to discuss a collaborative film project. Robeson was also becoming increasingly strident in his calls for freedom from tyranny around the globe. In the later 1930s, Robeson embraced the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and by June of 1937, he sang at a Basque refugee benefit at the Royal Albert Hall in London, declaring that the “true artist” must not “hold himself aloof,” and consequently, “[t]he artist must take sides” (emphasis mine). One had to “elect to fight for freedom or slavery,” he continued, and he concluded that he had “made [his] choice,” feeling he “had no alternative” (Foner 1978: 119). The following year, he put his words into action when he traveled to Madrid, and then on to Barcelona, to sing to wounded soldiers of the International Brigade. He would

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claim later in his biography that his visit to Spain in 1938 was a “major turning point in [his] life” (Foner 1978: 58).

The Webster-Robeson collaboration Earlier that summer, on 23 June, Robeson cabled his wife about upcoming opportunities, including other singing engagements, as well as acting in film and onstage. He ended the note with the following in capital letters: “MARGARET WEBSTER WANTS [ME] TO DO OTHELLO.” Essie replied almost immediately on June 25: Of all the ideas, I think the most interesting one is the proposal of Othello with Margaret Webster and Maurice Evans. . . . Webster is intelligent, very widely experienced, [and] has the formal background and classical knowledge. . . . She is not mannered, not ultra, not arty-crafty, nor super-psychological or super-technical; so the production might also come out honest, straightforward, modern and powerful. quoted in Robeson Jr. 2001: 327 The semi-sarcasm in the letter refers, of course, to the 1930 production at the Savoy, particularly the sneers about “arty-crafty” and “super-psychological” aimed at the co-directing team of Nellie Van Volkenburg and Maurice Browne. Whether Robeson’s wife was right about the failures of the 1930 version, she was certainly correct about Webster’s capabilities as a director, for the actress-director’s decision to enhance the drama by using multi-racial casting in 1942 would not only elucidate the themes of her history-making production, but also influence Robeson’s portrayal of Shakespeare’s Moorish General. To emphasize that point, he and Webster together decided it should be performed as a crosscultural encounter, so they cast José Ferrer, the Puerto Rican-born actor, as Iago, eliminating any simple black/white racial binary found in the 1930 production. In fact, the play is cited as the first time in Broadway history that the two leading male roles in a Shakespearean production were played by minority actors. The result proved to be a blockbuster hit, reviewers showering it with adjectives such as “magnificent” and “absorbing” (Roscoe 1943: 16) as well as a “landmark event for the American stage” (Coleman 1943: 15). Robeson’s performance itself was described as one of “epic grandeur and transcendent nobility” (Sillen 1943: 24). As she wrote in her 1942 book on directing Shakespeare entitled Shakespeare Without Tears, “when Paul Robeson stepped onto the stage for the very first time” in her version of the play, “he brought an incalculable sense of reality” to the drama: “We believed that he could command the armies of Venice,” but we also knew that because he was “a black man,” he “would always be alien to its society” (Webster 1955: 236). Webster concluded her discussion of the tragedy in these words: “It seems to me that in OTHELLO Shakespeare’s genius is at its height; his understanding is nowhere more penetrating nor his compassion more profound” (1955: 237). There is no doubt, as I have argued elsewhere, that Robeson’s newfound emphasis on global justice surely made the play timelier and more successful in 1942.5 Using the prompt script of Webster’s Othello, however, as well as her voluminous publications centering on Shakespearean production, Webster’s experience, empathy, and enthusiasm as a director were equally significant, specifically in her appropriation of cinematic devices. While the standard script of Othello is usually divided into five acts and fifteen scenes, Webster chose to divide her version into just two acts: Act 1 had two scenes, the first labeled “A Street in Venice” and the second “The Council Chamber”; Act 2 also had just two scenes,

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the first “The Castle in Cyprus” and the second “A bedroom in the Castle (Desdemona’s dressing room).”6 Such limited scene changes allowed for a fast pacing that she also borrowed from her work in Hollywood, when every screen minute had to count since cost was always the bottom line, so much so that capital often triumphed over talent. We know that Webster consulted both the Folio and Quarto versions of the play, and she included Othello, along with Henry IV, Part II, and Troilus and Cressida as three plays in which the “Folio prints” seemed to her to be an “original manuscript,” one she felt “agree[d] substantially with the Quarto version” (Webster 1955: 114). As she later explained in a lecture at Vassar: “Textually, I cannot say I did a very perfect job on Othello,” and she also confessed that her cuts would be “difficult to justify by any process of logic.” She also admitted that many of her choices were decided in consultation with the actors, particularly Robeson and Ferrer (“Modern Theatre” 1944b: 21). To shorten the play, she also cut lines “a bit here and a bit there,” as we will see, but “nothing of consecutive length,” and some of these cuts were made because they “seemed to help the actor,” referring to Robeson (“Modern Theatre” 1944b: 21). Even before Act 1 began, Webster made changes to enhance the plays dramatic effect by employing visual and musical ideas from her days working for Paramount studios. The stage curtain itself was emblazoned with a majestic image of the Venetian Lion of St. Mark, using inwrought material, woven of gold, green, and red.7 Just before the curtain opened, Verdi’s “Tuba Mirum” was broadcast over the audience creating, according to some observers, a type of “spell” such as many cinema soundtracks attempt to do (Johnson 1945: 14). Webster also rearranged the very first lines spoken. In fact, the first two characters to enter could be heard before they even entered onstage; according to her stage direction, they were located Off right, where Iago and Roderigo are heard talking as they exchange the following extrapolated lines. First Iago loudly complains “I say there is no remedy” (1.1.34) to which Roderigo replies, “But in the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor” (1.1.125).8 The result, of course, is that the audience immediately overhears, and so becomes privy to, the elements of racial and sexual tension, like a peep through a keyhole in a cinematic iris shot, before any actor even enters the scene. Her “Promptbook” then reverts back to the traditional text, and the two enter from stage right, as Ferrer portraying Iago spoke his next lines: “ ’Sblood, but you’ll not hear me! If ever I/ Did dream of such a matter abhor me” (1.1.4–5). He performed the role in an almost businesslike manner, according to at least one critic, “throwing away” these first lines “as if there were a job to be done” (Phelan 1943: 72). Webster herself would note later that Iago’s first lines should be “light, acute, beautifully phrased” with “every cynical, easy turn of it unerringly directed” (“Modern Theatre” 1944b: 23). From all accounts, Ferrer followed these directions flawlessly. A number of what she felt to be extraneous lines were cut in speeches, and this long opening dialogue was no exception; she also used a different tack hoping for clarity and efficacy in some speeches, by adding single words spoken by a character being addressed. For instance, in Iago’s lengthy lines which begin with “Despise me if I do not,” she splits his speech in half. Immediately after Iago identifies and proclaims the name of the ensign, “One Michael Cassio, a Florentine,” Webster chose to have Roderigo abruptly interrupt him here with one word, asking “Cassio?” (1.1.18). While this alteration may not be necessary, it gives the audience a moment to digest the first half of Iago’s speech before he continues to the second half, not unlike a cinematic rendering of a scene where speeches must be used, not for their fantastic poetry but for their furthering of the plot. The added echoing of the name by Roderigo in an interrogative manner not only reminds us that this is all new information to Roderigo, but also suggests “Cassio” is a name we will hear again. In casting Iago for the Robeson production, Webster recalled that, even though many “Othellos, among them Salvini,” played the title role “with magnificent tempests of rage and fury,” 328

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in that case, a director would need an “Iago who was a heavier man, slower altogether . . . who did not move very much or violently, who would convince people he was honest Iago, a rather heavy, slow, straight-forward soldier” (“Modern Theatre” 1944b: 22). But with Robeson playing Othello, “an enormous man with a wonderful voice, moving very slowly,” she thought it best to cast an Iago “as a swift, a mercurial, in a sense a volatile creature,” who could “provide the speed and the lightness to complement Robeson’s slowly moving tragic weight” (“Modern Theatre” 1944b: 22–23). This literal “balancing” act was always a part of her plan when casting and when directing Shakespeare plays in particular, for the actors are the “medium” she felt, through which the Shakespearean text is then “translate[d] to his audience” (“Modern Theatre”1944b: 23). I would also add that she envisioned each scene as a movie director might fill a screen shot, including color, balance, and composition. In addition, Webster’s stage directions after this exchange state the following: “Roderigo turns to Iago for instruction. Iago whispers to him then turns him back to face Brabantio” (Webster, “Promptbook”: 211). Once more this simple stage business, both physical and verbal (albeit a mere whisper), again increases Iago’s agency as the scoundrel of the play. Perhaps drawing on her experiences in Hollywood with melodramatic evildoers, Ferrer/Iago would often directly address the audience creating “a dream of evil,” according to some critics (McCarthy 1956: 74), continually revealing his “flawed mind,” in Webster’s words (1955: 98). At least two critics at the time caught the connection to films: the review in the Chicago Sun, for instance, called the play a psychological murder story, and concluded that it was “a melodrama as modern as anything by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer” (H.T.M. 1945: 14). Variety magazine agreed, the nom de plume “Khan” claiming that the elaborate editing helped to increase the suspense and to accelerate the action (1943: 44). Of course, one central question Webster had to grapple with like many directors before and after her was whether or not Shakespeare intended for an authentically black actor to perform the role. Webster was convinced he did, and she made this abundantly clear in her Vassar lecture: I do not propose . . . to go into the question of whether Shakespeare’s Othello was a Moor or Caucasian, of Aryan physique, from the northern shores of Africa, or whether he was one of the sons of Ham from Ethiopia, or what exact definition of a Moor Shakespeare had in mind. However, she concluded, she was “certain he meant a black man from Africa, and not a coffeecolored man from Palm Beach” (“Modern Theatre” 1944b: 22). In any case, she emphasized that “[w]hether Othello came from the shores of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean, or the Red Sea,” what was essential was that he was on alien shores, and so “the fundamental sense of racial difference must never be lost” (1955: 236). When he first appeared onstage, Robeson’s Othello was dressed in a soldier’s uniform that made him appear, according to some observers, part gladiator and part African chieftain. Lions’ heads, not unlike the one stitched on the main curtain, were visible on his breast plate, while over his torso, he wore a rust metallic robe, edged with fur. As Lewis Nichols pointed out, it was obvious that this “man could command an army,” as he immediately projected a muscularly dominating presence (1943: 18). The critics almost unanimously praised this particular scene in the play, especially when Robeson quietly spoke the line, “ ‘Tis better as it is” (1.2.6). Webster would later claim that in this moment Robeson “endowed the play with a stature and perspective which I have not seen before or since” (1972: 107). Robeson recalled his opening lines in this manner: “The way I play it, I’m calm, I’m quiet, through the early part. I don’t make an unnecessary move” (Van Gelder 1944: 153). Fortunately, Robeson added, “José Ferrer is “all 329

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over the stage” so it makes for an “effective contrast” (Van Gelder 1944: 153). Webster herself believed that “[s]tructurally, the main problems [in the tragedy] center on the two principle characters, Othello and Iago,” but she also added “the personality of Paul Robeson was, of course, the primary factor in this production” (1972: 21). To get Robeson to summon anger, she told him to think back to a time when he was filled with fury. So Robeson recalled a time when he was playing football at Rutgers, which we briefly noted at the outset. While he later stated in an interview that he “played ninety-nine games out of a hundred with a smile on [his] face,” there was one incident “when [he] went out of his head with rage” (Van Gelder 1944: 153). When he first tried out for the team (when he was only seventeen), the other players did not want a black team member, so on the first day of practice, one player “slugged [him] in the face and smashed [his] nose,” while another player kneed him while he was flat on the field, and it “dislocated [his] right shoulder” (1944: 154). After ten days in bed, he forced himself to return to the playing field during a scrimmage, and this time, as he was lying on the ground following a tackle he made, a different player came over and used his cleats to stomp on Robeson’s hand, trying to break the bones in it. As Robeson recounted, although “the bones held . . . every fingernail on the hand was torn off, and that’s when [he] knew rage!” (1944: 154). On the next play, Robeson “wanted to kill” someone. The football was handed off to a running back named Kelly, and Robeson grabbed him, put him up over his head, and planned “to smash him so hard to the ground that [he’d] break him in two” (1944: 154). But the coach yelled for him to stop and then shouted to Robeson, “Robey, you’re on the varsity!” which defused the situation (1944: 154). But it was that moment of rage which he drew on most nights when he played the scenes where Othello is clearly enraged, and on some occasions, he even “scared the actors” with whom he shared the stage (1944a: 154). Once the play moved out of New York, it also conquered horizontal space as it continued to draw capacity crowds across the country, in part because of its reflection of the racism still alive in the United States in the 1940s. Following the show’s tour, Robeson made the point of the play’s cultural relevancy when giving a speech to Phi Beta Kappa, the honorary society to which Robeson belonged: “It was deeply fascinating to watch how strikingly contemporary American audiences from coast to coast found Shakespeare’s Othello – painfully immediate in its unfolding of evil, innocence, passion, dignity and nobility, and contemporary in its clash of cultures” (Robeson 1945: 1). Webster herself summarized the play for her own era: “The General Othello marries the daughter of a Southern [U.S.] senator, and there is, I think, your plot” (“Modern Theatre” 1944b: 22). She continues, “the upshot of the union in Shakespeare’s story is disastrous enough to justify the most fanatical opponent of marriage between different races” (1944b: 22). As Robeson himself explained, he hoped the play would achieve “a double victory,” one against tyranny abroad, which tried to silence any dissenting or diverse voices, and one challenging domestic fascism at home, particularly in the form of racial discrimination (Swindall 2010: 70). Robeson went so far as to demand in his contract that the play not be performed at any segregated theatres, despite the protests of the accountants. But it made money and history anyway. Due to Webster’s and Robeson’s knowledge of contractual obligations, they insisted on two things in writing: that ticket prices would be kept low and that the play would never be performed in a segregated theatre. Since the cost for tickets was set at a more affordable price, the ticket buyers proved to be quite diverse. The Detroit audience, for example, was typical of such mixed spectators. As Robeson noted, “there were very few rich folks in the audience”; instead the blue collar workers for the local automotive plants “had most of the seats,” specifically “Ford workers, negro and white” who sat side-by-side in the audience (Robeson 1945: 286). 330

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Conclusion While Robeson’s performance of Othello in 1930 did not fare well, the Webster and Robeson collaboration exceeded all expectations, not only because of Robeson’s added scholarship, but also because of Webster’s expertise and experience, which, as Milly S. Barranger notes, achieved for Webster “a professional success that no woman stage director had achieved before or has achieved since” (2004: 3). One final element which served as a catalyst for this experiment, and which is almost always overlooked, also enhanced this innovative appropriation of Shakespeare; for Webster, a semi-closeted lesbian who had long term affairs with at least two prominent women, must have felt some kinship with both Robeson and Othello and her own sense of alienation. It may be that the developing sexual relationship between Hagen and Robeson also added fire to Ferrer’s stage jealousy.9 While such a hybrid, third space production allowed a certain critical intervention in the psyche of the 1940s and 1950s in the U.S., it did not come without a cost to both Webster and Robeson. At the start of the Cold War (along with the ancillary “red scare”), the U.S. government ramped up its attempt to silence any dissenting voices, particularly those of outspoken opponents of racial segregation and the entrenched institutions which protected the status quo. Since global justice is not always just, perhaps it should come as no shock that both actor and director were affected by their actions: Robeson was confined to the U.S. after his passport was revoked in 1950, and Webster came under FBI surveillance.10 Since no one would record Robeson and no public venues would permit him to perform due to a McCarthy-ist boycott, his yearly income dwindled from a high of $100,000 in 1947 to just $6,000 in 1952 (Foner 1978: 40). Webster was also considered to be a commie “suspect” for the rest of her career in the U.S., so she finally returned to England for her final days and was memorialized on 7 December 1972 at St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, the so-called “Actor’s Church,” and the same one where she had been baptized in 1905 at the age of two.

Notes 1 The term “third space” has now broadened to describe everything from architecture to cultural hotspots. According to the Palestinian architect Sennen Abdel Kader, a third space is “a hybrid space in which the interdependence of the occupier and the occupied becomes a source of strength for both sides” (quoted in Zandberg 2007: n.p.). And as I’m writing this in April of 2018, the global coffee conglomerate Starbucks has been defined as a “third space,” located betwixt and between the workplace and the home (Rose 2018: n.p.). 2 When Robeson complained to Stotesbury, the older lawyer sympathized with him, but told him directly that his “prospects for a career in law were limited” because “the firm’s white clients were unlikely ever to agree to let him try a case before a judge, for fear his race would prove a detriment.” He even said he would even “consider opening a Harlem branch of the office and put Robeson in charge.” In part because the law profession had “never been that inviting” in the first place, Robeson resigned instead (Duberman “Higher Education” 1996: 111). 3 O’Neill returned the letter to the KKK leader after scribbling “Fuck You” on it. 4 Although Robeson never wore the earrings, “Aldridge remained his model as an actor throughout his career,” according to Paul’s son (Robeson Jr. 2001: 346, n.23). Amanda Christina Elizabeth Aldridge (1866–1956), Ira’s daughter with Amanda Von Brandt, was a composer and an opera singer. When a throat condition cut her stage career short, she turned from performance to teaching. Some of her students, besides Robeson, included two of his colleagues, Roland Hayes and Lawrence Browne, as well as the famous opera singer, Marian Anderson. 5 For more on Robeson’s less successful 1930 London portrayal of Othello and his subsequent turn to global awareness, see Sawyer (2017). 6 All citations to the “Promptbook” come from Webster’s original (1943), now in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York, which also houses a

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Robert Sawyer typescript copy of the play. I have chosen to use the first, since it also includes her stage directions. It is worth keeping in mind, however, that the play was staged on numerous occasions and various locations totaling over six hundred performances, including the initial rehearsals and productions at Harvard and Princeton before debuting on Broadway in 1943. See also Carroll (1977). 7 The Lion of St. Mark pictures the biblical evangelist as a winged lion holding a Bible. It was a central symbol on the Coat of Arms of the Republic of Venice and is still found on the heraldry of the City of Venice. Today, the design, representing both wisdom and strength, appears on the military navel flags of the Italian Republic. 8 All line citations are to Othello, ed. Michael Neill (Shakespeare 2006). 9 For more on Webster’s life and loves, see Barranger (2004), a monograph in the series called “Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer: Theatre/Drama/Performance.” Duberman discusses the Robeson/ Hagen affair (1996: 286–87). 10 In 1955, Robeson lost his final appeal for a new passport. Although his passport was restored in 1958, his reputation never recovered.

References Barranger, Milly S. 2004. Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Carroll, Janet. 1977. “A ‘Promptbook’ Study of Margaret Webster’s Production of Othello.” PhD Dissertation. LSU. Coleman, Robert. 1943. The Daily Mirror. 20 Oct. 15. Duberman, Martin. 1988. Paul Robeson: A Biography. New York: Knopf. ———. 1996. “The Higher Education of Paul Robeson.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 13: 107–11. Foner, Phillip S., ed. 1978. Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918–1974. New York: Citadel Press/Kensington Publishing Corp. H.T.M. 1945. “ ‘Othello’ Has Dash and Paul Robeson.” The Chicago Sun-Times. 14 Apr. 12. Johnson, Audrey St. D. 1945. “Robeson’s Othello Makes Stage History in Victoria.” The Victoria Times. 13 Jan. 14. “Kahn.” 1943. “Othello.” Variety. 27 Oct. 44. Lavery, Carl. 2014. “Globalization, the Glocal, Third Space Theatre.” In Performance Studies: Key Words, Concepts, and Theories. Ed. Bryan Reynolds. New York: Palgrave. 193–200. McCarthy, Mary. 1956. Sights and Spectacles: 1937–1956. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy. Nichols, Lewis. 1943. “ ‘Othello’ with Robeson in Title Role, Revived by Theatre Guild Before an Enthusiastic Audience at the Shubert.” The New York Times. 20 Oct. 18. Phelan, Kappo. 1943. “Othello: Margaret Webster Production.” Commonweal, 5 Nov. 72. Robeson, Jr. Paul. 2001. The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist’s Journey (1898–1939). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Robeson, Paul. 1945. “Some reflections on Othello and the Nature of Our Time.” The American Scholar 391–92. ———. 1951. “Here’s My Story.” Freedom 1. Rpt in Foner, ed. 285–87. Roscoe, Burton. 1943. “Guild’s Othello a Triumph, Unbelievably Magnificent.” The World Telegram, 20 Oct. 16. Rose, Joel. 2018. “Not Everyone Feels Welcome Camping Out In ‘Third Spaces’ Like Starbucks.” All Things Considered. NPR. 18 Apr. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018, www.npr.org/2018/04/18/603693170/ arrests-at-philadelphia-starbucks-store-raise-uncomfortable-questions-for-compan. Sawyer, Robert. 2017. “Performing Protest in Cross-Cultural Spaces: Paul Robeson and Othello.” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 13.29: 77–90. Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Shakespeare, William. 2006. Othello, the Moor of Venice. Ed. Michael Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sillen, Samuel. 1943. “Paul Robeson’s Othello.” The New Masses. 2 Nov. 24–25. Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. Swindall, Lindsey R. 2010. The Politics of Paul Robeson’s “Othello.” Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

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Robeson, Webster, and their Othello Van Gelder, Robert. 1944. “Robeson Remembers – Interview with the Star of ‘Othello’ Partly About His Past.” The New York Times. 14 Jan. Rpt. in Foner, ed. 152–54. Webster, Margaret. 1943. “Othello Promptbook.” 19 Oct. The Billy Rose Theatre Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. ———.1944a. “Paul Robeson and Othello.” Our Time 3: 5–6. ———.1944b. Shakespeare and the Modern Theatre. Poughkeepsie, NY: Vassar College. ———. 1955. Shakespeare Without Tears. 1955. Rev. ed. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Co. ———. 1972. Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Zandberg, Esther. 2007. “Architecture’s Third Space.” Haaretz. 29 Nov. Accessed 28 Jan. 2019, www. haaretz.com/1.4961449.

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PART V

Transmedia Shakespeares

29 ECOLOGIES OF THE SHAKESPEAREAN ARTISTS’ BOOK Sujata Iyengar

This chapter discusses an under-investigated form of Shakespearean appropriation: artists’ books, which can include unique books bound and printed by artists; limited-run livres d’artiste or texts illustrated with prints from an individual artist; fine letter-press print editions; and altered, sculpted, kinetic, pop-up, or other books that exist not merely as containers for art (text or image) but as artworks in their own right. By an artists’ book, I mean a book made by an artist that pays attention to books as material objects with specific affordances or physical characteristics that interact with human readers, their bodies, and senses, as well as with the text that makes up what we usually call the content of the book. Such artworks “interrogate,” in Johanna Drucker’s phrase (1995), bookness, the quiddity or essence of books as phenomenal objects that engage human beings, a quality that has received attention from scholars and artists such as Jerome Rotherberg and Steven Clay (2000); Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe (2004); Garrett Stewart (2011); Robert Darnton (2009); Leah Price (with Seth Lerer: 2006); Maryanne Wolf (2008, 2018); Richard Lanham (2006); Jeffrey Todd Knight (2009); and others working within book history, textual studies, and literacy, including theorists of the digital medium such as Janet Murray (2011) or Naomi Baron (2015).1 Artists’ books engage with the capabilities of the form and the space that such objects occupy in the world, objects that the electronic publishing revolution has forced even those of us who identify as book readers rather than as book historians, typographers, publishers, or book artists to ponder anew. Book elements that are open to critique, intervention, and innovation include typography, binding, layout, paper, and ink. Earlier generations of readers took such features for granted (or read through them, rather than at them, in Lanham’s helpful formulation). The emergence of electronic media and digital publishing have, however, thrown such material affordances into sharp relief. Artists’ books of Shakespeare are, like other formal and editorial impositions on the play-text, adaptations or rather appropriations, open to be understood as critical and aesthetic interventions in what we call “Shakespeare.” Appropriations collaborate with Shakespeare to make new content, context, and forms (Desmet and Sawyer 1999; Henderson 2006) and, moreover, develop Shakespeare through a continuous process of negotiation among intertexts, a process that Laurie Osborne has characterized as the “creative interplay of intermedial differences” (2011). Some book artists develop these exquisite, diverse artifacts out of Shakespeare’s works in order not

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only to comment upon the form and structure of books and media but also to interpret and reconsider the Shakespearean text through specific qualities of bookness (Iyengar 2016). The centrality of Prospero’s magic book to Shakespeare’s play has mean that book artists naturally gravitate towards The Tempest; Peter Greenaway’s lushly beautiful film Prospero’s Books (1991), which interpolates a visually stunning extended sequence animating imaginary books from Prospero’s library, may have provided additional inspiration. This chapter considers some distinctive Shakespearean artists’ books of the proto-colonial text The Tempest as a commentary on what has recently been dubbed the Anthropocene.2 Climate scientists first used the term “Anthropocene” in the mid- to late twentieth century to propose a new epoch of geological time, one affected in hitherto unprecedented ways by human activities. Mainstream scientific literature did not, however, accept either the premise or the term until a paper in Science disseminated in January 2016 that argued that from the mid-twentieth century onward “humans have changed the Earth system sufficiently to produce a stratigraphic signature in sediments and ice that is distinct from that of the Holocene epoch” (Waters et al. 2016). Scientists can determine the age of sediment from changes in the structure of ice, including the presence or absence of bubbles, the presence of “heavy” water (that is, deuterium molecules), and they can detect human change in organic sediment and other kinds of sediment from what have begun to be called technofossils – the decay of plastics, aluminum, black carbon (a product of burning), trace rare earths, and nuclear fallout, including a detectable “bomb spike” of Carbon 14 “starting in 1954 and peaking in 1964” (Waters et al. 2016). Sue Doggett’s The Tempest: A Sketchbook (1995), Mark McMurray’s The Tempest (2001), and Jan Kellett’s miniature scroll Sea-Change (2001) and “triple dos-à-dos” codex Storming Shakespeare (2012b) all use the materials of the printed codex, particularly the texture, hue, weight, and translucency of paper, to comment, I will suggest, upon the defenselessness of unaccommodated human beings against the elements and, more importantly, the vulnerability of the natural world to human depredation. The heft or lightness, secrecy or openness of bindings and the feel, color, or saturation of marking media (ink, crayon, pencil) additionally help these book artists to interpret the material history of colonial and settler cultures and their contribution to sustainable or non-sustainable environmental practices by using and reusing the everyday products of those cultures. Such materials include wood taken from Britain’s deforested Arden to build ships whose timbers become book boards; fibers harvested in so-called “banana republics”; the goatskin book-covers dubbed “Morocco” leather; the ink squeezed from English oak galls and bound with gum “Arabic”; and the Crayola hues named for the beautiful and rare pigments so toxic to humans in their natural state (Cobalt Blue or Vermilion as minerals poison humans who consume them; in their waxen, fossil-fuel-derived form, they are non-toxic to humans, yet paradoxically the beautiful petroleum product of a process that poisons the earth).

Sue Doggett’s The Tempest: A Sketchbook Book artist Sue Doggett’s “sketchbook” of The Tempest belongs to the category of artists’ books known as “one-of-a-kind” or “unique” hand-made books. In Doggett’s Sketchbook, paper, text, illustrations, endpapers, and binding are all hand-made by the artist and communicate the artist’s experience and understanding of the play. As we shall see, these books of The Tempest additionally use the affordances of the book both to attribute traits to particular characters and to historicize the responses of earlier Shakespeareans. The artist’s own lengthy colophon tells us that Doggett imagined the shipwreck that opens Shakespeare’s play as fundamental to her understanding of the characters. She used bookbinders’ mull (thread) to construct the rigging of the “found brass and metal pins” that compose the 338

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wrecked ship, as if the book itself reconstructs or raises the lost ship from the depths of the ocean. At the same time, these images reconstruct the flotsam and jetsam found in the wake of a wreck as icons for the persistence of human debris in a natural world during an era we have begun to call the Anthropocene. The cover and clamshell box, reproduced on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Collation blog, in an entry by Erin Blake (2011) include (in addition to the found brass, metal pins, and linen thread) greyboard, acrylic texture paste, leather, and ink. The book additionally comments specifically on bookness and on the history of Shakespearean scholarship, with cut-up, pasted-in, scrapbooked sections of particularly dogmatic or pedantic selections from nineteenth-century editions, dictionaries, and works of criticism juxtaposed wittily with Doggett’s own dense and ephemeral artistry. Doggett’s own addenda include calligraphic annotations and pastings from old bibliographic records that remind us of old librarycard catalogues on the one hand but also of Ben Jonson’s annotations for Queen Anna on the other (on Jonson’s comments for the queen, see Orgel 1998). The idiosyncratic glossing estranges a professional Shakespeare from the scholarly edition as artifact. As if to emphasize and wittily to satirize the scholarly tradition, some of these pasted-in scraps are crossed out with red crayon (the red recalling the marking up of schoolwork, but the crayon recalling the schoolchild’s drawing itself ) and whited-over (with crayon or with acrylic paint). The handwritten notes throughout the Sketchbook are mostly clear and legible, unlike the words of the play, which are also hand-produced, handwritten, and type-written, but which are often “demediated,” to use Garrett Stewart’s phrase from Bookwork, rendered unrecognizable as communicative media. The book interleaves sheets of tracing paper between pages of text, so that the artwork and words and ink smears visible on one page are also visible – in increasingly demediated stages – on others. Ariel’s song “Full fathom five” is type-written on a translucent sheet so that the reader can see the design behind it. The mermaid, a visual motif throughout the book, holds a flower, anticipating Prospero’s command to Ariel to make himself “like a nymph o’ th’ sea . . . subject/To no sight but thine and mine, invisible/To every eyeball else” (FTLN 0430–31).3 The tracing-paper text allows Ariel to shimmer translucently through the verso (as Ben Whishaw’s airy sprite does in Julie Taymor’s 2010 film) and also partially to conceal the designs, as if we are seeing them through the clouds of the tempest. The circular device at the top center of the page, like a sun or a compass, also appears throughout the volume, as if turning the meandering inky lines into the coastline on a map. In this way the vessel on treated photocopy, glimpsed at the bottom of the page, through the tracing paper, sails through the tempesttossed seas of the book’s pages. The blurred ship and sun/compass contrast the crisp, dark ink of Ariel’s song and the cold-hearted mermaid combing her hair, indifferent to Ferdinand’s loss. The song transcends human suffering just as Ariel (at least, at this point in the play) overlooks human desires and sorrows and just as the translucent paper overlooks the ship’s wreckage to foreground the “rich and strange” artifacts of the island. Not only does Doggett’s Sketchbook blur the boundary between ink and paper (see the smudge or ink-wash on the verso opposite the dramatis personae, or what Blake calls the “sinuous” inked lines that writhe throughout the volume), scholarly and artistic, it also breaks down the supposed binary between reading and performance. The dramatis personae, calligraphed on the recto in ink and illuminated under erasure with red crayon, includes handwritten annotations about the play’s earliest performances, and a demediated photocopy of a scene presenting “an academic audience wait[ing] for a performance to begin.” The book is illuminated with treated photocopies, many of which come from early modern woodcuts, especially from Topsell’s Historie of Foure-Footed Beasts (1608) and his History of Serpents (1611). Photocopy, color, translucency, paper weight, and handwritten notes combine to comment upon the type-written text. The text of “A solemn air,” type-written on tracing 339

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paper, overlays a treated photocopy of a stern masculine face that, like Prospero’s hooded eyes on the book’s cover, seems to pronounce judgment upon the men of sin just as the text does. While this volume is by no means handy, it is richly tactile, its handmade paper rough, smooth, or deliberately textured. Reinforcing the tension between judgment and mercy, the eyes of the stony-faced figure appear underneath the phrase from the stage directions, “which Prospero observing” (emphasis mine), and the printed word “absolved,” seen through the tracing paper from its pasted-in scrap on the next page, appears next to the lines reading “the/approaching tide will shortly/fill the reasonable shore,” and “crime” appears between “reasonable shore” and “foul and muddy.” Doggett is here using the hand-eye co-ordination that readers instinctively deploy when using codices to reinforce her theme – forgiveness and absolution – in three dimensions: vertically down the page, horizontally from left to right, and under- and over-leaf. Doggett, like many book artists who respond to The Tempest, pays particular attention to Caliban and to the play’s female characters. Two of Caliban’s speeches receive treatment, “as wicked dew” (discussed above) and “Be not afeard.” The only printed text per se in the volume comprises cut-and-pasted scraps from scholarly editions of the play, dictionaries, and encyclopedias, which often comment ironically on changing historical understandings of race, nobility, or “savagery” or upon former understandings of “nature,” human and animal, especially with regard to Caliban. Such scholarly notes once more exemplify “demediated text,” drawing attention to their own status as text even as the text itself is difficult or impossible to read and instead foregrounds the book as object. These pasted scholarly scraps are juxtaposed to artwork that likewise critiques and comments on both the text and the printed commentary. A verso definition of “noble” opposes a recto that features what looks like on first sight a computergenerated wordle or word-cloud, but this cloud is not computer- or even print-generated but hand-generated. It is Caliban’s speech that begins “As wicked dew . . . blister you all o’er!” (FTLN 0456–9) summarized in clear, thin handwriting above and below an angry rectangle of red and black wax crayon through which, written in different sizes and thicknesses, Caliban’s bitter words emerge. The colors anticipate his curse, “the red plague rid you for learning me your language!” (FTLN 0509). “Raven’s feather” and “unwholesome fen” (FTLN 0457) and “blister ye both” [sic; FTLN 0459 reads “blister you all o’er]; shimmer through, partly demediated but still legible, just as Caliban’s anger is partly invisible to Prospero and Miranda, by choice and by ignorance, but only partly so. In its rage and rawness, it is ultimately unignorable. The pasted-in definition opposite includes the phrase “savage, idealized primitive man in Romantic literature.” Doggett foregrounds Caliban’s use of the natural world to shape his language, both when he blesses and when he curses: the clouds are ready to drop riches upon him, and the dew is ready to excoriate his enemies.

Mark McMurray’s The Tempest, Caliban Press If Doggett’s book emphasizes the persistent human traces even within the ocean, Mark McMurray’s Caliban Press edition identifies as a kind of Anthropocene the invasion of the so-called New World by the conquistadores. Modeled, in the artist’s words, on “a variety of/sources including Shakespeare’s First Folio; Bread & Puppet Theater of Glover, Vermont; John Coltrane’s Olé; the film Black Orpheus; and of course Prospero’s library” (Colophon), McMurray’s Tempest uses the handmade paper itself – the very “fabric of this vision” – to comment upon the violent encounter between Old and New World. Papers used in this volume include abaca (banana fiber paper originally from the Philippines); English “Charles I” paper by the famous papermill of Barcham-Green; and, most interestingly to me, Mexican amate (Nahuatl amatl), 340

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hand-made from the bark of the ficus and mulberry trees. The abaca paper appears as endpapers between sections of the volume, its plant fibers clearly visible and touchable in a reminder of the “closed-loop” production process surrounding early modern books, the so-called rag-paper cycle in which flax plants were harvested to make linen, linen became rags, rags became paper, paper was recycled and composted, and compost grew flax plants in turn (Calhoun 2011). Amate paper was used pre-Cortez to propitiate the Aztec deities and paid “from the people as a tribute tax to their Aztec overlords”; the finest amate was saved for priests to write upon in the Aztec sacred books called ‘tonamatl,’ as well as for religious ceremonies and celebrations in the form of decorations, awnings, flowers, bags, banners, fans, flags and . . . crowns, stoles, hats, imitation hair, breech clouts, vestments, dresses, and bracelets. Bell 1983: 98 Widely employed in rituals, as clothing, in weaponry, and in many aspects of sacred or consecrated Aztec life (Von Hagen 1943: 77–89; Bell 1983: 98–99), the use of amate made everyday living holy and writing into continuous acts of worship. McMurray’s book introduces Caliban through text and through amate paper simultaneously, in a recollection of Sycorax’s deep magic (see Figure 29.1). Brown amate paper spreads across the bottom of the creamy double-spread to create a kind of bog-monster rearing up from the “hard rock” underground to startle his interlocutors. Caliban’s first lines blast Prospero with “As

Figure 29.1 Mark McMurray,“Enter Caliban,” from The Tempest, 2001, mixed media (amate paper, feather) Source: Photographer: Sujata Iyengar. Courtesy of Mark McMurray. Image taken by the author at the Folger Shakespeare Library and reproduced with permission of the artist.

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wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed/With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen” (FTLN 0456–7). The raven evokes the trickster for some Native tribes and acts as the bringer of light for others, both functions evoked in the text printed on this page, where Caliban accuses Prospero and Miranda of tricking him out of his inheritance even as they taught him “To name the bigger light, and . . . the less” (FTLN 0472). On the “spur of the moment,” according to McMurray, the artist inserted a darkly iridescent blue-jay feather into some copies of his amate Caliban (2018). The feather functions not as much a memento of his mother and her “unwholesome fen” but (writes the artist) rather as a nod to Caliban’s expertise and local knowledge, where the “jay’s nest” lies and where to gather “clustering filberts” (FTLN 1236, 1238). The feather may also unintentionally recollect the feathered headdresses of Native warriors or evoke the Queztal bird, whose feathers decorated the crowns of ancient Aztec priests and kings, as in Montezuma’s headdress. The rough-textured paper associates Caliban with the rough or hairy “thing most brutish” with which Miranda allies him (FTLN 500). The torn border, eye-holes, and mouth-slit evoke the violence of conquest and reconquest, but also a certain humor. The face of this “monster” wittily evokes the Caliban of other Tempest appropriations such as the “Monster from the Id” in the science-fiction parody film Forbidden Planet (1956) or the malicious creature Armus from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1988). McMurray uses not only the texture and kind of paper to interpret Shakespeare’s characters, but also the shapes of cut-paper figures or objects. A cut-paper Ariel features on the box that houses McMurray’s volume, and the same figure-shape appears at Ariel’s first entrance, arms raised to hail Prospero. Prospero’s “charmed circle” appears as a watermarked brown circle laid over a double-spread, sewn in the gutter of the binding but still able to be lifted so that we can see what is beneath. And just as Doggett incorporates early modern materials (as treated photocopies) into the Sketchbook, so McMurray includes early modern paper inventions such as the volvelle, a wheel-shaped slide chart that some have called a “paper computer” (Rhodes and Sawday 2000; Gravelle et al. 2012; Martin 2015). The use of a volvelle is especially apt for a press called “Caliban” that is printing The Tempest; the Folger’s example of a volvelle comes from Martin Cortes’s Breve Compendio (1589), translated by Richard Eden as The Art of Navigation, a crucial text in the English conquest of the seas. McMurray’s volvelle models the spheres, placed above Prospero’s triumphant claim that his powers are reaching their zenith and his “charms crack not” (FTLN 1966) and across from Ariel’s gentle intercession: ARIEL: . . . if you now beheld them, your affections Would become tender. PROSPERO: Dost thou think so, spirit? ARIEL: Mine would, sir, were I human. PROSPERO: And mine shall. Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their kind, that relish all as sharply Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art? FTLN 1987–95 Ariel here parallels the angels who move the spheres, an analogy especially apt when placed opposite the spirit’s expression of uncharacteristic tenderness for human fallibility, a breath of kindly air that, arguably, encourages his master’s own compassion. 342

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The figure of Ariel on the box that houses McMurray’s volume is cut from sheet music, a reminder of Ariel’s association with harmony and of the rich tradition of musical settings for this play. The Ariel who hails Prospero almost pops out of the page, loosely pasted-in so that we can see his shadow, on a background of red ink spattered throughout as if to emphasize Ariel’s ubiquity as he “flamed amazement. . ./And burn[ed] in many places” on the ship in his account to Prospero (FTLN 0305–6). The cut-paper figure’s eyes and mouth appear as holes, like Caliban’s, which they anticipate, but unlike Caliban’s, they are cut smoothly, not torn, and Ariel’s smiling mouth contrasts the grim slit that is Caliban’s. Just as Ariel can be lifted up and out of the book here, so Prospero’s great renunciation can be hidden within a cut brown-paper circle bound on top of the double-page spread. Stage directions (with the exception of speech-prefixes) are printed outside the charmed circle; Prospero’s speech to the “elves of hills” appears within the magic space (FTLN 2006). The last lines on the brown-paper-circle verso are “I’ll drown my book” (FTLN 2030) and on the brown-papercircle recto, “Thou shalt ere long be free” (FTLN 2061). This book is a world that encompasses even Prospero’s magic, enchantment that has taken place within and through Prospero’s books. The ability to lift up the brown magic circle and to hide Prospero’s words again implies that he, too, can be lifted out of the island (as he is at the close of the play), leaving it to Caliban and to the island’s own magic and spirits. Visually, the brown circle parallels the book’s cover, a plain brown cardboard through which we see a green undersheet with “The Tempest” printed on it. The brown circle also recalls the brown amate-paper bog-monster that introduced Caliban, but to the touch, Caliban was rough and textured where Prospero is smooth. Both engage in powerful magic, but Caliban’s bursts from the bottom of the page where Prospero’s lies on top of it. Prospero’s magic can change the page for a time, but not permanently, and could (theoretically) be removed from the book without altering the sense of the narrative. Amate Caliban could not. Prospero’s power is circumscribed by his drowned book and also by this book from “Caliban Press.”

Jan Kellett’s Sea-Change and Storming Shakespeare Two books by the miniature book artist Jan Kellett publish both her responses to The Tempest and to its weather patterns. Named after a phrase that has entered the English language, SeaChange refers to Ariel’s song “Full fathom five,” and takes the form of a miniature scroll, packaged almost like a miniature ship’s telescope and “covered in a deep blue and gold hand made paste paper” (Kellett 1996–2015; see Figure 29.2). The text, screen-printed in “gold, blue, and green on parchment,” combines the words of Ariel’s song with the names of British seas called out on the BBC World Service during the Shipping News, to which the artist listened as a child “every day at teatime” with her father, who was training to become a pilot. The names of these watery bodies appear as a “magical chant” in the form of waves of text lapping at the edges of Ariel’s song. Kellett writes that she chose parchment not only because of its strength, endurance, and antiquity, but also, in the “light weight” she uses, for its shimmering “translucen[cy].” “[M]ounted on a sterling silver bar with disc-shaped ends, made by jeweler Judith Price,” the scroll’s small size and ephemerality comment whimsically on the vulnerability of human activities, such as taking ship, to the elements. Kellett’s second book to feature The Tempest, Storming Shakespeare, more overtly comments on the wildness of Shakespeare’s storms. Kellett’s Storming Shakespeare invents a new structure, which the artist calls “triple dos-à-dos,” that is, it comprises three books bound “back to back to back.” The volume includes four plates and three text blocks and uses different techniques to convey the varying relationships of Shakespearean plays with the elemental storms featured 343

Sujata Iyengar

Figure 29.2 Jan Kellett, Sea-Change, 2001, mixed media (parchment, oxidized silver, ribbon, paste paper) Source: Photographer: Sujata Iyengar. Courtesy of Jan Kellett. Image taken by the author at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript Archives and Rare Book Library, Emory University, and reproduced with permission of the artist.

within them. The first book is an essay by Kellett about the storms in The Tempest, Julius Caesar, and King Lear; the second book is a set of illustrations in drypoint and monotype that comment upon quotations from Lear and Caesar; and the third is a set of illustrations and quotations from The Tempest. Letter-press-printed, Storming Shakespeare prominently features paper as an artistic medium – through traditional illustration, through the use of decorative paste-paper and through translucence. Paste-paper emerged at the end of the sixteenth century as a way of creating beautiful endpapers and book covers that used up leftover bookbinders’ paper and glue and that did not require specialized equipment, expertise, or expense (Hunter 1943: 326; Loring 2007: 65–70; Wolfe 1990: 24). In its simplest form, designers stuck two pasted sheets together and gently pulled them apart, leaving a “veined or feathery design on both the paste-covered surfaces” (Loring 2007: 66). Other kinds of paste-paper include “combed” patterns in which binders “[drew] across the sheet a broad flat-toothed comb which threw the paste aside, much as a graver throws up the metal of an engraved line, leaving the white paper exposed to make the design” (67). Kellett comments on the mixture of reused or recycled materials and precious or exquisite techniques and minerals that inform the paste paper she decorated for Storming Shakespeare. The comb Kellett used she cut from an old “plastic ice-cream tub,” along with a “narrow strip of card,” even as she smeared “real gold flakes and dust” into the engraved lines she drew. “With words from King Lear echoing in my ears (‘the to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain’ [FTLN 1725]) I made sweeping marks with the comb and used the strip of card to draw the diagonal wiggly marks (lightning)” (Kellett 2012a), she writes. Her technique and execution evoke the elemental struggle among lightning, wind, and rain even as she whimsically reinforces human vulnerability and imperfection as part of what makes her work valuable: 344

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this being for an ed[i]tion, I tried to make each sheet similar to the others . . . but as I’m not a robot, each sheet is slightly different from its pals. And the evidence of the human touch, I think, is the beauty of a handmade object. Kellett 2012a “The Storm in The Tempest” uses the quality of translucidity, or rather, of semi-translucency, more frequently and to greater effect than in the books’ sections on Lear or Caesar. The titlepage of the Tempest section sets the pattern for subsequent pages. A blue- and green-patterned paste-paper double-spread is overlaid with a glassy flap printed with text – “The Storm in The Tempest” – that is glued at the edges but not at the center, so that the pattern is visible underneath and (dimly) through the top layer of paper. Subsequent pages present quotations (sometimes without commentary, sometimes prefaced with a contextualizing paraphrase from the artist) or drypoint illustrations printed or etched on the tracing paper overlay that appears almost as a pop-up across the middle of the double-spread. The effect of doubling each doublepage and of both displaying and obfuscating the design through the semi-translucent tracing paper heightens the supernatural powers of Ariel and Prospero and the uncanny presence of spirits on and around the island. Kellett’s tiny, handmade, human objects contrast the vast and cosmic forces of climate change and storm systems. Storm systems function as what eco-theorist Timothy Morton has called “hyper-objects,” material things too massive and too interconnected to be perceived by human beings as the objects that they are (2013). Because we fail to appreciate, say, the carbon dioxide storing energy in the atmosphere as a hyper-object, suggests Morton, or the world’s oceans as a single heat-sink, or polar ice caps as a massive carbon store, we are unable to anticipate or even react appropriately to our own human force and action upon these hyper-objects. At the same time, the force evoking Prospero’s magic in these artists’ books is the reader. Each encounter with one of these Shakespearean artists’ books performs The Tempest anew for the person who leafs through the book. Artists’ books blur the line between performance and reading, the ephemeral and the fixed, the occasional and the regular. Books do this anyway – no reading is exactly the same as the first, and subsequent readings differ from each other – but artists’ books heighten our perception of books as multi-sensorial worlds, and the books of The Tempest that I discuss in this chapter pierce us with the knowledge that these paper worlds are paradoxically less ephemeral than the fragile ecosystems around us.

Notes 1 See also, of course, Walter Benjamin’s classic and germinal discussion of the “aura” of original artworks (1969). 2 Shakespeareans who have investigated The Tempest in light of the Anthropocene include Sharon O’Dair (2005) and Ute Berns (2017). 3 Line-references to Shakespeare’s The Tempest are Folio through-line numbers (FTLN) taken from the Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Edition (Shakespeare 2006), Accessed 24 Nov. 2018. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org.

References Baron, Naomi. 2015. Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, Lilian A. Papyrus, Tapa, Amate, & Rice Paper: Papermaking in Africa, the Pacific, Latin America & Southeast Asia. McMinnville, OR: Lilaceae Press, 1983.

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Sujata Iyengar Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations. Trans. H. Zohn. New York: Harcourt Books. 217–52. Berns, Ute. 2017. “The Tempest in the Anthropocene: Preliminary Reflections.” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 153: 100–16. Blake, Erin. 2011. “Sue Doggett’s The Tempest, a unique artists’ book.” Blog post. The Collation: Research and Exploration at the Folger. 29 Aug. Accessed 21 Nov. 2018, https://collation.folger.edu/2011/08/suedoggetts-the-tempest-a-unique-artists-book/ Calhoun, Joshua. 2011. “The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper.” PMLA 126.2: 327–44. Darnton, Robert. 2009. The Case for Books: Past, Present, And Future. New York: PublicAffairs. Desmet, Christy, and Robert Sawyer, eds. 1999. Shakespeare and Appropriation. New York: Routledge. Doggett, Sue. 1995. The Tempest: A Sketchbook. London: Sue Doggett. Drucker, Johanna. 1995. The Century of Artists’ Books. New York: Granary Press. Gravelle, Michelle, Anah Mustapha, and Coralee Leroux. 2012. “Volvelles.” ArchBook. Accessed 14 Jul. 2019. Greenaway, Peter, dir. 1991. Prospero’s Books. Allarts. Cine Electra Ltd. Henderson, Diana. 2006. Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hunter, Dard. 1943. Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft. New York: Knopf. Iyengar, Sujata. 2016. “Intermediating the Book Beautiful: Shakespeare at the Doves Press.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.4: 481–502. Kellett, Janet. 1996–2015. “Sea-Change: Ariel’s Song from The Tempest.” Blog post. Accessed 18 Dec. 2018, www.dewaldenpress.com/all-books/sea-change-ariels-song-from.html ———. 2001. Sea Change. Malvern, England: De Walden Press. ———. 2012a. “Playing with Paste Paper.” Blog post. Accessed 21 Dec. 2018, www.dewaldenpress.com/ impressions/playing-with-pastepaper.html ———. 2012b. Storming Shakespeare. Malvern, England: De Walden Press. Knight, Jeffrey Todd. 2009. “Making Shakespeare’s Books: Assembly and Intertexuality in the Archives,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60.3: 304–40. Lanham, Richard. 2006. The Economics of Attention. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Loring, Rosamond B. 2007. Decorated Book Papers. Ed. Hope Mayo. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library/Harvard College Library. Martin, Rheagan. 2015. “Decoding the Medieval Volvelle.” The Iris: Behind the Scenes at the Getty. 23 Jul. Accessed 21 Nov. 2018, http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/decoding-the-medieval-volvelle/ McMurray, Mark. 2001. The Tempest. Canton, NY: Caliban Press. ———. 2018. Personal correspondence (email). 11 Nov. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Murray, Janet. 2011. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. Boston, MA: MIT Press. O’Dair, Sharon. 2005. “ ‘The Tempest as Tempest’: Does Paul Mazursky ‘Green’ William Shakespeare?” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 12.2: 165–78. Orgel, Stephen. 1998. “Marginal Jonson.” In The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. Eds. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 144–75. Osborne, Laurie. 2011. “Serial Shakespeare: Intermedial Performance and the Outrageous Fortunes of Slings & Arrows.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 6.2. Price, Leah, with Seth Lerer, eds. 2006. “The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature.” PMLA 121.1: 9–294. Rhodes, Neil, and Jonathan Sawday, eds. 2000. The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print. London and New York: Routledge. Rotherberg, Jerome, and Steven Clay, eds. 2000. A Book of the Book. New York: Granary Press. Shakespeare, William. 2006. The Tempest. Ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. In Shakespeare’s Plays, Sonnets, and Poems. Washington, DC: Folger Digital Texts/Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d. Accessed 24 Nov. 2018, www.folgerdigitaltexts.org Stallybrass, Peter, Roger Chartier, Jr., J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe. “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England.” Shakespeare Quarterly 55.4 (2004): 379–419.

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Ecologies of the Shakespearean artists’ book Star Trek: The Next Generation. 1988. “Skin of Evil.” Season 1, Ep. 23. Directed by Joseph L. Scanlan. Written by Gene Roddenberry, Joseph Stefano, Hannah Louise Shearer. Paramount (syndication). 25 Apr. Stewart, Garrett. 2011. Bookwork: Medium to Concept to Art. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang. 1943. The Aztec and Maya Papermakers. New York: J.J. Augustin. Waters, Colin N., Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin Summerhayes, et al. “The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene.” Science 351.6269, aad2622. 8 Jan. 2016. DOI: 10.1126/science. aad2622. Accessed 26 Jun. 2018. Wolf, Maryanne. 2008. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper. ———. 2018. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. New York: Harper. Wolfe, Richard J. 1990. Marbled Paper: Its History, Techniques, and Patterns with Special Reference to the Relationship of Marbling to Bookbinding in Europe and the Western World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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30 FALSTAFF AND THE CONSTRUCTIONS OF MUSICAL NOSTALGIA Stephen M. Buhler

In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Sir John Falstaff is presented as compulsively – or strategically, or both – quoting from numerous songs and ballads. A closer examination of the songs can determine exactly how the quotations serve not only to help bolster Falstaff ’s self-presentation (and self-image) as lover, but also to connect the Windsor version of Falstaff with the more elegiac version of the character found in Henry IV, Part Two. Elegy is a mode that has dominated many subsequent productions of the Falstaff plays and their adaptations. As Adrian Kiernander has observed, “it is impossible for the [Falstaff] plays not to contaminate each other” (Kiernander 2015: 198). The plays have effectively contaminated one another from the time of their first stagings and that contamination is especially inflected by both music and by nostalgia. Those processes of contamination – or, more benignly, cross-fertilization – can be seen at work across a wide range of musical, stage, and screen realizations and adaptations. The musical connections and their contexts substantiate the regular (and frequently remarked) deployments of various nostalgic strategies. There is something most musical, most melancholy (to echo Milton) in Shakespeare’s developing conception of the character of Falstaff, which invites the deployment of forms of musical nostalgia. Although the sequence of the plays’ composition and first performances is uncertain, the Falstaff of Merry Wives and the Falstaff of Henry IV, Part Two, appear to be closely related. Linda Charnes has astutely applied the hypothetical scientific concept of “wormholes,” effective shortcuts across spacetime, to the project of historicist criticism and to the developing cultural construct of nostalgia itself. I would suggest the concept of “wormholes” is also pertinent to the sometimes dizzying proximity and distance of times and places and characters in both time and place that occur especially in the mutually contaminating Falstaff plays (Charnes 2007: paragraphs 13 and 14). What follows is my own version of a critical wormhole: first, a consideration of how Shakespeare implicates Falstaff in a network of musical and nostalgic associations, then a brief survey of how later writers and composers followed Shakespeare’s lead, followed by a return to the Falstaff plays and their own longings for a not-so-distant but still inaccessible past. Falstaff ’s invocations of songs, amorous and otherwise, in all three plays are well worth considering in detail. Falstaff ’s character does not begin as a particularly musical creation. This might seem especially surprising in the wake of Roger Allam’s triumphant turn in the Shakespeare’s

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Globe productions of both parts of Henry IV, directed by Dominic Dromgoole (2011). Composer Claire van Kampen made especially effective use of the gallery musicians and of the vocal and instrumental talents of her actors. The “Welsh song” of Owen Glendower’s daughter, Mortimer’s new bride, was the culmination of a series of songs, with singers ranging from Peto on Gads Hill to Glendower himself. A literal show-stopper during Henry IV, Part One was provided by the company’s rendition in the middle of Act 2, Scene 5, of “Hal an Tow,” a traditional May Day song (complete with Robin Hood references), in celebration of Prince Hal’s exposure of Falstaff ’s lies about the robbery and his announcement that he has the stolen goods in possession. The song’s performance featured Jamie Parker’s Hal on recorder and Allam’s Falstaff on cittern, which he brandished much like a late twentieth-century rock and roll guitar-slinger. This celebration led naturally to Falstaff ’s call for “a play extempore,” simply to keep the party going. But the actual and specific musical references in the play-text of Henry IV, Part One are limited. The song that the new Lady Mortimer sings is unnamed. Ross Duffin’s ingenious attempt at a restoration of Shakespeare’s Songbook identifies only one precise reference to a song in the entire play: “Hem, Boys,” a standard drinking song quoted by Hal, as he confers with Poins early on (2004: 192–93). It is not until Henry IV, Part Two that the allusions to song – and, ultimately, performances of song – gather momentum, according to the play-text. The deployment of music in that play begins, possibly, with “Hem, Boys,” this time quoted by Doll Tearsheet at the beginning of Act 2, Scene 4. Duffin makes this identification confidently, but the context suggests that the sound Doll is making here stems more from nausea than less physical recollections of revelry. Falstaff ’s subsequent entrance in the scene is unquestionably musical, as he sings “When Arthur first in court” – the opening line of “The Worthy Acts of Arthur and the Round Table.” This performance, too, is evocative of little but laughter, because Falstaff interrupts himself to give instructions to Francis, the tavern’s drawer, about emptying the chamber pot that Falstaff has just used. Even when a production allows Falstaff to give an uninterrupted version of more of the song, the music can take a backseat to the excremental humor: the Globe production brought Falstaff ’s urination onstage, allowing Allam to finish a full verse of the ballad and to finish emptying Falstaff ’s (stage) bladder before giving the command, “Empty the jordan, Francis” (Henry IV, Part Two 2011). Pistol’s musical outburst later in the scene is comically expulsive, as well: he sings the opening to “O Death” in challenging Falstaff to a duel. The atmosphere quickly changes, however, when Shakespeare’s lines and the earliest stage directions indicate that musicians descend from the galleries and join the actors onstage. Falstaff: Doll Tearsheet:

Page: Falstaff:

Doll Tearsheet:

A rascally slave! I will toss the rogue in a blanket. Do, an thou darest for thy heart: an thou dost, I’ll canvass thee between a pair of sheets. Enter Music The music is come, sir. Let them play. -- Play, sirs. [Music plays] Sit on my knee, Doll. A rascal bragging slave! The rogue fled from me like quicksilver. I’ faith, and thou followedst him like a church. 2.4.198–2051

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The musicians are asked, in effect, to provide mood music for the wonderfully complex interaction between, as the disguised Hal later observes, “Saturn and Venus” (2.4.237) – old age and vital sensuality – Falstaff and Doll. After Falstaff leaves off speaking in blank verse to mock once again Pistol’s cowardice, Doll teasingly chides him first for not chasing after Pistol and then for not being mindful of his own mortality: “when wilt thou leave fighting o’ days and foining o’ nights, and begin to patch up thine old body for heaven?” (2.4.206–07). Falstaff ’s response is to accuse her of transforming herself into a memento mori: “do not speak like a death’s head; do not bid me remember mine end.” Depending on the music played, as well as how the lines are played, the conventional dance of insincerity between a customer and a prostitute can transform gradually or immediately into something moving and surprisingly candid. These performers are, in Mistress Quickly’s terms in praising Falstaff ’s acting ability as the King in Henry IV, Part One, “harlotry players” – but still with the power to express and inspire feeling. Falstaff comments on the “flattering busses” that Doll bestows on him; she counters that she gives her kisses “with a most constant heart.” He insists: “I am old, I am old.” She replies, “I love thee better than I love e’er a scurvy young boy of them all” (2.4.244–46). That last line can be played as heartfelt, as cannily professional, or as mockingly aimed at the disguised Hal – if, in the last case, the Prince has revealed his presence to Doll. In any event, Falstaff is inspired to celebrate, promising gifts to Doll of a kirtle and a cap and requesting from the musicians, “A merry song, come!” (2.4.248). The request indicates that what he and Doll and the audience have been hearing has not been celebratory. If the band of musicians have continued playing since Falstaff ’s command to “Play, sirs,” then the underscore to the scene between Falstaff and Doll, the language of which has been by turns satiric and wistful, effectively function as a death’s head. This could be achieved either by melancholy sonorities or by the power of nostalgia. Immediately after asking for the “merry song,” Falstaff observes that “it grows late.” Rather than listen to the lively new music (or inspired by it), he will instead go to bed with Doll. Before he does so, he turns himself into a memory already lost: “Thou’lt forget me when I am gone.” She protests that she will refuse to attract other customers in his absence during the new outbreak of civil war – “prove that ever I dress myself handsome till thy return” – after herself returning Falstaff ’s intimate “thou” in “thou’lt set me a-weeping an thou sayest so” (2.4.241–52). The possibility that she will indeed forget Falstaff is enough to make her sad. Falstaff, however, does not forget the players who provided the background to his scene with Doll. He instructs Bardolph to “Pay the musicians.” As he leaves, Mistress Quickly continues the musical thread with a quiet reference to “The Shepherd’s Slumber,” which begins with the phrase Quickly uses, “in peascod time”; the song, intriguingly, is about an attempt to resist love, to refuse to serve either Venus or Cupid. Although apparently a current air at the time of the play’s first performances, she introduces the reference via a nostalgic gesture, commemorating her long “twenty-nine years” of association with Falstaff. As the scene ends, Falstaff summons Doll and she rushes off to join him. The Folio version of the play include the words “She comes blubbered” as part of Quickly’s last speech, rather than the stage direction to which they, when they appear in a modern edition, have usually been changed. In either case, tears are marked as the appropriate response for yet another farewell to Sir John. Nostalgia dominates the references to music in subsequent scenes. During Act 3, Scene 2, the Justices Shallow and Silence serve as a pair of comic memento mori figures, allowing audiences to find humor even in Shallow’s determination that “Death is certain” (3.2.37). Shallow’s description of his younger self as “mad Shallow” (Silence corrects this to “lusty Shallow”) and of Falstaff as a slender youth is yet another indication of time’s passing. The references to music return with 350

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an overt reminiscence of past revelry: a more certain echo of the song “Hem, Boys” is uttered by Justice Shallow in response to Falstaff ’s concession that the two of them have “heard the chimes at midnight.” Even at this point, the scene need not be played as unrelievedly elegiac (although it often is). Instead, Falstaff resists melancholy through dismissing even the young Shallow as comically old-fashioned and a rather inept romancer. Adrian Kiernander’s essay on “Young Falstaff ” expands on the slippery nature of nostalgia, especially how the home might have changed and no longer fits with the idealised memory. A different version of this is the kind of reminiscence that the characters Shallow and Silence . . . indulge in . . . provoking a pleasurable recollection of a world where wishful memories of youthful exuberance and irresponsibility are rehearsed. Kiernander 2015: 199 Falstaff himself pushes back against Shallow’s wishful memories: A came ever in the rearward of the fashion, and sung those tunes to the overscutch’d huswives that he heard the carmen whistle and sware they were his fancies or his good-nights. Shakespeare 1997: 3.2.285.1–285.52 Falstaff makes at least two suggestions here. First, that Shallow was a timid lover, approaching the ladies only after others, such as Sir John, had made their amorous moves: “rearward of the fashion,” meaning lagging behind, as in a military action. There is likely some ribaldry here, since “The Carman’s Whistle” is one of those famously double-entendre Elizabethan ballads – like “Watkins’ Ale” – employing metonymy. Where the ingestion of Mother Watkins’ famous brew can represent (I almost said “stand for”) the erotic activity that alcohol might inspire, the carman’s whistle – which in the ballad is an instrument, as well as a sound, meant to keep his horses stepping lively – can suggest a different kind of instrument, which elicits unstinting praise from the lady of the ballad. In both ballads, a maiden’s anxiety that she will always remain a maid is effectively relieved by the man supplying either the ale or the whistle. Falstaff ’s second suggestion is that the tunes which the cart-drivers (carters or carmen) of their youth actually whistled were old enough that the young Shallow could claim them as his own musical inventions, since both “fancies” and “good-nights” were established musical forms – with their own amorous conventions of approaching and the departing from the object of the singer’s desires. The illustrious Elizabethan composer William Byrd’s own setting of the ballad dates from 1591, but Falstaff sets one version of the ballad firmly into his own medieval milieu. Falstaff ’s expressed contempt for Shallow’s self-fashioning of their younger days includes one more connection with the cultural past. Falstaff is surprised that someone as unsubstantial as Shallow has become a man of means: “And now is this Vice’s dagger become a squire” (3.2.286). The dagger carried by the Vice figure of medieval morality plays and Tudor interludes is neither a genuine threat nor a sign of actual social status. Shallow, however, has become a Justice of the Peace and has acquired enough wealth that Falstaff readily borrows a thousand pounds from him. The dismissal of the younger Shallow through the Vice intensifies Falstaff ’s own association with the figure. In Henry IV, Part One, Hal assumes his father’s voice to deliver a sustained indictment of Falstaff as tempter: “that reverend Vice.” Earlier in the same scene, as he decries Hal’s supposed cowardice at Gads Hill, Falstaff identifies himself with the role: “If I do not beat thee out of thy kingdom with a dagger of lath, and drive all they subjects afore thee like a flock of wild-geese, I’ll never wear hair on my face more” (2.5.123–25). As the plays unfold, a 351

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genuine cultural past of increasingly suppressed performances – the largely vanished guild plays and interludes – and persistent tunes coalesces with the invented past (at least Falstaff considers it such) for which Shallow is nostalgic. The misleadingly named (and perhaps ironically named) Silence reaches back to the authentic musical past with a tour-de-force performance of a series of musical turns, providing snippets from a range of songs and ballads. We hear, in fairly rapid succession, both musical phrases and words from such songs as “Be Merry,” “A Cup of Wine,” “Fill the Cup,” “Mounsier Mingo,” and “Robin Hood.” As Duffin makes clear, the last two songs dated back decades at the time of play’s first performances. Nearly all are festival songs, invoking the carnivalesque spirit with which Falstaff is allied, however problematically. Silence observes, in response to Falstaff ’s praise of his downing a health but also acknowledging his own surprising turn as singer, “an old man can do somewhat” (5.3.74). Falstaff greets the entering Pistol with lines from “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid,” a ballad that presents a monarch who once disdained love but is compelled by Cupid to fall for a maiden of (in her own phrase) “degree so base”; the beggar maid nevertheless shows herself of more than sufficient grace and beauty to be worthy of her new place. The reference to the song resonates, of course, with Falstaff ’s hopes to achieve high status at Hal’s accession to the throne, with both candor at the imbalance in status at work with most of Hal’s relationships and with special pertinence to the improbability of Falstaff ever demonstrating worthiness. The song also serves to remind audiences that, with all the self-interest at work between Sir John and the Prince, theirs is also a love story. Martina Pranić’s essay on what could be called the shadow side of Falstaff reminds us that Falstaff ’s self-deception works in several directions: he not only believes that a newly crowned Hal will lavish favors on him, but also believes (as do many of Falstaff ’s critical admirers) that he warrants such favor because of his embodiment of the common touch. Pranić points out that Falstaff is keenly mindful of protecting his relatively elevated status, as seen in his “rampant individualism” (2013: 154). Concluding the scene is Pistol’s exultant quotation from “Where Is the Life That Late I Led” (more frequently associated with Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew and in Cole Porter’s musical appropriation in Kiss Me, Kate) in announcing the death of Henry IV and the imminent coronation of Hal as Henry V. The exaltation leads inevitably and predictably to profound disappointment and what seems to many observers as tragic disappointment in the loss of both an idealized past and an imagined future. Duffin finds only one musical quotation in Henry V (beyond, presumably, the victorious king’s command for “Non Nobis” and “Te Deum” to be sung in the aftermath of the Battle of Agincourt): “Nutmegs and Ginger” in the pre-battle sniping among the French nobility. I find the claim to a specifically musical – as opposed to culinary – reference a bit of a stretch in this instance but think there is a clear musical reference within Pistol’s vehement plea on behalf of the condemned Bardolph: “Fortune is Bardolph’s foe.” “Fortune My Foe,” one of the bestknown and best-loved songs of Shakespeare’s time, is outright appropriated by Sir John in The Merry Wives of Windsor. In that play, the Robin Hood ballad that Silence quotes is echoed briefly by Falstaff, but with Robin Hood removed: only “Scarlet and John” remain to mock Bardolph’s ruddy complexion (1.1.144). Alice Ford introduces a reference to the perennial love song “Greensleeves” while expressing outrage at the contradictions between Falstaff ’s hypocritical posturings of virtue and his impertinent attempts at seduction: “they do no more adhere than the Hundredth Psalm to the tune of Greensleeves” (2.1.54–55) – there is no reconciling conventional piety and amorous longing. Then Falstaff effectively packages himself as a capable suitor, an experienced and successful lover, with repeated quotes from another ballad, “The Shepherd’s Wooing of Dulcina,” 352

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made to Frank Ford, disguised as Master Brook. “ ‘Come to me soon’ at night,” Falstaff beckons, again and again, near the conclusion of Act 2, Scene 2. Despite Mistress Ford’s skepticism toward the conjunction of the sacred and the profane in music, during Act 3, Scene 1, Sir Hugh Evans succeeds in mingling the biblical lament (a metrical version of Psalm 137, “Whenas We Sat in Babylon”); the pastoral complaint (“Come Live with Me and Be My Love”); and the narrative ballad (“There Dwelt a Man in Babylon”) – the latter version of the Susanna and the Elders story adhering nicely with the ultimate exposure of Falstaff ’s false reports about Mistress Ford and Mistress Page and their fidelity to their husbands. The confusion can be attributed to his nervousness at the impending duel with Doctor Caius; the staccato conflation of words and music intriguingly parallels Justice Silence’s rapidfire review of familiar songs. When Falstaff is finally allowed what he believes to be a private moment with Mistress Ford in Act 3, Scene 3, he gives voice to a resonant artifact in the Petrarchan mode: “Have I Caught [Thee] My Heavenly Jewel” features a text from Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella; different settings are still extant. Falstaff also echoes “Fortune My Foe,” returning the song to the realms of romantic longing: he implicitly promises Mistress Ford that her fortunes will change (and, of course, so will his) if she will accept and return his love. The song is prophetic once again, as Fortune’s wheel quickly turns and Falstaff is unceremoniously dumped into the Thames with the rest of the Ford household’s dirty laundry. Critics have wondered how the cunning Sir John Falstaff could so easily and repeatedly be gulled by the Merry Wives. Along with the tacit sexism that feeds such wonder, there is also an exaggeration of Falstaff ’s wit: the character of Sir John has been crafted by Shakespeare to be tricked – and repeatedly – by Prince Hal, whether at Gads Hill or the Boar’s Head Tavern or in Falstaff ’s unrealistic dreams of bountiful reward as a king’s favorite. There is also an underplaying of Falstaff ’s financial appetites, as the objects of Sir John’s desires also appear to him as solutions to his ongoing monetary needs. Those needs contribute to his agreeing to meet Mistress Ford at Herne’s Oak and just before the supernatural assault Falstaff alludes to – and perhaps briefly sings – the “Greensleeves” ballad: “Let the sky rain potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of Greensleeves, hail kissing-comfits and snow eringoes; let there come a tempest of provocation, I will shelter me here” (5.5.16–19). The song appears amid a catalog of aphrodisiacs and other aids (such as breath mints) to the physical intimacy, as well as financial support, he seeks from Mistress Ford. The appearance of Meg Page does nothing to cool his ardor; instead, he wishes to be divided “like a bribed buck, each a haunch,” to serve them both. The willingness to woo and enjoy both of them leads to the supposedly supernatural punishment at the hands of fairies, elves, and sprites armed with candles. They subject Sir John to a trial not only of his virtue but also his sincerity as a lover: the flames will hurt only “the flesh of a corrupted heart” (84) – not that of a faithful and virtuous Petrarchan admirer. The scorching and pinching culminate in the song “Fie on Sinful Fantasy,” voiced by Sir Hugh’s disguised schoolchildren and Falstaff ’s other tormenters, and led by Mistress Quickly, no less. The transformation of Doll Tearsheet’s employer into the scourge of “unchaste desire” can never be complete because this scene of staged and pretended haunting contains other forms of presence and revenance. Those forms continue through some of the first musical appropriations of Falstaffian matter. As John R. Severn has noted, several early operatic adaptations of The Merry Wives of Windsor appropriately focus their attention on the intelligence and independence of the wives themselves, with Falstaff appearing primarily as the object of their just wrath and the target of their pranks (2014: 85–87; 2015: 30–33). Antonio Salieri’s opera (1799) might bear Falstaff ’s name as its primary title, but the subtitle swiftly moves on to le tre buffe – the three tricks played upon Sir 353

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John. Otto Nicolai’s Merry Wives (1849) similarly shifts Falstaff to secondary status, although it gestures beyond that specific play to Henry IV, Part Two, in assigning Falstaff an aria in Windsor Park that recalls the chimes at midnight: “Die Glocke schlug schon um Mitternacht.” The emphasis changes in subsequent adaptations. Without necessarily participating themselves in what Charnes terms the “patheticizing” of Falstaff, Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito soften past treatments (in all senses of the term) of the knight and allow their version of Falstaff to wax nostalgic about his own past. In Falstaff (1893), their operatic appropriation from all the plays in which the character appears or is mentioned, they take Shallow’s reminiscence of the younger, slender Falstaff and make it part of Sir John’s overt and idealized remembrance of his past service to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. The chastising of Falstaff is also softened, as the pinching remains, but not the fire. Edward Elgar continues the trajectory of a simultaneously nostalgic and more admirable Sir John in his orchestral programmatic portrait Falstaff (1913). As Daniel M. Grimley has observed, Elgar creates his own idealized past by inventing a “folk tune” theme to represent Falstaff ’s own awareness of “failings and sorrow” (2007: 116). For Elgar, “popular music [was] expressive of lost innocence or Arcadian nostalgia” (Grimley 2007: 113) – an attitude which the composer then attributes to the character of Falstaff directly.3 As the title itself indicates, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s own operatic adaptation Sir John in Love (1928) refuses to make Falstaff ’s amorous schemes merely mercenary. At one point, Sir John and Anne Page actually sing “Greensleeves” to one another – and one of his treatments of the melody for the opera served as the basis for Ralph Greaves’s rearrangement of materials as Vaughan Williams’ famed “Fantasia on Greensleeves.” A similarly deft exploitation of music and nostalgia in depicting Falstaff is presented in Laurence Olivier’s film version of Henry V (1944). Music hall legend George Robey portrays the dying Falstaff, as seen during Mistress Quickly’s account of his last moments. Robey had first achieved fame as a performer with fanciful and comedic routines portraying historical figures such as Oliver Cromwell; he eventually moved to roles on the legitimate stage, including Falstaff in Henry IV, Part One. The casting of the beloved Robey was a brilliant move on Olivier’s part to acknowledge some of the costs of Hal’s coming of age as king. Personal grief and cultural nostalgia also combine in composer William Walton’s masterful redeployment of the music for “Watkins’ Ale,” which had been used earlier in the film to introduce the tavern world and Pistol’s unquestionably comic confrontation with Nym. Here, changed to a stately passacaglia, the festival tune contributes to an equally unquestionable tragic depiction of Falstaff ’s death (Buhler 2002: 102). Despite Orson Welles’s deep disagreements with Olivier about Hal, Henry, and the filmic portrayal of warfare, that director’s Falstaff / Chimes at Midnight (1966) takes Olivier’s elegiac treatment of Sir John as a point of departure. Welles’s conviction that Falstaff qualifies as “the greatest conception of a good man, the most completely good man” (Lyons 1988: 261) in dramatic literature does not lead to sustained engagements with musical nostalgia, except as support, through moments in Angelo Francesco Lavanigno’s score, for an idealized view of a Medieval past being supplanted by a harder, more pragmatic future.4 Welles’s nostalgia for “Merrie England” follows in the musical tradition of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, along with a valorizing critical tradition championed by A.C. Bradley (and, Charnes argues, initiated by Lewis Theobald) and culminating in Harold Bloom. Bob Pigeon, the Falstaff/Welles figure in Gus Van Sant’s film My Own Private Idaho (1991), confirms the pervasiveness of such a view. Over the past thirty years and more, stagings of The Merry Wives of Windsor have often engaged directly with musical nostalgia. Bill Alexander’s striking production (1985) for the Royal Shakespeare Company famously set the play in 1950s Britain, both exploiting and critiquing nostalgia for that era. This version ended with what was for the time a daring revival 354

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of the jig, the musical performance that concluded and glanced back at Elizabethan theatrical performances. The “curtain call,” as it was termed by critics, was variously described as a “jive” number and even as a “joyous sock hop,” which could been seen as either an almost-too-late acknowledgment of the Anne Page-Master Fenton subplot (and its generational themes) or an all-too-soon capitulation to the charms of Happy Days-style nostalgia. Daniel Fish’s production (1998) for the Washington, DC-based Shakespeare Theatre embraced such nostalgia completely in also setting the play in the 1950s. Here, David Sabin’s Sir John was a down-on-his-luck lounge singer (a characterization partly indebted to Bill Murray’s unrelentingly louche vocalist, a recurring role on Saturday Night Live) reduced to performing “Love Letters in the Sand” (already a nostalgic song when Pat Boone’s version became a hit in 1957) for the Host and his regulars at the Garter Inn. Gregory Doran’s production (2006) for the Royal Shakespeare Company offered a full adaptation of the play into a musical. As Merry Wives, the show incorporated music by Paul Englishby, lyrics by Ranjit Bolt, and a book by Doran himself that occasionally borrowed from Boito’s libretto for Verdi’s Falstaff. Boito allows Falstaff the opportunity to recover from his dunking in the river by enjoying a restorative drink of his favorite beverage and by singing the praises of sack – with the help of lines adapted from Act 4, Scene 2, of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part Two. Doran’s Merry Wives makes the paean to sherry-sack a communal celebration, not just Falstaff ’s own. Several of Englishby’s melodies consciously invoke the traditions of the English music hall, despite the early modern setting and his own stated goal of having the music “all sewn together with Elizabethan twine” (liner notes for the 2006 CD of the production’s songs). Bob Hall’s Flatwater Shakespeare Company presentation (in Lincoln, Nebraska) of The Merry Wives of Windsor (2008) was also given an early modern setting, which is unusual for that ­ensemble, since most of its productions tend toward the nineteenth century and later periods. Hall chose this uncharacteristic direction partly because the Company’s primary space (converted stables, in a cemetery) is strongly suggestive of an Elizabethan innyard and partly because the play comprises Shakespeare’s one glance at the very contemporary genre of City Comedy. As dramaturg and sound designer for the show, I supplied Joel Story, our Falstaff, with Ross Duffin’s best conjectures as to the original settings for the songs that Falstaff quotes – and in our production Falstaff indeed sang. Nostalgia was not a conscious goal of ours in employing early modern music; however, as Susan Bennett trenchantly phrased it years ago, tradition is “an agent provocateur for nostalgia” (1996: 16). An assuredly, indeed reassuringly traditional staging was warmly welcomed by segments of the audience who occasionally find the company’s more contemporary settings off-putting. A subsequent Flatwater Shakespeare production of Merry Wives, directed by Becky Boesen and set on the Great Plains (2017), nevertheless featured a Falstaff who schmaltzily sang some of his most ardent protestations of love to the delightfully anachronistic tune of “La Vie en Rose.” Director Christopher Luscombe’s Globe staging of Merry Wives (2008) was able to exploit nostalgia not only through its customarily traditional staging but also through deliberate invocation of BritCom tropes. The conceit is more than justified by the play’s palpable anticipations of situation comedy’s conventions, and several of the results – particular Andrew Havill’s Frank Ford veering deliciously close to the more manically imploding moments of John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty – were delightful. Nigel Hess’s music functioned in ways very similar to a television comedy’s soundtrack, complete with character themes and plot development cues. Katharina Niemeyer and Daniella Wentz have helpfully identified as “serial nostalgia” both a community’s affection for past television series and also later television series’ deliberate echoes of the past while seeking of inspire (and, rarely, critique) such affection (2014: 135–37). Merry Wives provides another illustration of this dynamic. In contrast, Geoffrey Rush’s time-collapse production 355

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(1987), which transformed Herne’s Oak to a 1940s Brisbane dancehall but invoked the recent fall of a contemporary and political Falstaff-figure, worked against easy nostalgia (Kiernander 2015: 206–9). A more recent musical adaptation in the U.S., John Haber and Robert Horn’s Lone Star Love (2004), set the events of the play in nineteenth-century Texas and deployed nostalgia not only for cowboy balladry but also for twentieth-century film and television depictions of life in the Wild West (Leonard 2018: 21–24).5 Recent productions of Verdi’s opera have thematized gestures toward nostalgia. The most vivid example of this is Damiano Michieletto’s Falstaff for the Salzburg Festival (2013). Inspired in part by Verdi’s own participation in building a retirement home in Milan for musicians and singers, Michieletto decided to set the opera in the existing Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, popularly known as Casa Verdi. Here, nostalgia was anticipatory and threatened to become allconsuming, as the singer portraying Falstaff, Ambrogio Maestri, was at the same time portraying an older version of himself who dreams of returning to his glory days in the role. I will conclude not by continuing up to the present-day but by jumping down the wormhole back to Shakespeare’s own creative processes and inspirations. Ultimately, Falstaff ’s musical memory derives from his character’s origins in the Vice figure not only of the Medieval morality plays but also of the Tudor interludes, a powerful locus of cultural nostalgia in early modern England and especially in London, where the interlude served as the progenitor of the public theater. A hallmark of the interludes’ Vice figure was song: Maura Giles-Watson has convincingly argued for the importance of the “Singing Vice” in, for example, the works of John Heywood and also in the development of such Shakespearean characters as Feste in Twelfth Night, who sings about “the old Vice . . . with his dagger of lath” (4.2.115, 117). The “reverend Vice” Falstaff is equally indebted to that richly significant figure (Giles-Watson 2009: 64). Falstaff ’s exit, under arrest, at the end of Henry IV, Part Two, closely matches what regularly occurs to the Medieval Vice. J. Dover Wilson simultaneously defends Hal’s last-minute rejection of Falstaff and argues for early audience’s acceptance of that rejection in these terms: “they no more thought of questioning or disapproving of that finale, than their ancestors would have thought of protesting against the Vice being carried off to Hell at the end of the interlude” (1943: 22). Wilson, interestingly, assumes the parallel without referring either to specific earlier titles or to the conditions of Falstaff ’s removal. Within the more comfortable confines of comedy, however, characters that partake of the Vice’s mystique can nevertheless find some measure of reconciliation. Falstaff ’s comic chastisement at the conclusion of The Merry Wives of Windsor is only slightly more severe than Mak’s in The Second Shepherds’ Play. Sir John even alludes to that form of punishment, as we have already seen. In his conversation with Doll in Henry IV, Part Two, Falstaff fulminates against the obstinate Pistol, who has just been kicked out of the Boar’s Head Tavern: in his anger toward this new addition to his retinue, he threatens to “toss the rogue in a blanket” (2.4.198). If Falstaff is indeed a transmuted Vice, seeking a meal ticket and some security as might also a minstrel in a great hall or a lounge singer at a nearby watering hole or a down-on-his-luck tenor in a retirement home, then he understands that he must sing for his supper. He and his creator also understand how powerfully music and nostalgia can intertwine in appealing to audiences. The epilogue to Henry IV, Part Two, looks both forward and back: at the play that has just concluded, at a future play (that Shakespeare eventually chooses not to write) that “will continue the story” and also continue to feature Sir John, and at the jig that will immediately follow the play. Likely spoken by Will Kempe, known for his indefatigable dancing and the likeliest candidate for the actor who first played Falstaff, the speech serves as an induction to the festive song and dance that audiences still expected as the conclusion to an afternoon’s entertainment. Whatever

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occurred to their characters, the actors could be expected either to return to the stage or to rise up from it. It is a theatrical context that helps to explain why the era’s most famous musical tribute (frequently attributed to John Dowland) to a comedic actor is entitled “Tarleton’s Resurrection.” Falstaff ’s “resurrection” from the fields outside Shrewsbury in Henry IV, Part One, connects the Elizabethan Clown with his predecessor the Vice figure. In a magisterial review of the history of nostalgia as both concept and emotion, Jean Starobinski considers the gradual interweaving of music with affective memory. By the end of the eighteenth century, a hundred years after Dr. Johannes Hofer coined the term nostalgia, “music was found to be gifted with a new power: it opened a retrospective space to desire” (Starobinski 2013: 335). Starobinski also points to the prehistory of the emotion before it was named and before Dr. Hofer’s terminology began transforming the emotion. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is part of that prehistory: he prefigures – he embodies – the interplay of memory, music, and desire. Shakespeare reinvents Sir John Oldcastle as Sir John Falstaff; in the Henry IV plays and into The Merry Wives of Windsor, he reinvents the Vice figure and its lost theatrical tradition through Sir John. Subsequent adaptations of Falstaff ultimately continue the character’s own processes of reinvention, as he reluctantly comes to accept his own age and mortality and transience. Like memory itself, Falstaff constantly, paradoxically, both wastes away and endures.

Notes 1 All Shakespearean text is from The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Stanley Wells et al. (Shakespeare 1997). 2 The lines appear in the Quarto, but not the Folio. The Norton editors combine both texts (Shakespeare 1997: 1345). 3 See also Sanders (2007: 53) on Elgar’s “tragic reading” of Falstaff. 4 See also Newstok (2017: 372–73) on Welles’s awareness of parallels between Verdi’s approach to adapting Shakespeare and his own. 5 See also Peterson (1997: 82–93) on media contributions to the development of “Country and Western” music.

References Bennett, Susan. 1996. Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. New York: Routledge. Buhler, Stephen M. 2002. Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof. Albany: State University of New York Press. Charnes, Linda. 2007. “Reading for the Wormholes: Micro-periods from the Future.” Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar 6. Duffin, Ross. 2004. Shakespeare’s Songbook. New York: W. W. Norton. Elgar, Edward. 1913. Falstaff, Symphonic Study in C Minor. Op. 68. Falstaff / Chimes at Midnight. 1966. Directed by Orson Welles. Music by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. Falstaff (Verdi). 2013. Directed by Damiano Michieletto. Salzburg Festival. Giles-Watson, Maura. 2009. “The Singing ‘Vice’: Music and Mischief in Early English Drama.” Early Theatre 12.2: 57–90. Grimley, Daniel M. 2007. “The Spirit-Stirring Drum: Elgar and Populism.” In Edward Elgar and His World. Ed. Byron Adams. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 97–126. Haber, John L., and Robert Horn. 2004. Lone Star Love. Henry IV, Parts One and Two. 2011. Directed by Dominic Dromgoole. Globe Theatre. Music by Claire Van Kampen. Henry V. 1944. Directed by Laurence Olivier. Music by William Walton. Two Cities/Eagle Lion. Kiernander, Adrian. 2015. “Young Falstaff and the Performance of Nostalgia.” In The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays. Eds. Evelyn Gajowski and Phyllis Racklin. New York: Routledge. 197–210.

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Stephen M. Buhler Leonard, Kendra Preston. 2018. “The Wild West meets the wives of Windsor: Shakespeare and Music in the Mythological American West.” In Re-Locating the Sounds of the Western. Eds. Kendra Preston Leonard and Mariana Whitmer. New York: Routledge. 13–26. Lyons, Bridget Gellert, ed. 1988. Chimes at Midnight. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Merry Wives, the Musical. 2006. Adapted and directed by Gregory Doran. Royal Shakespeare Company. Music by Paul Englishby. Lyrics by Ranjit Bolt. RSC Enterprises, CD (of production’s songs). My Own Private Idaho. 1991. Directed by Gus Van Sant. Music by Bill Stafford. Fine Line Features. Newstok, Scott. 2017. “Making ‘Music at the Editing Table’: Echoing Verdi in Welles’s Othello.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Ed. James C. Bulman. New York: Oxford University Press. 369–86. Nicolai, Otto. 1849. Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor. Libretto by Salomon Hermann von Mosenthal. Niemeyer, Katharina, and Daniella Wentz. 2014. “Nostalgia is Not What It Used to Be: Serial Nostalgia and Nostalgic Television Series.” In Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present, and Future. Ed. K. Niemeyer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 129–38. Peterson, Richard A. 1997. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pranić, Martina. 2013. “ ‘The purpose must weigh with the folly’: The Role of Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Plays.” Theta XI: Théâtre Tudor: 149–64. Salieri, Antonio. 1799. Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle. Libretto by Carlo Prospero Defranchesi. Sanders, Julie. 2007. Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings. Cambridge: Polity Press. Severn, John R. 2014. “Salieri’s Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle and The Merry Wives of Windsor: Operatic Adaptation and/as Shakespearean Criticism. Cambridge Opera Journal 26.1: 83–112. ———. 2015. “Beyond Falstaff in Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor: Otto Nicolai’s Revolutionary Wives.” Music and Letters 96.1: 28–54. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Norton Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. and textual ed. Stanley Wells, et al. New York: W. W. Norton. Starobinski, Jean. 2013. “On Nostalgia.” In The Emotional Power of Music. Trans. Kristen Gray Jafflin. Eds. T. Cochrane, B. Fantini, and K.R. Scherer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 329–40. The Merry Wives of Windsor. 1985. Directed by Bill Alexander. Royal Shakespeare Company. Music by Jeremy Sams. The Merry Wives of Windsor. 1998. Directed by Daniel Fish. Shakespeare Theatre (Washington, DC). Music by Red Ramona. The Merry Wives of Windsor. 2008. Directed by Bob Hall. Flatwater Shakespeare Company (Lincoln, NE). Music by Stephen Buhler. The Merry Wives of Windsor. 2008. Directed by Christopher Luscombe. Globe Theatre. Music by Nigel Hess. The Merry Wives of Windsor. 2017. Directed by Becky Boesen. Flatwater Shakespeare Company (Lincoln, NE). Music by Becky Boesen, Brad Boesen, Stephen Buhler, Will Hutchinson, and Orion Walsh. Vaughan Williams, Ralph. 1928. Sir John in Love. Libretto by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Verdi, Giuseppe. 1893. Falstaff. Libretto by Arrigo Boito. Wilson, J. Dover. 1943. The Fortunes of Falstaff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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31 THE MOOR MAKES A CAMEO Serial, Shakespeare, and the white racial frame Vanessa I. Corredera

In an article discussing the importance of frames to works of art, Emma Crichton-Miller (2015) characterizes them as the “Cinderellas of the art world” due to their multi-faceted functions: stressing structure, patterns, and colors; suggesting a painting’s value; and perhaps most fundamentally, protecting the piece. Yet despite this work, “anomalously, to all but certain connoisseurs and collectors, museum curators and auctioneers and the artists and dealers who depend upon [frames], they are practically invisible” (Crichton-Miller 2015). Thus, except perhaps to those with expertise, a frame’s function remains crucial – shaping the viewer’s relationship to the art work – yet largely imperceptible. Despite their vastly different contexts, ideological frames function similarly, as illustrated by sociologist Joe R. Feagin’s (2013) concept of the “white racial frame.” Feagin moves away from sociological studies of race focusing on individual racial prejudices, instead examining a cultural system of racial meaning. Though people use multiple frames, the white racial frame is hegemonic: More than just one significant frame among many; it is one that has routinely defined a way of being, a broad perspective on life, and one that provides the language and interpretations that help structure, normalize, and make sense out of society. Feagin 2013: 11 In creating the nation, Feagin argues, white Americans have crafted a “white worldview” that positions whites as racially superior by stressing “positive” characterizations of whiteness and “negative” understandings of various racial Others; this binary depends upon conceptions of superior white intellect, rationality, modernity, emotions, and values (10). White Americans combine various methods and elements to advance the white racial frame, including beliefs (stereotypes), cognitive facets (racial narratives), the visual and auditory (racialized media and accents), feelings (racialized emotions), and actions (discrimination) (10). Moreover, the frame positions white-controlled institutions as the norm and establishes stereotyping as a means of reinforcing this ideological and institutional normalcy. The white racial frame is so systemic that racial minorities likewise subscribe to it, few whites challenge it, and it “[extends] across white divisions of class, gender, and age” (10). In fact, even if white Americans do not exhibit explicit racial prejudice, many still unconsciously inherit and disseminate pieces of the frame 359

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that reinforce white superiority, therefore advantaging whiteness. Thus, like an artwork’s frame, the white racial frame also imposes structure, guides the gaze, and protects – though in this case, what is protected is racial hierarchy – and does so in ways often unnoticed by the average person. In both its artistic and ideological contexts, a frame also takes the otherwise incidental, a certain color or a seemingly unremarkable narrative, and makes it central by drawing one’s attention and helping guide one’s interpretation, thereby conferring significance. This is precisely the case with the influence of the white racial frame upon a fleeting Shakespearean reference in the NPR podcast Serial. As the first podcast to reach 5 million downloads on iTunes and ultimately 90 million worldwide, cultural critics have lauded Serial as a global phenomenon. Debuting on October 3, 2014, the twelve-episode This American Life spin-off examines the 1999 case of Pakistani American Adnan Syed, a Baltimore teenager convicted of murdering his Korean girlfriend Hae Min Lee. In Serial’s first episode, entitled “The Alibi,” journalist and host Sarah Koenig deploys a culturally recognizable and high status figure – Shakespeare – in order to introduce this unfamiliar narrative, largely about persons of color, when she describes the unfolding story as a “Shakespearean mashup” (Koenig 2014a). This moment alludes to Romeo and Juliet and Othello without naming the plays, their characters, or their lines, instead referencing key plot points and thematics from each tragedy, “evoking Shakespeare’s aura without using any of his words” (Erickson 2007: 1). Koenig (2014a) explains: And on paper, the case was like a Shakespearean mashup – young lovers from different worlds thwarting their families, secret assignations, jealousy, suspicion, and honor besmirched, the villain not a Moor exactly, but a Muslim all the same, and a final act of murderous revenge. And the main stage? A regular old high school across the street from a 7-Eleven.1 “Young lovers from different worlds thwarting their families” points to Romeo and Juliet. But “jealousy, suspicion, honor besmirched” and the “Moor” as the story’s “villain” invoke Othello. As an appeal to her presumed privileged, educated NPR audience, Koenig provides a narrative frame via Shakespeare, one carrying cultural access and import. This citation functions as what Douglas Lanier terms a “cameo appearance” (2007: 136): “passing references to recognizably Shakespearean lines, characters, scenes, or motifs separated from their source narratives.” Upon first consideration, this moment’s brevity suggests that Koenig deploys Shakespeare as the “transcendental signified” that confers authority for her project (Pittman 2011: 2). Yet a closer examination reveals that Koenig’s Shakespearean invocation functions as an important discursive and narrative element of the white racial frame plaguing Serial, for through its thematic content and logical structure, the Shakespearean cameo undermines Koenig’s investigative objective by creating a racial bias against Syed. Indeed, the Othello cameo highlights Koenig’s careless engagement with immigrant and/ or diasporic individuals and their experiences by exposing two methods that draw attention to the influence of the white racial frame upon issues of race and representation in Serial: first, Koenig’s overt and surreptitious dependence on stereotypes to characterize the unfolding narrative’s central figures and, second, her persistent privileging of her own perspective as normative and central, instead of those belonging to the first- and second-generation immigrants, as well as diasporic persons, at the heart of the unfolding narrative. The second method depends very much upon the first, for Koenig’s use of Shakespeare as a narrative frame for Serial creates “a loose structural homology” between her story and Othello, with Koenig’s narrative authority taking on Iago-like qualities that privilege whiteness at the expense of those positioned as Other (Desmet et al. 2017: 19). Here, it is helpful to consider Alexa Alice Joubin’s and Elizabeth Rivlin’s (2014) 360

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call for an attention to ethics regarding Shakespeare and appropriation. Though “notoriously difficult to define,” Joubin and Rivlin understand ethics most broadly as that which counts as “good action,” especially “in terms of a responsibility to cultural otherness” (2014: 2). The cameo, then, becomes particularly useful for considering both Shakespeare and whiteness as important frames for Serial, particularly their deployment in ways that could not be considered “good action” or responsible toward the Other, therefore proving unethical regarding racial representation. Though currently few scholarly treatments of Serial exist, online essayists and journalists have spilled significant “ink” about topics ranging from the reason for its popularity to its journalistic ethics to its treatment of race.2 Most notable in discussions of Serial and race are Jay Caspian Kang’s (2014) and Julie Carrie Wong’s (2014) respective critiques. In his essay for The Awl, Kang (2014) asks, “What happens when a white journalist stomps around in a cold case involving people from two distinctly separate immigrant communities? Does she get it right?” Kang responds with a resounding “no.” He argues that Koenig’s white reporter privilege manifests in the assumptions, logical leaps, and stereotypical characterizations she makes concerning Lee and Syed, even as she quickly dispenses with the difficulties concerning ethnicity, race, and religion her topic raises. Essentially, Kang accuses Koenig of being “a flawed, unreliable narrator,” as well as a “cultural tourist,” which results in “the difficult feat of both whitewashing and stereotyping Hae and Adnan.” Buzzfeed contributor Wong (2014) criticizes Koenig for her fetishistic, stereotypical depiction of immigrant culture. More troubling to Wong, however, is Koenig’s establishment of Wilds as a “counterpoint to her portrayal of Adnan and Hae,” so that Syed and Lee represent the model minorities in opposition to the more legally and socially troubled Wilds. The problem with this myth resides in the idea that “If Asians can succeed . . . that proves racism is over and black people are responsible for their own failure to thrive.” Because of this dynamic, Wong reproves Koenig’s “harmful” narrative, which she argues “[feeds] its listeners a steady dose of racist tropes” (2014). Rather than addressing Koenig’s white privilege – the often unacknowledged systemic factors that both make possible and shape Koenig’s role as narrator – I want to focus on her privileging of whiteness. Koenig does so through tactics reminiscent of Iago: crafting a racialized and chorus-like interpretive lens and stressing her reactions and interpretations, especially her affective ones, over those of her subjects. Admittedly, Iago focuses on others – Desdemona, Othello, Cassio, and Roderigo – while Koenig focuses on herself. Despite this difference, Koenig, like Iago, proves irresponsible, or to borrow Joubin and Rivlin’s (2014) language, unethical, in her treatment of the cultural Others at the heart of Serial by extenuating their voices and privileging hers – the representation of whiteness – in their stead. As a digitally and therefore globally disseminated podcast, however, this white racial frame, its effects on Koenig’s positioning of her narrative authority, and its ethical implications may become easily obscured. As L. Monique Pittman argues, a text’s dissemination into a “digitally flattened world” may “undermine the sociopolitical critique art so often provokes” by obscuring originary context (2017: 177, 178). In the case of Serial, global citizens may not comprehend the racializing nature of Othello as deployed in the Shakespearean cameo; particularly, they may not grasp how it encapsulates Serial’s problems regarding racial characterization and narrative authority, difficulties informed by America’s pervasive white racial frame, which Feagin argues is unique. He explains: This societal reality is significantly different from that of other leading industrialized countries in the west. Countries like Great Britain and France were central to centuries of European colonialism, including the Atlantic slave trade and slave plantations in the Americas, but their early and later growth as nations was not built directly on 361

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an internal labor force of enslaved Africans or local lands stolen by recent conquests of indigenous peoples. Feagin 2013: ix Outside of an American context, then, listeners may comprehend race as playing a role in the podcast, but they may have trouble grasping the influence of the white racial frame and Shakespeare’s usage within it. Thus, Serial’s Shakespearean citation reminds us that Shakespeare does not always work as a force of unmitigated social critique. Rather, as Shakespeare moves between contexts and mediums via global distribution, we must be wary about the invisibility of the ideological frames used to understand Shakespeare, and those frames that Shakespeare is used to reify, as Koenig does for the white racial frame in Serial. Koenig’s reference to Othello causes tension regarding the podcast’s purported purpose, while also highlighting the subtle ways cultural and racial prejudice influence her characterizations of Serial’s protagonists. This misrepresentation is oddly apropos, for Othello becomes one of a number of first- and second-generation immigrants that Koenig mischaracterizes as she invokes the stereotype of the violent black man, which in turn vexes her probing re-consideration of Syed. Koenig sought to investigate this compelling story in order to “get to the bottom of it all” (Syme 2014). Part of that pursuit involves trying to affirm or deny Syed’s guilt. As such, the choice to create a thematic and structural bridge between Serial’s story and Othello proves odd. Informed listeners know that Othello murders Desdemona. Curiously, if Koenig strives to reassess Syed’s culpability, her early invocation of Othello, the character and play, muddles this aim. By aligning Syed with Othello, Koenig suggests Syed’s guilt, even if inadvertently, thereby positioning him as the villain of her investigative endeavor. The shift from referencing Romeo and Juliet to Othello occurs as Koenig addresses “jealousy, suspicion, and honor besmirched.” For the average listener, the joint characteristics of “jealousy, suspicion, and honor besmirched” apply more straightforwardly to Othello than they do to the play’s central villain, Iago, especially given Koenig’s explicit reference to the Moor. Furthermore, Othello calls himself “an honorable murderer,” insisting, “For naught did I in hate, but all in honor.”3 Thus, if these qualities signal villainy in Shakespeare’s play, the logic of Koenig’s comment, coupled with the emphasis on honor, positions the Moor as villain despite assertions to the contrary. In doing so, Koenig suggests Syed’s villainy as well. For those who believe Syed murdered Lee, Koenig develops an effective frame for the first episode. For all others, Koenig troubles her quest to reconsider Syed’s responsibility in Lee’s death. The podcast’s biweekly release would only have complicated this dynamic by making reconsideration and reevaluation of Koenig’s opening more difficult. Ultimately, these details accrue to invite prejudgment of, or prejudice against, Syed and his role in Serial, a prejudice that becomes racially inflected in ways that expose the white racial frame affecting the podcast’s representations of persons of color. Granted, Koenig attempts to distance Syed from Othello by averring that he is “not a Moor exactly.” In transcript form, one can easily reread and fully grasp Koenig’s meaning. But in its aural form, this quick shift in argumentation might be easily missed. In fact, the most common ways of listening to podcasting make distraction likely. Podcast consumers tend to listen to them at home or in their cars, most often via their phones (Edison Research 2017). Their appeal “is the capability for [them] to be used anytime-anywhere,” which creates “another interesting advantage: users can do other tasks (e.g. cooking, taking notes, driving . . .) while they are listening to them” (Fernandez et al. 2009: 386). In other words, “Podcasts aren’t books, and can be easily consumed while engaging in another activity” (Porges 2015). Consequently, people tend to listen to podcasts while distracted. Due to this multitasking, pinpointing that one has missed a particular claim, when in the podcast that claim was made, and precisely how to return to a 362

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specific moment proves more challenging with a podcast than with something in written form, thereby making Serial more difficult to review. Koenig’s quick shift in argumentation might thus be overlooked, which makes the ethical imperative of thoughtful narration all the more significant. The issue here is one of association. By casting the Moor as villain, especially in relation to a murder, Koenig dredges up stereotypes of black male violence. The specter of deviant black masculinity looms over this case given the centrality of Jay Wilds. An African American young man known for selling marijuana, Wilds led the police to Lee’s car and served as the prosecution’s key witness after claiming that Syed confessed to him and forced him to participate in the disposal of Lee’s body. As a result, here, Othello becomes associated with the “emotion-laden” stereotype of the criminal black man (Feagin 2013: 103). The stereotype may not be obvious, but as such, it helpfully exemplifies the white racial frame’s logic, which associates those positioned as Other with negative behaviors – in this case, criminality, including homicide – even if only tacitly. Problematic in and of itself, through the Othello reference, the qualities of this stereotype extend to Syed, thereby further troubling Koenig’s introduction of him, as well as her goal of reconsidering his involvement in Lee’s murder. In this cameo, then, Shakespeare authorizes decidedly vexed characterizations of Otherness that more easily invoke rather than challenge common racial stereotypes and complicate Koenig’s ostensible purpose. In addition to deploying stereotypes associated with black masculinity, Koenig borrows from the prosecution’s approach to the case by focusing on “honor besmirched,” the motive asserted for the Muslim Syed’s turn to murderous rage, in a way that also misrepresents Muslim masculinity. In doing so, she further reveals the prejudicial, racializing function of the white racial frame and the way Shakespeare can be deployed to advance it. As early as Syed’s bail hearing, prosecutor Vicki Wash characterizes him as a “young Pakistan [sic] . . . male who was jilted by his girlfriend” (Koenig 2014b). Later, prosecutor Kevin Urick argues that Syed “became enraged, he felt betrayed, that his honor had been besmirched and he became very angry and he set out to kill Hae Min Lee.” Knowledge of this prosecutorial focus informs Koenig’s choice to employ the phrase “honor besmirched” in Episode 01, as made clear when she tells listeners in Episode 10, “you’ve heard this language before in an earlier episode, but it bears repeating.” In Episode 01 (Koenig 2014a), however, listeners do not yet know anything about the case, including the suggested motive or, according to some, the lack of evidence to support it. By asserting such an emotionally evocative phrase in conjunction with a seemingly strong assertion of villainy on Syed’s part and coupling it with a reference to a famous tragedy in which jealousy serves as the motive for murder, Koenig once again makes it difficult to attend to her qualifications. As such, even as this cameo invokes the violent black man, it also draws upon the Orientalist vision of Muslim masculinity that positions it as a jealous, domineering force that can barely be controlled, even as it controls. Because Koenig clearly describes the villain as “Muslim,” this stereotype appears much more clearly than the criminal black man. Ultimately, both reside side by side in the logic of Koenig’s Shakespearean cameo, where her use of Shakespeare and race can easily prompt a pre-disposition against Syed, especially when he is read through the white racial frame. Just as troubling is the factual inaccuracy Koenig affirms in this Othello cameo. With the qualifier “not a Moor exactly,” she “cursorily acknowledges the distinction between Syed and Shakespeare’s tragic Other” (Corredera 2016: 36). Yet she simultaneously insists on a shared identity between Syed and Othello. As I argue elsewhere, “She does so first by the ‘almost but not quite’ nature of the qualifier, ‘not a Moor exactly.’ ” Her use of “exactly,” instead of the more certain, “not a Moor” therefore, “plants the suggestion that Syed could almost be a Moor, that he somehow falls just shy of that distinction. She then claims that both Syed and Othello are ‘Muslim all the same.’ The problem is that Othello is not, in fact, Muslim” (Corredera 2016: 36, 37). Koenig, however, wants the listener to create, through Othello, an association between race and 363

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religion that transfers onto Syed in order to lend gravitas to her discussion.4 But her assertion is wrong. This is not an issue of textual fidelity but rather one of accuracy. To return to Joubin and Rivlin’s (2014) discussion of Shakespeare and ethics, such an incorrect collapse of different forms of Otherness – race and religion – cannot be understood as “good action,” especially from a reporter who enjoys white privilege discussing a story involving almost entirely persons of color. By mixing fact with interpretive imprecision and adding a dose of Shakespearean fiction for good measure, Koenig makes it hard to parse precisely what the listener should perceive as a rhetorical flourish rather than fact. Broadly, then, Shakespeare authorizes Serial as a whole. In this cameo, however, Shakespeare authorizes decidedly vexed characterizations of Otherness that more easily invoke rather than challenge common racial stereotypes. This Shakespearean invocation thus directs attention to the stereotyping entrenched within the white racial frame that may not arise out of express prejudice – as I believe is the case with Koenig – but rather due to the ideological embeddedness of the belief in the inferiority of those considered Other. Furthermore, it demonstrates just how easily carelessness with Shakespearean appropriation can result in an irresponsible engagement with cultural Otherness. Careful analysis of this brief yet ideologically potent Shakespearean citation thus exposes Koenig’s incitement of prejudicial thinking, reification of stereotypes, and unethical conflation of categories of difference via Shakespeare, thereby revealing how even as Shakespeare authorizes Serial as a project, he also authorizes the ideologies of the white racial frame. The podcast’s white racial framing appears more widely than in just the Shakespearean cameo, however. In fact, the frame affects both the podcast’s content and structure, particularly as Koenig’s privileging of her own interpretations, impressions, and feelings functions to promote further the authority of whiteness. In some ways, then, Koenig’s approach to Serial’s narrative directs us back to Othello. At the end of the tragedy, Othello poignantly requests that “When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,” Venetians should “Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,/ Nor set down aught in malice” (5.2.350–53). Othello’s final entreaty demonstrates his understanding of and concern with narrative authority and the way race colors retellings. The “when” of the letters indicates the inevitability of recounting, yet what Othello cannot trust is the nature of the tale told. “Speak of me as I am” (5.2.352), he insists, for he realizes that it is all too easy to leave pieces of the story out, to “extenuate” and shape him as the villain through “malice.” For a modern reader, “extenuate” may imply that Othello attempts to take responsibility by refusing any excuse for his actions. But given the following lines in which he directs Venetians to mention his love and extreme distress at Iago’s hand, “extenuate” carries the more common meaning in early modernity of making thin, rendering less dense. In fact, the OED notes of “extenuate”: “Improperly used for: To extenuate the guilt of; to plead partial excuses for.” Thus, Othello’s request instead calls for complex narrative representation.5 Moments before his suicide, then, Othello recognizes the limits of his agency and tries to wrest whatever narrative authority he can from those whose racial perspectives he fears will taint their reiterations of his misfortune. This fear derives from the fact that Iago has already crafted a version of himself he does not recognize; after all, “That’s he that was Othello. Here I am” (5.2.292). In the process of fomenting this displaced sense of self within Othello, Iago famously deploys a racialized interpretive lens. In doing so, the frequent soliloquizer concomitantly performs a chorus-like function by offering up his epistemological interpretations as the means of “reading” a given moment or situation – such as Cassio’s supposedly “guiltylike” departure (3.3.40) – to both the characters within the play and those without. By doing so, Iago positions himself as a “star” in the play he directs. Though familiar to Shakespeare scholars, Iago’s strategies for endowing himself with narrative authority bear rehearsing because they likewise appear in Serial through Koenig. 364

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Though without an invocation as direct as Othello’s, the podcast raises similar questions about race and narrative authority, about the voice who fashions and controls ways of knowing within the unfolding chronicle, about who is able to “aestheticize real life, to wonder why all the details don’t fit, to say what makes sense and what doesn’t . . . to explain to the world what these people were like” (Wallace-Wells 2014). This grappling with narrative authority becomes more fraught in both Othello and Serial due to the marginalized status of those at the heart of each respective story. Imtiaz Habib reminds us that Othello’s marginalization does not simply rest with his skin color but also with his “alien status, which positions him as the equivalent of a contemporary immigrant” given that both terms function as “primary markers of the distinction between foreign/different and natural born/same” (2016: 138). As such, due to his vexed legal standing as a black, formerly enslaved alien, “Othello’s status is akin to that of an informal enslavement” (137).6 Skin color, personal history, and his social status as stranger all alienate Othello from Venice’s hegemony. Similarly, Serial’s narrative is peopled by individuals who are likewise immigrants and/or diasporic, who are also judged by phenotypes designating Otherness, who also reside on society’s margins due to their immigrant status, their social class, their racial/ethnic/religious background, their gender, or, most commonly, a combination of these factors, and who also must depend on white voices to tell their stories. Just as first Iago and then other Venetians orchestrate Othello’s story, and his status as Other within it, so too does Koenig orchestrate a story concerning these Others in American society. She is the podcast’s Iago figure who narrates, investigates, and produces the saga. She even inserts herself into the narrative, so much so that she becomes a “character” as significant to Serial as Syed, Lee, and Wilds. Admittedly, the comparison between Iago and Koenig can only be taken so far. Koenig’s motives reside far from Iago’s insidious plot of revenge. Koenig also inhabits a more advantaged space than Iago; an ensign, he serves under Othello while Koenig works for NPR reporting on a set of teenagers from 1999, none of whom shares her socio-economically privileged position by 2014. Even so, like Iago, Koenig wields narrative authority and therefore responsibility over racial representation, and just as Iago’s depiction of Othello has merited critical attention, so too should Koenig’s depiction of the Others whose stories she capitalizes upon, for attending to the way she deploys narrative authority further highlights the white racial frame at play in Serial. While issues of racial representation and narrative authority pervade Serial, returning to “Episode 01: The Alibi” (Koenig 2014a) proves particularly important given that it establishes the series’s foundation. Throughout the podcast, Koenig attempts to provide the appearance of authenticity, most notably by allowing the listener access to her thoughts and emotions, so that “The listener becomes more like a co-conspirator than a distant observer . . . [picking] up clues at the same time she does, [shifting] our view of the case in tandem with her” (Rosin 2014). She takes pains to establish her ethos by stressing good will toward her audience, such as when she warns that a tape she plays during the podcast “is a little upsetting to hear in parts” (Koenig 2014a). Such gestures suggest that Koenig provides listeners with the unvarnished story. Part of this access comes through Koenig’s “real time” divulging of her shifting perspectives and emotions. As Feagin (2013) notes, however, when one is white and those emotions relate to the racial or ethnic Other, they too can be part of the white racial frame. In other words, expectations about the racial Other predispose or even trigger particular emotions toward that Other. Koenig’s emotions may thus be authentic, but they are not universally applicable in the way she attempts to position them throughout the podcast, for they cannot be divorced from her whiteness. Indeed, careful analysis of Koenig’s commentary demonstrates the subtle ways that she racializes her subjects while stressing her impressions and epistemological determinations. Take the discussion of her first meeting with Syed. She observes (Koenig 2014a), “I was struck by two things. 365

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He was way bigger than I expected – barrel-chested and tall. . . . He’d spent nearly half his life in prison, becoming larger and properly bearded.” Koenig’s description of Syed carries potential racialization. It is common for a thirty-two-year-old man to be larger than his ­seventeen-year-old self. But this attention to size takes on racial components when Koenig couples it with an emphasis on Syed’s substantial, “proper” beard. Her description, in other words, pairs a reminder of his ethnic and religious Otherness with a stress on his size, which could easily seem menacing and thereby provoke negative emotional associations within her listeners. Specifically, Koenig invokes the same threatening Orientalized male who appears in the Shakespeare cameo. Even as she focuses on Syed, however, Koenig, like Iago, shifts the spotlight to herself. She notes, And the second thing, which you can’t miss about Adnan, is that he has giant brown eyes like a dairy cow. That’s what prompts my most idiotic lines of inquiry. Could someone who looks like that really strangle his girlfriend? Idiotic, I know. In this moment, Koenig presents an almost physiognomic approach toward judging Syed, wanting “Men [to be] what they seem” (3.3.139). By doing so, Koenig draws just as much focus to the person interpreting as the person interpreted, quickly moving from an examination of Syed to her “idiotic” inquiry. On its own, this moment may be read as a temporary lapse in thoughtfulness. But when taken together with numerous instances in the podcast, addressed further below, one instead finds a pattern of Koenig expressly stressing her subjectivity through her editorial and narrative choices as she “[leads] us through a re-enactment, not a discovery” (Rosin 2014). Furthermore, she repeatedly makes universalizing gestures that assume that her experience and interpretations function as the “norm.” Richard Dyer (2012) comments on the way white privilege influences normalization, noting, As long as race is something only applied to non-white people, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people. There is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. 10 This dynamic is a tacit function of the white racial frame, for only those in the position of the “norm” have the privilege of such universalizing claims. Even as Koenig crafts dubious, at times racialized chorus-like interpretations for her listeners, and even as she makes central her “role” in the podcast, she also deploys another of Iago’s strategies: an emphasis on affective interpretive responses. Specifically, Koenig further centralizes herself within Serial by stressing her emotional reactions to the investigation rather than reserving space for and directing attention toward the persons of color whose experiences and perspectives she tackles. This tactic differs somewhat from Iago’s approach, for he rejects the signification of his emotions, asserting that his “outward action” is not in “compliment extern” to “The native act and figure of my heart” (1.1.63–65). Koenig, on the other hand, claims to wear her heart on her sleeve as a means of signaling her truthfulness. Indeed she may, but she does so while literally silencing the voice of those social Others in order to advance her own perspective, as seen when she interviews African American Asia McClain, a potential alibi witness who was never contacted by the defense during the first two trials. During their exchange, McClain sighs after Koenig emphasizes that the time during which McClain claims she talked with Syed in the library is precisely the time frame the prosecution established for the murder. Rather than delving into McClain’s sigh, however, Koenig posits, “That’s how I feel a lot of the time. Because 366

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I talk to Adnan regularly, and he just doesn’t seem like a murderer” (Koenig 2014a). But is that why McClain in fact sighs? Listeners do not know, for Koenig highlights her own interactions with Syed and her interpretation of the sigh rather than McClain’s explanation of it by never following up. McClain’s race plays a role here only in that by accentuating her own thoughts and emotions, Koenig stresses the narrative and affective authority of whiteness rather than that of the Other, which could have been easily rectified if she had ceded space in the podcast to those whose stories she was ostensibly committed to telling. In fact, Koenig’s tunnel vision regarding the significance of her emotions appears once again only moments later when she acts deflated because Syed feels “heartbroken” rather than excited over the fact that Koenig talked to McClain. Syed explains that he is happy that someone may be able to affirm that “I’m not making this up,” but he expresses disappointment that McClain cannot help from “a legal perspective.” Syed ultimately comforts Koenig, noting, “I’m sorry, I mean I, I definitely appreciate it. You know, and I definitely kind of hear the elation in your voice. But now I feel like I punctured your balloon.” Koenig responds, “No, no, I mean I totally. . . . I see what you’re saying. I hadn’t thought about it in that way.” This interchange reveals that Koenig’s previous move to assume a shared affective response between her and Serial’s investigative subjects proves fraught, for she has limited capacity to imagine their positions as subjects, positions informed by various facets of Otherness, some as blatant as the difference between incarcerated and free. By stressing her voice, her reactions, her feelings, and her interpretations rather than letting them stand objectively or allowing the voices of her subjects to take priority, Koenig deploys the white racial frame that privileges and normalizes the feelings, analyses, and values of whiteness over those positioned as Other. This dynamic thus makes the narrative authority across the podcast a decidedly white one. To be clear, Koenig’s decision to craft herself into one of the podcast’s central characters is not a racialized move in and of itself. But because she undoubtedly becomes the most authoritative voice compared to those of the persons of color who make up the narrative she interrogates, her podcast, even if inadvertently, reflects the dynamics of the white racial frame. It also mirrors the dynamics of Othello, as Iago wrests narrative authority from Othello by employing disturbingly similar means. As such, while unethical, Koenig’s Shakespearean cameo helpfully exposes the thematic, structural, and racial overlaps between Serial and Shakespeare’s famous race play. Iago’s and Koenig’s intentions differ; nuances exist between the ways they assert narrative authority; and the questions each text raises about race, representation, and whiteness are not exactly the same, for both bear the imprints of their time. Yet by noting the “cross-historical” approaches for establishing racialized narrative authority, we can recognize how voices of whiteness continue to extenuate the voice of the Other (Erickson and Hall 2016: 7). Furthermore, Koenig’s decision to frame the podcast via Shakespeare redirects us to conversations about the ethics of Shakespearean appropriation, especially when those appropriations deploy Shakespeare as a way of undergirding the ideological supremacy of whiteness. During a time where we question whether “Shakespeare’s work [can] adequately address current issues of racism and racial justice” (Erickson and Hall 2016: 10), we cannot ignore even brief Shakespearean references such as the one in Serial. It too becomes part of the ideological baggage of whiteness and its “exclusivity” that the signifier Shakespeare carries (Thompson 2011: 37). Similar to the almost invisible artistic frame, this white racial frame is designed precisely so that it remains difficult to identify and displace. As “texts” such as Serial disseminate globally via cyberspace or an iTunes download, this frame, and Shakespeare’s problematic function within it, become that much harder to identify and combat. Thus, like the artists, museum curators, and art dealers who engage with the importance of a painting’s frame, it remains crucial for purveyors of Shakespeare to use their expert gaze in order to dislodge Shakespeare from this racialized association. They 367

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must take Othello’s request seriously, insisting that Shakespearean appropriations telling stories such as his, Syed’s, Lee’s, and Wild’s manifest the complex racial interpretive prisms Othello so desperately desires.

Acknowledgments I am ever grateful for the unwavering assistance provided by L. Monique Pittman and Karl Bailey for all pieces of this chapter, great and small. I appreciate the diligent help of student assistants Dakota Hall and Alexi Decker with research and editing matters. I am especially indebted to the generous, incisive comments, questions, and suggestions provided by the participants at the “Appropriation in an Age of Global Shakespeare” conference hosted by Borrowers and Lenders. Thanks as well to editors Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson for their work on this collection.

Notes 1 Serial’s producers do not provide transcripts for the podcast. The Serial website FAQ insists that Serial is meant to be heard not read. For this chapter, I first transcribed episodes, then cross-referenced my transcription with those posted online, except for Episode 01, which I cross-referenced with the authorized transcript provided by This American Life (“537: The Alibi Transcript” 2014). Ultimately, all quotations from the podcast are based on my transcription. 2 Elsewhere, I argue that this same Shakespearean reference and Serial’s consideration of race as a whole can help us understand the varying forms modern constructions of race take. In turn, early modern scholars can better comprehend “the nuances of early modern writing on race” and well as “employ our current conversations about racial identity as a fresh way of reconsidering Renaissance texts” (Corredera 2016: 33). 3 Othello, 5.2.303, 304. All references to Shakespeare are from the Bedford/St. Martins edition, edited by Kim F. Hall (Shakespeare 2007). 4 Another significant overlap between Serial and Othello is the centrality of an inter-racial relationship. For further discussion of the inter-racial dynamics often imagined in retellings of Othello, see Daileader (2005). 5 Ian Smith (2016) compellingly argues that Othello’s call for accurate representation should extend to Shakespearean scholars, as well. 6 For a divergent interpretation of the status of black individuals in England just prior to early modernity, see Kauffman (2017).

References “537: The Alibi Transcript.” 2014. This American Life. n.d. Accessed 29 Jan. 2015, www.thisamericanlife. org/537/transcript. Corredera, Vanessa. 2016. “Not a Moor exactly’: Shakespeare, Serial, and Modern Constructions of Race.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1: 30–50. Crichton-Miller, Emma. 2015. “What Goes Around: The Art of Framing.” Christie’s. 20 Apr. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018, www.christies.com/features/Frames-in-Focus-5815-1.aspx. Daileader, Celia R. 2005. Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dyer, Richard. 2012. “The Matter of Whiteness.” In White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. Ed. Paula S. Rothenberg. New York: Worth Publishers. 9–14. Edison Research. 2017. “The Podcast Consumer 2017.” Triton Digital. n.d. Accessed 27 Feb. 2018, www. edisonresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Podcast-Consumer-2017.pdf. Erickson, Peter. 2007. Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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The Moor makes a cameo Erickson, Peter, and Kim F. Hall. 2016. “ ‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1: 1–13. Feagin, Joe R. 2013. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Fernandez, Vicenc, Pep Simo, and Jose M. Sallan. 2009. “Podcasting: A New Technological Tool to Facilitate Good Practice in Higher Education.” Computers & Education 53: 385–92. Habib, Imtiaz. 2016. “The Black Alien in Othello: Beyond the European Immigrant.” In Shakespeare and Immigration. Eds. Ruben Espinosa, and David Ruiter. New York: Routledge. 135–58. Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Elizabeth Rivlin. 2014. “Introduction.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 1–20. Kang, Jay Caspian. 2014. “White Reporter Privilege.” The Awl. 13 Nov. Accessed 04 Feb. 2015, https:// www.theawl.com/2014/11/white-reporter-privilege/. Kauffman, Miranda. 2017. Black Tudors: The Untold Story. London: Oneworld Publications. Koenig, Sarah. 2014a. “Episode 01: The Alibi.” Produced by WBEZ. Serial. 3 Oct. Podcast, MP3 audio, 1:00:27. https://serialpodcast.org/season-one/1/the-alibi. ———. 2014b.“Episode 10: The Best Defense is a Good Defense” Produced by WBEZ. Serial. 3 Oct. Podcast, MP3 audio, 1:00:27. https://serialpodcast.org/season one/10/the-best-defense-is-a-good-defense. Lanier, Douglas. 2007. “Introduction: On the Virtues of Illegitimacy: Free Shakespeare on Film.” In Shakespeare after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture. Vol. 1. Ed. Richard Burt. Westport: Greenwood Press. 132–37. Pittman, L. Monique. 2011. Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Adaptation. New York: Peter Lang. ———. 2017. “Colour-Conscious Casting and Multicultural Britain in the BBC Henry V (2012): Historicizing Adaptation in an Age of Digital Placelessness.” Adaptation 10.2: 76–91. Porges, Seth. 2015. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Listening to Podcasts.” Forbes. 15 Jan. Accessed 27 Feb. 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/sethporges/2015/01/15/everything-you-ever-wantedto-know-about-listening-to-podcasts/#40093aaf22eb. Rosin, Hanna. 2014. “The Real Secret of Serial.” Slate. 23 Oct. Accessed 19 Jul. 2017, www.slate.com/ articles/arts/culturebox/2014/10/serial_podcast_and_storytelling_does_sarah_koenig_think_adnan_ syed_is_innocent.html. Shakespeare, William. 2007. Othello. Ed. Kim F. Hall. New York: Bedford/St. Martins. Smith, Ian. 2016. “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1: 104–24. Syme, Rachel. 2014. “Talking to ‘Serial’s Sarah Koenig About Her Hit Podcast and Whether There Will Ever Be an Answer.” Vulture. 30 Oct. Accessed 17 Aug. 2017, www.vulture.com/2014/10/serials-sarahkoenig-on-her-hit-podcast.html. Thompson, Ayanna. 2011. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallace-Wells, Benjamin. 2014. “The Strange Intimacy of ‘Serial.’ ” Vulture. 23 Nov. Accessed 19 Jul. 2017, www.vulture.com/2014/11/strange-intimacy-of-serial.html. Wong, Julia Carrie. 2014. “The Problem with ‘Serial’ and the Model Minority Myth.” BuzzFeed. 16 Nov. Accessed 4 Feb. 2015, www.buzzfeed.com/juliacarriew/the-problem-with-serial-and-the-modelminority-myth?utm_term=.gaxEMdxbdL#.gexDWPX9P2.

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32 DE-EMPHASIZING RACE IN YOUNG ADULT NOVEL ADAPTATIONS OF OTHELLO Keith Botelho

Writing in 2008, Jonathan Bate argued that in the aftermath of 9/11, Othello was ready for reinvention: “just as [one] reading lost its shine, a fresh interpretive emphasis emerged” (Bate 2008: 356). These new emphases can be seen in recent young adult novels set in the Global South. Shyam Selvadurai’s Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (2005), set in 1980s Sri Lanka, talks back to Shakespeare in ways that address local postcolonial performance and sexual identity, engaging South Asian politics of sexuality by putting the gendered bodies of young men at the forefront. Mal Peet’s Exposure (2009), set in a fictitious South American country, uses Othello to explore the issue of class, particularly in the street kids whose fates mix with wealthy celebrities and murderous politicians. Both novels point to Shakespeare’s global reach and reinvent their Shakespearean source text by de-emphasizing race.

Categories of difference and the Global South Since the nineteenth century, in the United States Othello has been seen through the lenses of white supremacy, slavery, blackface minstrelsy, segregation, and racial intolerance, and productions in the country continue to be racialized today. According to Andrew Carlson, in the United States, “the meanings of Othello and Shakespeare have been created through the language and practice of white supremacy” (Carlson 2016). But global productions and literary adaptations are decidedly not in America’s shadow, and we have become increasingly aware that Shakespeare often speaks to local conditions. The United States’ Othello is not the globe’s Othello. And while questions of race and ethnicity are not absent from the two novels discussed in this chapter, they are given equal footing with other categories of difference. Indeed, the novels seem to engage with intersectionality, exploring how race overlaps with class and sexuality, all three becoming identity markers that are discriminated against and oppressed. Selvadurai and Peet seem to be interested in exploring how other facets of Shakespeare’s play might resonate in ways specific to the countries of their respective novels more than, or as much as, race. One salient example is in Sri Lanka, the setting for Selvadurai’s novel. In 2017, in partnership with British Council Sri Lanka, the Workshop Players presented the first “Shakespeare in the Park” festival, over three consecutive weekends, at the capital city of Colombo’s Viharamahadevi

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Open Air Theatre. The three plays performed – Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Merchant of Venice – were those that had been studied by local on-level, advanced-level, and university students. A review by Devika Brendon notes, It is impossible to emphasise enough the significance of such an initiative in Colombo, at this particular point in Sri Lanka’s cultural history, when the country is opening up to the outside world after years of horror, trauma, and frustration, to which the understandable and survivalistic response has been endurance and introversion. Brendon 2017, emphasis added While Shakespeare has been a part of Sri Lanka’s colonial past, his plays are ripe for reimagining, particularly considering that they are taking place after years of civil war in the country. Regional and local perspectives are brought to bear on the plays, but so too are the personal experiences of the actors and directors, whose endurance at a particular historical moment, in a particular geographical space, changes Shakespeare from universal to decidedly local. Brendon’s phrase “at this particular point in Sri Lanka’s cultural history” reveals an immediacy to these performances and interpretations of Shakespeare, ones that undoubtedly wrestle with the local. And perhaps Othello is merely the vehicle to get at something beyond race, something specific, something necessary to bring to the fore in a particular country in the Global South. Thus, these adaptations extend Shakespeare’s play not on the grounds of race, but through class and sexuality.

Othello and young adult literature Shakespeare was often adapted for children and young adults in Victorian culture – Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807), Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1851), and Edith Nesbit’s The Children’s Shakespeare (1897) – and, as Katherine Prince tells us, sometimes, as in dramatic adaptations for toy theaters such as Skelt’s Othello: A Drama in Five Acts, the reworking of the text only served “to propel the characters from pose to pose and costume to costume” (Prince 2008: 46). In the twentieth century, Julius Lester’s young adult novel Othello (1995) explored race, but with a twist: Othello, Desdemona, and Iago were all black Africans. Lester noted in his Preface that Shakespeare’s Othello is deracinated, noting, “I found it more interesting to explore racist feelings in a black person” (Lester 1995: xiii). More recently, Tracy Chevalier’s New Boy (2017), her addition to the Hogarth Shakespeare series, has reimagined the setting of Othello – the events take place on a playground and elementary school in suburban Washington, DC, sometime in the 1970s – but kept the focus on racial identity, as the new boy from Ghana, Osei, befriends the beautiful and popular white sixth-grade girl Dee. Young adult literature often creates space to investigate issues that matter to a younger demographic. Making Shakespeare accessible and relevant is necessary, but “when youth engage Shakespeare . . . it is always a contested site, but one in which they have agency and power” (Hulbert et al. 2006: 4). Identity issues and an understanding of intersectionality help to drive the rewriting of Shakespeare’s source text, often engaging it in unique ways to find new methods to re-tell the Shakespeare play. Young adult literary texts “act as ‘mirrors’ for readers who face challenges like those faced by characters in the texts and as ‘windows’ for readers who don’t” (Mason 2008: 55). Young adult literary adaptations of Shakespeare, including the two texts discussed in this chapter, often makes visible other categories of analysis not at the forefront of the source text.

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Sexuality, Sri Lanka, Shakespeare As Poonam Trivedi has written of Asian intercultural Shakespeare, an “enacted and em-body-ed Shakespeare speak[s] across time, space, language, culture, genre, and gender” (Trivedi and Minami Ryuta 2010: 5). This is certainly the case for Sri Lankan Shakespeares, which (re)negotiate their local conditions and, to follow Douglas Lanier in his discussion of Shakespearean adaptation, “mark general lines of cultural force, contours of affiliation and debate” produced by their culture’s encounter with Shakespeare (Lanier 2002: 97), “repositioning” Shakespeare, to borrow Thomas Cartelli’s term, within their own national formations (Cartelli 1999: 1). Shakespeare has been part of the fabric of Sri Lankan culture since the nineteenth century. Whereas the earliest recorded performances of Shakespeare in India date to the late eighteenth century, the first Shakespeare plays to be performed in Sri Lanka (as nadagam [Sinhala for “drama”]) were in the mid-nineteenth century; as Neloufer De Mel relates, John de Silva, who adapted five Shakespeare plays, wrote in his Preface to Othello (produced in 1909) that “they would enrich the native language, and that Shakespeare belonged not only to Englishmen but to all communities and races” (De Mel 2001: 63). Certainly, Shakespeare took hold in the subcontinent not only because of cultural assimilation, of “the imperial mission of educating and civilizing colonial subjects in the literature and thought of England” (Viswanathan 2015: 2), but also because Shakespeare could be repurposed to fit local dramatic forms and speak to local issues. According to Nira Wickramasinghe, “The theatre provided a forum where the anxieties of a colonized people were exposed and sometimes assuaged,” while some plays were “constructed in opposition to the British colonial regime” (Wickramasinghe 2006: 81). Tower Hall – what would become Sri Lanka’s national theater – opened in 1911 in the capital city of Colombo, and the performance, adaptation, and remaking of Shakespeare was central to the development of the theater’s identity. The deposits left by the tradition of Shakespeare can be seen in the Shakespeare Centre in Colombo, founded in 1990 to promote the works of England’s greatest dramatist. One of its cofounders and the current president of the organization, Obinamuni Gamini de Silva, expressed his desire to take Shakespeare to the masses, noting that the competition is for everyone and that “Shakespeare should not be someone reserved to an elite branch of society . . . we want students and teachers to be encouraged to study Shakespeare” (Perera 2015). Working under the guidance of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the International Theatre Institute, the Shakespeare Centre sponsors the Inter-School Shakespeare Competition – the Shakespeare Challenge, with all performances in English. Awards are the pride of the schools who participate, as medals, certificates, and trophies are given out at Tower Hall for everything from Best Drama to Best Actor and Actress to Best Music, Stagecraft, and Choreography, recognizing the multiple aspects of dramatic production. The Shakespeare Challenge, in fact, is the backdrop for noted Sri Lankan author (now living in Canada) Shyam Selvadurai’s young adult novel Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, which is set in Sri Lanka in 1980. The novel – a Lambda Literary Award winner in children’s literature and a finalist for Canada’s most prestigious literary award (for children’s literature Governor General’s Award) – follows fourteen-year-old Amrith coming to terms with his past (particularly the death of his mother) and accepting his homosexual identity amid the backdrop of the Inter-School Shakespeare Competition, which was to be judged by an actor from the Royal Shakespeare Company visiting Sri Lanka to do a one-man show. Amrith, a gifted actor who the year before had won the award for Best Female Portrayal from a Boys’ School for his Juliet, takes on the role of Desdemona from the final scene of Othello, and the play’s thematics of jealousy and betrayal find their way into Amrith’s life both on and off the stage. Set before the outbreak of civil war (1983–2009), the novel is seemingly caught between two worlds: a Sri 372

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Lanka caught between its colonial past, with its references to the remnants of British architecture and the continual annoyance of Amrith’s Aunty Bundle with “the colonized minds of most Sri Lankans” (Selvadurai 2015: 77), and its emerging postcolonial identity after independence, one that is inflected by youthful Western values, as evidenced by Amrith’s sisters, who are obsessed with American popular culture. Similarly, Amrith’s visiting cousin Niresh, who feels he is never truly Canadian nor Sri Lankan, reveals at the end of the novel that he is often called “Paki” at his high school in Canada and a “black foreigner” in Sri Lanka (212). Selvadurai himself was born on the island to parents of differing ethnic groups – Sinhalese and Tamil – and left Sri Lanka for Canada when the civil war began in 1983. Balancing the two worlds of his native Sri Lanka and his current home in Canada, Selvadurai has said that he grew up in Sri Lanka without a language to pinpoint his identity; furthermore, his novels also straddle many identities, as he has recently said that his work is discussed under such categories that include gay, childhood, Sri Lankan, immigrant, and South Asian (Selvadurai: n.d.). Selvadurai, a gay man, has written about his return visit to his native Sri Lanka with his partner, realizing that he could never be at home in the country that remains so central to his life and his novels. In the novel, others know of Amrith’s inclinations; they read it on his face and body when he is around his older cousin Niresh. Amrith’s Drama teacher, Mrs. Algama, looks at him “as if she saw right into his soul and understood something about him that he did not understand about himself. And what she saw made her more kind to him, more gentle.” She remarks to another teacher that Amrith is “that way inclined” (Selvadurai 2015: 224), for she knew many similar individuals in the theater circles she frequented with her well-known Sinhalese actor husband. Although not used to describe Amrith, the term ponnaya (a Sinhalese slang insult meaning homosexual/feminine man) is used in the novel to describe not only another boy in his theater group but also his Aunty Bundle’s business partner, the famous architect Lucien Lindamulage, who was often surrounded by male secretaries, which caused a scandal because his actions were illegal in Sri Lanka (as they are today). Yet it is actually Amrith’s experience with Shakespeare that allows him to accept his gift, as it is called in the novel, his growing awareness of a “lightness within” that allowed him to become aware “for the first time, of the heavy burden of silence he had carried around these past eight years” (254). At his mother’s grave at the end of the novel, he whispers, “I am . . . different” and refuses to use the term ponnaya to describe himself (267). Furthermore, it is through Othello that Amrith accepts and remembers his past, allowing him to choose willingly not to turn away from his identity, instead overcoming the barriers of the past to look to the future. Amrith auditions for the much-anticipated Inter-School Shakespeare Competition and is excited by the prospect of a real Shakespearean actor judging his performance. His win the year before for Best Female Portrayal from a Boys’ School made him no longer one of the school’s “invisible boys” (Selvadurai 2015: 50), and he had begun secretly to entertain the idea of becoming an actor – for being declared the best by an “English Shakespearean actor would be further confirmation he was destined to be an actor” (52). Amrith’s competition is a smug rival boy named Peries, who is teased by the older boys in the group, despite previously winning for his performances as Ophelia and Portia. When the role of Desdemona initially goes to Amrith, Peries is given the role of Cassio, and the boys begin to tease him. As one says, “The lines about Cassio lying with Iago in bed are right there in act 3, scene 3. Turn to it and see for yourself. It’s in bold print” (66). Peries, shamefaced, reads the scene: “The other boys laughed and began to whistle, making sounds at Peries. Ahmed tried to embrace Peries. ‘Cassio, you can lie with me anytime’ ” (66). Amrith doesn’t understand the teasing but becomes uneasy once he does, since his casting as Desdemona is conditional, and if he does not do well in rehearsals, he would take over as Cassio. Amrith reads that Iago told Othello that Cassio mistook Iago for Desdemona 373

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and held Iago’s hand in his, kissed him hard on the lips over and over again, embraced him, and pressed his leg over Iago’s thigh (68). It dawns on him that this is why the boys giggled uncontrollably when their teacher told Peries he was the perfect Cassio: “someone who is poetic looking,” with “such lovely fair skin, such pretty curls” (67). And when Amrith shares a bed with his cousin Niresh one evening (167), it is this passage from Othello that resonates with his own situation, helping to give him a language by which he can understand. As Selvadurai rewrites Othello to engage South Asian politics of sexuality, it is Amrith who, as a boy playing a woman, is at once very Elizabethan and at the same time quite modern. Fueled by possessiveness of his cousin Niresh (whom he realizes he has sexual feelings for), his inability to grasp his identity, and his jealousy of his rival actor Peries, Amrith’s life begins to take on the contours of Othello (similar to Cukor’s film A Double Life) – vindictive like Iago, with a seething bitterness and jealousy resembling Othello. At the novel’s climax, as Amrith lies on the bed as Desdemona during a rehearsal, all of this rage floods him, and a confrontation escalates between Amrith and the boy playing Othello, Suraj, to the point where they are shouting their lines at one another and the boy actually tries to strangle Amrith before he fights back aggressively. Amrith pleads with his teacher, “And anyway, Madam, why wouldn’t Desdemona struggle? It does not make any sense. . . . It’s not realistic. . . . Wouldn’t anyone put up a fight if they felt they were unjustly treated” (Selvadurai 2015: 220–21). Although he identifies with Desdemona’s struggle here, the role is taken away from him, and he must settle for Cassio; once his inner monsoon passes, Amrith is ready to reconcile himself to his past and accept his future. Selvadurai’s novel, then, temporarily displaces questions of race, which do not register with Amrith. Furthermore, the novel shows the disruptive potential at the heart of performing Shakespeare, as it allows for a young man to grasp his sexual identity fully amid the local conditions of a country that deems such identities as transgressive.

Class, South America, Shakespeare Aimara da Cunha Resende notes that Shakespeare’s work appeared for the first time in Latin America in the 1820s, when the actor Francisco Cárceres played Othello in Argentina; for the next few decades, “Othello seems to have been the play generally preferred in the translations and productions of that time” (Resende 2013). British writer Mal Peet, author of Exposure, winner of The Guardian’s Children’s Fiction Prize, decided to set his updated version of Othello in a fictitious South American country obsessed with soccer (similar to his own country), but primarily because “it’s an exclusively marital story,” giving a footballer and a celebrity a part in a modern Shakespearean retelling (Flood 2009). Yet Peet, while not sidestepping the play’s original concerns of race, seems equally if not more interested in class, in particular how celebrity and poverty can intertwine in unforeseen ways. Exposure begins by describing Bush, “the boy with all the dreadlocks” (Peet 2009: 3), one of the street kids who hustles outside the office building belonging to La Nación, the leading independent newspaper of an unnamed South American country. Bush had two lines of business: washing windshields and running errands, particularly for employees of the newspaper. It was Paul Faustino, the paper’s senior sportswriter, who had befriended Bush, remarking: “The Rasta hair; the longish Spanish face, the wide Indian cheekbones, the African coloring, the narrow nose from God knows where – Arabia, maybe – the good teeth. Some flecks of green in the eyes” (15). Bush was an amalgamation of many places, one of the hybrid homeless, as global as he was local. Bush lived in “a lean-to, a ramshackle tumbledown shed” (26) with his sister Bianca and his girlfriend, Felicia, in a courtyard behind a bar called La Presna. La Presna was owned by Fidel and his wife Nina, who kept watch over the trio as best they could, given the 374

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risk if discovered – the Child Protection Order in the country made it a criminal act to provide food, shelter, and clothing to these “feral kids” “on the grounds that it ‘encouraged homelessness and destitution’ ” (27). Theirs was much better living than many places in the city, particularly the slums that the government had called a “zemo (a zone of special economic measures)” (Peet 2009: 277). Many street kids lived in the shadows, sometimes in alleyways where temporary encampments had been built: two upturned wooden pallets with a ragged tarpaulin for a roof, a chained-up handcart walled around with cardboard. Small territories had been established: a square yard or two of blanket or matting; sheets of cardboard in the lee of the big wheeled rubbish bins. 48 Paul Faustino often wondered about how and where Bush lived, knowing that street kids “often formed themselves into small clans, established territories, protected each other, operated a harsh kind of communism whereby they shared whatever they could steal or scavenge” (175). The Child Protection Order, however, was the brainchild of a nefarious conservative government that had its eye on the upcoming elections, reasoning that it was best to keep these street kids out of sight – the party’s slogan was, after all, “A Cleaner Tomorrow” (Peet 2009: 173). Fidel told Bush, They want to say,‘Hey, look how our Safer Streets Campaign and our Child Protection Order and so on have cleaned the city up, so vote us in again.’ Forgetting to mention it’s their damned economic policies is what forced kids to hustle and pull tricks on the street in the first place. 127 To clean up the streets, the government enlisted “the feared Child Protection Force – otherwise known as the Rataneros, or Ratcatchers” (19). Gallego, the Minister of Internal Security, derisively speaks of these kids as “the great unwashed” and the “common herd” and worries that they might be able to vote. Rumors are circulating that street kids are disappearing before the election, even a girl who helped organize a “poverty demo” (249). Fidel, worried about Bush, Bianca, and Felicia, questioned what happens to the kids they take off the street, many of whom were taken to the State Centers for Rehabilitation, Education, and Work (otherwise known as SCREWs). Fidel doesn’t believe this state propaganda, especially after he has heard from reliable sources that girls’ bodies are being found in bags that were dumped in landfills around the city. There is a disparity of wealth in the country, and the novel explores “how the other half lives” (Peet 2009: 344) as well, before merging these two worlds mid-way through the book. The poverty of the street kids is juxtaposed with the opulent wealth and glamorous lifestyle of the country’s best striker and national captain, Otello, and his celebrity wife, the pop singer Desmerelda. When Otello moves south to the capital to play for the team Rialto, it causes a stir in the country: as Faustino writes in the paper, “Born in the North, and famously proud of his African heritage, Otello has done much to silence (in stadiums, at least) the racist jeers directed at black northerners” (Peet 2009: 8). Otello is “concerned for the poor, for damaged kids” (254); his charity work, which includes food banks and soccer academies in the slums, “has given him a status, a respect, way beyond the usual scope of soccer stars” (8). While the novel does not shy away from engaging with the issue of race, it juxtaposes race with economics and class in a way not evident in the source text. 375

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Members of the New Conservative government were also on the Rialto Board of Directors (as one player noted, “Soccer is politics in this country” (Peet 2009: 107). Senator Nestor Brabanta, father to Desmerelda, was also on the Rialto Board, and he threw a welcome party for Otello with the “cream of society” (62) – wealthy and white – at his mansion. Desmerelda’s whiteness is emphasized: “Presumably the hair – all carefully tumbled swirls the color of honey – and the light skin are inherited from her American mother” (64). When she meets Otello for the first time at the party, she asks him about “the social implications of his move to the South,” and soon enough, they have become smitten with one another and married, to the despair of her father, whose racism is evident when he speaks about how his daughter would “marry this, this nigger, two weeks after meeting him” (92). Yet this sensational marriage has taken a hold on the country; as Fidel says, “celebrity as the opiate of the masses” (Peet 2009: 222). First, the couple, at the behest of Otello’s agent, Diego, does an erotic and rather disturbing print advertisement for the woman’s razor Elegante. Later, the top PR company of their country, called Shakespeare, is angling to get the couple, “the hottest item in the country” (142), on board to promote them as modern symbols of married love so they would become “iconic” (148). Diego, Iago-like in his spite, who works so hard to undermine his client, waits for “the public to sicken of this unvaried diet of love and sweetness and fidelity. For the poor to realize how stupid it is to idolize the rich” (150). He wants to bring Dezi and Otello down, “to relish the numb shock of the people in the streets” because he finds it pathetic that the public’s heroes are celebrities (226). Diego’s plan to bring about their fall begins by telling Dezi, “the two of you dictate street fashion in this country” (232). He wants to produce “funky, sportswear-slash-streetwear” that appeals to the masses (232), and the advertising campaign will use “real kids. Not squeaky-clean little models from some agency. Real kids, off the street. Kids with attitude. That other kids can relate to” (235). The clothing line, called Paff!, was designed to “assert that [Otello] belongs to all of us, to kids especially” (266). The words on the jerseys are not in Spanish but rather in “Arabic, English, Chinese, French,” meant to internationalize Otello, to expand his reach in more global terms. Yet “fashion becomes an extra ingredient in the spicy stew of celebrity and politics and crime that feeds the sharks” (373). The company hired to do the photography needed a way in to get street kids to be models for this clothing line launch, and they enlisted a former gang member to help round up the kids. One of those kids was Bush’s fourteen-year-old sister, Bianca, who “stands out. . . . She’s very beautiful. And when that’s not a blessing, it’s a curse” (Peet 2009: 133), for Bianca is said to see the world full of promises and isn’t afraid of anything (202). The gang members make sure Bianca boards the bus for the photo shoot, and she is ecstatic, often posing as she has seen Desmerelda Brabanta do in the magazine pictures she has hanging on her shack’s walls. Yet soon after the photo shoot, Bianca goes missing. Paul Faustino finds this out from Bush, and he enlists the help of a police captain and his partner, realizing that he was wading into “a world whose default settings were uncertainty, vulnerability, and dread” (330). Bianca had been strangled to death, found in an alleyway still wearing the clothing they let her take home from the photo shoot. It is Diego who murders Bianca, takes pictures of her dead body, uploads them to Otello’s computer, and attempts (but fails) to frame him. The novel ends with Otello and Desmerelda separated; his death is equated with playing soccer in the United States, and Desmerelda lives with their child at her estate, where Bush and Felicia are employed. Yet their seeming escape from the slums comes at a price; as Fidel tells Faustino, “There are no solutions for kids like Bush. For them, solutions are undreamed-of luxuries” (Peet 2009: 368). Exposure moves beyond race to explore the underbelly of a country where politics and celebrity bring class and economics to the forefront. Both of the novels discussed here are situated in the Global South, with authors living outside the places they write 376

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about, tackling questions of sexuality or class and remaking the ways in which we might read Othello by de-emphasizing race.

References Bate, Jonathan. 2008. The Genius of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carlson, Andrew. 2016. “Not Just Black and White: ‘Othello’ in America.” American Theatre. 27 Dec. Accessed 17 Jun. 2018, https:www.americantheatre.org/2016/12/27/not-just-black-and-whiteothello-in-america. Cartelli, Thomas. 1999. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. London and New York: Routledge. Chevalier, Tracy. 2017. New Boy. London and New York: Hogarth. Clarke, Mary Cowden. 1851. The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. New York: G.P. Putnam. De Mel, Neloufer. 2001. Women and the Nation’s Narrative: Gender and Nationalism in Twentieth Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Flood, Alison. 2009. “Mal Peet on Winning the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize.” The Guardian. 10 Oct. Accessed 29 Apr., www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/10/mal-peet-exposure-faustino-fiction. Hulbert, Jennifer, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., and Robert L. York. 2006. “Introduction.” In Shakespeare and Youth Culture. Eds. Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., and Robert L. York. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 1–41. Lamb, Charles, and Mary. 1807. Tales from Shakespeare. London: Printed for Thomas Hodgkins. Lanier, Douglas. 2002. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lester, Julius. 1995. Othello: A Novel. New York: Scholastic. Mason, Katherine. 2008.“Creating a Space for YAL with LGBT Content in Our Personal Reading: Creating a Place for LGBT Students in Our Classrooms.” The ALAN Review 35.3: 55–61. Nesbit, Edith. 1897. The Children’s Shakespeare. Philadelphia: Henry Altemus Company. Peet, Mal. 2009. Exposure. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press. Perera, Priyangwada. 2015. “Holy Cross Gampaha Bags Shakespeare Challenge Trophy.” Ceylon Today. 15 Oct. Accessed 11 Mar. 2018, http://sandbox.ceylontoday.lk/18-106497-news-detail-holy-crossgampaha-bags-shakespeare-challenge-trophy.html. Prince, Katherine. 2008. Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals. New York: Routledge. Resende, Aimara da Cunha. 2013.“Shakespeare in Latin America.” MIT Global Shakespeares. 25 Jul. Accessed 13 Jul. 2018, http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/blog/2013/07/25/shakespeare-in-latin-america/. Selvadurai, Shyam. 2005. Swimming in the Monsoon Sea. Toronto: Tundra Books. “Shyam Selvadurai – Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens.” n.d. YouTube. 19 Oct. Accessed 19 Oct. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XFDH2VCdhA. Trivedi, Poonam, and Minami Ryuta, eds. 2010. Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia. New York and London: Routledge. Viswanathan, Guari. 2015. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Wickramsinghe, Nira. 2006. Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

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33 RESISTING HISTORY AND ATONING FOR RACIAL PRIVILEGE Shakespeare’s Henriad in HBO’s The Wire L. Monique Pittman History is not a substitute for social praxis, but its fragile witness and necessary critique. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History

Prologue: history’s shards The writing of history both reveals and conceals, speaks and silences. Historiography transforms the concrete and the ephemeral evidences of an always-already vanished past into consumable narrative. In so doing, its stories render visible, audible, and enduring certain agents of sociocultural formation whilst excluding other persons and participant-groups from the grave matter of history’s meaningfulness. For Michel de Certeau, historiography mediates the “real” of a past through the “unreal” of discourse, in the process constructing a narrative that papers over the essential otherness of its elusive subject matter and denies its methodological fragility (de Certeau 1988: xxvii). Through methods that exclude and demarcate, historiography represses certain stories in favor of others, particularly when mobilized to underprop specific forms of political authority. Although historiography establishes “intelligible” lines of narration through opposition to dominated groups, de Certeau insists those voices of the excluded return: But whatever this new understanding of the past holds to be irrelevant – shards created by the selection of materials, remainders left aside by an explication – comes back, despite everything, on the edges of discourse or in its rifts and crannies. de Certeau 1988: 4 As a result, historiography fails to conceal entirely both its deliberate constructedness and attendant sins of omission. The “return of the repressed” (4) exposes the curated nature of history’s authority and articulates those previously ignored and unwritten stories. As a reflection both of what a society wishes to be and fears it is, historiography can provoke acts of painful self-reflection, “forcing a society to confess, ‘I am other than what I would wish to be, and I am determined by what I deny’ ” (de Certeau 1988: 46). In other words, though 378

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history serves a self-definitional function for a dominant group, its gaps, fissures, shards, and denials inevitably prompt disruptive questions. These interrogations reveal that the self-narration of a dominant class silences other histories and severely circumscribes the agential capacities of marginalized others. Thus, even as historiography serves hegemonic powers, its excesses and remainders trouble monolithic assertion: shards remain after the refining and serve as a “fragile witness and necessary critique” of social praxis (de Certeau 1988: 48). Recognizing those shards and hearing voices of dissent in the historical and cultural record fulfill an ethical duty by which the dominant or privileged class can begin to atone for being “other than what I would wish to be.” The ten plays we know as “history plays” by William Shakespeare instantiate the range of contradictions and uncontainable excesses de Certeau identifies as endemic to the historiographic enterprise. In these works, the real medieval historical event transforms at the hand of the playwright and through the bodies of actors; in the case of every play, the “shards” of an unofficial history disrupt the uniformity of a narrated past.

Recognizing Shakespeare in history’s shards In film and television reviews, “Shakespearean” often functions as an adjectival mechanism of elevation, a descriptor choice that shorthands quality. That intensifier also frequently telegraphs the painful complexity of human tragedy. However, despite the scale of suffering the modifying epithet invokes, the “Shakespearean” label may be soon uttered and all too soon forgotten. More troubling is the sad fact that frequently “Shakespearean” codes a cultural value wedded exclusively to whiteness, barring other multiethnic identities from tragic gravitas. Ayanna Thompson describes this as “the unspoken back-story to Bardolatry,” that “Shakespeare represents the epitome of Western culture because he represents the exclusivity of white culture” (2011: 37). Since scholars now conceive of the Shakespearean as diffuse, rhizomatic cultural manifestations, that casual and too often toxic label should be pushed further and its aptness tested against specific aspects of language, plotting, and film technique in so-called “Shakespearean” movies or television series. Because the rhizomatic construct directs attention to the Shakespearean presence in unexpected and provocative locations, its hermeneutic can widen productively the ethnic reach of canonical texts. For example, such a method illuminates a trace of Shakespearean quoting and plotting in HBO’s acclaimed series The Wire (2002–2008). Repeatedly characterized as “Shakespearean,” The Wire actually cites passages and echoes plotting from Shakespeare’s I Henry IV (1596/97) and II Henry IV (1598), layering millennial Baltimore’s ethnic and class trauma onto the history plays’ compulsive troubling of master narrative.1 Much as the history plays question in a proto-Certeauvian fashion whose stories matter, what constitutes history, and who controls its narration, so The Wire deploys analogues of Prince Hal and Falstaff to enact substitutions and focal reorientations that force viewers to confront similar questions about contemporary Baltimore and the stories we choose to validate. Through the visual lexicon of the camera, the series combines plot and character echoes with cinematographic techniques that vex narrative authority in order to insist that the audience recognize an alternate history centered on the urban class. Reading The Wire as a rhizome of the Henriad prises loose from their hegemonic foundations those plays central to conceptions of white authority, insists on the tragedy of Baltimore’s African American urban class, and demands ethical action on the part of the audience now bearing witness to history’s shards. Douglas Lanier has proposed Shakespearean rhizomatics as a methodological corrective to the fidelity cul-de-sac in adaptative and appropriative studies. The rhizome’s non-hierarchical interconnectivity prompts Lanier to formulate new interpretive questions: “Not, ‘Should we count this as Shakespearean?’ but rather, ‘In what ways does attributing the label ‘Shakespearean’ 379

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to this work change the cultural formation that goes by the name ‘Shakespeare’?” (2014: 33). Lanier’s work expands productively the interpretive field of Shakespeare studies, laying groundwork for criticism mindful of how our methods and object of study constrain or expand global human value. His theoretical framing thus justifies lingering a bit longer over the critics’ “Shakespearean” label. Furthermore, Christy Desmet’s searching reassessment of appropriation even more directly highlights the ethic of “recognizing” Shakespeare through dialogic transactions: “recognition, in turn, is an ethical gesture rooted in both technical fidelity and fealty, or responsibility to and for another, either text or person” (2014: 41). Like Diana E. Henderson’s “collaborations with the past” (2006: 8), Desmet’s dialogic frame acknowledges the pressure exerted by performance and audience on an artwork: “Appropriation achieves its ethical import, furthermore, through the tension between taking and giving that characterizes dialogic interactions. The value of appropriations lies in showing us a different connection, a previously unacknowledged resemblance, between two texts or persons” (Desmet 2014: 55). In the case of The Wire, recognizing Shakespeare in the television series’s language and narrative arc becomes an act not only of interpretive responsibility but also of social obligation on the part of the HBO audience. Forced to acknowledge resemblances between an archetypal narrative of white male coming of age (Prince Hal) and the experience of black Americans in Baltimore’s inner city, a privileged audience participates in recuperative acts that can begin to atone for how Shakespearean history, even when it contains disruptive shards of the past, has still been employed to perpetuate cultural racism and profound inequities.

Prince Hal and Falstaff on the Baltimore corners The Wire takes as its subject matter the social and moral diseases of a fractured and fading postindustrial Baltimore. Though The Wire first aired in 2002, its portrayal of Rust Belt America and the casualties of the War on Drugs remains tragically relevant today. That so many news agencies rushed to interview the show’s creator, David Simon, in the aftermath of the Freddie Gray death in police custody (19 April 2015) demonstrates, sadly, how little has changed about Baltimore, Maryland in the intervening years since the show’s debut.2 Critical evaluations of The Wire rely upon several recurring literary comparisons – the nineteenth-century novel, postmodern fiction, and the drama of William Shakespeare. Not surprisingly, the reference to the Bard of Avon forms an adjectival enhancement: “The series appears to eschew any episodebased resolutions . . . preferring instead to offer larger narratives, juggling a Shakespearian cast of dozens of individuals” (Marshall and Potter 2009: 9), or as Meghan O’Rourke gushes in an interview with Simon: “It reminded me of Shakespearean drama for the way that even the villains are humanized” (Simon 2006). Simon himself in several interviews deliberately resists the “Shakespearean” label as illustrated by an exchange with Nick Hornby: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. . . . We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct – the Greeks – lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. Simon 2007 For Simon, the deterministic structures of Greek drama match better his stated subject matter – the individual’s brutalization by the institutions of capitalism. While for Simon Shakespeare may not provide the broad paradigm governing the show’s understanding of human agency (though the degree of human agency predicated in any given Shakespeare text should be a debatable 380

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point), the history plays centered on Prince Hal’s coming of age and friendship with Falstaff do find echoes and references in the plotting of the series.3 Furthermore, those echoes access Simon’s own obsessive concern with the limits of human self-determination and contextualize within a broader historical and literary tradition the show’s urgent social commentary. Some years prior to The Wire, Simon, in fact, had found the history plays a useful lens through which to view the War on Drugs. Simon’s 1992 article for The Baltimore Sun comparing Linwood Rudolph Williams to Richard III may provide a model for understanding how Shakespeare functions in The Wire.4 Throughout the article, Simon juxtaposes plot details, characters, and passages from Shakespeare’s morality play about tyranny with elements from the saga of Williams’s reign as one-time drug lord in Baltimore. While Simon appears absorbed by the informing parallels to be drawn between the two figures, ultimately, his column drives towards differentiation and distinction rather than similitude – the complete absence of a Richmond to restore civil order in Baltimore. Simon’s smoldering anger over the drug war’s failed tactics cries out, In our world, the war that rages is not between different royal factions, but among ourselves. For money and not for crown, the bodies still fall in West Baltimore, the medic sirens still wail, and the $10 capsule remains the cornerstone of our secret economy. Simon 1992 Simon closes his column with an annotated passage from Shakespeare: “ ‘If you do sweat to put a tyrant down,’ Richmond tells his soldiers on the battle’s eve, ‘you sleep in peace, the tyrant being slain.’ But not here. Not now.” In this instance, Simon relies on Shakespeare to draw a sharp line between the justice imagined by play’s end and the collapse of his own adopted city. Simon’s appropriation of Shakespeare expands the poet’s function in contemporary culture by asserting that the same grandeur of scale and pathos found in Shakespeare likewise breathes in the narratives of the urban shadow-class even when the same endings cannot be achieved and, perhaps, precisely because those resolutions remain out of reach. That the history plays offer a literary reference point for the power structures of The Wire becomes explicitly apparent in Season Three when police investigator Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) delivers a slant quotation from II Henry IV to describe a nervously pacing drug king (Russell “Stringer” Bell, played by Idris Elba): “Heavy is the head that wears the crown” (“Reformation” 2008).5 Freamon translates Shakespeare’s, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” (3.1.31), into the idiom of the surveillance squad and the street.6 But quotation turns to more extensive narrative appropriation with the inscription of a Henriad plotting arc featuring the Falstaffian character Joseph “Proposition Joe” Stewart (Robert F. Chew) as both advisor to and victim of a young drug king, Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector), who functions as a type of Prince Hal to the portly and ease-loving Prop Joe. While Prop Joe assumes he controls the drug world narrative, Marlo, like Shakespeare’s Hal, rejects the training of his would-be mentor to establish a deadly counter-narrative. Throughout The Wire’s plotting of Prop Joe and Marlo Stanfield, camera techniques silently remind viewers of the tenuous power-sharing between these two figures and of the vexed question of narrative perspective. The camera’s presence consistently directs viewers to the constructedness of stories and the contrast in multiple viewpoints. This technique translates the reorientations of perspective repeatedly taking place in Shakespeare’s Henriad to the vocabulary of film.7 From his first appearance in Season One, Robert F. Chew’s Proposition Joe is marked by the physical expansiveness long a central feature of Falstaffian characterization: “A goodly portly man, i’faith, and a corpulent, of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage” 381

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(I Henry IV 2.4.422–24).8 Chew’s portrayal of Prop Joe as a clever wordsmith assured of his own wit and control of the game relies on a stolid immobility perhaps a result of his formidable size; shots record Joe standing on occasion but more frequently sitting and holding court much as Falstaff does at the Boar’s Head Tavern. Rather than fight for turf, Joe advocates for and presides over a corporate-style drug co-op that meets regularly and debates assignment of territory in a local hotel conference room. When not ruling the co-op, Joe controls his East Baltimore drug empire from the counter of his electronics repair storefront identified in an exterior shot as “John’s TV,” a mismatch for its proprietor’s name “Joseph” but another tantalizingly sidewaysShakespearean reference to old “Sir John.” Joe mentors his Prince Hal, Marlo, in the finer points of drug network management and adopts a paternal relational framework for his interactions with Marlo. Habitually, Joe refers to Marlo as “son,” even when it appears Marlo resists the hierarchy of experience, knowledge, and power implied by such an epithet. Much as Falstaff should take warning from the fact that Hal allows him only thirty-six lines to play the father-king to a wayward son-Hal in I Henry IV (2.4), so the wily Joe should recognize the threat Marlo embodies, a young man coolly emotionless at core who forms no lasting alliances or bonds. The camera’s treatment of Joe throughout his final two episodes establishes a pattern of oblique approach that raises the question of narrative control and power. In “Not for Attribution” (2008), Joe and Marlo seated opposite one another first can be seen reflected in a shard of broken glass atop a counter littered with the detritus of small appliances. The camera gently dollies back from the reflected image and gradually pans left to view the colloquy from over Joe’s shoulder. While such a move seems to locate narrative agency in Joe from whose perspective we view Marlo and his henchman Chris Partlow (Gbenga Akinnagbe), the initial indirect approach unsettles the security of Joe’s position. Furthermore, the series repeatedly utilizes the retreating camera as a ritual of elegiac farewell to characters and places exiting from the storyline. A subsequent scene of the same episode continues to utilize camera proximity and position to stress the eroding primacy of Joe as mentor-father to Marlo. For much of an exchange about money laundering, the camera views the figures at a distance – first through a doorway and then through a series of interior windows, which act as foreground qualifiers diminishing viewer direct access.9 Such an angle mimics the detached habits of Marlo and disrupts a scene in which Joe should be easily in charge as he schools the young man. But, the camera knows, as Joe does not, that Marlo will not require his services long. Later in the episode, an oblivious Joe advises Marlo against violence: “I’d let sleeping dogs lie, son.” Marlo glibly replies, “I know you would, Joe. You smart like that” and points to his head, “but me . . . anyway. . . .” Marlo’s unfinished reply cloaks steely resistance in flattery and an amiable shrug, the kind of double-talk reminiscent of a Prince Hal who only half-jokes, “I do, I will,” in response to Falstaff ’s plea, “banish not him thy Harry’s company – banish plump Jack, and banish all the world” (I Henry IV 2.4.478–81). As a final predictor of how narrative control will soon shift, the last scene depicting Joe and Marlo in this episode begins by viewing the pair over Marlo’s silhouetted shoulder and from his perspective. When Joe meets his end, the camera once again reveals him obliquely reflected in a mirror (“Transitions” 2008). Marlo enters wearing a black shirt screen-printed with the words “Royal Addiction,” silently referencing the monarchal metaphors spinning throughout the plot arc.10 Recognizing the inevitable too late, Joe argues for his life: “But you, I treated you like a son.” However, Marlo’s reply, “I wasn’t made to play the son,” suggests the ways in which Joe has misread the power dynamics of the relationship from the start and that the paternal tack will not move Marlo. Furthermore, Marlo’s use of the term “play” signals a self-awareness about the performative and temporal nature of his relationship to Prop Joe. In the sleight of hand characteristic of The Wire, another narrative perspective soon diminishes the significance of Marlo’s ascendancy and, more importantly, instantiates why the stories 382

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of Baltimore’s corners too often go unheard. The whole unsettling of narrative perspective in this plot arc culminates in what happens when Joe’s death becomes history. Though Marlo gloats to his henchman Chris, “Do it feel like a crown on your head right now? Do it? ‘Cause that’s what I’m wearin’ on my head,” the episode reminds viewers that Marlo’s usurpation of Joe’s co-op throne may not rate in other Baltimorean quarters (“React Quotes” 2008). Indeed, at The Baltimore Sun, a reporter catalogues for her editor the previous night’s police report, which includes two deaths: “Drug-relateds were one Joseph Stewart, found in his dining room, and one Nathaniel Manns, found in an alley garage.” The editor brusquely demands, “A couple graphs on each,” and moves on to more pressing news. While Joe’s death facilitates Marlo’s fantasy of narrative mastery, the newspaper’s casual dismissal reminds viewers of how little such lives and deaths matter. Indeed, Joe’s death will literally occupy the margins of the newspaper before being dismissed as another too-easy drug war casualty. Simon’s The Wire seeks to redress this problem by wrenching these shards of history from the throwaway edges.

Recognition as atonement While critical consensus would most likely agree that The Wire does not present an intentional performance of the Henriad, its gesture towards Shakespeare and appropriations of the history play dynamics to a filmed medium do, in fact, contribute to the process by which we redefine Shakespeare in popular culture. Furthermore, by placing the language and plotting of Shakespeare in the context of a predominantly African American Baltimore, The Wire transforms the author from a historiographic mouthpiece of hegemony into a voice of the margins, one critical of the establishment for which Shakespeare has long provided ideological underpropping. The series insists in important ways that the plotlines and themes of Shakespeare gain new and pressing social relevance when lodged in the narratives of the disenfranchised. At just this moment, when public attention focuses on the peril of being black in America, applying Shakespearean plotting to the stories of those first harmed by the creeping decay of America’s economic imperialism and persistent institutional racism redeems, however briefly, the Shakespearean canon from complicity with hegemony. This is not to suggest that the stories of black America need the salvific touch of a white Shakespeare – that somehow the sufferings of Baltimoreans gain significance because they have been glossed by Shakespeare – but rather that the oppressive use to which white artistic culture has been put can be re-framed in an act of atonement. The extensive utility of Shakespeare as instrument of hegemonic power instantiates the “cultural racism” defined by Derald Wing Sue as “the individual and institutional expression of the superiority of one group’s cultural heritage over another group’s (arts, crafts, language, traditions, beliefs, and values) and its imposition on racial/ethnic minority groups” (2016: 25). Although the “Shakespearean” has previously functioned as a marker of status differentiation, it can, in the case of The Wire, operate as a nostra culpa, one that invites a white audience in particular to apologize for such cultural impositions and unearned privileges while offering to serve as allies for social change.11 Indeed, much of The Wire reminds its audience of racial and economic privileges denied a wide range of the series’ characters.12 I would contend that the Shakespearean in The Wire does not signal a “flaw” or inadequacy in the stories of Baltimore or a need for a white savior but rather that the Shakespearean echoes may target an audience of socio-economic means and influence, and, in many cases, of white privilege, an audience to be cultivated as allies. Thus, the Shakespearean presence in The Wire constitutes a move to expand the audience who hears the stories to which Simon lends voice. Recently, Ian Smith (2016: 111–12) has pointed out the need for just such allies to tell responsibly the stories of those with less access to power and to do so in ways that involve 383

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careful listening, critical self-reflection, and humility – the Certeauvian admission, “I am other than what I would wish to be.” The creators of The Wire remain keenly aware of the danger inherent in that task – that representing the underclass from a position of privilege can devolve into a troubling aestheticization of suffering. Simon directly confronts such tendencies in an episode of Season Five entitled, “The Dickensian Aspect” (2008).13 In a season-long reflection on the state of investigative journalism, Simon depicts The Baltimore Sun newspaper editors as so consumed by their desire for Pulitzer Prize accolades that they willfully disregard warnings about the truthfulness of their lead reporter investigating and embellishing a fabricated serial killer case. As traction for the story increases, the newspaper executive editor, James Whiting (Sam Freed), shifts resources to the reporter Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy) and explains to his subordinate city desk editor, Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson), “Our coverage should reflect the Dickensian aspect of the homeless. The human element.” The season’s Baltimore Sun plotline highlights the use-value too often made of human anguish transformed into printed words and images – literary melodrama designed to trigger an affective response in readers and generate economic gain for the paper and fame for the reporter. Simon’s minute examination of social networks and institutional structures may look “Dickensian,” but in his open-ended, mostly unsentimental conclusions about injustice and economic disequilibrium, the series creator (who sneers at such literary labels) seeks to provoke ethical action on the part of his viewers. Amanda Ann Klein notes: “play with melodramatic conventions is employed in The Wire to subvert the passive, satisfied viewing position typically established by the primetime social melodrama. In its place the series constructs an active, socially engaged viewer” (2009: 188). The degree to which viewership transforms into action remains uncertain. In a detailed analysis of posts to the HBO online forum devoted to The Wire, Kathleen LeBesco tests claims made about audience response to the series. Her assessment of reader reactions to the death of Omar Little (Michael K. Williams) leads her to conclude that the portrait of such a character “motivates reflections on and action in the realm of social justice” (LeBesco 2009: 220). She catalogues posters who urge that outrage be channelled productively into careful deliberation at the ballot box (226). Though the fan posts LeBesco examines differ vehemently about the message, aesthetics, and tactics of The Wire, she concludes, “the series functions effectively as a consciousness-raiser about the social, political and economic plight of individuals constrained by corrupt, failing institutions” (228).14 Certainly, passivity in the face of overwhelming human suffering and the intransigence of culpable institutional structures may threaten the efficacy of The Wire as a catalyst for social change. Nonetheless, as Blake D. Ethridge asserts, “What is important for Simon is the representation of the problem and the provocation of the audience. . . . Simon wants . . . the anger of the show to influence the audience” (2008: 155). One aspect of that representation, a literariness translated by some readers as Dickensian and by others as Shakespearean, redresses previous failures of history to tell the stories of the underclass and to expose the privileges that accrue to many of the series’ viewers. Indeed, by appropriating echoes of Shakespearean history, The Wire offers an orientation shift in the discourse that constitutes history, one that returns us to Desmet’s ethical act of “recognizing” Shakespeare. Her emphasis on “appropriation as reception” concludes: Appropriation thus operates not simply according to a technical standard of formal fidelity, but also according to the ethical achievement of fealty, an acceptance of responsibility for the bond that binds disparate narratives conceptually and emotionally in the face of their manifest differences. In Shakespeare sightings of all kinds, what

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matters is less what the author intended than how a connection to Shakespeare is recognized. 2014: 55 Locating the Shakespearean in The Wire directs us to the shards that remain outside authoritative history and corrects the way white cultural artifacts have reinforced racialized hierarchies. Of course, such recognitions are by no means sufficient to unwrite the past or expiate for the exclusionary deployment of Shakespearean histories – especially if unaccompanied by action – but these “sightings” can open up new dialogic encounters to ensure that those silenced stories can be told boldly, heard aright, and acted upon.

Acknowledgments Once again, I must thank the members of my research workshop at Andrews University, Karl Bailey, Vanessa Corredera, and Ante Jerončić, for nurture and provocation in equal measure. Several student assistants labored with me: Shanelle Kim, Alaryss Bosco, and Ingrid Radulescu. The participants in the Borrowers and Lenders conference, “Appropriation in the Age of Global Shakespeare,” organized by Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson, offered highly valued feedback. To all, much thanks.

Notes 1 This approach to The Wire relies upon Phyllis Rackin’s familiar discussion of self-reflexivity in the history plays (1990: 9). 2 Though notorious for its low ratings and constant vulnerability to cancellation, The Wire survived as a five-season series and now experiences a significant digital afterlife (Nilsen and Turner 2014: 6). Reporting on the final season, Robert Bianco (2008) observes, “Never a huge audience draw, peaking at about 4 million viewers [per episode], The Wire has seen its numbers dip below 1 million this season,” a drop David Zurawik (2008) calculates at 23% based on HBO-supplied numbers. In April of 2014, The Wire and much of the HBO archive became available through the Amazon Prime streaming service (Hibbard 2014). 3 A minor detail of set dressing found in the fifth season’s recreated Baltimore Sun newsroom also provides an allusive reference to the Henriad (“Transitions”). Clearly visible on one of the newsroom desks, placed where other journalists house copies of a thesaurus or dictionary, stands a copy of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1 (6th ed., 1993), coincidentally the last edition to anthologize I Henry IV. 4 Margaret Talbot’s profile of Simon for The New Yorker explains that his initial attraction to the newspaper industry resulted, in part, from the example set by charismatic family friend, Irving Spiegel, a New York journalist who Simon recalls reciting “Shakespeare in Yiddish” (2007: 159). 5 Elba brings another Shakespearean intertext to bear on his performance as he played Achilles in Troilus and Cressida (New York, 2001), directed by Sir Peter Hall (Alvarez 2009: 266). All quotations from The Wire are author transcriptions. 6 All references to II Henry IV are to the Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (1974b). Further references will be included in the body of the text. In “Transitions,” Freamon once again makes a passing Shakespearean reference, remembering the partner of his “salad days” in the force. 7 Much admirable scholarship explores the notably self-reflexive quality of Shakespearean history. See, for example, Walsh (2009) and Karremann (2015). 8 All references to I Henry IV are to the Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Shakespeare 1974a). Further references will be included in the body of the text. Simon reveals familiarity with the alignment between corpulence and Falstaff in his career-making, non-fiction account of Baltimore police work, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets; in his true-life crime narrative, Simon compares the police detective, Terrence Patrick McLarney, to Falstaff both for reasons of his 230-pound girth and his function as investigative “comedic chorus” (1991: 143–44).

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L. Monique Pittman 9 In total, 40% of the scene is filmed in long shot with the camera placed outside the interior windows for 23% of the scene. 10 In an example of the multiple narrative lines at work, “Royal Addiction” is the name of Jamie Hector’s line of urban attire launched in 2006–2007. Here the actor playing Marlo advertises his line of clothing at the same time the crown on the shirt signifies his character’s persistent obsession with absolute rule. 11 Launched in 1972, HBO has long courted auteur media creators (like Simon) to provide quality programming characterized by a tendency to defy generic conventions and institutional authority. As has been frequently observed, however, this anti-establishment creative ethos transmits to an elite, subscription-only audience (see Anderson (2008); Pittman (2011); Santo (2008) for further discussion). Though the exact make-up of an HBO subscription audience remains difficult to describe in detail, Christopher Anderson contends that certain assumptions can be made about “viewers of privileged economic circumstances” and “of an educated upper-middle class,” a substantial number of whom must be heirs to the forms of unearned white privilege denied the characters of The Wire (2008: 34). 12 In fact, by so minutely observing the systemic mechanisms of institutional racism, The Wire endeavors to illuminate the invisible privileges associated with whiteness in America: “White skin privilege is a birthright, a set of advantages one receives simply by being born with features that society values especially highly” (Dalton 2016: 18). 13 Thanks to Stephen Buhler, who pointed out this connection at the Borrowers and Lenders conference “Appropriation in the Age of Global Shakespeare.” 14 Though most critical responses to Simon’s series applaud its social provocations, some pinpoint limits in the storytelling – particularly a problematic depiction of women and African American mothers (see Ault (2012) and Strolovitch and Murakawa (2015)). Obviously, Simon’s social and political agenda on The Wire must be read in light of these critiques of his persistent blind spots; he should never be elevated as an infallible Oracle of the Oppressed, though we can rightly acknowledge that the achievement of The Wire has few comparables.

References Alvarez, Rafael. 2009. The Wire: Truth Be Told. New York: Grove Press. Anderson, Christopher. 2008. “Producing an Aristocracy of Culture in American Television.” In The Essential HBO Reader. Eds. Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 23–41. Ault, Elizabeth. 2012. “ ‘You can Help Yourself/But Don’t Take Too Much’: African American Motherhood on The Wire.” Television and New Media 14.5: 386–401. Bianco, Robert. 2008. “Too few were plugged in, but HBO’s The Wire was electric.” USA Today, Mar. 5. Accessed 7 May 2018. https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2008-03-05-the-wire_N.htm. Dalton, Harlon. 2016. “Failing to See.” In White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. Ed. Paula S. Rothenberg. 5th ed. New York: Worth Publishers. 15–18. de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press. Desmet, Christy. 2014. “Recognizing Shakespeare, Rethinking Fidelity: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Appropriation.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 41–57. Ethridge, Blake D. 2008. “Baltimore on The Wire: The Tragic Moralism of David Simon.” In It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era. Eds. Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley. New York: Routledge. 152–64. Henderson, Diana E. 2006. Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hibberd, James. 2014. “HBO Makes Huge Amazon Prime Deal: See Which Shows are Going Online.” Entertainment Weekly, 23 Apr. Accessed 7 May 2018, https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/television/ news/2008-03-05-the-wire_N.htm. Karremann, Isabel. 2015. The Drama of Memory in Shakespeare’s History Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klein, Amanda Ann. 2009. “ ‘The Dickensian Aspect’: Melodrama, Viewer Engagement, and the Socially Conscious Text.” In The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television. Eds. Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall. New York: Continuum. 177–89. Lanier, Douglas. 2014.“Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 21–40.

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History and atoning for racial privilege LeBesco, Kathleen. 2009. “ ‘Gots to Get Got’: Social Justice and Audience Response to Omar Little.” In The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television. Eds. Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall. New York: Continuum. 217–32. Marshall, C.W., and Tiffany Potter. 2009. “ ‘I am the American Dream’: Modern Urban Tragedy and the Borders of Fiction.” In The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television. Eds. Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall. New York: Continuum. 1–14. Nilsen, Sarah, and Sarah E. Turner. 2014. “Introduction.” In The Colorblind Screen: Television in Post-Racial America. Eds. Sarah Nilsen and Sarah E. Turner. New York: New York University Press. 1–14. “Not For Attribution.” 2008. The Wire: The Complete Series. Dirs. Joy Kecken and Scott Kecken. Writ. Chris Collins. Perf. Robert F. Chew and Jamie Hector. HBO Home Entertainment. DVD. Pittman, L. Monique. 2011. Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Adaptation. New York: Peter Lang. Rackin, Phyllis. 1990. Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. “React Quotes.” 2008. The Wire: The Complete Series. Dir. Agnieszka Holland. Writ. David Simon and David Mills. Perfs. Gbenga Akinnagbe and Jamie Hector. HBO Home Entertainment. DVD. “Reformation.” 2008. The Wire: The Complete Series. Dir. Christine Moore. Writ. Ed Burns. Perf. Dominic West, Idris Elba, and Clarke Peters. HBO Home Entertainment. DVD. Santo, Avi. 2008. “Para-television and Discourses of Distinction: The Culture of Production at HBO.” In It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era. Eds. Marc Leverette, Brian Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley. New York: Routledge. 19–45. Shakespeare, William. 1974a. I Henry IV. The Riverside Shakespeare. Eds. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 847–85. ———. 1974b. II Henry IV. The Riverside Shakespeare. Eds. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 886–929. Simon, David. 1991. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. New York: Henry Holt. Simon, David. 1992. “The Tragedy of Richard III; The Tragedy of Rudy Williams.” The Baltimore Sun. 12 Jan. Accessed 7 May 2018, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1992-01-12/news/1992012086_1_richardiii-tragedy-of-richard-rudy-williams. ———. 2006. “Behind The Wire: David Simon on Where the Show Goes Next.” Interview with Meghan O’Rourke. Slate. 1 Dec. Accessed 7 May 2018, www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2006/12/behind_the_wire.html. ———. 2007. Interview with Nick Hornby. Believer, August. Accessed 7 May 2018. www.believer mag.com/issues/200708/?read=interview_simon. Smith, Ian. 2016. “We are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1: 104–24. Strolovitch, Dara Z., and Naomi Murakawa. 2015. “The Missing Women of The Wire: Gender and Limits of Verisimilitude.” In The Politics of HBO’s The Wire: Everything is Connected. Eds. Shirin Deylami and Jonathan Havercroft. New York: Routledge. 147–65. Sue, Derald Wing. 2016. “The Invisible Whiteness of Being: Whiteness, White Supremacy, White Privilege, and Racism.” In White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. Ed. Paula S. Rothenberg. 5th ed. New York: Worth Publishers. 19–28. Talbot, Margaret. 2007. “Stealing Life: The Crusader Behind ‘The Wire.’ ” The New Yorker, 22 Oct. 150–63. “The Dickensian Aspect.” 2008. The Wire: The Complete Series. Dir. Seith Mann. Writ. Ed Burns (from a story by David Simon, and Ed Burns). Perfs. Sam Freed, Tom McCarthy, Clark Johnson. HBO Home Entertainment. DVD. Thompson, Ayanna. 2011. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. New York: Oxford University Press. “Transitions.” 2008. The Wire: The Complete Series. Dir. Daniel Attias. Writ. Ed Burns. Perf. Robert F. Chew, and Jamie Hector. HBO Home Entertainment. DVD. Walsh, Brian. 2009. Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Zurawik, David. 2008. “Viewership for HBO’s The Wire Declines.” The Baltimore Sun, 24 Jan. Accessed 7 May 2018. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2008-01-24/features/0801240228_1_hbo-cumulativeaudience-cusson.

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34 INDIGENIZING SHAKESPEARE Haider and the politics of appropriation Amrita Sen

In 2014, amidst worldwide observations of the 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, including the launch of the Globe to Globe Hamlet, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider was released to eagerly awaiting audiences in India and abroad. Coming after Maqbool (2003) and Omkara (2006), Haider was Bhardwaj’s third cinematic adaptation of a Shakespearean play and, like the previous two, was aimed at both domestic and international markets.1 If the Globe’s Hamlet production went on a tour of 197 nations and 5 refugee camps with the purpose bringing the play “to as many people as possible” because “Shakespeare can entertain and speak to anyone” (Dromgoole 2014), then Bhardwaj’s Bollywood adaptation of the play with its screenings at film festivals and theatres worldwide demonstrated the persistence of a global viewership not just composed of traditional Shakespeare performances, but also of indigenous Shakespeares on stage and screen. Moreover, Haider draws not only upon Bollywood conventions, but more importantly incorporates local performative genres such as the Bhand Pather, that suggests its attentiveness both to global and regional theatrical traditions. Haider thus negotiates what might be described as the vexed politics of appropriation – if on the one hand it appears as an indigenous production, bringing to the forefront an alternative interpretation of Shakespeare’s play set against the backdrop of the Kashmir insurgency of the 1990s and including local theatrical and political developments, then on the other it risks becoming part of an appropriating machinery that co-opts subaltern cultures. Does Haider use Shakespeare to critique the political handling of Kashmir? Or does it in fact utilize Shakespeare and his elite status as a global icon to appropriate the struggles of the Kashmiris during the last insurgency crisis? In other words, does the film use Shakespeare – whose arrival in India is inextricably linked with colonialism – as a neo-colonial apparatus? Such questions become especially important at a time when the Kashmir crisis has returned to the forefront with critics such as Arundhati Roy accusing India of “colonizing itself ” (Popham 2011).2 Although the very premise of adaptation or appropriation usually brings up issues of fidelity, and the “survival” of the original text (Kidnie 2009: 1–3), Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin (2014: 2–10) remind us that ethics remains an important aspect of these debates. Within a postcolonial paradigm the ethics of Shakespeare appropriation extend not only to how the bard’s work is portrayed, but also to how appropriations are used to legitimate other artistic and political agendas. In other words, Shakespeare adaptations, especially Bollywood Shakespeares, become a new way for us to understand the relations between the centers and margins of the modern Indian state. 388

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This chapter is interested in exploring how these questions of appropriation – of both Shakespeare and Kashmir – get played out through the aesthetic choices of the film Haider. The Kashmir Valley has been contested territory since 1947, with both India and Pakistan claiming rights over it (Noorani 2011:1–28, 122–72; Ali 2011: 7–55). In 1990, soon after the rise of insurgency in Kashmir, the Indian government instituted the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which gave the military sweeping authority over the entire region (Gazala Peer 2016: n.p.; Banerjee 2004: 4404–6).3 Bhardwaj chooses this AFSPA-dominated Kashmir to stage Hamlet’s dilemma of action and being. Haider, however, despite being set in Kashmir does not employ local actors for its principal roles (Sen 2018: 88). In other words, although the film is an indigenous adaptation, it is a Bollywood Shakespeare and not a regional one. At the same time, the film includes as one of its script writers the Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer and makes use of episodes from his memoir Curfewed Night (2010). It is this tension between established Bollywood conventions and the need to bring in local Kashmiri elements that gives the film a unique sense of urgency and pushes the limits of what it might mean to be an indigenous Shakespeare. Haider comes across as highly metacinematic – terribly conscious of its status as a Bollywood movie with a ready-made global and domestic audience, and yet Bhardwaj longs to reach beyond, to incorporate rarely heard Kashmiri voices into his plot. For instance, if the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern figures of the film, Salman and Salman, double up as agents of the Indian state and owners of a Bollywood movie parlor, then Haider (Hamlet) turns to the traditional folk theatre of Bhand Pather in the mousetrap scene to prove his uncle’s treachery. If Ghazala’s (Gertrude’s) indecision symbolizes the trauma of Kashmiri women who are caught in the strife between the insurgents and the Indian State, then her dying act typecasts her as the by now familiar figure of the female terrorist in Indian films. Haider, as we shall see, tries to negotiate these twin demands of representing both mainstream Bollywood and marginalized Kashmir culminating in an ending that fundamentally transforms this re-telling of Shakespeare. In this version, it is Haider (Hamlet) who miraculously survives, leaving viewers with an ambiguous message regarding the state of terrorism and any hope of reconciliation in Kashmir.

Toward a recent aesthetics of Indian Shakespeares on stage and screen As is now well known, India’s introduction to Shakespeare was mediated by the English East India Company. The history of these earliest Shakespeare performances as well as the inclusion of the bard in colonial curriculum have all been well examined (Trivedi 2005a: 13–39; Singh 1989: 445–58; Panja 2006: 102–16). I am here more interested in Shakespearean receptions in post-independence India in theaters and on-screen. Despite belonging to two very different media traditions, films and theatres in India have been closely intertwined – each borrowing actors or artistic components from the other. Nowhere is this interdependence clearer than in Shakespeare adaptations – the earliest cinematic takes on the bard were directly influenced by the Parsi theater (Verma 2005: 269–75), and subsequent celluloid adaptations have continued to engage with local stage performances. Thus before turning to Haider it might be worthwhile to briefly reacquaint ourselves the regional theatrical scene – especially when it comes to Shakespeare adaptations since Haider, like many of its predecessors, directly engages with traditions of the Indian stage and not just with Bollywood conventions. As we shall see, on the regional vernacular stage, Shakespearean plays became a way for articulating radical political views – with the bard’s stature as a global cultural icon making it easier to evade obvious censorship. Haider in situating itself against the backdrop of Kashmiri insurgency thus seems to belong to this tradition of performing political Shakespeares on the post-independence Indian stage. This is not to suggest, however, that all indigenous 389

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Shakespeares are political or even that there is a single unified convention of performing Shakespeare in India. This plurality arises not only from individual directorial choices, but also from the heterogeneous nature of the Indian subcontinent with its different languages and art forms (Panja 2006: 103). One of these local performance traditions that is undergoing a revival is the Bhand Pather of Kashmir. The term bhand means “actor,” or even “clown.” While the bhand is a familiar figure in many parts of India, the Bhand Pather is unique to Kashmir. A nearly 2,000-year-old folk art form, the Bhand Pather “incorporates dance, Sufi music, and puppetry, in addition to dramatic dialogues” (Menon 2013: 154–83; Bajeli 2012; Emigh 2003: 61). A particularly syncretic form, it combines both Hindu and Islamic traditions in its plot and stylizations. Known for its humor and satire, this traveling theater, as Jisha Menon observes, has been used to portray the evolving social and political lives of the Kashmiris with stories or scenarios such as Angrez Pather (about British rule), Raze Pather (about kings), or Gosain Pather (about Hindu mendicants). It was M.K. Raina, however, who brought this indigenous Kashmiri performance tradition and Shakespeare together with Badshah Pather (2013a), based on King Lear. Like other Bhand story lines, Badshah Pather directly engages with the political climate of Kashmir. For instance, as Menon points out, the map used at the beginning of the play to show the division of Lear’s kingdom “offers an uncanny reminder of the cartographic power politics at the heart of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan” (2013: 173). Raina also makes some structural changes to the plot – turning Lear’s daughters into sons to accommodate the all-male cast of the traditional Bhand. Nonetheless, the deep-seated sense of loss and alienation in Shakespeare’s play becomes a way to narrate the fragmentation and isolation faced by ordinary Kashmiris. When Haider incorporates Bhand Pather elements in the Mouse-Trap scene which within the context of the film is a challenge to not only Khurram (Claudius) but also the state apparatus that he represents, it is upon this revival of the Pather tradition as its status as a political outlier that the movie depends upon for the scene to be truly effective. Bhardwaj’s film, in other words, relies on the memory of other indigenous theater performances to fully deliver its political critique. The Bhand Pather, specifically the Badshah Pather, is not, however, the only indigenous theatrical adaptation that uses Shakespeare to voice civic dissent and political crisis but is part of a longer post-independence tradition. For instance, Lokendra Arambam’s Macbeth Stage of Blood (1997), set in Manipur, yet another AFSPA territory (like Kashmir), uses Shakespeare’s play as “a metaphor of the anarchy” and violence inflicted on his native state (Trivedi 2005b: 51; 41–55). Similarly, Kishworjit uses his adaptation of Hamlet (2001) to portray the “conflict of contemporary Manipuri youth” (MIT Global Shakespeares). Even outside AFSPA rule, Shakespeare has become a means for chronicling political change. In Bengal, it was successive productions of Hamlet that helped “map a political cartography of Kolkata from the 1970s to contemporary times” (Chakravarti 2016: 41). However, unlike these stage productions, cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare – whether they be regional or Bollywood – rarely bring in overtly political issues. The films while incorporating other elements do not usually duplicate the strong political message of the stage productions. Haider, as Trivedi (2014) points out, is thus an exception when it comes to Bollywood Shakespeares, “mak[ing] a bolder, more political statement than attempted before.” Bhardwaj’s film thus starts out looking closer to the indigenous stage performances than to its celluloid counterparts. Most prominently, as we shall see, it incorporates in its central song and dance sequence, elements of the Bhand Pather. Such a move not only gestures back to folk traditions but might also be read as the filmmaker’s homage to the emergent Kashmiri Shakespeare that has recently gained global critical attention.

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Bollywood and Kashmir in Haider Bhardwaj’s film opens with Hilaal Meer (Hamlet Senior), a rural doctor deciding to operate on a known insurgent, despite his wife Ghazala’s (Gertrude’s) misgivings. The next day the Indian Army unexpectedly conducts a raid which results in their home getting blown up and Hilaal’s arrest. Once in custody, his whereabouts become a mystery, as he joins the thousands of Kashmiris who disappeared under AFSPA. It is under such trying circumstances that Haider (Hamlet) returns from Aligarh Muslim University (Bhardwaj’s Wittenberg) to try and ascertain his father’s fate. The film retains the basic elements of the Shakespearean plot – Haider’s love interest Arshia (Ophelia) dutifully goes mad and dies, Ghazala marries her brother-in-law Khurram (Claudius) shortly after Hilaal’s grave is uncovered. Arshia’s father Pervez Lone (Polonius), an army major, dies by Haider’s hand, though not completely accidentally. There are a few major departures as well from the Shakespearean text that give Bhardwaj’s film its own distinctive identity: there is no separate Horatio, with Arshia doubling up as both friend and lover, and most interestingly Hilaal’s ghost comes in the form of Roohdar (literally “sprit-holder”), a Pakistani ISI agent. Moreover, although Khurram later contests the Kashmiri elections and wins his constituency, it is clear that he is a mere figurehead, and the real power in the valley is wielded by other political agencies through the army. Surprisingly, in Bhardwaj’s adaptation, Hamlet gets to live, a gesture that possibly arises from a need to hold out some hope for the Kashmiri youth whom Haider clearly represents. This radical ending, however, as we shall see later, results in a violence of its own that disrupts Shakespeare’s plot and reinforces Bollywood stereotypes regarding contested Indian geographies. Ironically, Haider starts out by challenging popular portrayals of Kashmir in Bollywood films. In particular it sets itself against the predominant strand within mainstream Indian cinema which drawing upon older poetic descriptions of the valley, especially those by the medieval Sufi scholar Amir Khusrow, saw Kashmir as an earthly paradise. As M. Ashraf Bhat argues: Kashmir (as a geographical space) was primarily identified as pornotropic land, with lush green valleys, snow covered mountainous peaks, house boats, Dal Lake, fresh streams and springs. Apart from portraying Kashmir as a celebrated ‘beauty myth’, the world’s second largest Indian based film industry, Bollywood played a crucial role in [re]presenting it as a romantic geographical spot, dominated by its scenic landscape. Bhat 2015 Starting with Kashmir Ki Kali (1964), Bollywood repeatedly idealized the valley’s landscape, an aesthetic choice which sublimated the fraught political reality of the region. Even Mani Ratnam’s Tamil film Roja (1992, also dubbed in Hindi), which included a terrorist plot, depicted Kashmir as a honeymoon destination, its natural beauty miraculously alleviating the tensions between the newlyweds. In contrast, Haider opens not with scenes of breathtaking mountains but with the narrow streets and homes of the Kashmiris. When Bhardwaj does take us to the rural countryside, it is a landscape that has been torn apart by violence. Lush valleys become impromptu grave sites where the Indian Army buries men suspected of terrorism. The city streets and town squares become spaces where instead of lovers dancing to Bollywood songs, the “half-widows” or women whose spouses have gone missing for years, hold up placards and photographs of their lost family members. When Haider returns to Kashmir and embarks on a quest for his father, instead of a tour through paradise what we are shown is his hellish journey through military camps, hospitals, and mud-slicked river banks. Some of the most dystopic

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scenes owe their origin to Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (2010), such as the one where a boy leaps out of a truck filled with bloodied corpses and screams “I am alive! I am alive”; or when Hilaal and Ghazala upon hearing the army raid stumble out of bed and immediately go for their identity cards (Basharat Peer 2010: 119–20). Not surprisingly Bhardwaj’s Haider follows Hamlet (2.2.240) in claiming that “All of Kashmir is a prison.” Some of the strongest critiques of prevalent Bollywood aesthetics, however, comes in the form of Salman and Salman, Bhardwaj’s reimagining of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Owners of a movie rental store called “Video-e-Kashmir,” the two friends of Haider are obsessed with the Bollywood romantic hero Salman Khan. The two men imitate his hairstyle, physical movements, and speech patterns, casually inserting names of Salman Khan’s films while discussing the daily curfews and response of the army major to any violators. What makes it all the more sinister is the fact that Salman and Salman, much like their Shakespearean counterparts, are agents of the state. Unlike Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, however, the two Salmans are more deliberate participants in the political intrigue and report directly to Pervez, the major in the Indian army, and not to Khurram, who is just a local Kashmiri politician. While this is not the first time that Bhardwaj introduces a meta-cinematic element in his Shakespeare adaptation – in Bhardwaj’s Maqbool (2003), for instance, the ambitious young crime-lord, Miyan Maqbool, is awarded control of Bollywood (Cawdor) in return for his loyalties – in Haider, what we get is a more insidious side of the mainstream Mumbai film industry and its blind followers. The Salmans not only pick up Haider at the beginning and try to ascertain his future plans, they later try to kill him on Pervez’s orders. The development of the Bollywood-loving Salmans is carefully worked out in the film from clowns to state sponsored murderous agents. The tensions between the Salmans (and by extension Bollywood) and Haider becomes fully evident in a sequence that closely follows Shakespeare’s original. At a crucial moment in the film, Haider, like Hamlet, hesitates killing his uncle while he is praying. He is interrupted when Pervez arrives unexpectedly, accompanied by the two Salmans, and upon seeing Haider with a revolver immediately arrests him. Haider’s anguished cry: “I didn’t kill you for you were in prayer. Even a ghastly sinner would enter heaven if killed in prayer” – is remarkably similar to Hamlet’s own dilemma: Now might I do it [pat], now ’a is a praying; And now I’ll do’t – and so ’a goes to heaven, And so am I [reveng’d]. That would be scanned: A villain kills my father, and for that I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven. 3.3.73–784 Neither Pervez nor the Salmans, however, understands Haider’s frustration. Moreover, the fact that the Salmans, unlike their Shakespearean originals, were never really friends of Haider becomes obvious when they depart together in the military jeep and Pervez issues them a chilling advice on “encounter killings”: “Shoot from a distance and shoot him [Haider] on the back.” With Haider sitting at the back, his hands tied and helplessly staring down the barrel of a soldier’s rifle, the Salmans drive off, a raunchy Bollywood song blaring from the jeep’s stereo. Such moments highlight the disconnect between the fantastical settings of Bollywood blockbusters and the fraught realities of politically contested regions in the Indian subcontinent. Elsewhere in the film, Bollywood also becomes unwitting agent of a larger state apparatus – for instance during their search for Hilaal, Haider and Arshia turn up at a movie theater that has been taken over 392

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by the military, and we see the officer in charge enjoying a Salman Khan potboiler. The scenes of flirtatious lovers that flash from the large overhead projector contrast rudely with the prison-like atmosphere of the foyer where Haider and Arshia wait to hear any news. The officer proves to be as unsympathetic as the other military personnel in Bhardwaj’s movie, an overall attitude that is reinforced when in the very next scenes an army guard callously tosses aside Haider’s carefully printed pictures of his father. This jarring note reaches its climax when after the arrest and the jeep-ride, one of the Salmans starts gyrating in the typical fashion of a Bollywood dance number as his partner (following Pervez’s instructions) aims a rifle at Haider on a deserted, snow-capped mountainside. Bollywood’s dream destination thus gets recast as a nightmarish geography of violence, while the Bollywood industry itself gets exposed as a hegemonic tool used for dominating marginalized cultures in the India. Fortunately, Salman’s rifle malfunctions, and Haider brutally bludgeons the two Bollywood impersonators to death. The gory end of the Salmans, very different from the sanitized news that “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead” (5.2.353) in Shakespeare’s play-text, in many ways symbolizes the end of an era of Bollywood aesthetics that glorified Kashmir’s natural beauty at the cost of its inhabitants. The fake Salmans with their allegiance to Mumbai and mainstream India results in the need for a counter-aesthetics within which Haider’s resistance might be staged in the film. If in Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern mediate the arrival of the players at Elsinore, who upon Hamlet’s instructions, put forward the Mouse-Trap play, in Haider, the Salmans do no such thing. Instead, Haider devises his own entertainment, one that runs counter to the popular Bollywood aesthetics of the 1990s, to trap his uncle. Bollywood is not totally absent though, but Bhardwaj makes an attempt to include indigenous art forms, especially the Bhand Pather. During the celebrations of Ghazala’s marriage to Khurram, a distraught Haider takes the lead in a song and dance sequence that combines Bollywood and the pather traditions. Giant puppets stand in for Haider’s parents and uncle, as the story of Khurram’s treachery is revealed to all. Alongside the puppetry, the sparse stage settings, all male dance-crew, and the use of elaborate masks are reminiscent of the Bhand Pather. In particular, Haider’s ornate blue bird mask is very similar to animal masks used in the Shikargah (hunt) Pather. One of the older pather plays, the Shikargah Pather, stages the advent of Mughal soldiers who go on to speak in Persian to illiterate Kashmiri villagers who cannot understand them (Raina 2013b). The theme of the hunt and of miscommunication triggered by outsiders also features in Angrez Pather. The satire in both instances arises precisely from this disjunct between an external imperial machinery and the local agents. The Bhand Pather tradition, including its recent revival, specializes in exploring these marginalized Kashmiri identities and delivers its political critique through humor. The Mouse-Trap scene in Haider draws on these latent tensions of the Bhand Pather with audience members in the film comprising those sympathetic to the Indian state, whereas Haider seems to have become radicalized after his father’s death. Within the context of Haider’s song, Ghazala is the bulbul (nightingale) that has been snared, but the entire Mouse-Trap scene is also an elaborate hunt, designed to expose Khurram’s treachery. Significantly, Bhardwaj, who started his career as a music director, also uses traditional Kashmiri instruments such as the rubab and the sarang for this segment. The main purpose of the show, however, is not to obtain proof of Khurram’s guilt. Instead, Bhardwaj’s Haider is more concerned about making his mother aware of the terrible betrayal. The song thus adds a twist to Shakespeare’s Mouse-Trap play, and the poison that is poured down Gonzago’s ears (3.2.245) becomes instead the lies that Khurram whispers to Ghazala. Not surprisingly, Khurram remains unperturbed at the end of the performance, and Haider discovers that his uncle knows all about his adventures, including his meeting with his Roohdar (the ISI agent doubling as Hilaal’s ghost), owing to Arshia’s unwitting betrayal. 393

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There are, however, allusions to other aesthetic traditions as well in Haider that bring out the cultural complexities of the subcontinent. For instance, the refrain that unites the main action of the film is Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Urdu ghazal “Gulon mein rang bhare, baad-e-naubahaar chale” (“Let the flowers be filled with colors, and the fresh spring breeze flow”). If in the flashback scenes Haider remembers the happy days when his father used to sing this song in the comfort of their home, then it is Roohdar’s memories of his fellow prisoner crying out the darker couplets of the ghazal that seals the moment of anagnorisis in the movie. Haider recognizes his dead father through the lyrics of Faiz, and begins to believe in his cry for vengeance: “Tell him to aim his bullets at those cunning deceiving eyes [Khurram’s] that entrapped his mother.” The choice of this particular ghazal, however, is rather interesting since it became famous after Mehdi Hassan’s rendition of it in Khalil Qaiser’s anti-colonial Pakistani movie Farangi (1964). One of the things that Bhardwaj stages in Haider is the dilemma of choosing between India and Pakistan, while still holding on to a sense of Kashmiri identity. By introducing different performative traditions, Bhardwaj recasts political allegiances and choices on an aesthetic plane: Hilaal who quotes Faiz chooses to operate on a known terrorist; Salman and Salman who worship Bollywood heroes blindly follow the Indian military, while Haider in his songs and dance tries to locate the remnants of an indigenous Kashmir.

Towards a political aesthetics in Haider Despite its critique of Bollywood, or even the inclusion of specifically local elements such as the Bhand Pather and old Kashmiri songs, Bhardwaj’s film, however, still remains rooted in certain Indian celluloid traditions that fundamentally re-shape this retelling of Shakespeare. As I have mentioned before, Haider repeatedly attempts to balance the demands of Bollywood and the need for producing a type of Shakespeare while remaining true to Kashmiri aesthetics. The most obvious example of this is the ending of the film where Bhardwaj radically alters Shakespeare’s play by having Hamlet live. Instead, it is Ghazala who dies spectacularly, blowing herself up, along with Khurram, and all of Haider’s remaining enemies in a snow-covered grave-yard. Before she carries out her suicide mission she delivers a message that challenges the revenge plot of the movie as well as of the original play: “until we are free from revenge, we can never be free.” As I note elsewhere, instead of bringing a sense of reconciliation, this ending generates a violence of its own that is absent in Shakespeare’s plot.5 Ghazala’s transformation into a suicide bomber could be explained away as the result of her affection for her son and her desperate need to save him. This violence, however, owes its origins to Bollywood (and mainstream Indian cinema’s) stereotypes regarding terrorism in the subcontinent and AFSPA territories in particular. She arrives unexpectedly at the grave-yard, and while everyone, including Khurram, her new husband, expects her to make an emotional appeal, Ghazala wordlessly reveals the bomb-vest she is wearing and pulls the trigger. I am going to call this the “Grand Exploding Ghazala Trick” – for the blast magically conjures a “happy” ending where the Bollywood Hamlet gets to walk away alive, his most pressing problems having just gone up in flames. The scene, however, has striking similarities with the grand finale of Mani Ratnam’s film Dil Se (1998), which was set in Assam, another AFSPA territory.6 In the culminating scene, Moina, the young Assamese girl who goes by the alias Meghna, is stopped by her lover Amar as she is on her way to assassinate the Indian President. Amar flings aside her green shawl, and after a little coaxing, Moina/Meghna silently confesses her love for him. We realize that she is wearing a suicide vest underneath, and Moina/Meghna finally surrenders to Amar’s embrace. The bomb explodes, killing the lovers, but saving the Indian Republic. The message in

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both films is a complicated one of love, forgiveness, and a repudiation of revenge – but one that gets played out against the exploding bodies of female suicide bombers.7 These exploding women from politically contested spaces in India – whether in Dil Se or in Haider – seem to establish a troubling pattern of how mainstream Indian cinema understands its relationship to the margins. If Bhardwaj sets the scene in Kashmir, then Mani Ratnam takes on insurgency in the Indian Northeast, and while making no explicit reference to AFSPA, the film nonetheless shows the brutal effects of army occupation. While in Haider we encounter Kashmiri half-widows, in Dil Se we learn of the Indian Army gang-raping Assamese girls during their routine hunts for terrorists. This later explains Moina/Meghna’s intense trauma and her desire for vengeance. The bodies of these marginalized women, both Ghazala and Moina, become important objects of desire before they are allowed to explode, suggestive of what Hamid Dabashi, taking cue from Frantz Fanon, describes as “the mutation of the feminine body into a site of colonial contestation” (Dabashi 2012: 9). This contestation is evident in both films, because Ghazala, through her marriage to Khurram who becomes a Member of the Legislative Assembly, and Moina/Meghna, through her love for an All India Radio journalist, seem on the verge of assimilation into “mainstream” India. But this does not happen, and in each case the body of the woman physically disintegrates. While Dabashi sees in the “posthuman body” of suicide bomber a “defiance against the politics of power and all its claims to (legitimate) violence” (2012: 13), such a correlation is unclear in Bollywood’s representation of these women. Despite the politically charged backdrop, both Moina and Ghazala become suicide bombers not so much to send a posthumous message to the state, but to allow someone else to survive – the Indian President or Haider. Each time in these movies the suicide bomber explodes after accepting love and forgiveness.

Conclusion Although Bhardwaj’s film comes across as a radical Bollywood Shakespeare in its incorporation of an openly political setting, it remains an integral part of mainstream Indian cinema. While other Bollywood Shakespeares have avoided politically controversial subjects, the indigenous post-independence theaters have been using the Bard precisely for the political freedom that his plays allowed them. Haider tries to incorporate these indigenous elements, particularly the Bhand Pather; however, this aesthetic gesture remains incomplete. Unlike the Bhand Pather which uses the Kashmiri language, Haider relies on the popular Bollywood mix of Urdu and Hindi. With its production houses and marketing offices centered in the financial capital of Mumbai, Haider is very much a part of mainstream Indian cinema. This tension between mainstream and marginalized aesthetics in the film is what marks Bhardwaj’s latest Shakespeare offering as an important example of neo-global politics. Global Shakespeare, as we have traditionally understood, has been a way to showcase non-English performative traditions. By bringing to the forefront the complex negotiations between Bollywood and Kashmiri aesthetics, Haider further complicates our understanding of representation and indigenous voices in global performances. Where might we locate the local voices in Haider? If it is in the glimpses of Bhand Pather or the snippets from Basharat Peer’s memoirs, then these get overtaken by the ending. By turning Ghazala into a suicide bomber, the film replicates the identification of Kashmir and its majority region, Islam, with terrorism. It also forecloses the continuation of any dialogue with mainstream India, since Ghazala practically kills off everyone other than her son. Even the dying Khurrum’s calls for help go unanswered by Haider. Bhardwaj’s third Shakespearean adaptation thus comes across as a teaser, caught as it is between the twin demands of Bollywood and Kashmir.

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Notes 1 For instance, Maqbool premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, while Haider was first released at Busan International Film Festival in South Korea. Omkara was also screened at the Cannes Film Festival. 2 Roy’s comment was about the Indian government’s treatment of tribal communities, but she has elsewhere compared the handling of the Kashmir issue with colonial practices. See for instance Roy (2008). 3 The provision of AFSPA was first made in British India. Post-independence, Kashmir was not the first state which saw the implementation of AFSPA. In 1958 Assam and Manipur first fell under the Act. AFSPA remains an extremely controversial law. 4 This and all other quotations from Shakespeare’s play are taken from the Bedford St. Martin’s edition (Shakespeare 1994 [1603]), as specified in the References. 5 For a discussion on Ghazala’s suicide within the context of Kashmiri politics see Sen (2018: 96–97). 6 Assam and Manipur were the first states where AFSPA was instituted in 1958. 7 Incidentally, early in his career, Bhardwaj had been the music director of Gulzar’s Maachis (1996), a movie which chronicled the plight of Punjab after AFSPA was briefly introduced there during the 1980s. In the film, Veeran, the female protagonist is compelled by circumstances to become a terrorist. At the end she kills herself and her lover, though not as a suicide bomber, but by consuming poison. Her suicide, however, is clearly understood as a political act and becomes an early example of how Bollywood represents women in AFSPA controlled areas.

References Ali, Tariq. 2011. “The Story of Kashmir.” In Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Eds. Tariq Ali, et al. London and New York: Verso. 7–56. Bajeli, Diwan Singh. 2012. “When all the world’s a stage.” The Hindu. 19 Jan. Accessed 16 Aug. 2017, www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/theatre/When-all-the-worlds-a-stage%E2%80%A6/ article13372137.ece. Banerjee, Sumanta. 2004. “India’s ‘Home’ Front.” Economic & Political Weekly 39.40 (2 Oct.): 4404–6. Bhardwaj, Vishal, dir. 2003. Maqbool. Kaleidoscope Entertainment. Yash Raj Films. DVD. ———. 2006. Omkara. India: Sheemaroo Video Pvt. Ltd., Big Screen Entertainment, Panorama Studios. Eros Entertainment. DVD. ———. 2014. Haider. UTV Motion Pictures. DVD. Bhat, M. Ashraf. 2015. “Bollywood’s [Re]presentation of ‘Kashmir’ And ‘Kashmiri’: From Romance (Kashmir Ki Kali) To Tragedy (Haider).” Countercurrents.org. Accessed 21 Aug. 2017, www.countercurrents. org/bhat080515.htm Chakravarti, Paromita. 2016. “Urban Histories and Vernacular Shakespeares in Bengal: Kolkatar Hamlet, Hemlat and Hamlet 2011.” In Performing Shakespeare in India: Exploring Indianness, Literatures and Cultures. Eds. Shormishtha Panja and Babli Moitra Saraf. New Delhi: Sage Publications India. 41–59. Dabashi, Hamid. 2012. Corpus Anarchicum: Political Protest, Suicidal Violence, and the Making of the Posthuman Body. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dromgoole, Dominic. 2014. Shakespeare’s Globe. “Globe to Globe Festival: About the Project” Advertisement. Globe to Globe. http://globetoglobe.shakespearesglobe.com. Emigh, John. 2003. “Bhand Pathar [sic].” In South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia. Eds. Margaret A. Mills, Peter J. Claus, and Sarah Diamond, New York and London: Routledge, Globe to Globe. Accessed 3 Aug. 2017, http://globetoglobe.shakespearesglobe.com/hamlet/about-the-project. Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Elizabeth Rivlin. 2014. “Introduction: Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 1–20. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. 2009. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge. Menon, Jisha. 2013. The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Noorani, A.G. 2011. Article 370: A Constitutional History of Jammu and Kashmir. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Panja, Shormishtha. 2006. “Not Black and White but Shades of Grey: Shakespeare in India.” In Shakespeare Without English: The Reception of Shakespeare in Non-anglophone Countries. Eds. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Chee Seng Lim. New Delhi: Pearson. 102–16.

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Indigenizing Shakespeare Peer, Basharat. 2010. Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love and War in his Homeland. London and New York: Scribner. Peer, Gazala. 2016. “Collateral Damage or Regrettable Casualty?” Fault Lines of History: The India Papers II. Ed. Uma Chakravarti. New Delhi: Zubaan. Epub. https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Fault_ Lines_of_History.html?id=BwMeDgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_ esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false Popham, Peter. 2011. “Arundhati Roy: ‘The Next Novel Will Just Have to Wait. . . .’ ” Independent, 17 Oct. Qaiser, Kahlil, dir. 1964. Farangi. Pakistan: K. K. Productions. DVD. Raina, M.K. 2013a. Revisiting Bhand Pather. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. DVD. ———. 2013b. “The Bhand Pather of Kashmir.” Accessed 3 Aug. 2017, www.koausa.org/BhandPather/. Ratnam, Mani, dir. 1992. Roja. India: Madras Talkies. Ayngaran International. DVD. ———. 1998. Dil Se. India: India Talkies/Madras Talkies: Eros International. DVD. Roy, Arundhati. 2008. “Land and freedom.” The Guardian. 22 Aug. Samanta, Shakti, dir. 1964. Kashmir ki Kali. Kamal Studies/Shakti Films: Spark Worldwide. DVD. Sen, Amrita. 2018. “Locating Hamlet in Kashmir: Haider, Terrorism and Shakespearean Transmission.” In Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion. Eds. Allison K. Lenhardt, Sonya Loftis, and Lisa Ulevich. New York: Routledge. 87–99. Shakespeare, William. 1994 [1603]. Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Boston and New York: Bedford St. Martin’s. Singh, Jyotsna G. 1989. “Different Shakespeares: The Bard in Colonial/Postcolonial India.” Theatre Journal 41.4, Theatre and Hegemony: 445–58. Trivedi, Poonam. 2005a. “Introduction.” In India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance. Eds. Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press. 13–39. ———. 2005b. “ ‘It is the Bloody Business Which Informs Thus . . .’ ”: Local Politics and Performative Praxis, Macbeth in India.” World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. Ed. Sonia Massai. London and New York: Routledge. 47–54. ———. 2014. “Hamlets of India.” The Indian Express, 4 Oct. Accessed 17 Aug. 2017, http://indianexpress. com/article/opinion/columns/hamlets-of-india/. Verma, Rajiva. 2005. “Shakspeare in Hindi Cinema.” India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance. Eds. Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press. 269–90.

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35 OVIDIAN APPROPRIATIONS, METAMORPHIC ILLUSION, AND THEATRICAL PRACTICE ON THE SHAKESPEAREAN STAGE Lisa S. Starks The Ancient Roman poet of change, Ovid, provided an impetus for artistic creation in the early modern period, leading to his widespread influence throughout the world and his long, rich, global afterlife. European Renaissance visual artists and writers appropriated the subject matter of his poetry and the method that he used – metamorphosis or creative transformation – as a basis for their own artistic works. Ovid provided alternative structures, methods, and perspectives – all of which enabled the English stage to experiment with strategies of adaptation, variances of dramatic form, and concepts of theatrical arts. Dramatists like Marlowe and Shakespeare foregrounded Ovidian perspectives on the stage in the 1590s, thereby transporting the global poet to their local theatrical space. This decade – arguably the “Ovidian” decade of the Elizabethan theater – was led by Christopher Marlowe, the quintessential Ovidian poet-playwright whose path Shakespeare continued and expanded until The Tempest (1600–1601) and Ben Jonson’s satirical Poetaster (1600) marked the end of the era. Nevertheless, even after the Ovid craze faded, a spectral Ovid continued to haunt the English stage in numerous appropriations and adaptations well into the eighteenth century. Although many critics have discussed the influence of Ovid on early modern theater, I argue that it was much more extensive than has previously been acknowledged. Besides the subject matter, Ovid provided an innovative approach to global adaptation that undergirded the dramaturgy of the age; moreover, he became the means through which the nature of theater was conceptualized, explored, articulated, and debated in early modern England. Both the enemies and the friends of the stage appropriated Ovid to take sides on the political divide on theatricality. A wide range of writers – such as Stephen Gosson, William Prynne, and Thomas Heywood – indirectly and directly refer to, cite, or quote Ovid when either attacking or defending the stage in their treatises. Thus, Ovid came to signify the full theatrical experience itself: plays, playing, and playgoing. Shakespeare addresses the impact of Ovid throughout his canon, but in highly metadramatic plays like Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest, he self-reflexively explores the Ovidian nature of theater to its fullest extent. Through his appropriations of Ovid, Shakespeare engages in heated debates surrounding the global textual transformations of classical writers, the metamorphic ability of the actor, and the transfiguring effects of theater on its audiences. 398

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Ovid and appropriation Ovid’s innovative approach to appropriations, adaptations, and translations of inherited Greek and Roman material inspired Renaissance artists, as it spoke to their shared vision and the nature of mythology itself. As Julie Sanders points out, “Mythical literature depends upon, incites even, perpetual acts of reinterpretation in new contexts, a process that embodies the very idea of appropriation” (2006: 63). Ovid fully exploited the possibilities for mythology and appropriation. Of course, many classical authors, particularly Virgil, provided models for emulation and strategies for revisions of Greek myths. However, Ovid was different. His own methods of remediating myths provided an alternative model of global appropriation for Renaissance writers to employ in their own translations and adaptations of his poems (see Burrow 2002: 302). In contrast to other ancient writers, the counter-classical Ovid offered more inventive choices of generic models and structures; more range in making the past present, the foreign domestic; more daring in his depiction of violence and grim humor, often reversing the roles of predator and prey; more freedom in attacking authority and mocking the gods; and less reverence for past heroes – amounting to a rejection of the dominant, heroic masculine values underpinning the Virgilian epic (see Starks-Estes 2014: 3–18). Ovid – as a doubly foreign poet, both of another time and place, sent into exile from his own land – was also deemed counter-classical for early modern writers because he embodied a sense of alien otherness. For Miriam Jacobson, “[Ovid] is ‘counter-classical’ because these aspects of his poetry align themselves with foreignness in a period when Britain was encountering and engaging with exogamous cultures to a greater extent than ever before” (2014: 10), and this foreignness promoted his regard (Jacobson 2014: 12). Moreover, Ovid’s alien status underscored the global nature of metamorphosis, emphasizing its traversal of time, space, and form. In the early modern era, Ovidian metamorphosis propelled global intertextual exchange, the translation and remediation of texts across cultures and centuries, realized through the extremely malleable yet common thread of myth. Ovid became virtually synonymous with this exchange, for authors “described the processes of translation and the adoption of figurative language as metamorphosis” (Jacobson 2014: 11). These writers also depended on a sophisticated understanding of the embedded chain of global appropriation and adaptation that Ovid himself fashioned from received textual variations of those myths. They perceived a complex textual interplay between contemporary writing and that of antiquity, one that emphasized tension and discontinuity as well as tradition and continuity (see Bate 1993: 84–87). With Ovid as a model, Renaissance authors emulated the doubly foreign poet and struggled to equal – or best – his Latin verse with their own vernacular. They drew from previous texts but revised them into completely new works through the process of imitatio – deliberately emulating identifiable stylistic characteristics and/or subject matter of a canonical author’s texts in order to situate one’s own literary writing with that of the past (see Bate 1993: 131). Tied to pedagogical practice and rhetorical study, imitatio involved a deep respect for literary tradition, but not a complete submission to it. A similar concept, translatio referred to the adaptation of texts to one’s own contemporary world. A prime example of the latter is Ovid’s own practice of revising past Greek myths to his own time and place – making the global local – which Arthur Golding continued in his incredibly popular and influential “Englished” translation of Metamorphoses in 1567 (see Lyne 2001: 19). Moreover, early modern writers often grafted together pieces of myths, remediating and shifting genres. Ovid was especially influential in the Renaissance practices of imitatio and translatio because of his unique uses of them as a poet. Ovid often rebelled against the texts he appropriated, undercutting the perceived sanctity of revered works by deliberately overturning their established 399

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form and content. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid critiques Virgil’s Aeneid and its Augustinian patriarchal values through the poem’s circular structure, multiple narrative perspectives, and shifts from the epic hero to minor characters (often victims). In so doing, Ovid challenges the idea of imitatio while undermining imitatio itself – taking the rivalry aspect of emulation so far that the concept is challenged by its own use. Ovid thus overhauls imitatio for future generations by questioning its goals, practices, and underlying ideology – making him an audacious and bold choice for an early modern writer’s own experimental appropriations. Ovid’s rebellious strategies for appropriation and adaptation enabled Renaissance writers to go further in their own textual remediations: to adapt more loosely and creatively, to undercut an earlier text and/or its values even while refreshing it in a new context, and to use models in which the origin (the author’s “original” to be emulated) virtually disappears. Significantly, Ovid gave writers the license to defy the work of a canonical author, even if that author was Ovid himself. In the Renaissance, it became very Ovidian to mess with Ovid. In their own use of this classical terminology, early modern writers demonstrated and often self-consciously focused on processes that now fall under the rubric of “appropriation” or “adaptation studies” (Sanders 2006). Nevertheless, the past and present terms are not synonymous. Imitatio and translatio both denote a writer’s conscious textual strategies; contemporary concepts of appropriation and adaptation, however, may include conscious or, importantly, unconscious textual borrowing. Therefore, when employed alongside classical rhetoric used by Renaissance writers, appropriation/adaptation theory (Sanders 2006; Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013; Joubin and Rivlin 2014; Desmet and Iyengar 2015; Desmet et al. 2017; Lanier 2014, 2017) can enable a rich analysis of intertextual relationships that both fall within and exceed the definitions of imitatio or translatio. Contemporary concepts make it possible to discuss remediations that may be directly or indirectly attributed to Ovid’s poetry or appropriations/adaptations of it. Besides serving as an inspiration for global textual appropriation, Ovid also inspired controversial subject matter that fed into contemporary debates in early modern England. Ovid’s afterlife, from the medieval Ovide Moralisé to the Renaissance Ovid vogue, can thus be seen as a site of contention concerning the relationship between the ancients versus the emergent vernacular tradition, the foreign versus the domestic, and the pagan versus the Christian. In the sixteenth century, Ancient Rome itself emerged as a site of conflict: simultaneously the spring of cultural knowledge and the source of Britain’s past oppression, both the source of literary tradition and the root of pagan idolatry. As a Roman, non-Christian poet, Ovid simultaneously incited both reverence and rivalry as a foreign writer of antiquity who challenged his own literary status quo.

Ovid, theatricality, and personation These tensions resurfaced in notions of playacting, in which actors were thought to take on the form and emotions of another. The anti-theatricalists regarded acting – “metamorphosis” – as fiendishly deceptive;1 conversely, the pro-theater camp likened the player’s transformation to an inspired, godlike, creative act. Significantly, both sides invoked Ovid. For example, Prynne uses the term “metamorphosing” itself when referring to the actor’s damnable art, and when condemning male effeminacy as an effect of playgoing, Gosson cites Ovid’s description of Roman audiences from Ars Amatoria (1579: sigs. CIr – C2r.). Interestingly, defenders of the theater, such as Heywood, also appropriated Ovid and the same basic argument, but rather in support of rather than objection to the stage. Both sides insisted on the powerful effects of the player’s metamorphosis, whether morally corrupting or edifying (Starks-Estes 2016: 104–6). In part, the prevalence of Ovid in theatrical discourses and plays can be traced to the role of Ovid in humanist education in grammar schools, where students were immersed in studies of 400

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rhetoric and oratory, a close cousin of acting on the stage, and in acting at university (see Cartwright 1999 and Enterline 2012). John Lyly’s court dramas and, of course, the university plays staged Ovidian transformations. Ovid is comically linked to the latter in the Cambridge play The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, when the character of Will Kempe complains that “Few of the University men pen plays, well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid, & that writer Metamorphoses” (1601 [1949]: 337). Here, the university wits lampoon Kempe in this comic portrayal of the anti-alien, anti-intellectual bent they perceived in the public theater. But, despite this satiric jab, the public theater – not just university plays – greatly “smelled” of that doubly foreign Ovid and that global “writer” Metamorphoses. In the English public theater, Ovidian metamorphosis revolutionized the theatrical medium by conceiving “personation” (the actor’s embodiment of a role) as metamorphic illusion. Personation stemmed from the player’s embodiment of emotion, which was then thought to engender transformative responses in audience members. Shakespeare repeatedly explores this idea through metadramatic scenes that are inspired by Ovid’s layering of tales-within-tales-withintales. These scenes – like those in Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest – generate a heightened awareness of theatrical representation. Through the appropriation of key Ovidian figures within these scenes, Shakespeare comments on theatrical practices and engages in debates surrounding personation, emotion, and audience affect. Already appropriations from earlier textual variations of myths, these figures sprang from their depictions in Ovid’s poetry and morphed into global icons, resonating with meanings they had accumulated from numerous past and present appropriations of Ovid’s poetry and subsequent adaptations. Specific Ovidian characters – Hecuba, Niobe, Philomela, Daphne, Actaeon, Venus, Medea, Ganymede, Pygmalion, and so on – garnered broader significations beyond the context of their own tales, taking on their own Renaissance afterlives. Therefore, when actors represented these characters on stage, or even just cited them, they suggested rich intertextual associations and made instantaneous yet meaningful connections with their audiences. Significantly, Shakespeare appropriates these iconic figures to associate Ovid with theatricality and the art of personation even further. Citing female figures who suggest extreme grief and loss, Shakespeare links their passion to the nature of theatricality and the conveyance of emotion. For instance, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, when Julia describes her own imitation of “Ariadne, passioning/For Theseus’ perjury” in (Two Gent., 4.4.164–165),2 she makes a profound connection between Ariadne’s lament in Ovid’s Heroides (Letter X) and Metamorphoses (Book VIII), underscoring both the significance of Ariadne as an icon of abandonment and the actor’s craft of conveying emotion. When Hamlet employs Niobe (Meta., Book VI) as a figure of sorrow (Ham., 1.2.149) and Hecuba (Meta., Book XIII) as one of traumatic loss in the First Player’s speech in Hamlet (2.2.451–465; 469–98; 506–19), he forges links between Ovid, trauma, and the actor’s portrayal of emotions (on Hecuba and trauma, see Starks-Estes 2014: 94–95, 124–25). Sarah Carter (2011: 46–52) provides an extremely useful and thorough discussion of the figure of Hecuba in Renaissance literature; Cora Fox (2009: 118–21) also addresses the significance of Hecuba as an emblem of extreme sorrow in Titus Andronicus. Moreover, in appropriating Hecuba in the First Player’s speech and Hamlet’s response to it, Shakespeare not only draws from the wellspring of Ovidian (and other classical) texts to represent the deepest levels of grief and issues of revenge, but also he further aligns Ovid with the actor’s art of personation. Hamlet responds to the First Player’s famous speech in soliloquy, exclaiming: Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, 401

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Could force his soul so to his whole conceit That from her working all his visage wann’d, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing. For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her, That he should weep for her?  Ham., 2.2.551–560 Here, Hamlet cites Ovid’s Hecuba to reflect on both the impressive power and the “monstrous” danger of the player’s emotional display, while admonishing himself for not taking action. This scene is intricately bound up with Hamlet’s speech to the players, in which he articulates his own views of personation as the player’s responsibility to “[s]uit the action to the word, the word to the action” (Ham., 3.2.18–19) to achieve verisimilitude onstage. It also resonates with the later play-within-the-play, the “Murder of Gonzago” (3.2.138–272), which Hamlet uses to test his uncle’s culpability and Shakespeare stages to dramatize the power of theater to provoke inward change in its audiences. Moreover, Shakespeare intensely examines the psychophysiological effects of personation in Hamlet’s response to the First Player’s speech cited above by casting personation as Ovidian transformation. Hamlet emphasizes the overwhelming change in the actor’s facial expression and coloring, pointing to a notion of, in W.B. Worthen’s terms, “a sense of human identity as malleable and self-created” (1984: 17). Joseph R. Roach claims that “[t]he predilection of the age for Ovidian alterations of bodily state further emphasized the actor’s capacity to assume the ‘perfect shape,’ as Heywood called it, ‘to which he had fashioned all his active spirits’ ” (Roach 2008: 42; Heywood 1612: E4).3 Furthermore, as Roach explains, this scene in Hamlet and other descriptions of acting at the time indicate the belief in the actor’s ability to change his exterior shape, to undergo an “instantaneous” psychophysiological transfiguration that was scripted by playwrights, who ordered that players “depict the passions and sudden and violent metamorphoses” (Roach 2008: 42). The actor’s personation was thought to then “irradiat[e] the bodies of spectators through their eyes and ears, . . . literally transform[ing] the contents of his heart to theirs, altering their moral natures” (Roach 2008: 28), his emotion affecting the audience and playing space (see Starks-Estes 2016: 118–19). Since the actor was thought to take on or appropriate a character and incorporate it into the self, personation was viewed as either a dangerous or potentially liberating force, sometimes simultaneously.

Personation and Protean transformation The awe-inspiring potential for self-shaping of personation and its flipside, the “monstrous” dangers of unrestrained emotion and its display, were signified by the supreme icon of Ovidian metamorphosis, Proteus. A figure embodying Ovidian metamorphic personation, Proteus was often employed in praise of actors, as in Heywood’s portrayal of Edward Alleyn as a “Proteus for shapes, & Roscius for a tongue” (Heywood 1633: A4v); Richard Flecknoe’s description of Richard Burbage as a “delightful Proteus” who “[s]o wholly transform[ed] himself into his Part, & putting off himself with his cloathes” (Flecknoe 1664); and Thomas Randolph’s account of Thomas Riley as “a Proteus, that can take/What shape he please, & in an instant make/Himself into anything: be that or this/By voluntary metamorphosis” (Randolph 1640). Jonas Barish (1981: 98–131) discusses the use of “Proteus” and “chameleon” in anti-theatrical discourses. 402

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Primarily, he describes them as negative terms, but he also notes the positive uses of them in Neoplatonic philosophy (Barish 1981: 107–12). Although it was often considered to unleash invigorating, creative energy, Protean transformation also had a frightening edge – the vulnerability to emotion and the threat of the imagination’s penetration into and possession of the body, which could lead to severe melancholy or the dissolution of the self. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton points to the dangers of becoming another “Proteus, or a chameleon [who] can take all shapes,” for it has the force to “work upon others as well as ourselves” (Burton 1621: 1.2.257). With the imagination unguarded, the self was thought to be open to penetration by harmful agents, both external and internal. Protean transformation was the most threatening for the actor, whose entire sense of self was at risk in taking on a role, as it left him vulnerable to attack from the imagination, which was thought to have the potential of penetrating the self and entirely altering one’s psychophysiological makeup (see Starks-Estes 2014: 120–21). The seventeenth-century writer Edmund Gayton refers to a player who was so “instantly Metamorphozed” into his role as a tyrant that he could not immediately shake off his assumed state or “reduce himselfe, into the knowledge of himselfe” after his performance (until he had some ale to bring him around, anyway); he also explains how some actors were “forc’d to fly to Physick” after “too passionately and sensibly represent[ing]” their roles (Gayton 1654: 144). Shakespeare fully explores the subject of Protean transformation throughout his plays – from those that center on shape-shifting and the illusory nature of reality, discussed below, to others that foreground deception, aggression, and realpolitik – thereby commenting on ways in which Proteus represents the dangerous potential of theatricality noted above. For instance, Shakespeare’s character of Proteus in Two Gentlemen of Verona responds to Ovid’s version of the god Proteus – not only his changeability but also his sexual aggression, an aspect of Proteus’s story that Ovid adds to Virgil’s version of the myth, linking acting and violence. Citing Proteus, Richard in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3, claims that he “can add colours to the chameleon,/Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,/And set the murderous Machiavel to school” (3 Hen. 6, 3.2.191–93). In Richard III, he exploits his skills as an actor to use his impairment, considered a disability by those around him, to his advantage. Katherine Schaap Williams (2009: 26) fully develops this point about Richard from the perspective of disability studies. His ability to play various roles thus enables him to dominate other characters onstage as well as the audience off-stage, thereby endowing him with prowess and theatrical supremacy. Even though generic and historical pressures mandate that Richard must be vanquished in the end by the lackluster Richmond, the villain brandishes the power of acting and displays its link to Ovidian metamorphosis.

Ovidian appropriation and theatrical illusion on the Shakespearean stage In comedies, Shakespeare appropriates Ovid (as he does in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, noted above) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, among other instances, to examine bodily transformations and the creation of dramatic art. I have discussed Ovidian appropriations in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Starks-Estes 2014: 160–72), but there I focus on the figure of the nightingale, Philomela. Here, I am more interested in the act of theatrical appropriation itself. Appropriating from both Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Apuleius’s The Golden Asse, Shakespeare situates Bottom’s metamorphosis in a theatrical context: the rehearsal of a play based on an inept translation of Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe (Meta., 4.67–201). Through this one gesture, Shakespeare foregrounds the fusion of Ovidian metamorphosis and dramatic practice by intersecting 403

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the event of Bottom’s “translation” with the artisan’s theatrical process in Act 3, Scene 1. When Bottom appears with the ass’s head, reciting his lines as Pyramus, Quince shouts in horror, “O monstrous! O strange! We are haunted! Pray, masters! Fly, masters! Help!” (Mid., 3.1.98–99); following up, he exclaims, “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated” (Mid., 3.1.111–12). Parodying Ovidian metamorphoses, the scene humorously forges a link between the artisans’ theatrical practice and Oberon’s magic, further underscoring Ovid’s importance to the creation of artifice on stage. In the artisans’ rehearsals and subsequent performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, Shakespeare explores matters of theatrical transformation, satirizing inept or botched notions of metamorphic illusion through their unsophisticated grasp of personation and its effect on audiences. Bottom suggests that there be a prologue explaining that the action on stage is played, not real; that “we will do no harm with our swords”; that “Pyramus is not killed indeed”; and that he “Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the Weaver,” to “put them [the audience] out of their fear” (Mid., 2.2.15–20). Heeding Bottom’s warning, the artisans worry about the ladies actually believing in their (rather awful) portrayal of the tragic lovers’ deaths and genuinely being frightened by the actor-in-lion’s-suit roar. Their simplistic grasp of personation and its effects on the audience parodies much of the theory and practice of acting that Shakespeare comments on seriously elsewhere. Rather than undermining a more sophisticated approach to personation as metamorphic illusion, however, Shakespeare here parodies the unschooled efforts of those who fail to grasp the complexities of the player’s craft and the powerful effects of Ovidian theater. Tellingly, Shakespeare couches the artisans’ flat-footed approach to theatrical practice in a play within which he appropriates Ovid’s myths and poetic method of transformation to celebrate the powerful effects of theatrical illusion, which culminates in Act 5. In the final act of this comedic tour-de-force of Ovidian appropriations, Shakespeare comments on the dual aspects – both generative and dangerous – of the poetic creation that feeds into the communal fantasy of the theatrical experience, tying it to the lovers’ collective dream in the play. Upon hearing about their shared fantasy, Theseus refers to the “[t]he lunatic, the lover, and the poet” who, with “imagination all compact” (Mid., 5.1.7–8), see that which exceeds the dictates of “cool reason.” As he explains, “the imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown,” which “the poet’s pen” then “[t]urns . . . [into] shapes, and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name” (Mid., 5.1.14–17). Hippolyta troubles Theseus’s dismissal of the lovers’ dream as only a product of their imagination, thereby blurring the line between empirical perception and illusion, as the artisans did earlier in their rehearsal. By the time Theseus utters this articulation of the poet’s transformative art, audiences have been fully immersed in the Ovidian world of metamorphosis on virtually every level. The subsequent play-within-the-play, then, surpasses the main play with its over-the-top, comic celebration of the role that Ovid plays in the full theatrical experience. In this metadramatic scene, Shakespeare reminds us in every possible way that dramatic art – from its inception in the poet’s imagination, to the actor’s personation (here parodied), and, finally, to both the on- and off-stage audiences’ own collective “dream” – is one of Ovidian transformation. Like Bottom, audiences and actors are “translated,” although perhaps not into asses. This Ovidian idea of theater as metamorphosis, which is both celebrated and parodied in Midsummer, appears in other plays and discourses as magic that was often considered to be dangerously in league with the occult. Ovidian transformation suggested a link with the supernatural, primarily because actors and, by extension, the theatrical experience itself, were thought to have the power to cast spells on audiences. Although Heywood claims that the audience may be uplifted and molded into “the shape of any noble and notable attempt,” he nevertheless uses the rhetoric of the occult to describe it. For him, when the “Personater” becomes the “man 404

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Personated,” the performance has a “bewitching” hold over the spectator (Heywood 1612: B4). As such a powerful force, acting was necessarily seen as an experience that balanced on the thin line between two dramatically transformative potentialities – one positive, the other negative – both overlapping with the supernatural realm. Shakespeare hints at this connection at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; in The Tempest and other plays, he develops the intersections between Ovid, theatricality, and the dark side of the occult more fully. In the former, Puck associates the comedy with a more threatening vision of the supernatural when he describes fairy time as one when the “graves, all gaping wide,/ Every one lets forth his sprite/In the church-way paths to glide” (Mid., 5.1.374–76); and when, in his epilogue, he refers to the actors on stage as “shadows” in the audiences’ collective “visions” (Mid., 5.1.417, 420). In The Tempest, Prospero appropriates Ovid to embody the occult. Prospero takes on the role of Medea, the Ovidian healer/witch, casting himself as “good” in contrast to the “evil” Sycorax. In a highly metatheatrical moment, Prospero closely cites Medea from Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (7.265–777), identifying himself with the Ovidian icon of healing through herbal magic and of raising the dead – a power that Prospero also claims to have exercised – and also for potentially damnable witchcraft, before renouncing “this rough magic” and “drown[ing]” his “book” (Temp., 5.1.50, 57). After tracing a circle and performing the theatrical rite of ceremony, Prospero echoes Ovid’s Medea, evoking “[y]e elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,/And ye that on the sands with printless foot/Do chase the ebbing Neptune” and cataloguing his magical skills. Like Medea, he has controlled the physical world, “bedimmed/The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,/And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault/Set roaring war”; he has also ventured into the metaphysical, exclaiming, “graves at my command/Have waked their sleepers, ope’d and let ’em forth/By my so potent art” (Temp., 5.1.33–35, 41–44, 48–50). By portraying Medea from this particular tale in Metamorphoses – when she brings Jason’s father back to life and restores his youth – Prospero aligns himself with the benign, “white magic” side of this icon’s dual image. Nevertheless, the appropriation of Medea necessarily carries with it the “black magic” aspect of her character, pointing toward her later revenge for Jason’s betrayal. In this appropriation of Medea, Shakespeare seems to comment on the decade of Ovidian theater that preceded it, pointing to the dualistic nature of theatrical power – both reveling in Ovidian metamorphosis and simultaneously warning against its potential dangers. This move parallels that of Ben Jonson in Poetaster, a satire that directly pokes fun at fellow dramatists John Marston and Thomas Dekker and indirectly criticizes Ovidian poet-playwrights Marlowe and Shakespeare by staging a show-down between ancient Roman poets Ovid (a lovesick poet) and Virgil, moderated by Horace (most likely representing Jonson himself ) and judged by the Emperor Augustus. A comedy also staged at the heels of the Ovidian decade, Poetaster could be seen to reflect on the Ovidian 1590s, signaling a break from that era in the banishment of Ovid. For Jacobson, Jonson’s play mourns the end of an era characterized by the obsession with Roman antiquity, exotic language, and the foreign Ovid, but much as it “mocks the invasion of new and foreign words into the English language, it also celebrates them by putting them on display” (2014: 49; see also 42). Like Jonson, Shakespeare marks the end of the Ovid craze in The Tempest. Rather than mocking it, though, he luxuriates in the theatrical illusion that he then leaves behind. Prospero relinquishes this power, but in doing so, reaffirms its potent force – as does Shakespeare in this tour-de-force of Ovidian metamorphosis. Prospero drowns his book (Golding’s 1567 Metamorphosis, perhaps?) or his magic powers, exorcising the demons of theatricality even though the play itself has just glorified such artifice. Through Prospero, Shakespeare appears to comment on 405

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his own reputation as the embodiment of the “sweet” and “witty” Ovid, which Frances Meres called him a couple of years prior in reference to his Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece (1598: 282). In The Tempest, Shakespeare exceeds this description, stressing the link between metamorphosis and the occult in his appropriations of the dangerously foreign Ovid. By appropriating Medea, Shakespeare thus invokes Ovid in a metadramatic moment that portrays the illusions or shadows created in the playhouse as fantastic yet terrifying. In his Ovidian speech, Prospero echoes Medea’s boast in Golding’s translation that she “call[s] up dead men from their graves” (Ovid [1567] 2000: 7.275) when he proclaims that he also has “waked” the dead in their graves “and let ’em forth” (Temp., 5.1.48–49). This Medea-like power of raising the dead appeared in discourses that emphasized the spectral effects of theater: players often referred to themselves as having ghost-like presences, composed of insubstantial essences or “shadows” (as in Puck’s reference above). Players, through the transfiguration of personation, thus became “the Ghosts of our ancient Heroes” to have “walk’t againe,” in Thomas Gainsford’s words (1616: sig. Q4r); or the specter of a hero such as Talbot, “rais[ed] from dead – bones newe embalmed with the teares of 10,000 spectators” in Thomas Nashe’s (1592: I, 212). Furthermore, these ruminations on resurrection suggest the idea of reincarnation or Pythagoras’s theory of the transmigration of souls, which Ovid expounds on at length in Book XV of Metamorphoses. During the sixteenth century, Ovid’s focus on Pythagoras was given great weight of importance; Golding, for instance, points to it in his Epistle to his translation as a central theme in the poem that joins pagan and Christian beliefs about life after death ([1567] 2000: 7, 288–89. See StarksEstes 2014: 5; 2016: 124.). Notably, Frances Meres makes an explicit link between Pythagoras, Ovid, and Shakespeare in the famous comment noted above, that “[a]s the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous & honytongued Shakespeare” (Meres 1598: 282). Although Meres cites Shakespeare’s narrative poems, not plays, as examples of this Pythagorean connection, the rich associations between the transmigration of souls, the chain of literary adaptation, and the ability of theater to raise the dead and to transport souls from one body to another seem clear. Besides the compliment on Shakespeare’s talent with verse, Meres’s remark suggests a spectral chain that, like the descriptions of theater itself, traces the haunting of Ovid’s doubly foreign spirit to the English Shakespeare, which he then passed on to the actor who, through personation, radiated it outward into the space of the theater and the embodied souls of its audiences. A spectral presence, the global Ovid was thus metamorphosed again and again on the local Shakespearean stage.

Acknowledgments For Christy Desmet, in loving memory. Many thanks to the editors of this volume – Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson – for their generous and helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes 1 Puritans based their argument on Deuteronomy chapter 22: verse 5, which reads, “The woman shal not weare that which perteineth vnto the man, nether shal a man put on womans raiment: for all that do so, are abominacion vnto the Lord thy God,” followed by the note, “d. For that were to alter the ordre of nature, & to despite God” (Geneva Bible 1560).

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Ovidian appropriations, metamorphic illusion Puritans interpreted this verse as a commandment forbidding the actor’s “metamorphosing” into “idolatrous . . . brutish forms,” in Prynne’s words (1633: sig. 5X4r). 2 All references to Shakespeare’s plays are taken from The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, (Shakespeare 2014). 3 Roach fully describes the early modern notion of personation as psychophysiological change, although only making a brief reference to Ovid in his description of metamorphosis as the basis of the early modern concept of playing. As he explains, it was thought that through the alteration of passions via pneuma, which carried vital spirits through the body, the actor could literally transform himself and extend the transmutations outward to his external surroundings and audiences.

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Lisa S. Starks Prynne, William. 1633. Histrio-mastix. London: Printed by Edward Allde, Augustine Mathewes, Thomas Cotes, and William Iones for Michael Sparke, and are to be sold at the Blue Bible, in Greene Arbour, in little Old Bayly. Randolph, Thomas. 1640. The Jealous Lovers. Cambridge: Printed by Roger Daniel. Roach, Joseph R. (1985) 2008. The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge. The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus. 1601 [1949]. In the Three Parnassus Plays, 1598–1601. Ed. J. B. Leishman. London: Nicholson & Watson. Shakespeare, William. 2014. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. Eds. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan. London: Bloomsbury. Starks-Estes, Lisa S. 2014. Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid. Houndmills: Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———.  2016. “Julius Caesar, Ovidian Transformation and the Martyred Body on the Early Modern Stage.” In Julius Caesar: A Critical Reader. Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. Ed. Andrew James Hartley. London: Bloomsbury. Williams, Katherine Schaap. 2009. “Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard II.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (Fall): 26. Worthen, W.B. 1984. The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics of Performance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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36 DETERMINED TO PROVE A VILLAIN? Appropriating Richard III’s disability in recent graphic novels and comics Marina Gerzic From medieval times until now, Richard III’s identity has been firmly tied to his disability. Medieval and Renaissance writers, from Thomas More to William Shakespeare, were obsessed with Richard’s outward appearance, using it as way to measure him as both a ruler and a man. Shakespeare applied “medieval notions of disability to the historical Richard III in his construction of Richard, the character” (Comber 2010: 183). The appropriation of medieval and Renaissance attitudes to Richard’s disability as a marker of character and morality continues in various twenty-first-century graphic novel and comic book representations of Richard III. This chapter examines recent graphic novel and comic book representations of both Shakespeare’s Richard III (Manga Shakespeare, Richard III; Requiem of the Rose King; Kill Shakespeare; and Batman: Knight and Squire), as well as the “historical” figure Richard III (The Boar and several web comics by artists Emma Vieceli and John Aggs). I am interested in how these works (re)interpret and visualize Richard’s appearance and their underpinning sources and assumptions. How is Richard’s disability – or lack thereof – depicted? Which Richard emerges more clearly: the Richard with a malformed body who is inherently evil or Richard the innocent victim of Tudor propaganda? A question that emerges in this chapter is how Shakespeare and disability are both adapted in comic books and graphic novels, and their relationship. There is possible wordplay on adaptation and accommodation to be made here. Hilary M. Nunn defines “accommodation” as something that occurs “when the body and the environment surrounding it reach accord” adding that “happiness can only occur within this harmonious balance” (2015: 128). Nunn’s use of the term “harmonious” echoes Scott McCloud’s work in Understanding Comics (1993). McCloud argues that one of the most crucial functions of comics is the interplay between image and text. A “good comic” for McCloud is one in which the combination of these different forms of expression are “harmonious” (1993: 47). However, “disability [in comic books] frequently operates in contexts that are more troubled and less clear” (Walters 2016: 114) and “can productively disrupt normative expectations about ‘typical’ composition process[es]” (Walters 2015: 174). The story of Richard III does not need to portray his physical impairment; nevertheless, it has become inseparable from his characterization, and comic books, which must pack as much detail as possible into small, compact illustrations, make deliberate choices in their depiction of Richard. Like Michael P. Jensen’s 2011 survey of comic book adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, amongst others (Burt and Jensen 2007; Heuman and Burt 2002), my focus is global. I look 409

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beyond Western comics and analyze Japanese manga, as well as Western works inspired by manga. Comic book and graphic novel adaptations allow readers to engage in a type of reading that emulates performance closely: readers interpret these texts not only through written cues, but also through body language and facial expression, spatial placement, movement, artistic design, and framing. Kevin Wetmore Jr. writes of both the “influence of theatre on graphic novels” and a “rising influence of graphic novels on theatre” (2006: 173). However, the differences between what makes a watchable (and enjoyable) play and what makes a readable (and enjoyable) graphic novel or comic are often not the same thing (Tondro 2011: 92). This chapter builds on Irina Metzler’s and Abigail Elizabeth Comber’s methodology when discussing disability and Richard III, primarily as they differentiate between modern medical stigma and medieval concepts of impairment. Jeffrey R. Wilson defines this “stigma” as “the making of meaning in disability and other abnormalities,” arguing that, while we encounter disability in Shakespeare’s texts, we also and more “explicitly encounter stigma” (2017). This stigma is valuable in historic and cultural terms, changing in “one culture from one historic period to the next” (Metzler 2006: 37). Throughout the chapter, I therefore employ the terms “impairment” and “disability” within the framework of their modern connotations, using disability to represent social constructs and impairment to reference physical differences (Comber 2010: 184).

Depicting Richard before the Battle of Bosworth The majority of historical sources that discuss Richard, his rise to power, short reign, and his appearance come from authors writing after his death in 1485. Contemporary accounts do, nevertheless, exist; however, they generally provide relatively little evidence about Richard’s character and disability. The Usurpation of Richard the Third, an account by Dominic Mancini – an Italian who visited England in 1482–1483 – never mentions Richard’s appearance (Mancinus 1969). Nicolas von Poppelau – a nobleman who spent ten days in Richard’s household in 1484 – does discuss Richard’s appearance: a diary entry written during his stay suggests that Richard’s body appeared distinctive. Poppelau reports that Richard was three fingers taller than him, but a little slimmer and not as bulky, much more lean, and had very fine-boned arms and legs (Armstrong 1969: 137). Without knowledge of Poppelau’s own height, we cannot gauge Richard’s, but the account does build up a picture of a thin, spare physique, which perhaps accords with later hostile caricatures of Richard’s body. The accounts of Richard by John Rous – who lived and wrote before, during, and after Richard’s rule – are interesting as they change drastically over time, from sympathetic to outright hostile. Rous was in the service of the Yorkist dynasty as a chaplain during Richard’s reign. He was responsible for creating The Rous Roll (ca. 1483–84), an illustrated armorial roll-chronicle of the Earls of Warwick and their kin. The work was dedicated to the current lords of Warwick at the time – Richard III and his wife Anne Neville – and the roll presents a pro-Yorkist version of English history. The Rous Roll includes two portraits of Richard (f.2br and f.7cr); in neither does Richard display any uneven shoulders, withered arm, or any other impairment. With the shadow of Tudor rule looming, however, Rous’s description of Richard’s appearance begins to change. In Historia Regum Angliae (ca. 1480–1500), while Rous describes Richard as courageous in defeat (f.137r), he also makes outrageous claims, including that Richard spent two years in his mother’s womb and was born with hair and teeth (f.134v). While Rous’s account of Richard’s appearance may seem absurd, he correctly notes Richard’s burial location and describes the king as “slight in body and weak in strength” with “unequal” shoulders, the right higher and 410

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the left lower (f. 135r.). The delicate, gracile character and the pronounced scoliosis of Richard’s skeleton discovered in 2012 support Rous’s account. This hasty reversal of Rous’s earlier glowing judgment of Richard is an obvious example of the Tudor propaganda used to blacken the reputation of the House of York and bolster Henry VII’s tenuous claim to the throne.

Depicting Richard after the Battle of Bosworth The most well-known historical texts and chronicles, and those that would influence Shakespeare’s perception of Richard III as king and as man, were written after Richard’s death in 1485. The Tudor influence on the writing of these chronicles must be acknowledged, and the sources treated cautiously; however, it is important not to discount them altogether, as they draw on earlier material, and so some details, especially regarding Richard’s disability and burial place, have been proven to be true. It is remarkable how much attention the Tudor accounts of Richard III devote to his physicality and his impairment. Recent theories suggest that this undue focus is perhaps a response to his enemies only discovering Richard’s impairment once he was killed in battle: several accounts of the Battle of Bosworth mention that Richard’s body was stripped after he was killed (Lund 2015). The recent television documentary Richard III: The New Evidence (Johnstone 2014) shows how armor could have been made specifically for Richard, not only as a support for his scoliosis but also to hide any trace of it, and therefore any perceived weakness, in battle. The same would have applied to any tailoring of other clothing. According to ancient traditions, exterior “negative” traits such as physical impairment were seen as the “manifestations of personality degenerations, as well as a sign of the connection to the so feared maleficium”: wrongdoing or mischief (De Jesus Crespo Candeias Velez Relvaz 2013: 196). An imperfection from birth, such as a hunchback, therefore indicated a permanent and major defect of the soul. In the Elizabethan view, Richard’s impairment would have explained not only his moral corruption but also his ambition and desire for revenge. Francis Bacon, in his essay “Of Deformity” (1625), also reiterated this view, referring to a supposed consent between the body and the mind: “where nature erreth in the One, she ventureth in the Other” (254). This idea of an impaired body’s association with an evil mind and soul is prevalent throughout the descriptions of Richard III in the Tudor chronicles. Shakespeare’s primary source for Richard III is Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548). Hall’s chronicle includes as its principal source Thomas More’s History of King Richard III (1513–1518), on which Shakespeare draws. More’s portrait of Richard emphasizes the correspondence between Richard’s inner and outer features, describing Richard as “little of stature, ill fetured of limmes, croke backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right,” before accusing him of being malicious, wrathful, envious, and even perverse (More 2005: 9–10). More paints Richard’s “true” nature as arrogant, pitiless, cruel, and ambitious, as indicated by his twisted outward appearance. More thus re-writes history to suit his purpose: in his case, to legitimize the rule of Henry VII – who had a lineal claim to the throne far weaker than the man he had just murdered – through demonizing Richard.

Shakespeare’s Richard III An integral part of Richard’s identity in Shakespeare’s work is his physical impairment. Katherine Schaap Williams astutely notes, “Richard III has always asked audiences to pay attention to Richard’s body”; they “expect to see a body that [Shakespeare] . . . calls ‘deformed’ and we might now call ‘disabled’ ” (2016). In Richard III, Shakespeare amplifies the accounts of the king’s 411

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body from More’s History. Marjorie Garber argues that Shakespeare, like his predecessors, shapes both Richard’s physiognomy and character either for political purposes or as part of the Tudor revisionist desire to “inscribe a Richard ‘shap’d’ and ‘stamp’d’ for villainy” (Garber 1987: 30). Garber adds that Richard’s impairment is “transmitted . . . through both historiography and dramaturgy” (36). The play begins by bluntly exhibiting Richard alone on the stage, vicious in body and mind. Richard makes much of his physical appearance and the superstitions attached to his disability: he tells the audience that he is “not shaped for sportive tricks”;1 is “curtailed of this fair proportion” (Richard III, 1.1.18); and is “Deform’d, unfinish’d” (20). Richard also openly admits that, as a result of his impairments, he is “determined to prove a villain” (30) and is “subtle, false, and treacherous” (37). As in More’s History, Shakespeare’s Richard is a cunning, devious, and ruthless murderer, and the opening of the play demonstrates an initial figurative conflation of disability and sin. While More offers Richard’s disability as an emblem of moral wickedness, Shakespeare Richard’s physical impairment becomes “the root condition of his psychopathology” (Greenblatt 2013). Stephen Greenblatt notes that Shakespeare does not suggest that “that all men with twisted spines become cunning murderers,” but instead that a “child unloved by his mother, mocked by his peers, forced to regard himself as a monster will develop certain compensatory psychological strategies, some of them both destructive and self-destructive” (2013). Likewise, Tobin Siebers argues that the distinguishing feature of Shakespeare’s Richard is his self-consciousness about his own status as disabled (2016: 436), adding that Richard possesses a critical understanding of representations of disability and uses these falsehoods and negative beliefs about disability to his benefit (436). Linda Charnes similarly argues that Richard is the subject of traumatic cultural memory and is a figure “forced to embody and experience its symptomology” (1993: 28). Shakespeare had already positioned Richard’s disability as the cause of his psychopathology in a preliminary sketch of the character in Henry VI, Part 3, where Richard is called “crookback” three times.2 Richard is more specific about his own appearance and what it means when he claims that nature has made “an envious mountain on my back,/Where sits deformity to mock my body” (Henry VI, Part 3, 3.2.157–58). Since Richard cannot be loved or have any hope of sexual success, he instead sets his sights on obtaining the crown for himself. Shakespeare interprets the word “crookback” as referring to the spinal deformity of a “hunchback.” The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded use of “hunch-backed” is the second quarto of Richard III, when Elizabeth of York calls him “that foule hunch-backt toade” (Richard III, 4.4.l81). That we still refer to Richard today as a hunchback is indicative of how influential Shakespeare’s version of Richard’s body has been. Adaptations, as well as audiences and readers, now often imagine Richard’s body – following a long history of performance on stage and screen – with a humped back, a limp, and an immobilized arm. Even a production that plays Richard against type, without a visible impairment, depends on the “surprise on how Richard’s body doesn’t look distinctive” (Williams 2016). Richard’s disabled body is crucial to an audience’s desire to watch the play. Reading Richard’s staging of disability calls attention to what an audience wants to see when they look at Richard and what they think his disability can mean. For Geoffrey A. Johns, Richard is a “persistent but elusive signifier that simultaneously arouses and evades the impulse of the spectator to classify and to interpret” (2015: 43). Michael Torrey argues that Richard’s “ability to deceive repeatedly complicates the semiotic status of his deformity” (2000: 141). Richard’s paradoxical nature as both physically impaired, while extremely strong and able in both the political arena and on the battlefield, challenges audiences to question ideas of body image and disability. Johns argues that Richard’s textual instability “seems entirely the point,” constituting what he terms a “performative lacuna” (2015: 42) that is designed to encourage the audience to “supply their 412

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own narratives of bodily signification, only to have these narratives undermined as the plot unfolds” (42–43). The concept of impairment or disfigurement has become integral to the central argument surrounding the Ricardian historiography that inspired Shakespeare, and surrounding discussions concerning Richard’s morality and his capacity and aptitude as monarch. This is particularly evident in modern graphic novel representations of Richard and to how these works interpret and embody Richard and his disability visually.

Graphic novels, comics, and Shakespeare’s Richard III The series Manga Shakespeare offers cut-down versions of some of Shakespeare’s plays in a Westernized version of the Japanese cartoon style, manga. The term manga, coined by Japanese artist Hokusai Katsuhika, refers to an incredibly popular form of comic book in Japan. Jensen notes that manga is “not on the fringes of society as comics are in the West, but, rather, central to Japanese life and culture” (2011: 396). Manga has its own “distinct grammar and inner logic made of pictograms, written text, and visual frames” (Otmazgin 2016: 4). Manga Shakespeare Richard III (2010), illustrated by Patrick Warren, relies on various conventions of the shōnen manga art style in order to embody Richard and signal his evil character and intent. Shōnen manga is aimed primarily at pre-teen and teenage boys and is focused more on action than relationships. The Manga Shakespeare adaptation of Richard III has much in common with shōnen manga, where “fast-paced action-packed storylines are common,” and Warren’s Richard III “is concentrated on the action, focusing on the blood thirsty exploits of its evil male protagonist” (Hayley 2010: 275). The dark and brooding, black-and-white gothic style of Warren’s illustrations is used to convey whether a character is good or evil. Manga has developed its own distinct iconography for expressing emotion and other internal character states, with a character’s appearance saying as much about them as the text. As Robin E. Brenner attests, in manga “emotion is the key” (2007: 41), with emotion being conveyed through a character’s eyes and body type, amongst other physical features (40–50). Villains in manga are often colored in darker tones, including a shadowing on the face, and have narrow eyes fixed in a menacing glare. Warren’s Richard is no exception: his angled and sharp-looking facial features and slick dark hair are neatly juxtaposed with his curved body. Richard’s hunched back is made more prominent through the placement of a raven, Richard’s familiar, on top of his back (Warren 2010: 15).3 Contrasted with Richard, Henry Tudor has light colored, pointy-looking hair, his face is not marred by shadow, and he wears light colored armor: a handsome young man with a spiky hairdo is the recognizable hero in shōnen manga. Similarly, a new manga depicting the life of Richard III – and roughly based on Shakespeare’s depiction of Richard – has been published recently. The ongoing shōjo manga series Requiem of the Rose King (2014–) is written and illustrated by renowned shōjo mangaka Aya Kanno. Shōjo manga is aimed primarily at a young female audience; the style is typically characterized by a focus on personal and romantic relationships. Ryuta Minami notes that “the division of the self, or the conflict between one’s true gender/self and the other gender/self,” is a popular theme of shōjo manga (2007: 814). In Kanno’s work, Richard takes the place of this androgynous heroine. Like Warren’s adaptation, Kanno presents the story of Richard via a darker, gothic inspired aesthetic. In an allusion to the spirits that haunt Shakespeare’s Richard the night before the Battle of Bosworth, Kanno’s Richard is haunted from a young age by visions of a strange woman in armor, who turns out to be the deceased Joan of Arc: she tells young Richard that he is a demon to be feared and taunts him by calling him “an indigested and deformed lump” (Kanno 2014: 11). In Requiem of the Rose King, there is no evidence of Richard’s physical impairment, of 413

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which Shakespeare and his sources made so much. Instead, Kanno’s Richard is portrayed as different because he in intersex and has heterochromia iridum (differently colored eyes). Richard is small and slender, with an effeminate, pale face that often is marked by shadows; his dark hair is long in the front and obscures his lighter-colored left eye. There is no implication so far in the series that Richard identifies as anything other than male – the gender assigned to him at birth – especially as Richard is inspired by, and wishes to emulate, his father. Yet, the narrative frames this Richard as physically neither male nor female: the spirit of Joan of Arc appears and questions Richard’s gender, telling Richard that: “You’re not a boy. That said . . . You’re not a girl either” (40), and throughout Requiem, there are several instances of Richard’s shirt being torn, with the implication that he has breasts. Janella Asselin notes it is an immensely complicated choice to “take a character that Shakespeare described as ‘deformed’ and imply that the character is either intersex or transgender” (2015). The gender politics of Kanno’s adaptation are further muddied by her portrayals of Margaret of Anjou, Cecily Plantagenet, and Elizabeth Woodville as controlling, evil, and unhinged. As Requiem of the Rose King is an ongoing series, it will be interesting to see how Kanno embodies Richard as he grows, and the more familiar parts of Richard’s story have to be told. The graphic novels Kill Shakespeare (2010–) and Batman: Knight and Squire (2011) can also be considered loose adaptations of Shakespeare’s material, staged in the popular superhero comic genre, a genre that continues to impact comic book and graphic novel production in the West. Both works rely on intertextuality and intervisuality in their reworking and embodiment of Richard. Kill Shakespeare is a graphic novel series created by Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery and illustrated by artist Andy Belanger. It features some of Shakespeare’s greatest heroes as they battle against some of Shakespeare’s greatest villains. The quest at the center of the series is one to track down and kill – or save – a reclusive wizard by the name of William Shakespeare. The Prodigals, the name given to the group of heroes in the series, are rebelling against the unscrupulous rule of Richard III. They want to save Shakespeare, whom they see as their savior against the tyrannical Richard and the other villains who support him. The villains, led by Richard, want to claim Shakespeare’s mighty power for their own. Kill Shakespeare’s Richard is muscular, tough, and intimidating. Belanger notes that Kill Shakespeare writers Del Col and McCreery instructed him to “skip the ‘hunchback’ element to Richard” (Del Col et al. 2015: 311), and so Richard’s shoulders are even. However, he still has a withered arm, made more noticeable because his other arm is massive. Belanger refers to his conception of Richard’s appearance as “a more muscular version of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, with a tinge of Darth Vader” (311). Richard’s wicked character is thus signalled by his appearance: like Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview and Vader from Star Wars, Richard is a monster, conman, and an obsessive, power-hungry villain, through-and-through. Along with Kill Shakespeare, another depiction of Richard III in the superhero comic genre is in found in Batman: Knight and Squire. The series follows the adventures of Knight, a British vigilante who models himself after both the Knights of the Round Table and Batman, and his teenage sidekick, the Squire, who is reminiscent of Robin, Batman’s sidekick. In “For Six,” the third episode of Batman: Knight and Squire, a character named Professor Merryweather brings back Richard III from the dead as part of her human cloning project. Unlike her assertion that Richard has been defamed by historians and is actually kind and wise, Richard turns out to be more like Shakespeare’s Richard – conniving, manipulative, and power-hungry. There is no sense that this Richard is impeded by an impairment; this is confirmed by writer Paul Cornell, who argues that “Shakespeare probably gave him [Richard] his hunchback” (Cornell et al. 2011) as justification for choosing not to include it. This artistic choice is at odds with others in Batman: Knight and Squire that connect its Richard directly with Shakespeare’s Richard: Richard 414

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speaks in iambic pentameter and ends his sentences in rhyming couplets, and artist Jimmy Broxton notes that Richard’s appearance is “modelled on a young [Laurence] Olivier” (Cornell et al. 2011) – presumably from the 1955 film Richard III – although this is not explicitly stated. This visual influence is particularly evident in the panels where Richard reveals his evil plans, in a typically Shakespearean aside. Like Olivier’s portrayal, the Richard in Batman: Knight and Square is also highly charismatic and evil to the core. He exploits social media and holds press conferences in which he cons his followers into believing that he is noble and good, before turning on Merryweather and attempting unsuccessfully to reclaim the English throne.

Graphic novels, comics, and the “historical” Richard III As well as graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare’s Richard, there have been recent comics and graphic novels that seek to challenge Shakespearean orthodoxy and depict a Richard unimpeded by Shakespeare’s Tudor-inspired account. Like Shakespeare and adaptations of Richard III, these works use Richard’s body as a site for signalling the morality of his character. The Boar (2010), by Italian artist Cecilia Latella – a self-confessed Richard III “fan” – is a personal take of Richard’s “(His)Story” (Latella 2010: iii). Latella cites the novels The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1888) and We Speak No Treason (1971) as her inspirations (iii), which seemingly places The Boar in the realm of historical fiction. However, Latella’s work largely glosses over the history, especially the political matters, which are only included on one page, and barely hints at the fate of the Princes in the Tower (51, 77–78). This decision is not surprising, as Latella essentially ignores the majority of acknowledged historical sources in favor of an overly romanticized fictional account of the love story and tragedy of Richard and Anne Neville, told in the form of Richard’s recollection of life events. When Richard’s disability is removed – Latella’s Richard has no hunchback, scoliosis, or any other visible impairment – his character is eroded into a thin, fragile-looking tragic-hero (38, 73). Like Shakespeare, Latella essentially re-creates Richard in order to suit her purpose, which is to rehabilitate Richard, but by eliminating what we do know about Richard, she presents a disappointingly incomplete and blatantly biased portrait. Latella’s Richard is a man lacking in agency: he is denied agency by his brother and is not given the opportunity to kill Anne Neville’s first husband, Edward of Lancaster, during battle. Latella’s Richard is also surrounded by tragedy, but he remains blameless: he is convinced by the people that he should be king (30); Edward IV’s daughter, Bess, wants to marry him (71–72); and the Duke of Buckingham takes it upon himself to murder the Princes in the Tower (77–78). The only time Richard feels guilty about something is misplaced guilt about the death of his wife from illness (57–61): her name is the last word he utters before being murdered on the battlefield at Bosworth (103). As Latella’s work appeared before the discovery of Richard III’s skeleton, I now move on to works that were inspired by the search for and discovery of Richard’s remains in Leicester. Artist Emma Vieceli was commissioned by the University of Leicester to create a series of panels telling Richard III’s story for the University’s press conference announcing the discovery of a skeleton at Greyfriars. Like Latella, Vieceli admits to a longstanding fascination with Richard (“Richard III Discovery” 2012). Vieceli’s work shows Richard’s defeat at Bosworth and the fate of his remains, until his disinterment from a Leicester carpark. The first panel is fascinating piece of Ricardian propaganda. Flags blazing, Richard is an unarmed hero in his final moments of the battle, wearing light-colored and immaculate armor – his impairment hidden through tailor-made armor to support his body. He is surrounded front and back by – we presume – Henry VII’s soldiers: faceless menacing dark shadows who resemble wild animals with their claw-like hands and wolf-like silhouettes (“Richard III Pictures” 2012). As in Manga Shakespeare, 415

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the contrast between light and dark is used by Vieceli to signify good and evil. Vieceli further cements Richard as hero by turning a common Tudor period insult used against Richard, “the Usurper,” on its head; the caption below the image of Richard now refers to Henry as the “Usurper” (“Richard III Pictures” 2012). The discovery of Richard III’s skeleton also prompted the Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre to run an exhibition to coincide with the announcement of the identification of his remains. Graphic novel artist Richard Aggs was commissioned to create a series of images for the exhibition, Richard III: The Making of a Myth (“King Richard” 2013). The images, inspired by Japanese and Franco-Belgian comic styles, depict the life and dramatic death of Richard (“Richard III Manga” 2013). The art, based on both fact and legend, includes scenes from Richard’s coronation, his possible connection to the Princes in the Tower, the death of both his son and wife, the Battle of Bosworth, his burial, and the discovery of his remains. Aggs pointedly creates images that do not intentionally depict Richard as a villain and instead highlights both his battle prowess and personable side. Of particular note is the panel depicting the missing young Princes: Aggs offers two versions of the story – one where the Princes are killed in the Tower and one where a cheerful looking Richard sends his nephews away (presumably to safety) – and both scenarios are offered as possibilities. More significantly, in Aggs’s artwork, Richard does not to appear to have any sort of overt or visible physical impairment. His shoulders are even, and his movement and actions are not impeded in any way – he is able to fight in battle alongside his army without sort of bodily restriction. In an interview about his creation of the artwork, Aggs describes his process as more like a “reportage project than a historical one,” as he was “drawing this as live information was coming in from the site archaeologists,” making changes as “bits of information were confirmed” (“Richard III Manga” 2013). Aggs’s comments indicate that his artwork is intended to be an accurate visualization of the archaeological information surrounding Richard’s death. For example, his depiction of Richard’s death at Bosworth Field shows the final blow to Richard’s head by one of Henry Tudor’s solders, information that was revealed after the discovery of Richard’s remains (Greyfriars Research Team et al. 2015: 65–68). However, Aggs stops short of depicting the mutilation of Richard’s corpse by the Tudor forces before his body was buried. While this editing is probably a result of the artwork being on public show and needing to be “family friendly,” the absence of panels depicting the brutality of the Tudor forces in a representation that otherwise attempts a balanced view of Richard’s life and death is noticeable. The archaeological research work at Leicester in 2012–13, which discovered and identified Richard’s remains, does not tell us anything about the character of Richard III. His physical condition and appearance were not a manifestation of his character or morality. However, when viewing the reconstruction of Richard III’s face based on his skull, Philippa Langley, one of the driving forces behind the exhumation of Richard, exclaimed, “you can kind of see the man. It doesn’t look like the face of a tyrant” (Osmond and Woods 2013). Marcela Kostihova aptly surmises Langley’s reaction as substituting one form of embodiment for another as “the decisive marker for informing . . . perceptions[s] of the king’s interiority” (2016). What struck me about Langley’s naïve, and frankly absurd, comment was how much Richard’s body and appearance are still connected to how we perceive what kind of man he is. As David Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder note, this “reiterates an equation at the root of cultural mythologies of disability” between “external shape and interior disposition” (2000: 102). The graphic novels I have discussed here make similar assumptions in the way that they embody Richard: those based on Shakespeare’s conception of Richard, and those working against the anti-Richard Tudor mythology both use Richard’s body, and the presence or absence of a disability and impairment, to signal what kind of man and king he was. Richard might have been a tyrant, or he might have 416

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been a brave king whose custom-made armor hid his condition from prying eyes. We will never know his character for certain, and any analysis of Richard’s personality drawn from his physical appearance and disability is simply idle speculation.

Acknowledgments I thank Aidan Norrie and Helen Balfour for their assistance during the preparation of this chapter. Earlier versions were presented at the “Appropriation in an Age of Global Shakespeare” conference (at the University of Georgia in 2015) and the 2015 ANZAMEMS Conference, and I thank the participants at both these events for their helpful feedback.

Notes 1 Richard III, 1.1.14. All references to Richard III are to the Arden edition, edited by Antony Hammond (Shakespeare 1985); further citations will be incorporated into the body of the text. 2 Henry VI, Part 3, 1.4.75, 2.1.96, 5.5.30. All citations to Henry VI, Part 3, refer to the Arden edition of John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen (Shakespeare 2016); further references will be incorporated into the body of the text. 3 Richard is also equated with ravens in the series two episode of Shakespeare: The Animated Tales that adapts Richard III (Orlova 2004). Here, an image of a raven perched atop a castle transitions into a hunched Richard sitting down to dinner. My thanks to Sharon O’Dair for directing me to this reference.

References Armstrong, C.A.J. 1969. “Appendix.” Dominicus Mancinus. In The Usurpation of Richard the Third: Dominicus Mancinus ad Angelum Catonem de occupatione Regni Anglie per Ricardum Tercium libellus. Trans. and Ed. C.A.J. Armstrong. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 136–38. Asselin, Janelle. 2015. “Aya Kanno Plays With Gender and Shakespeare in ‘Requiem of the Rose King.’ ” Comics Alliance. 3 Apr. Accessed 20 Jul. 2017, http://comicsalliance.com/aya-kanno-requiem-of-therose-king/. Bacon, Francis. 1625. “Of Deformity.” In The Essayes or Counsels, Ciuill and Morall, of Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount St. Alban. Ed. Francis Bacon. London. 254–56. Brenner, Robin E. 2007. Understanding Manga and Anime. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. Burt, Richard, and Michael P. Jensen. 2007. “Cartoons and Comic Books.” In Shakespeares after Shakespeare. Vol. 1. Ed. Richard Burt. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 10–73. Charnes, Linda. 1993. Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Comber, Abagail Elizabeth. 2010. “A Medieval King ‘Disabled’ by an Early Modern Construct: A Contextual Examination of Richard III.” In Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations. Ed. Joshua Eyler. London: Routledge. 183–96. Cornell, Paul, Jimmy Broxton, and Guy Major. 2011. Batman: Knight and Squire. New York: DC Comics. De Jesus Crespo Candeias Velez Relvaz, Maria. 2013. “A Villain and a Monster – The Literary Portrait of Richard III by Thomas More and William Shakespeare.” Revista Anglo Saxonica 3.5: 191–201. Del Col, Anthony, Conor McCreery, and Andy Belanger. 2015. Kill Shakespeare. Backstage edition. San Diego, CA: IDW Publishing. Garber, Marjorie. 1987. “Descanting on Deformity: Richard III and the Shape of History.” In Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. Ed. Marjorie Garber. New York: Routledge. 28–51. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2013. “The Shape of Life.” The New Yorker. 5 Feb. Accessed 30 Jul. 2015, www.new yorker.com/books/page-turner/the-shape-of-a-life/. Hall, Edward. 1548. The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Families of Lancastre and York. London. Hayley, Emma. 2010. “Manga Shakespeare.” In Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Toni Johnson-Woods. New York: Bloomsbury. 267–80. Heuman, John, and Richard Burt. 2002. “Suggested For Mature Readers? Deconstructing Shakespearean Value in Comic Books.” In Shakespeare after Mass Media. Ed. Richard Burt. New York: Palgrave. 151–72.

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Marina Gerzic Jensen, Michael P. 2011. “Shakespeare and the Comic Book.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts. Eds. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete, and Ramona Wray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 388–405. Johns, Geoffrey A. 2015. “A “Grievous Burthen”: Richard III and the Legacy of Monstrous Birth.” In Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. Ed. Sujata Iyengar. London: Routledge. 41–57. Johnstone, Gary, dir. 2014. Richard III: The New Evidence. Channel 4 Television Corporation. Kanno, Aya. 2014. Requiem of the Rose King. Vol. 1. San Francisco, CA: Viz Media. “King Richard III’s Life and Death Told through Graphic-novel Style Art.” 2013. BBC News Leicester. 15 Feb. Accessed 1 Jun. 2015, www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-21382096/. Kostihova, Marcela. 2016. “Digging for Perfection: Discourse of Deformity in Richard III’s Excavation.” Palgrave Communications 2. DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.46. Latella, Cecilia. 2010. The Boar: A Comic about Richard III. Trans. Cecilia Latella, and Eva Thien Point. lulu.com. Lund, M.A. 2015. “Richard’s Back: Death, Scoliosis and Myth Making.” Medical Humanities 41: 89–94. Mancinus, Dominicus. 1969. The Usurpation of Richard the Third: Dominicus Mancinus ad Angelum Catonem de occupatione Regni Anglie per Ricardum Tercium libellus. Trans. and ed. C.A.J. Armstrong. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial. Metzler, Irina. 2006. Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment during the High Middle Ages, c. 1100–1400. London: Routledge. Mitchell, David, and Sharon L. Snyder. 2000. “Performing Deformity: The Making and Unmaking of Richard III.” In Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Eds. David Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 95–118. More, Thomas. 2005. The History of King Richard the Third. Ed. George M. Logan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nunn, Hilary M. 2015. “ ‘The King’s Part’: James I, The Lake-Ros Affair, and the Play of Purgation.” In Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. Ed. Sujata Iyengar. London: Routledge. 127–41. Orlova, Natasha, dir. 2004. Shakespeare, The Animated Tales: Richard III. New York: Ambrose Video Pub. Osmond, Louise, and Pete Woods, dir. 2013. Richard III: The King in the Car Park, Channel 4 Television Corporation. Otmazgin, Nissim. 2016. “Introduction: Manga as ‘Banal Memory.’ ” In Rewriting History in Manga: Stories for the Nation. Eds. Nissim Otmazgin and Rebecca Suter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 1–26. “Richard III Discovery Inspires Host of Artwork and Illustrations.” 2012. University of Leicester Press Office. Accessed 1 Jun. 2015, http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/for-journalists/richard-iii/features/ richard-iii-discovery-inspires-host-of-artists/. “Richard III Manga Exhibition – Interview with Artist John Aggs.” 2013. Sophie’s Japan Blog. 25 Feb. Accessed 1 Jul. 2017, https://sophiesjapanblog.com/2013/02/25/richard-iii-manga-exhibition-inter view-with-artist-john-aggs/. “Richard III Pictures by Emma Vieceli.” 2012. University of Leicester: News and Events. 12 Sep. Accessed 1 Jun. 2015, http://www2.le.ac.uk/news/blog/2012/september/richard-iii-pictures/. Rous, John. ca. 1483–8484. The Rous Roll. Add MS 48976. ———. ca. 1480–1500. Historia Regum Angliae. Cotton MS Vespasian A XII. Ryuta, Minami. 2007. “Appendix A: Shakespeare in Japanese Comics.” In Shakespeares after Shakespeare. Vol. 2. Ed. Richard Burt. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 813–17. Shakespeare, William. 1985. King Richard III. Ed. Antony Hammond. London: Arden Shakespeare. ———. 2016. King Henry VI, Part 3. Eds. John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen. London: Arden Shakespeare. Siebers, Tobin. 2016.“Shakespeare Differently Disabled.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race. Ed. Valarie Traub. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 435–54. The Greyfriars Research Team, Maev Kennedy, and Lin Foxhall. 2015. Bones of a King: Richard III Rediscovered. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Tondro, Jason. 2011. “By My So Potent Art.” In Superheroes of the Round Table: Comics Connections to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Ed. Jason Tondro. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. 91–141. Torrey, Michael. 2000. “ ‘The Plain Devil and Dissembling Looks’: Ambivalent Physiognomy and Shakespeare’s Richard III.” English Literary Renaissance 30: 123–53. Walters, Shannon. 2015. “Graphic Disruptions: Comics, Disability and De-Canonizing Composition.” Composition Studies 43.1: 174–77.

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Appropriating Richard III’s disability ———. 2015–2016. “Graphic Violence in Word and Image: Reimagining Closure in The Ride Together.” In Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives. Eds. Chris Foss, Jonathan Gray, and Zac Whalen. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 111–24. Warren, Patrick. 2010. Manga Shakespeare: Richard III. London: Self Made Hero. Wetmore, Jr., Kevin J. “ ‘The Amazing Adventures of Superbard’: Shakespeare in Comics and Graphic Novels.” In Shakespeare and Youth Culture. Eds. Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., and Robert L. York. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 171–98. Williams, Katherine Schaap. 2016. “Richard III and the Staging of Disability.” In Discovering Literature: Shakespeare and Renaissance Writers, British Library, 15 Mar. Accessed 15 Jul. 2017, www.bl.uk/ shakespeare/articles/richard-iii-and-the-staging-of-disability/. Wilson, Jeffrey R. 2017. “The Trouble with Disability in Shakespeare Studies.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.2.2. http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i2.5430/.

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37 SOME TWEETING CLEOPATRA Crossing borders on and off the Shakespearean stage Louise Geddes

The affordances of a global, post-textual Shakespeare network have presented challenges for those who seek out the place of language in appropriation theory. As appropriative critical practice finds itself increasingly oriented towards cultural studies, it becomes necessary to rearticulate the place of the Shakespearean text in such work. Shakespeare studies continues to wrestle with what fidelity might mean; appropriative critical practices increasingly dismiss of visible manifestations of the Shakespeare text. Douglas Lanier’s influential application of Deleuzian rhizomatics to appropriation theory recognizes the limits of this approach even as he acknowledges that the absence of a centralized “root” threatens to elide Shakespeare entirely and requires that we “revisit the role of the Shakespearean text and the authority it seems to provide in relation to adaptation” (Lanier 2014: 23). Instead, Lanier proposes that we engage in a process of “selective essentialization,” emphasizing a fidelity to the “spirit” of Shakespeare (Lanier 2017: 9), while Desmet, Loper, and Casey suggest that this reassessment “brings to the foreground the relationship between medium and message” (Desmet et al. 2018: 6). Likewise, Julie Sanders’s update to her seminal Adaptation and Appropriation affirms the need to reconsider the space we allocate to the presence of the text, noting that “in any study of adaptation and appropriation the creative import of the author cannot be as easily dismissed as Roland Barthes’s or Michel Foucault’s influential theories of the ‘death of the author’ might suggest” (Sanders 2017: 3). What this post-rhizomatic uncertainty suggests is the need for an acknowledgment of some form of centralized hub, or core, to “this transmedial set of objects we call Shakespeare” (Lanier 2017: 3), one that articulates a point of convergence where the various inscriptions of a text might make visible the extent to which appropriation exists as a “recursive process of give and take” (Desmet 2014: 43), rooted in shifting understandings of a text in transition. And yet, as long as the Shakespeare text is identified as an object, as something “that we preserve in climatecontrolled library vaults” (Desmet et al. 2018: 5), methodologies remain trapped in an “archivecentered” approach (Lopez 2008: 311), and our capacity to fully articulate what fidelity means is limited to a discussion of equivalence. Even though Shakespeare studies strives to move beyond assessing shades of exactness, what constitutes these bonds that hold Shakespeare together, and how they are formed, is overlooked in favor of artifact study – understandably so. Capturing the appropriative process as it occurs is nearly impossible. A more fruitful approach requires an acknowledgment of the Shakespeare text and locates this transmedial set of objects in a borderland as it moves from one form to another. 420

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To account fully for appropriation as a process of transformation requires a network of critical thought that allows appropriation theory to intersect with three adjacent methodologies that affirm the place of the transformative text: Global Shakespeares, performance study, and theories of digital texts. This chapter attempts to centralize the plasticity of text by emphasizing the multiplicity of language, and suggests that Ivo Van Hove’s 2012–2018 multimedia production Roman Tragedies is an appropriative text that enacted (and continues to enact through its ongoing presence on social media) the borderlands subjectivity that is crucial to appropriation.1 In Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep Amsterdam creates simultaneous texts that cross linguistic, media, geopolitical, and textual boundaries to illustrate the network of textual variants that characterize Shakespeare when situated in the liminal space between work and event that appropriation occupies. When its fragments of performance, text, technology, and translation coalesce into a singular iteration of Shakespeare, Roman Tragedies models the interplay of text, performance, culture, and reception that characterizes appropriation. If, as Joubin suggests, language is “a marker deeply ingrained in identity politics” (Joubin 2014: 192), then Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s simultaneous performance texts – the underlying Shakespearean narrative, the spoken performance in Dutch, English surtitles, and concurrent Twitter commentary – identifies alienation, alterity, stability, and narrative inclusion as sites of convergence where the transformative text mutates across media. A six-hour aggregate of three Shakespeare plays – Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra – Roman Tragedies defines itself by its ongoing practice of border transgression, creating an appropriation that occurs both in real time and asynchronously, one that begins in the theatre, and continues online as audience members were encouraged to live-tweet the performance using Twitter hashtag #RomanTragedies. Roman Tragedies is an appropriation that interweaves the four performance texts of Shakespeare into one singular event, and each point (this is true for at least the performance that I experienced in the United States) is distanced from the experience of the “original” text through a remediation manifest in either language, theatre, or technology. Roman Tragedies embodies the contested status of language in a post-textual, postdramatic Shakespeare network, and situates its audience of theatregoers, readers, and social media users between the borders of different encounters, and asks them to create a cohesive Shakespeare experience for themselves. In so doing, it represents the dynamic, transformative text at the core of Shakespeare, eschewing rhizomatics, the performance/print binary, and source-based models of adaptation in favor of a more robust network of associations that gravitate towards, but never settle upon, a fixed notion of the Shakespeare text. In recent years, performance theory has been dominated by Hans-Thies Lehmann’s idea of a postdramatic theatre that consciously shifts away from the work, that is to say, text-based dramatic theatre, to a more transitory, and ultimately unrecordable, event. In his prologue, Lehmann describes the postdramatic in botanical language that directly undercuts any reliance on rhizomatic structures, suggesting that in postdramatic theatre, “the limbs or branches of a dramatic organism, even if they are withered material, are still present and form the space of a memory that is ‘bursting open’ in a double sense” (Lehmann 2006: 27). Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, Lehmann recognizes the need for a core even if it is in a process of decay. Although the theatre experience is one that has always embodied “extra-linguistic or at least borderline linguistic semiosis” (Lehmann 2006: 48) the decaying, frayed corpse of the text lingers. Theatre is, as Peggy Phelan notes, always on the verge of disappearance, existing nowhere else but in the moment that it is experienced (Phelan 1993: 146–36), but the text is not so easily discarded, lingering as a ghostly shadow, or as W.B. Worthen suggests, operating as a template from which performance is built (2014). The emphasis on ephemerality of performance that shapes much postdramatic performance theory allows us new ways of thinking about how engagement with the text might constitute its 421

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own event. By positioning appropriation as a process that crosses the borders among languages, media, genre, and culture, we situate it as a negotiating agent between the book locked in the vault and the ephemerality of text at play. As the plays themselves toy with the borders of the Roman Empire, Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s reimagined text rehearses the disorientation that occurs in an event situated at the border between a extant text and its subsequent performance, between languages, and between the live and the digital. Roman Tragedies highlights the intermediary and flexible nature of text as a site of transformation and makes visible the processes of appropriation by demanding that the participating spectators (or spect-actors, to use Diana Taylor’s term [2015: 73–87]) take ownership of their chosen perspectives. Van Hove’s playful perforation of expected textual and theatrical boundaries illustrates the deterritorialization of Shakespeare that occurs in a globalized, multi-media network of performance, critical study, and appropriation, and suggests that fidelity is rooted in an assertive correspondence between the bounded material text and the open-ended network of use engendered by appropriation that we might term “event.” For the Shakespeare text to exist in a borderland is for it to exist in a state of perpetual coming into being, and to engage with such an object is to be forced to make decisions and yield to a more participatory engagement. In Roman Tragedies, then, the Shakespeare text affirms an “existential border subjectivity” (Birringer 2002: 69) as it oscillates between work and event. It should be no surprise that global, digital, and performance Shakespeares have bloomed concomitantly as fields of study. The pressures that these fields had previously put upon demands of exactness have since been mitigated by new theorizations about what occurs when we transpose Shakespeare onto new media, cultures, and uses. In particular, translation theory focuses the broad designation of “Global Shakespeares” and establishes a more grounded assessment of the ways in which the texts transverse culture, style, and language. Trans-linguistic acts of appropriation cross borders in obvious ways, but in omitting the larger cultural adaptation and thinking more closely about the act of translation, we can see how appropriation is both a dismissal and an affirmation of the authority of language. In practice, translation threatens to displace the significance of the English language as the primary identifying signifier of the vast network of citations, images, cultural memories and critical histories that we term Shakespeare, and yet, a work cannot fully extrapolate itself from presence of the English language text, as its very identity is built on a the demand for a comparative parallel. Transformations of Shakespeare in nonEnglish languages do indeed highlight “cultural authenticity and alterity” (Joubin 2014: 191), but the study of Shakespeare performed or translated also implicitly asks how “authenticity” might inhabit multiple spaces simultaneously, and subsequently root alterity in the play of language itself. In acknowledging the extent to which a translation “is received by a different community to that which received the ‘source text’ and will obviously be subject to very different readings to those of the respective foreign language ‘source’ ” (Minier 2014: 23), critical studies of Shakespeare in translation build a complex network of texts bound together by its affiliation as “Shakespeare,” making visible both the processes and reception of the appropriated text. Transcultural, translinguistic Shakespeares highlight the paradox at the heart of the debate over the constituency of “text” – it is at once identifiable, yet subject to communities and networks of use. Critical explorations of Shakespeare in diverse global communities suggest a crossover point at which culture, language, and affective memory manifest “new interactive possibilities within Shakespearean language, meaning, and context” (Singh and Arvas 2015: 184), but again, the critical recognition that this is a task that is fraught with discourses of colonization2 that resonate through language use as much as it does through circulations of cultural capital. As Derrida and Venuti note, within the act of translation exists in an “economy of in-betweenness” (Derrida and Venuti 2001: 179) that is both “appropriating and appropriate” (178) and the 422

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fragmentation of the “unity of the word” (181) that occurs in acts of translation creates a liminal space that requires the reader’s participation in negotiating multiple cultures and languages simultaneously. Alfredo Michel Modenessi goes further and claims that “a translation is an event, evanescent by nature, like a performance, and it will not usually become fixed and translatable” (Modenessi 2015: 75). In seeking out difference, the process of translation seeks out the “spirit” of Shakespeare, wrangling with the possibility that this spirit is found in language itself. For critics working with Shakespeare, this economy of in-betweenness is already expounded by Shakespeare’s place as both the embodiment of intellectual imperialism and as a site of resistance. Performance studies has undergone a similar shift away from a reliance on textual similitude as a means of understanding Shakespeare in motion and remains understandably reluctant to cede a more dialogic perspective on performance. Like appropriation theory, performance studies has found it necessary to shift away from affirmative assessments of the value of the Shakespearean text in theoretical practice, in order for a performance text to be understood as its own entity. Performance’s conscious dismissal of a mimetic theatre practice is akin to translation’s movement away from equivalence and carries the burden of representing Shakespeare, whose authority is traditionally rooted in language (and, by extension, print), in diverse cultures and forms. In spite of the rise in original practices, both as practice and as a source of scholarly authorization for “authentic” Shakespeare, it seems to me that in the twenty-first century, to continue to affirm the “aesthetic and ideological persistence of realist ‘objectivity’ ” (Worthen 2014: 93) of the Shakespearean text is critically irresponsible. As Worthen has repeatedly pointed out, performance transforms the text, often repositioning Shakespeare as a medium in itself and, yet, even in this productive approach, retains a tendency to isolate and dismiss the work that risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For Worthen, Shakespeare is an intermediary presence, navigating between the notions of a literary construction of “text,” and the more performative idea of “event,” and if this is the case, then it is our responsibility to look to appropriation as a means of straddling this divide. The advent of postdramatic performance theory has resulted in a significant shift away from a methodology rooted in dramatic literature, in favor of the study of an ephemeral moment that is permeable and embedded within its context. As a result, performance theory recognizes that Shakespeare becomes “necessarily transformative” (Iyengar 2017: 6) every time it is used, which poses a particular set of challenges for Shakespeare studies, whose practices depend upon a recognizable and stable canon. Certainly, due to the endurance of that which we term “play,” most contemporary Shakespearean theatre would fail to meet the criteria for postdramatic inclusion because of the cultural ubiquity of the Shakespearean dramatic text. Shakespeare, textual or post-textual, cannot simply “recede from the theatre” (Lehmann 2006: 49), but it can exist in transformative borderlands, becoming a locus for new meanings, methodologies, and practices. Transformative Shakespeares are a conduit for transmutations of media and new cultural practices, building on Kidnie’s seminal assessment of appropriation as a process (2009: 30), becoming an embodied “event” that captures a greater “density of intensive moments” (Lehmann 2006: 83). Even as he advocates for the expiration of script-based dramatic theatre, Lehmann finds himself unable to leave the work behind and defines Shakespearean theatre as a “disorderly knot, containing words” (Lehmann 2004: 105, my italics). Ideally, Lehmann envisions Shakespearean stage as “a world without borders, even if sometimes cloaked in fog, or surrounded by prison walls” (104), and appropriation’s transformative use of Shakespeare is a tool with which we can continuously remap the limits of such a world. Appropriation signals the space in between “work” and “event,” “text” and “performance,” and appropriation becomes the convergence point through which the transition from work to event is made visible. We might push Lehmann further and suggest that appropriated Shakespearean text is a borderland “with no restrictive unity of style, no atmosphere without ambiguity” (104). 423

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Of course, the argument that text is a site of interpretive play has been well made by poststructuralism. But the prominence of digital textuality has made the multiplicious nature of text more apparent, and in the case of Roman Tragedies, gives continued life to the text in cyberspace, sustained by its existence in hyperlinks, snapshots, videos, and recollections shared on social media. Twenty-first-century reading practices have changed the materiality of text, and the “hypertextuality of the Internet forces the reader/user into active constructions of the text’s boundaries” (Sandvoss 2017: 33). Firstly, the digital world has destabilized the notion of printed text as something that exists through a Cartesian “ritual iteration” (Schalkwyk 2010: 72); instead, text exists in a medium that empowers the user to overwrite the extant linguistic signifiers at any point. In a digital world, the mutability of text is foregrounded and this makes explicit text’s dependence on its medium – as it is fragmented, disseminated, and appropriated, text becomes, to poach the popular phrase, spreadable (Jenkins et al. 2013). Secondly, the increasingly common global circulation of mass media, and the ostensible collapse of markers of cultural hegemony, subcultures, and geo-temporal organization that comes with the accessibility and movement of text, performance, and image through social media, blogs, and webpages, dismisses the notion of the stable text as an essentialist, purist artifact as not only fallacious, but elitist, instead offering up the text for widespread consumption. Digital media, fan practices, and an increased sophistication in the technology we use, continues to entangle Shakespeare in cultural context, breaking the notion of “text” down to a raw metadata in a process that draws attention to the ongoing need for curation.3 In short, the organizational demands that digital media place on the text makes that text ephemeral. Encountering the text – finding it, contextualizing it in its new platform, following hyperlinks, ignoring or following tabs, or screen pop-ups that co-exist in digital space – becomes an event. The simple act of loading a page becomes both an act of translation, as the text is translated from XML code to readable text, and an act of performance, as this particular text exists ephemerally at the demand of the reader/user, and thanks to advertisements, adjacent webpages, potential bugs or errors in connectivity, proffers a different experience with every load of the page. Moreover, as establishment institutions such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Globe, and the Shakespeare Institute reach out on social media and draw in creative, amateur iterations of a text, the notion of Shakespeare as stable text is imbued with a catalogue of interpretive variants is drawn further into doubt. To build on Worthen’s view of Shakespeare as a medium in itself underscores Desmet’s suggestion that we cannot but be faithful to Shakespeare because the text is activated into a perpetual state of becoming by the processes of consumptionas-production that appropriation engenders. Shakespeare’s Roman plays themselves explore the ways in which constant, shifting geopolitical boundaries impact nationalist identity and draws attention to how shifting conceptions of Rome activate the semiotics of honor. These plays punish characters who are static and challenge characters who mistakenly believe that their own blood’s merit is equivalent to the value of Roman soil by remapping Roman politics to exclude such characters when they assume they are most safe. The characters who invest in the stability of Roman honor are most harshly treated, and key to political survival is a character’s understanding of language’s multiplicity. Characters who thrive in Shakespeare’s Rome do so because they are adaptable when they find themselves on the outskirts of Roman political intrigue and of the geopolitical Roman empire, and Van Hove’s fidelity to historical chronology emphasizes both the advantages and dangers inherent in a borderlands existence. In Julius Caesar, Antony moves from spectator to player when he invigorates the masses, even before they have beheld “Caesar’s vesture, wounded”(Julius Caesar, 3.2.194). Later, Antony falls when faced with the limits of his authority because he relies on the weak assertion that “I am 424

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Antony yet” (Antony and Cleopatra, 3.13.98) to affirm his autonomy. Coriolanus is trapped by his inability to recognize his own borderland identity when banished from Rome, thinking that his honored name is meaningful enough to eviscerate his city when he announces “I banish you!” (Coriolanus, 3.3.123). Cleopatra ultimately triumphs over both Antony and Octavius because of her willingness to exploit her borderlands subjectivity, both in terms of her geographic location and her relationships to men of political power. Consistently on display in these plays, and emphasized through the authority (real and perceived) of names, are the limitations faced by characters who assume a semiotic fidelity to the labels applied to them when the political climate is constantly shifting. Van Hove’s production was recognizably Shakespearean in its narrative form. The narratives were streamlined but left structurally consistent with the print editions, and the play was staged in a modern television news office with the small company of actors performing in contemporary formal business wear. The stage was divided into two generic, IKEA-style news offices and center stage, a small alley was established by glass walls that enclosed the abutting rooms. This no-man’s-land was a purely theatrical space, off-limits to the spectators who were invited to leave the auditorium and roam around the stage throughout the show, and every death was staged in this area. Multiple large television screens were placed at different points across the set, and the off-stage areas, such as the make-up table, were also visible. The televisions situated around the stage screened both contemporary news footage and the live-streamed the action on the stage, allowing audience members to watch themselves watching the drama. Situating the tragedies in a contemporary global newsroom allowed Van Hove’s production to amplify the geopolitics of the text in a twenty-first-century global community as the actors performed among flat-screened televisions that “served as breaches where the history of the 20th and 21st centuries invaded that of Rome” (Ball 2013: 166). By relocating the drama to a site of news commentary, the characters in Roman Tragedies were thematically moved into the same space of the audience themselves: marginalized, operating as both makers of action and spectators. Caught between enactment and reportage, Roman Tragedies reaffirmed the blurred boundary between public and private that is present throughout the Roman plays, amplifying the affective construction of character that is so prevalent in both Shakespeare’s Rome and contemporary media culture. Multi-media production choices mirrored the denial of private space by staging intimate scenes, such as Coriolanus’s submission to Aufidius in the style of a talk-show, with the actors sitting in two comfortable chairs, facing outwards towards the auditorium, and immediately following the scene with a screened news interview – a staged television program that then ran intermittently throughout the show. The setting of the production trapped the characters in a theatrical borderland, both performing the roles of participants and chorus, caught between watching and doing, externalizing the processes of the characters and putting it on display alongside the receptive process of the audience. The production choices, which “immediately inscribed onto the spectator’s consciousness a troubling tension between the real and the fictionalized” (Collard 2013: 8) makes explicit the blurring of the boundaries between “real” and “fictional,” between “live” and “digital,” and forces the spect-actors to participate in a public act of reception. As is consistent with Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s output, the text was translated into Dutch, but designed to tour worldwide, and sought to linguistically maintain the geographic placelessness that the set was designed to reflect. Two sets of surtitles remediated the performance further, and it is this attention to the continual fragmentation and reconstitution of Shakespeare language that makes visible appropriation’s borderland identity. A large screen above the stage showed scenes that took place too far upstage to see and even when dark, continued to translate the spoken lines into English. The words were not modernized, nor was any translation adapted 425

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to Dutch vernacular, suggesting that the remediation lay in the larger consumption of the text, marking the production as a conduit for language’s permutations, rather than a receptor in its own right. Below the screen, a red LED board intermittently ran lighthearted, notices across the top of the playing space, announcing breaks, presenting responses that were entered by audience members at the computer station in the lobby outside, and running countdown clocks on major characters’ deaths – The Guardian’s theatre reviewer, Lynn Gardner, advised her London readers that as the show counts down to the death of Caesar “you calculate whether you can fit in a toilet break” (Gardner 2017). Overhead spoken announcements during the scene reinforced the understanding that we were experiencing an event by continuously drawing attention to time. The announcer counted down each set change, explained to the audience any cast doubling, and reminded the spect-actors that they had time to purchase snacks or change their location on or off the stage. The text was never far from the production, however, as the surtitles and the announcer’s self-consciousness about the impending dramaturgical timeline kept the text at the foreground of the performance. Moreover, the audience’s prior textual knowledge of the plays’ narratives supplemented the experience of the event, giving the audience members time to locate themselves in proximity to a particular moment that they wished to encounter close up (or avoid, should that be their preference). The surtitles offered the audience a stability to cling to in the face of an potentially impenetrable language (assuming that the majority of the New York audience with whom I shared the experience with were not sufficiently fluent in Dutch to fully comprehend the spoken language). The surtitles offered the audience Shakespeare, both through translation of the lines into English and by drawing the audience’s attention to what was coming in the marathon production. This moment hints at further textual multiplicity, as the audience member reading along is encountering an adapted, rehearsal-room edited, and possibly twice-translated text. The anticipation of signifiers (in this case, staged deaths) stood as a marker of time passed, narrative cohesion, and Shakespearean tragedy – the audience would have its promised end. Not only were eyes divided between text and performance, but audience members also found themselves free to choose their subjective position – they could stay in the house and read the text, framing themselves as viewers, or go up on to the stage and watch the actors closely, live or on screen, turning away from embodied performance to watch one of the television sets. They were also free to supplement the experience by following or posting to the Twitter hashtag #RomanTragedies. Therefore, in spite of multiple screens across the stage, the show rejected spectacle in favor of an emphasis on the mutability of language – a bold choice for three plays that explicitly engage with the power of spectacle. There was no place for blood in Van Hove’s bland corporate office space, and as a result, Coriolanus became a failed politician, forcing the audience to rely on the narrative of his deeds, rather than bear witness to Caius as a “thing of blood” (Coriolanus 2.2.109. Antony revealed a photograph of Caesar’s body, which he then marked up with red pen, and when death occurred, it came not through the high Roman fashion – stabbing – but by an actor assuming a position on the movable block in the liminal space between rooms and rolling backwards underneath a bird’s eye camera that could then display their corpse on screen from above. These were bloodless revolutions, and they were televised, presenting war as a sinister green light, but omitting the carnage. The choice to avoid bloodshed in Roman Tragedies is a curious disembodiment of these very corporeal play texts that resisted the ambiguity of the semiotic body, a particular concern to both Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, and reaffirmed the production’s commitment to language as the foundation for this appropriation. There were obviously practical reasons for such an omission – I am reasonably sure that no theatre-goer would have wanted to walk through the 426

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remains of Caesar – and yet these omissions forced a greater reliance on the linguistic markers, both within the text (such as Antony’s speech to the mob) and beyond the text, through the surtitles. The production was forced into a discursive zone, and the lack of spectacle ultimately reduced the theatrical power of the event, instead, favoring a work that was not only read across texts and platforms, but transcended the event’s temporality, becoming accessible outside of theatre when it gained life on social media. Roman Tragedies not only violated traditional boundaries of theatrical space by inviting the audience to roam around the auditorium, but also by encouraging social media documentation on twitter, via the hashtag #RomanTragedies, allowing the gaze to move from actor to audience participant, from stage to device, integrating reading, participating, and viewing as a means of experiencing Roman Tragedies. Alongside the stage production itself, Twitter might have merely offered an alternative performance, one that transcends the five-plus hour traffic of Van Hove’s stage, but the Roman Tragedies advertised its own commentaries, including a digital comment box by the snack bar that would then appear in the running commentary on the LED board. At its most fundamental level, the hashtag #RomanTragedies allows audience members the opportunity to validate their experience, identify and interact with other audience members, relive the experience, or catch up on what might have been missed (and with a five-and-a-half hour run time, Twitter offers a valuable opportunity to stay plugged in to the performance during Gardner’s recommended bathroom break). For the aspirational audience member unable to attend a performance, the hashtag offers a sampling of the experience, and a partial reconstruction of an experience curated by an audience member, affirming Van Hove’s aspiration for a subjective performance event.4 More cynically, Mancewicz (2014) suggests that ultimately the effect of the intermediality in Roman Tragedies is “a bitter comment on the inactivity of citizens in contemporary democratic societies” and suggests that “the production reflects on a mediatized world in which social networks give a mere illusion of civil action” (144). I disagree. Roman Tragedies suggests that, in borderlands, new methods of communication can yield new strategies for participation. The adjacent Twitter performance contributes to the overall appropriation and embodies the reception processes that Desmet sees as essential to the understanding of Shakespearean appropriation. Moreover, as Danielle Rosvally suggests, Twitter offers opportunities to engage in a digital form of Marvin Carlson’s “ghosting” palimpsest (2003), in which the memories of the audience haunts contemporary performance. Applied online, ghosting expands so that the practice of crowdsourcing active definitions of Shakespeare “creates access points for knowledge economies” (Rosvally 2018: 151). The hashtag, which transcends time and distance, thus makes an already inter-cultural and translinguistic appropriation a deeper global presence by existing across temporal-spatial boundaries, linking together prior performances, their contexts, and other ephemera, through the authority of written word, staged as it is, on Twitter. #RomanTragedies is a vast and varied set of affiliated tweets, ranging from the real-time experience of audience members, to the utterly inexplicable – one user attached the hashtag to a retweeted video of a man proposing to a woman in a Chick-Fil-A restaurant in Austin, Texas, for example. Much of the commentary, however, is from people experiencing the show, such as @blancanyon’s (Añón 2012) interpretive observation that in “#RomanTragedies strobe marks death!” Many tweets illustrated the platform’s capacity to place the spect-actor “simultaneously inside and outside the performance” (Calbi 2013: 140) and included filmed moments, such as @desavisdia’s (Desavisdisa 2017) clip of Coriolanus in the marketplace, as a taster “avant ma critique de ces époustouflantes #RomanTragedies.” Other comments were deliberately intertextual in nature, such as @polyg’s (Gianniba 2017) light-hearted personal update: “#DonJuaninSoho tonight. Is it unreasonable to expect as much snogging as in Antony and Cleopatra? #romantragedies.” Tweeter @eoin_price (Price 2017) complained that “everyone I know is 427

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at #romantragedies,” suggesting that his sense of missing out is underscored by his ability to somewhat share the experience that his own personal network is having by skulking on Twitter. Elsewhere, @jimdougan (Dougan 2017) gives a warning: “for anyone there, the best bit of #romantragedies is coming up,” and @Millymelon (Melon 2017) posts a list of “some of the questions Ivo Van Hove wants us to think about” alongside a photograph of the PowerPoint slide that closed the production with a list of discussion prompts, such as “when do principles become unreasonable?” Although the language of the tweeter, the date, and the occasional inclusion of the performance location (e.g. @BarbicanCentre) can help us separate out the discrete events, Twitter’s own organizational algorithms offers the social media user the opportunity to sort tweets by “top,” “latest,” “people,” “photos,” “video,” “news,” or a now defunct category named “periscope.” As the tweets become ever more detailed in their referents and cross-linking, the hashtag #RomanTragedies throws the discourse communities that surround our knowledge of Shakespeare into further relief by drawing attention to work that identifies itself as part of a hub of Shakespeare activity. These links are indicative of the diverse associations that build a complex network through which we encounter Shakespeare when caught between work and event. It embodies the paradox of simultaneously stable and unstable language, becoming a node that both directs the reader directly to the intended object of intellectual desire, and immediately diverts attention to a subjective, unexpected, and unintended association. Through the various forms of language at work in Roman Tragedies and its ongoing afterlife on social media, the dialogic processes of appropriation are actualized in the movement between work and event. Such a performance challenges the rhizome by returning appropriative acts to their central root, or trunk, and identifying this crossing space as a borderland where the spirit of Shakespeare exists in media res. As Twitter user @Franciska_E (Ery 2017) notes, “once again Ivo Van Hove only leaves in the essentials. No fake blood. No cliche [sic] costumes. Only text. And the human. #romantragedies.”

Acknowledgments This chapter was written for the Shakespeare Performance Research Group at the 2016 American Society for Theatre Research annual conference. Many thanks to Regina Buccola, Eric Brinkman, Emory Noakes, and Valerie Fazel for their feedback on this chapter.

Notes 1 The production began life in 2007 and, at the time of writing, continues to tour. Performances are scheduled until June 2018. 2 See Poonam Trivedi (2011). 3 To affirm this point, XML files are available on Open Source Shakespeare, the Folger’s Digital Texts database, and the University of Toronto’s expansive Shakespeare’s Contemporaries website. 4 It should be noted that, due to the wealth of material out there, the dedicated #RomanTragedies hunter might be able to assemble a significant portion of the event, should they wish to do so.

References Añón, Blanca. 2012. Twitter post. 16 Nov. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, https://twitter.com/blancanyon/status/ 269630296520019968. Ball, James R. 2013.“Staging the Twitter War: Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s Roman Tragedies.” TDR 57.4: 163–70. Birringer, Johannes H. 2002. Performance on the Edge. London: Bloomsbury.

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Some Tweeting Cleopatra Calbi, Maurizio. 2013. Spectral Shakespeares: Media Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave. Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Collard, Christophe. 2013.“On the Dynamic Equilibrium of Embodied Adaptations Contextualizing Ivo Van Hove’s Roman Tragedies.” Theatre Annual 66: 1–16. Derrida, Jacques, and Lawrence Venuti. 2001. “What is a “Relevant” Translation?” Critical Inquiry 27.2: 174–200. Desavisdisa. 2017. Twitter post. 19 Mar. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, https://twitter.com/desavisdisa/status/ 843911144943304704. Desmet, Christy. 2014. “Recognizing Shakespeare, Rethinking Fidelity: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Appropriation.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 41–59. Desmet, Christy, Jim Casey, Christy Desmet, and Natalie Loper. 2018. “Introduction.” In Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. Eds. Christy Desmet, Jim Casey, and Natalie Loper. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. 1–22. Dougan, Jimmy. 2017. Twitter post. 19 Mar. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, https://twitter.com/jimdougan/ status/843554945307738112. Ery, Francesca. 2017. Twitter post. 19 Mar. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, https://twitter.com/Franciska_E/ status/843587838243495936 Gardner, Lynn. 2017. “The Roman Tragedies review – Ivo van Hove’s magnificent take on the spectacle of politics.” The Guardian. 19 Mar. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/mar/19/ the-roman-tragedies-review-barbican-ivo-van-hove-barbican. Gianniba, Poly. 2017. Twitter post. 19 Mar. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, https://twitter.com/polyg/status/ 843888432673931264. Iyengar, Sujata. 2017. “Shakespeare Transformed: Copyright, Copyleft, and Shakespeare After Shakespeare.” Actes de congrès de la Société Française Shakespeare 35. DOI: 10.4000/shakespeare.3852. Jenkins, Henry, Joshua Ford, and Sam Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: NYU Press. Joubin, Alexa Alice. 2014. “Shakespearean Performance as a Multilingual Event: Alterity, Authenticity, Liminality.” In Interlinguicity, Internationality, and Shakespeare. Ed. Michael Saenger. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press: 190–208. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. 2009. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Lanier, Douglas. 2014.“Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 21–40. ———. 2017. “Afterword.” In Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. Eds. Christy Desmet, Jim Casey, and Natalie Loper. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. 293–306. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jurs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2004. “Shakespeare’s Grin: Remarks on World Theatre of Forced Entertainment.” In Not Even a Game Anymore: The Theatre of Forced Entertainment. Eds. Judith Helmer and Florian Malzacher. Berlin: Alexander Verlag. 103–17. Lopez, Jeremy. 2008. “A Partial Theory of Original Practices.” Shakespeare Survey 61: 302–17. Mancewicz, Aneta. 2014. Transmedial Shakespeares on European Stages. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Melon, Milly. 2017. Twitter post. 19 Mar. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, https://twitter.com/millymelon/status/ 843584552249581568. Minier, Márta. 2014. “Definitions, Dyads, Triads and Other Points of Connection in Translation and Adaptation Discourse.” In Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film. Ed. Katja Krebs. London and New York: Routledge. 13–35. Modenessi, Alfredo Michel. 2015. “ ‘Every Like is not the Same’: Translating Shakespeare in Spanish Today.” Shakespeare Survey 68: 73–86. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Price, Eoin. 2017. Twitter post. 19 Mar. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019, https://twitter.com/eoin_price/status/ 843527780306423808. Rosvally, Danielle. 2018. “The Haunted Network: Shakespeare’s Digital Ghost.” In The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture. Eds. Louise Geddes and Valerie Fazel. New York. Palgrave Macmillan. 149–66.

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Louise Geddes Sanders, Julie. 2017. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York. Routledge. Sandvoss, Cornel. 2017. “The Death of the Reader? Literary Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. 2nd ed. Eds. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York University Press. 29–44. Schalkwyk, David. 2010. “Text and Performance Reiterated: A Valiant Reproof, or a Lie Direct?” Shakespeare International Yearbook 10: 47–76. Singh, Jyotsna G., and Abdulhamit Arvas. 2015. “Global Shakespeares, Affective Histories, Cultural Memories.” Shakespeare Survey 68: 183–96. Taylor, Diana. 2015. Performance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trivedi, Poonam. 2011. “ ‘You Taught Me Language’: Shakespeare in India.” Shakespeare Survey 64: 231–39. Worthen, W.B. 2014. Shakespeare Performance Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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38 THE SANDMAN AS SHAKESPEAREAN APPROPRIATION Miriam Jacobson

Embedded in one of the many short narratives that make up the seventy-five issues of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic book series (1989–1996), which features a family of philosophical, allegorical gods (the Endless) dominated by Morpheus (god of dreams), also known as Dream, Shakespeare makes a brief but important appearance. The story “Men of Good Fortune” (The Sandman 13, collected in The Doll’s House, 1990) explores the slow-developing acquaintance between Dream and a long-lived human named Robert (“Hob”) Gadling, who is granted immortality by Dream’s sister Death in 1389. We know this date because Chaucer and a friend named Edmund are hanging out in the tavern arguing over the value of vernacular literature in the background – Edmund compares Chaucer unfavorably to Langland (13.3.2).1 The lord of dreams agrees to meet with Hob at the same tavern once every century, and the story progresses through the ages, finally ending in the 1980s with the friendship fully acknowledged and established. The story’s background encapsulates its beauty: the comic peppers its gently overlapping panels with speech-bubbles that represent the chatter and hubbub taking place in the tavern, but perhaps because Dream’s powers allow him to hear everything, or perhaps because it’s a comic, we catch precise snippets of every conversation occurring throughout the tavern. As the narrative jumps across the centuries we overhear political unrest, dirty anecdotes, writers discussing their craft: history being made through background chatter brought into deep focus. The foregrounded narrative – Hob Gadling’s miraculous survival, the ups and downs of his livelihood, and the development of his friendship with Dream – is deliberately unremarkable. Gadling even admits himself that he hasn’t evolved and doesn’t expect to, in direct contrast with his Ovidian interlocutor: “I doubt I’m any wiser than I was five hundred years back” (13.24.1). The world changes around Gadling, but he himself does not. This story’s power lies in its background conversations, historical details, and side-stories, a dialogic technique that comics are particularly well-poised to present. Thus, we first meet Shakespeare in the background of another person’s story. At the moment that we (and Dream) encounter Shakespeare, he is the “crap” author of one play, (13.13.5), asking the more successful Kit Marlowe for advice. Shakespeare earnestly wishes aloud for a Faustian bargain that would make him as talented and successful as Marlowe. The last we see of the playwright is his back, with Dream’s arm around his shoulders as they walk off to make a bargain (13.14.3). About 200 years later, the tavern now a coffeehouse, Gadling asks Dream if 431

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Shakespeare sold Dream his soul (13.19.2). Dream both acknowledges and demurs: “Nothing so crude,” (13.19.3) and the conversation, along with history, moves on. Gaiman dedicates two episodes of The Sandman to Shakespeare. They are, in effect, re-tellings of two plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Sandman 19, collected in Dream Country 1991) and The Tempest (Sandman 75, collected in The Wake 1996), and both stories share their titles with the plays. As a patron-muse, Dream has promised Shakespeare tremendous success and talent, “To give men dreams that would live on long after I am dead” (13.13.3) in exchange for two plays, one at the start and one at the end of the playwright’s career. The comic leaves the nature of the exchange amorphous: are these plays written for Dream, written under Dream’s influence, or written to Dream? The deliberate ambiguity of this collaborative exchange is what interests me most. In his essay on Gaiman’s appropriation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, John Pendergast emphasizes the “shared aesthetic qualities between comics and theatre” (Pendergast 2008: 186), these qualities emerge not only in the way Gaiman explicitly compares Shakespearean theatrical composition with comic-book writing, but also, I contend, in the way that both endeavors turn out to be appropriative, to echo with many voices. Sandman’s reworking of the Shakespearean corpus presents the two plays and their author – like comics themselves – as engaged and entangled in continuous acts of appropriation. In Gaiman’s graphic retellings, both illustrated by Charles Vess, both plays reveal themselves to be dialogic, intertextual, and, most importantly, collaborative and dynamic. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” this dynamism manifests in the faeries’ disruptive presence in the audience and, in “The Tempest,” through friends, literary collaborators, family members, and background tavern-goers in Stratford. The Sandman reconfigures Shakespearean authorship as dynamic, collaborative communities of appropriation, a model of literary production that lends itself most fittingly to the medium of comics. This protean model of narrative extends to the entire Sandman epic, which references Ovid to depict the fluid and timeless nature of literary appropriation itself. In the critical debate over how to define various uses of Shakespeare (is it adaptation, is it retelling, is it appropriation), the term “appropriation” has been defined and employed in a number of different ways. Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar adumbrate the dialogue between proponents of adaptation versus appropriation, noting Linda Hutcheon’s use of the term “adaptation” to describe the textual, structural process of creating new texts that comment on their originals (Desmet and Iyengar 2015: 12; Hutcheon 2006), a process that brings to my mind both Horace’s description of translation in his Ars Poetica and Rita Copeland’s interpretation of medieval scholarly translation as “displacing the source and supplementing itself ” (Copeland 1991–1995: 30). “Appropriation,” on the other hand, can describe both traditional and more evolutionary adaptation as outlined by Hutcheon, as well as larger cultural processes that do not involve textual traditions, but as Douglas Lanier has argued, move spatially and nonhierarchically across genres, cultures, languages and media, like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome (Lanier 2014; Desmet and Iyengar 2015: 12; Desmet et al. 2017: 4–5). Desmet’s own definition of Shakespearean appropriation expands Jean Marsden’s initial philological description of literary appropriation as “associated with abduction, adoption and theft . . . the desire for possession; . . . it has connotations of usurpation, of seizure” (Marsden 1991: 1) into the term’s full legal resonances, appropriation as an exchange, something that can either be a theft or a gift, a reallocation of resources (Desmet and Sawyer 1999: 4). Desmet and Iyengar build beautifully on these ideas, stating: to appropriate something is to make it one’s own, part of oneself, not just one’s property. . . . To appropriate Shakespeare is to make it part of one’s own mental furniture 432

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as well as to extend the solitary self out towards the broader world of Shakespeare and what Shakespeare touches. Desmet and Iyengar 2015: 14 Adopting Alexa Alice Joubin’s and Elizabeth Rivlin’s ethical take on appropriation via Levinas as “a shared selfhood created by face-to-face encounters between self and other” (Desmet and Iyengar 2015: 14; Joubin and Rivlin 2014), Desmet and Iyengar describe appropriation as “a two-way street that cultivates agents as well as Foucault’s subjected subjects” (Desment and Iyengar 2015: 14). Appropriation as both seizure and gift allocation, as an exchange that necessitates encounters between self and other fittingly describes the narratives of the writing and performing of Shakespeare’s plays in The Sandman through the transaction between Dream and Shakespeare. Dream appropriates Shakespeare’s imagination, populating it with stories and poetic inspiration, and Shakespeare in turn produces the plays that appropriate Dream’s ideas and memorialize his friends Titania, Auberon [sic], Puck, and the faeries, who are in the process of leaving the human realm forever. The Sandman’s Shakespearean episodes, particularly the performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, illustrate the nature of Shakespearean appropriation in multiple ways, beyond the transaction that Shakespeare makes with his patron-muse Dream: the performance of the play outdoors on the Sussex Downs for a surprise audience made up entirely of faeries and gods, with Shakespeare’s own son Hamnet portraying the changeling Indian boy and the real Puck literally “stealing the show” to play his own role on stage, demonstrates the play’s porosity and plasticity, open to glitches and outside influences that it fluidly reincorporates into itself.2 The performance also foreshadows more tragic features in the text’s external narrative of Shakespeare’s life to come (the loss of his son, his abandonment of his family in Stratford). The comic’s presentation of the play itself, making great use of speech bubbles, long perspectival landscape panels alternated with close-ups of the audience members commenting on the play, particularly three grotesquely adorable faeries, juxtaposed with the faces of Titania and Dream (who, the text hints, share an intimate connection) builds a volatile embodied universe around the play that the play is forced to incorporate, which in turn transforms the play and its players. Brandon Christopher notes that most critics read The Sandman’s use of the character of Shakespeare as an “author-surrogate” for Gaiman (Christopher 2017: 159), and he points out how deeply allusions to Shakespeare populate the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics (which first published The Sandman and a number of other highly literary, adult-oriented comics). For Christopher, delineating visual and citational references to Shakespeare in comic books’ paratext (title pages, asides, margins), Shakespearean references signify not only Vertigo itself (2017: 163) but also a genealogy of “literary respectability” (152) that lends comics an authority not hitherto granted to them. This observation supports Christopher Pizzino’s argument that comics published and marketed as comic books (including Gaiman’s work), rather than as privileged “graphic novels,” continually fight to establish their literary and artistic legitimacy and that this engagement appears on the page itself (Pizzino 2016: 45, 62). But I want to argue that even when Shakespeare’s plays and life story become part of the dominant narrative in Gaiman’s adaptation and appropriation – or should I say Dream’s and Shakespeare’s joint appropriation? – The Sandman continues to upend the notion of Shakespeare as any kind of singular genius of individual talent, instead championing the plays, and the writer himself, as products of dynamic exchange, infiltration and usurpation (Shakespeare’s mind by Dream, Shakespeare’s play and life by faeries). The two plays and the narratives of their coming into being flatten authorship into a rhizomatic network of chance meetings and collaborative possibilities. Though the comic does not deny that Shakespeare’s plays are powerful, or that 433

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Dream has given Shakespeare the gift of enduring poetry and ideas, it divests Shakespeare of singular literary authority by championing messy, imperfect, cacophonous sharing, exchange, borrowing, and stealing (in other words, appropriation) that can occur only in creative encounters between self and Other – even (following Freud) when that Other is the unconscious self, given allegorical shape as Dream. In Sandman 19, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Gaiman 1990; Dream Country 1991), we meet Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Long Man of Wilmington, an actual ancient chalk hill figure on the slope of Windover Hill in East Sussex, to which Dream refers as “Wendel’s Mound,” a site of an ancient British theatre, not only pre-conquest but pre-human (19.3.5).3 As Shakespeare’s patron, Dream initiates and orchestrates an unplanned, unpredictable, and unconventional first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for a magical audience: Lord Auberon of Dom Daniel, his consort Titania, and a whole host of elves, faeries, and goblins, including a playful and demonic sprite called Puck (the real Puck). These are, of course, characters in Gaiman’s Sandman multiverse who are based on Oberon, Titania, and Puck from Shakespeare’s play (and British folklore) but have their own roles to play in the Sandman narrative, as well as a spin-off series of comics of their own. The guardian of the portal to faerie is the Long Man himself, who, across three panels, brings his arms together and opens a door in the hillside through which the faeries, hobgoblins, and elves emerge onto the title page (19.6.3–4), so that Gaiman’s and Shakespeare’s characters converge with the fantasy of a real Oberon and Titania. The dominant colors throughout “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” are green and blue: the green of the English countryside and sloping Sussex Downs where the play is performed, and the blue of the sky as it turns from evening to twilight and finally to darkness. The faerie audience is also represented in shades of blue and grey, as if in perpetual shadow. These colors reinforce the complementary elemental aspects of the story: the actors, in shades of gold and ochre, seem chthonic as the soil, the playing space as fresh and green as the English countryside, and the faery audience ethereal as the sky. Together, all three colors blend seamlessly into one another across several panels, creating an ombré effect from deepest turquoise (the shadowed backs of the faeries), dark green to light-green playing spaces, followed in the background by ochre stage, tiring house, actors, and hills. This elemental blending and complementarity in the color scheme – elegantly limned by colorist Steve Oliff – creates a sense of connectivity during the performance, suggesting a symbiotic relationship between the faeries, the landscape, the earth, and the actors. It is as if Dream’s appropriation of the performance and its audience spreads the play onto the English landscape, reincorporating it into earth, grass, and sky, enacting what Desmet and Iyengar describe as the extension of the individual self out to the broader world configured by acts of appropriation, a kind of rhizomatic spreading and integrating of realms in which Shakespeare is not (and never was) a dominant figure: players made into ochre silhouettes, endless green landscape, blueshadowed faerie folk, anthropomorphic dreams and poetry. Dream and his non-human audience reframe the play’s own built-in commentary with a new commentary, sometimes willfully (mis)understanding the play, as when an elegant, petite female-bodied goat-headed fairy in the audience is offended by Bottom’s transformation: “What’s so funny about having a donkey’s head? Eh? Eh? Go on, tell me what’s so funny?” (19.15.2) she pouts. Later, perhaps in retaliation, she dispels the illusion of gender attempted by the play: “Besides – if you ask me, none of those women are women at all. They’re males. I can tell” (19.15.4). Ironically, the fairy can tell the boy players’ biological sex not because of the shape of their bodies but because of their status as food, hinting at a much more violent story that we don’t witness: “Human males taste more like rabbit than the females – and they stick in your teeth. Oh yes” (19.15.4). Has she already tasted the boy players? Does she plan to 434

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try at the interval? We will never know, but her commentary works to emphasize the profound differences between the human players and their non-human audience members, revealing an underlying menace to the meeting and melding of realms. It is thoroughly possible, now, that the host of carnivorous faeries in the audience might rise up and devour the players before the play is over, adding to the thrilling precariousness of the many levels of appropriation at work in the play. Gaiman’s fairy creatures are uncontrollable, dangerous forces, but their violence is an integral part of Shakespeare’s play itself, with its suggestions of rape in the fairies’ song to Ovid’s Philomel (Midsummer, 2.2.13–24) and in Oberon’s sexual manipulation of the drugged Titania.4 Gaiman’s human-hungry fairy’s commentary harmonizes with contemporary readings of Shakespeare’s play that point out the demonic aspects of the historical myth of Robin Goodfellow and the sinister, violent, and amoral aspects of fairies as posthuman figures (Purkiss 2001). The actual Puck introduces another level of dangerous instability by bewitching the actor playing him so that Puck can play himself. In appropriating his own fictional character, Puck literally “steals the show” (19.16.6) and is so convincing in his role that Shakespeare remarks that the actor Dick Cowley “seems almost two-thirds hobgoblin” (19.18.4). By the end of the play, as the faeries make their sudden and dramatic exit back through the Long Man of Wilmington, Puck sticks around to delight and terrify the human actors, who have now swapped places with their fey playgoers and become the audience themselves. Puck’s speech vanishes like the Cheshire cat, leaving only eyes, teeth, and speech bubbles broken down into individual words, plunging everyone into total darkness with a completely black panel (19.24.6). Puck’s usurpation of his own role coincides with an even more sinister threat of appropriation: that of Hamnet Shakespeare (already playing the role of Titania’s changeling boy in the play) by the real Titania, who clearly wants Hamnet for a changeling of her own and lures him to her side with enchanting stories of “bonny dragons” flying through “honeyed amber skies” of faerie, where it is “forever summer’s twilight” (19.17.7). The colors and shadows mimic her words as we see Titania tempting Hamnet with a (bewitched?) piece of fruit in crepuscular shadow against a honey-colored sunset. On the one hand, it’s palliative to imagine an alternative fantasy story-line for the real Hamnet, who died at eleven: maybe he ended up alive, but a prisoner in faerie. On the other hand, this is tragic foreshadowing, because even while spending time with his father, Hamnet confesses to the other players of the abandonment he senses from his father: “All that matters to him . . . All that matters is the stories” (19.14.1–6). Both this story and “The Tempest” maintain that Shakespeare’s bargain with Dream cost him his attention to, and meaningful connection with his family: a situation quite shockingly revealed in “The Tempest” when we are first introduced to a witty and spunky Judith (dark-haired, like Dream, Titania, and Gaiman himself ). Judith adores her father at his craft but remains unable to read, due to her father’s disinterest and absence during her childhood (75.18.4; 75.19.1–4). The panel that reveals Judith’s illiteracy and confinement in Stratford stands in relief against an open background panel that depicts the scene Shakespeare is composing at the time of this revelation: Ariel’s imprisonment in a tree (175.18.1). It eventually transpires that Dream has commissioned A Midsummer Night’s Dream to honor the faerie folk, who are on the verge of departing the human realm forever. As Dream, sitting somewhat uncomfortably between a ram-horned (cuckolded?) Auberon and raven-haired Titania, explains with a touch of ambiguity, having enjoyed faerie company and “entertainments” he wishes to repay them: “They shall not forget you” (19.22.2–3). The play is not only Dream’s and Shakespeare’s joint appropriation of source texts from Dream, the faeries, and Ovid (Titania recalls hearing Orpheus – Dream’s son, in the comic – sing a similar tale), but also is repayment to the faeries for services and feelings rendered. Although Gaiman never makes clear what entertainments and diversion Dream has enjoyed, Dream shares a close rapport with Titania, as 435

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evinced by the comic’s many close-ups of their faces together watching the play, looking at one another out of the sides of their eyes. They engage in subtly flirtatious behavior as they discuss the play. Titania tries to fathom Dream’s motives while Dream demurs: “Later, lady. Watch the play” (19.11.5). Dream turns towards Titania several times over the course of the play (19.11.5; 19.12.3–5;19.18.3; 19.20.2–5; 19.22.5) uncharacteristically confessing his thoughts and concerns to her at length, revealing considerable doubt and vulnerability, which suggests that the entertainments he received from Titania may have been romantic in nature, an idea that is alluded to indirectly throughout the series but left tantalizingly undefined.5 Dream’s eagerness for Auberon and Titania to see a play loosely based on their own marital discord, his ongoing commentary on the play seated between king and queen, and the way he carefully observes Titania watching the play, invoke another iconic, brooding prince who stages a play-within-a-play: Gaiman’s positioning of Dream as melancholy, impromptu theatrical impresario with ambiguous ulterior motives appropriates Hamlet. Auberon continues this analogy by standing up abruptly like Claudius, exiting the play before its end (19.23.3–7). Throughout her interactions with Dream, Titania seems reserved in response to Dream’s earnest confessions, giving Dream somewhat the air of a melancholy, unrequited lover, which is mirrored by the actions and words of Helena on stage, costumed here against type. Shakespeare’s text contrasts Helena’s fairness with Hermia’s darkness, whereas Gaiman’s actor playing Helena wears a black wig that mirrors both Dream’s and Titania’s glossy locks. Thus it appears that Dream has not only engineered the entire production, but in addition to appropriating Shakespeare’s mind, his pen, his current and yet-to-be-written characters (Helena and Hamlet) and his troupe to perform the play privately, he has appropriated his audience as well, bringing Auberon, Titania, and their people to earth to see the play despite the faeries’ semi-reluctance to visit and – at least until Act 5 of the play when Dream explains that he is repaying them for an unspecified gift – their confusion about why they were brought there in the first place. Auberon’s displeasure with the play at the end (19.23.3) seems to provide further evidence that the play was intended to entertain some faeries more than others. Charles Vess’s depictions of players and otherworldly audience frequently present both sets of figures from behind, in shadow, as well as from a hilly, faraway vantage point. By the opening of Act 5 when Theseus, played here by Shakespeare, delivers his speech linking lover, lunatic, and poet with the imagination, we see the player from the back in shadow, colored in black with pale blue outlines, performing before an audience of winged faeries and goblins who are also presented in black shadow, only their red eyes and mouth slits visible (19.21.2). We also see the same speech in miniature as if from far away, cast in blue and shadow as night descends and we read the words “from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven” (Midsummer, 5.1.13; Sandman 19.21.4). The final panel of the speech – “The poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name” (Midsummer, 5.1.15–17) – cast in shades of blue and black, reveals Dream’s brooding face in profile, a faint and very rare smile playing about his lips (Sandman, 19.21.5). These perspectives and shadows not only further blur the already shaded boundary between players and audience, which will eventually turn into one panel of complete darkness at the end of the play (19.24.6), but they also blur the boundaries between the playwright and his patron-muse, particularly in the panel depicting Dream’s profile and subtle smile. Whose pen is it that turns things to shapes? Shakespeare’s? Dream’s? Gaiman’s? Vess’s? Oliff ’s? Letterer Todd Klein’s? The faeries refer to Dream as “The Lord Shaper,” which augments the ambiguity of authorship. The title page of the story appears six pages in, right when Titania, Auberon, Puck and the faeries descend into the earthly realm through Wendell’s door. The top of the page is occupied by the three panels depicting the opening of the door, superimposed onto a large open 436

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panel depicting the faeries’ grand entrance. At their feet, a banner looking like torn parchment announces the group of creators as collaborators: “Written by NEIL GAIMAN, with additional material taken from the play by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Art by CHARLES VESS. Colored by STEVE OLIFF. Lettered by TODD KLEIN.” (19.6.4) followed by the editors and the names of featured characters’ creators Gaiman, Keith, and Dringenberg. The comic’s title page fairly announces collaborative, participatory authorship, placing all creators on the same plane, including the faeries and Dream. Although Shakespeare clearly serves as Gaiman’s muse, in a parallel to Shakespeare’s relationship with Dream, here he is jokingly relegated to a writer of “additional material.” Which “airy nothing” is named/unnamed here? Dream will not reveal his secrets, but he does hint to Titania – in what could be an appropriation or echo of Sidney’s description of poetry in his Defense (1595) – that the play is truthful, despite not being historical: “Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot” (19.22.5), which in turn glosses Theseus’s own commentary on Pyramus and Thisbe, presented from behind and in miniature as the final unframed panel in the scene, which privileges Dream’s conversation with Titania above the action of the play: “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination mend them” (Midsummer, 5.1.203; Sandman 19.22.6). Theseus dismisses plays and tales as mere shadows, and Dream counters this by elevating their status to profound poetic truth. This echoes Puck’s observation earlier in the play as he watches Bottom’s “translat[ion]”: “This is magnificent – and it is true! It never happened; yet it is still true. What magic art is this?” (13.14.9). Puck utters these words immediately after Hamnet reveals Shakespeare’s disregard for his family. Puck speaks in the final panel on the page, gesturing upwards with his hand to the line of panels above him, much like an illustrated sage pointing out typological readings in a sixteenth-century Bible. Thus, Puck’s words comment metatheatrically both on the play he is watching (Bottom’s transformation into an ass) and on the comic we are reading (Hamnet’s back-stage degradation of Shakespeare from great writer to terrible father). Glossing creates a mise-en-abyme effect as we witness Dream and Titania commenting on the unhappy lovers, or Theseus and Hippolyta commenting on Pyramus and Thisbe. Notably, Dream is, like many Shakespearean characters – particularly those in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest – an Ovidian appropriation himself. Not only does his story and identity borrow heavily from Ovid’s Metamorphoses’s treatment of Morpheus, but at times throughout the series, Dream is associated with Ovid himself: the faeries call him “Lord Shaper,” alluding simultaneously to Ovid’s shape-shifting water god Proteus, to Ovid’s tales of Metamorphoses of transformed shapes, and to the Middle English word for poet, scop or “shaper.” As Lisa S. Starks’s Chapter 35 in this book notes, in early modern England, a protean shape-shifter might also be a theatrical player. A shaper, too, is a kind of collaborative author, one that gives ideas and thoughts shape and shadow, but leaves them open for others to fill and pencil in, much like a comic book author or illustrator. And, in the penultimate issue of the series, moments before “The Tempest” begins, Dream quotes and translates Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15 on transformation as the only constant: “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit. Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost” (18.23.7). “Midsummer” occurs early in the first third of the epic, whereas The Sandman’s final installment – its ending – is “The Tempest.” Illustrated, colored, and lettered by the same team that produced “Midsummer,” Gaiman’s valedictory Sandman story returns to Shakespeare, paralleling the composition of Shakespeare’s final play with the composition of the series’s final comic, and Dream’s final appearance. Dream appears here in flashback. The character we came to know as Dream and called Morpheus was killed at the end of the ninth volume, grieved and mourned in the first three issues of volume 10 (The Wake), his divine position as lord of dreams, like a 437

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monarch, filled by a new character. Here we see Shakespeare fulfilling his bargain with Dream (our Dream), completing his final play. Here, unlike in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” we witness the play’s composition, not its performance. The narrative is still one of appropriation, collaboration, and exchange, and as in Gaiman’s first Shakespearean story, this model of appropriation is reciprocal and repetitive: it is never clear who is appropriating whom or what. The weather in Stratford produces a storm that drives Shakespeare out from his cozy home and into a nearby tavern, where he encounters three seafaring grifters displaying the corpse of a Caribbean Native American (75.9.2–4). Every penny they make off the side-show they spend on drink, waking Shakespeare with the bawdy drunken song that the playwright will later give to Stefano and Trinculo (11.4–7). Over the course of the episode, Shakespeare is visited in Stratford by several collaborators from whom he both appropriates ideas and to whom he gives his own to be appropriated. First, marching across Vess’s landscape of November trees presented by Vozzo in pale shades of washed out blue sky, pinkish sunset, and lavender-shadowed trunks and branches, is his colleague Ben Jonson. Jonson tries to lure his friend back to London and, having given up, helps Shakespeare move 1.1 in The Tempest from turgidity (Shakespeare himself acknowledges that Prospero “laboriously explains the plot” to Miranda) to action: “Perchance the enchanter could send the girl to sleep while he talks to the familiar” (75.15.3), while the two jointly contribute a few verses to a now well-known rhyme about Guy Fawkes Day (75.16.3). As the landscape shifts to snowy winter, we see Shakespeare walking with an unnamed white-bearded Oxford divine dressed in black university robes. The scholar thanks Shakespeare for secretly lending his poetic skills to the translation of the psalms (and perhaps the Song of Solomon as well) for the King James Bible project of 1611 (75.25.1). Their conversation occupies two pages, and as they walk, the snow falls more heavily, eventually obscuring the two figures, sky, and landscape in a final, almost completely white unframed panel (75.26.6). As the scholar praises the playwright’s talents, attributing them to god, Shakespeare humbly and a bit guiltily disagrees, presenting in rhetorical question form a description of a talented person (playwright or magician, Shakespeare or Prospero) whose talents depend upon a transaction with other beings: “What if he bargained with the pow’rs of the dark for talent, for power, for craft?” (75.25.6). The scholar then gives Shakespeare the idea of having Prospero renounce his magic at the end of the play: “Let him break his staff and burn his books” (75.26.2). As the two figures recede into the snow-blanketed landscape and approach a disappearing horizon, the scholar continues the Shakespeare-Prospero parallel, joking that he thought at first Shakespeare was speaking about himself, not his character (75.26.4), and of course both are true. The gradual obscuring of the figures, landscape, and boundary between earth and sky by white snow mirrors the blending of Shakespeare into Prospero. The gradual fade to white here serves as a negative complement to the darkening black-out of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” As we see later, this blurring between authors and character reaches its climax when Shakespeare admits that he himself is fashioned out of his own characters, in effect becoming an appropriation of his own plays. The play finished, Dream releases the playwright from his obligation. In return, Shakespeare requests a final drink at Dream’s palace. Over the course of their conversation, we learn that the bargain with Dream has transformed Shakespeare into a dynamic collection of stories and characters with no fixed selfhood. Just as his plays are themselves appropriations, so Shakespeare turns out to be an anthology of character appropriations: I am Prosper, certainly. . . . But I am also Ariel – a flaming firing spirit, crackling like lighting in the sky. And I am dull Caliban. I am dark Antonio, brooding and planning, and old Gonzalo, counseling silly wisdom. And I am Trinculo, the jester, and Stephano 438

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the butler, for they are clowns and fools and I am also a clown and a fool. And on occasion, drunkards. 75.30.6; 75.31.1–2 Hamnet’s description of his father in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” proves sadly true: “He doesn’t seem like he’s really there anymore. . . . Anything that happens he just makes stories out of it. I’m less real to him than any of the characters in his plays” (19.14.2). Shakespeare confirms Hamnet’s suspicions, confessing to transferring his grief and loss to the plays themselves (75.35.4). His family life in shambles,6 Shakespeare confesses that his life is lived entirely inside his plays: “Prospero and Miranda, Caliban and Gonzalo, aethereal Ariel and silent Antonio, all of them are more real to me than silly, wise Ben Jonson; Susanna and Judith; the good citizens of Stratford; the whores and oyster-women of London town” (75.35.6). Just as Gaiman’s Shakespeare has appropriated his life experiences into his plays, so is his selfhood appropriated and constituted by his characters and narratives. Shakespeare asks Dream why he commissioned The Tempest (75.36.4). He points out how classically appropriative the play is, a muddle of influences and stolen speeches: There is some of me in it. Some of Judith. Things I saw, things I thought. I stole a speech from one of Montaigne’s Essays. And closed with an unequivocally cheap and happy ending. Why did you not want a tragedy? 75.36.5 But Dream wanted “a tale of graceful ends . . . about a magician who becomes a man, about a man who turns his back on magic” (75.36.6), further blurring the lines between himself and Shakespeare as authors, and between authors and character. Unlike Prospero and Shakespeare, Dream believes that he cannot be liberated: “I will never leave my island” (75.37.4). Of course, readers of the full Sandman epic know that Morpheus has already found an egress through death, while his job lives on. Dream here seems to beg both Shakespeare and Gaiman to release him at least figuratively from his responsibilities, which drives Shakespeare, on the concluding page of The Sandman, to compose Prospero’s epilogue. Dream’s ending thus becomes entangled with the text’s and with Shakespeare’s who, the final panel reminds us, died six years after writing his parting play. Mirroring Puck’s conclusion to the performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Prospero’s epilogue engages the audience in a final appropriative exchange, where applause becomes the currency that ends the play, releasing it into the collective consciousness. The audience is offered the chance to purchase Robin Goodfellow’s good will, “Give me your hands, if we be friends/And Robin shall restore amends” (Midsummer, 5.1. 437–38), and to liberate Prospero jointly from the island and from his sins: “Let your indulgence set me free” (The Tempest, 5.Epilogue.20). The final panels that quote Prospero’s epilogue as Shakespeare writes it enact a visual vanishing similar to Puck’s at the end of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” but instead of swathing the scene in darkness, Gaiman and Vess zoom in on the materiality of textual composition, the scratches of a ragged quill pen dripping ink. The iconic outline of Dream’s sister Despair hovers over Shakespeare’s forehead as he writes “And my ending is despair, unless I be relieved by prayer” (75.39.5). The text of Prospero’s speech alternates between speech bubbles as Shakespeare pronounces the words, and italic handwriting on torn parchment as he composes them. The panels converge increasingly on the lettering: the letters’ curves mirror the shape of Despair’s face, blending word with image. Whereas in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Puck’s speech emphasizes facial gesture and movement, here the written word dominates. The final 439

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panel concentrates on the messy blot made by the frayed quill dripping ink onto the papers below, an incomplete manuscript missing its final line (75.39.9). Instead of the final lines of the play, “set me free” we see “Mercy . . . and free,” as if Dream offered thanks from beyond. The blot suggests both a messy (un)finality, splattered punctuation and the fluid nature of the Shakespearean text. The parallels between Shakespeare’s tattered quill spilling ink onto the page below – like slime, or The Tempest’s “ooze” (1.2.254) – and the viscous materials of comics, both in the way they self-consciously depict authorship as a messy business and make visual use of such seeping fluids, are obvious. But Shakespeare the author, like Puck at the end of “Midsummer,” disappears completely. All we are left with are a few notes of historical epilogue in narrative speech boxes: Shakespeare died soon after (Jonson’s gluttony possibly to blame); Judith had an unhappy marriage; Anne died the same year the First Folio was published (75.39.9). Gaiman’s name, followed by The Sandman’s publication dates 1989–1996, sit discreetly in the bottom right corner, the Shakespearean text fully appropriated by comics, the author by Gaiman himself.

Acknowledgments My profound thanks to Sujata Iyengar and Christy Desmet OBM for introducing me to appropriation and collaboration, and to Yaniv Lazimy for introducing me to The Sandman. Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

Notes 1 The Sandman was published in seventy-five issues, each with its own title, which were then collected into ten titled volumes, reissued later under DC’s Vertigo imprint. I cite here issue number, followed by page and panel numbers. The three titled volumes I’m working with appear in the References. 2 The actors in the comic are performing Shakespeare’s plays. To avoid confusion, when I am discussing a play by Shakespeare, I always use italics for the title. When I am discussing the comic, I place the title in plain text and quotation marks. 3 The Long Man of Wilmington was thought to be a Neolithic geoglyph like the Uffington White Horse, but archeological evidence from 2003 that post-dates The Sandman has revealed it to be a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century creation. Although Gaiman could not have known this at the time of composition, the anachronism seems almost more fitting to the comic’s setting, with its emphasis on late sixteenthcentury appropriation of ancient sources. 4 All Shakespeare quotations throughout the chapter are taken from the Arden Shakespeare editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare 2017) and The Tempest (Shakespeare 2011), respectively. 5 At least two other moments in The Sandman subtly link Titania and Dream romantically: in Season of Mists (Gaiman 1990–1991), Titania sends Dream the gift of a young faerie woman named Nuala, who falls into unrequited love with him. When Nuala returns to Faerie in The Kindly Ones (Gaiman 1996), the queen is despondent and angry that Dream has sent no secret message back to her. And in The Wake (Gaiman 1996), Titania attends Dream’s funeral, but adamantly refuses to elaborate on their intimacy: “My association with the Lord Shaper? That is none of your affair. I am the queen of Faerie. I keep my own counsel.” All of the other attendees profiled in the story are former lovers or devotees of Morpheus. 6 In the comic, Shakespeare’s lack of attention to practicality is matched by Anne’s lack of appreciation for poetry (75.27.1–5, 28.1–6). Meanwhile, Judith is engaged to marry the Caliban-like simpleton Tommy Quiney (75.7.5, 17.4–6).

References Christopher, Brandon. 2017.“Paratextual Shakespeareings: Comics’ Shakespearean Frame.” In Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. Eds. Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 149–67. Copeland, Rita. 1991–1995. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The Sandman as Shakespearean appropriation Desmet, Christy, and Sujata Iyengar. 2015. “Adaptation, Appropriation, or What You Will.” Shakespeare 11.1: 10–19. Desmet, Christy, and Robert Sawyer, eds. 1999. Shakespeare and Appropriation. New York: Routledge. Desmet, Christy, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey. 2017. Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gaiman, Neil. 1990. The Doll’s House. The Sandman. Vol. 2. New York: DC/Vertigo Comics. ———. 1991. Dream Country. The Sandman. Vol. 3. New York: DC/Vertigo Comics. ———. 1996. The Wake. The Sandman. Vol. 10. New York: DC/Vertigo Comics. Gaiman, Neil, Charles Vess, Steve Oliff, and Todd Klein. 1989. The Sandman. 10 vols. New York: DC/ Vertigo Comics. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Rivlin, Elizabeth. 2014. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lanier, Douglas. 2014.“Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Eds. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 21–40. Marsden, Jean I. 1991. The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Pendergast, John. 2008. “Six Characters in Search of Shakespeare: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Shakespearean Mythos.” Mythlore 26.3: 185–97. Pizzino, Christopher. 2016. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin: The University of Texas Press. Purkiss, Diane. 2001. Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories. London: Penguin. Shakespeare, William. 2011. The Tempest. Eds. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden. ———. 2017. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Sukanta Chatterjee. London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden. Sidney, Philip. 1595. The Defence of Poesy. London: William Ponsonby.

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39 SHAKESPEARE’S SCATTERED LEAVES Mutilated books, unbound pages, and the circulation of the First Folio Christy Desmet When Shakespeare is unbound, is that a good thing or a bad thing? The poster for the 2018 French Shakespeare Society meeting suggests humorously that unbinding the bard is a very good thing. Part superhero, part monster, Shakespeare defiantly breaks the chains of the codex book that confines him, his broad grin and furrowed brows telling us all we need to do about the pleasures of destruction and escape from the page’s bondage. More frequently in our postprint era, the end of the book is figured as a tragedy. The book’s demise demands elegy; it presages cultural degeneration, even apocalypse. As early as 1992, Robert Coover mourned the passing of printed books, their end paradoxically signaled by a misleading abundance: The very proliferation of books and other print-based media, so prevalent in this forest-harvesting, paper-wasting age, is held to be a sign of its feverish moribundity, the last futile gasp of a once vital form before it finally passes away forever, dead as God. Coover 1992 The specific threat in 1992 was hypertext, although hypertext’s dismantling of the page’s integrity through metonymic linkages did not survive the passing of Web 1.0. In 1998, Ian Donaldson would write, in a hopeful vein, “Like the death of the author, the death of the book has been greatly exaggerated” (Donaldson 1998: 2). Nonetheless, he offers copious examples of the indignities to which books (and by extension, their authors, even when long dead) are subjected. Take, for example, Byron’s ironic discovery that leaves from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela were being used to wrap a gypsy’s bacon in Tunbridge Wells (3). Donaldson highlights as well the book’s inherent fragility – a wish for the book to outlast brass and stone that evolves in tandem with anxiety about its vulnerability to dissolution. Notable for this sentiment is Ben Jonson’s dedicatory poem to Shakespeare’s First Folio: Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe, And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give. 1623: A4r

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This chapter argues that contemporary narratives surrounding the circulation and consumption of William Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623 figure the cultural fate of that text in elegiac terms of mutilation and dissolution, but that the celebratory tale of “Shakespeare unbound” emerges in our discourse about the bard as a counter-narrative, sustained by the First Folio’s increased circulation, in both material and virtual terms, during the twenty-first century.

Mutilated books and decaying pages From a historical perspective, discourse about books and their history often rests on the metaphor of the book as a mutilated body. As far back as Riddle 26 from The Exeter Book, we find the construction of a bible described in terms of corporeal torture. The personified book narrates first the indignities to which its vellum leaves are subjected in the preparation of a writing surface: An enemy ended my life, took away my bodily strength; then he dipped me in water and drew me out again, and put me in the sun where I shed all my hair. The knife’s sharp edge bit into me once my blemishes had been scraped away. . . .  Exeter Book 2008: 600 As the bible’s individual leaves are bound together, the codex book is again put to the rack: “A man bound me,/He stretched skin over me and adorned me/with gold.” Within this Christological context, the bodily pains of preparing the bible’s vellum leaves ends with the bound book’s apotheosis. But this is not always the case. In Riddle 47, we encounter the bookworm who “swallows” the substance of its host and “gorges” on the book’s “fine phrases.” Here there is no redemption, for the destroying worm does not benefit from the book’s destruction; he is “not a whit wiser” for consuming its words (Exeter Book, 628). Books can meet their demise by physical abuse, but sometimes they simply dissolve into their constituent elements. Today’s paper books endure a mechanized form of wholesale mutilation when they are recycled. As Gill Partington and Adam Smyth describe from their visit to a book pulping plant, the volumes are shredded, crushed, and reshaped into new objects. (Partington and Smyth 2014: 1–3). In accidental book destruction, water is often a culprit. In 2016–2017, the American Bookbinders Museum launched an exhibition called “Books and Mud: The Drowned Libraries of Florence,” commemorating the 1966 Arno River floods that devastated Florence’s museums and libraries, when “Medieval and Renaissance-era cultural treasures stored in library and museum cellars steeped for days in water, mud, and sewage” (American Bookbinder’s Museum n.d.: n.p.). The internet also remains stocked with images of offices and libraries containing water-damaged books from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the New Orleans levees were breached. Finally, Kate Flint opens her essay “The Aesthetics of Book Destruction” with a meditation on James Griffioen’s photographs of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository – destroyed by fire in 1987, ruined further by the water used to quench that blaze, then locked up and left to rot: “These volumes are the victims of neglect. The Depository’s interiors have a horrible beauty to them, ravaged by fires, exposed to the elements, so that mushrooms grow in the damp ashes of charred and rotted workbooks” (Flint 2014: 176). Water is nature’s weapon against the printed word, the agent of a slow and unspectacular death.

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Scattered leaves A third, less widespread metaphor for the book’s material metamorphosis is that of separate leaves or pages scattered by the wind. A look at Google Image or Pinterest will reveal any number of fanciful images of trees adorned with books in their branches, trees made from books, leaves made from cut-up pages of books, and air-borne seeds wafting from books whose pages are fanned open. The conceit acquires literary capital from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, where in the opening sentences of “The Custome-House,” the narrator muses that the truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates. Hawthorne 1975: 3 A particularly beautiful literalization of the trope can be found in Nicola Dale’s installation Sequel, which consists of a twelve-year-old oak tree felled by the artist’s friend, whose leaves are stripped and replaced by artificial leaves “made from the pages of unwanted reference books from charity shops and library sales” (Smyth et al. 2014: 194). Dale’s project is about recycling, cutting up books already slated for destruction in order to recreate them in new artistic forms. Sequel dramatizes the circulation of books and leaves in the material world. The trope of the book unbound, with pages as scattered leaves, informs as well Mark Danielewski’s contemporary U.S. cult text, House of Leaves. The novel’s principal narrative is a gothic tale in which a family takes up residence in a haunted house, whose interior proves to be larger than its exterior. The story turns dark as children disappear into the walls, people die, and a vicious animal seeks to claw through the walls. This story is complicated and often confused by the novel’s copious paratexts, which range from complex footnotes to multiple appendices and an index so monstrously complete as to be unusable. Abetted by this information overload, which feeds but also frustrates traditional literary criticism, House of Leaves offers itself to the reader as a material object for aesthetic appreciation. One page features inserts of mirrored sentences, as if the apprentice printer had accidentally printed his page in reverse or the bookbinder had made an error. Another, which appears at the beginning of the chapter “What Some Have Thought,” opens with a paragraph in which asterisks substitute for the printed word, denying the access to hidden thoughts that its title has promised. At times, the impossibility of interpretation becomes an overt theme. In another example, we find on the verso side of a page from House of Leaves a slanted list of sayings in different languages and, on the recto, a fairly normal page of type over which is printed, in the style of nineteenth-century letters that sought to save space by cross-writing, the reiterated phrase “Forgive me.” This text was written, as it turns out when you consult the appropriate appendix, by the schizophrenic and incarcerated mother of House of Leaves’s fictional editor, Johnny Truant, before she hanged herself. To understand the relevance of the dark proverbs and snatches of communication on the verso ide to one of the novel’s tangled plots – to make sense of the words as information – the reader must penetrate the carefully wrought surface of the book and range further afield in the novel’s paratexts. The proverbs are unfamiliar: for instance “Love’s love in her blackest season” or the phrase “Dell’oro, del oro, delore.” This last phrase has attracted attention on the plentiful discussion boards dedicated to the novel. For instance, one writer says, “dell’oro, del oro, deloro – (Italian) of the gold, (Spanish) of the gold, the other word has no meaning” (shins_pearl and Elise Pypaert 2008). Elise Pypaert replies, 444

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I am commenting on the Deloro bit. I am a native French speaker, and the first thought I had when I saw the word Deloro was the French word, douloureux, which means painful, sad, or sorrowful. I am not sure if this has any connection, who knows! Danielewski, or perhaps the editor Truant, or perhaps the mother, gives us an enigma that violates a basic rule of proverbs: that they sound sensible and resist interpretation, but in the end allow “translation.” The final word in the triad, deloro, which makes no sense to a wide variety of readers, ensures that the proverb is simply ungrammatical, relying on a nonsense word, a bad grammatical declension, or at best, a semantic false friend (deloro, douloureux). Like the recto page, where the familiar format of a letter degenerates into cross-hatched scribbles, this collection of proverbs invites aesthetic appreciation and intense intellectual scrutiny, but in the end prevents understanding. This kind of textual play will be familiar to readers of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, but Danielewski’s novel makes typographical experiment the dominant mode of book creation and consumption. N. Katherine Hayles describes the reader’s experience of House of Leaves through Richard A. Lanham’s model of “at” versus “through” vision: the complementary perspectives of looking through a page (when we are immersed in a fictional world and so are scarcely conscious of the page as a material object) and looking at the page, when innovative typography and other interventions encourage us to focus on the page’s physical properties. 2002: 794 In House of Leaves, however, the dominance of images and fanciful typography means that the material page often overwhelms information. In another illustration, the menacing house of unfathomable proportions is itself reduced to a textual palimpsest of words upon words, rendered un-readable by heavy over-writing and marred by another “black hole” with bleeding ink to create a narrative lacuna that mimics the holes into which the house’s inhabitant are sucked. As a novel built on words, House of Leaves proves to be as fragile as Dale’s textual tree in Sequel. In this case, it’s all allegory, no story. While the palimpsest is a repeated trope in House of Leaves, the image of the novel as a tree makes a last-minute appearance on the novel’s final page, appearing, unexpectedly, after the index (Danielewski 2000: 709). As Mark B.N. Hansen describes it, the page bears the inscription ‘Yggdrasil’ in the form of a T followed by four lines of text and a fifth line containing a single, large-font, bold O. A reference to the giant tree supporting the universe in Norse mythology, the page startles in its apparent randomness, reinforcing the well-nigh cosmological closure effected by the novel it culminates, yet shedding no new light on just what should be made of it. Hansen 2004: 598 This mythological tree, as the novel’s promised, if terminally delayed, telos, is contradicted by the novel from its very beginning. The inside cover to the 2016 paperback edition proclaims that the novel first circulated as both material and virtual versions of the unbound text: Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying 445

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story would soon command. . . . Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices. Danielewski 2000 [2016] In a reversal of the traditional trope of book destruction, House of Leaves began as “scattered leaves,” circulated in manuscript or on the internet, which were then recuperated and bound together as a printed codex with meticulous production values. While to my knowledge no trace of the original textual fragments persists in cyberspace to corroborate this statement, Danielewski did create an online forum “to coincide with the release of the novel” that had postings in nine languages, although mostly in English and French (Davidson 2014: 80). (Thomas Davidson claimed in 2014 that the forum was still active, and when I registered on 23 May 2018, I noted at least one new post for that day and several from the past month; as we saw in the discussion of the word “dolere,” above, other readers’ forums continue to form.) In this way, according to Davidson,“the space of House of Leaves and its many participants is characterized by a network of geographically dispersed, yet interconnected nodes across which agency is distributed” (Davidson 2014: 73). The unbound book whose leaves are cast to the wind morphs into the network more characteristic of the computer age. We see another version of this dialectic between networks and books in Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books.

Shakespeare in circulation: Prospero’s Books Peter Greenaway’s film adaptation of Shakespeare is, among many other things, a reflection on the use and abuse of books. As Partington and Smyth note in the Introduction to their edited volume on “book destruction,” “Books are two-faced; on the one hand they are totems: carriers of culture, values, beliefs. But on the other hand, they are quotidian objects: material and ephemeral things, subject to decay and physical obsolescence like any other” (2014: 4). The volumes that star in Prospero’s Books are equally two-faced, at once objects of wonder, sources of practical knowledge, and part of the domestic landscape. The twenty-four books introduced to viewers in the course of the film are first and foremost totems – art objects like House of Leaves, or even supernatural art objects. Prospero’s books glide, page by page, across the screen, shimmering and vibrating with life, with John Gielgud’s voiceover detailing their qualities and quirks. The companion volume to Greenaway’s film, also titled Prospero’s Books, catalogues the books and gives insight into their spectacular qualities. To give just one example, the Book of Motion, unveiled rather late in the film, vibrates precariously on its lectern as Prospero, attended by spirits, regresses from the library. According to the “catalogue description” in both book and film, The Book of Motion is covered in tough blue leather and, because it is always bursting open of its own volition, it is bound around with two leather straps buckled tightly at the seams. At night, it drums against the bookcase and has to be held down with a brass weight. Greenaway 1991: 24 But as Partington and Smyth would say, these books are also quotidian objects. We find them scattered haphazardly around the bathhouse pool, their unprotected leaves riffling in the wind. Books can also be put to more traditional uses on the island. Prospero tutors Miranda from The Book of Nature, but when she encounters Ferdinand for the first time, she can be spied handing off to a cherub what proves, upon closer inspection, to be The Book of Love. Engravings of 446

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mythological figures in close embrace suggest that this smaller volume (rather incomplete in its content, according to the voiceover) is at once an extra-curricular guide for Prospero’s innocent daughter and a book still waiting to be completed and corrected by the island’s chaste couple. Prospero’s Books, following Shakespeare’s gesture in this direction, also offers a primer in book destruction, figured in the familiar terms of mutilation and dissolution. Antonio’s usurpation of Prospero’s rule involves burning his library. Caliban, as in Shakespeare, rages against the book knowledge of his youth. In the film, he nevertheless has possession of at least one volume, whose pages he rips out, stabs, and defiles with his own bodily waste. Books also suffer from both normal and extraordinary wear and tear. The “scratched and rubbed” crimson leather cover from The Book of Traveller’s Tales testifies to children’s love for the book, while the “battered and brunt” green tin cover of An Atlas Belonging to Orpheus bears the marks of hellfire and Cerberus’s teeth. The Book of Water, despite being waterproof, is still damaged and has “lost its color by much contact with water” (20, 17). Finally, the ceremonial destruction of Prospero’s library is achieved by not a book burning, but a book drowning, as Prospero and Ariel hurl volume after volume into the water surrounding Caliban’s lair. Prospero’s books invite “at” and “through” vision in a cinematic version of the word-image dialectic found in House of Leaves. Just as Danielewski’s novel tempted us toward the house’s conceptual black holes with a trick of vision, in a trompe l’oeil sequence at the opening of Prospero’s Books, we pass through the pages of The Book of Water to glimpse the floundering Neapolitan ship. (Among the many of examinations of the dialectic between word and image in Prospero’s Books are analyses by Mariacristina Cavecchi (1997), Lia M. Hotchkiss (2002), and James Tweedie (2000).) While bodily damage and dissolution are the film’s dominant tropes for the end of books, Prospero’s Books also figures the cycle of a book’s creation and decay in terms of its binding and unbinding. While we often see Prospero writing on parchment in an elegant italic hand to create his manuscript volumes, Greenaway’s film also celebrates the binding of books as a mechanized process more readily associated with age of print. At the film’s beginning, spirit ballerinas form an assembly line, handing off volumes to one another, as unbound book leaves circulate wildly through the air – fanned by the earnest puffing of Botticellian spirits, presumably to coalesce in the artistically bound volumes of Prospero’s library. Even when the library is empty, the pages continue to circulate restlessly through the air. While scattered leaves of books convey in this instance the energy of book creation, wind-blown book leaves also blow across the desolate landscape Caliban inhabits as just more form of human detritus, further evidence of the printed word’s evanescence.

Perfecting Shakespeare’s book The least prepossessing among Prospero’s books in the Peter Greenaway film is the last, coyly entitled Thirty-Six Plays: This is a thick, printed volume of plays dated 1623. All thirty-six plays are there, save one – the first. Nineteen pages are left blank for its inclusion. It is called The Tempest. The folio collection in modestly bound in dull green linen with cardboard covers and the author’s initials are embossed in gold on the cover – W. S.1 This, of course, is the First Folio of William Shakespeare’s plays. True to the text’s imperative, Prospero drowns with the others the First Folio and his own unfinished Tempest. Thus, Greenaway’s hymn to the book ends as an elegy. 447

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By contrast, the principal narrative surrounding Shakespeare’s First Folio has, in recent years, been a saga of perfecting – both beautifying and completing – the damaged, vagrant copies of that book. In The Shakespeare Thefts, Eric Rasmussen tells the tale of the hunt for all extant copies of the Folio, which are brought together finally in the Descriptive Catalogue of Rasmussen and West (2012). Rasmussen’s accompanying detective story records not only the scholars’ mission but also the damage and indignities suffered in the past by these copies of the First Folio. One may (or may not) have been deliberately burned in a Spanish library (Rasmussen 2011: 7ff ). The Mesei University copy in Tokyo, which once belonged to Thomas Killigrew, follower of Charles I, sports a bullet hole that penetrates all the way through to the first page of Titus Andronicus (29). In one of the most sensational scandals, where the First Folio ostensibly found in Cuba turned out to have been stolen by Raymond Scott from the Durham University Library, physical damage to the codex was assimilated to the national body from whom the volume was untimely ripped. Stephen C. Massey meticulously examined the folio that Scott had brought into the Folger Shakespeare Library for verification. Immediately, Massey “could see that the binding was missing and that the volume had been scoured of all identifying marks by someone who knew what he or she was doing” (29). Testifying at Scott’s trial, then Head Librarian of the Folger Shakespeare Library Richard Kuhta characterized this subterfuge as a crime, stating that the book was “a cultural legacy that has been damaged, brutalized, and mutilated.” The presiding judge agreed; passing sentence on Scott, he “condemned the damage to the First Folio as ‘cultural vandalisation’ of a ‘quintessentially English treasure’ ” (39, 43). While as a book, Shakespeare’s First Folio suffers mutilation and decay, it is also a tree denuded of leaves. As Rasmussen and also Emma Smith point out, almost all extant copies of the First Folio are incomplete (Smith 2016: 34). Early owners filled their lacunae often with spare leaves from incomplete copies, the meticulous nineteenth-century pen-and-ink facsimiles of James Harris (Rasmussen 2011: 63), or one of the later, or photographic facsimiles from the twentieth century. Finally, there are the hyper-perfected extra-illustrated copies, where the Folio pages are adorned with illustrated scenes from the plays.2 Smith and Rasmussen both contextualize the project of “perfecting” the Folio within the book’s economic fortunes. Shakespeare’s First Folio is not a particularly rare book and so does not command high prices on account of its scarcity, its artistic merit, or its condition – simply on the basis of its author’s celebrity. In fact, until George Steevens remarked on the high prices commanded by copies of the Folio in the eighteenth century, the Folio had lost its use-value; hence, the need for a second, third, and fourth Folio (Smith 2015: 24–120; West 2001). Even the Bodleian, which received the deposit copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio from the printer, bound originally by William Wildgoose of Oxford, de-accessioned the First Folio and replaced it with a copy of the Third Folio, as being more useful or up-to-date (Rasmussen 2011: 72ff ). The cover of the Bodleian First Folio is worn, the endpapers ripped and patched, and in the upper right corner of the cover is visible the tear where the book was ripped from its chain when it was discarded. As described in Rasmussen and West’s complete catalogue of First Folios, there is serious damage on the lower right of the first page of The Tempest (Rasmussen and West 2012: 25).

Disseminating the First Folio in the twenty-first century Thus far, we have two meta-narratives in counterpoint with one another: a story of loss, mutilation, and dispersal against the tale of Shakespeare’s Folios perfected and finally brought back together by scholarship, money, and justice. The twenty-first century offers two new

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spins on the First Folio’s story. The first is the dissemination of the material text through the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2016 First Folio tour (“First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare” 2016). The second is the unbinding and circulation of Shakespeare’s “scattered leaves” via the internet. In many ways, the First Folio tour represented the apotheosis of the book as object or sacred relic. There were many rituals surrounding the selection of the site, carefully regulated procedures for its transport (a Folger representative accompanied each copy to its destination) and its display (the books were all opened to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy).3 At the same time, however, the tour offered a tour de force literalization of the bard’s long reach. Although not exactly “scattered,” the Folger’s Folios circulated widely throughout the United States during the year 2016. Before and after the Shakespeare 2016 celebration, rare book libraries have also taken up the task of distributing their rare books, Shakespeare’s First Folio among them, in digital form via the internet. Smith notes that the St.-Omer Shakespeare, discovered in plain sight in a French library and probably the most dramatic excerpt in Rasmussen’s travelogue, was digitized almost immediately after its discovery (Smith 2016: 335). This manner of distribution paradoxically increases those books’ cultural capital with the act of widespread, free dissemination. In their current state, digital First Folios are being made available to the public in multiple formats for different users. Both the Bodleian First Folio and Folger First Folio no. 68 can be downloaded as single JPEG images (another form of separated leaves), and both can be animated and read by clicking the “Play” button, so that the Folio’s pages turn automatically in a manner reminiscent of the books lining the edge of Prospero’s pool in the Greenaway film (“Read the Book,” n.d., Bodleian Folio; Folger Digital Texts). Like the modern-edition Folger Digital Texts, the Bodleian First Folio tour site also allows users to download a PDF of the digital edition that accompanies the scanned page images and the XML (Extensible Markup Language) text that underlies the digital text. Text marked-up for digital display is “cut-up” in yet another way, separated into its constituent elements and labelled in preparation for user access. In the digital age, Shakespeare’s First Folio is “unbound” and re-bundled for varied purposes and people. The use-value of these digitized copies, however, remains under debate. In 2016, Sarah Werner noted that Online facsimiles make access to and study of the First Folio possible for an exponentially greater number of people than earlier technologies. It is now possible for teachers to easily task students with looking at the earliest printed texts of the plays, for theatre practitioners to consult the plays without the intervention of modern editors, and for everyone from the general public to advanced scholars to examine the First Folio text for their own purposes. Werner 2016: 170 Werner suggested further that electronic copies of the Folios could make accessible to ordinary users such previously arcane evidence as stop-press corrections, a task that Werner models in a posting on her personal blog (Werner 2013). But Werner also pointed to limitations that hamper scholarly use of these assets: for instance, most do not allow readers to search by through-line numbers (TLN), so that browsing and stumbling upon information is the default search mode. More generally, the dismantling of the First Folio into its constituent pages creates logistical problems for users. In many ways, the constraints of using digitized Folios are similar to those that plague previous attempts to enable comparisons between different Shakespeare texts in

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printed form. For example, Michael Warren’s ambitious and astronomically expensive Complete King Lear from 1989 seeks to demonstrate the distinctiveness and uniqueness of the three early printed texts of King Lear: to heighten awareness not just of their similarities but also their dissimilarities; to provoke and facilitate continuing contemplation of the problem of the single designation King Lear for a nexus of complex issues. It is a resource book that allows immediate contact with the diverse elements of King Lear. Warren 1989: xiv–v This multi-part scholarly kit consists of a bound book offering a general introduction and parallel texts in facsimile of the First Quarto and First Folio texts, with lines of facsimile text of corrected pages recorded in a separate column. The remainder of the package consists of loose pages reproducing uncorrected and invariant/corrected states of the different texts. In this way, the reader can play human Hinman Collator by placing uncorrected and corrected pages literally next to one another for comparison. The photographs of The Complete King Lear reproduced here show not only the superior production values of this facsimile compilation, but also its pitfalls; managing this information is complex, and it is always possible to shuffle the pages from three separate packets out of order. Whether in paper or digitized format, the scattered leaves of Shakespeare’s multiple texts are a challenge to re-assemble in a useful manner. One thing that might ease the educational process for DIY Folio scholars is better availability of explanatory supplements to focus readers’ visual attention and comprehension of information. Dale’s Sequel does not make complete sense unless the viewer knows that the beautiful artificial tree is constructed from discarded reference books; and certainly, the secrets of Greenaway’s magical books remain hidden without John Gielgud’s explanatory voiceover or the companion volume, Prospero’s Books. As Werner says in her 2016 essay, most digitized First Folios available at the time of writing lack the kind of paratext that can help amateurs make sense of the scattered pages they find. That paratext may be supplied by Rasmussen and West’s Shakespeare’s First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue. Although by no means democratic in its pricing ($437 U.S. just for the Kindle version), this user-friendly volume is really a delight to look through. Some of the excitement of the chase that Rasmussen chronicles in The Shakespeare Thefts also manages to come through here. The account of each Folio begins with the most interesting information (history, provenance, and owners) and leaves the matter only a professional bibliographer could love (press variants and watermarks) until the end of each entry. With the print catalogue as supplement, the scattered digitized leaves of Shakespeare’s First Folio can be used as well as admired, returning us to that moment, in Prospero’s Books. The dialectic between looking at a facsimile surface as an aesthetic object and looking through to its content, which the digitized First Folios, House of Leaves, and Prospero’s Books share, relies not only on the affordances of new media (desktop publishing and digitization), but on an important constraint or holdover from the printed codex. For all three projects, the page remains the relevant unit for consumption of and scholarship about these books. In the discourse surrounding facsimile texts, as Bonnie Mak argues, “The adoption of a model of supersession” – where manuscript yields to manuscript codex to printed book and then inevitably to the digital edition – is a mirage (Hinman 1996: 9). In whatever medium, we continue to approach books as collections of separate pages or leaves. The current state of digital Shakespeare First Folios may eventually allow a wider group to users to become more cognizant of the technologies that shape the page, the unit by which these books are currently transmitted to us. In the meantime, the examples of Prospero’s Books and 450

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House of Leaves demonstrate what we can do with the scattered leaves of Digital Shakespeare First Folios: concentrate on the page rather than the book and oscillate between what “at” vision – looking with artistic finesse at the surface of a page – and “through” vision – reading for the message on a facsimile page. This might accomplish, or at least approximate, the democratizing goal attempted by Michael Warren’s Complete King Lear: making available to a wider variety of Shakespeare users the tools to unpack the secrets of Shakespeare’s Big Book.

Coda At the end of Greenaway’s film, Prospero drowns all of his books, including the incomplete First Folio and his manuscript of The Tempest. After the book drowning, Caliban slips in to rescue the two latter volumes, taking them down beneath the water’s surface to his hidden lair. Many readers see this gesture as a triumph for Shakespeare and for the book, but placed within the context of Rasmussen’s tale of the Shakespeare Thefts, the triumph is at best ambivalent. Like the original Folios, this one disappears from view and will certainly suffer damage from its aquatic journey, to resurface who knows when and in what condition, given Caliban’s penchant for book destruction. Peter Donaldson, however, notes that the First Folio Tempest does somehow find its way into print, as its text, in shimmering gold letters, scrolls up the screen over the final union of Miranda and Ferdinand: in one voyage Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis, And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves When no man was his own. 5.1.249–2544 Donaldson argues that with this gesture, Prospero “is installed as a permanent, authorizing presence” to “remystify the book” as originary discourse (1997: 175). His conclusion is just but captures only partially the conclusion to The Tempest’s story, for Gonzalo has proposed that this statement be “set . . . down/With gold on lasting pillars” (5.1.248–49). We can now imagine at least three versions of these words – those on the pillars, in the First Folio itself, and on the screen – that survive the drowning of Prospero’s manuscript Tempest or, depending on one’s interpretation, its theft and sequestration by Caliban. As noted above, the First Folio was never a rare book; it became valuable because of its author’s celebrity status. Thus, the unbound pages of Shakespeare’s First Folio, replicated and scattered across the internet, paradoxically gain rather than lose cultural capital through their plenitude. In digitized form, Shakespeare’s scattered leaves secure their author’s status by circulating endlessly in libraries and classrooms, downloaded to computers and tablets, and passing through the hands of professionals and amateurs alike.

Acknowledgments Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson thank the Société Française Shakespeare (SFS) for allowing us jointly to publish posthumously this chapter that will be published simultaneously as part of a special issue of their journal dedicated to the memory of Christy Desmet. We encourage readers to visit the SFS website once the essay is live, in order to access the lavish, full-color images Christy chose to accompany her piece. 451

Christy Desmet

Notes 1 The cardboard covers and cheap green linen seem unhistorical. Emma Smith reports that dark calf on board was the most popular option (2015: 158). See Blayney (1991) for more information. 2 On extra-illustrated folios at the Folger, see especially the exhibition curated by Erin C. Blake, ­Stuart Sillars, and LuEllen DeHaven and its associated catalogue, Extending the Book:The Art of Extra-­Illustration, ed. Blake and Sillars (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2010). This note was added by Sujata Iyengar. 3 Public relations information about the tour can be found at “First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare” (Folger Shakespeare Library First Folio n.d.); you can see the stringent requirements for applications at the American Library Association (n.d.) website, noted in the References list. 4 All quotations from Shakespeare’s The Tempest are from the Folger Digital Texts (Shakespeare 2018), listed in the References.

References “50th Anniversary of Florence Flood Inspires Exhibition at the American Bookbinders Museum.” American Bookbinders Museum, https://bookbindersmuseum.org/events/books-and-mud-the-drownedlibraries-of-florence/ American Library Association (ALA). n.d. https://apply.ala.org/shakespeare/guidelines. Blayney, Peter W.M. 1991. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. Cavecchi, Mariacristina. 1997.“Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books: A Tempest between Word and Image.” Literature/Film Quarterly 25.2: 83–89. Coover, Robert. 1992. “The End of Books.” New York Times, 21 Jun. https://archive.nytimes.com/www. nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html?pagewanted=all Crossley-Holland, Kevin, trans. 2008. The Exeter Book Riddles. Rev. ed. London: Enitharmon Press. Kindle Book. Danielewski, Mark Z. 2000 [2016]. House of Leaves. 2nd ed. New York: Pantheon. Davidson, Thomas. 2014. “The Spatio-Temporal Dimensions of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves: ‘Real Virtuality’ and the ‘Ontological Indifference’ of the Information Age.” Word and Image: A Journal of a Literary Studies and Linguistics 4.1: 70–82. Donaldson, Ian. 1998. “The Destruction of the Book.” Book History 1: 1–10. Donaldson, Peter S. 1997. “Shakespeare in the Age of Post-Mechanical Reproduction: Sexual and Electronic Magic in Prospero’s Books.” In Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video. Eds. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt. London and New York: Routledge. 169–85. “First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare.” 2016. www.folger.edu/first-folio-tour. Flint, Kate. 2014. “The Aesthetics of Book Destruction.” In Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary. Eds. Gill Partington and Adam Smyth. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 175–89. Folger Shakespeare Library First Folio. n.d. no. 6. www.folger.edu/the-shakespeare-first-folio-folger-copyno-68#page/Fourth+page+of+preliminaries/mode/2up Greenaway, Peter. 1991. Prospero’s Books: A Film of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” by Peter Greenaway. New York: Four Walls, Eight Windows. Hansen, Mark B.N. 2004. “The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” Contemporary Literature 45.4: 597–636. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1975. The Scarlet Letter: A Novel. New York: Easton Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2002. “Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves.” American Literature 74.4: 779–806. Hinman, Charlton. 1996. The First Folio of Shakespeare. New York: Norton. Hotchkiss, Lia M. 2002. “The Incorporation of Word as Image in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books.” The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 95–107. Partington, Gill, and Adam Smyth. 2014. Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rasmussen, Eric. 2011. The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios. New York City: St. Martin’s Press. Rasmussen, Eric, and Anthony James West. 2012. The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Shakespeare’s scattered leaves “Read the Book.” n.d. The Bodleian First Folio, http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/book.html. Shakespeare, William. 2018. The Tempest. Folger Shakespeare Library. The Tempest, from Folger Digital Texts. Ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library. 25 May. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. shins_pearl, “Language Translations,” and Elise Pypaert, “Reply.” 2008. “Appendix II. E – The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute Letters.” House of Leaves. The Book Club. Livejournal. 28 Jul. https://bookclub33. livejournal.com/4026.html Smith, Emma. 2015. The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio. Oxford: Bodleian Library. ———. 2016. Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smyth, Adam, Gill Partington, and Nicola Dale. 2014. “Kindle: Recycling and the Future of the Book: An Interview with Nicola Dale.” In Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary. Eds. Gill Partington, and Adam Smyth. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 190–217. Tweedie, James. 2000. “Caliban’s Books: The Hybrid Text in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books.” Cinema Journal 40.1: 104–26. Warren, Michael J. 1989. The Complete King Lear, 1608–1623. Berkeley: University of California Press. Werner, Sarah. 2013. “First Folios Online.” Wynken de Worde: Books, Early Modern Culture, and Post-modern Readers. 22 Apr. http://sarahwerner.net/blog/2013/04/first-folios-online/ ———. 2016. “Digital First Folios.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio. Ed. Emma Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 170. West, Anthony James. 2001. The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, Volume 1: An Account of the First Folio Based on its Sales and Prices, 1623–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics represent an illustration. 8 Days to Premier (film) 30 10 Things I Hate About You (film) 217 30 Rock 209

Afrikaans 161, 163, 164 Afrikaner nationalism 161 After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Berger) 17 “Against Appropriation” (Sinfield) 1 Agamben, Giorgio 280 – 2, 284, 286 agha¯nı¯ 306, 308, 315 aibhne (river) 81 – 2, 83 Air Force One (film) 217, 223 – 5 Akino, Matsuri 294 Aldridge, Amanda Ira 325 Aldridge, Ira Frederick 6, 244 – 5 Aldwych Theatre (London) 275 – 6 Alexander Text of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, The 28 Alfaro, Luis 92 Ali Hassan, Sayyid 311 Allam, Roger 348 – 9 All God’s Chillun Got Wings (O’Neill) 324, 325 Al-Qı¯tha¯ra (The Lyre) (Abu Shabaka) 307 – 8 Al-Wakil, Taha Abd al-Hamid 311 Americanism 261 American University of Kuwait 199 Americas 5, 9, 15; see also African Americans; artists’ books; colonization; First Peoples of Canada; imperial/imperialism; Latin America; Mexico; South America; United States Amharic language 174 Amin, Idi 200 Amula, Sammy 184 ‘Ana¯nı¯, Muh ammad 311 ana¯shı¯d 306;˙and agha¯nı¯ 308, 315; of Shakespeare 315 – 20 Anderson, Marian 331n4 Anderson, Robert 150

Abbey, The (Ireland) 254–60, 258, 263 Abele, Alexander 228, 229, 233 abjection 98, 99, 129, 131 Abu ¯ Dı¯b, Kama¯l 311 Abu Shabaka, Ilyas 305 – 8, 311 Abu¯ Sha¯dı¯, Ah mad Zakı¯ 7, 304 – 22; legacy 311; see also ana¯shı¯d˙ Accents on Shakespeare (series) (Hawkes) 1 Achebe, Chinua 171 Actaeon (character of) 185, 401 actants: characters as 217, 221 – 4; vs. characters 219 – 22 actors, characters as 221 adaptation 75; see also appropriation Adaptation (Hutcheon) 2 Adonis 90, 96; see also uVenas no Adonisi; Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare) Aeschylus 269, 380 Africa 102, 110, 171; appropriations 5 – 6; artists 33; east 172, 178; French 114; gods/goddesses 104; Hamlet tour in 26; irrelevancy of Shakespeare in 178; and James Baldwin 60; see also South Africa; sub-Saharan Africa; Uganda African Americans 56, 206; culture 8; isolation of 54; theater 33; see also Baldwin, James; Wire,The (TV show) African-Caribbean music 38 African Hamlet,The 177; see also Hamlet (Shakespeare); Malawi African Shakespeare 5, 171 – 9; see also South African Shakespeare

455

Index Anglo: culture 91; hegemony 94; Indian 117; Irish 83; queer theory 97; stereotypes 53; supremacy 100; theatres 92 Anglo-American: audiences 22; criticism 200; culture 243; Shakespeare films 228 Anglo-British 228 Anglocentrism 90 Anglo-Norman settlers 80 Anglophone 122; audience 120; cultures 25, 91; directors 26; literature 22; non- 231; productions 118, 121; settlers 171; world 113, 172 anime 7, 8, 71, 290 – 1, 294 – 300 Anthropocene 18, 23, 338, 340 anthropophagy, cultural 39 Antony (character of) 424 – 5, 426 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 421, 425 Anzaldúa, Gloria 50, 56 apartheid 161 – 4, 167 “apemanship” 172 Âpihtawikosisân 128 apocalypse 15 – 23, 442 Apollo/Apollonian 148 Apollo Group 307 Appignanesi, Richard 69 – 70, 73 – 6 “Applying the Paradigm” (Burnett) 229 appropriation 1, 369; and artists’ books 327; beyond 217 – 25; as citation 27 – 31; as collaboration 2, 7, 63, 228, 282, 298, 337, 380, 432; ethics of (see Certeau, Michel de; Joubin, Alexa Alice; Levinas, Emmanuel; Rivlin, Elizabeth); global 1, 4 – 8, 22; globalectic 181; manga 75, 76; and McGuinness’s Mutabilitie 79; as mouvance (Genette) 3; postdramatic 421, 423; proprietary 181; as rhizome 3, 8, 133, 379, 428, 432 (see also Deleuze, Gilles; Lanier, Douglas); teaching Shakespeare understood as 208; as theft or gift 32, 423, 432; theory 420; as transformative 197, 401, 423; transnational 121; transpositional 181; via folklore 4 – 5, 95, 117, 219, 229, 268, 283, 326, 354, 389, 434; see also Baldwin, James; Haider (film); intermediality; Ovid; Shakespeare Arab, Othello as 249 Arabic culture 204; poetry 305, 307 – 8, 311 – 13, 315 – 20 Arabic language 174, 199, 307; Juba 173, 174; Richard III 199; sonnets of Shakespeare in 315 – 20 Arab Shakespeare 7, 304 – 13, 315; see also Abu¯ Sha¯dı¯, Ah mad Zakı¯; Moor; sonnets (Shakespeare), as ˙¯shı¯d ana architextuality 70, 73, 75 Ariadne 401 Aristophanes 267, 268, 269, 273, 275, 276 – 7 Aristotle 219 Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) 389 – 91, 394 – 5

456

artists’ books 7; of Shakespeare 337 – 45; see also visual culture Art Theater (Greece) 269, 271, 272, 275 – 6 Ashcroft, Peggy 326 Asian actors, in Shakespeare’s plays 115, 117, 118 Asian America(n) 31, 33 Asian Shakespeare 3, 229, 372; see also anime; Haider (film); Illyria (location); India; Japan; manga Astrophil and Stella (Sidney) 317 As You Like It (film) 122 As You Like It (manga) (Akino) 294 Atim, Sheila 26 authenticity 1, 167, 317; authentic Asian/ Anglo-Indian 117, 118; “authentic Mexican” 42; “authentic Shakespeare” 2, 40, 54, 291; authentic South African 162 – 3, 167; and blackness in the role of Othello 329; in comic books 291, 292; emotional 365; ethnic 33; Latinx 49; linguistic 182, 291; musical past 352; racial 62; reductive ideas of 38 Bacquedano, Elizabeth 43 Baker, David 81 Bal, Mieke 220 – 1 Baldwin, James 59 – 68; appropriative relationship to Shakespeare’s work 59 – 68; see also race consciousness Balfour, Lawrie 59, 61 – 2 Ballester, Juan Pablo 93 Barabas 142 – 3, 145 – 6 Bara-ou no Souretsu (Requiem of the Rose King) (Kanno) 294 Barnfield, Richard 318 Barranger, Milly S. 331 Barrymore, John 323 Barthes, Roland 220, 222, 225 Barvi Raat 117 Bassanio 141, 292 Bassett, Kate 163 Bate, Jonathan 18, 370 Batman: Knight and Squire (comic) 409, 414–15 Baxter Theater, Cape Town 163, 164 Beller, Thomas 15 – 16 Bennett, Susan 167, 355 Benton, James Grant 5, 181 – 9 Beresford, Stephen 117 – 18, 120 – 1 Berger, James 17 Bhaba, Homi K. 323 – 4 Bhand Pather 8, 388 – 90, 393 – 5 Bhardwaj,Vishal 8, 33 – 4, 229, 388 – 95 Biały z zazdros¯ci: “Othello”Williama Szekspira (Sangare) 250 bias 40, 140, 415; class 187; cultural 208; racial 360 Billington, Michael 163, 177 Bird, Rachel 234 Birds,The (Aristophanes) 267, 269

Index Bumatai, Andy 182 Burbage, Richard 80, 402 Burgess, Anthony 71 Burnett, Mark Thornton 3, 229 Buscemi, Steve 209 Byron, George Gordon (Lord) 442

bisho¯nen 75 black actors, racism against 249 – 51, 232, 326, 330; see also blackface; Macon, Peter; Moor; Othello (character of); race, and Othello; Robeson, Paul blackface 164, 244, 246 – 7, 249, 370 black lives: in America 383; and Titus Andronicus 213; see also African Americans; Wire,The (TV show) Black Lives Matter 61 blackness and whiteness 62 Black Power movements 60 Blue Apple Theatre 202 Bogdanov, Michael 259 – 60, 265 Bohannan, Laura 228 Boito, Arrigo 354–5 Bollywood 7, 25, 33, 114 – 19, 121 – 2, 388; and Haider 8, 388, 389, 390, 391 – 4; Hamlet 394; see also Bhardwaj,Vishal Bombay Dreams (musical) 118 Bond, Felicia 223 Bonsall, Amy 178 Booga Booga comedy troupe 182–3 Border Crossings theatre 177 Borrowers and Lenders (B&L) (Desmet and Iyengar) xxvii, 1, 229 borrowings (cultural) 7, 275, 400; see also transmedia/transmedial Botelho, Keith xxii, 8 Bourdieu, Pierre 50 – 1, 52 Boyle, Elizabeth 80 Bracho, Ricardo 91 Bradley, A. C. 222, 247, 354 Branagh, Kenneth 93, 203, 256; As You Like It (film) 122; Hamlet (film) 27; reciting The Tempest 29 Branco, Joao 174 Brébeuf’s Ghost (film) 129 Brink, André 161 Bristol, Michael 1 British Asia 25 British colonialism 5, 171, 372; Shakespeare and  171 – 3 British Council 177 – 8 British Empire Shakespeare Society (BESS) 254 – 6 British Original Theatre Company 115 Broadway (New York City) 250, 323 – 4; Othello  326 – 7 Brook, Peter 273 – 5 Brown, Georgina 117 Brown, Michael 214 Browne, Maurice 327 Browning, Elizabeth (Mrs.) 316 Brozo, William 72 Buhler, Stephen M. xxii, 8 Buile Shuibhne (“Sweney’s Frenzy”) 81, 83, 85 – 6 Bulgaria, Hamlet in 7; Hamlet Adventure 281 – 3; I, Hamlet 280 – 8; at National Theatre “Ivan Vazov” 286 – 7; at village festival 287 – 8; Wittenberg Revisited 283 – 6

Caliban 29, 39, 59, 83; King 110; Prospero/ Caliban dichotomy 103, 104 Caliban (image): Kubin 234; McMurray 341 Caliban I (image) (Grossman) 234 “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America” (Retamar) 157 Calibán Rex 102 – 10 Calvo, Clara 277 Cameron, David 26 Canada 5, 33, 114, 127; Indian diaspora to 115; see also First Peoples of Canada cannibalism/cannibal culture 5, 39, 128 – 9, 157; in Macbeth 109; starving Irish 84, 86 Cano, Mayra 41 canon: literary 22, 33, 76, 129, 212, 256, 285; race 206; Shakespearean film 228 Cantonese 182 “Cape Coloreds” 164 Cape Town 163, 164; see also South Africa capitalism 7, 142, 146, 280, 380; global 18, 197; and nationhood 140, 143; Shylock as symbol of 145, 147 Cardinal, Tantoo 136 Caribbean 5, 31, 114; culture 103; impact of European colonization 110; religions of 104 Caribbean Shakespeare 33, 102 – 3 Carlson, Andrew 370 Carlson, Marvin 427 Carrió, Raquel 102 – 4, 107 – 10 Carson, Christie 167 Cartelli, Thomas 2, 181, 372 Carter, Sarah 401 Caspar, Karl 234 Castro, Fidel 106 – 7 Catalan language 202 Catholic: iconography 48; O’Neill as covert 256; Shakespeare as dissident 81; William as believer 83 Cavanagh, Sheila T. xxii, 6, 9 Caven, Michael 79, 80 censorship 151, 273, 389 Certeau, Michel de 378, 379, 384 Césaire, Aimé 59, 102, 175 “Chakespeare Louie” 50 Charnes, Linda 348, 354, 412 Chavez, Leo 52 Chevalier, Tracy 371 Chiang, Desdemona 26 Chicanx 48; appropriation of Shakespeare 49; blacks, inclusion of 54; experience 53;

457

Index consumerism, post-communist 7, 282, 288 Coover, Robert 442 Corredera,Vanessa I. xxii, 7, 208 Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 258, 421, 425 – 7 Covent Garden 331 Coward, Noel 257 Craig, Edmund Gordon 235 – 7, 236 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 50, 56 Creole/creole 181; English 181; Krio (Sierra Leone creole) 172; Mauritian (MC) 172; see also Hawai’i Creole English (HCE) Cresswell, Tim 195, 196 Crewdon, Gregory 93 Crichton-Miller, Emma 359 Cristina, Isabela 156 Cross Country Checkup (talk show) 130 cross-cultural 29, 49; communication 102; contact 133; contagion 129; conversations 196, 200; discourses 79; encounters 327; exploration 197; Shakespeare 122 cross-curricular 237 cross-dressing 92, 150 – 5 cross-gendering 121 cross-media 8, 29 Cuba 104 – 10, 150 – 9, 448; see also Illyria (Díaz); Otra Tempestad (Carrió and Lauten) Cuba Absolutely 151 cultural: anthropophagy 39; brainwashing 172; cringe 166; “difference” 167; geography 271; hybridity 105; racism 383; syncretism 104 “Cultural Variation is Part of Human Nature” (Sugiyama) 228 Cumberbatch, Benedict 203 Curfewed Night (Peer) 389, 391 Curtis, Lainey 234 Curtis, Nick 105 Cymbeline (Shakespeare) 173, 233 Cyrus 147 Czekajac na Otella (Waiting for Othello) (play) 250

perspectives 49, 52; see also Latinx Shakespeare Chichewa language 178 Chicken Rice War (film) 30 Children’s Shakespeare,The (Nesbit) 371 Choephori (Aeschylus) 269 Chong, Ping 31 Chong, Tommy 48 Christopher, Brandon xxii, 5 citation, ethics of 31 – 33 citationality, political 33 – 5 civility 85, 165, 281 civilization 18, 19, 39, 133, 248; African 173, 175; British “civilizing” mission 172; “civilizing” Ireland 84, 85; and culture 172; subversion of 249 civilized/savage 87, 130 Civil Rights Movement (United States) 55, 60, 207, 213 Civil War: Spanish 326; Sri Lanka 371, 373; United States 207, 324 Clarke, Mary Cowden 371 Classic Comics 72 Classics Illustrated 72 Cleopatra 8, 420 – 30 Clockwork Orange, A (Burgess) 71 Close, Glenn 223 Coco (film) 38 code-switching 49, 55, 166, 211 Cohen, Leonard 148 Colby College (Maine) 6, 227; Museum of Art 228, 233, 234; Undergraduate Research Symposium 232, 233, 235, 236 Cold War 223, 331 colonial 95; Africa 171 – 9, 245; ambition 162; Anglo culture 91; anti- 394; curriculum 389; India 118, 120; inter-relations 127; Ireland 262; narrative 29; neo- 119; politics 56; post- 151, 261; prejudice 3; Sri Lanka 371 – 3; value systems 136 colonialism 2, 6, 27, 71, 116, 197; American 210; British 5, 171, 250, 254, 372; and Hamlet 100; history of 60, 167; homesickness 45; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream 116; neo- 368; post6, 8, 38, 79 – 89, 103, 120, 187; in Station Eleven 18; and The Tempest 102, 107, 108, 110; Western 59; see also British colonialism; decolonial/ decolonization; imperial/imperialism colonization 146 colonizer/colonized 102, 104, 107, 108; European 157, 159, 161, 164 Color Blind (film) 49, 54–6 Comedy of Errors,The (Shakespeare) 260 – 2 comics 69 – 78, 409 – 19, 431 – 41 communism 6; Bulgaria 281; Othello and Poland 245 – 6; post- 7, 247 – 9, 284, 287 communitas 286, 288 Complete Works (Shakespeare), translated into Mandarin 26

D’Acevedo, Barbarella 158 Da Kine Dictionary (DKD) 182 Daniel, Norman 31 Daphne (character of) 401 Darwish, Mahmoud 309 Datta, Sangeeta 25 Davies, John (Sir) 319 Dawson, Antony 166 Day-Lewis, Daniel 414 Day of the Dead 38 Death Proof (film) 212 Deckard, Sharae 165 Decker, Thomas 173 decolonial/decolonization 5, 127 – 37; ethics 56; South Africa 161, 167; see also First Peoples of Canada Decolonizing the Mind (Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o) 172

458

Index political 147; Shakespearean 8; stupid 39 – 40; see also capitalism Edelman, Lee 75 – 6, 99 Eden: Garden of 104; new 154, 285 Eden, Richard 342 education: gaps 208; at historically black universities or colleges 206; and manga 71 – 3, 193, 291 – 2; settings, attention paid to Shakespeare and language 50 – 1; Shakespeare as a signifier of class and 189, 208; Uganda and Shakespeare 172; see also Colby College (Maine); Makerere University (Uganda); pedagogy and teaching Shakespeare; World Shakespeare Project (WSP) elegy 348, 442, 447 Elgar, Edward 354 Elizabeth I (queen) 80, 85, 114, 146; complaints regarding New World theatre 155 – 9; letters to Shakespeare 150 – 4, 157, 159 Elizabeth II (queen) 26 Elizabethan age 81, 117, 152 – 4, 178; audiences 183; conventions 269; literature 172; verse 165, 261 Elliott, Alicia 127 El Público (Lorca) 151 El Rey Lear (King Lear) 150 El Teatro Campesino 92 Emperor Jones,The (play) (O’Neill) 325 Empire Writes Back,The (Ashcroft et al.) 103 England, early modern 165, 208, 211, 356, 398, 400, 437 English language, early modern 181; see also Creole/creole English Merchant Adventurers 146 Erickson, Peter 2, 56, 61 Espinosa, Ruben xxiii, 4 – 5, 209 Espinosa Dominguez, Carlos 155, 158 Espinosa Mendoza, Norge 152 ethics see Certeau, Michel de; Joubin, Alexa Alice; Levinas, Emmanuel; Rivlin, Elizabeth Ethiopia 172, 174, 178, 200; Addis Ababa 202; roles in Othello 250; World Shakespeare Project 200, 202 Eurocentric 133, 173, 212, 231; colonial values 131; fallacy 38, 116 Evans, Maurice 324, 327 evil 64, 265, 330; Iago as 247, 329; Othello as 250; patriarch 219; Richard III as 409, 411, 413, 414; Shylock as 292; spirit 129; Sycorax as 405 Ewe see Ghana exhibitionism, neo-colonial 177 Exposure (Peet) 370, 374 exotic/exoticism 26, 82, 115, 162; Africa as 176; birds 110; familiar and 25; fantasies 42; India as 115, 116, 118, 121; Mexico as 38; neo- 37; New World as 157; sexual 151; South Africa as 163; see also Orientalism

De Grazia, Margreta 218 De Lima, Frank 182, 186 Della Gatta, Carla 90 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 139, 147, 148, 420 – 1, 432 Demeter, Jason xxii, 5, 9 Dench, Judi 203 Derrida, Jacques 2, 28, 76, 422 Desdemona (character of) 104, 109, 153, 225, 234, 247 – 9, 263 – 5; as black African 371; in Ikeda’s Othello 293; in interracial staging of Othello 326; invoked in Serial 361, 362 Desmet, Christy xxiii, xxvii, 1, 7 – 9, 27, 32, 424; on appropriation 217, 427, 432, 434; on dialogic transactions 380; on the First Folio 442 – 53; on Ophelia 93; on “recognizing” Shakespeare 384 Devaris, Dionysis 269 Díaz, Carlos 5, 150 – 60 Die Hielige Familie (The Holy Family) (short film) 229 Die Shakespeare-Illustration (1594–2000) (Hammerschmidt-Hummel) 233 Dil Se (film) 394 Dintshontsho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara (Plaatje) see Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) Dionne, Craig 17 DiPasquale, Theresa M. xxiii, 5 disability 403; and Richard III/Richard III 409 – 17 disguise 155 – 7; see also cross-dressing Django Unchained (film) 206 Djibouti 202 Doggett, Sue 338 – 40 Doran, Gregory 163, 177, 355 Dornford-May, Mark 177 double consciousness (Du Bois) 62 Dowden, Edward 255 Dowell-Vest, Theresa 49 Dream (play) (Supple) 122 Dromgoole, Dominic 26, 121, 195, 202, 349 Drucker, Johanna 337 DruidShakespeare 262, 263 DruidSynge 262 DruidTheatre 262 Druid Theatre Company 262, 263, 265 Drummond, William 319 Du Bellay, Joachim 319 Du Bois, W.E.B. 5, 61 – 2, 207 Dunster, Matthew 37, 38, 41 – 5 Durand,Yves Sioui 33, 129, 133, 135 Dussel, Enrique 38 Dutchman (Jones) 61 Dyboski, Roman 244 ecocritical approach see Fischlin, Daniel; Iyengar, Sujata; O’Dair, Sharon economy: feudal, 140, 146; global 39; of in-betweenness 422 – 3; of The Merchant of Venice 140, 142, 143, 144, 146; neoliberal 26, 95;

459

Index Giles-Watson, Maura 356 Gillen, Katherine xxiii, 4 – 5 Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin) 67 Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (Clarke) 371 globalectic 181, 183, 189 globalization 25, 113 – 14; and appropriation 121; diversity and 38; historical record of 30; homogenizing effects of 39; The Tempest as study of 102 Global Shakespeare 6, 26, 195; and appropriation 22, 27; ethics within 25 – 35; teaching 227 – 239 Global Shakespeare Program (defunct) (U.K.) 201 Globe Theatre (London) 44, 110, 121, 173; Old 115; performers 23, 39 Globe to Globe production 25, 105 – 6; Festival 118, 166, 176 – 7, 196, 198, 201, 203; Hamlet 388 “glocal” 8 – 9, 241; cultural politics 243; interests 3 Glytzouris, Antonis 269 Godfather,The (film) 217; Part III 217 Godinez, Henry 105 Goodman Latino Theatre Festival 105 Gordon, Colette 164 Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin) 59 Gould, Dorothy Ann 163 Grady, Hugh 1 Grand Alliance 245 Greece, Shakespeare in 267 – 77 Greenaway, Peter 338, 446 – 7, 449 – 51 Greenblatt, Stephen 218 “Greensleeves” ballad 253 – 4 Grene, Nicholas xxiii, 79, 82, 83, 86 Grey, Arthur de Wilton (Lord) 79 Grise,Virginia 92 Grossman, Rudolf 234 “Ground on Which I Stand, The” (Wilson) 61 Gucinksi, Alex 232 Guns of the Magnificent Seven (film) 29

Faerie Queen,The (poem) (Spenser) 84 fairies 434 – 5; see also monsters/monstrosity fairylands/fairyworlds 117, 270, 270 – 2, 405; see also Ovid; Sandman,The (serial) (Gaiman); Tempest,The (Shakespeare) Falk, Rosemarie 132 Falklands War 259 Falstaff, John (Sir) (character of) 221, 348 – 57 Falstaff (opera) (Verdi) 355 – 6 Fanon, Frantz 59, 172, 395 Farber,Yael 163 – 6 Fate Apocrypha (anime) 299 Fate/Grand Order (mobile game) 299 Fazel,Valerie 3 Feagin, Joe R. 359, 361, 365 Feng, Xiaogang 229 Ferrer, José Vincente 323, 327–8 Filipinos see Philippines First Folio 27, 203, 328, 340, 440, 442; circulation of 8; disseminating 448 – 53 First Folio Theatre Company (Chicago) 115 First Nations Shakespeare 129 – 36 First Peoples of Canada 5, 127 – 37 Fischlin, Daniel xxiii, 5 Fiske, John 219 – 20, 222 Flaherty, Jennifer xxiii, 5 Flute Theatre 202 Folger Shakespeare Theatre 196 folktale structure 221 Forbes, Jack 128 Foreign Shakespeare (Kennedy) 2, 167 Fraser, Robert 107 Fresa y Chocolate (play) (Paz) 151 Fritsch, Herbert 229 From Stage to Page: Shakespeare in German Expressionist Prints (exhibit) 234 Futari wa PreCure (Pretty Cure) 290 Gaiman, Neil 7, 431 – 3, 435 – 9 Galeano, Eduardo 38 Galery, Maria Clara Versiani 105 Ganymede (character of) 401 Garber, Marjorie 32, 412 Gardev, Javor 286 – 7 Gardner, Lyn 117 Garrick, David 161 Gate Theatre (Ireland) 256 – 7 Gay, Geneva 197 Gebre-Medhin, Tsegaye 172, 174, 178 Geddes, Louise xxiii, 8 Genette, Gérard 70 geography: contested 391; cultural 271; dispersal 446; and education 207; and Global Shakespeare 195 – 6, 203; natural 271; of violence 393 German Expressionism 233 Germany, Shakespeare in 25, 237, 277 Gerzic, Marina xxiii, 7 Ghana 174; Ewe language 174; Nzema language 174

Habima Theatre 198 Hadjidakis, Manos 272 Hagen, Uta Thyra 323, 331 Haider (film) 8, 33 – 4, 388 – 97; political aesthetics of 394 – 5 Hall, David 44 Hall, Edward 411 Hall, Kim F. 56, 58, 215, 368, 369 Hall, Stuart 33 Hamlet (image): Craig 235, 236, 237; Jaeckel 234 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 7; in Bulgaria 280; at a Bulgarian village festival 287 – 8; German version 229; Malawi version 177; Road House (film) as 218 – 22; Schlegel/Tieck translation 229, 230; see also Bulgaria, Hamlet in; Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet (Appignanesi and Vieceli); Ophelia (character of); revenge Hamlet Adventure,The (film) 7, 281 – 3 Hamlet gliwicki (Hamlet from Gliwice) (film) 29

460

Index historically black college or university (HBCU) 206 – 7, 210 Hocquenghem, Guy 97 Hoenselaars, Ton 277 Höfele, Andreas 25 Hofer, Karl 234, 235 homoeroticism 120, 151, 157; in adaptation of Othello 373 – 4; and censorship 151; in Hamlet 74 – 6; in Twelfth Night 152 homogeneity in Poland 243 – 52 homonormativity 95 homophobia 98, 155 homosexuality 151, 372; in Toufann 175 homosociality 214 Howard, Tony 34, 217 Huapango (film) 32, 229 Huffman, Terry 197 Hungarian language 196 Hunter, Tom 93 Hurricane Katrina 16 – 17 Hutcheon, Linda 2, 73, 432 hybrid: cultural landscape 32; figures 82; homeless 374; identities 79, 87; performance space 4 – 5; performance styles 25; political culture 4 – 5, 56; religious forms 104; spaces 323, 331; subject 33; text 102 hybridity/hybridization 56, 82, 104, 128; of Caliban 108; Cuban artistic 105; cultural 105, 110; syncretism and 106 hyperbole 32 hypermasculinity 49 hyperobjects 345 hypertext and hypotext 70, 74, 75; hypertextuality 70, 424, 442

Hamlet Globe to Globe (Dromgoole) 195 Hamlet-le-Malécite (Durand and Messier) 129 “Hamlet”Without Hamlet (De Grazia) 218 hamlet_X (Fritsch) 229 Hammerschmidt-Hummel, Hildegard 233 Hansa, merchants of the 146 Hardy, Thomas 317 Harlem 65 – 7;YMCA 324 Harvey, Gabriel 319 Harvey, P.J. 43 Hateley, Erica 75 Hatfield, Charles 70 Hauptmann, Gerhardt 233, 237 Havana-Cultura 151 Hawai’i 181 – 9; Chinese immigrants in 185 Hawai’i Creole English (HCE) 5, 181 – 2 Hawkes, Terence 1 Hayes, Helen 324 Hayley, Emma 72, 73, 74–5 HBCU see historically black college or university (HBCU) Hecuba (character of) 401 – 2 Henderson, Diana 2, 228, 337, 380 Henriad, the (Shakespeare) 378 – 9, 381, 383; see also Wire,The (TV show) Henry IV (historical figure) 262 Henry IV, Part I (Shakespeare) 44, 63, 67, 209 – 10, 262, 263, 324; cited in The Wire 379, 382; musical nostalgia in 349 – 52, 354, 355, 356, 357 Henry IV, Part II (Shakespeare) 254, 328, 348 – 9; cited in The Wire 379, 381 – 2; epilogue 356 Henry V (film) 354 Henry V (historical figure) 262 Henry V (Shakespeare) 79, 81, 85, 214, 256, 262, 319, 352 Henry VI (historical figure) 262 Henry VI (Shakespeare) 254 Henry VI, Part II (Shakespeare) 254 Henry VI, Part III (Shakespeare) 254, 403, 412 Henry VII (historical figure) 415 – 16 Henry VIII (historical figure) 317, 412 Herrenvolk 63 Herrington, Rowdy 217 hero 76, 220 – 2, 292; action 224; ancient 406; Bollywood 394; celebrities as 376; chorus and 285; epic poems 306, 399, 400; Othello as military hero 249; prophets and 308; revenge of 212; Richard III as 416; romantic 153, 392; Shakespeare as 318; superhero (in comics) 72, 414; tragic 211, 415; war 276 Hero (character of) 43 heroic: anti- 275 – 6; failure 7 Heroides (Ovid) 401 heroine 90, 93, 261, 296; gender-reimagined 290, 294; in manga 413; point of view 293; racial identity of 98; romantic 184 Historia Regum Angliae (Rous) 411

Iago (character of) 178, 245 – 9, 264, 264 – 5, 327 – 30, 360 – 7; as black African 371; played by a boy playing a woman 373 – 4 Ibsen, Henrik 33, 269 If Beale Street Could Talk (Baldwin) 65 – 7 If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (Numeroff and Bond) 223 Igarashi,Yumiko 293 Igbo see Nigeria Ikeda, Ryoko 293 Iliad,The (Homer) 306 Illyria (Díaz) 5, 150 – 60 Illyria (location) 114 – 22 imperial/imperialism 18, 31, 33, 110; British 29, 118, 161, 166, 210; cultural 372; Dutch 161; European 59; India 116, 121, 393; intellectual 423; literary 183; neo- 179; post- 256; Roman 214; values 171 India 164; as Illyria 118 – 22; Illyria as 114 – 18 Indian Shakespeares 389 – 90 Indonesia 164 Inglourious Basterds (film) 212 Inocéncio, Josh 5, 90 – 100

461

Index set in contemporary Africa 177; SeZar (Farber) 163; translated in various languages 174 “Jump Jim Crow” 164 Juno and the Paycock (play) (O’Casey) 257 Junosza-Stepowski, Kazimierz 244 – 5

intercultural: Britian 118; dialogue 38; exchange 27, 129; Shakespeare 3, 4, 6, 8, 13, 90, 122, 254 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 22 intermediality 29, 129, 229, 300, 337, 427; see also Mancewicz, Aneta International Opera Theatre (IOT) 202 intersectionality 56 – 7, 100, 370; see also Crenshaw, Kimberlé intracultural 90 Ireland 79 – 87; and Shakespeare 254 – 65; stereotypes 256 Irobi, Esiaba 175, 176, 178 Isango Ensemble (South Africa) 177 isiXhosa see Xhosa isiZulu see Zulu language islands 3, 150, 154, 255, 339; Britain/Ireland 256, 265; Caliban’s 175; desert 294; Hawaiian 181; Honshu 31; Mauritius 173; Mysterious Island 72; Otra Tempestad 102 – 10; prison- 268; Prospero’s 343, 345, 439, 446 – 7; Queen Charlotte Islands 131; “Robben Island jail” 28; Salvage Island 85; in Toufann 175; see also Illyria (location); Tempest,The (Shakespeare); Twelf Nite O Wateva! (Benton) Islas, Arturo 49 – 56 Israel 6, 195; Malaysian business ties 198 – 9 Israelites 143 Italy 83, 132, 142, 146, 202, 312, 315 Ivory, James 25 Iyengar, Sujata xxiv, xxvii, 1 – 11; on appropriation 432, 433, 434; on Ophelia 93; on transformation 228, 423

Kahlo, Frida 38, 43 – 4 Kahn, Michael 116 Kahoutek comet 49, 52 Kalthoum, Um 309 Kama Sutra 115 Kanehele, George 188 Kani, John 163 Kanno, Aya 294 Kanter, Albert 72 Kaplan, Sophie 234 Karantinos, Socrates 270 Kashmir 8, 33 – 5, 195, 388 – 90; and Haider 391 – 4 Katharina (character of) 261 Katrina see Hurricane Katrina Kean, Edmund 245 Kellett, Jan 328 Kelly, Erin E. 130 Kenani, Stanley Onjezani 178 Kennedy, Dennis 167 Kennedy, John F. 64 Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company 203 Khan, Salman 392 – 3 Khoi-San 165 Khoisan peoples 164 – 5 Kidnie, Margaret Jane 2, 423 Kilcolman castle 80 Kill Shakespeare (comic) 414 Kimura, Larry 188 Kingdom of Desire (opera) (Wu Hsing-kuo) 31 King Lear (Shakespeare) 3, 17, 27; Chicanx 49; El Rey Lear 150; “Eskimo” 132; Lear (image by Meseck) 234; Life Goes On (film) 25; Masken (image by Hofer representing Lear) 234, 235; see also Islas, Arturo King, Martin Luther Jr. 175 Kinogamish reserve 33 Kirol Lir (film) 229 Kishida, Koi 293 Kiss Me, Kate (musical) 352 Kiswahili see Tanzania Knapp, Terence 182 – 3 Koenig, Sarah 360 – 8 Kokoschka, Oskar 234 Konopka, Zbigniew 29 Kostihova, Marcela 416 Koun, Karolos 7, 9, 267 – 77, 270, 274 Kozusko, Matthew xxiv, 6 Krio (Sierra Leone creole) 173, 174; see also Creole/creole Krontiris, Tina xxiv, 7, 9

Jabra¯, Ibra¯hı¯m Jabra¯ 311 Jacobson, Miriam xxiv, 1 – 11, 399, 405 James I (king) 107 Japan 8, 30, 71; and Shakespeare 69 – 76, 290 – 300; see also anime; Kurosawa, Akira; manga Japanese language 182 Jay-Z 209 Jensen, Michael P. 409 Jewish Ghetto,Venice 139 Jewish people 5, 6, 244; Arab 304; Barabas 145; and the Holocaust 246; nation 144; refugees 139, 326; Shakespeare’s portrayal of 214; Shylock 32, 109, 142 – 3, 146 – 7, 292; in Venice 198 – 9 Jharkhand (India) 6, 197 – 8, 202 Johns, Geoffrey A. 412 Jonson, Ben 80, 82, 141, 339, 438, 439; Poetaster 398, 405 jotería studies 97 Joubin, Alexa Alice 3, 4, 22, 177, 229, 360 – 1, 388; on language as identity marker 421; Shakespeare and ethics 364 Judaism 109 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 28, 421, 424 – 6; Dintshontsho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara (Plaatje) 165;

462

Index Macbeth, Lady (character of) 104, 107, 225, 234; in Sanazaki’s version 293 Mac Conghail, Fiach 263 Machiavelli, Niccolò 5, 141 – 8, 246, 403 Mac Líammoír, Michéal see McMaster, Anew MacMorris (Captain) (character of) 81, 87, 256, 262; see also Henry V (Shakespeare) Macon, Peter 263, 265 Macondo oil well explosion 15, 16 Madagascar 164, 233 Madden, John 30 magic/magical beings 103, 107, 220; book 338; Hamlet’s fascination with 231; of Prospero 343, 345; soothsayers as 177; of Sycorax 341; see also Tempest,The (Shakespeare) Makerere University (Uganda) 172; production of Julius Caesar at 172 Makibefo (film) 229 Malaysia 164; Kuala Lumpur 198 Malawi 177, 178 Malcolm X 175 Maloney, James 38, 43 – 4 Mama Day (Naylor) 61 Mancewicz, Aneta 29, 427 Mancini, Dominic 410 Mandela, Nelson 28 manga 69; bisho¯nen character 75; Shakespeare and 5, 8, 69 – 76, 290 – 300; sho¯jo 70, 73, 75, 292 – 4; sho¯nen 413 Manga Club 71 Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet (Appignanesi and Vieceli) 5, 69 – 76 Manga Shakespeare Learning 292 Mannoni, Octave 59 Maori Merchant of Venice (film) 228 “Maori Take on Shakespeare” (McDougall) 228 Maqbool (Bhardwaj) 229, 388, 392 Marin, Cheech 48, 53, 57 Marlowe, Christopher 146, 318, 398 Márquez, Gabriel García 16 Márquez, John 49, 54, 56 Marshall, Thurgood 207 masculinity 76, 340, 399; black 363; hyper- 49; nudity 156; violent 76 Masten, Jeffrey 97, 99 Mathews, Charles 164 Mauritian Creole (MC) 173; see also Creole/creole McCarthyism 331 McCloud, Scott 409 McCormick, F.J. 257 McDonagh, Martin 262 McDougall, Julie 228 McGuinness, Frank 5, 79–87 McKeown, R.H. 115 McMaster, Anew 256 – 7 McMurray, Mark 340 – 3, 341 McLynn, Pauline 261

Kuala Lumpur see Malaysia Kubin, Alfred 234 Kubrick, Stanley 71 Kujawin´ska Courtney, Krystyna xxiv, 6 Ku Klux Klan 325 Kurosawa, Akira 30 – 1, 229 Kuwait 199, 200 Lachmann, Piotr 29 Ładnowski, Bolesław 244 Lamb, Charles and Mary 371 Lanier, Douglas 2, 10, 133, 134, 138, 139, 149, 171, 180, 217, 226, 243, 252, 360, 369, 372, 379, 380, 400, 420, 432 Latin America 38 – 9, 41, 104 – 5, 110 Latinx empowerment 90 – 100; see also queer/ queered/queering Latinx Shakespeare 90 – 2; appropriations of Shakespeare 54 – 6, 232 Lauten, Flora 102 – 10 Lavery, Carl 324 Lee, Hae Min 360 – 8 Lee, Sidney (Sir) 317, 318 – 19 Lee, Spike 207 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 421, 423 Lessing, Lauren 233, 237 Lester, Julius 371 Leszczyn´ski, Bogusław 244 Levinas, Emmanuel 31 – 2, 433 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 220 LGBTQ in Houston 92, 100 Life Goes On (film) 25 li hing mui see Twelf Nite O Wateva! (Benton) Lind, Jenny 325 linguistic terrorism 52 Lipkies, Ivàn 229 Little, Arthur 208, 214 London 23; see also Globe Theatre (London) Long Day’s Journey into Night (O’Neill) 256 Loomba, Ania 104, 151 Lorca, Frederico García 91, 150, 151 “Lucy,” anthropological discovery of 202 Luhrmann, Baz 29 – 30, 48, 116 Lu’lu’a, ‘Abd al-Wa¯ hid 311 Lutian, Justin 232 Maas, Peter 16 Macbeth (character of) 109, 178, 291; Garrick’s performance of 113 Macbeth (manga) (Sanazaki) 293 – 4 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 30, 42, 50 – 4, 129, 174; Brébeuf’s Ghost 129; and Django Unchained 212; Mexican adaptation of 37; performances of 247, 258; samurai-style 290; Sanazaki’s version of 293 – 4; teaching 212, 229; see also Mendoza (play); Psycho-Pass (anime, TV show); Shogun Macbeth (Briggs)

463

Index Morikawa, Kumi 293 Morocco 141, 200; leather 338 Morphology of the Folktale (Propp) 219 Morricone, Enrico 43 Morton, Timothy 16 Moses, Daniel 33 Moses (prophet) 147 Mozambique 164, 235 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare) 4, 37, 39 – 45; Mexican adaption of 37; see also Mendoza (play) Muhammad (prophet) 306 Mulrooney, Denise 165 Muñoz, José Esteban 99 munshids 309 Museum of Civilization (fictional) 21 Mushakavanhu, Tinashe 166 music in Twelfth Night 157 – 9 Muslims 64, 198, 199, 306; non-Arab 304; in Serial podcast 360, 363 Mutabilitie (play) (McGuinness) 79 – 87 My Own Private Idaho (film) 354

McWilliams, Susan J. 61 Meaning by Shakespeare (Hawkes) 1 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) 273 Medea (character of) 401 Méndez Piña, Pablo Pascual 155 Mendoza (play) 37, 39 – 40, 44, 49 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) 5 – 6, 32, 109, 139 – 49; Israeli production of 198; Maori Merchant of Venice 228; in Santali dialect, performed in India 197; teaching 212, 232 Meres, Francis 318 Merry Wives of Windsor,The (Shakespeare) 8, 135, 348, 352 – 7 Mesnak (film) 33 Messier, J.F. 129 mestizo/mestizage 102, 104 – 5, 110 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 7, 399–406, 437 Metzler, Irina 410 Mexico 37 – 45 Mexico City 30 Mick Lally Theatre (Ireland) 262 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare) 26 – 27, 96; Koun’s production 270, 274, 274; Sogno Di Una Notte Di Mezza Estate202; Sommernachtstraum (prints) 234; Sueño de un noche de verano 150; Tigrinya version 174 Mikael, Kebede 174 Mi’kmaw narrative of the Friendly Visitor 129 Millais, John Everett 93 Millar, Peter 71 Minami, Ryuta xxv, 7, 8, 372, 413 mira/mirada 108 Miranda (character of) 103, 107 – 9, 340, 342, 438, 439 Mirazoeff, Nicholas 227 mise-en-scène 113 MIT Global Shakespeare 199 modernist 1, 269 – 77 Modernist Shakespeare,The (Grady) 1 Moberly, David C. xxv, 6 – 7 Modenessi, Alfredo Michel xxv, 4, 423 Modern Shakespeare Off-shoots (Cohn) 2 Molière 250 Mollie and the King of Tears, La (Islas) 49 moneylenders 197 – 8 Monsoon Wedding (film) 118 Monster Strike (mobile game) 291, 299 monsters/monstrosity 83, 214, 341, 343, 412; Caliban as 29, 342; Richard III as 414 Montaigne, Michel de 108 Moonlight Flowers (Tsukomo) 294 Moor 143, 244; actors playing the role 323, 325, 327 – 9; Othello as 244, 245, 249, 264; in Serial 360, 362 – 3; see also Othello (character of); race, and Othello Moraga, Cherríe 92 More, Thomas 106, 409, 411 Mori see Ramos Mori, Roberto

Nabulya, Eve 200 Nanairo Inko (manga) 292 narrative: functional 223; indicial 223; structure 221 narrative theory, applied to Road House/Hamlet 219 – 22 Narratology (Bal) 220 “Nashı¯d al-Amal” (“The Chant of Hope”) (Abu Shadi) 309 nashı¯d or nasheed poetic tradition 305, 308 – 11 National Arts Festival, Grahamstown 163 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Women and Girls (NIMMWG) 128 National Theatre “Ivan Vazov” (Bulgaria) 286 – 7 National Theatre of Bulgaria 286 – 7 National Theater of Greece (NTG) 268 – 72 National Theatre of Ireland see Abbey, The (Ireland) Negro (racist designation of) 55; American 59, 60, 62, 65, 232, 326, 330; European 244; Othello as 245, 250, 323; see also Baldwin, James; Othello (character of); race, and Othello; racism; Robeson, Paul Nesbit, Edith 371 New Boy (Chevalier) 371 new world 104, 107, 318; “brave new world” 103 New World 102, 108, 131, 153 – 7, 247, 284, 340; Old World 110 Ngu˜gı¯ wa Thiong’o 172, 181 Nichols, Lewis 329 Nigeria: Igbo 175; Sycorax (Irobi) 175;Yoruba 174 Niobe (character of) 230, 401 Nixon, Richard 133 Nixon, Robert 102 Noche de Reyes see Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) North Korea 196

464

Index Otra Tempestad (Carrió and Lauten) 5, 102 – 10 Ovid 398; and appropriation 399 – 400, 403 – 6; theatricality and personation 400 – 2; and transformation 402 – 3 Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare in Performance (Bulman) 167 Oz, Avraham xxv, 5

North, Sterling 70 nudity 150 – 2, 155 – 8 Numeroff, Laura 223 Nunn, Hilary M. 409 Nunn, Trevor 80 Nyberg, Amy 71 Nyerere, Julius 173 Nzema see Ghana Obote, Milton 172 Ocampo-Guzman, Antonio 209 O’Casey, Seán 257 O’Dair, Sharon xxv, 4, 8 “Of Coaches” (Montaigne) 108 Ofélio (Inocéncio) 5, 90 – 101 Oguntokun, Wole 201 Oikonomidis,Yiannis 272 Oldman, Gary 223 Oliver Twist (stage adaptation) 257 Olivier, Laurence 354, 415 Omkara (Bhardwaj) 228, 229, 388 O’Neill, Eugene 256, 323, 325 O’Neill, Hugh (Earl of Tyrone) 81, 82 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez) 16 “On National Culture” (Fanon) 172 Ophelia (character of) 34, 92 – 5, 224; in The Hamlet Adventure 283; manga versions of 74 – 5; and Ofélio 90 – 9; in Otra Tempestad 104; in Pflegeeltern (Fosterparents) 231; in Road House 220 – 1; in Suzman’s Hamlet 163; Ugandan students’ views on 200 – 1; in Wittenberg Revisited 284 – 7 Ophelia (image) (Freese) 235 – 7, 236 Opium Wars 26 orature 183 Oregon Shakespeare Festival 203 Orgel, Stephen 2 Orientalism 38, 114 orishas 103 – 4, 106 – 8 Orkin, Martin 104 Orwell, George 297 Osamu, Tezuka 292 Osborne, Laurie E. xxv, 6, 337 Osofisan, Femi 176 Othello (Amharic) (Gebre-Medhin) 174 Othello (character of) 103; race of 6, 163, 178, 244 – 5 Othello (image): Gulbransson 234; Teutch 234 Othello (Lester) 371 Othello (manga) (Ikeda) 293 Othello (Shakespeare) 6, 7, 32; Amharic version 174; First Nations’ version of 132; and Poland 243 – 54; teaching 205, 229, 234; transnational 323 – 31; young adult adaptations of 8, 370 – 7; see also Exposure (Peet) Othello: A Drama in Five Acts (Skelt) 371 Other/otherness 167, 244, 364; tragic 363; see also exotic/exoticism; Othello (character of)

465

Pacino, Al 32 pakalana flower 185 “Paki” (racial slur) 373 Palmer, Judith 106 Pamela (Richardson) 442 Pasternoster (short film) 230, 231 – 2 paternalism: in Shakespeare’s plays 142, 231; state 281 paternoster 231–2; see also Catholic Paul, Prince (later King) of Greece 271 Paz, Senel 151 p’Bitek, Okot 172 pedagogy and teaching Shakespeare 6, 76, 130; benefits of 197; in Canada 131; and imitatio 399; and marginalization 212; student-responsive 208, 212; training 206; world 193, 195 Pedi language 165, 166 Peer, Basharat 389 Peet, Mal 370 people of color and Shakespeare 208; see also historically black college or university (HBCU); race, and Othello; racism personation 400 – 4, 406 Peter Pan (play) 257 Petersen, Wolfgang 217, 223 Peterson, Kaara 94, 97 Petrarch 319 Pflegeeltern (Fosterparents) (short film) 229 – 30, 231 Phelan, James 218 Philippines 232, 340; Filipinos 182, 184, 186; see also “Pinoy Shakespeares” (Lutian) Philomela (character of) 401, 403 Pianist,The (film) 32 Pidgin 181–9; see also Hawai’i Creole English (HCE) Pino, Dania del 155 “Pinoy Shakespeares” (Lutian) 232 Pittman, L. Monique xxv, 7 – 8, 361 Plaatje, Sol 161, 165 Planned Parenthood 98 Plastow, Jane xxv, 5 Playboy of the Western World 261 Pluto (Aristophanes) 269 Poland 6; and Othello 243 – 51 Polanski, Roman 32 Polylas, Iacovos 270 Popular Expressionism, Greek 269 Portal Cubasí 157 Porter, Cole 352 Portuguese 182

Index Richard III:The New Evidence (documentary) 411 Richardson, Samuel 442 Rivlin, Elizabeth 4, 10, 22, 24, 27, 36, 138, 149, 179, 180, 225, 226, 360, 361, 364, 369, 386, 388, 396, 400, 407, 429, 433, 441 Road House (film) 217; as Hamlet 218 – 22 Roach, Greg 282 – 3 Robeson, Paul 323 – 31 Romania 196 Roman Tragedies (multimedia production) 8, 421 – 8; and Twitter (#RomanTragedies) 427 – 8 Romeo (character of) 103 – 4 Romeo × Juliet (anime, TV show) 295 – 6, 297 Romeo + Juliet (film, 1996) 48 Romeo and Juliet (film, 1998) 29 – 30 Romeo and Juliet (manga) (Kishida) 293 Romeo and Juliet (manga) (Sanazaki) 293 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 7, 20, 109, 263; accidental appropriations of in films 217 – 19; Air Force One (film) as literary parallel to 223 – 5; Amharic version 174; in Brazil 254; Chichewa version 178; echoed in Serial 360, 362; and failure 130 – 1; in Greece 269, 273, 276; in If Beale Street Could Talk 65 – 7; interracial version 49, 54 – 6; Luhrmann film version 29, 30, 38; manga and anime versions of 72 – 3, 290 – 9; reading in Palestine 32 – 3; in the Philippines 232; sonnet in 317; South African version 163, 166; in Station Eleven 20; teaching 209, 210, 212; see also Color Blind (film) Romewana Julyat:Teater (Mikael) 174 Romulus 147 Rosenthal, Laura 232 Rosvally, Danielle 427 Rotas,Vassilis 268, 272, 274 Rous, John 410 Roy, Arundhati 388 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 26, 42, 177, 269, 273, 275, 354 – 5 Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works Festival, Stratford-upon-Avon 163 Ryan, Kiernan 63, 64 Rylance, Mark 110, 198

postmodern 95, 132, 165, 276, 380 Potsdam Conference 245 Pratt, Mary Louise 197 praxis 4, 49, 281; social 40, 378, 379 Propp,Vladimir 219 – 21 Prospero (character of) 15, 39, 59, 131; and Caliban 102 – 4, 175 – 6; in Doggett 339 – 40; in Kellett 345; manga versions of 294; in McMurray 342 – 3; and Ovid 405 – 6; in Prospero’s Books 338; and The Sandman 438 – 9 Prospero’s Books (film) 338, 446 – 7, 450 – 1; see also Tempest,The (artist’s book) (McMurray) Protestants 80, 81, 84 – 5 Psycho-Pass (anime, TV show) 295, 297 – 8 Purcell, Stephen 106 Pygmalion (character of) 401 queer/queered/queering 4, 81, 90, 98, 122; of color 100; Hamlet 69 – 76, 90 – 100; Latinx empowerment via 4 – 5, 90 – 100; selfhood 97 Quin, James 256 quinquenio gris (five-year gray period) 151; see also censorship race, and Othello 244 – 5, 250, 370 – 7; see also racism race consciousness 61 – 2; appropriative strategies of 59, 61, 63, 67, 68 racism: against American “Negros” 55, 60, 62, 65, 232, 326, 330; challenges to 55; Othello as “Negro” vs. “Moor” 244 – 5 racist tropes 361 Ramos Mori, Roberto 156 Rasmussen, Eric 448 – 51 Ratnam, Mani 394, 395 Ratnam, Roshina 163 Raz´niak, Waldemar 249 Rea, Marty 264 Reinventing Shakespeare (Taylor) 1 relatability 212 Renegade Theatre Company 201 Requiem of the Rose King (manga) 294, 409, 413 – 14; see also Richard III (manga) Resende, Aimara da Cunha 374 Respectable Prostitute,The (play) (Sartre) 152 Retamar, Roberto Fernández 59, 104, 157 revenge 33 – 4, 69, 81, 120, 146, 214; fantasy 206, 212 – 13; Hamlet as story of 218, 220 – 1, 283, 401; Iago’s plot of 365; Malvolio’s 153; religious 147 Rice, Emma 38, 42, 44 – 5, 121 Richard II (Shakespeare) 324 Richard III (historical figure) 105, 409 – 11; graphic novel versions of 415 – 17; as hunchback 411 – 13 Richard III (manga) 409 Richard III (Shakespeare) 411 – 13; Arabic version 199; graphic novel versions of 413 – 15

Sailor Moon 71 Salie, Igsaan 164 Salieri, Antonio 353 – 4 Samuel Beckett Theatre 80 Sanazaki, Harumo 293 Sanders, Julie 2, 113, 357, 399, 400, 420 Sandman,The (serial) (Gaiman) 7, 431 – 41 Sangare, Omar 250 sangoma 167 Santali language 197 Santos, Boaventure de Sousa 133 Sartre, Jean Paul 150, 152 Savoy Theatre 326

466

Index Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (Bristol) 1 Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys (Lei et al.) 2 Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Grene) 262 Shakespeare Society of Eastern India 197 Shakespeare Thefts,The (Rasmussen) 448 Shakespeare Visionen (folio collection of prints) 233, 237 Shakespeare Wallah (film) 25 Shakespeare, William: adapting the work of 174 – 6; in Africa 176 – 8; and appropriation 1 – 9; as character 432 – 40; as dissident Catholic 81; sexuality of 305; teaching 208; translating the work of 173 – 4; white 383; white folks in Africa, promotion of the work of 176 – 8; young adult adaptations of 371 – 7; see also Shakespeare, plays of Shakespeare Without Tears (Webster) 327 Shakespeare Yearbook 3 Shamoon, Deborah 292 – 3 Shapiro, James 203 Shapiro, Michael 92 Shaw, Fiona 256 She’s the Man (film) 217 Shogun Macbeth (Briggs) 31 Shona language see Zimbabwe Shuttleworth, Ian 105, 106 Shylock (character of) 5, 32, 109; nomadic 139 – 49; see also Jewish people; Prospero (character of) Sicorax (character of) 103, 107 – 8, 110; see also Sycorax (character of) Sideris,Yiannis 272 Sidney, Philip (Sir) 312, 315, 317, 437; see also Astrophil and Stella (Sidney) Sierra Leone 173; Krio 174 Silverstone, Roger 220 Simon the Cyrenian (play) 325 Simpson, Leanne 128 Sinfield, Alan 1 Singer, Bryan 29 Sir John in Love (opera) 354; see also Falstaff (opera) (Verdi) Slave,The (Jones) 61 slaves and slavery 175, 208, 210; transatlantic slave trade 210 Smallman, Shawn 129 Smethurst, Adam 26 Smith, Emma 449 Smith, Ian 383 Smith, Philip 18 Sogno Di Una Notte Di Mezza Estate see Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare) Sokolova, Boika xxvi, xxvii, 7 soldaderas 44 Song of Lawino (p’Bitek) 172 sonnet 315; history of 317 sonnets (Shakespeare), as ana¯shı¯d 305 – 11, 315 – 20

Sawyer, Robert xxv–xxvi, 1, 2, 7 Schilling, Dolores 130 Schlesinger, Minky 163 Sea-Change (artist’s book) (Kellett) 343 – 5, 344 Sebek, Barbara xxvi, 5 Seeff, Adele xxvi, 5 SelfMadeHero 69, 72, 291 Selvaduri, Shyam 370, 372 – 4 Semerdjiev, Stanislav 282, 283 Seminole Indians 217 Sen, Amrita xxvi, 8 Serial (podcast) (Koenig) 359 – 68; as Shakespearean mashup 360 Setswana language 161, 165, 166 settler colonialism 129; see also colonialism Severn, John R. 353 sex and sexuality 71, 213; heteronormative 75; ideologies of 76; macho 281; modern 92; Ophelia’s 93, 94; purity 95; queer 95 – 100; see also homosexuality; queer/queered/queering SeZar (play) (Farber) 163 – 5; see also Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) Shakespeare and Appropriation (Desmet and Sawyer) 1 Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas (Trivedi) 2 Shakespeare and Ireland (McGuinness) 81 Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Lanier) 2 Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (Joubin and Rivlin) 4 Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (Kidnie) 2 Shakespeare Beyond English (Bennett and Carson) 167 “Shakespeare in France” (Klein and Maguin) 2 “Shakespeare in Japan” (Anzai) 2 Shakespeare in Love (film) 30 Shakespeare in Mzansi (series) 166 “Shakespeare in the Bush” (Bohannan) 228 Shakespeare Jubilee (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1769) 161 Shakespeare, plays of: Antony and Cleopatra 421, 425; Coriolanus 258, 421, 425 – 7; Hamlet 7; the Henriad 378 – 9, 381, 383; Henry IV, Part I 44, 63, 67, 209 – 10, 262, 263, 324; Henry IV, Part II 254, 328, 348 – 9; Henry V 79, 81, 85, 214, 256, 262, 319, 352; Henry VI 254; Henry VI, Part II 254; Henry VI, Part III 254, 403, 412; Julius Caesar 28, 421, 424 – 6; King Lear 3, 17, 27; Macbeth 30, 42, 50 – 4, 129, 174; Measure for Measure 273; The Merchant of Venice 5 – 6, 32, 109, 139 – 49; The Merry Wives of Windsor 8, 135, 348, 352 – 7; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 26 – 7, 96; Much Ado About Nothing 4, 37, 39 – 45; Othello 6, 7, 32, 264; Richard II 324; Richard III 411 – 13; Romeo and Juliet 20; The Taming of the Shrew 260 – 2, 261, 352; The Tempest 26; Titus Andronicus 163, 206, 212, 214, 297; Troilus and Cressida 269, 273, 275, 276, 328; Twelfth Night 5, 269, 272, 273; Two Gentlemen of Verona 176, 319, 401, 403; Venus and Adonis 90, 96, 177, 317, 406; The Winter’s Tale 26, 237

467

Index taboo 151 – 2, 157 Taboo (play) 324 Tain Bo Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) 81 Takahashi, Ryoko 294 Tales from Shakespeare (Lamb and Lamb) 371 Taming of the Shrew,The (Shakespeare) 260 – 2, 261, 352 Tanzania 173; Kiswahili language 173, 174 Tarantino, Quentin 206, 212 – 13 Tarnawski, Władysław 244 Tartuff (character of) 250 Tatort (Crime Scene) (short film) 229 Tatort (Crime Scene) (TV show) 230 Tawfiq, Badr 311 Taylor, Charles 105 Taylor, Diana 422 Taylor, Gary 1 Taylor, Paul 106 Teatro Buendía 102 – 10 Teatro El Público 150 Teatro Trianón 156 Television Culture (Fiske) 219 – 20 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (Baldwin) 67 Tempest,The (artist’s book) (McMurray) 340 – 3, 341; see also Caliban (image); islands; Otra Tempestad (Carrió and Lauten); Prospero’s Books (film) Tempest,The (Shakespeare) 15, 26, 42, 131 – 2; in Africa 174 – 6; in Greece 269 – 70, 272; manga and anime versions of 294 – 9; in Poland 246; Sycorax (Irobi) 175; Toufann (Virahsawmy) 175; Une tempête (Césaire) 102; in visual art 234; Zetesuen no Tempest (manga) 294 – 8 Tempest,The: A  Sketchbook (artist’s book) (Doggett) 338 – 40 Tezuka, Osamu 292, 295 Théâtre du Soleil 105 Theatre of the Oppressed 105 Theotokas,Yiorgios 271 Theseus (character of) 117 “Third Force” guerrilla war 166 “third space” 7, 323, 324 Thirty-Six Plays 447 Thokoza street language 166 Thompson, Ayanna 57, 81, 91, 379 Thorpe, Thomas 318 Throne of Blood (film) 229 Thurman, Chris 166 Tigrinya language 174 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) 163, 206, 212, 214, 297 Todorov, Tzvetan 220 Toneelgroep Amsterdam 421 Tonouchi, Lee 182 Torrey, Michael 412 Toufann (Virahsawmy) see Tempest,The (Shakespeare)

Sophocles 250, 277 Souls of Black Folk,The (Du Bois) 61 South Africa 28 South African Native National Congress (SANNC) 165 South African Shakespeare 161 – 7 South America 8; and Shakespeare 374 – 7 South Sudanese Theatre Company 174 Spanish Civil War 326 Spectre (film) 38 – 9 Spenser, Edmund 5, 79 – 83, 315, 316, 319; channeling Irenius 80, 83 – 7 Sperlinger, Tom 33 Spheres of Action 221 Sri Lanka 370 – 1 Starobinksi, Jean 357 Stafford, Kate 177 Stanislavski, Konstantin 325; Stanislavski System 269 Starks, Lisa S. xxvi, 7, 437 Station Eleven (St. John Mandel) 4, 15 – 23 Stavreva, Kirilka xxvi, xxvii, 7 Steevens, George 448 St. John Mandel, Emily 4, 17 – 18 Storming Shakespeare (artist’s book) (Kellett) 338,  343 – 5 Strange Illusion (film) 217 “Stranger in the Village” (Baldwin) 62 Stratford Shakespeare Festival 136 Stratford-upon-Avon 161, 163 Stoffels, Royston 163 structure see narrative sub-Saharan Africa 5, 171, 244 subversive/subversion 5, 63, 76, 139 – 49 Sue, Derald Wing 383 Sueño de un noche de verano see Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare) Sugiyama, Michelle Scalise 228 suicide 56, 76, 133, 197, 248, 395; of Ghazala 394; Ophelia’s death as 93, 200 – 1, 214, 231, 286; of Othello 364; of Romeo and Juliet 224 Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre 199 Supple, Tim 27, 117 – 18, 122 Suzman, Janet 163, 166 Svich, Caridad 105 Swan Theater (Stratford) 163 Swayze, Patrick 218 Sweney see Buile Shuibhne (“Sweney’s Frenzy”) Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (Selvaduri) 370 Sycorax (character of) 103, 175, 341, 405; see also Sicorax (character of) Sycorax (Irobi) 175; see also Tempest,The (Shakespeare) Syed, Adnan 360 – 8 syncretism 103, 106 S/Z (Barthes) 222

468

Index Verdi, Giuseppe 328, 354, 355 Vermeulen, Pieter 17 Versaci, Rocco 72 Vieceli, Emma 69 – 70, 72 – 6 Vietnam War 275 View of the State of Ireland (Spencer) 79 – 80, 83 – 87 Virahsawmy, Dev 3, 173 – 5 Virgil 285, 399, 400, 403, 405 visual culture 6, 7, 227 – 39; see also anime; artists’ books; manga; Sandman,The (serial) (Gaiman) Volksbühne 230

tragedy 262 – 5 transcultural 4, 8, 13, 198, 422; theory 197; transculturation 197 transgender 57n1 transmedia/transmedial 22, 291, 296, 335; definition of 7; Shakespeares 8, 9, 227, 228, 420; structures 4; texts 298 – 9 Trans Mountain Pipeline 127 transnational 3, 4 transtextual relationships 70, 73 Transylvania see Romania Tretiak, Andrzej 244 Trinity College Dublin 80, 255, 259 Trivedi, Poonam xxvi, 3, 4, 9 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) 269, 273, 275, 276, 328 Troubles, The (Ireland) 80 Trudeau, Justin 127 T.R.U.T.H. Project 92 Tsarouchis,Yiannis 269, 272 Tsing, Anna Lawenhaupt 196, 200 Tsotsitaal (argot) 165 Tsuraize Bokuchan (It’s a Tough Life) (manga) (Takahashi) 294 Tswana language 165–6 Twelf Nite O Wateva! (Benton): aloha, use of term 188; li hing mui 186 – 7 Twelfth Night (film) 26, 27 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 5, 269, 272, 273; “Indian” 4, 9, 113 – 22; Noche de Reyes 150 Twitter 420 – 21; hashtag (#) Shakespeare 421 Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shakespeare) 176, 319, 401, 403; Shona language version 176; woodcuts 237

Wainwright, Rufus 308 Walker, Jessica xxvi, 9 Walling, Michael 175 Watson, Thomas 317, 319 Webber, Andrew Lloyd 118 Webster, Margaret 323 – 31 Welles, Orson 324 wendigo 128 WESSA (white English-speaking South African) 163 West Side Story (musical) 90 wétiko psychosis 128 Wetmore, Kevin Jr. 410 Whatley, Alastair 115 “white folk” promoting Shakespeare in Africa 176 – 8 white (intellectual) property, Shakespeare as 208 whiteness 61 – 2; and teaching Shakespeare 208 white racial frame 8, 359 – 68 white supremacy 60, 97 – 100, 370 whitewashing 48, 54, 94 – 5, 99, 361 Whitman, Charles 324 “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare” (Baldwin) 214 Wichmann-Walczak, Elizabeth 182 Wiens, Birgit 230 Wild Duck (play) (Ibsen) 269 Wilde, Oscar 255 Wilkinson, Jane 174 Williams, Deanne 94 Williams, Katharine Schaap 403, 411 Williams, Linwood Rudolph 381 Williams, Ralph Vaughn 354 Williams, Raymond 140 Williams, Tennessee 150 Wilson, August 61 Wilson, J. Dover 356 Wilson, Jeffrey R. 410 Winfrey, Oprah 207 Wingate School 172 Winter’s Tale,The (Chiang) 26 Winter’s Tale,The (Shakespeare) 26, 237; Nigerian Yoruba version 176, 201, 203 Wire,The (TV show) 7 – 8, 378 – 85; see also African Americans Witek, Joseph 72 Wittenberg Revisited (film) 284 – 6

Uganda 179, 200 – 1; Makerere University 172 uGugu no Andile (film) 163, 166 Ulysses (Joyce) 255 Une tempête (Césaire) see Tempest,The (Shakespeare) Unhold, Max 234 Unionist rule (Ireland) 80, 255 Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke,The (Hall) 411 United Farm Workers 81 United States: as the “Hamlet” of nations 29; presidents 133; racial divisions in 54 universality 63; Shakespearean 67, 92, 113, 196 – 7 Up in Smoke (film) 48 Utopia (More) 106 uVenas no Adonisi 166 Van Hove, Ivo 421 – 2, 424 – 8 Van Sant, Gus 354 Van Volkenburg, Nellie 327 vengeance 74, 212 – 13, 220, 394; see also revenge Venus (character of) 401 Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare) 90, 96, 177, 317, 406

469

Index Women of Brewster Place,The (Naylor) 61 Wood, Andrea 75 Woodford-Gormley, Donna xxvi, 5 Woodhead, Cameron 72 Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe (Dickson) 202 World Shakespeare Project (WSP) 196 – 203 World War I 245 World War II 114, 243, 246, 281 Worthen, W.B. 105, 162, 402, 421, 423–4 Wray, Ramona 80 Wright, Laurence 117, 162 Wyatt, Thomas (Sir) 312, 315, 317

Yakuza 71 Yanev, Kiril 282 Yanni, Mara 275 Yeats, W.B. 255–6 Ye Yan/The Banquet (film) 229 Yes! PreCure 5 Go-Go (TV show) 290 Yoruba 102–8, 174, 176, 201; mythology 103 young adult literature 371 Young, Iris Marion 64 Young, Kanalu 189 Zabus, Chantal 103 Zadek, Peter 273 Z˙elazowski, Roman 244 Zeneral Makbef (General McBeef) (Virahsawmy) 173 Zetesuen no Tempest (manga) 294 – 8 Zimbabwe 3; Shona language 176 zombie, Horatio’s interest in 231 – 2 Zulu language 165, 167n3; isiZulu 166 Z˙urawski, Andrzej 244

xenophobia 55, 132, 285 xenos (foreign) 276 Xhosa: isiXhosa language 166; peoples 163, 164 Xi Jinping 26 X-Men: Apocalypse (film): Caliban in 29 X-Men comic books 29

470