Hugo, Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire: Great Shakespeareans Volume XIV 9781472554963, 9781441139467

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Series Editor’s Preface

What is a ‘Great Shakespearean’? Who are the ‘Great Shakespeareans’? This series is designed to explore those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. Charting the effect of Shakespeare on cultures local, national and international is a never-ending task, as we continually modulate and understand differently the ways in which each culture is formed and altered. Great Shakespeareans uses as its focus individuals whose own cultural impact has been and continues to be powerful. One of its aims is to widen the sense of who constitute the most important figures in our understanding of Shakespeare’s afterlives. The list is therefore not restricted to, say, actors and scholars, as if the performance of and commentary on Shakespeare’s works were the only means by which his impact is remade or extended. There are actors aplenty (like Garrick, Irving and Olivier) and scholars too (Bradley, Greg and Empson) but our list deliberately includes as many novelists (Dickens, Melville, Joyce), poets (Keats, Eliot, Berryman), playwrights (Brecht, Beckett, Césaire) and composers (Berlioz, Verdi and Britten), as well as thinkers whose work seems impossible without Shakespeare and whose influence on our world has been profound, like Marx and Freud. Deciding who to include has been less difficult than deciding who to exclude. We have a long list of individuals for whom we would wish to have found a place but whose inclusion would have meant someone else’s exclusion. We took long and hard looks at the volumes as they were shaped by our own and our volume editors’ perceptions. We have numerous regrets over some outstanding figures who ended up just outside this project. There will, no doubt, be argument on this score. Some may find our choices too Anglophone, insufficiently global. Others may complain of the lack of contemporary scholars and critics. But this is not a project designed to establish a new canon, nor are our volumes intended to be encyclopedic in scope. The series is not entitled ‘The Greatest Shakespeareans’ nor is it ‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope,

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be seen as negotiating and occupying a space mid-way along the spectrum of inclusivity and arbitrariness. Our contributors have been asked to describe the double impact of Shakespeare on their particular figure and of their figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, as well as providing a sketch of their subject’s intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider context within which her/his work might be understood. This ‘context’ will vary widely from case to case and, at times, a single ‘Great Shakespearean’ is asked to stand as a way of grasping a large domain. In the case of Britten, for example, he is the window through which other composers and works in the English musical tradition like Vaughan Williams, Walton and Tippett have a place. So, too, Dryden has been the means for considering the beginnings of critical analysis of the plays as well as of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays influenced Dryden’s own practice. To enable our contributors to achieve what we have asked of them, we have taken the unusual step of enabling them to write at length. Our volumes do not contain brief entries of the kind that a Shakespeare Encyclopedia would include nor the standard article length of academic journals and Shakespeare Companions. With no more than four Great Shakespeareans per volume – and as few as two in the case of volume 10 – our contributors have space to present their figures more substantially and, we trust, more engagingly. Each volume has a brief introduction by the volume editor and a section of further reading. We hope the volumes will appeal to those who already know the accomplishment of a particular Great Shakespearean and to those trying to find a way into seeing how Shakespeare has affected a particular poet as well as how that poet has changed forever our appreciation of Shakespeare. Above all, we hope Great Shakespeareans will help our readers to think afresh about what Shakespeare has meant to our cultures, and about how and why, in such differing ways across the globe and across the last four centuries and more, they have changed what his writing has meant. Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

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Notes on Contributors

David Barnett is Reader in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Sussex. He has published monographs of Heiner Müller (Peter Lang, 1998) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (CUP, 2005), the latter as a Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation. He is currently writing a history of the Berliner Ensemble, a project funded by a British Academy Research Development Award and an AHRC Fellowship. He has written several articles and essays on German, English-language, political and postdramatic theatre. Timothy Mathews is Professor of French and Comparative Criticism at University College London. He is author of Reading Apollinaire, Theories of Poetic Language; Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth-Century France; and Alberto Giacometti: Art and Relation. He co-edited Tradition, Translation, Trauma: the classic and the modern with Jan Parker. His has translated, with Luce Irigary, Everyday Prayers; with David Kelley, Gérard Macé, Wood Asleep; and, with Delphine Grass, Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Struggle. He is Officier dans L’Ordre des Palmes Académiques and a member of the Academy of Europe. Ruth Morse is Professor of Literature in English at the Université ParisDiderot, having previously taught at the universities of London, Sussex, Leeds and Cambridge. She has published many articles and reviews on a variety of topics including medieval literature and Shakespeare, and is author or editor of, among others, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Reality, and Representation, Shakespeare, les français, les France, and, with Helen Cooper and Peter Holland, Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents. She has held fellowships at the Humanities Research Centre in Canberra, the National Library of Australia, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and visiting fellowships in Calcutta, Jaipur, Canberra and Caracas. She is currently Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Fellow at the National Humanities Center in the USA.

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Notes on Contributors

Ann Pasternak Slater is a Senior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she taught English literature, specializing in Shakespeare. The daughter of Boris Pasternak’s youngest sister, Lydia Pasternak Slater (1902–1989), she is the author of Shakespeare the Director, and the editor of George Herbert’s Complete English Works and Evelyn Waugh’s Complete Short Stories. In addition to her work on Pasternak’s translations of Shakespeare, she has translated A Vanished Present (the memoirs of Boris’ brother Alexander Pasternak, 1893–1982), and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man.

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Introduction

Writing Against Tyranny Ruth Morse

This volume of Great Shakespeareans brings together five Europeans (one hyphenated) who engaged as much with Shakespeare through translations – reading, making and adapting them – as by seeing or reading his plays performed. The oldest was born in 1802, the youngest died in 2008. They are united by their lifelong opposition to tyrannies political, religious and social, either by external powers or internal repression. Four were poets and playwrights, active in the theatre; two were novelists; one was a historian, critic and editor. All five saw in Shakespeare not only the master of plot, character and language, but a force – through his choices of historical settings and situations – of resistance. If this makes them sound heroic, the reasons will become clear in the chapters which follow. The lives of the first two, Victor-Marie Hugo (1802–85) and his son, François-Victor Hugo (1828–73), span the suppression of republican France (twice), the restoration and collapse of monarchy (twice), the authoritarian Second Empire under Napoleon III – who banished them – to end under the long Third Republic, which endured until the return of terror under Nazi Occupation. They spent eighteen years in exile. The achievements of the son – who predeceased his father – have endured through his translations; his more original work as an editor was suppressed early by a combination of public and publisher conservatism. Boris Leonidivich Pasternak (1890–1960), the son of an artistic, assimilated Jewish-Russian family deeply influenced by Tolstoy, was born under the Czarist Empire, lived through the Great War, the Revolution, the Gulags, the horrors of the Second World War, and the consolidation of terror under Stalin – who sent him into internal evacuation – in a police state which ranged across Europe to Asia, from the Finnish border to the Chinese. In 1958 he was forced to decline the Nobel Prize for literature. Pasternak’s slightly younger contemporary, Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), born in Bavaria under a united German monarchy, was drafted at the end of the Great War, fled the

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coming Nazi terror in 1933, and spent more than a decade writing against it from the United States (where the nearest he came to direct persecution was a summons by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947). After the war Brecht returned home to a divided Germany and to an East Berlin under the Soviet Empire, where he founded the great theatrical company, the Berliner Ensemble. When in 1954 he received a Stalin Peace Prize it was Pasternak who translated his acceptance speech. Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), poet, playwright and politician, was born in French colonial Martinique, co-opted into the elite French educational system, passed the Agrégation to enter the teaching profession, and returned to Martinique to teach in the Lycée from which he began, like many other young men formed to direct the following generation. Like Victor Hugo, he served as a Representative in the French National Assembly in Paris, while retaining his power base as Mayor of Fort de France, the capital city of Martinique. He was instrumental in transforming Martinique, and three other former colonies, into overseas départements (administrative units) of the French state. French by language, education and citizenship, like many other Frenchmen he had loyalties divided between state centralization and his distant natal region and between his responsibilities as a politically committed writer and left-wing politician. The five men’s interrelations are fascinating, not least as instancing the spread of Shakespeare’s influence on multiplying stories of nationalism from the Romantic period to the Postcolonial, with their demands for linguistic and cultural definition. Translation was a conduit everywhere, and translated Shakespeare helped liberate imaginations all over Europe; translations aided and abetted new literary and theatrical vernaculars in national languages; and Shakespeare helped new readers and writers, even, to stay alive. As the first chapter demonstrates, the earliest of the volume’s five men, Victor Hugo, found external legitimation for his own practice in the name ‘Shakespeare’. Like many of his contemporaries, he read Shakespeare in poor translations, but understood him through Walter Scott.1 What Scott did for the baggy new historical novel stimulated Hugo both to return to Shakespeare for his new epic theatre, and to attempt his own epic historical novels. In turn, Hugo’s manifesto in his preface to the closet play Cromwell (1827) influenced readers all over Europe, even more than his later book-length William Shakespeare (1864), originally conceived to introduce his son’s great edition of Shakespeare in French, finally published – too lengthy and too late – but with perfect timing to celebrate Shakespeare’s third centenary.

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Introduction 3 His son, François-Victor Hugo, is the great unknown of Shakespeare editors and critics. Accompanying his father into exile, he used his time to edit, translate and introduce a new Complete Shakespeare (1859–65), arranged as never before – or since – according to themes rather than in the Folio order. He was the first editor to realize that Shakespeare wrote in scenes rather than in acts; that he revised (his first volume contained two Hamlets, not a conflated text); and that Shakespeare’s earlier plays were his own most important source. The edition shocked its readers by having no act/scene divisions; no realistic indications of place or time; and no correction or improvement of Shakespeare’s characters’ speech, but the full gamut of expression. Revised by nervous publishers into a more acceptable (and cheaper) presentation, it has never been out of print. It has been an inspiration (and crib) to francophone readers and to many translators into European languages for whom French was easier to read than the original. There is something to be written on the influence of the exiled Hugo’s Quatrevingt Treize, published in 1874 just after the bloody defeat of the Paris Commune, a novel even more important, perhaps, than his Notre Dame de Paris of forty years earlier, both of which show how Scott’s own Shakespeare lessons transformed the continental novel and theatre. Scott’s Shakespeare inspired and legitimated Hugo’s campaign to change continental estimations of how novels and plays might be, should be, and were, written. This mixed transmission of Shakespeare through Scott through Hugo informs the encompassing bagginess of Doctor Zhivago. Hugo’s generically mixed, sprawling, but ultimately coherent construction reaches Brecht’s theatre, and Césaire’s; both chose ‘epic’ to characterize their plotting. And, despite what Brecht may have thought he was doing, Shakespeare’s ability to create breathing characters in breathtaking action, never left him: his Mother Courage remains with us when we have forgotten the political ambitions her creator intended. Using hitherto unknown material, including manuscript annotations of Pasternak’s copy of Hugo’s William Shakespeare, Ann Pasternak Slater tells the moving story of Pasternak’s many returns to the plays and poetry, and his ‘indirect dissidence’. As she writes, for Pasternak Shakespeare’s past prefigured the mortal uncertainty of his own present. Not only did Pasternak translate into Russian – between the terrible years 1936 to 1950 – three Shakespearean sonnets, two songs, six of his tragedies, and the two parts of King Henry IV, but in his ‘private’ correspondence with his father (known to be opened by the secret police), Pasternak attempted to

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enlist Shakespeare as an encryption to warn his father against returning from Germany to Moscow. Translation was a refuge, but the politics of his theatrical translations brought him into constant conflict with actors and directors, behind all of whom the fear of censorship and the life-threatening moods of Stalin informed every choice. Only when he returned from his evacuation to Christopol and it became possible once more for him to read in public (for example, in 1946, with mischievous intent), did he discover how much his poetry and translations meant to his fellow citizens. Their discovery of his novel, however, had to wait until long after it had been smuggled west for first publication, in Italian in 1957, and in English the following year. Pasternak discusses that combination of Shakespeare and Epic and Historical Fiction that we see throughout this volume, valuing the precedent of Hugo’s defence and illustration. David Barnett, the historian of the Berliner Ensemble, follows Brecht’s lifelong, sometimes contradictory, connection with Shakespeare ‘material’, from Brecht’s childhood enthusiasm for Shakespeare through his development as playwright and director. He roots Brecht’s efforts to revolutionize Germany’s bourgeois theatre and its audiences in his wide and constant engagement with earlier playwrights, above all Shakespeare, to whom he alludes more even than to Marx. Brecht’s search for Lukács’ ‘typical’ characters, which he extended to dramatizable representative characters taken from other than the middle or high classes of society, was of course more theorized than Hugo’s efforts to bring the novel and drama to bear upon political change. But Hugo’s efforts moulded the novel to his social and aesthetic purposes with the ambition to regenerate the greatest theatre in Europe by mixing high and low, comedy and tragedy, the beautiful and the grotesque. He, too, aimed to mobilize public opinion to greater social justice. Brecht’s representations of the poor and dispossessed rejected Hugo’s period sentimentality, yet Hugo had been absorbed into German culture, German theatre’s own history of Baroque melodrama, and its historian, the omni-cultivated Walter Benjamin. These shadows underlie Brecht’s vision, as Brecht’s in turn underlie Benjamin’s. Barnett traces Brecht’s lifelong unbroken engagement with Shakespeare, giving a new interpretation of his developing critical vocabulary as he wrote and worked with the Berliner Ensemble, where he made Shakespeare ‘material’ from which to create scenes for his actors’ preparatory work. Barnett defamiliarizes the story of Brecht’s notorious adaptations: Coriolanus was left unfinished at his death, a lifetime after he had first read the play as an adolescent, just before he was drafted in 1917.

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Introduction 5 Hugo, Brecht and Césaire, all professional theatrical practitioners, used their melodramatic, stereotyped characters in plots that drew immediately upon history – or, at least, fictionalized history. Hugo’s elevation of ‘the grotesque’ had become tacitly part of the norms of both Pasternak and Brecht; his insistence upon Shakespeare as the greatest of dramatists was no longer controversial. ‘Epic’ can be a euphemism for ‘ambitious’, but it has a long prior association with historical stories of political foundation. So it is worth pausing for a moment over Aimé Césaire’s epic/historical drama La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963), not only because the trilogy it initiated ends with Une Tempête (1969), treated in detail here by Timothy Mathews, but because, for Césaire, Henry Christophe’s tragedy was the first of a developing theatrical trilogy on heroes of black experience, in plays all directed by Jean-Marie Serreau. In the event his second play, about Patrice Lumumba, has a black hero; the third returned to Shakespeare and The Tempest, and, as Mathews argues, it may not have a hero.2 Césaire had passed from his classical French education, through Surrealism, Négritude, and the Harlem Renaissance to return to commitment to a Caribbean culture within a larger world. He had already written Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial (1962), a history in which he describes a revolution against French colonialism inspired by the concepts of the French revolution (1789 and 1793). In that book he also explicitly addresses the problem of miscegenation, of Caribbean competition between darker- and lighter-skinned inhabitants, in which the mulatto becomes a sign of the ‘évolué’, the native whose skin is a mark of development toward the civilization of white Europe. Louverture was a liberator who became a tyrant, and Césaire’s play picks up the story just after his death. Christophe was first performed at the Salzburg Festival in 1964, evidently influenced by both Hugos and by Shakespeare.3 In a programme note to the play’s first appearance at the Comédie française, in the 1990/91 season, Richard Marienstras explored its Shakespearean inspirations while emphasizing the play’s universal relevance – beyond the century’s tyrants and tyrannies. Anticipating resistance to the play’s evidently unclassical form and content, he replied by beginning ‘No doubt: it is one’. He argued that Christophe’s tragedy amounted to Césaire’s grievous self-criticism of the experience of global decolonization and the fall of new nations into old forms of tyranny.4 His claims mattered in the context, which was the deliberate choice of an all-white cast of actors incarnating, but transcending, the Haitian context. Less well-known than its more domestic successor, Christophe has also been less taken up in anglophone postcolonial debates, although it is the first

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exploration of some of the problems repeated elsewhere. Césaire knew Hugo’s emphasis on the mélange, indeed the fusion, of the sublime and the grotesque that characterized modernity and legitimated his own practice – which Hugo had legitimated by reference to Shakespeare. Additionally, like most other French students then and now, Césaire met Shakespeare through F.-V. Hugo’s translations.5 He sieved Shakespeare’s supernatural both through his Afro-Caribbean experience and his own surrealism. His Christophe took from Hugolian drama a long historical scope without much anchorage for the ignorant; a sense of a new nation suffering its own birth and fate, including its rulers’ inevitable hunger for power; in its own language, encompassing his own Créole. From both Hugos he absorbed a broad theatrical sense of portraying tyranny with buffoonery at its side; in Jarry’s famous Ubu Roi (1896) he found an absurdist interpretation of a Shakespearean Macbeth. From King Lear he made a newly politicized Fool who survives to step into power in his own right. He may have known François-Victor’s use of Créole dialect for the four captains of Henry V, an early use of dialect in such translation. Politically, he may have learned as much from Brecht’s ambition to separate individual heroism from social progress, dramatically both lehrstücke and verfremdungseffekt. Christophe concentrated its attention on Henry Christophe (Césaire’s spelling), a former slave, who had been a successful soldier under Napoleon. Tyranny acquires a tragic-comic timbre when former fighters for liberty and ‘the rights of man and citizen’ become oppressors in their turn. The play is little performed and is not further discussed in this volume. It was the accident of a third, specific commission from the iconoclastic Serreau to do something with The Tempest which inspired Césaire to continue using Caribbean material to explore not the polarities of power, but a complex of triangulating and therefore shifting alliances and struggles appropriate to the struggles of and within the West Indies. Understanding that his catalyst and fulcrum, the mulatto Ariel, another évolué, is part of the play’s address to that experience corrects readings that insist on ‘a’ single allegory of colonial contest (Caliban, like Christophe, is blacker and more ‘African’). A great writer’s engagements with Shakespeare – or, indeed, ‘Shakespeare’ – may in turn have important influences on other writers, in other languages, in other times and places, through unanticipated transmission. Above all, the most important thing uniting all five subjects in this volume is their unyielding opposition to oppression, and their demonstration that poetry can indeed make things happen. For all five men, Shakespeare was a source of cultural freedom and a support for political liberty. Earlier

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Introduction 7 volumes in the series have made clear the unsteady but continuous growth in Shakespeare’s reputation, nowhere more contentious than in France. In the first volume Claude Rawson’s introduction describes a pattern in which popular theatrical production jostled the private readerly experience of immortal characters in universal situations. In Britain, from Dryden onwards, the contradictory experiences of page and stage encouraged the belief that the poetry and the characters were worthy of serious reflection. But serious reflection itself suffered considerable jostling from the received idea that Shakespeare’s structure and style were incorrect, too loose, too indecorous, too ignorant of the Ancients. Far from following the classical models of high rhetoric and high society, Shakespeare’s characters emerge from just anywhere, with speech to match. And they leap about, spilling the crockery and each other’s blood. Rawson quotes John Dryden’s refusal to bow to judgements no longer appropriate, and I quote the same lines again. To begin with Shakespeare; he was the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of Nature were present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily; when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him of wanting learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn’d; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look’d inwards, and found her there.6 We are always inheriting the arguments and controversies of earlier generations, and ‘correctness’ remained a vital argument wherever the topic of ‘Ancients v. Moderns’ was to be found, itself sometimes also a synonym for ‘good taste’. But the new pugilisms had to do with more than correct and decorous dramatic representation: vernacular linguistic and literary progress were cornerstones of national pride. ‘Correctness’ itself implied association with a single reality, an undiluted purity. In isolation, the topic itself is one of the oldest unresolvable debating subjects in the western world, and therefore of its pedagogy. As Michèle Willems indicates in Volume III, Voltaire’s changing attitudes to Shakespeare, by virtue of his own prestige and the attention he paid, attracted other people’s attention and, eventually, a new prestige. By the nineteenth century, where this volume begins, the controversy over Shakespeare’s place in arguments about drama was becoming an international touchstone of national ‘maturity’, enlisted in assessments of national vernaculars, national theatres, national

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cultures. Additionally, behind some of the arguments about ‘correctness’ so clear in the essays on Voltaire, Goethe and Schlegel in our third volume lay deep and ultimately bloody competitions between France and Germany. Arguments in which ‘undiluted’ implied ‘purity’, and ‘pure’ an appeal to unbroken generations of superior bloodlines, also implied untainted precedence of foundation. ‘Scholarship’ may have begun as an aspiration in Europe’s leading nations, but it also became a mark of advanced cultural superiority. Culture’s translatio studii was a tacit parallel to the translatio imperii of political dominance. ‘Romantic Nationalism’ looked back into medieval history with its assumed organic communities recruiting scholarship to elevate the first vernacular ‘epics’ and ‘romances’ and with them the earliest ‘folk’, the ‘spirit’ from which languages and nations grew strong. In these sometimes inexplicit arguments, Shakespeare – or perhaps ‘Shakespeare’ – was a wild card, not least after Voltaire’s characterization of him as practically a wild man. Shakespeare’s work offered different, but attractive, new models and a source of external legitimation for ‘nations’ of many kinds, and not only in Europe. In the middle of the nineteenth century a variety of Shakespeare translations spread east and south as well as over the oceans. And in old theatres and new, Shakespeare’s history plays offered sources for resistance, encouragement and imaginative freedom. In central Europe, when the first plays to be translated began to be staged they were political and historical, and often implicitly intended as calls for change.7 How this happened is an important part of this volume. Whereas Germany (and its cultural sphere) had a standard (if constantly modified) translation, known as ‘the Schlegel-Tieck’, in France it was the two Hugos who made Shakespeare known, and known to a huge new public as the pre-eminent creator of characters in plays remarkable for their investment in human freedom. For Pasternak he was poetic nourishment in times when inspiration helped keep hope alive. Brecht’s lifelong engagement with Shakespeare’s characters enriched his theatre – and his poetry, too, although this is not the place to explore that more private aspect of his writing. Césaire combined several twentieth-century freedom movements, wresting from a tradition of French interest in character tested in the crucible of conflicting values, characters to stage a conflict about agreed values: the access to French values of liberty, equality and fraternity for the colonized. An adaptation of The Tempest offered a high-status way to adapt a universally valued play to attract audiences not only French, listening in French, in France, but all over the world, in unknown accents Shakespeare’s collaborators anticipated but could not have imagined. He

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Introduction 9 makes Caliban cry out ‘Uhuru’ in Swahili, for liberty from colonialism, inspiring similar acts of adaptive originality in the theatre and elsewhere. The Caribbean littoral had already used Ariel and Caliban to symbolize varieties of relationships with the United States, with Old Europe, and with the rest of the Americas. Who cares where Prospero’s island is when it can be – as it often became in classical French theatre from Marivaux onwards – a site of revolution? Like Pasternak’s Elsinore, or Brecht’s Rome, Césaire’s geography lends Shakespeare’s an exotic habitation and a name. If, with a slightly different meaning, a literary classic becomes something the educated know without knowing it at first hand, then Shakespeare’s characters were early examples of instantly recognizable names tending to signify new types. With time, a thick texture of allusion, parody, burlesque, even, turn Romeo and Hamlet into household words. But the words in which Lady Macbeth or Falstaff entered households all over the world were not Shakespeare’s. The first volume in this series contained chapters on three eighteenth-century editors whose work ensured that respect for Shakespeare’s words should inspire study so close as to align textual and critical study of them with the inheritances of Greco-Roman classical poetry and the Judaeo-Christian holy books. François-Victor Hugo belongs among their number, in his originality as an editor, for his critical prefaces, and for the imaginative success of his translation. Translation is not, perhaps surprisingly, one of the main subjects of the chapters which follow. There are many excellent discussions of Shakespeare translation elsewhere, and, in the end, that is not what most characterizes this volume, with its five subjects. Translating Shakespeare was seldom a purely disinterested act. For Pasternak under Stalin, it was a safe house; it transformed, for François-Victor Hugo, the long years of exile and allowed him to trumpet his interpretation of Shakespeare’s hatred of tyrants. Translation could be a cultural cry to arms against the current moribund state of the theatre, or a political act of theatrical commentary on the current state, as well as, in terms explored by Harold Bloom and George Steiner, a complex act of competitive desire.8 Shakespeare’s characters, divorced from their original contexts, provided a source of shared reference, a third way that was neither Biblical nor Greco-Roman, and rooted not in poetry but in the dramatic fictions of the study and the stage. To those whose first reaction is that Shakespeare in translation can never be Shakespeare, this volume is a reminder, first, that nothing can ‘be’ Shakespeare, if by that is meant something ‘authentic’, and as Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood it. Second, the complaint about translation betraying Shakespeare’s words forgets that the theatre depends

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upon the bodily action and articulation of the players, and that when good actors create a character they convey extraordinary and comprehensible ideas, emotions, motivations, reactions. Not only did all five authors in this volume know that, but they in turn taught it to the authors and composers they influenced.9

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Chapter 1

Les Hugo Ruth Morse

Shakespeare autant que Dante laisse entrevoir l’horizon crépusculaire de la conjecture. Dans l’un comme dans l’autre il y a le possible, cette fenêtre du rêve ouverte sur le réel. Quant au réel, nous y insistons, Shakespeare en déborde; partout la chair vive; Shakespeare a l’émotion, l’instinct, le cri vrai, l’accent juste, toute la multitude humaine avec sa rumeur. Sa poésie, c’est lui, et en même temps, c’est vous. So – the spirit of realism is the union of liveliness and authenticity. Ordinariness, which always seems unexpected and paradoxical, owing to the prejudices and distortions dominating all times… Boris Pasternak annotates his copy of Hugo’s William Shakespeare 1 This chapter concerns a father and son, the great French Romantic poet, playwright and novelist, Victor-Marie Hugo (1802–85); and his son, François-Victor (1828–73), and it focuses largely on the middle third of the nineteenth century when Shakespeare achieved a vexed centrality in French culture. It will therefore have rather more historical scene-setting than some essays in this series. Given how much influence the two men have had, that is inevitable. So the first part is about that period and Victor Hugo’s part in it, not only the political upheavals he lived through – and participated in – but also reaching across the Channel to Sir Walter Scott as writer of historical romance, from whom Hugo learned to reinterpret history through Shakespeare, as well as Shakespeare in history. In the second half of the chapter I turn to his son, now known only – when known at all – as a translator of Shakespeare whose prose renderings of the plays remain after 250 years the cheapest and most widely available French source of student cribs and bases for theatrical production. I shall show how revolutionary his edition and translation of the plays was, argue

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that his scholarly innovations were suppressed by a public refusal to believe what has subsequently come to seem obvious, and suggest how great his influence was and continues to be, both on other translators and on other men of the theatre. He was the translator but never recognized as one of the outstanding editors. Romanticism came later to France than elsewhere in Europe, and if this chapter were a book, it would probably begin with the political contexts of post-French Revolution, post-Napoleonic struggles against French governments, and with the crises of French ideas about the country’s cultural as well as political dominance. For centuries, the unquestioned centrality of France as a political and cultural power had been decreed in universalist legal, social and artistic generalizations, and expressed in sweeping opinions about correct behaviour and expression, supported by their active inheritance of classical culture as manifested in great writing from philosophy to poetry to the theatre. But in 1815 the final, comprehensive, Allied defeat of Napoleon was in effect the first time France had been conquered. The experience of defeat, of being dictated to by the hated Allies, dented Franco-centric self-confidence; it almost inevitably reopened cultural debate, even the possibility of opening to foreign influence. In this chapter a few paragraphs will have to suffice for a historical and cultural summary: readers are referred to the many other chapters about Romantic Shakespeare elsewhere in these volumes, as I shall do in the pages which follow. French school textbooks date the arrival of Romanticism with startling precision to the opening night of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani, in 1830 (Balzac was in the audience). The Romantic movement, like many self-styled revolutions, aspired to change the dominant modes of expression without questioning the idea of dominance itself; and although in France the coming generation of the 1820s and 30s quarrelled among themselves, they agreed that they were Romantics, liberating France from the dead hand of Classicism. Those external influences to which they were all open included Scottish novels, English plays – and even players, as well as German poetry and philosophy. As will become clear, Victor Hugo’s centrality as a poet, playwright and polemicist established Shakespeare as the presiding genius of the modern era. In a world in which French was the first foreign language, François-Victor Hugo provided the words through which to read him, and introductions as polemical as his father’s manifestos. These claims make sense of the place of Les Hugo in a collection of great Shakespeareans.

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Victor Hugo, l’homme océan Victor-Marie Hugo was born under the first Napoleon, whose military coup crushed the French Revolution and fledgling republic; he grew up under Napoleon’s empire, and was still young during the European allies’ victory over France and their subsequent restoration of the same Bourbon monarchy which had been interrupted by the execution of Louis XVI.2 He first made his name as a poet while still an adolescent under the relatively brief reigns of the surviving brothers of the guillotined monarch: first Louis XVIII (1814–24, except for Napoleon’s Hundred Days) and then Charles X (1824–30), the last Bourbon King. As Charles’ semi-official poet, he was made Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur at the extraordinarily young age of twenty-two. In keeping with his other precocious achievements, Victor-Marie Hugo married early, in October 1823. He and his wife, Adèle Foucher (1803–68) had four surviving children: Léopoldine (1824–43), then Charles (1827–71), François-Victor (1828–73), and the unfortunate Adèle (1830–1915).3 The young father’s early start in poetry and prose earned the money necessary to support them all, and opened possibilities such as the publication of an experimental novel, Han d’Islande (1823), immediately recognized by its English reviewer as a Scott pastiche. But, then, most of Hugo’s precocious achievements were extraordinary, controversial, first rejected, but then long-lived and recognized in retrospect – not perhaps always historically accurately – for what they anticipated in French culture. These include recruiting Shakespeare for the transformation of French theatre. Shakespeare was Hugo’s best defence for his own practice, which also included historical novels. As a teenage poet Hugo was already drafting tragedies of unusual proportions, historical, epic, based on not-wholly digested Scott. It was in Hugo’s review-essay of Quentin Durward published the same year as his ‘Icelandic’ novel and as Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare that we first see him projecting his own ideas, values and ambitions onto Scott – the ideas he was to spend the rest of his life expanding. Peu d’écrivains ont aussi bien rempli que Walter Scott les devoirs du romancier relativement à son art et à son siècle; car ce serait une erreur presque coupable dans l’homme de lettres que de se croire au-dessus de l’intérêt général et des besoins nationaux, d’exempter son esprit de toute action sur les contemporains, et d’isoler sa vie égoïste de la grande vie du corps social. Et qui donc se dévouera si ce n’est le poète? Quelle voix s’élèvera dans l’orage, si ce n’est celle de la lyre qui peut le calmer? Et

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qui bravera les haines de l’anarchie et les dédains du despotisme, sinon celui auquel la sagesse antique attribuait le pouvoir de réconcilier les peuples et les rois, et auquel la sagesse moderne a donné celui de les diviser? Quelle doit être l’intention du romancier? C’est d’exprimer dans une fable intéressante une vérité utile. Et une fois cette idée fondamentale choisie, cette action explicative inventée, l’auteur ne doit-il pas chercher, pour la développer, un mode d’exécution qui rende son roman semblable à la vie, l’imitation pareille au modèle? Et la vie n’estelle pas un drame bizarre où se mêlent le bon et le mauvais, le beau et le laid, le haut et le bas, loi dont le pouvoir n’expire que hors de la création?4 [Few writers have fulfilled the duties of the novelist to his art and to his times as well as Walter Scott; for it would be a mistake amounting almost to guilt for a man of letters to think himself above the general interest and national need to exempt his intelligence from any action affecting his contemporaries, to isolate his egotistical self from the extensive life of the social body. Who then will devote himself if not the poet? What voice shall rise against the storm if it be not the poet’s song which can calm it? And who will brave the hatreds of anarchy and the contempt of despotism, if not he to whom the wisdom of Antiquity allowed the power to reconcile peoples and kings, and to whom modern wisdom has given the power to divide them? What should the novelist’s intention be? To express a useful truth via an interesting story. That fundamental idea once chosen, that invented action expressive, must not the author then search for a form of expression that will make his novel resemble life, an imitation like its model? Is not life itself a bizarre drama in which good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, the heights and the depths, are all mixed, a law whose power expires only after the creation is gone?] Defending Scott is Hugo’s first manifesto for his own ambitions. The italicized words and phrases are the germ of what would become Hugo’s own first Big Idea: that the world has seen a series of eras in which different forms and styles are not just appropriate, but necessary; the ‘drame bizarre’ became his own era’s replacement of outworn ‘tragedie’ by ‘le drame’ with his necessary absorption of ‘le grotesque’ as its constituent feature. Sixty years later La Lyre became the title for his late poetry. He comes to see Scott absorbing from Shakespeare the insights which he will himself reveal to a recalcitrant world. In 1823 he could not have foreseen his own political activism against tyranny, since he was still a royalist, but

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he already recognized in Shakespeare the radical spirit of freedom. How far French readers understood that Scott himself was a great interpreter of Shakespearean ideas of history and historical representation made no difference, since the concatenation of their influence changed explicit plotting and characterization.5 Characteristically, too, Hugo soon forgot how much he derived from Scott, preferring to derive his ideas from Shakespeare – or, at least, to recognize that Shakespeare had preceded him in the same insights. (So had Stendhal, also unacknowledged.) But he never doubted his own future influence: his collected reviews were widely read, not just in France; and one who read and remembered his essay on Scott was Robert Louis Stevenson, who compared the two novelists in the first chapter of his Familiar Studies of Men & Books (itself a collection of pieces published elsewhere), oddly misunderstanding the ethical thrust of Hugo’s intentions.6 Stevenson’s essay on Hugo was widely read, reprinted and quoted; it was pirated and used for an introduction and notes to sell an American edition of Hugo’s novels within a few years of Hugo’s death. From his mid-twenties Hugo achieved national and popular fame, which he never relinquished. He moved steadily left from his early royalism to a dangerous democratic republicanism. Under the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe (1830–48), who made him a Peer of France shortly after his accession, the new Baron Hugo was an active politician in the National Assembly; after the coup of 1848 he mounted the barricades against the political crackdowns of Louis-Napoleon, soon to be the Emperor Napoleon  III (1848–70). Shortly thereafter Louis-Napoleon exiled Hugo and his politically active sons. Throughout almost twenty years of exile in Guernsey, Hugo maintained a constant Absent Presence in France even when he was refusing to publish there. With Louis-Napoleon’s death he returned, supported the Commune (and escaped execution); he died under the long Third Republic, which itself survived until the Nazi defeat and occupation of France in 1940. A genius and a monstre sacré, he was the unavoidable figure, for most of his long life the undisputed literary leader, first among his 1830s generation of poets, playwrights and novelists, then pre-eminent in France, praised and excoriated in equal measure. Despite Hugo’s egotistical tendency to absorb and then forget the intermediaries from whom he learned, as a playwright he was genuinely ahead of his time, first in the popular theatres and then in the Holy of Holies: the House of Molière, the Théâtre français, later known as the Comédie française or, now, simply ‘La Française’. Although he was one of the chief conduits for Shakespearean influence, and despite those long years in the Channel Islands, he never learned much more than rudimentary

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English. But none of his manifestos depended upon close study. Rather the contrary. Throughout his life he read his Shakespeare in translation, though, like everyone who was anyone, he was astonished and liberated by the famous visit of London actors in the 1827/1828 season, when Berlioz, too, discovered Shakespeare, and found himself too spellbound to read the cribs sold to French audiences. Their ‘realism’ – always a chameleon among signifiers – spoke to their audiences despite the language barrier. Perhaps the language barrier was in fact an advantage, since the audiences had perforce to follow the actors’ bodily expressions and tones rather than actually understanding what they were saying, so they could not be distracted from Shakespeare’s strange and incorrect expression. Exposure to that important company of actors provided the opportunity for firsthand experience of cross-Channel practice which offered a viable, and high-status, alternative to the closed caste of neoclassical theatrical practice. Neoclassical tragedy had had no need for spectacle, no physical action, and certainly no contact between male and female characters, nor much music to be pandering to the uneducated. In the Anglo-Saxon theatre the actors moved about; they touched and grappled, ran and fought. The great contrast would be Racine’s magnificent Bérénice – itself a deliberate exaggeration of neoclassical practice – in which Racine makes it impossible for the lovers to cross the stage and embrace, not least because any marriage between them would be ‘impure’. But such frissons as neoclassical tragedy offered were too tame for Hugo and his cohort. Their victories in the Romantic theatres, too, have been well told elsewhere; here what concerns us is how Hugo increased Shakespeare’s prestige by appealing to its presumed world-renowned and unquestionable status, in order to legitimate his own practice.7 Like Verdi, who will make a cameo appearance in the second section of this chapter, Hugo had an intuitive grasp of what Shakespeare was doing, and how Scott made it modern. Shakespeare gave him what he needed, and Hugo repaid him with supreme legitimacy in French culture, perhaps any culture. One of the ways he did this was with the Biggest of his Big Ideas, which, instead of attacking the dead hand of neoclassicism and its claims to universality, insisted that in the succession of eras what was once the only right way came with the passage of time to be superseded. Shakespeare and Hugo were the present and the future. The other way was to support his son’s years of toil on a radically new edition and translation of Shakespeare’s Complete Works. His own role, largely financial, included what was to have been an introduction, but which – with his fatal facility – became too long, and was finished too late, to appear until after most of the edition had been

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published. His longevity meant that he outlived most of his children, his wife, his mistresses, his literary contemporaries, and the politicians whose tyranny he excoriated. With the Great Man’s ability to digest advanced contemporary ideas, to present them as his own position, and to forget his sources, Hugo absorbed the thoughts of his mentors. It had been the Royalist scholar and writer Charles Nodier who brought Hugo to the attention of the King, and it was from Nodier that Hugo took – in the strong sense – many of the ideas he adumbrated in his first serious manifesto, the ‘Preface to Cromwell’, which I shall treat below. Intellectually and artistically, he belonged to a group known as ‘Le Cénacle’, which met from 1824 in the Arsenal Library in Paris, at the salon of its director, Nodier, who tolerated the range of political positions. Nodier himself increased the library’s theatrical holdings, encouraged the study of (and wrote) Gothic and Fantastic literature, as well as what we now call fairy tales. The gathering of talent there was extraordinary. Artistic positions did not necessarily correspond to political ones: Sainte-Beuve was politically conservative, but artistically tolerant; younger men such as Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset and Alexandre Dumas were more eclectic; Gérard de Nerval was inward, eccentric, and then mad. Young poets read their work to each other, and found appreciation, even if criticism was sometimes robust. Alexandre Dumas, Sainte-Beuve, and other writers less well known today have left descriptions of its evenings, and of Hugo’s pre-eminence. Alphonse de Lamartine, the poet and politician; Alfred de Vigny, then a Guards officer, soon a translator of Othello; and Hugo himself belonged among the Royalists; the Liberals counted Stendhal, Prosper Merimée (another imitator of Scott), and very soon Hugo himself. Nodier’s position was a royal appointment; when he was invited to the coronation of Charles X as the new King’s historiographer, he took the young Hugo with him. So it was in Rheims, in 1825, that Hugo made his earliest almost-first-hand acquaintance with Shakespeare, though he already knew Stendhal’s criticism. As Hugo remembered it forty years later in ‘A Rheims’, one evening there was a private reading among gentlemen reluctant to attend a ball, of an English copy of Shakespeare’s King John, with running translation and commentary by Nodier, among others.8 Hugo knew no English, but he found the discussion of the play stimulating. Like the self-fashioner he was, Hugo’s role was the jeune premier, the young male lead, in theory and in practice; he amalgamated the ideas of Chateaubriand, Mme de Staël and his patron. He also digested certain of Scott’s ideas of history, as expressed in the ‘impure’ novel, and saw them

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as a way to transform French historical theatre (as was clear from his essay on Quentin Durward two years earlier). For Hugo, then, the ambition was to make historical fiction into tragic history, to do what Scott had done. And as Scott had learned from Shakespeare, so he would learn from Scott (and his friend and rival Alexandre Dumas) to revivify the theatre. As Nicola Watson puts it in the introduction to her essay in Volume V, ‘it was the new historical sensibility that Scott inaugurated and popularized that ratifed the idea of Shakespeare as in and of history’.9 She might have reversed her formulation, for it was also Shakespeare who ratified Scott; as Scott made the novel respectable, so – especially in France – did his baggy plotting reflect an almost serious light on the popular theatre. Balzac made no secret of his admiration for Scott; Dumas imitated him in both the novel and the theatre. So did Hugo. Scott, hugely popular in prose fiction, provided an easily crossed bridge to the strange and difficult structures chosen by the English playwright.10 Hugo crossed it to sway opinion about theatrical forms. It is Hugo who gets the credit for what might be called a ‘paradigm shift’. His apparent attacks on the claustrophobic hold of the supposed neoclassical unities, the rigidity of the state theatrical system and its supreme place in elite culture came at an opportune moment. We might reflect that neither English nor Scottish Romantics, first or second generations, had to contend with an Académie française, or, more to the point, the Napoleonic reinforcement of the four ‘major’ theatres, with their rigid grip on what could be performed for the only part of society which mattered.11 One sense of what this meant can be understood from the impossibility of accepting that Othello gave Desdemona a ‘mouchoir’, so that when, in 1829, Alfred de Vigny tried to present the French audience a ‘handkerchief’, there was outrage at such a laughable assumption and the play failed. Ordinary objects could not cross the threshold of High Tragedy. History, however, is recalcitrant about tidy periodizations, and already by 1829 alternatives existed. Hugo’s impression of knowing Shakespeare, of knowing about Shakespeare, came by reputation, by listening to arguments about Shakespeare, and arguments about Voltaire’s ideas of Shakespeare as they continued to claim the attention of his contemporaries and occlude the opinions of his opponents. Michèle Willems’ essay on Voltaire in Volume III (5–43) of this series describes the influence of Voltaire on the reception of Shakespeare in France, and, therefore, elsewhere in what was understood to be the civilized world. Even in the 1760s, off-off-Place de l’Odéon, in the northern-Paris pantomime and popular houses, in operetta, burlesque and melodrama, playwrights imitated what they liked from foreign authors,

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including Shakespeare. As did Voltaire. When La Place pointed out that Voltaire profited from what he read, and imitated Shakespeare’s ideas and characters, Voltaire was as furious as he was later over Le Tourneur.12 He drove himself to a position where shouting, rather than the arguments, put his adversaries on the defensive, but he could not douse the burning enthusiasm he had himself kindled. The trouble is that this is not the whole story; it is a polemic which owes its life to Voltaire’s supporters, as well as to the creation of a loyal opposition – not to Shakespeare, but to an anti-anti-Shakespeare. Elevating the position advocated by late Voltaire guarantees a hegemonic authoritarianism which gave the Romantic proponents of Shakespeare a banner and rallying cry. As often within a politics of cultural reaction, ‘Exotic’ or ‘Oppositional Shakespeare’ proposed a default position of its own: revolutionary, anti-authoritarian (State, Church, Academy), and popular. So France created, partly following the arguments of Pope and Johnson, a philosophically idealist binary, and, as with all binaries, the first term hardened the second with the necessary exclusion of third terms or other possibilities. One way of addressing the problem is called ‘Ducis’, author of the first great continental stage successes, whose adaptations had multiple advantages, not least by inspiring disdain, thus spurring on other translators or adapters to do better. Or, at least, better about what they saw, or thought they saw, or wanted to see.13 Universalist arguments depend upon what appear to be the axioms of reality; the difficulties of attacking fundamental assumptions need not be underlined. Not incidentally, the extent to which many arguments about Shakespeare, as about ‘romance’, contribute to the prestige of ‘nations’ have only in recent decades come under scrutiny. Two further received ideas have resisted redefinition. First, there is the assertion that ‘Shakespeare’ in translation cannot be Shakespeare, an all-too-insistent, still-too-familiar demand for singularity (a rather large singularity) as well as ‘authenticity’, as if we could dig our way back to one ‘real thing’, to accuracy in a degree that we now understand was beyond anyone’s reach, because the question is so misplaced. A second, more recent assertion claims a Shakespearean Common Era, a series of those metaphorically tectonic shifts which define the modern. This is not the place to examine the ways that recent claims to ideological elevation of Shakespeare themselves subtend various forms of nationalist and linguistic prestige, but the five figures discussed in this volume certainly had very different ideas. From the axiom that Athens represented the acme of culture, Aristotle’s identification of apparent cultural truths, indeed, natural laws, appeared

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unquestionable; more immutable than, say, the rules of chess. From the point of view of France – the centre of culture – neither the three theatrical unities nor chess could be doubted. Voltaire’s increasing hostility to Shakespeare as he aged kept them both in the centre of attention, as Voltaire continued to extract from – and improve – him. Given the axiomatic unities, Shakespeare was either the uneducated prisoner of outlandish barbarian custom, or himself a barbarian distracted by the grotesque. What could otherwise explain his departure from the only true structure of the greatest form of literary endeavour, tragedy? Theatrical writing, in this interpretation, was correctly either Tragedy or Comedy, or rubbish. The point of an axiom is that it must be accepted: so neoclassical presuppositions defied counter-argument. Hugo was one of those who attempted to defy them, with all the panache of his youth and energy; the essay that became the key text for French Romanticism was the work of a twenty-four-year-old poet and polemicist with no first-hand experience of Shakespeare, but with a Big Idea whose moment had come. In 1827, when Hugo was twenty-five, he published a closet drama, the book-length, unproduceable Cromwell. It was in effect a novel in dialogue, with a historical cast including (among many others) John Milton; unplayable because of its huge number of speakers – one can hardly call them actors – and the impossible scope of the play’s scenic and temporal variety. England’s Charles I offered such obvious parallels to France’s Louis XVI that it was provocative to make Cromwell the eponymous hero. The subject – like much of Hugo’s work – had been treated before, but no one had dared offer a study of the young commoner caught in a moral dilemma reminiscent of Caesar at the Rubicon, contemplating kingship or renunciation. Not only did it sprawl, but its genre was unclassifiable, with a plot too mixed, too low, too various to be tragedy or tragi-comedy. There is a sense in which ‘mixed genre’ could only be useful if Hugo accepted that genres are stable, which he did not. His way forward was to use ‘le drame’ when he wanted to avoid precisely the unities-evocation that comes with the word ‘tragedy’. Hugo solved his problem by starting from somewhere else, where Shakespeare, like Scott, offers a new way of looking; the preface makes that clear. Even had the play taken an actable form, in correct verse, with a noble hero, it would have been beyond any possibility of performance, in a theatre governed by multiple censors. But it was not Cromwell’s dilemma which made Hugo even more famous than he already was for his opportunist odes; it was his so-called ‘preface’ to the play, and, within the ‘preface’, the establishment of Shakespeare as the voice of artistic freedom and Hugo as its speaker. It was immediately recognized as

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the French manifesto for Romanticism. We may agree that nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come, and that it was Hugo who sliced the Gordian knot of neoclassical restriction. Now, however, it is a museum piece, like his own plays. The brilliant and original Graham Robb has written that the ‘préface de Cromwell’ is a text to read once only, to avoid being condemned to reread it repeatedly. The seduction of the polemic – it is hardly an argument – does its work by sweeping readers along in a white-water torrent of assertions that they are compelled to acknowledge as obvious. The assertions are Hugo’s, but the arguments behind them were available in the pages of earlier writers, Mme de Staël in De l’Allemagne, Nodier, Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare, and other of his contemporaries such as Vigny and Merimée. Hugo was not alone in advocating the transformation of high-register, rhyming-couplet, French neoclassical tragedy, long on talk and short on scenery or action, into a tragic historical drama, but his was the voice which carried. Reduced to summary, the thrust of the essay is that Shakespeare combined the gifts of the great French dramatists, but reversed their belief in univocal unities. Shakespeare demonstrated that strictures about form are accidental, not substantial, and that he, the Englishman, who understood man’s double nature, embodied in modern tragedy a double vision best called ‘drama’. Drama allied the sublime and the ‘grotesque’, what in the passage above appears proudly as ‘bizarre’ in poetry and prose; it would be socially inclusive, and of wide scope in place and time. To find a way around the apparent laws apparently laid down – or recognized – by Aristotle, Hugo began from the observation of historical change, not as steady deterioration from a golden age, but as human development. Each age, each era, asserted Hugo, expressed itself in appropriate forms, and drama is the modern form, combining the variety of human experience in a single scene. Great men – like his Cromwell – combined gravity and vulgarity. Hugo carefully avoided attacking Aristotle or France’s great seventeenth-century playwrights, with their consistent high style and straightforward dilemmas; but he relegated their rules by asserting that they did things differently there because the past is another country. He concentrated on his own time, arguing for Shakespeare as the informing genius of the modern. His three posited Ages, with their own appropriate development of human character within them, remained vague and undefined. Hugo’s generalizations offered to substitute a longer historical view than mere ‘periods’, as was recognized with envy by the English historian Macaulay and the French historian Michelet – the latter another

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of Hugo’s admirers, as the former admired Scott. That is, Hugo redefined Shakespearean multiplicity to renew the hermetic world of official theatre with the melodrama of the public Boulevard theatres, where an alternative way of proceeding was popular. He also extended the fictional world of his novels: in both he shocked by exploring sexuality more explicitly than decent society had seen.14 No synthesis of the preface can do justice to its protean vocabulary and sublime muddle. To summarize its pronouncements is in effect to make its arguments, since Hugo proceeds rather by repeated assertions, combining, permuting and varying them. To synthesize is to lose the power of Hugo’s passionate flow; to make explicit is to clarify what really isn’t there, in a kind of over-translation. The key is that Hugo’s ‘le drame’ was an axiom for its time. He imports ‘the sublime’, which everyone understands, and offers what appears to be a contrast, which he calls ‘the grotesque’, but ‘grotesque’ becomes a word for all seasons, until its meaning, while evidently claiming to be a positive evaluation, is as slippery a signifier as ever polemicist discovered. Insisting that ‘le drame’ is the theatrical form of our time, and characterizing its inclusiveness by its unswerving exploitation of ‘le grotesque’, Hugo evades the claim for neoclassical universalism, an otherwise intractable problem, as he redefines something not apparently susceptible to redefinition, while slipping in the obvious existence of historical, developmental change, so that ‘le drame’ is evidently suitable because modern and appropriate to contemporary times. Since he offers no dates, moments, or reasons for fundamental change, he need not say when ‘modern’ began, or, for that matter, when any other era ended. He replaces ‘tragedy’ with ‘drama’, and he wins. Hugo asserts that different artistic forms are appropriate to different ages; that we are in the last: Un homme, un poëte roi, poeta soverano, comme Dante le dit d’Homère, va tout fixer. Les deux génies rivaux unissent leur double flamme, et de cette flamme jaillit Shakespeare. Nous voici parvenus à la sommité poétique des temps modernes. Shakespeare, c’est le Drame; et le drame, qui fond sous un même souffle le grotesque et le sublime, le terrible et le bouffon, la tragédie et la comédie, le drame est le caractère propre de la troisième époque de poésie, de la littérature actuelle.15 [A man, a poet-king, the sovereign poet, as Dante recognizes in Homer, settles everything. The two rival geniuses unite their double flame, and from that flame bursts Shakespeare.

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Now we arrive at the poetic summit of modernity. Shakespeare is Drama; and drama, which fuses the grotesque and the sublime in a single breath, terror and the clown, tragedy and comedy; drama is the natural characteristic of poetry’s third epoch, of literature now.] The problem posed by Hugo’s formulations here – and throughout the preface – is not least a result of its own poetic rather than discursive qualities: ‘fond’ implies the melting together of something forged under heat, but it extends to the breath of creation, likening, however faintly, the creator to The Creator. So it is revolutionary as Stravinsky was later to seem revolutionary, both only for a time. Hidden in the language of the preface is its dependence upon contemporary dramatic theory’s metaphors of purity. Once Shakespeare slipped through the crack of prejudice, he brought with him not only other dramatists but also the novel, including the Gothic as well as Scott. Hugo finds a solution to the otherwise intractable arguments about purity of form, about ‘the beautiful’, by remarking that each of the three great eras offers new expectations; and, above all, the modern era offers a new drama, which absorbs a multifaceted ‘grotesque’ into more straitened ideas of art. Just as he finds a way around ‘purity’, so also he avoids implicit arguments from aristocracy – the appeal to precedent and ancient ancestry – which continued to be so common. He makes himself sound less anti-classical than anti-restriction or anti-exclusion, welcoming ‘the people’, as Shakespeare celebrated them, into the house of Art. One of the characteristics of the Romantic movement was its elevation of ‘the people’, particularly as ‘the folk’, in the sense of connection to the land rather than to the city and the machine – especially when they were long dead. Hugo is the master of epigram, and he does appeal to the ancient world, reversing the usual formulation: instead of calling Shakespeare the Aeschylus of England, he calls Aeschylus the Shakespeare of Greece. Then he expands. The first age was Primitive; it was marked by patriarchal structures; its artistic form was the Ode; it was naive. The second was Ancient and Christian and manifested itself in Epic, which solemnized history, with simplicity. The Modern age celebrates drama; it is marked by its combination of melancholy and curiosity, with the truth of life itself; and, by implication, Shakespeare is its great hero. (Hugo will be the next hero, but he does not reveal that yet.) Drama distinguishes itself from the historical mode by its concentration upon interiority. As developmental theories go, this one requires an effort of the historical imagination without demanding such niceties as dates or places for these great ages. Hugo imbues his assertive descriptions with sweeping organic metaphors that work by the French habit of ‘opposition’,

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a stronger word than ‘contrast’ and important in French understanding of dialectical progress through thesis, antithesis, and new synthesis. That is, an ‘opposition’ has an argumentative force in French that it lacks in English, stronger than mere ‘contrast’; those who have read Lévi-Strauss will find this familiar. Structuralism, anthropological or literary, was to proceed by playing with irreconcilables. Hugo’s key term, the ‘grotesque’, is a shifting polarity, always in opposition to something he wants to modify. Above all, Hugo wanted to replace the standard words for plays, ‘pure’ tragedy or comedy, with his resolution, ‘le drame’. And he did, at least to a great extent. French generic labels still include ‘comédie dramatique’, which we cannot translate into ordinary anglophone categories, because it is part of older ways of dividing the theatrical universe. The former ages’ standard, ‘la comédie’, tends towards what anglophones consider farce. Understanding this helps explain why French productions of Shakespeare’s comedies are almost always pushed toward farce just when we would expect them to be comédie dramatique. Shakespeare’s habit of layering his poetry with references to death and disease, as he does in his Henry IV plays or in Twelfth Night, would have been rebarbatative, even disgusting, had translators not habitually misunderstood or suppressed them. Hugo’s Cromwell contains laughter; Cromwell himself is already a character who is both black and white – not a villain, nor simply a hero caught in a Cornelian dilemma between, say, duty and honour. Such characterization was in very bad taste – like a mouchoir. It was only in the next year that Hugo actually saw the visiting English actors. Hugo’s own plays were always melodramatic, and as plays their moment has passed – except in the opera. Hernani, which caused such scandal in 1830, as well as Le Roi s’amuse, became sources for Verdi: as Ernani and Rigoletto, shorter, more distilled, but nonetheless offering the heightened emotion that the Romantics identified with ‘le drame’. Duchet, the editor of Cromwell for the Collected Works, offers a telltale annotation which takes us straight to the erotic heart of the Romantics’ metaphors, citing an epigram from the Memoirs of Dumas: ‘…En matière de théâtre surtout il me paraissait permis de violer l’histoire, pourvu qu’on lui fit un enfant’ [In the theatre above all it seemed permitted to rape history, as long as one got her with child (‘histoire’ is grammatically feminine)] (OC xxx 59. n.37). The power of this claim to the potency of genius is clear if we recast Dumas’ bon mot as ‘we can do violence to staged history so long as we make something fruitful’. So paraphrased it is entirely evacuated of its power. So proceeds the young Hugo, imbuing his new vocabulary with associations from nature

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(‘sommité’ from a tree’s highest branch) or from creative processes (such as foundries). And he, like Dumas, added a lot more sex. In 1976, Peter Brooks found over a dozen different meanings in Hugo’s use of ‘grotesque’, his portmanteau word that helped him evade the negative evaluative-descriptive words which immediately denigrate whatever contrasts with (is ‘une opposition à’) ‘the sublime’.16 Brooks’ analysis of melodrama remains timely, as huge audiences are glued to sprawling and comprehensive social criticism through television crime series – the kind of popular drama regularly dismissed as ‘mere’ entertainment, although in our day ‘crime’ fiction is a key place for social criticism. So there is social snobbery, too. Hugo overwhelms his readers with lists of the great; delights them with metaphor; dares to claim that Molière is modern because he is always true; and to omit Racine altogether. He mocks Voltaire by dismissing a man who wanted nothing to do with Shakespeare, but wanted nothing to do with the Greeks either. What kind of judgement was that? What sort of man was Voltaire to refer to the Bard as Gilles Shakespeare? One is almost tempted to feel sorry for Voltaire. Brooks also drew attention to an important polemical aspect of Hugo’s preface, showing how he takes advantage of what had already been happening for years in the Boulevard theatres, as well as for how long literary historians have nevertheless continued to believe the high culture accounts of French theatre of the early nineteenth century (The Melodramatic Imagination, 90–92). Melodrama had arrived with force in the novel and the theatre before the end of the previous century; and spectacle, one of its great advantages, was somehow respectable elsewhere, not least as an aspect of garden design. Playwrights such as Pixérécourt and, later, Scribe situated their plots in many levels of society, without restricting them to the nobility, which allowed them – just – to discuss social and political questions of moment, especially by finding historical circumstances which could be recognized as familiar.17 So did Hugo and Dumas. One value Hugo never doubts through all his Romantic fire, one fixed point he shares with prior criticism, is correct behaviour, that ultimate appeal to good taste. An appreciation of ‘good form’ is, after all, a word for the manners that men recognize without calling them ‘ethics’, nor recognizing how much they cohere with certain classes in certain places at particular times. The release of the banished is as resurgent as the return of the repressed. ‘Good taste’ was now called into service to obliterate Voltaire’s denunciation of the barbarian playwright; that title threatened to devolve upon Hugo within the gates.

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Hugo’s first publicly performed play, Amy Robsart of February 1828, was his earliest attempt to produce historical drama in the theatre. Scott’s Kenilworth, from which he took his plot, begins in a tavern, where a well-born man makes common cause with a drunken criminal in order to penetrate the stronghold where his beloved appears to be imprisoned; the novel moves to the court, where the ambitious Earl of Leicester participates in the struggle for influence over Queen Elizabeth; it reveals that the apparently kidnapped and debauched young woman is nothing of the kind, but is secretly Leicester’s wife; it paints a picture of Elizabethan England from top to bottom; it includes a series of low characters so clearly Shakespearean that they were readily so identified at the time, starting with Scott’s own annotations. And it offers a series of grotesques, not least the agile, ugly and ambitious young ‘Flibbertigibbet’, a name with Shakespearean overtones. However, the first night of the play was also its last; conservative Paris arrived already prepared to begin whistling and slow-clapping before the curtain rose. In France, this mix of ingredients was shocking and invigorating in its daring combinations of low and high; formal and informal; tragic dignity and farcical comedy; beauty and ugliness; linguistic registers from cultivated language to country dialect passing via slang and cant. French enthusiasm for Scott – and, of course, the advent of the novel, and the novel of history – made these characteristics not only pleasurable, but acceptable in polite company. The speed of the change can be illustrated by the demand for printers’ sheets to be regularly rushed from Edinburgh to Paris for publication in French almost simultaneous with the appearance of the Waverley novels in English. Three translations of Kenilworth appeared in March 1821.18 Novels were expensive, but their contents were acted out in the popular theatres along the Boulevards of northern Paris: plays using the plot of Le Chateau de Kenilworth appeared almost immediately. Here we see almost a textbook case of material changes in taste outside the bastions of high culture overtaking traditional theory. The rejection of 1828 was to be slowly, inexorably redeemed: History herself took Hugo’s side.19 To read or see Scott was to find Shakespeare more accessible, and less startling (except in quality). What had been ‘impure’ melted into the modern amalgam. Or, at least, it threatened to become so: in February 1829 Alexandre Dumas’ modern drama, Henri III et sa cour, penetrated the Comédie française, with the support of the King. But five months later Hugo’s historical play, Marion de Lorme, which built on some of Dumas’ suggestions, was suppressed by the Minister of the Interior because it presented a weak king. Yet by 1830, the fateful year in so many ways,

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Shakespeare permeated French culture. Championed and then pilloried by Voltaire, who absorbed what he needed for his own work; adapted by Ducis and adopted by the Théâtre français; Shakespeare could be found parodied in puppet-shows and burlesqued in French popular theatres.20 If none of these ‘represented’ Shakespeare, they nonetheless made Shakespearean stories and characters familiar. So, too, the abbreviated ‘Shakespeare’ of early introductions by La Place and La Harpe were superseded by the corrected paraphrase translations of Le Tourneur, which were themselves amended and modernized between 1821–7 by Guizot and Amadée Pichot, an anglophile, entrepreneurial man of letters and publisher. Guizot’s biographical work on Shakespeare was part of his interest in English history, itself part of his life as a politician with a stake in understanding the past. Guizot’s ideas about the importance of ‘the people’ in aspects of the religion and culture of England, as well as the artistic liberty of a country which entirely lacked an educated caste which could dictate taste, both reappear in Hugo’s preface, but now vaster, more passionate, and with the creative unclarity which claims an inclusive domain for all of life in Art.21 1830 was a fateful year, not least because it brought Louis-Philippe, the citizen king of the French (not King of France), to the throne. The end of the Bourbon dynasty also appeared to capitulate artistically to the defining challenge of Romanticism against dying neoclassicism, cultural – and political – freedom against stultifying repression. People often repeat that the theatre is a dangerous place – in France, in Paris, it was the premier cultural space, in which government subsidy preserved a relic of the seventeenth-century greatness of the Sun King, radiating out to the world. If Hugo’s moments of eminence begin with a pamphlet-sized introduction to a closet play, the opening night of his melodrama, Hernani, was a more riotous assembly. Hugo won this battle too. His lifelong practice as a playwright and novelist was thereafter supported by adulation, as the public slowly accustomed itself to those innovations; by his sense of himself as Shakespeare’s successor; as the presiding spirit of his age, indeed, the transcendent spirit of Art. If he had had the Hindu concept ‘avatar’ he would have used it, himself embodying, as he believed, Art’s transcendent body. He was not modest, not humble, not gentle, and not wrong about his huge gifts. For the purposes of this chapter – and this chapter’s place in the history of great Shakespeareans – the triumph of Romanticism and Hugo’s self-proclaimed place in the toppling of neoclassicism changed French theatrical production. The long years of exile only solidified his sense of his own transcendence. Those years, and that reputation, create, or recover, a context for his much later manifesto, William Shakespeare, which otherwise

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looks a remarkably silly book. I shall return to this book below, after my discussion of the edition it was originally meant to introduce. Changes in our understanding seldom come suddenly or as a surprise; they acknowledge things somehow already known. Diderot was an early writer to express reservations about the style of tragedy established by Corneille and Racine, but the catalytic moment came later, and is obvious only in retrospect.22 A recognition of ‘Romantic Shakespeare’, like ‘Romantic Drama’, also obliges us to understand both sides of a change, even if we cannot sympathize with the past it affected to have superseded. What is striking about Hugo’s position is that he manages to avoid that kind of revolutionary reversal which largely imitates the structures it opposes. Some of this is due to the very unclarity of Hugo’s details. He offers a long, slow historical narrative of huge eras succeeding each other, which effectively constitutes a teleology of progress. In one way he was lucky: if there had continued to be great dramatists writing within the laws of the neoclassical unities, a ‘decline’ narrative would be false – or, at least, it would be postponed. By positing a historical rhythm, he legitimates the very revolutionary change which he espoused. He claims no sudden drumroll to announce a new epoch; Hugo’s own metaphor was a long-dilapidated house which suddenly collapses.23 The theatre’s material culture must include wage and salaries: Hugo and Dumas were aided and abetted by the stars of the four state-subsidized theatres, who wanted the money that the popular theatres offered. If they were willing to desert the Française for the Boulevard theatres, the ‘civilized’ theatres had rushed out to meet them. The barbarians were not just inside the gates, but in the best seats. The gates were physically present at the Porte Saint-Martin, in the north of the city, a neighbourhood nicknamed Le Boulevard du Crime (‘Crime Avenue’) because of the sensationalism and spectacle of the plays produced there. Their long-lasting influence is inscribed in Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), with its own Boulevard theatricality, its own inset Othello; Carné’s plot performs precisely the kind of historical multi-plot melodrama that characterized the period, as initiated by Hugo and his friends. Undignified as these popular plays were, they created a profitable body of spectacular melodramas which could be ignored only by wilful blindness to what was happening. Large gatherings of people uninhibited by polite behaviour were always risky, and the Boulevard theatres were considered places of danger. Despite attempts to limit their number, in the first third of the nineteenth century the most renowned of them, the Porte Saint-Martin Theatre, established some measure of independence with its overwhelming popularity and financial

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success in the face of government opposition. Referred to as ‘the people’s Opera’, it was the theatre at which Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Scribe were to enjoy their popularity, fame and incomes. So by the 1830s, Parisian theatrical performances had ceased to be restricted to the court and the wealthy. The bastions of neoclassicism fell to the power of money: when people were ready to pay for the wrong kind of play, actors were eager to be paid to play it for them. In fact, both high- and low-culture theatres developed other kinds of performance than were prescribed by neoclassicism, but the dead hand of national greatness-in-correctness sustained the theatrical institutions as well as criticism of the practice and theory of plays and playing. Playwrights could make money without prestige, or enjoy restricted status with lower financial rewards. Except for a brief period during the Revolution, theatres were regulated, and attempts were constantly made to enforce government restrictions, but people want to go to the theatre, and what they wanted the popular theatres established, in Paris and the provinces.24 When, from time to time, restrictions were briefly lifted, free or cheap theatrical performances offered a secular version of civic education as, before the Revolution, Catholic stained glass, statues and illustrations had taught religion. The idea of escapism, of a nice night out, was too frivolous for theorists of tragedy to consider, even in the face of large numbers of theatre-goers set on enjoying themselves. Ripeness is all: healthy institutions don’t suddenly topple, but nor do unhealthy ones. Retrospection finds a heroic moment to mark its fall, such as the opening night of a play. When Hugo and his generation attacked ‘high tragedy’, they found themselves toppling a moribund target mined from inside, not least by actors unwilling to lose their prestige to a new style of performance, but unwilling also to lose their theatres and their incomes. The high style limped on. ‘Romantic acting’ could not derive its respectability from the Boulevard du Crime, however rich it made its participants; it was risky to attribute to foreign influence. But, conveniently, by apparent historical accident, legitimation arrived right on time: the historical moment of change also coincided with a troupe of visiting British Shakespearean actors in the season of 1827–8, long enough after the humiliations by the Allied forces to be received with enthusiasm. Hugo was part of a spontaneous agreement by le tout Paris that their choices of extracts and scenes were a revelation – though his astonishment didn’t reach the heights of his contemporary, Berlioz, who fell so madly in love with the young female lead, Harriet Smithson that he married her, although he spoke no English and she no French.25

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As the young generation became the dominant one of the 1840s, some died, some became rich, and many of their lives became harder, until the explosions of 1848 made life impossible. Hugo’s sons, Charles and François-Victor, who were political journalists, went to prison for publishing an anti-government newspaper (subsidized by their father).26 Hugo himself might have been killed on the barricades, as Napoleon III tightened his control over the government and its subsidized theatres, with successful repression; underlying the cultural vicissitudes lay the multiple pressures of a demand to establish national continuity through historical legitimacy, and to re-establish international pre-eminence. By 1850, Hugo’s friend Balzac was dead, and he himself an exile, in Brussels, then on Jersey, from which he was expelled – on charges probably trumped up by the British government to please their French colleagues – to Guernsey. And there he remained, France’s greatest writer, for eighteen years.27

François-Victor Hugo and a New Shakespeare Edition Un matin de la fin de novembre, deux des habitants du lieu, le père et le plus jeune des fils, étaient assis dans la salle basse. Ils se taisaient, comme des naufragés qui pensent. Dehors il pleuvait, le vent soufflait, la maison était comme assourdie par ce grondement extérieur. Tous deux songeaient, absorbés peut-être par cette coïncidence d’un commencement d’hiver et d’un commencement d’exil. Tout à coup le fils éleva la voix et interrogea le père: — Que penses-tu de cet exil? — Qu’il sera long. — Comment comptes-tu le remplir? Le père répondit: — Je regarderai l’Océan. Il y eut un silence. Le père reprit: — Et toi? — Moi, dit le fils, je traduirai Shakespeare. [One late-November morning, two local inhabitants, father and youngest son, were sitting in the courtyard. They kept the silence of the shipwrecked, thinking. It rained outside, the wind blew, the house deafened by the roaring outside. Both were dreaming, perhaps overcome

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by the simultaneous beginning of winter and of exile. Suddenly the son addressed his father: ‘What do you make of this exile?’ ‘That it will be long.’ ‘How will you fill it?’ The father replied, ‘I shall contemplate the Ocean.’ There was silence. The father continued, ‘And you?’ ‘I’, said the son, ‘I shall translate Shakespeare’.] Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare (1864)28 In 1823, the same year the young Victor-Marie Hugo married, published his first novel, and wrote his review of Scott, Stendhal asserted in what became his Racine et Shakespeare that Romantic tragedy would be written in prose, and that Shakespeare was its founding father. By the time Hugo and his son, François-Victor began their exile in the Channel Islands, that was a battle won, with important implications: readers – not yet theatre-goers – were accustomed to the idea of Shakespeare’s mixtures of prose and verse, sublime and grotesque, princes and paupers, public and private. But they were not familiar with Shakespeare’s comprehensive linguistic registers. Voltaire rewrote Shakespeare into Voltaire (1731–); La Place paraphrased and largely refused to translate what he thought untranslatable (1745); Ducis cut, compressed, rewrote (1769–92); and Le Tourneur, responsible for the first attempt to translate all Shakespeare’s plays (1776–83), transposed Shakespeare’s language into the formal registers appropriate to his French readership. It was Le Tourneur’s multi-volume translation which served as the base for a series of ‘new’ translations (‘new’ as in soap-powder advertising) such as Guizot’s in 1821 or Laroche’s in 1843 (the translation used by Berlioz). Early representations of Shakespeare’s theatrical writing had regularly been congratulated and mocked in varying combinations. In the long struggle between authenticity and acceptability it must be recognized not only that the conventions of translation were very different from what we now expect; that French, although much richer than English in available rhymes, is narrower in vocabulary; but also that French vocabulary is gendered grammatically, without a neuter case: la tragédie, le drame. The central paradox for translators is true in any language: they must do what cannot be done, spurred on by individual passion and social demand for this bizarre playwright so celebrated in his own country and in Germany, France’s great rival. On the French stage Shakespeare’s plays, like all theatrical representations, confronted an inhibiting multiplicity of autocratic government

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censors as well as a militant and conservative Catholic hierarchy. In the French study, his often-proclaimed, undemonstrable greatness was unreadable. Publishing Shakespeare in prose, from exile, was perhaps above all an assertion of freedom against tyranny. These ideas inform the peroration of François-Victor Hugo’s introduction to his translation, that the young should learn from Shakespeare to persevere in their duty to confront tyranny. François-Victor had good reason to remind his readers where he was coming from. Political militancy was the family business. With his older brother Charles, François-Victor had been imprisoned for several months under Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. The unacceptable legislation they advocated in their journal included the abolition of the death penalty and an amnesty to allow all political exiles to return home. When he died, François-Victor merited an obituary in the New York Times for his political courage, not for his literary achievement.29 The hundreds, perhaps thousands, who lined the streets for his funeral were silently demonstrating their support of the still-exiled Hugo and his family, but above all their opposition to the government. François-Victor’s interests were scholarly, and ranged from the antiquarian (he wrote a book about ‘Unknown Normandy’), to poetry (other people’s), to translation. At 31 he published his translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets, later to be included in his complete edition. His first published translation of a play was Marlowe’s Faust (1848). From 1859–65 he produced the fifteen volumes of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, including a translation of Shakespeare’s will. No previous translator had his breadth and depth of understanding or his commitment to close translation, even when it was unacceptable in polite company. In 1859, the startling first volume of the Complete Works, Les Deux Hamlet, begins …pour qu’une traduction littérale de Shakespeare fût possible, it fallait que le mouvement littéraire de 1830 eût vaincu, il fallait que la liberté qui avait triomphé en politique eût triomphé en littérature, il fallait que la langue nouvelée, la langue révolutionnaire, la langue du mot propre et de l’image, eût été définitivement créée. (Les Deux Hamlets, I.6) […for a literal translation of Shakespeare to be possible, the triumph of the literary movement of 1830 was necessary; it was necessary that that liberty which had triumphed in politics triumphed in literature; necessary that the renewed language, the revolutionary language, the language of the just word and image, had finally been created.]

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These bold words assume his father’s riotous triumph with the production of Hernani. At the moment of publication, of course, both father and son were proscribed. At that moment, too, his father’s promised introduction to the edition was still gestating. François-Victor Hugo announced his scholarly independence by publishing the two quarto texts of Hamlet preceded by a reasoned argument for treating them separately, rather than amalgamating them into the composite which had been (and remained) normal practice since Rowe in 1709. Nous avons fait comme les protestants: plein d’une fervente admiration, nous avons supprimé toutes les interpolations posthumes, et, au risque d’être taxé d’hérésie, nous avons fait disparaître dans notre édition ces indications d’actes qui rompaient arbitrairement l’unité profonde de l’oeuvre.30 [Like the Protestants, full of burning admiration, we have suppressed all posthumous interpolations, and, at the risk of exposing us to accusations of heresy, our edition has erased all the Act divisions which arbitrarily interrupted the work’s profound unity.] Hugo’s ‘textual protestantism’ is intended to provoke appreciation of his wit, if not agreement with his decision. Here he is ahead of his time, but elsewhere in his criticism he shows the tendency to project oneself into the study of Shakespeare that was so important to the Romantics. The earliest moment comes in his engagement with Goethe’s criticism of Hamlet (he does not distinguish Wilhelm Meister from his creator). Most of the time, however, he reminds readers not to confuse what the characters say with what Shakespeare thinks: Polonius is his first example (I, notes, 338–9). And, although he explains to his readers that the familiar indications of place have always been editorial, and that neither Quarto of Hamlet has many, he will here follow that normal editorial practice and give locations. The rhythm of publication was annual: four volumes in 1859, three in 1860, then slightly fewer per year until completion of the plays in 1864 and the edition’s appendices in 1865. In 1866 he supplemented the canonical plays with eleven from the Shakespeare Apocrypha, which included Titus Andronicus, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles, and Edward III. About this last play, now absorbed into the Shakespeare canon, he was perhaps the first to pose the rhetorical question: ‘Who else could have written this?’.31

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William Shakespeare, his father’s late introduction, appeared as an independent book in 1864, in time for the birthday celebrations (the occasion when Berlioz proposed a toast to Victor Hugo’s empty chair). The father’s work has one of the most incompetent biographies of Shakespeare ever produced, and is largely not about Shakespeare or his plays, but about his place among the greatest literary geniuses of what Hugo could not yet think of limiting to the West – not that it would have made the slightest difference to him to have included the whole globe’s populations. It had mixed reviews, including Baudelaire’s angry letter to Le Figaro decrying the brouhaha for the barbarian as puffery by Hugo for Hugo: ‘Préparer et chauffer le succès du livre de V. Hugo sur Shakespeare, livre qui, comme tous ses livres, plein de beautés et de bêtises, va peut-être encore désoler ses plus sincères admirateurs…’ [‘To prepare and heat up the success of V. Hugo’s book on Shakespeare, a book full, like all his books, of beauties and stupidities, which will perhaps once again sadden his greatest admirers…’ ], a letter he carefully collected later.32 The book at least is four times the length of the preface to Cromwell, whose ideas it repeats, and is largely a seamless (and repetitive) celebration of the world’s great geniuses whose avatar is implicitly its author. But at this stage exile merely encouraged his self-reference, and his book has little relation to his son’s or, indeed, to Shakespeare except – as Baudelaire doesn’t say – as Shakespeare prepared the way for Hugo. Of the many extraordinary facts about the new edition – beyond the speed at which it was produced – was that François-Victor did it all himself (Le Tourneur had had assistants). This has been denied by critics and scholars who give no impression of having read the edition. François-Victor based his opinions on a good grasp of English; on scholarship in the British Museum; wide reading of the documents and theatre texts of the period beyond those attributed to Shakespeare; mastery of the best criticism of the day; above all an informed distance from the textual developments which had created the English ‘Received Text’, from Rowe through Pope to Johnson-Steevens. In Guernsey, he had discussions with an anglophone neighbour and fellow Shakespeare enthusiast – the woman he might have married, had she not died of consumption. His edition did not spring upon the world from nothing. Because Voltaire had so successfully manipulated the arguments, we tend to forget that there is less stupid wilfulness in his otherwise-forgotten enemies, as well as more French Shakespeare, than was dreamt of in the great statesubsidized Paris theatres, whether in versions by Voltaire himself or those of Ducis. Novelists, too, borrowed his plots (perhaps Père Goriot’s daughters

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owed something to Lear’s). Knowing Shakespeare ranged from knowing about him; reading summaries of his plays; reading his plays in translation or adaptation, in English or in German as well as in French; seeing extracted scenes or adaptations in the public theatres, or in professional or amateur private performances; to looking at pictures or reproductions (many texts contained illustrations often reprinted); or to listening to music, symphonic or operatic. François-Victor saw Shakespeare as a man of his time, but a man superior to his time, critical of tyranny; generous to the people; understanding love, desire, and the human urges to ambition, sacrifice, self-promotion and self-destruction. Above all he saw Shakespeare as an independent thinker, reader and writer for the theatre and the study, who returned to and reshaped his themes, situations and characters throughout his career. This idea that among Shakespeare’s chief sources was Shakespeare was one of his many forgotten insights. The edition François-Victor shaped has never been repeated; its attack on received ideas of editing might have come into their own in the late twentieth century. But it struck upon the rock of received ideas of Shakespeare’s text and was forgotten. Except for purposes of criticism – often competitive – translators tend to be invisible, a window, for the obvious reason that we treat translations as instrumental.33 And for that reason, there is no study of François-Victor’s translations, no bibliographical listing, no attentive analysis.34 Evidence is anecdotal: informal surveys reveal that every French colleague I asked had read one or more of them, often at school, and that many other non-French non-anglophones preferred them to what was available in their own vernacular; my informal survey further suggests a widespread view that although they’re – of course – very old-fashioned now, they’ve lasted because they’re, well, not bad. That view included Derrida, who was among many who treated Hugo-fils with some deference, as a competent, acceptable translator, but it is a deference characteristic of spot-checked agreement with a modern reader’s or translator’s own ideas.35 That is, the great thing about a translation is that you do not need to treat its decisions with respect. Shakespeare-in-translation, too, can be ‘improved’ without reference to the translator’s ideas or methods, as was common in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries. The ideas that translators might have read and understood Shakespeare’s language or translate with consistency in method and procedure are relatively recent, and it is to those observations that I now turn. Long assumed, within France, to be merely a translator, a window upon the real Shakespeare, François-Victor Hugo was a ground-breaking

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editor. The edition and translation, made after advanced textual study, and directly from the quartos and folios, of an Oeuvres Complètes de W. Shakespeare (containing the plays, poems, Shakespeare’s will, and three volumes of apocrypha) forms one of the most important transmissions of Shakespeare ever made; outside the German sphere of influence, the most important. I shall offer an overview, beginning upbeat, but ending with two more sombre reflections, one on missed opportunities, the other on opportunism.

II: The Edition 1859–65 First, there is no question but that François-Victor Hugo’s Shakespeare translations (that is, the plays in close-equivalent French prose) have had extraordinary staying power: they are still sold in ostensibly revised editions (not much revised, in my experience of comparison). They remain the cheapest source of paperback Shakespeare in France; they also remain the cheapest source of play-scripts, which – since they are long out of copyright – can be stropped, chopped and dropped without constraint or complaint from author, translator or publisher. The first Pléïade Shakespeare of the mid-twentieth century contained twenty-seven of them alongside, among others, Gide’s Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, a kind of apotheosis for a translator, as for his subject.36 In the 1960s, as part of French celebrations for the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, Gallimard commissioned J. B. Fort to produce what purported to be the complete Hugo translation, but was nothing of the sort – even for a trade edition a shocking travesty of scholarly editing which entirely misrepresented its subject.37 As an indication of the prestige of the project, Gallimard produced a large-format multi-volume deluxe edition as well as a threevolume set intended for students and scholars: Shakespeare, Théâtre Complet: Traduction de François-Victor Hugo. It is, however, not difficult to see how this high-handed and incompetent re-edition should have come about, not least in a show of cultural strength against other countries with supposedly canonical translations, viz., Germany. Gide was right: François-Victor Hugo’s claims upon our attention begin with his basic competence, but Gide was ignorant of their greater reach, not least because the question of transmission entails a larger question of what is transmitted, but also because of the suppressions I shall discuss below. Hugo was the first translator of Shakespeare into French whose English was adequate to the task; who had studied the scholarship available at the time,

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both in Paris and in the British Museum; for whom Shakespeare’s originality was not a handicap of incorrectness; who was, perhaps consequently, the first editor of Shakespeare to understand that he wrote in scenes and not in acts; who challenged the Folio arrangement; and who presented the plays accordingly, with a comprehensive sense of how Shakespeare borrows from himself, returns to previous themes, plots and characters. The texts he translated were thus unlike all previous editions or translations, which accepted British scholarship and its ‘received text’. Having made his editorial decisions, Hugo then translated Shakespeare’s words, including slang, dialect and improprieties, daringly, under the shadow of French public decorum: what you can’t say, you can’t say, and you can’t direct actors to perform it either.38 What he constructed differed in every way from earlier editions in any language. Finally, the idea that he never intended his work to be performed is only that, another received idea. The charming tale of how this edition came to be is oft told, but always follows the father’s anecdote, quoted as an epigraph to this part of the chapter. Despite his eighteen years of exile, Hugo’s English remained exiguous; Robb offers some amusing evidence of his incompetence (Robb, 324). Hugo’s version is that François-Victor willingly followed his father to the Channel Islands, where they each proposed a project.39 The joke is that Hugo was called l’homme océan, as I called him in the first part of this chapter, but his contemporaries also understood an intention of ‘selfcontemplation’, a criticism fully vindicated by William Shakespeare (1864). Less charmingly, Hugo-père was a monster of egotism and control, and tied his children to his purse strings: neither son was allowed a profession, or F–V a marriage, and neither had any independence, although their father’s writing had brought him great wealth. Even the wife left behind in Paris (the long-term mistress was housed separately on the island) to oversee business had to account for every sou to her husband. And so did the sons. The older son, Charles, lived out his exile mainly in Brussels. Hugo took his second son along to the Channel Islands, allowing him occasional forays to London for research. François-Victor, who had a grounding in contemporary English at his mother’s instancing, set to this daunting lifer’s work, and it began to appear seven years later, in 1859, intended for use both as an ‘accompaniment’ and as a ‘replacement’ translation, for the study, the drawing room, and, eventually, the stage.40 The first edition asserted its bilingual utility with dashes in the midst of prose sentences to mark the position of the original verse line-breaks.41 The second printing took them out, but this so-called ‘second edition’ was made up of mixed sheets – announcing that a first edition was sold out was a family publicity ploy.

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Because the translations have survived, it is important to emphasize that they were not the whole thing. Hugo preceded his grouped plays with long introductions; accompanied them with annotation and commentary; and followed each group with appendices and source extracts. Unfortunately, the original edition in fifteen volumes (plus, soon, three volumes of apocrypha) struck upon the rock of publisher recalcitrance: the public seem to have found the edition expensive as well as strange. So the soonestablished habit of reproducing the plays stripped of their paratexts travestied Hugo’s project and destroyed any hope he might have harboured that his editorial work might be recognized and influential. François-Victor was the first editor to abandon the Folio order. After the two texts of Hamlet, the next three volumes offered ‘Tyrants’, ‘Fairies’, and the first group of two groups of ‘The Jealous’ (Les Jaloux here means specifically ‘the jealous men’). The two early editions offered thematic connections which radically redirected attention to themes and schemes and assimilated Shakespeare’s interests to concerns familiar to postRomantic revolutionaries. As a critic, Hugo-fils acted upon his insight that Shakespeare recycled his own material, making himself his great source. The new arrangement failed to convince, and was soon abandoned, but so many volumes had been printed that they continued to circulate and to influence some readers and translators of Shakespeare into the twentieth century. When I began working on this chapter I was able to buy uncut volumes from the first and second printings (that is, with and without the hyphens to indicate line-breaks). In fact I had to buy them, as such translations were not acquired by great libraries and are not much in demand today, except by collectors interested in beautiful bindings: the edition was evidently the must-have of its day. Scholarly impecuniosity led me to the discovery of the change between ‘editions’, which is not mentioned elsewhere, as I bought separate volumes in dribs and drabs. In this age of internet book sales, it is a reminder of the paramount importance of the book itself for textual studies: it is not possible to know exactly what state a volume represents merely from entries in catalogues – or even from holding it in one’s hands before cutting all the pages. Gallimard still reprint just the translations in a variety of paperback imprints, without editorial comment. Fortunately, perhaps, their ostensibly complete edition has been out of print for many years. This is also the place to record that – at least in France – resistance to Hugo’s most startling idea that Shakespeare thought in scenes rather than acts, which was part of what failed to convince his public to buy the edition, continues to this day. Even the best essay on Hugo finds it inconceivable

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that Shakespeare should not have understood that plays are divided into five acts.42 So there is a curious contradiction at the outset: a reader able to read Hugo’s edition as Hugo intended it to be read is offered a quite different Shakespeare from Hugo’s translations alone. If, as increasingly happened, one had access only to the translations, although they were good and reliable, that was all they were. Readers would not divine from them Hugo’s linguistic strategy, his polemic, or his scholarly originality. As time passed, and the language changed, the patina of age made Hugo’s French old-fashioned, even conservative. Yet, hundreds of copies of the original multi-volume edition were bought, bound, left unbound, circulating throughout the francophone world. Given the history of publishing in France, it seems to me impossible that anyone reading Shakespeare in French in the last 150 years could have avoided reading Shakespeare in the words of François-Victor Hugo at some point, and possibly at every point. That includes all translators. So publication since the first duodecimo edition, published by Lemerre for a comparatively ‘mass’ market (1871–80) has varied from a reassertion of the Folio or presumed chronological arrangement, to small collections, to single works. They erased Hugo’s paratexts as well as his original organization. Not only are they not Shakespeare, they are not Hugo-fils either. The edition makes no sense – or it does not make the sense Hugo meant it to mean – as a series of independent volumes of the translations. For if the Hugo translations alone appear to stimulate re-examination of Shakespeare, they open interpretation in ways unanticipated, and, to a remarkable extent, the opposite of what Hugo intended, a malleable source for theatrical production; a subject of deep conservatism in education.

III: The Example of Othello Othello has already walked-on in this chapter, in the pioneering Romantic translation by Alfred de Vigny, Victor-Marie Hugo’s fellow in the days of the Cénacle. Vigny’s translation had failed in the theatre because of its use of an ordinary word for an everyday object, the handkerchief, immediately before Hugo’s publication of his Cromwell. At mid-century, with the battle won, the strictures about ‘dignity’ in abeyance, Romantic novels and plays were regularly transformed by operatic adaptation, and Victor-Marie’s fame spread through adaptations of Ernani (1844) and Rigoletto (1851). François-Victor Hugo, too, found a way, smaller, and at second hand, into

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the opera house. The greatest musical interpreter of Shakespeare – as of Hugo-père – was Verdi who, through his discovery of Hugo’s translations, found two subjects which were completed and performed, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893). Verdi’s encounter with Shakespeare offers a counterexample to the tale of woe I have been describing.43 His engagement with Shakespeare began early. Though he grew up on approximating Italian and French translations, which often improved and censored their originals, he seems to have acquired new ones, including Hugo’s, promptly. In addition to Verdi’s three completed Shakespeare operas, there was a fourth, which occupied him on and off for many years; but he never began to set his projected Re Lear. To give some sense of the role played by Hugo’s translation and paratext, let me consider two moments from Verdi’s engagement with Hugo. Verdi and his librettists had access to previous French translations, Pierre Le Tourneur’s (1776–83), and those which followed, periodically, ostensibly replaced – but actually lightly updated – by a series of men of letters who could not possibly have translated from the English (including Dumas and Guizot). Despite traditional scholarly reports to the contrary, Le Tourneur sought systematically to correct and improve his original. Verdi, who was in his mid-forties when Hugo’s work began to appear, was typical in his beliefs: he believed in ‘authenticity’, he believed in fidelity to Shakespeare, and he believed that he had achieved it in his own proudly Italian variety of music drama, even if some of what he achieved also immortalized Davenant.44 By contrast to the young Wagner’s Das Liebesverbot (1834) with its light comedy interpretation of Measure for Measure, Verdi set Shakespeare. His circumstances required him to find authenticity by combining an extraordinary degree of verbal compression with a musical language which offers complex simultaneity, a multiplicity we recognize as Shakespearean. Far from a box-ticking catalogue bound by word-, by sense-, or by scene-by-scene equivalence, Verdi’s Shakespeare grappled with a play’s core. Grappling with the core meant ‘character’, and ‘character’ meant ‘decision under pressure’. The first of Verdi’s three completed Shakespeare operas was his Macbeth of 1847, revised for Paris in 1865. Despite working with a translation we would not, today, have much time for, he heard Macbeth’s inner turmoil, and scored it; he dared give the unusual instruction to the diva to make Lady Macbeth sound ugly, an instruction difficult to persuade a soprano to follow. There is a gulf between Macbeth and Otello. Verdi always made his own synopses, which his librettists set in constant communication with the master.45 The Macbeth libretto, using Verdi’s synopsis, was the work of Francesco Maria Piave (1810–76), using a recent Italian translation by

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Carlo Rusconi (c. 1839). The Italian production was a success, though Verdi’s rewritten version for Paris in 1865 less so. In France, French translation outranked Italian representation of Shakespeare, and Verdi’s was multiply ‘not-Shakespeare’. Responding to accusations that he understood nothing of the play, nothing of Shakespeare, he wrote (in a much-quoted letter of 1865) that Shakespeare had been his bedside book for many years. It was, of course, never Shakespeare that sat by his bedside table, but a succession of Italian adaptations and increasingly improved translations, then Hugo. Verdi’s testimony, in this moment of disappointment, reminds us for how long many, even most, readers assumed that style, including translation, was transparent – that window again. George Orwell insisted upon something like this, but good prose is never like a window: we can look at it as well as through it, and the writer or translator has always tinted the glass. After Macbeth Verdi began thinking about a Lear, using a new translation by Giulio Carcano, but a Re Lear remained a series of sketches. Then came Hugo. Verdi’s supralinguistic compression of Shakespeare’s characters only increases as he struggles with Iago (1887), his working title for the new opera which became Otello. Verdi found melodic equivalents for what Wilson Knight does not call the verbal Iago music, scoring the terrible moment of seduction when Othello abandons his own style to begin singing in Iago’s.46 Arrigo Boito, his librettist, read English, as did Verdi’s long-time companion, Giuseppina Strepponi, and all of them were at ease in French. James Hepokoski has shown how influential upon the libretto was François-Victor Hugo.47 Othello appears in Hugo’s Volume  V, ‘Les Jaloux 2’. In the Verdi archives Hepokoski found three copies of François-Victor Hugo’s translation, annotated in Boito’s hand, and Hepokoski quotes Hugo at length – necessarily, however, in English translation – to show how far Hugo is the key to Verdi’s Iago, particularly to Iago’s motivation.48 More can be derived from considering Hugo’s whole volume: of the five murderous enraged men collected in the two volumes titled ‘Les Jaloux’, Hugo juxtaposes Cymbeline’s Posthumus and Othello, uniting two falsely accused wives. In context, with Hugo’s introductions, the play looks quite different: it has the anti-monarchism, the anti-clericalism, and the bedrock denial of a beneficent deity characteristic of the radical translator. This is a slightly compressed paraphrase of Hugo’s peroration: This is the most painful, the most heart-breaking of all Shakespeare’s endings. In the poet’s other plays, the action explains the unavoidable bloody conclusion. It is conceivable that Hamlet dies: he killed Ophelia’s

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father. It is still conceivable that Romeo dies: he killed Juliet’s cousin. It is understandable that Lear succumbs: his curse killed his own daughter! It is legitimate that Macbeth falls: he killed Banquo, he killed Lady Macduff! But what did Othello do to die this cruel death? What did Desdemona do! What made them deserve to be carried off to the tomb? Their consciences were clear: they never committed, even foolishly, an evil deed; they were free of remorse as of blame. They were good, honest, and loyal. How did they incur this punishment? They committed no misdeed [Hugo uses ‘faute’ here, which is preparing his own dramatic ending: this word runs from error through offence to sin]. They did! They did commit an offence, the primordial offence, the offence which is earlier even than Cain’s offence. They were guilty, like the first and the last of us, of the original offence. They were begotten on this earth. They were born already damned in a world where happiness is forbidden to those most worthy, where all joys exact the price of sorrows, where laughter produces tears, in a world where good has evil as its necessary punishment, where love has jealousy as its other side; where genius has envy as its shadow. They were born in a world where social injustice amplifies natural imperfection, where virtue only licenses one to be tested, service guarantees ingratitude, heroism only designates one for martyrdom, in a world where bad faith triumphs over good, where any Socrates drinks hemlock, any Brutus commits suicide, where any Dante is exiled, where Tiberius reigns. Yes, Othello and Desdemona suffered because they were born. Both were tortured to expiate humanity’s crime. Let those who are tempted to find that expiation too hard, refrain from hating the poet, faithful historian of life. The true author of this conclusion is not Shakespeare. It is God.49 Here I want only to refer to three questions: the range of the acceptable in period decorum; the limits of translator understanding; and the magic of adaptive risk. Because, if one only has Hugo’s translation, it can look as if Verdi followed an idea of Desdemona as a familiar period sweet and naive creature; but the paratext shows that while Hugo sees abjection in Desdemona’s reactions to Othello in what we call Act IV (it is, of course, printed with scene numbers only), that is not all he sees. Hugo’s introduction offers a Romantic interpretation of a Cornelian dilemma: Othello suffers in obeying honour over love, and Hugo conjures up Othello’s crime of passion with some striking word-play, as Verdi repeats the melody of ‘un baccio’, and the words of Hugo’s introduction, finding a musical equivalent

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for Hugo’s desire-suffused depiction of ambivalence. The tenor can convey this if he can act and does not succumb to sentimentality. Jamais Othello n’a plus aimé sa femme qu’au moment où il va l’assassiner. Jamais elle ne lui a paru plus belle, plus séduisante, plus désirable, plus irrésistible! Jamais elle ne lui a causé, plus qu’en ce moment, les éblouissements des sens…. Un baiser, un baiser encore, un de plus, et ce sera le dernier!… (80). Il enlève l’oreiller nuptial, cet oreiller où, hier encore, reposaient deux têtes adoreées, et il en fait un étouffoir. (81) [Never has Othello loved his wife more than in this moment when he is about to murder her. Never has she seemed more beautiful, more seductive, more desirable, more irresistible! Never before, never more than in this moment, has she so dazzled his every sense…. He lifts the bridal pillow, that pillow where two adored heads still rested yesterday, and uses it as an étouffoir.] Il enlève l’oreiller nuptial, cet oreiller où, hier encore, reposaient deux têtes adorées, et il en fait un étouffoir. Il arrache les draps de noce, ces draps tièdes encore de la première nuit, et il en fait une garotte. Il saisit tout le mobilier de l’amour, et il en fait l’appareil de la mort. (81) [He lifts the bridal pillow, that pillow where two adored heads still rested yesterday, and uses it as an étouffoir. He tears off the wedding sheets, those sheets still warm from the first night, and uses them as a garotte. He seizes all the furnishings of love and transforms them into the machinery of death.] ‘Etouffoir’ can mean ‘an airless room’, corresponding to English ‘stifling’, but it is a technical term from the contemporary piano pedal, creating a shocking pun by making the pillow the mechanism which stops the music of the keys. And then Emilia and the anagnoresis. I write ‘the tenor can’ because many do not; as with the sopranos of Macbeth, there is often rejection of the composer’s tough-minded decisions. Zeffirelli’s Otello reinstates poetic justice by killing Iago; Verdi’s own Iago escapes. Translators’ daring is the magic of what they do, but Hugo has in mind something else, something so politically and intellectually bold that one wonders how he escaped more time in prison. Hugo was a radical, and a free thinker, and he conveyed his ideas across Europe – if readers acquired an early edition. The muffled piano key is not the end of his introduction. Hugo asks what can have made the lovers guilty, what invited their tragedy, and he answers with a complex peroration about the guilt of having

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been born into an unjust world where good invites evil, where iniquitous societies exaggerate human imperfection, where ill will triumphs over good. Hugo’s last sentence asserts that the true author of the play’s tragic end is not Shakespeare, but God (84). These are fighting words, and it is to words that I want now to turn.

IV: The Semantic Moment The example I have just given has implications which have to do with arguments in certain times and places, questions of moment; how they attract attention, stamping their hollow feet and demanding an answer, within agreed presuppositions. The Hugo family business included the excoriation of tyranny; they wrote boldly, and enlisted Shakespeare in their cause. In the mid-century moment, François-Victor Hugo was the right man in the right spot, not just because the Romantic battle over Shakespeare had achieved such leverage, but because the politics of mid-century, with the institutional crises of monarch, constitution and church made that leverage powerful in attacks against autocracies; that is, not just a stick with which to beat supposedly sterile academicism. Supposedly sterile academicism is always a sign of a greater malaise. From outside France’s inward-looking culture, Shakespeare offered one of the world’s most powerful examples of external legitimation. Hugo punctuated his introductions with clarion calls to political freedom, and to freedom of thought. As we might now say, the paratext thundered. It is not Shakespeare, but it spoke to believers in liberty and independence and free nations all over Europe. Like much Romantic polemic, it cast itself as addressing theatre characterized as backward-looking or trivial. Verdi found Hugo a reinforcement of the multiplicity he achieved both in Otello and in his last opera, Falstaff, which I shall not discuss here. We cannot always be as certain as we are here of influence. Verdi shared the Hugos’ hatred of tyranny, whether in State or Church. Thus far I have made some striking claims about Hugo as a scholar and critic. Let me now turn to the close work of the translations. How revolutionary are they at the micro level? The more closely I study Hugo, the more impressive I find his variations; Hugo’s consistency may have to do with the speed with which he translated, but it must also have to do with a global vision of Shakespeare’s language. The consistencies disappear when someone, like Derrida, simply substitutes a word he prefers, wiping away a speck from the window. It would, after all, be unusual (outside, perhaps,

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Biblical translations) to attend to the minutiae of the target language as managed by a particular translator, that linguistic glazier. Given the moment of the French language in the middle of the nineteenth century, not just in terms of rhetorical presuppositions about decorum, but in terms of available vocabulary, my first impression was that Hugo was imbricated in French Catholic language of transcendence, sacral kingship, sacrifice, and so forth. I expected that the implications of this might take us back to Shakespeare’s English to think more carefully about semantic change in his time, too, and how hard it sometimes is to be exact about shades of meaning – as it is in the slides among meanings – in the example from Othello. This is hardly the moment to expand on this assertion, but Shakespeare’s own usage varies, sometimes according to status, sometimes to his archaizing speech, old-fashioned or rustic character. Relatively invariable examples include inherited season- or holiday-marking vocabularies, which retained their Catholic names. More variable examples might be the ways a lower status character addresses a superior with deference, whether it is Emilia (a confidential domestic servant and a woman) urgently demanding permission to speak or Cornwall’s lifelong servant rebelling at the blinding of Gloucester. At this point in my research I am clear that Hugo does find – despite the limitations of French conceptual terminology – a broad non-Catholic field of reference in the world of classical antiquity, including Leontes’ appeal to Apollo’s oracle.50 One area of difference may be that between Catholics and Protestants, with their different assumptions built into the Catholic vocabulary of accident and substance, immanence and transcendence. The Hugo family may have opposed the Catholic hierarchy and proudly considered themselves non-believers, but the French language was not so easily liberated from its Catholic vocabulary. This assertion can best be illustrated by comparing translations. When Dominique Goy-Blanquet quotes ‘mon divin silence’ (Coriolanus II.i.175) she returns the ‘grace’ to ‘My gracious silence, hail’.51 Shakespeare sometimes reawakens ‘grace’ in ‘gracious’, in Measure emphatically so, but also, in the ostensibly non-Christian-context plays, Errors, Winter’s Tale, Titus and Cymbeline, where ‘grace’ can imply ‘mercy’. G. R. Hibbard’s Penguin (1965) gives ‘lovely’ (II.i.168, 210); Philip Brockbank’s Arden (1976) has only a quotation about ‘silence’ at II.i.174 (which he also discusses in his Introduction, 60); but R. B. Parker’s Oxford edition (1994) has a diffident gloss at II.I.171, ‘b) spiritually beneficent?’ (215). In the final scene (Hugo’s XIII) of The Winter’s Tale, the companion play to Othello in the first of the two volumes of ‘Les Jaloux’, French Paulina says: ‘Il est nécessaire que vous appeliez à vous toute votre foi’ (‘you must

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call upon all your faith’ rather than ‘it is required you do awake your faith’). Here Hugo is less implicated in the language of Christian belief than is Shakespeare. This usage is consistent with his A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Volume II, Fééries, where he explained to his readers that in the face of ‘Fairies’ sixteenth-century Englishmen experienced a double emotion of admiration and, precisely, faith (II.8). His other choices in this scene are matter-of-fact: ‘nouvelles surprises’ for ‘more amazement’ and ‘stupéfaction’ for ‘marvel’; Hermione is ‘délivrée’, delivered, rather than redeemed; her actions are ‘innocentes’ rather than ‘holy’; her gaze upon Polixenes was ‘pur’, not Shakespeare’s ‘holy’. Only when the dead queen speaks to ask the gods’ blessings upon her daughter do Hugo’s choices approach Shakespeare’s, though he has ‘urnes’ rather than ‘vials’. Hugo’s consistency was not accident, but a careful, deliberate production of a series of registers for Shakespeare’s characters. The implications of this tiny point seem to me to spread in numerous directions, not all to do with different flavours of Christianity. Again I return to the historical imagination, and the Roman-ness or otherwise of the Roman plays. Inadequately Roman, says Germaine Landré in a 1965 Garnier-Flammarion paperback reissue of the Hugo translations, although Hugo makes Titus respond to Tamora’s demand for mercy for her son thus: Contenez-vous, Madame, et pardonnez-moi. Voici les frères vivants de ceux que vous, les Goths, vous avez vus mourir; pour leurs frères égorgés ils demandent religieusement un sacrifice. Votre fils est marqué pour cet holocauste; et il faut qu’il meure, pour apaiser les ombres gémissantes de ceux qui ne sont plus. (I.i, 34)52 The shock of ‘holocaust’ reminds us that etymologically Hugo has chosen an old word for sacrifice. Titus says Patient yourself, madam, and pardon me. These are their brethren whom your Goths beheld Alive and dead, and for their brethren slain Religiously they ask a sacrifice; To this your son is marked, and die he must, T’appease their groaning shadows that are gone. (I.i.120–6) Titus is old-fashioned, and his status as a kind of throwback is marked by the way he speaks, consistently with Shakespeare’s archaizing elsewhere. ‘Patient’ is what we must ‘be’: it is an adjective or, less frequently, a noun.

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It is nowhere else in Shakespeare a reflexive verb. As for the lexical forms of ‘brethren’, nine of Shakespeare’s twenty uses come in Titus, and most of them are Titus’. And, just one more detail, the idea of the day when a person was alive-and-dead is a standard Middle English locution, and I take it that Titus’ use of it here is one of those apparent archaisms that characterize him, as they do Gower in Pericles. Like Spenser, Shakespeare has an eye to older forms in English. After all that, the ironies which abound in ‘religiously’ are almost an anti-climax. Hugo was over-translating, and making Titus more Roman, not less; his translation also asks about ideas of romanitas in societies such as Hugo’s when classical languages still reigned in schools as well as societies whose own classical theatre is predicated upon neoclassical plays. Later editions, up to and including the Garnier ‘Complete’, ignored or belittled Hugo’s textual work. Nonetheless, it was not ridiculous to reject the idea that Shakespeare’s construction was in scenes rather than acts; in every age we are sensitive to the loyalty readers continue to ascribe to what has become familiar in reading and hearing, with traditional vocabulary, even in secular texts. The relatively recent use of TLN, throughline-numbering, has inspired resistance and remains a scholarly rather than a popular reference. Then, of course, there is sensitivity to register, something hard to acquire, hard to teach, hard to translate. And translations, famously, date and require replacement. Hugo’s translations are now harder for audiences to understand than the vibrant contemporary translations of, say, Jean-Michel Déprats, or the estrangement effects of the director Stuart Seide, whose own translations are not afraid sometimes to feel like translations, reminding audiences that Shakespeare is not French, while helping French theatres to achieve what Verdi described as the true end of his work: to fill the house.53 Editions after the first two appeared in a variety of forms which preserved only his thoughtful, accurate prose, with new prefaces written in ignorance of Hugo’s original arrangements and introductions. Hugo’s prose, which by now has just enough archaism to offer an appropriate historical distance, is a very good not-Shakespeare, and holds the stage. Some might say, too much so. Readers who had the good fortune to obtain an early multi-volume edition were sometimes – like Verdi – offered stimulating innovations in many directions, something it really is no exaggeration to call revolutionary. But the edition did not survive the three-fold shock of Hugo’s revolutionary introduction; his original rearrangements by theme which so convincingly called traditional genre categories into question; and his brilliant insistence that Shakespeare thought in scenes rather than in acts,

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the first great editorial breakthrough to have come from outside the British Isles. Resistance – not just publishers’ resistance – stimulated conservative outcry and the suppression of his paratextual triumph. Rather like other conservative backlashes, readers’ resistance to something ignorantly perceived as inauthentic, editorially and socially radical, led to the failure of the edition. But the failure of the edition did not extend to the failure of the translations. Verdi and Boito took full advantage of Hugo’s Jaloux as they did of Les Joyeuses épouses de Windsor in the volume called ‘Les Farces’. But later readers and writers were not always so fortunate. Hugo’s transforming work was itself undone, de-metamorphosed, into something more familiar, increasingly less an inspiration against academicism, and apparently more safe than Hugo’s brilliant secularizing choices intended it to be. Cocooned in new introductions, of sometimes remarkable conservatism, throughout the twentieth century, by editors who treated Hugo as a mere window, it was returned to the acceptable, the received text, the traditional ideas of the bard and his works. We think of breakthroughs in understanding as forward-looking progress, but they need not be. Hugo’s translation was a lost opportunity, remade into presentations not progressive at all, and absorbed into his father’s penumbra – the son’s achievement was often ignorantly ascribed to his father.

The Hugos and their Influence As Victor Hugo was absorbed into the French Pantheon of Great Men, the complexities of his biography and of some of his essays faded from view as he became part of le patrimoine, the cultural heritage of France. His sprawling Romantic novels, originally driven by his opposition to tyranny and his desire for some degree of social justice, became so much exam fodder, with little attention to the politics of what he wrote. Slowly his passion against tyranny faded, too, especially for international readers, for whom the novels were historical fictions as in Quatre-vingt treize. Notre Dame de Paris, with its grotesques and its final tragic melodrama, became a happy hunchback cartoon romance, rather than an outcry against the destruction of the architectural history of Paris by a despot who wanted boulevards too wide for the people’s barricades. People forgot Hugo’s absorption of Scott, and through Scott, Shakespeare, in his creation of a socially broad history of France, Les Misérables; Hugo is now known for a long-running musical

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comedy of the same name. He inspired and annoyed Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Pasternak; Cocteau and Sartre; Stevenson and Ford Madox Ford; and André Gide caught the combination of attitudes in his reply to the question who was France’s greatest poet, ‘Victor Hugo, hélas’. But these are gloom-laden simplifications. The life of a book is unpredictable and its contents sometimes work in mysterious ways. As I have spoken and corresponded with Shakespeare scholars all over Europe and South America, I am impressed by how often François-Victor’s translations can be found as unsuspected intermediaries, invisible chainlines of influence.54 There was no convention of naming him. Aimé Césaire used Hugo’s translation of The Tempest, which he probably first read at school. As Ann Pasternak Slater shows, Pasternak found William Shakespeare moving and a solace, and went back to its pages many times. One does not often associate Victor Hugo with Brecht, but in the context of this volume it is not absurd to recognize the importance of finding sources to legitimate not only the theatre in other countries, but the expression of social protest by appeal to greatness elsewhere. The Hugos were not the first to recruit Shakespeare to the progressive cause, but they were, in their different ways, among the most successful. François-Victor’s criticism supplemented the family polemics not only for Verdi, but elsewhere, and I shall end with a striking example. The widespread belief that Shakespeare’s plays were a force for resistance to tyranny, and thus useful as a cover to outwit censorship, could also be used to insist that his tragic vision was ultimately pessimistic, that his personal views coincided with those of the plays’ characters and culminations, especially bad ones. A surprising example of the influence of the Hugos was less their immediate effect on the Polish director, Jan Kott, than Kott’s influence on critics and directors all over the world. What follows is additional to the essays in Volume XIII of this series by Madalina Nicolaescu and Zoltán Márkus.55 Kott’s book was translated into French two years before it appeared in English with a preface by Peter Brook. From the mid-1960s, Kott’s interpretations had a huge vogue, partly – in anglophone countries – due to their being taken up by Brook, who emphasized Kott’s sincerity and authenticity: ‘Kott is undoubtedly the only writer on Elizabethan matters who assumes without question that everyone [sic] of his readers will at some point or other have been woken by the police in the middle of the night.’56 Kott’s chief critical contribution to Shakespeare studies and performance was his insistence on Shakespeare’s dramatization of a ‘Grand Mechanism’, a metaphor whose strength came from its appeal to

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the machines of the industrial revolution and the industrialized slaughters and murders of mid-century Europe. That is, Kott used an evaluativedescriptive phrase which substituted for earlier idea of fate, necessity, or those philosophical ideas that had progressively renamed Judaeo-Christian ‘Providence’ as a world-organic spirit (Hegel’s ‘Geist), or Marx’s ‘History’. Marx’s well-known reflection on history’s repetitions (that they come the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce) comes in reference to Hegel, and uses theatrical vocabulary which is also to be found in Hugo.57 If one reads Shakespeare Our Contemporary in an English translation, the chainlines are too faint to read. Hugo’s presence is first apparent in the essay on Lear and Endgame, especially at the end of the essay’s first section, where he refers only to the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski and not to Marx on Hegel nor Victor Hugo’s Cromwell preface or his William Shakespeare. This may only be an example of ideas that have become familiar over time, until nobody remembers who first associated grotesque drama with the success of Romantic Tragedy. Nevertheless, ideas about the ‘grotesque’ and the ‘absurd’ pepper Shakespeare Our Contemporary. More surprising for the purposes of this chapter, though, is the invisible influence of François-Victor Hugo’s first edition introduction to the volume he called ‘Les Tyrans’. This volume grouped Macbeth, King John and Richard III, in an order determined by the idea of Richard III as a kind of culmination: ‘Richard et Jean sont encore des tyrans primitifs; Richard, c’est déjà le despote moderne’ (65) [Richard and John are still primitive tyrants; Richard is already a modern despot]. There seems to be no way to prove that Kott read the son as he evidently read the father. But at the time he began reading Shakespeare, after the war, his French was much better than his English; he spent time in Paris using the Sorbonne library, and, intellectually, he was always drawn to France. François-Victor Hugo’s most dramatic influence may have been to help Kott make Shakespeare his contemporary, and I offer some evidence from the introduction to the volume, Les Tyrans: Dans les trois pièces, un prince assassine son parent et usurpe la couronne; puis il règne, ne se soutenant sur le trône que par le meurtre; puis il est trahi par ceux qui le servent; puis il est attaqué par un prétendant que les peuples suscitent contre lui; puis il risque une lutte décisive où il succombe. (57) [In all three plays, a prince assassinates his relative and usurps the crown; then he reigns, only maintaining himself on the throne by murder; then

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he is betrayed by those who serve him; then he is attacked by a pretender whom the people support against him; then he gambles on a final battle where he succumbs.] François-Victor’s picture here is of Shakespeare’s repeated portraits of tyrants; it is partial. He sees perfectly well the playwright’s condemnation of these men. He continues, speaking directly to his contemporaries, in Shakespeare’s name: De toutes les oppressions, la plus hideuse, la plus exécrable, le plus digne de la malédiction de Dieu et des hommes, c’est l’oppression moderne, c’est cette oppression qui associe à son triomphe la civilisation elle-même; c’est cette oppression qui simule toutes les vertus, affecte tous les mérites, et qui, égoïste toujours, a toujours à la bouche ces grands mots du désintéressement: ordre, religion, progrès…. Mais, à une époque différente, quand la raison est pleinement développée, quand le droit est reconnu, quand la conscience humaine existe, massacrer des hommes, tuer des enfants, rompre la foi jurée, déchirer les contrats inviolables, prendre les peuples en traître, et puis après régner au nom du bien publique, ah! tu as raison, Shakespeare, c’est monstrueux! (65) [Of all oppressions, the most hideous, the most execrable, that most merits the curse of God and men, is modern oppression, that oppression which associates its triumph with civilization itself; that oppression which simulates all virtues; pretends to all merits, and which, always egotistically, has a mouth full of the great language of disinterestness: order, religion, progress…. But, in a different era, when Reason is fully developed, which recognizes the Law, when human conscience exists, massacring men, killing children, breaking sworn faith, ripping up unbreakable contracts, accusing the people of treason, and then insisting that it is for the public good – Ah, Shakespeare, you are right, it’s monstrous!] Hugo is in no doubt that Shakespeare has no mercy upon the offenders; that he brings his tyrants before the judgement of the people – his audience – and that he expects their condemnation. Hugo’s order sees Richard III as the culmination of the motor of ‘Implacable Equity’, his word for impartial justice, as ‘History’. Kott’s idea is intensely public and his Fall of Princes intensely predicated on a ‘mechanism’ he never defines. His ‘history’ crushes anyone whose ambition sets them upon the turning wheel, now a wheel with cogs and gear, of course, by contrast to the

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traditional icon of Fortune. For him there is no escape from the horrors of tyranny. After the horrors of World War II, the inescapable knowledge of mass murder dehumanized on an industrial scale, pervaded European life and thought, and brought the label, ‘Absurd’ to movements in the theatre whose greatest expression – as Kott recognized – was Beckett’s. But before that, ‘le grotesque’, darkness risible, was the Hugos’.58

Figure 1:  ‘“Maison de Shakespeare à Stratford sur l’Avon” donné à mon cher petit Victor, V.H., 8 octobre 1860’.

Appendix Œuvres Complèts de Shakespeare, 15 volumes (Paris, Pagnerre, 1859–65) François-Victor Hugo (1828–73), editor and translator 1859 I. Les Deux Hamlet [Quarto 1603, Quarto 1604] II. Fééries Le Songe d’une Nuit d’été, La Tempête

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III. Les Tyrans Le Roi Jean, Richard III, Macbeth [Hugo’s alternative title was ‘Le Talion’ (p. 57)] IV. Les Jaloux I Troylus et Cressida, Beaucoup de Bruit pour rien, Le Conte d’Hiver 1860 V. Les Jaloux II Cymbeline, Othello VI. Les Comédies d’amour La Sauvage apprivoisée [now usually La Mégère apprivoisée], Tout est bien qui finit bien, Peines d’amour perdues VII. Les Amants Tragiques Antoine et Cléopâtre, Roméo et Juliette 1861 VIII. Les Amis Les Deux Gentilshommes de Vérone, La Marchand de Venise, Comme il vous plaira IX. La Famille Coriolan, Le Roi Lear 1862 X. La Société Mesure pour Mesure, Timon d’Athènes, Jules César 1863 XI. La Patrie I Richard II, Henry IV (première partie), Henry IV (deuxième partie) XII. La Patrie II Henry V, Henry VI (première partie) XIII. La Patrie III Henry VI (deuxième partie), Henry V (troisième partie), Henry VIII

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1864 XIV. Les Farces Joyeuses épouses de Windsor [now usually Les Joyeuses Commères de Windsor], La Comédie des erreurs, Le Soir des rois 1865 XV. Sonnets (reprinted, orig. 1857), Poèmes, Testament This volume also contains an ‘afterword’, by Victor Hugo (not to be confused with his book, William Shakespeare) 1866 Les Apocryphes I. Titus Andronicus, Une Tragédie dans l’Yorkshire, Les Deux Nobles Parents II. Péricles, Edouard III, Ardon de Feversham III. La tragédie de Locrine, Le Fils aîné du Roi Brutus; La Vie et la mort de Thomas Lord Cromwell; Le Prodigue de Londres; La Puritaine our la Veuve de Watling Street

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Chapter 2

Indirect Dissidence, Shakespeare, and Pasternak Ann Pasternak Slater

Between 1936 and 1950 Boris Pasternak translated three Shakespearean sonnets, two songs, six of his tragedies, and the two parts of King Henry IV into Russian. During Stalin’s tyranny, translation was the safest, and the least dishonourable literary occupation open to Soviet authors. Like children’s literature, the other option, it allowed a legitimate escape from the present. Inevitably, it was also an oblique reflection of that present. Among the books left behind after Pasternak’s death is a copy of Shakespeare’s tragedies in an Everyman edition.1 On the fly-leaf, Pasternak has copied out and dated seven lines from Henry IV, in his neatest hand: There is a history in all men’s lives Figuring the nature of the times deceas’d, The which observed a man may prophesy, With a near aim of the main chance of things As yet not come to life, which in their seeds And weak beginnings, lie intreasured. Such things become the hatch and brood of times. The chronicle of Henry the Forth [sic] Part 2, III, 1, 80. Chistopol, June, 1943 For Shakespeare, then, the past was predictive. For Pasternak likewise. Shakespeare’s past prefigured Pasternak’s present. We are lucky, now, to have no remotely adequate feeling for what Pasternak and his contemporaries lived through in Stalin’s reign. A résumé of those years can provide some sense of the personal context essential to understanding Pasternak’s engagement with Shakespeare.

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I Cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d 1936–46 In 1936, Pasternak signed a contract for his first book of translations, from the poetry of Kleist and Rilke. The collection, which was postponed and ultimately reconfigured, emerged in 1940 with versions of largely anodyne poems by Shakespeare, Raleigh, Byron, Keats, and other European writers.2 Pasternak’s son tells us that Boris’ original reasons for turning to translation were his anxieties about the survival of European culture, and his bitter sense of severance from his own family.3 In 1921, after the Revolution, civil war, and during the first famine of the Soviet era, Pasternak’s parents and two younger sisters left Moscow for Germany. Boris’ father, Leonid Pasternak, was a leading Russian artist of the old school, illustrator and friend of Tolstoy, portraitist of the major writers, musicians and artists of his time. For Boris he embodied precisely that wide European culture which was now visibly under threat. In the Nazi book-burnings of 1933 the works of Babel, Brecht, Darwin, Ehrenburg, Einstein, Engels, Freud, Gide, Gorki, Heine, Hemingway, Kafka, Lenin, Lukács, Marx, Mayakovsky, Musil, Proust, Schnitzler, Trotsky, Wells, Zola and Zweig (among others) were put to the flames. In the USSR Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930. His death coincided with the official creation of the government agency directing penal labour camps, whose acronym was GULAG. (In the same year Pasternak was refused permission to visit his parents in Germany.) In 1934 the poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested; Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova interceded effectively with Bukharin, then the editor of Izvestia, on his behalf. Pasternak received a telephone call from Stalin, to which I will return. In 1935 Anna Akhmatova’s former partner, the Futurist art critic and historian Nikolai Punin, and Lev Gumilev, her son by the poet Nikolai Gumilev, were arrested. Pasternak and Akhmatova interceded successfully with Stalin himself, on their behalf. According to Alexander Gladkov, a young friend of Pasternak’s, even the arrest of Mandelstam ‘had not caused any particular alarm. It was only after the death of Gorki in the summer of 1936 that things began to get out of hand’.4 Mandelstam was one of the thousands arrested again in 1938, and died in a transit camp on his way to Siberia. Anxieties about the Nazi and Communist destruction of contemporary culture were widely shared. Yet neither side of the Pasternak family could

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correspond openly about such things. Censorship in Russia was a present and feared reality; in Germany it was an uncertain dread. Consequently in 1936 Pasternak wrote to his father, now trying to make arrangements to flee Nazi Germany for Moscow, naming ‘your landlady’s sickness’ as necessitating the move. But, while welcoming his (Jewish) family’s return, Boris also needed to get across a sense of danger that could have been fatal to describe openly. The 1936 correspondence crosscuts his longing to see his parents with the difficulty of explaining what present-day life in Russia is like. Letters are abandoned ‘because I found myself analysing or describing things that are difficult to understand at a distance’. He has no faith in ‘the possibility of any common language between an artist (as pure and talented as Papa) and the present time’. Another euphemism. State propaganda, voiced by a family friend encouraging the parents’ return to Moscow, is not to be trusted. It is ‘all stale lies, fairy tales for children’.5 At the same time Pasternak was suffering from material well-being: at the age of forty-six he had been allotted a dacha in the writers’ village of Peredelkino, outside Moscow. Living in a beautiful, rural and ‘outwardly luxurious environment’ exacerbated his ‘feelings of loneliness, death, and treachery in my soul’. His letters must always be read with an ear cocked to the sub-text. In ‘an atmosphere of greed and philistinism,’ he tells his father, ‘village customs’ (another euphemism) are ‘far from being harmless or innocent […] Things can’t go on like this, and that weighs on me’ (Family, 308, 310; September 1936). Pasternak’s oppressive sense of his own frail good fortune is well explained by Max Hayward, the first co-translator of Doctor Zhivago, in a long discussion of Pasternak’s apparent and unintentional special relationship with Stalin. Hayward points out that this may have originated with Pasternak’s note of condolence on the death of Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin’s wife, who shot herself, in protest or depressive reaction against the appalling consequences of collectivization, in 1932. In comparison with the trite and manifestly insincere letter published by thirty-three signatories from the Union of Writers (six of whom were liquidated a few years later), Pasternak appended his own, independent message, which Hayward calls ‘astounding’ in both its casual tone and idiosyncratic content: I share the feelings of the comrades. The day before [the announcement of Alliluyeva’s death] I thought, as a poet, deeply and intensively about Stalin – for the first time. Next morning I read the news. I was shaken, as though I had been there, living by his side, and had seen it. Boris Pasternak.

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Hayward comments: It is impossible to convey the quality of the original in translation. There is an absolute minimum of words – pronouns and auxiliary parts of speech are left out, as in a telegram. Yet – perhaps because of this, and the total lack of sycophancy – it creates an impression of genuine compassion. To anyone familiar with the stylized manner of such pronouncements in the Soviet press, even in those early days of the ‘cult of personality’, it will seem well nigh impossible that something as eccentric as this could have appeared in print. Quite apart from the pointed gesture of dissociation from the other ‘comrades’, there is an almost sacrilegious note in the phrase about having thought about Stalin ‘for the first time’. And why ‘as a poet’? Most extraordinary of all is the suggestion that Pasternak had a premonition of Alliluyeva’s death – a hint of ‘mysticism’ surely unparalleled in a context of such a kind. Koriakov believes that it was this which must have somehow have awakened in Stalin a superstitious feeling that Pasternak, as a poet, was gifted with second sight.6 Hayward conjectures that this incident may have been the source of Pasternak’s curious relationship with Stalin, which culminated in the famous telephone call. In the spring of 1934 Mandelstam had been arrested for a poem directly and most unflatteringly describing Stalin as a gleeful cockroach in gleaming topboots, a greasy-fingered assassin surrounded by a whinnying gaggle of sycophantic half-men. Instead of execution, Mandelstam was sentenced to exile in the Urals. In June 1934 Stalin rang Pasternak. Reports on the phone call differ; Hayward speculates that it was to convey that Pasternak’s pleas on Mandelstam’s behalf had been heard. Pasternak’s son, Evgeny, is clear that it was to subject Pasternak to a three-minute interrogation about Mandelstam .7 After an exchange about Mandelstam, Pasternak said he would like to meet Stalin and have a talk with him. ‘About what?’ Stalin asked. ‘About life and death,’ Pasternak replied. At this point Stalin hung up. Pasternak’s desperate and rather comic attempt to get back to Stalin via the Kremlin switchboard was fruitless […] It is clear that in his ingenuous and trusting way he felt he might somehow have been able to influence Stalin, to open his eyes to what was going on in the country. (Hayward, 16) The main thing going on in the country was famine in the Ukraine. Chillingly known as the Holodomor, genocide by starvation, the

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institutionalized famine was caused by the liquidation of the so-called ‘kulaks’, collectivization, and Stalin’s First Five Year Plan. Between four and five million people died between 1932–3 and in the next years the birth rate plummeted. Figures are approximate because the Soviet census of 1937 was declared invalid in an attempted cover-up. 8 Pasternak refers covertly to Stalin’s phone call in a letter to his father on 23 June 1934: The one thing that saves me is that everybody treats me very well – people from the most diverse and diametrically opposed sections of society. Last week I even received a telephone call (for the first time in my life) from St. himself. You can have no conception what that means. I didn’t even tell Zheniochek [his son] about it… (Family, 266; 23 June 1934) The submerged comedy of Pasternak trying to engage Stalin on questions of life and death, his absurd pursuit of the fleeing tyrant on the line, are distinctly suggestive of Hamlet’s buffoonery. Pasternak was well known and revered for what Hayward calls ‘his extreme spontaneity, the almost childlike directness and lack of guile’ which won him wide respect and affection, and which may well have impressed the morbidly suspicious Stalin more than all his whinnying yes-men. Yet in 1936, the year from which my account began, Pasternak was right to fear that ‘Things can’t go on like this’. The first Moscow Show ‘Trial of Sixteen’ was held in August 1936; all were executed. These were the ominous village customs to which Pasternak had referred so blandly. In the second Show Trial of January 1937, thirteen of the seventeen defendants were executed. In June came the Secret Trial and execution of Tukhachevsky and the Red Army Generals. (With considerable courage, Pasternak refused to sign the petition for their execution.) In July the Great Purge began. The NKVD Orders nn. 00447 and 00486 set nationwide quotas for the execution and enslavement of ‘anti-Soviet elements’. Relatives of the accused were condemned to labour camps. In 1938 the Show ‘Trial of the Twenty-One’ put Bukharin and all twenty co-defendants to death. Conservative estimates judge that about 1,000 victims a day, totalling some 1.2 million, were executed in the Great Purge of 1937–8. The Soviet population was reduced to informers, informers’ victims, and victimized informers. Boris’ émigré parents and sisters were an ample single pretext for his liquidation. Yet he continued to write to the ‘anti-Soviet elements’ that were his family abroad. How could Pasternak convey these dangers to his father, who was deep in negotiations for an exhibition of his work on his imminent, and certainly

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fatal return to Moscow? In November 1936, the official organizing Leonid’s exhibition was arrested, and subsequently died an unrecorded death. His name was unusual: Juvenal Mitrofanovich Slavinsky. Now Boris writes his most intensely, urgently minatory letter to his parents. He laces neutral information about the flat he has just acquired for his parents with advice that their travel plans should not to be influenced by the purchase. There are frequent suggestions of unexplained anxiety: ‘Accustomed as I am to living in a constant state of alarm and tension…’ How difficult it is to understand someone. Each time I’m due to visit town my anxiety reaches a peak. What will be the latest news from you? Is Zhenia [his ex-wife, living in Moscow] all right? […] How difficult [creative work] has always been, and how immeasurably more difficult it has become in our day, all the world over. So don’t be surprised if you don’t get a reply to this summer’s ongoing correspondence about an exhibition. (Family, 313; 24 November 1936) The italics are mine. Boris couldn’t allow himself that luxury. And Leonid probably didn’t realise that the next paragraph was underscoring, as heavily as Boris knew how, the subtext that couldn’t be voiced. He switches, directly and without explanation, to a historic parallel, the natural gloss to contemporary events that the censor would be unlikely to understand. In these inexplicable remarks the name of Leonid’s middleman is repeatedly encrypted. Oh what a powerful thing history is. Here I am, reading Michelet’s 20-volume ‘Histoire de France’. At present I’m on Volume 6, covering the terrible period of Charles VI and Charles VII, with Joan of Arc and her trial and burning at the stake. Michelet quotes page after page from the original sources, the ‘Chronique de Charles VI’, by the contemporary politician and ‘prévôt des marchands’, Juvenal des Ursins. Where is that Juvenal now, who can say? – yet here I am, reading his chronicle, half a thousand years old, and my hair stands on end with horror. That contemporary gained fame9 by writing down what he lived through, despite spending an age imprisoned in the Tour de Nesle, which might have led cynics to regard him as a naïve little Mitrofanushka.10 And the Roman Juvenal has gone too … why am I going on about them? Why indeed. Bold and italic scripts are mine again. It’s unlikely that Leonid understood; he wrote to Boris’ brother Alexander, in a tone of offended

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bafflement, complaining that ‘Borya doesn’t seem to want me in Moscow’. Even Boris’ own son only came to understand the significance of this bizarre paragraph, apparently quite à propos des bottes, in the 1990s, when he was editing Boris’ correspondence. In fact the paragraph raises connotations that reverberate beyond its immediate context. Boris was also to gain fame, like Juvenal des Ursins, by writing down what he had lived through in Doctor Zhivago, despite his incarceration in the larger penal cell of the Soviet Union. He, too, was regarded by his contemporaries as a naïve little Mitrofanushka, a holy idiot protected by his own innocence. And the tangential but urgent implications of Michelet’s history – that the past is present – will be recognized by author and readers alike, in Pasternak’s translations of Shakespeare. In the terrible years of 1937–9 Boris’ letters to his parents shut down on any external events. In 1937, Paolo Yashvili committed suicide and Titsian Tabidze was executed. The two Georgian poets were among Pasternak’s closest friends. The writer Boris Pilnyak was arrested and died in custody. Worse than this, in Leningrad the son of Leonid’s sister, Sasha Freidenberg, was arrested in 1937, and shot in 1938. The first Boris knew about this was in 1937, when Sasha’s mother, his aunt Asya, refused to open her door to one of the Muscovite Pasternaks, cursing Boris, his brother, and all their clan – ‘all this to the accompaniment of sobbing behind the door, and signs of the most genuine, indescribable suffering’, and no explanation of the cause of her misery. Suspicions of treacherous denunciation by friends and family were endemic in these times, when people disappeared without trace overnight. Nor could the suspicions ever be safely clarified: causes and outcomes both remained unknown, and Sasha’s family, like so many others, were never formally informed of his death. In the Pasternaks’ case, it took two years to mend the breach and learn something of its cause. Finally, in 1939 Boris ventured to write to his sister Lydia, briefly retailing the two-year-old story of inexplicable tears and curses behind a closed door, concluding lightly that Aunt Asya’s ‘main affliction was Sashka Konfaind; furthermore, she was losing her sight’. But now Aunt Asya had had a cataract operation, her sight was returned, and all was well between the two families… I doubt whether this coded message was understood any better than Juvenal des Ursins and the naïve little Mitrofanushka, even though this time Boris did do his own underlining. In Boris’ Russian script Sashka Konfaind looks like a name, odd enough to attract attention, maybe, but not meaningful to a censor – nor to any other reader unversed in Jacobean English, or unfamiliar with Hamlet and Macbeth.11

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- Denmark’s a prison. - Then is the world one. - A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one of the worst. I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in To saucy doubts and fears. Pasternak also used the trivial illnesses of a normal family correspondence to introduce a much clearer warning to his parents. With some irony he apologizes for not having responded to the news that his mother has hurt her leg and is in bed with a cold, continuing: And indeed these are anxious times, not only as regards family events. The general tension creates so much suspicion on all sides that the mere fact of an entirely innocent correspondence with one’s family abroad sometimes causes misunderstandings and forces one to abstain […] But I can’t entirely give up getting news from you, or giving you signs of my own existence. (Family, 320–1; 30 October 1937) Thereafter his few letters are scrupulously upbeat, to reassure his parents, and anodyne, to reassure state spies. He describes the joys of autumnal life in Peredelkino, collecting firewood from the forest, naked November dips in the freezing local pond, the simple physical privations he has always enjoyed. In the New Year his second son, by his second wife, is born on the stroke of midnight, the first Muscovite child of 1938. Walking back through the poorest districts at five in the morning of a hard Christmas frost, he finds himself relishing old memories in the familiar streets. I had no idea that so many people get up and switch on their lights at this hour […] People with artistic temperament are always drawn to the poor, to those whose lot is humble and difficult; everything is warmer and more mature there; there’s more soul and colour than anywhere else in the world. […] My happiest memories are of the difficult, hard-up periods of my life – they have more earth, more colour, more of a Rembrandt character. I need life to subject me to hardship.12 Mere physical hardship was the least of his fears. Even that promised to be alleviated when, in the spring of 1939, he was approached by the theatre

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director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, to translate Hamlet for the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Leningrad. By then his parents had safely fled from Germany to England, taking both their daughters and families with them. From this point onwards, until his last translation, of Macbeth in 1950, Pasternak was able to find some refuge in his Shakespearean translations, despite the vicissitudes around him. No collection of his poetry was published between Second Birth, in 1931, and On Early Trains in 1943. Translating Shakespeare filled the gap, and earned him much-needed money. Initially it was a preoccupation that completely absorbed him. Later, it became more of a routine task, as the first attempts at composing a prose work – or a verse drama – on the life of his times drew him onwards to their final realization in Doctor Zhivago. * Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet brought him straight to the heart of Russia’s theatrical tradition, the Moscow Art Theatre. The theatre was co-founded by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1898, and first made its reputation with Chekhov’s The Seagull, which had originally flopped when premiered by Nemirovich-Danchenko in the Alexandrinsky Theatre in 1896. Danchenko persuaded Stanislavsky to put it on again – with great success – in the first season of the Moscow Art Theatre. Subsequently the theatre premiered Uncle Vanya and commissioned Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov and the Moscow Art Theatre had a symbiotic relationship and the seagull became the theatre’s emblem. It is still appliquéd to its curtains today. Chekhov’s wholly idiosyncratic drama was fostered by the theatre’s coherent aesthetic, based on an ensemble group trained in Stanislavsky’s method, with its focus on psychological realism and minute attention to the text. Meyerhold was a student of Nemirovich-Danchenko’s – as was Olga Knipper, later Chekhov’s wife. In the Moscow Art Theatre’s Seagull Meyerhold played Treplev to Stanislavsky’s Trigorin. Stanislavsky was so impressed by Meyerhold that he hailed him as ‘my sole heir, here or anywhere’. In 1922 Meyerhold founded and began running his own Meyerhold Theatre. Here the progressive changes inaugurated by Stanislavsky were developed into Meyerhold’s ‘biomechanics’, which bared theatrical devices and amalgamated Constructivist set-design with stylized movement deriving from Noh drama and the Commedia dell’Arte. Meyerhold worked with Mayakovsky (who wrote The Bedbug at Meyerhold’s instigation), and continued to stage Mayakovsky’s works after his suicide. He also inspired Sergei Eisenstein, who studied with him and used actors who had been trained in the

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Figure 2: Chekhov reading The Seagull to the company of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899, with Stanislavsky on Chekhov’s right, NemirovichDanchenko in the window and Meyerhold seated on the far right.

Figure 3: Pasternak, aged forty-four, with Meyerhold (centre) and André Malraux (left), 1934.

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Meyerhold school. The Disneyesque staginess of, for instance, the first part of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1942) demonstrates the distance travelled from Stanislavsky’s naturalism to Meyerhold’s circus-theatre to Eisenstein’s cartoon propaganda. Meyerhold rejected socialist realism and by the early 1930s his productions continually infringed the Stalinist veto on avant-garde art. His work was declared anti-Soviet and in 1938 his theatre was closed. The aged and ailing Stanislavsky invited Meyerhold to join him at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, where Meyerhold commissioned Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet.13 Pasternak was delighted. ‘What am I to do with my life?’ he asks his father: Admittedly, I’ve been doing nothing but translations over these past few years, but even translations can be little ones or great ones. At the beginning of the year I started work on Hamlet, and by early April I had translated two and a half acts – half the play. […] I’m doing it for a theatre […] Shakespeare – and Hamlet in particular – has probably been translated some fifteen times at least. Some of the translations are quite recent […] But if they approach me […] and pressingly urge me to do a translation, then why shouldn’t I take advantage of such a theatrical whim, even if I have no hope of standing comparison with my predecessors? It gives me an excuse to run away and hide myself in Shakespeare’s depths. And a visit there (I mean, the chance to read him slowly) is an utterly incomparable treasure. Ah, Shakespeare, Shakespeare! Even in translation! And as for the original! (Family, 334–5; 29 April 1939) He set himself a regime of a hundred to a hundred and fifty lines a day, working ten to twelve hours daily, and gave up smoking too. And then, on 20 June 1939, Meyerhold was arrested. On 15 July Meyerhold’s wife was found in their flat, dying of multiple stab wounds, including one in each eye. The flat was subsequently divided in two, one half going to the lover of Beria, head of the NKVD, and the other to Beria’s chauffeur. Within a year Meyerhold was tortured and shot. Pasternak continued working on Hamlet. On 5 August England declared war on Germany. On 22 August his mother died. The next day the Non-Aggression Pact between Russia and Germany was signed. Marina Tsvetayeva had returned to Russia from Paris, most ill-advisedly, in June. On 28 August her daughter was arrested; on 10 October her husband. On the same day, Boris finally responded to the news of his mother’s death.

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My dear, dear ones! This is the first letter that I have been able to write to you, for various reasons, after Mama’s death. It has turned my life upside down […] I can’t tell you just now about the strange and bitter events that have begun happening to me and around me, following on that blow. It aged me in an hour. A cloud of unkindness and chaos has settled over my whole existence: I’m permanently distracted, downcast and dazed from grief, astonishment, tiredness and pain. This is my mourning – which isn’t worn here – and my news bulletin – such things aren’t issued here. (Family, 346) Not for the first time, Boris sent the apologies of his first wife, and his brother, for their silence: they haven’t written ‘only because it’s so very difficult to correspond, even under such exceptional circumstances, even when we have lost someone who is dearest to us’. The next day he received a postcard from his father. It’s terrible to say so, but I went mad with joy on seeing it – I had never expected to hear from you so soon, and was feeling completely incapable of starting a new existence without Mama. I couldn’t shake off a feeling of homelessness, of time stopping, of an end – as when the cold weather takes hold, on those impenetrable black autumn evenings: and into this atmosphere your letter came […] Of course, Mama’s death alone would have been enough to knock me sideways – that goes without saying. But the news fell on prepared ground. I am mortally tired of life, its bombastic triumphalist stupidity, its boastful parading of empty appearances which it proclaims to be self-evident truths, its insatiable greed. (Family, 347) A few weeks later, in November 1939, Nemirovich-Danchenko recommissioned Pasternak’s ongoing translation of Hamlet for the Moscow Art Theatre. The theatre was already working on Hamlet in a new translation, which proved to be disappointingly lightweight. Nemirovich-Danchenko wanted a text which combined ‘contemporary, colloquial sharpness with poetry, without sacrificing philosophic significance’.14 Plans to splice the inadequate version with an academic translation were quickly jettisoned when Pasternak’s translation came to the theatre’s notice. Pasternak to his father:

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I wanted to write and tell you about the day when I read my translation to the theatre board and Nemirovich-Danchenko. First of all, he remembered every detail of your last meeting with him; but since, at his age, there’s no great difference between your own age and mine, he promoted you from being my father to my brother […] But that’s not the point. You ought to have seen that 84-year-old scamp in his boots and gaiters, with his oval-trimmed beard and not a single wrinkle on his face, running across and up the stairs to the rehearsal room where the reading was happening, sitting and listening from 2 in the afternoon to almost 7, […] eating lunch with practically no dietary restrictions, and apparently not needing a rest (which I have to have after lunch) but going on listening and discussing it all! […] They liked my translation, but it was a long time before I knew [the outcome…] This work has been an absolute salvation for me. Many things, particularly Mama’s death (the other things you don’t know about, and they would take too long to tell) would have driven me out of my mind. I achieved the aim I had set myself […] At present people like the play, but later on they’ll say – with some justification – that I’ve simplified the text.15 Pasternak was right. True to its own established practice, the theatre embarked on an extensive rehearsal period, initially setting Pasternak and the player of Hamlet, Boris Livanov, to work through the text together, improving single lines in response to Livanov’s sense of what could be spoken on stage. Fortunately Pasternak was already an enthusiastic admirer of Livanov’s acting, and they became lifelong friends. Livanov’s son Vassily describes the Moscow Art Theatre’s script, with blank facing pages for the actors’ notes. Livanov’s were scribbled over with his textual queries, and Pasternak’s suggested variants. Later, Vassily says, the family’s home was strewn with sheets of the play-text, overlaid with handwritten improvements on long strips of paper pasted in by Pasternak (a method subsequently replicated in his corrections of Doctor Zhivago) (Livanov, 28). This painstaking process continued throughout the production’s chequered history.16 Pasternak’s original reading at the Moscow Art Theatre was certainly a success. Vitaly Vilenkin, head of the theatre’s literary section, describes hearing it and then meeting Leonidov, the reluctant, proposed director of the play: [Pasternak] reads, as usual, rhythmically, with powerful gushes. There is something of Hamlet about him; he captivates you by the rhythmical quality of his delivery which seems to come from within. Leonidov

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happened to hear [some of it…] and then came to see me the following day with the words: ‘You have prevailed, O Man of Galilee… And you know what – he himself is Hamlet, he should play the role, and I will produce it.’17 In the event, Nemirovich-Danchenko ousted Leonidov, and took over the direction himself. Pasternak enjoyed his own readings as much as his auditors. In the coming years, when theatre productions as well as publication were blighted by the pressures of war and Stalin’s cultural autocracy, it was the one way he could – and resolutely did, repeatedly – reach his enthusiastic public. In a letter to his cousin Olga, he describes his own pleasure in giving that historic reading to the board of the Moscow Art Theatre: The supreme indulgence, one quite beyond compare, is to read Hamlet out loud, without cuts – even if only half of it; for three hours you feel yourself a human being in the highest sense of the word – endowed with the divine gift of words, a person in your own right, full of fire; for three hours you find yourself in spheres familiar to you from birth and from the first half of your life – and then, limp from spent energy, you fall back into the unknown, you ‘return to reality’.18 Here Boris reiterates his sense, already expressed in an earlier letter to his father, that his knowledge of Shakespeare derives from Leonid, and is part of the European culture in which he was brought up in the first half of his life.19 There is, in fact, a strong familial resemblance between Boris’ profound sense of pietas towards his father and Hamlet’s chastened humility before his father’s ghost. Both fathers embody the integrity soiled by Stalin and Claudius, corrupt despots both. Boris’ own palpable kinship with Hamlet was sensed by his contemporaries – like Leonidov – before he expressed it himself. And what irony in that final paradox! From Shakespeare’s world of eloquent intensity he falls back into the abyss of ‘reality’, the unheimlich unknown of the present, with all its inexpressible horrors. The rehearsals for Hamlet, which had filled Pasternak’s life with a new purpose, were broken off by the German invasion of Russia in June 1941. With Russia’s entry into the war, the members of the Moscow Art Theatre were evacuated from Moscow; Pasternak and his family were sent to a writers’ colony in Chistopol, a small town in the Tatarstan Republic. It was only in 1943 that both the Moscow Art Theatre company and the Pasternaks returned to Moscow and work on the interrupted production of Hamlet

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was resumed. The authority of Nemirovich-Danchenko emboldened the company to defy rumours of Stalin’s opposition to ‘Hamletism’. But Nemirovich-Danchenko died in April 1943. The production was taken over by his co-director, Sakhnovsky. For another two years Pasternak and Boris Livanov perfected the text. Costumes and sets were made; the war ended; in 1945 the last rehearsals were in progress when Sakhnovsky died. The theatre determined to open to the public regardless; Livanov was waiting in the wings in costume and make-up for the final dress rehearsal to begin, when the production was terminated without explanation. Two years later, the theatre was still storing all the materials, from scenery and costumes to detailed production notes, in the hope that the production could be revived. In vain; pleas by the theatre were simply ignored by the higher authorities. It has only recently emerged that Sakhnovsky was actually arrested in 1945, and died shortly after his release.20 The details of his arrest and death, like so many others during Stalin’s tyranny, are still unknown. It now seems probable that the deaths of not one but two of the three directors connected with this production were deliberate. Vassily Livanov’s account of this frightening history focuses on its safer side: his father’s growing comradeship in arms with Pasternak, the sketches his father made for the production, the shared frustration recorded in the letters and signed photographs each Boris – the player of Hamlet, and his author – exchanged with one another (Livanov, 23–31). Two versions of Pasternak’s translation were published. The first, in 1940, was the original translation as intended for Meyerhold’s production. It was prefaced by a translator’s note: This work needs to be judged as a Russian original dramatic production because apart from accuracy, symmetry of line with the original and so forth, there is more in it of the deliberate liberty without which there is no way of approaching great things. The second, in 1941, is a more literary version, purged of colloquialism and rustic proverbialism in accordance with the requirements of NemirovichDanchenko and his troupe. It is clearly repudiated in the author’s foreword. In publishing Hamlet in this different form, Pasternak says, The translator […] is acting under the pressure of necessity. He refers readers with taste and understanding, who are able to distinguish between truth and its appearance, to the original version.21

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A year after Stalin’s death, in April 1954, Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet was finally staged in the Alexandrinsky Theatre, as originally intended. Pasternak did not to go to the premiere, being preoccupied with the completion of Doctor Zhivago. Boris Livanov, the original Hamlet, was refused admittance to the dress rehearsal by the play’s director, Kozintsev. * Pasternak spent the first years of the war, 1941–3, principally in evacuation at Chistopol, on the river Kama, some 650 km to the east of Moscow. The town was inaccessible except by river, which froze over in winter. In spite of the war, for him this was ‘a period of vitality […], an untrammelled, joyous restoration of the sense of community with everyone’22. A number of other writers were also evacuated here; they ate in a communal canteen, shared literary evenings and, rather more than Pasternak, they socialised. Pasternak was engrossed in Shakespeare, translating Romeo and Juliet, then Antony and Cleopatra. His second wife, Zinaida worked all day in a boarding school for the children of enlisted parents, where their young son and his half-brother were accommodated. She returned in the evenings to share her allotted meal with Boris. We find a vivid picture of him at this time in the reminiscences of Alexander Gladkov, a young dramatist who first met Pasternak in the Meyerholds’ Moscow apartment in 1936. Gladkov had encountered Pasternak’s early poetry as a teenager, and gives a good sense of its power: Very soon everything published by Pasternak had become part of the equipment of my young mind. Every summer shower began to seem like a quotation from him […] Pasternak’s neo-romanticism did not summon the reader to exotic places […] but was perfectly at home with a bench on the Gogol Boulevard, a bathing-hut on the Klyazma […] He took all the familiar things he had known from childhood and turned them into poetry: the town and its streets, husks of sunflower seeds […] ‘a lilac branch / rainsodden like a sparrow’; ‘raindrops weighty as cufflinks’.23 After the long evening at the Meyerholds in 1936, Pasternak and Gladkov ran into each other at Moscow concerts. Then, shortly after Gladkov’s brother was arrested, Pasternak stopped to talk to me with quite extraordinary outspokenness. This was in the autumn of 1937, at the height of the arrests and executions. He

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talked while I listened, embarrassed by the unexpected vehemence of his diatribe […] The brevity of the entry in my notebook about this meeting is eloquent enough: ‘Gogol Boulevard, Pasternak,’ and the date… (Gladkov, 34) In the winter of 1941, Gladkov joined the literary evacuees of Chistopol. Among the grumpy company in the Litfond canteen, he found Pasternak, ‘standing out in cheerful contrast […] benevolent, trusting, absorbed in himself and his work’ (Gladkov, 50). It was a very cold winter; stacks of frozen logs had to be dragged a long way from the river to the town. Well-heeled writers hired others to do the work for them; Pasternak did it with Gladkov when the temperature was 30 degrees below. ‘I have rarely met anyone so unspoilt, and with such a capacity to endure as Pasternak,’ says Gladkov. ‘Simplicity and a modest way of life seemed to be part of his nature’ (Gladkov, 44). His diary for the six months he spent in Chistopol is full of bright, fleeting snapshots – Pasternak tapping at his window, calling him out for a walk, snapping icicles off the eaves as he waited for Gladkov to find his coat. Jacketless in the draughty, unheated Litfond canteen, correcting small sheets of his translation, an English-Russian dictionary, a pocket edition of Shakespeare, the daily ration of 222 grammes of black bread, and a bowl of thin cabbage soup growing cold beside him. Gladkov calling on Pasternak, and waiting obediently behind the closed door of his small room in lodgings: You could hear the cheerful sound of water splashing and loud spluttering noises from Pasternak. At last he opened the door and invited me in. He was in trousers and a crumpled white vest splashed with water. He continued to dress as he talked, buttoning up his shirt, putting on his collar, braces and jacket. The lowest button on the right side of his jacket hung by a thread, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The floor was flooded with water. He got a brush and mopped it up. [… The room] is of a medium size and the walls have been painted after a fashion. There is a decorative pattern of black and red birds going all the way round them in the middle. There are two beds placed together […] It is all very uncomfortable, but there is plenty of light. On the table there is a pile of large sheets of paper – this is the manuscript of his Romeo and Juliet – an old, two volume edition of Shakespeare in the original, an English dictionary, a French dictionary. There is Victor Hugo’s book on Shakespeare with many slips of paper sticking out […] One of his upper front teeth is missing. He is sprightly and vigorous.

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Figure 4: Pasternak, aged fifty-three, at his table in Chistopol, 1943. I find it very hard to put down our conversation. It was always so much easier for me to write down what Meyerhold said. Pasternak is prolix, discursive and chaotic – though everything he says has its inner logic and only the form is impressionistic or paradoxical. When he is groping for words, he makes a strange, mooing kind of sound… (Gladkov, 85–6) In spite of Gladkov’s difficulty in recreating Pasternak’s mooing monologues, he quotes aphoristic summaries, often of remarks saturated in Shakespearean thought. I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. ‘No-one can give me freedom as a gift if I do not already possess it in embryo within myself,’ Pasternak tells Gladkov: ‘Nothing is more spurious than outer freedom if one lacks inner freedom. A citizen of Chicago […] chewing over the fare provided by his newspaper or radio set, is actually less free than a philosopher in the solitary confinement of a prison cell…’ (Gladkov, 66).

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Chicago citizen, or Writers’ Union member: the pensée is deliberately deflected from its dominant context. Reading Gladkov’s account of those invigorating, absorbed days in Chistopol, one is struck by one preoccupation: the importance of maintaining simplicity and truth in a world of propaganda and betrayal. The theme recurs in Pasternak’s conversations with Gladkov as an aesthetic, rather than a moral imperative. It is one of many remarks recorded after a long walk together on 25 December 1941: What appeals to me nowadays in poetry is precision, strength, and the sort of inner restraint that clothes all personal, still warm and smouldering things – all real and uninvented private particulars – in a general, universally accessible form of expression. I dream of a style which I would call unobtrusive – a style almost as simple as the prattling of a child, and as warm and intimate as a mother’s lullaby… (Gladkov, 59) The New Year came; the plumper members of the artists’ colony arranged a well-stocked party. Gladkov went to pick up Pasternak and found him in bed, reading Victor Hugo by the light of a small oil lamp. They hadn’t thought to invite him, and he preferred to stay at home. It grew colder. By the end of January it was 53 degrees below. Gladkov called on Pasternak and found him at his desk, a coat thrown over his shoulders, reading Hugo again. ‘A treasure house of ideas,’ Pasternak called him; ‘not only about Shakespeare, but about art in general. It makes you feel like an ignorant child.’ And he began reading aloud, translating at sight: […] ‘To give to every object as much space as it needs – neither more, nor less: that is simplicity in art. To be simple means to be equitable. That is the law of true taste. Each thing must be given its due place and expressed by its proper word. On the sole condition that there is a certain hidden balance and that a certain mysterious proportion is preserved, the greatest complexity in either style or composition may prove to be simplicity.’ He stopped and looked at me triumphantly, as though inviting me to share his delight. I started to say something, but he interrupted: ‘No, wait a moment. That’s not all. Listen to this: ‘The simplicity of poetry is like that of an oak with its spreading branches. Would you say that an oak tree strikes you as too Byzantine or elaborate? Its innumerable antitheses: the massive trunk and tiny leaves,

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the hard bark and velvety moss; the light it drinks in and the shadow it casts; the branches used to crown heroes and the acorns fed to swine – are we really to believe all this speaks of artificiality, affectation and bad taste? Does it mean that the oak is rather too clever? That it is ludicrously mannered, afflicted by conceit and self-importance? Or that it belongs to the decadent school? Can it be that only a head of cabbage can lay claim to simplicity?’ (Gladkov, 62–3)24 On the same occasion Pasternak turned to Hugo’s praise of Shakespeare as a historian, translating at sight again: ‘Hamlet pretends to be mad not to make it easier to carry out his plan of revenge, but to save his life. The poet is also a magnificent historian who knew the ways of these baleful kingdoms. In those times it was woe betide the man who learned of a murder committed by a king. Voltaire surmises that Ovid was exiled from Rome because he knew something terrible about Augustus. To know that a king was a murderer was in itself a cause of high treason. A man suspected of suspecting it could count himself doomed.’ (Gladkov, 64)25 Pasternak capped this by turning to Hugo’s description of Macbeth. Gladkov mentioned that he once talked to Meyerhold about the trials of 1937–8, and Meyerhold told him to read and re-read Macbeth. P. gave a gasp, was silent for a moment, and said then: ‘No, let’s not talk about that – it’s too terrible’ – and after another pause: ‘You see how alive he is, Shakespeare; always putting terrifying associations into our heads.’ (Gladkov, 65) It’s noticeable how many of Gladkov’s conversations with Pasternak took place during walks by Chistopol’s river Kama or, later, in the streets and parks of Moscow. Even in the late 60s, long after those times, I found that it was still a routine precaution to talk about any potentially risky matters walking arm-in-arm down the city boulevards (or in the countryside). If anyone noticed an eavesdropper following, linked arms would be squeezed and the subject silently dropped. When Gladkov and Pasternak exchanged their New Year greetings in 1942, Pasternak wished him ‘everything we have spoken about so much together, and, even more, what we have been silent about’ (Gladkov, 60). *

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Pasternak’s parents and sisters, settled in England since 1938, caught brief glimpses of his war years. Three days before the German invasion of the USSR, Pasternak began writing to them in English, hoping to smooth his letters’ passage past the censors.26 ‘Dear papa! I sufficiently imagine, how suspectable a letter, not to speak of a photograph or book in a foreign language must be in times such as ours. Yet I try to send you the new-appeared Hamlet tragedy in my version…’ He boasts of the produce grown in their vegetable plot in Peredelkino: half a cellar of potatoes, two casks of sauerkraut, four thousand tomatoes; peas, beans and carrots to last a year. His English has a distinctly Shakespearean flavour: ‘Judge my Hamlet not too severely […] And now, farewell! Never make you torments with letter writing of today […] Farewell once more […] Commend me to your sons-in-law and their wives and children, my dear sisters…’ 1941–2 were spent in Chistopol, where he finished translating Romeo and Juliet in the contented absorption described by Gladkov. In the autumn he was allowed to return to Moscow for three months, and wrote to his father and sisters, in his quaint English again. He regrets his enforced creative silence, and refers to his nights as a firewatcher during the bombardment of Moscow, when the front line passed near Peredelkino. His English hasn’t improved: My dearest, my adored! It will come time, I will relate to you all we had to endure the last half of our separation. My work is undone through my forced futility. That is the worst in my steady embittering. But now we have to thank God. His grace is immeasurable. Papa is well and working! […] Two years of such a war and we are yet at life!! Its most terrible part is probably over. How many nights have I spent in my forest-trench past my late country-house!! How often observed the fires and bombardments during my night-firewatches on the roof of our town-house! (Family, 361, 26 November 1942) He returned to Chistopol for the winter, completing his translation of Antony and Cleopatra. In June 1943, he, his family and what remained of the literary community at Chistopol were shipped back to Moscow. WIRE IMMEDIATELY PAPAS HEALTH BROUGHT FAMILY MOSCOW TEMPORARILY ROOFLESS MUCH SATISFACTION SHAKESPEARE TRANSLATIONS THE REST IMPOSSIBLE… (Family, 362; 24 August 1943) This was the period of the ultimately frustrated production of Hamlet. Then Pasternak and some of his fellow-writers were attacked for

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‘ideological distortion’.27 Driven back to translation to earn himself some degree of independence, Pasternak signed contracts to do King Lear and Othello. He wrote to his cousin Olga: ‘I am translating Othello against my will; I never liked it. I am working with Shakespeare semisubconsciously. He seems like a member of a former family […] I am oversimplifying him terribly.’ He was impatient to return to his own work, an outspoken verse play on wartime, and tells her: ‘I am driven to despair not by superficial hardships but by the knowledge that I am a writer, that I have something to say […but] there is no literature here now, and under present conditions there will not and cannot be any […] Circumstances show no signs of changing.’28 Consequently in January 1945 he signed another contract to translate the two parts of King Henry IV. And then, in July, his father died. CRUSHED DOWN BY DREADFUL NEWS. HOW TO SURVIVE THE IRRECOVERABLE LOSS OF THE SAD DISCOLOURED LIFE WITHOUT THE ADMIRED GREAT MAN ARTIST LIFE EXAMPLE POOR POOR DEAR FATHER (Family, 363; 4 July 1945) Alas, poor Ghost! Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing. Leonid’s death was one profound factor of the many driving Pasternak to action. A Moscow reading in the autumn of 1945 opened his eyes to an audience he hadn’t been aware of: ‘the many, many people … in favour of what is worthwhile and serious. The existence of this reservoir right here among us was a revelation to me.’ His external circumstances couldn’t be changed, but he deliberately altered his mindset. A sense of new energy and determination is clearly perceptible. He devised a rigorous regime in which translation bought him time for his real work. The first draft of 1–2 Henry IV was completed within a month of his father’s death. He abandoned his verse play, and began work on Doctor Zhivago. The novel’s affinity to Shakespearean historical drama is suggested by all three texts: Henry IV, the abandoned verse play about wartime, and the novel, crisscrossing Pasternak’s desk at the same time. Moreover, Pasternak decided to take a stand against the pusillanimous members of the Writers’ Union, writing to Mandelstam’s widow: ‘Not only do [they…] not exist for me – and I repudiate them – but I let no moment slip to declare this openly and publicly. And they are of course right to give as good as they get. The line-up of forces is, of course, uneven, but

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my fate is settled and I have no choice.’ His sense of a self-imposed destiny is ominous, pronounced and consistent: ‘One must try to do something costly and of one’s own, and try, in a more hazardous form than has been the case, to get through to the public.’ 29 To one friend, he later explained that at this point his whole past seemed ‘one long accumulation of failures and blunders, to which I wanted to put a drastic, tangible and absolutely final end […] It was imperative that the outcome represent a radical, major break with all past habits and the start of something new.’ By January 1946 he felt ready to start work on ‘something completely of my own […] a prose work about the whole of our life from Blok to the present war’. He told Nadezhda Mandelstam that he was ‘writing furiously […] My rush to get it done is quite natural – I can hear the days and weeks whirling past my ears.’30 By 1947 he could look back on a summer’s work in which he had translated two and a half thousand lines of the Hungarian poet Petöfi in five weeks, and King Lear in six. His tone, and his will, had hardened. There was a time when I translated well, but it got me nowhere. The only way to avenge this is to do the same thing badly and unconscionably fast. The novel, or rather the world, in which I took refuge […] is so far removed from, and so incommensurate with, the daily grind, that what do I care about Lear or whether I translate him well or badly. Damn it all, it really makes no difference to me any more.31 That word, ‘avenge’ is significant. Just as Hamlet was charged with revenge, so Pasternak recognised that writing Zhivago was his own appointed task. His commitment to translation dwindled to a pragmatic, financial necessity, and Hamlet became instead the insistent metaphor for his own sense of a self-imposed and dangerous duty. In February 1946 he gave his first public reading of Hamlet in the club of Moscow University. At the same time he wrote his Note on Hamlet. It is clearly autobiographical, audibly echoing the repeated recognition of the task imposed on him, first raised in the autumn of his father’s death. Rejecting the tired critical debate about Hamlet as a tragedy of will, he stated crisply: From the moment the ghost appears, Hamlet renounces his own desires in order to do the will of him who sent me. Hamlet is not a drama of characterlessness, but of duty and self-sacrifice. When it transpires that an abyss separates appearance and reality […] the will of chance turns Hamlet into the judge of his own time and servant of the future. Hamlet is a drama of high calling, imposed heroism, and incontrovertible destiny.32

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Pasternak’s italicized phrase echoes Christ’s words in St John’s Gospel: ‘I seek not my own will, but the will of the Father who has sent me’ (John v.30). It is echoed in Christ’s prayer on the cross: ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless, not what I will, but what thou wilt’ (Mark xiv.36). Both Biblical texts, Hamlet, Christ, Zhivago and Pasternak all fuse in ‘Hamlet’, the first in the cycle of Yury’s poems closing Doctor Zhivago. The first draft of this poem also dates from February 1946; its final draft was completed in December – a considerably slower gestation for its sixteen lines than the ruthlessly rushed translation of King Lear. When Pasternak was buried, ‘Hamlet’ was one of the two poems read over his open grave. It was his epitaph. This translation is by his sister Lydia:33 Гамлет

Hamlet

Гул затих. Я вышел на подмостки. Прислонясь к дверному косяку, Я ловлю в далеком отголоске, Что случится на моем веку.

The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter. I am trying, standing in the door, To discover in the distant echoes What the coming years may hold in store.

На меня наставлен сумрак ночи Тысячью биноклей на оси. Если только можно, Авва Отче, Чашу эту мимо пронеси.

The nocturnal darkness with a thousand Binoculars is focused onto me. Take away this cup, O Abba Father, Everything is possible to Thee.

Я люблю Твой замысел упрямый И играть согласен эту роль. Но сейчас идет другая драма, И на этот раз меня уволь.

I am fond of this Thy stubborn project, And to play my part I am content. But another drama is in progress, And, this once, O let me be exempt.

Но продуман распорядок действий, И неотвратим конец пути. Я один, все тонет в фарисействе. Жизнь прожить – не поле перейти.

But the place of action is determined, And the end irrevocably sealed. I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood: Life is not a walk across a field.

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II - Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in’t? - No, no, they do but jest … no offence in the world. 1946–60: Dissent In a single decade, from 1936 to 1946, the Soviet Union had endured Stalin’s Terror and world war. Widespread hopes of a relaxation of the regime, a reward for all that the nation had suffered and won, were disappointed when peace came. The massive loss of life suffered during the war (24–7 million) did not end. POWs, prisoners of what Russians still call the Great Patriotic War, were forcibly repatriated to their fatherland, and returned home to execution or exile in penal labour camps.34 In 1946–8 the country bore its fourth famine in three decades under Soviet rule. Initially triggered by deteriorating harvests in 1944–5 and drought in 1946, it could have been avoided. As in the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932–3, there were enough grain reserves to feed the one-and-a-half million who died, but rations were not allowed for the starving rural peasantry, who were supposed to fend for themselves.35 Alas, poor country, Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot Be call’d our mother, but our grave; where nothing But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile; […] where violent sorrow seems A modern ecstasy. The dead man’s knell Is there scarce ask’d for who. In the same two years, after a wartime period of relative laxness, a new era of cultural despotism was initiated by the Zhdanov decrees (1946–8), which condemned alleged deviations in the arts by denouncing specific scapegoats: Akhmatova, Eisenstein, Shostakovich, Prokofiev. It was an effective and ‘savage campaign intended to terrorize the intelligentsia at home’.36 Lastly, in 1952 Stalin fabricated the Jewish Doctors’ Plot, supposedly designed to wipe out the Soviet leadership. This paranoid fantasy was orchestrated in order to launch a second, specifically anti-Semitic Terror, and set off a new cycle of show trials to liquidate Stalin’s perceived enemies. Camps for the unexecuted condemned had already been constructed

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when Stalin died, or was murdered by Beria, in 1953, before the fulfilment of his nightmare scenario was complete. Bleed, bleed, poor country. Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure, For goodness dare not check thee. How incongruous then to turn to one man’s minor tribulations. And yet, for Pasternak, these final turns of the screw became a categorical imperative, a motivation not to be denied, for the urgent composition of Doctor Zhivago. Publication was promised; ultimately it was withdrawn and the novel only appeared in the West in 1957–8. Acclaim and the Nobel Prize brought Pasternak expulsion from the Writers’ Union. He was compelled to refuse the prize, or leave. Two years of state vilification, culminating in the charge of treason, inevitably hastened his death. Yet an important second string, the readings of what he had written, also runs steadily throughout Pasternak’s creative life. First there were his readings of his poems; later of his Shakespearean translations; lastly his many semi-private, informal readings of Doctor Zhivago as the work progressed. Marginally liberated from the exigencies of censorship, these solo performances brought Pasternak to the large and hungry audience whose discovery had been a revelation to him in 1945. In them he flouted state orthodoxy with increasingly dangerous, stubborn playfulness.37 In the thirties these public appearances were not intentionally contrary, merely a manifestation of Pasternak’s simplicity. His unpremeditated, instinctive undercutting of state-speak was witnessed by Gladkov at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Maxim Gorki presided; Pasternak (then in good odour) was seated on the platform, waiting his turn among the other speakers, when A group of workers building the Moscow Metro came to offer their greetings. Among them were some girls in the rubber suits they wore on the job. One of them was carrying a heavy metal tool on her shoulder, and took up her position next to Pasternak. He immediately jumped up and tried to take [it] away from her, but the girl would not give it up. Watching this tussle between them, the audience burst into laughter. Pasternak was covered with confusion and began his speech by trying to explain what had happened. The high comedy of the incident lay in the fact that the heavy tool on the girl’s shoulder was there not out of necessity but to symbolize her

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function as a worker; with his direct and natural view of things, Pasternak saw only a frail woman struggling with an unwieldy object. It was a peculiar feature of the age that everybody had grown accustomed to such ostentatious, bogus expressions of public sentiment. Nobody was surprised by a woman unnecessarily shouldering a pickaxe – any more than by the vast rhymed tributes from the entire nation to the Great Leader, or the long columns of birthday greetings to him printed in the newspapers for many months after the event. (Gladkov, 46–7) Writing with hindsight ten years after Stalin’s death, Gladkov adds: ‘All this is still not a very long time ago, but already it seems strange to the point of absurdity; yet at the time it seemed strange if somebody was so eccentric as not to take these ritual obeisances seriously.’ He goes on to defend Pasternak against the contemporary accusation of deliberate buffoonery: This may have been the impression of people who had quite forgotten what it was to behave naturally on any occasion. Diplomats and trimmers always regard straightforward and honest behaviour as naivety bordering on folly. There were a good many such ‘follies’ in Pasternak’s life… (Gladkov, 47) Gladkov remembers a number of Pasternak readings he attended, both in Moscow and Chistopol, both of his poems and his Shakespearean translations. The vulnerable charm of Pasternak’s inept modesty and unaffected absorption is recurrent. He describes Pasternak’s appreciative response to a pompous reading by Fedin in Chistopol: There is something old-fashioned about his generosity, something chivalrous, and not in the least obsequious. I watched him as he listened. Most of the others were reserved and self-important. Nobody else had Pasternak’s boyish expression of delight. Perhaps he looks so young because of his missing front tooth. He smiled all the time, and occasionally murmured to himself… (Gladkov, 52) Pasternak gave readings of Romeo and Juliet in Chistopol in the winter of 1942, and Antony and Cleopatra in Moscow in the summer of 1943. Gladkov recalls his rambling summaries of cut passages, longer than the cuts themselves, his naïve rendition of character parts and his power in the tragic passages. After Enobarbus’ speech describing Cleopatra’s first meeting with Antony (‘The barge she sat in…’), the audience broke

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into spontaneous applause. ‘Pasternak smiled with pleasure, took off his spectacles, gave a rather awkward little bow, and said: “Just wait – it gets even better…” ’ (Gladkov, 106). There was nothing identifiably subversive in these engaging readings. But Pasternak’s continued determination to read was an act of defiance. When his Shakespearean translations weren’t staged and his poems weren’t printed and publication of his novel was inconceivable, these performances were his only way of remaining heard, of writing not for himself alone but for his contemporaries and for the future. Their charm and humour, the audience’s affectionate laughter, can still be heard in the recordings that survive.38 The mischievous defiance of these semi-comic performances is obvious in his most significant reading on 27 May 1946, in Moscow’s Polytechnic Museum, which housed the city’s largest auditorium. Max Hayward, Gladkov’s translator, was serving in the British Embassy, and got a front-row seat. It was the only time he was able to see Pasternak. His description is memorable.39 The meeting was advertised as ‘An Evening of Poetry on the theme: “Down with the Warmongers! For a Lasting Peace and People’s Democracy”’. It was part of a state campaign against the North Atlantic Treaty, triggered by Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, with which the Cold War began.40 The score or more poets listed in the announcement […] included Pasternak. This seemed doubly incredible; incredible that after recent attacks on him in the press he should have been invited by the organizers to attend, and even more incredible that he himself should have agreed to be associated with what was obviously going to be a crude manifestation of support for official propaganda. The immediate thought was that Pasternak might at last have succumbed to the pressures, and was now going to be produced in public to demonstrate the fact […] Hayward canvasses other remote possibilities – that Pasternak might choose this event to demonstrate his loyalty to the party line (unlikely); that he would draw an audience for a non-event. That, at least, was true: The large hall, often used for major propaganda lectures, was quite remarkably crowded: people were squatting on the steps in the aisles, and large numbers who had not been able to get tickets stood on the street outside […] There was a perceptible air of excitement, most unusual for the apathetic Soviet audiences of those days. About twenty poets trooped out onto the stage and sat down dutifully

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on the chairs facing the audience. In front of them was a table, and a rostrum with a microphone. But Pasternak was not among them. One chair at the back of the stage remained empty. The tense expectancy in the hall gave way to what was quite evidently a mixture of disappointment and relief – after all, what would he have been doing in that company? It seemed probable that he had been excluded at the last moment, or had simply decided against it himself. The reading was presided over by the novelist Boris Gorbatov, who took his seat at the table. He had a little bell in front of him. The first poet summoned to come forward was Surkov. He stood at the rostrum and declaimed into the microphone some verse which went straight to the point, denouncing the North Atlantic Treaty, the warmongers and Churchill […] As Surkov was halfway through his last line, the audience suddenly burst into loud applause and when he glanced over his shoulder, startled at the ovation which so clearly was not for him, he saw what everybody else could see: Pasternak had slipped in from the wings and was just taking his seat in the back row. He looked a little flustered, but was visibly grateful as he made imploring gestures with his outstretched palms until the crowd eventually quietened down. The recital continued, with each of the successive poets delivering his rhymed invective in the accepted sub-Mayakovskian manner […] No-one was interested in them; applause was thin and impatient, the audience restless. At last Pasternak was called forward. Gesturing for quiet again, and smiling rather shyly, he came to the edge of the stage, but instead of going to the microphone like the rest, he came down some steps on the side of the stage and stood below, directly in front of the audience, shifting his feet slightly as he waited for the applause to die away. At last there was dead silence. He looked exactly as Gladkov describes him – extremely young, with a strikingly handsome face, on which there now appeared a rather mischievous, almost puckish, yet at the same time invincibly innocent expression. In his peculiarly nasal voice, drawing out the Russian vowels to at least twice their normal length, he said, ‘Unfortunately, I have no poems on the theme of the evening, but I will read you some things I wrote before the war.’ The tension was broken, and there was renewed applause. Beads of sweat appeared on Gorbatov’s bald head. Pasternak then recited several poems which were obviously known to the audience. At one moment he forgot a line and was immediately

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prompted from various parts of the hall. People began to shout out requests for particular poems, and he was clearly ready to oblige, but things were getting out of hand, and Gorbatov looked more and more distressed – though he too was affected by the general mood, and at one point his lips could be seen moving as he followed the words. Suddenly someone shouted, Shestdesyat shestoi davai! (‘Give us the Sixty-Sixth!’) […] Perhaps it was fortunate that he did not recite those lines, which so perfectly defined the general state of affairs, and his own situation in particular: … Art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill, And simple truth miscalled simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill… ‘The meeting,’ says Hayward, ‘was descending into an unheard-of demonstration.’ Gorbatov was vainly ringing his little bell; the applause continued, ‘and Pasternak stood there smiling awkwardly and patently enjoying his dangerous triumph.’ An intermission was called, and half the audience left. Hayward concludes that almost anyone but Pasternak would have been arrested for such political provocation. He was not. Throughout the summer he continued to give his readings of Doctor Zhivago to small private audiences. On 14 August the first Zhdanov decree attacked two Leningrad journals for publishing Akhmatova and Zoschenko. Three weeks later Fadeyev attacked Pasternak in a speech to the presidium of the Writers’ Union. In March 1947 Surkov had a go. Pasternak wrote to his cousin Olga: ‘It stands to reason that I am ready for everything. Why should it happen to Sashka [meaning her executed brother, ‘Sashka Konfaind’] and everyone else and not to me?’ In February 1948 came the second Zhdanov decree, aimed against the composers. In March, Surkov had another go, raising Pasternak’s culpably ‘individualistic work’ in the meeting of the Writers’ Union devoted to the decree. More attacks followed. In September, Gladkov noted in his diary that the first half of Pasternak’s novel is ‘going round the city. I should have it in a few days’ time’. In October Gladkov was arrested, like so many other intellectuals, and sent to a forced labour camp. In December Pasternak broke his two-year silence to write a long uncensored letter, carried by an intermediary, to his sisters in England. In it he summarizes the events of the past two years, mainly concentrating on the novel and its associated poems, admitting that ‘publication abroad

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would expose me to the most catastrophic, not to say fatal, dangers’, and mentioning that Last spring, a new edition of my selected lyric poetry […] 25,000 copies of which were printed and ready for distribution, was pulped on orders from above on the day before publication day. Public appearances by me are regarded as undesirable. The restrictions placed on me (I can only be conceived of as a translator) make my situation sombre and tense. (Family, 376; 12 December 1948) He ends, in haste: ‘It’s a good thing that we’re not in correspondence with each other: we’ll have to carry on with this self-restraint until the era of suspicion comes to an end.’ It was eight years before he wrote again, in 1956 – three years after the death of Stalin, four years before his own. Zhivago, opprobrium, and illness filled the time that remained. * In the first uneasy thaw of the 1960s, a joke was going round Moscow. A man gets up on a box in Red Square. Not, by any means, a common sight. Passers-by pause to listen. A crowd gathers. ‘Life is good in the Soviet Union!’ he’s saying. ‘The shops are full of food! We can travel wherever we like! We enjoy complete freedom of speech!’ As the militia bundle him off, he protests, ‘What’s the fuss about? All I said was –’. ‘We know what you mean,’ they reply. In a severely repressive society, everything is loaded. It’s not just that poker-faced dissent deliberately plays with irony, metaphor, litotes. The most innocent greetings naturally become metaphors. Daily platitudes are saturated with meaning. Codes proliferate. They may think they know what we mean, but we know more. Classic texts leap into life, speaking directly to us as an image of our times. Polonius tells the startled Ophelia: You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said. We heard it all. How loaded and chilling a line, for a nation cowed by fears of surveillance, phone-tapping and the lies of informers! How dreadfully familiar to Stalin’s terrorized victims, Goneril’s defiant cry: The laws are mine, not thine: Who can arraign me for’t?

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What did Pasternak want to tell Stalin, when he tried to keep him on the phone, asking for a meeting – to talk ‘about life and death’ as his country starved? The King is but a man, as I am. Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel. How many must have felt, like Hamlet and Pasternak, It is not, nor it cannot come to good. But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue. This is a two-way process. Reading Shakespeare with the hypothetical sensibilities of his Soviet audiences, one is startled into a fresh perception of Shakespeare’s barbarous times, and Shakespeare’s own dissent. Hamlet calls for the recorders, to illustrate his rebuke of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery […] There is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be play’d on than a pipe? It’s very easy to hear Pasternak’s refusal to join Stalin’s choirs of praise in Hamlet’s lines. You would play upon me … yet cannot you make [me] speak. But then, turn it the other way round. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. What is Shakespeare describing? The live disembowelling of prisoners executed for treason. For refusing to toe the Tudor line. The Catholic line. The Protestant line. A fearful reality all too familiar to Shakespeare’s London playgoers, now buried in an apparent cliché, but the heart is still beating. Pasternak’s present can bring Shakespeare’s past back to life. Every director, hunting out contemporary, controversial new settings for Shakespeare’s plays, knows how ‘relevance’ compels a jaded audience’s attention. The Soviet audiences didn’t need modern dress to help them listen, and understand. Indeed, Pasternak’s translation makes the links between Hamlet’s Denmark and their immediate present clear. Instead of ‘pluck out the heart out of my mystery’, Pasternak translates, ‘Вы уверены, что выжмете из меня голос моей тайны’ – ‘You’re sure you’ll squeeze my secret voice out of me’. In Olga Freidenberg’s letters the state pressure of total ostracization is referred to as ‘being “squeezed”, as we then called it’.41

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In any era, stifled dissent seeks out historic analogues, just as Pasternak turned to Michelet’s Histoire de France to express his anxieties to his father. Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Richard III and Julius Caesar – the plays of despots – were perfectly attuned to Soviet times, and, in the provinces, much performed. They fulfilled the same role in relation to Soviet audiences, as Hamlet’s old-fashioned drama, The Mousetrap, serves in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. They were the vehicle of protest. The play’s the thing, Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King. Visiting Moscow in the 1960s, I was taken to see Anouilh’s L’Alouette, in translation. Its primary source was also Michelet’s History. It was being performed by the admired Moscow Puppet Theatre. You could hardly imagine anything more innocuous: a play about Joan of Arc, shrunk to gesticulating puppets on a tiny stage: a bite-sized children’s treat. Far from it – if you were a Muscovite, and you could instinctively read the analogies, which I, an adolescent Western literalist, failed to recognize until enlightened, sotto voce, in the darkness. The brightly lit box of the dwarf stage stretched to human proportions and the puppets’ wooden gestures grew meaningful:  the visionary Joan was crushed between politicians’ machinations and the machinery of war. In 1990, the centenary of his birth, Pasternak was rehabilitated. The civic authorities staged a weekend’s shameless ostentations of proud respect. We attended one meeting of international academics. The only memorable contribution was given by Georges Nivat, who had known Pasternak in his last years. Pasternak told him that in his youth he disliked the obvious artifice of Shakespeare’s soliloquies – till the Terror came. Crossing the Moscow River by the old Kamenny Bridge, he found himself looking back over his shoulder at the Kremlin behind him, and saying to himself, in true soliloquy: ‘Oh, just you wait. One day, I’ll stand in judgement over you.’

III Words, words, words The translations: editors, texts, performances In his work on Shakespeare Pasternak also had to contend with other, less terrifying forces than Stalin and his all-enveloping disasters. These were

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the publishers, literary editors, theatre managers and academics – anxious followers of unpredictable party lines. The one who stands out most clearly is Mikhail Mikhailovich Morozov – teasingly ‘Mikh Mikh’ in one of Pasternak’s letters. Professor Morozov was a highly respected Shakespearean scholar and publishers’ reader of Shakespeariana, including Pasternak’s translations. In photographs he has the same weary, wary look as was glimpsed in Meyerhold and Pasternak, snapped with the unruffled Malraux in 1934. Morozov made a point of combining his insistence on textual accuracy with what he thought of as theatrical sense. He annotated Shakespeare’s texts; collaborated in translations, providing prose versions for colleagues to versify; and advised on productions. His Shakespeare on the Soviet Stage42 is a sensible, unusually informative survey of Russian translations and productions of Shakespeare from the first free adaptation of Hamlet in 1748 to the present of 1947. He is obviously an avid theatre-goer, and claims that all the Soviet productions described in his book are ones he witnessed himself. Most memorable is Morozov’s account of a celebrated version of King Lear in Yiddish, performed by the State Jewish Theatre with its director, Solomon Mikhoels in the lead. It was first staged in 1935 and remained in the Jewish Theatre’s repertory for the next decade. During the German advance on Moscow, the company was evacuated to Tashkent, and Morozov recalls a member of the Tashkent audience hissing Goneril and Regan as ‘Fascists!’. For Morozov, this is a perfect illustration of Shakespeare’s capacity to hold up his mirror to the future. Yet before the war this longrunning production was, much more immediately, a reflection of Stalin’s Russia, as the description of one contemporary critic clearly suggests:43 The stage of the State Jewish Theatre is full of the breath of a horrible age, the breath of legalised betrayals, legalised murders, legalised robberies, legalised brutalities, legalised war of everybody against everybody… Mikhoels courted danger with his production, but during the war he served Stalin’s propaganda purposes well as chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Morozov wasn’t to know that in January 1948, a year after his innocent survey was published, Mikhoels would be bludgeoned to death on Stalin’s orders. His body, dumped on a roadside in Minsk, was run over by a truck to simulate a hit-and-run accident. His fate throws a chilly sidelight on the unexpected death of Sakhnovsky, the last director of Pasternak’s Hamlet, three years earlier. The State Jewish Theatre was shut down and all the members of the Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested. All but two were shot in the anti-Semitic purges initiated shortly before Stalin’s death.

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* Morozov was, above all, a Shakespearean scholar. In 1942 he provided the reader’s report for Pasternak’s Hamlet. Detgiz, the Children’s State Publishing House, was preparing a third version of Pasternak’s translation for senior-school students, in what was, for wartime, an exceptionally large run of 50,000 copies. The first we hear of it is an outraged letter from Pasternak to Naumova, the editor-in-chief. Pasternak’s irritation is unusually forthright. [Morozov’s] recommendations drive me to despair. I don’t understand the need for him to deal with a translation that is wholly alien and essentially incomprehensible to him. In his condescension he deems it sufficiently faithful and would only like to strengthen its precision. But as it happens I never had any pretensions to accuracy. I completely disagree with the contemporary take on translation. I feel distant from the work of Lozinsky, Radlova, Marshak and Chukovsky; it seems artificial, shallow and soulless. I take my stand with the nineteenth-century view of translation as a literary problem, whose elevated conception left no room for the fads of linguisticians. Consequently, however tempting the money […] you’ll have to approach someone else with the task. My loss will be merely material. In any case progressive young readers will get to know Hamlet in this, the most living and natural version, just as they do today, and as they probably will do, even more, with Romeo and Juliet. Because, notwithstanding the report’s grudging recommendation, Hamlet has spent an unheard-of, overwhelming winter at the front and in field hospitals, by the beds of the dying and in enforced evacuations, regardless of whether I was rewarded or not, and whether or not people want to recognise that fact.44 One begins to sympathize with Pasternak’s exasperation in his subsequent letter to Morozov, taking issue with particular objections. The stance of both writers is sharply illustrated by their disagreement over Hamlet’s exultant doggerel after Claudius’ hasty exit from the play scene. Hamlet ends with this quatrain: For thou dost know, O Damon dear, This realm dismantled was Of Jove himself, and now reigns here,

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Hugo, Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire A very, very – pajock. You might have rhymed. (Hamlet III.ii.297ff)

It is clear to an educated English reader that Hamlet’s doggerel, referring to Claudius, pointedly avoids the degrading Elizabethan rhyme of ‘was’ with ‘ass’, replacing it by the dissonant and absurd ‘pajock’ (probably meaning peacock). Pasternak’s translation follows suit, with a sonorously insulting quatrain: Ты знаешь, дорогой Дамон, Юпитера орел Слетел с престола, и на трон Воссел простой осе…тр. The wit of this translation partly resides in its assonantal play, so typical of Pasternak at his happiest. The hissing Russian sounds like this: Ti znayesh, dorogoi Damon, Yupittera oryol Slitel s pristola, i na tron, Vossyel prostoi osyo…tr. It means: ‘You know, dear Damon,/Jupiter’s eagle/Flew off the throne, and on it/Mounted simply a ss…turgeon.’ The last word would have been ‘ass’ (in Russian, ‘osyól’), as the Russian rhyme demanded, had it not been transformed into the ludicrous ‘sturgeon’ (‘osyótr’) by the resounding substitution of ‘…tr!’ An enthroned sturgeon is even sillier than Shakespeare’s ass. The ingenuity of this translation is delightfully theatrical. What actor could resist it? But Morozov was fretting about the peacock. Where had it got to? It is perfectly preserved (and the joke lost) in the translation by Lozinsky, whose versions of Hamlet and Twelfth Night Morozov later praised for ‘their painstaking accuracy and attention to academic detail’.45 Pasternak spends some time laboriously explaining the joke to Morozov; pointing out that Horatio’s line indicates a rhyme is missing, which the translator must evoke; arguing that Morozov’s view of ‘peacock’ as a serious descriptor of Claudius misses the point (‘then you wouldn’t have had the pause – it would just have gone on “a verry verry46 pajock”’); that Horatio’s ‘You might have rhymed’ demands a word that has been mouthed, chewed and stretched over a mid-word pause for the

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Russian audience to register the lost rhyme and its comic substitution… ‘I’m astonished,’ Pasternak says, pausing for breath, ‘how all this passed you by, and you still don’t understand’ (Masterstvo VI, 346). Pasternak continues with ‘A mote it is in the mind’s eye’ (Hamlet I.i.112) which, in his version, preserves its link with the Biblical ‘Why beholdest thou the mote in thy brother’s eye’ (Matthew 7.3), so exceeding the wordfor-word precision required by Morozov. There’s more trouble with the crucial couplet epitomizing Hamlet’s predicament: The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right! Hardly surprisingly, it had particular force for Pasternak, who tells Morozov, it gave me no rest, and to my ear combined: 1) a state of dislocation, + 2) a bitter oath at the line’s resonant turn, + 3) regretfulness about his own cross [meaning, ‘his cross to bear’] on a gradually dying breath. None of my previous solutions of this moment contained all three. This is the first [to do so]. Please get used to it. (Masterstvo VI, 345) For all his disagreement with a recalcitrant opponent, Pasternak’s long letter to Morozov is considerably more restrained than the expostulation delivered to the chief editor of Detgiz. There is a sense of companionship in Pasternak’s quarrel with Morozov. He is not entirely ironical in his praise of Morozov’s scholarship, by the side of his own, competing poetic expertise: In our unventilated set-up you, as a sensible person, – must know that you are an acknowledged witch-doctor in Shakespearean matters, just as I would have been a thrice-decorated quack-pundit ‘in matters poetical’, or some such other ****, if I hadn’t used all my strength, even to the point of risk, in combating every form of quackery in this delightful little rose-garden of ours.47 Pasternak has reason to be conciliatory as well as combative. His letter ends: I’m sending Naumova the translation of Romeo. If you wish, have a read of it, and if you don’t like it, please don’t do it down. I’ve gone further in it than in Hamlet, because Hamlet is the absolute, a divine creation, while

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“Romeo” is a youthful, self-indulgent and ambitious work, which had to be translated on a tight rein. I ask you to believe just one thing. I haven’t been wilfully clever-clever anywhere, I haven’t allowed myself anything which didn’t directly serve my one aim: to convey the true, realistic genius of Shakespeare with strength and liveliness… (Masterstvo VI, 346) Alas, while Morozov’s report for the Detgiz Hamlet has not survived, his report on Romeo and Juliet has. That was also for Detgiz. He begins blandly: ‘This translation appears a magnificent artistic creation.’ He praises the balcony scene’s combination of high poetry with simplicity. Characters are colourfully individualized in the true Shakespearean manner. The theatre will be grateful to Pasternak. But… ‘But there are many inaccuracies in the translation. The poet-translator still has much to improve.’ Morozov lists seven areas of inadequacy, backed by examples of variable weight (Masterstvo VI, 351–5). 1. There are lines an actor will find difficult to pronounce. [The two examples are lines where Pasternak uses alliteration.] 2. Pasternak fails to sustain a steady iambic pentameter. Soviet actors are unused to verse speaking and it must be made easy for them or their verse will be delivered as prose. [The four examples of what Morozov deems ‘complicated forms of the iambic pentameter’ – in itself a contradiction in terms – are simply lines in which not all the iambic feet are fully stressed. In response Pasternak ironically ‘corrected’ them all into a lumbering jog-trot.] 3. Pasternak should not use the russified version of ‘gentlemen’ in a play set in Italy. Just the one term complicates the choices of the theatre! Should the play be set in England, or in Italy? [It wasn’t hard for Pasternak to change this single occurrence to a russified ‘signori’.] 4. There are some instances where the original is arbitrarily coarsened. In Juliet’s ‘Oh what a beast I was to chide at him!’ a Russian audience would certainly laugh at Juliet calling herself ‘skotina’. [This collective noun means ‘cattle’. In the singular, colloquially, it is ‘beast’ or ‘swine’. Morozov has a touching faith in Juliet’s good breeding.]  5. There are many infelicitous moments, as well as extremely inaccurate ones. [His three examples are very weak.] 7. Morozov’s main objection is to Pasternak’s textual inaccuracies and omissions. These he finds completely unacceptable. He lists numerous examples, exclaiming in exasperation, ‘What need for these cuts? The theatre can make its own cuts, and the reader needs the full text. This is intolerable!’ It would be another matter, he says, if the translation were frankly titled an adaptation. Finally, the headmaster’s wigging:

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We expect a lot from Pasternak’s great gifts. It is very, very disappointing, when what is wonderful in its totality is ruined by individual blunders. Pasternak must eliminate these blunders. Only after the correction of these blunders [sic] can (and should) this translation be published and staged. (Masterstvo VI, 355) And it didn’t rest there. Pasternak wrote first not to Morozov but Naumova, the Detgiz editor-in-chief. He sets Morozov’s report against a letter from a respected theatre director who praised his Romeo and Juliet, only regretting that the translation was not freer, with more of Pasternak in it. He explains that the job Morozov counted half-done was actually doubly done: Pasternak began by translating every line, like everyone else. Then, checking his version against those of his Russian predecessors, he saw that they already provided a crib’s line-for-line accuracy, and he could turn to something freer. Recognizing that less is more, he abbreviated longueurs like Mercutio’s unfunnier repartee. ‘What need for these cuts?’ asks Mikhail Mikhailovitch. They are needed for the play to be readable and comprehensible. For it not to perish of a pimple – which can be passed over, so easily, in silence. You yourself required the omission of improprieties. (Masterstvo VI, 358) As for calling the work an adaptation, Pasternak considered it himself, but decided his deviations weren’t pronounced enough. In any case, he adds with some satisfaction, Romeo and Juliet is now being printed by Goslitizdat (another publishing house). Pasternak will take advantage of Morozov’s observations to improve the text, as he did with Hamlet and as he thinks fit. In the autumn of 1942, Pasternak evidently wrote Morozov a conciliatory letter, now lost. Morozov’s reply is fulsome about Romeo and Juliet, unrepentant about his criticisms. With a sublime lack of tact, if not deliberate offensiveness, he diagnoses an inexplicable ‘frustrated creativity’ in Pasternak, who seems bent on working Shakespeare up for the Russian stage, much as Shakespeare dramatized his sources. But, says Morozov, Shakespeare isn’t raw material. There’s plenty of Elizabethan trash – Dekker and Heywood for instance – whom Pasternak can turn into plays of his own. Why doesn’t he do that? Tellingly, Morozov asserts that if he had to choose between a brilliant but abbreviated translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus by Goethe, say, or one by Weinberg, complete but with errors, he would prefer the Weinberg.

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In Shakespeare on the Soviet Stage, written five years later, Morozov describes Weinberg as ‘one of the best of the old translators’ whose Othello is ‘impressive’ and ‘conscientious’ but, unfortunately, three times as long as the original. Was Morozov by any chance experiencing a change of heart? In the same chapter, he sets Pasternak first among his contemporaries, guilelessly confessing: When I first glanced through Pasternak’s translation [of Hamlet], my immediate impression (and in poetry one’s immediate impression means so much!) was ‘How like the original it is!’ And it was not only the external similitudes of certain individual passages that struck me so forcibly, but also the internal likeness which goes to the very heart of a work of art […] Pasternak conceived it in the spirit of that realism and that sympathy with mankind, which are so deeply ingrained in the spirit of Russian literature.48 * * * Morozov was right to gesture towards a broad conception of the Russian tradition. Pasternak was first impelled on his journey as a translator by his wish to enrich the nation’s contemporary literature, starving in its impoverished Soviet soil. His intention was to translate Shakespeare in accordance with the Tolstoyan principles of simplicity and truth in which he had himself been raised. As he said of his Hamlet, in a letter to his father: I achieved the aim I had set myself, translating the thoughts, situations, pages and scenes of the original, rather than the individual words and lines. The translation is utterly simple, smooth, understandable on a first hearing, and natural. In an age of false and high-flown rhetoric, there is a great need for a direct, ardent, independent voice. (Family, 353; 14 February 1940) This was the long-held principle prompting Pasternak’s rebellious introduction to his first, 1940 translation of Hamlet as ‘a Russian original dramatic production’ [my italics], to be judged as such because it had more of ‘the deliberate liberty without which there is no way of approaching great things’. Even in 1940, the date of his letter to his father, Pasternak was well aware that however positive his translation’s reception might be now, ‘later on they’ll say – with some justification – that I’ve simplified the text’. As

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Morozov duly did. Pasternak explains to his father that he modified ‘the things that Tolstoy attacked’, that is, the heightened rhetoric, metaphors and symbolism natural to English Renaissance drama. For English readers, the dogged stupidity of Tolstoy’s essay on ‘Shakespeare and the Drama’ (1904), preferring the primitive source-play of King Leir to Shakespeare’s version, has always seemed absurd. For Pasternak, the value of Tolstoy’s approach lies in his basic principles of simplicity and artless truth – precisely the qualities Pasternak also admired in Hugo’s praise of Shakespeare, and the qualities he strove after in his own translations. He is, in fact, absorbing Shakespeare into the Russian, Tolstoyan tradition, absolutely deliberately. The simplifications and cuts so castigated by Morozov are part of this conscious exercise, as Pasternak makes clear in his letter to Naumova, the editor-in-chief of Detgiz. Pasternak is heated, so his sentence runs away with him: Tell me: after everything Lev Tolstoy had done and everything that has happened and continues to happen in history, could a person of some significance in today’s literature go on hiding under the wing of mythical Shakespearean arcana, his untouchable holy relics and metaphoricised romanticism, to the detriment of the real Shakespeare, as I understand him, the arch-Tolstoyan Shakespeare, – Shakespeare who is the summit of all individual, realistic creativity in the history of mankind? (Masterstvo VI, 357) The moral even-handedness of Tolstoy’s own credo, first formulated in the Sebastopol Sketches, is certainly Shakespearean: Where in this tale is the evil that should be avoided, and where the good that should be imitated? Who is the villain and who the hero of the story? All are good and all are bad […] The hero of my tale – whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful – is Truth. * * * Pasternak’s Notes on the Translation of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, first commissioned in 1946, was only published in its entirety in 1956. He told his sister he’d been asked to write ‘whatever I liked, freely and boldly. And they swore they’d print it. […] Now it’s written, and they’re sighing and

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rolling their eyes at what I say, and of course there’s no question of it being printed, it’s so far removed from anything acceptable’ (Family, 373; 20 June 1946). It’s hard to see what could be even remotely objectionable in this succinct, fast-moving miscellany of Shakespearean observations. The style is terse and decisive. The most original sections are lightning sketches – a kind of director’s mood-board – of each play translated. These are vividly idiosyncratic, and influenced subsequent productions. Pasternak also deals briskly with a number of dead debates, including the authorship question also raised in his Chistopol conversations with Gladkov. He defends Shakespeare’s nonchalant shifts between verse and prose. He invokes Dr Johnson and T. S. Eliot, and echoes Coleridge, in praising the realism of Shakespeare’s ‘unity of tone’ (Coleridge’s ‘unity of feeling’), which modulates between comedy and tragedy as a composer moves between major and minor. Pasternak’s heavily scored copy of Harley Granville-Barker and G. B. Harrison’s Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge 1941) demonstrates his background reading for these dated questions.49 At the same time, Pasternak’s Notes are as independent-minded as his translations. He often sides with the iconoclasts. Like Dr Johnson, he is exasperated by Shakespeare’s muddled thoughts, his ‘heap of empty circumlocutions instead of the single elusive word he was in too much of a hurry to find’ (Works III, 194). He invokes Tolstoy and Voltaire and denigrates Shakespeare’s metaphorical artifice – failing, like them, to understand that in the major works high rhetoric is often deliberately ironic. This is understandable: parody is hard to identify in an alien language. Moreover, in his own poetry Pasternak had begun to restrain his own early and extraordinary gift for metaphor, perfecting the simplicity he also pursued in his translations. And yet he quickly switches from criticism to praise: Shakespeare’s metaphorical language is faithful to the essence of all parabolic truth. The use of metaphor is a natural consequence of man’s short span and the timeless magnitude of his problems. In the face of such disproportion he is compelled to view nature with an eagle eye and to express himself in instantly revealing flashes of illumination. This is poetry. Metaphor is the shorthand of genius, the speedwriting of the spirit. (Works III, 194) Pasternak is also critical on his own account. Some of his strictures are distinctly odd. His dislike of Othello, a play which pivots on Iago’s lengthy

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temptation scene (III.iii), leads him to the untenable generalization that Shakespeare is weakest in his third acts, while his ‘expository and final scenes are full of life’. He attributes to Shakespeare his own experience, that poetry came to him more easily than prose, paradoxically maintaining that ‘This even leads to many verse passages in which one can detect rough drafts of prose blocked out in the poetry’ (Works III, 195). It’s worth noting that in Romeo and Juliet Pasternak puts the Nurse’s verse speeches into prose; that Shakespeare’s finest piece of prose (Hamlet’s ‘What a piece of work is a man’) is not memorably rendered by Pasternak; and that both parts of Henry IV, in which so many of the Falstaffian low-life scenes are in prose, are the least interesting of his translations. Pasternak was particularly attentive to G. B. Harrison’s essay on Shakespeare’s historical context, which he read in its entirety, marking several passages detailing Tudor malpractice. He also studied Hume’s history of Elizabeth’s reign, particularly noting Peter Whitworth, a parliamentary commoner bravely speaking out for freedom of speech and imprisoned for it.50 With implicit self-identification, Pasternak explains that ‘Some of the events described in [Shakespeare’s English Histories] lived on in the circumstances surrounding his own life, and [he] couldn’t treat them with sober impartiality’. In spite of the realism of all Shakespeare’s work, he says, objectivity can be found not in the comedies, tragedies, or English histories, but in the Roman plays: Julius Caesar, and, above all, Antony and Cleopatra are not written out of love of art, or for poetry’s sake. They draw on his study of unenhanced, ordinary life. This is the ruling passion of every artist […] But why should history as remote as that of Ancient Rome inspire such realism? […] It was precisely their distance from the present that allowed Shakespeare to give things their proper names. He could say everything that he thought fit, whether political, moral, or anything else. (Works III, 201–2) By the same token, translating Shakespeare allowed Pasternak to speak the thoughts they shared, in twentieth-century Russian. * However, Pasternak’s spiritual freedom as a translator imposed technical restraints in practice. Comparing his versions line-by-line with the originals, one quickly identifies his own implicit rules. In blank verse he always aims for approximate equilinearity, rarely venturing beyond a couple of lines’

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difference at most. He imitates Shakespeare’s verse-forms with versatile tenacity, reproducing nearly all the permutations, from prose to blank verse, couplets, the three sonnets in Romeo and Juliet, end-stopped lines, enjambment, and even the significantly broken blank verse line, as in the Player’s image of Pyrrhus: So, like a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood, And like a neutral to his will and matter, Did nothing. (Hamlet II.ii.480ff.) Pasternak is alert to local verbal play, ingenious in his translation of puns, and vividly succinct in conveying Shakespeare’s imagery. At the same time he routinely bowdlerizes obscenities, clarifies obscurities, and abbreviates with tact. Elizabethan and Jacobean colloquialisms, now antiquated, are rendered in lively contemporary Russian. His supremely natural versions of Shakespeare’s songs, proverbs and jingles are one of his greatest strengths as a translator. Given his constantly repeated claims for freedom in order to recreate the spirit of his original, he is surprisingly accurate to the letter too. Of course this was difficult. The problem lies in two opposing factors: approximate equilinearity competing with linguistic difference. Russian is an inflected, highly polysyllabic language whose heroic line accommodates an average of four to five words. English is uninflected, with a preponderance of what Dryden called ‘our base Teuton monosyllables’. Our loose syntax relies on pronouns and prepositions, where Russian declines verbs and inflects nouns and adjectives to express linguistic relationships. In a comically polysyllabic sentence, Pasternak envies the monosyllabic nature of English, which allows it such metric freedom.51 Our blank verse line can accommodate anything up to ten words, each with its own shade of meaning. The difference between Russian and English is clearest in the most prosaic verse lines. Each of the following has been literally rendered by Pasternak. The vocabulary is not farfetched. King Polonius

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Have you your father’s leave? What says Polonius? (8 words) Отец пустил? Что говорит Полоний?(5) A hath, my lord, won from me my slow leave… (10) Он вымотал мне душу, государь…(5) I do beseech you, give him leave to go. (9) Благоволите разрешить поездку.(3)

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Inevitably, Pasternak’s translations replace Shakespeare’s looseness by a more compressed structure, from which – like it or not – much Shakespearean padding has to be cut. The act of translation is also an act of criticism, and my own disconcerting impression is of Shakespeare’s frequent weakness by the side of his translator. Hamlet, in particular, is riddled with doublings and even triplings, regularly cut by Pasternak. Some are nearly tautologous, like ‘leave and favour’, ‘leave and pardon’, ‘stand dumb and speak not’, ‘all forms, modes, shapes’, ‘both in time, / Form of the thing, each word made true and good’. Others have a spray-gun effect – the alternatives spatter the subject, and convey a finer chromatic shading, like ‘pith and marrow’, ‘new-hatch’d, unfledged’, ‘squeak and gibber’, ‘foul and most unnatural’, ‘oppress’d and fear-surprised’, ‘slow and stately’, ‘cheer and comfort’, ‘no soil nor cautel doth besmirch’, ‘the dead waste [waist] and middle of the night’. All these come from the first act of Hamlet and there are many more. Each is replaced by a single Russian equivalent. Individual doublings are defensible; even the general tendency has been identified as thematically significant.52 Yet Morozov’s contretemps with Pasternak teaches us one thing: every Shakespearean academic has his own pet fixations, whose importance seems incontrovertible to him, and to his own time alone. In the late twentieth century other critics, myself included, registered with dismay the image-patterns Pasternak fails to reproduce in all their minor ramifications. Yet if Pasternak were to accommodate everything we wanted, his translations would be stillborn. Russian readers and auditors of Hamlet will not miss these lost refinements, however significant they may seem to the leisured literary critic and Russian iskusstvovyed. It’s instructive to watch Pasternak’s surgical approach in detail. Dr Johnson, like Pasternak, complained about Shakespeare’s occasional struggle with unwieldy sentiments, ‘which he cannot well express, and will not reject’, resignedly observing that ‘If it continues stubborn’, Shakespeare ‘comprises it in such words as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow on it’.53 The best example is Hamlet’s confused rumination on the ‘vicious mole of nature’, ending: … that these men, Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, Being nature’s livery, or fortune’s star, His virtues else, be they as pure as grace, As infinite as man may undergo, Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault. The dram of eale

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Doth all the substance of a doubt To his own scandal. (Hamlet I.iv.30ff) This lame and impotent conclusion is correspondingly limber and lucid in Pasternak. He sacrifices Shakespeare’s metaphors (stamp, livery, star) for clarity. The first sentence is put into logical order and the confusion between singular and plural resolved. The speech ends on an instantly familiar, rather than obliquely metaphorical note: Бывает, словом, что пустой изьян, And so, sometimes, just a flaw, В роду ли, свой ли, губит человека, whether inherited or his own, ruins a man’s От мнений всех, будь доблести его, reputation, even if his achievements Как милость божья, чисты и несметны. are pure and incalculable as God’s grace. А все от этой глупой капли зла, Just because of that stupid drop of badness, И сразу все добро идет насмарку. everything good comes to nothing. Досадно ведь. It’s a real shame. That homely last line, Pasternak’s addition to Shakespeare, is just one instance of his sustained, Tolstoyan colloquial simplicity. This aspect of his technique brings together what are, for the scholar, his most regrettable omissions with his greatest strengths. Pasternak is not acute in his reading of Shakespeare’s high rhetoric. For instance, like most readers before the late twentieth century, he took Romeo and Juliet’s conventional Petrarchan paradoxes (‘Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate / O anything, of nothing first create!’) at face value, not realizing that this dated literary affectation is ironically pastiched by the play, until the lovers’ genuine feelings make the emotional incompatibilities central to Petrarchanism come painfully true. Consequently, misreading it as a sign of Shakespeare’s youth, Pasternak abbreviated many of the play’s parodically Petrarchan passages. Once the lovers have met and fallen in love, their increasingly genuine exchanges survive intact. Hence Morozov’s criticism, and his relieved praise of the balcony scene.

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Shakespeare habitually marks the mendacity of excessive rhetoric by identifiable artifice, including intricate Latinate syntax, inkhorn terms, tautology, and classical references. Pasternak tends to trim out excessive classicism anyway, and I suspect that he wasn’t familiar enough with English to identify the stylistic falsity of, for instance, Goneril and Regan’s protestations of love at the beginning of King Lear, or the absurd duet over Ophelia’s grave, where Laertes’ rant is out-ranted by Hamlet with furious irony. To take just one of these, compare the Russian and English Regans: I am made of that self metal as my sister, And prize me at her worth. In my true heart I find she names my very deed of love Only she comes too short: that I profess Myself an enemy to all other joys Which the most precious square of sense possesses, And find I am alone felicitate In your dear Highness’ love. (King Lear, I.i.69ff.) Regan’s most obviously giveaway phrase is the recherché classicism of ‘I am alone felicitate’. Her syntax is snakily convoluted. Pasternak, however, is intent on clarification. He abbreviates by two lines. He reduces the ominous metaphors of coining (‘self metal’) and commerce (‘prize’, ‘worth’). He omits intensives (‘my true heart’, ‘my very deed’, ‘all other joys’, ‘most precious’, ‘alone felicitate’, ‘dear highness’). His Reagan could almost be Cordelia in her unadorned directness. Отец, сестра и я одной породы, Father, my sister and I are of one kind, И нам одна цена. Ее ответ and have one price. Her reply Содержит все, что я б сама сказала, contains everything I’d have said myself, С той небольшой разницeй, что я with one small difference, that I Не знаю радостей других, помимо know no other joys, apart from Моей большой любви к вам, государь. my great love for you, lord.

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We first saw Pasternak’s instinctive impulse to laconic simplicity in his ‘extraordinary’ message of condolence when Stalin’s wife killed herself. It was impelled by Pasternak’s own sense of living ‘in an age of false and high-flown rhetoric’ when, as he told his father, ‘there is a great need for a direct, ardent, independent voice’. Moreover, his imperative for unadorned immediacy was not only paramount and all-consuming. It would also have been impossible for him to translate Goneril and Regan’s hypocrisy into the dead lingo of the personality cult, however close in spirit to Goneril and Regan’s flattery. Apart from the Russian Hamlet’s ‘squeezed’ for ‘pluck the heart out of my mystery’, I have found only one other example of identifiable Soviet-speak in Pasternak’s Russian, when Claudius invites Laertes to murder Hamlet, offering ‘soyuz’ (union, alliance) with him. And we shall jointly labour with your soul To give it due content. (Hamlet IV.v.212–13) И мы в союзе с вашею душой Добьемся удовлетворенья. And we in union with your soul Will achieve satisfaction. Pasternak has perfectly reproduced Claudius’ creepy mixture of false spirituality with sexual gratification to mask murder, and added his own twist. ‘Soyuz’ is not a word with happy associations in the Sovietskii Soyuz, the USSR. Pasternak’s default position of toning down Shakespeare’s high style, even when it carries strong negative connotations, is counterbalanced by his warmth in the lower registers. He’s at his happiest when rendering the humble life whose Rembrandt tones he found so close to his own heart, walking across Moscow in the new year’s dawn of 1938. His translations are written, quite unwittingly, in the spirit of F. P. Wilson’s 1941 British Academy Lecture in praise of ‘Shakespeare and the Diction of Common Life’. Pasternak’s own domestic Russian was full of tender diminutives. He regularly wrote to his parents as ‘papochka’ and ‘mamochka’ even in his late middle age (a verbal mannerism that irritated his brother Alexander). The suffix, ‘chk’, in its various forms, is the Russian diminutive that’s so hard for foreigners to translate (‘Little father’!). In Russian it’s the most natural thing in the world. Shakespeare’s Ghost addresses Hamlet as ‘thou noble youth’; Pasternak’s tenderly calls him ‘moi malchik’, ‘мой мальчик

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благородный’, ‘my noble little boy’. Even Polonius calls Ophelia his ‘little daughter’, ‘dochurka’. Pasternak’s Nurse, garrulously misremembering Juliet’s tottering toddler steps, naturally talks of her ‘little legs’ (‘nozhki’), and affectionately calls her ‘my little crumb’ (‘moia kroshka’) instead of Shakespeare’s ‘pretty wretch’. Pasternak, like Shakespeare, knows how painful these endearments can be in the wrong context. When Othello treats Desdemona as a whore in front of the Venetian envoys, Desdemona is baffled by his oblique remarks. In Shakespeare, she blankly asks ‘My Lord?’ four times, and ‘Why sweet Othello’ once. Pasternak varies and intensifies Desdemona’s bewilderment, as she repeatedly appeals to him: ‘Hе слышу.’ ‘Что ты говоришь?’ ‘Что, мой милый?’ ‘Mой милый?’ (‘I can’t hear.’ ‘What are you saying?’ ‘What, darling?’ ‘My dearest?’) Pasternak’s Fool tells Lear he’s pulled his knickers down (‘spustil s sebia shtanishki’) for his daughters to give him a good spanking. Even Shakespeare’s Fool is more polite (‘thou put’st down thine own breeches’). In Russian the diminutive ‘shtanishki’, worn by today’s toddlers and forcibly contemporary, turns the Fool’s sibilant sneer into derisive baby-language which is deeply shocking.54 And – a last example – when Pasternak’s Hamlet insists on calling Claudius ‘dorogaia matushka’ (‘dear little mummy’), this naïve peasant diminutive is more insolently improper than the adult sarcasm of the English Hamlet’s ‘Farewell, dear mother’ (Hamlet IV.iii.49). ‘Kroshka’ [crumb], the Nurse’s endearment for Juliet, poignantly reappears in Desdemona’s willow song: ‘The poor little crumb sat in tears by a bush’. As in most of his translations of Shakespeare’s songs, Pasternak’s translation is free, but his metre closely echoes Shakespeare. In the transliteration below, I have marked the stressed syllables in bold. ‘Iva’ means ‘willow’. The metre is dactylic (tum ti ti). The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree… Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee Sing willow […] sing all a green willow. (Othello IV.iii.40ff.) Nishiastnaia kroshka v slezax pod kustom Sidela odna u obriva. Zatyanite ivushku, ivu spoyom Okh iva, zelyonaia iva. Несчастная крошка в слезах под кустом The poor little crumb sat in tears by a bush

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Сидела одна у обрыва. Alone, on the edge of a bankside Затяните ивушку, иву споем Pull tight the willow, let’s sing of the willow Ох ива, зеленая ива. Oh willow, oh the green willow. It is easy to imagine the tranquil authenticity of Pasternak’s Russian version being sung by peasant girls weaving a hundred and two hundred years ago. Inevitably, Shakespeare sometimes sounds archaic to us. Pasternak’s Russian is both contemporary and timeless. Take Ophelia’s songs in Hamlet IV.v.27ff:   Queen Alas, sweet lady, what imports this song? [Golubushka,] what does your song mean?   Ophelia Say you? Nay, pray you mark. [Da nu vas], I’ll sing you some more. He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone, At his head the grass-green earth At his heels a stone.

Помер, леди, помер он, He died, lady, he died, Помер, только слег, He died when he lay down, В головах зеленый дрок, At his head the green gorse, Кaмушек у ног. At his feet a little stone.

Gertrude’s ‘golubushka’ [‘little dove’] is a pet name any Russian mother could use even now. Like the Russian ‘kamushek’ [‘little stone’] in the last line, it is a timeless folk diminutive. Ophelia’s ‘da nu vas’ is an accurately vague rendition of Ophelia’s ‘Say you?’ ‘Pomer, ledy, pomer on, / Pomer…’ (‘he died, lady, he died’), thrice repeated, takes the same heavy trochaic stress as ‘He is dead and gone’. Pasternak’s alternating three and four-stress lines match his original so closely that both songs can be sung to the same tune, the Elizabethan folksong predating Hamlet which Ophelia goes on to misquote in the next verse. Here little triplets disturb the regular trochaic beat, which breaks down altogether in both versions’ last line. White his shroud as the mountain snow Larded all with sweet flowers

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Белый саван, белых роз Деревцо в цвету,

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И лицо поднять от слез Мне невмоготу.

Pasternak misses what a Shakespearean scholar would know, but the ordinary playgoer does not – that Ophelia inserts an extra-metric negative (‘did not go’) into the original folksong, in unconscious recognition of Polonius’ huggermugger burial. In Pasternak’s version, we have instead the pathos of ‘White his shroud, the wood white with roses, and I can’t lift up my face for crying.’ Pasternak fulfilled the aim he described to Gladkov, to find an unobtrusive style ‘almost as simple as the prattling of a child, and as warm and intimate as a mother’s lullaby…’. His translations of Shakespeare’s songs are unparalleled. They survive as songs in their own right, and often introduce folk elements that seem to convey the spirit of Shakespeare’s original as, we imagine, it might have touched Shakespeare’s own contemporaries, rather than us at the remove of several centuries and countless revolutions of style. Elsewhere he repeatedly imports folkloric touches without a precedent from Shakespeare. When Horatio’s line about Hamlet’s father, ‘I saw him once, ’a was a goodly king’ (I.ii.186), becomes ‘я видел раз его, кpaca-кopoль’, the archaically formulaic ‘krasa-korol’ (‘a fair king’), linked with the prosaic ‘I saw him once’, gives a sense of warm archaism – we’re in the land of living fairy-tale. The care Pasternak takes over sound is remarkable. Macbeth’s ‘ “Aroint thee witch!”, the rump-fed ronyon cries’ (I.iii.6) turns into an even nastier string of harsh As, gutturals and rasping Rs: ‘a eta tvar kak garkniet, von otsiuda, prakliataya karga!’ (‘And the creature shrieks, Get out of here, you cursed hag!’ 'А эта тварь как гаркнет: 'Вон отсюда, проклятая карга!'). His care in reproducing the actual sound of his original is well illustrated by Lear’s last speech: And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never. (King Lear V.iii.306ff.) Мою My Бедняжку удавили! Нет, не дышит! Poor little one’s been strangled! No, not breathing! Коню, собаке, крысе можно жить

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A horse, a dog, a rat’s allowed to live Но не тебе. Тебя на век не стало, But not for you. You’ve gone for ever, Навек, навек, навек, навек, навек. Forever, forever, forever, forever, forever. ‘No, no, no life’ becomes ‘nyet, nye…’ The vowels retreating back down the throat in ‘dog, horse, rat’ are echoed in ‘konyu, sobahke, kreesi’ (which puts the horse first for aural reasons). Pasternak’s last two lines repeat three negatives, ‘you’ twice in mid-line to painful effect, and ‘navyek’ (meaning ‘for ever’) six times in all: ‘No nye tebye. Tebya na vyek ne stalo,/Navyek, navyek, navyek, navyek, navyek.’ We know from Pasternak’s own poetry how inimitably he uses onomatopoeia and alliteration. He shares them with Shakespeare too. In Macbeth IV.ii.20–1 Ross says the Scots ‘know not what we fear,/But float upon a wild and violent sea’. Pasternak clarifies the implicit metaphor: ‘безвестность/ Колышется кругом как океан’ (‘obscurity sways around like the sea’) – ‘koluishetsia krugom kak okean’. The sea speaks a universal language, and Pasternak’s clucking sound effect echoes Auden’s ‘pluck and knock of the tide’ and Joyce’s ‘in cups of rocks it slops; flop, slop, slap’. A final, sustained illustration of Pasternak’s sound effects is his version of ‘To be or not to be’ (III.i.55ff.). For Hamlet’s ‘To die, to sleep; / To sleep, perchance to dream,’ he provides three alliterating alternatives: ‘Скончаться. Сном забыться./Уснуть’ (Skonchiatsia. Snom zabuitsia. Usnut’) – ‘to pass away. In sleep to find forgetfulness. To fall asleep’. He then adds further derivatives from ‘son’ and ‘snui’ (dreams), ‘sniat’ (to take off), ‘smert’ (death) and ‘obyasnit’ (to explain), to create the resonant sequence alliterating on ssnn ssmm – Скончаться. Сном забыться. Уснуть. И видет сны? Вот и ответ. Какие сны в том смертном сне приснятся, Когда покров земного чувства снят? Вот объясненье. – which sounds like this: ‘Skonchiatsia. Snom zabuitsia./Usnut. I videt snui? Vot i otvet./Kakiye snui v tom smertnom snye prisniatsia,/Kogda pokrov zemnovo chuvtstva sniat?/Vot obiasneniye…’ (meaning roughly: ‘To die. To fall asleep and to forget. And to see dreams? What an answer! What dreams will be dreamed in that dream of death, when the pall of worldly feelings is lifted?’). Pasternak pulled all the stops out for this soliloquy – almost

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literally, because he thought of it in musical terms. In his Notes on Translating Shakespeare’s Tragedies he defends Hamlet’s cruelty to Ophelia in the following Nunnery scene by this analogy. Let us consider what introduces this heartless scene. It is preceded by the famous ‘To be or not to be’, and the very first verse lines exchanged by Hamlet and Ophelia in the beginning of this offensive scene are still drenched in the fresh music of that soliloquy. In its bitter beauty, and the disorder in which Hamlet’s doubts jostle, throng and delay, the soliloquy is like an abrupt, unexpected trial run of organ notes before the requiem is played. (Works III, 197) Tracing Pasternak’s progress through Shakespeare side by side with his original, one shares the imaginative sympathy Pasternak felt for Shakespeare as he translated him day by day. You get used to the businesslike dispatch of less interesting scenes, and come to expect his routine cutting, clarification, mild bowdlerization and stylistic cleansing. But with the great speeches and great scenes something quite different is in the air – a sense of tension, challenge, heightened effort. At such moments the translations are noticeably freer; the aural effects accumulate; the lines sing and sting. * In his lifetime Pasternak was unbelievably unlucky with performances of his translations. Hamlet, the play he worked hardest over, lost three directors in turn: Meyerhold, Nemirovich-Danchenko and Sakhnovsky. Pasternak patiently modified his text to accommodate each director’s wishes in turn. The text is extremely fluid. Pasternak’s son Evgeny, who edited the play for an edition in 1968, found he had twelve different versions to work from, as well as manuscript corrections Pasternak made in a late edition of the text (France, 261). However, Evgeny did not have access to an unpublished document preserved in the Pasternak family archives in England. This is a xerox of the 1940 prompt-copy from the original Nemirovich-Danchenko production. It was kept by A. I. Kasatkin, the prompter of the Moscow Art Theatre, and is painstakingly annotated in his neat upright hand, recording every agreed alteration Pasternak provided in the course of rehearsals. There are numerous cuts and 92 numbered insertions, the longest, number 71, being a ruthlessly abbreviated paraphrase of V.ii. in tonelessly functional blank verse, where Hamlet tells Horatio the backstory of his escape from Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. Some seventy lines of this scene are reduced to twenty, and slipped into the Gravediggers’ scene at V.i.64:

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Figure 5: 1940 Prompt Copy of Nemirovich-Danchenko’s Hamlet V.i 35–71, p. 110. N71 (Enter Hamlet and Horatio) Hamlet That’s about it. A couple of words about something else. Do you remember what happened? Horatio Of course, prince. Hamlet That night I groped my way to their cabin, Imagine, they had an order with them Saying that in England I should be seized And my head chopped off. Horatio Impossible. Hamlet Here’s the decree. Read it later. Shall I tell you what I did then? Horatio Please. Hamlet I switched it for a forgery. My new text stated that Guildenstern And Rosencrantz should lose their heads. Horatio Where did you get the seal from? Hamlet I had my father’s with me, which The current Danish seal is copied from.

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On the third day at sea a heavily armed corsair gave us chase.55 Seeing we couldn’t escape, we attacked it. In the grapple I boarded them, I didn’t notice how. At that moment the ships disengaged and I turned out to be their only prisoner. They dealt with me like good-hearted villains. And that’s how I’m here. Horatio So Guildenstern and Rozencrantz are sailing To their deaths? Hamlet That’s what they were after. My conscience is clear. Horatio What a king! Hamlet Judge for yourself how mad I am… Morozov would have had a fit. I can’t imagine Pasternak enjoyed this hack-work either. With the first post-war hopes of friendship between Britain and the USSR, a group of English actors sent their Russian colleagues a recording of Shakespeare’s soliloquies. Gielgud dedicated his reading of ‘To be or not to be’ to Livanov, then deep in his Hamlet rehearsals. The two actors exchanged friendly letters and signed photographs of themselves as Hamlet. And then Stalin frowned, Sakhnovsky died, and Hamlet was withdrawn from production. Undeterred, in 1953, Livanov decided to stage Pasternak’s King Lear with himself in the title role. Pasternak was delighted but busy with Doctor Zhivago. No rewriting this time, but he suggested cuts and explained lines and themes, in one letter telling Livanov, In Lear there is one eternal Tolstoyan note, and it is this. All that talk about kindness, fidelity, interests of the state and loyalty to the fatherland comes exclusively from scoundrels and criminals. The real heroes of the tragedy are a mad minor despot and a girl who loves truth to the point of sanctified folly. ‘Common sense’ is represented by beasts from a zoo and only these two are real human beings. The concept is supremely anarchic. (Livanov, 32) Ill-omened words! History repeated itself. Parts were distributed, sets designed. Paul Scofield, touring Russia as Lear, sent Livanov a photograph of himself in the role, with good wishes for Livanov’s future success. Then the Zhivago scandal broke, Pasternak was declared an enemy of the people, and the production foundered. However, Stalin had died in March 1953, and in October of that year Kozintsev wrote to Pasternak with his plans to stage Hamlet in Leningrad’s

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Alexandrinsky Theatre.56 Pasternak recommended the Detgiz edition and encouraged Kozintsev to cut freely, stressing that a reader wants to understand for himself, but in the theatre the auditors must feel that characters speak to each other, not us, and that they do understand one another. In those days Soviet theatres allowed themselves generous rehearsal times. Five months later, Kozintsev wrote again, warning Pasternak that he wanted to cut the whole of the Fortinbras ending, which he took to be an operatic upturn demanded by the Elizabethan censor, so that the play could end with a strong ruler on the throne. But of course, Kozintsev continued, in the prison of ‘Denmark’ the new reign will be no different from the old. Instead, he wanted to cut Hamlet’s staged death, and finish with him addressing Sonnet 74 to the audience, to celebrate the survival of the spirit. It would run on perfectly from Hamlet’s You, that look pale and tremble at this chance, Who are but mutes and audience to this act, Had I but time – as this fell sergeant, death Is strict in his arrest – O! I could tell you – But be contented: when that fell arrest Without all bail shall carry me away My life hath in this line some interest, Which for memorial still with thee shall stay… (Hamlet V.ii.334–7, Sonnet 74, 1ff.) Hamlet would drift to sleep; the curtains would part wide; Hamlet would rise and deliver the sonnet from stage front. Lighting, and Shostakovich’s specially composed music, would make it work. If Pasternak had no time to translate the sonnet, would he object to their using Marshak’s version? Pasternak objected strongly, and provided his own translation. He also pointed out that the Fortinbras close was typical of Shakespeare’s habitual juxtaposition of noisy public life continuing alongside private tragedy. He and Akhmatova both thought the audience would be confused by Kozintsev’s projected staging (was Hamlet dead or not?). Akhmatova thought the sonnet could be delivered by Horatio. But it was all entirely up to Kozintsev. In the event Kozintsev found another way to suggest the triumph of the spirit, which some of the audience found just as baffling. Pasternak’s Leningrad cousin, Olga Freidenberg, was at the first night and sent him a detailed, critical account.57 She complained that ‘To be or not to be’ ‘failed to

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touch us because it is delivered against a background of muted organ music from backstage’ (which suggests that Kozintsev had studied Pasternak’s Notes on the play, and put some of them into literal practice). She hated the cuts: ‘Gone are Shakespeare’s metaphors and aphorisms. Gone the verse. Actors speak their lines as in ordinary conversation.’ She was shocked by the loss of Fortinbras in Act IV. And she didn’t stay to the end. So what happened? The set contained an interior, Hamlet’s room, which was dominated by a huge Nike without a head: the winged victory of Samothrace now standing in the Louvre. In a postscript to her letter, Olga adds: ‘I just learned that the finale of Hamlet goes like this: the dead lie in darkness, the sky is brightly lit, and there, high against it, stands Nike on her pedestal. No comment needed, as they say.’ Much later, she tells Boris that her neighbour asked: ‘Tell me, Olga Mikhailovna, what was that bird without a head doing in Hamlet’s room? There was no-one I could ask. Everyone is wondering why there should be a man-sized bird there, without a head.’ Kozintsev went on to make two films, of Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970)58. For English audiences they are quite stagey. For their contemporary Soviet audiences these at least were rich with meaning. His Hamlet is heavy with the sense that Denmark, like Russia, is a prison. The film opens with clattering horsemen riding across the wide countryside and into Claudius’ fortress – across a drawbridge, through the gateway tower, and into an open courtyard. The drawbridge is pulled up; slowly the portcullis, a criss-cross iron curtain, descends. The ladies of the court move in their stiff dresses with fixed smiles. Ophelia practices a formal dance like a little marionette. When Polonius is murdered, her waiting women dress her in mourning: below the black dress big metal hoops to hold up her skirts, a tight metal corset bolted around her ribcage – another portcullis. It is a cruel world of spying, murder and betrayal, debarred from nature. Beyond the ramparts the sea moves and a solitary gull is flying as Hamlet muses on a destiny in the fall of a sparrow. Hamlet himself, young and blonde, in this black-and-white film looks uncannily like the white-haired Pasternak in his last years.

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Acknowledgments I would like to renew my thanks to Professor Alexei Vadimovich Bartoshevich for his gift of the xerox of the annotated prompt-copy prepared for Nemirovich-Danchenko’s production of Pasternak’s Hamlet in 1939–43. The text was preserved by the theatre’s prompter, A. I. Kasatkin, who gave the xerox to Professor Bartoshevich before his death in 1962. Professor Bartoshevich offered the Pasternak Trust this document when we met at a Soviet-British Shakespeare Colloquium in Moscow in 1987; in 1990 Peter Holland kindly delivered it to Oxford, where it is currently housed in the Trust’s archives. Given the circumstances of Nemirovich-Danchenko’s ill-starred production, it is hardly surprising that the survival of this prompt-copy should be virtually unknown. I have a deep and lifelong debt of gratitude to Boris’ eldest son, Evgeny Borisovich Pasternak, and his wife, Elena Vladimirovna Pasternak, for their loving kindness and unstinted scholarly support over many years. No question addressed to them ever remained unanswered; every answer opened new horizons. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Evgeny Borisovich Pasternak (1923–2012).

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Chapter 3

Brecht as Great Shakespearean: A Lifelong Connection David Barnett

At first glance, it might appear somewhat overblown to call Bertolt Brecht a ‘great Shakespearean’. Brecht, while occupying a position as one of the twentieth century’s greatest playwrights, theorists and practitioners of theatre, adapted only one of Shakespeare’s plays and used another as a source for a drama which, in its final version, offered points of contact rather than full correspondence. A closer examination, however, reveals an interest in Shakespeare quite early in Brecht’s life which developed into a productive and critical fascination which he never forsook. Brecht wrote two radio adaptations (of Macbeth and Hamlet – both now lost), added scenes to Shakespeare’s plays to emphasize his own dramaturgical ends, and used Shakespeare as a point of reference from the 1920s until his death in 1956. The library he left behind contained sixty-three volumes of Shakespeare.1 The collection contains editions from the late eighteenth, early nineteenth and twentieth centuries in English as well as several editions of the famous Schlegel-Tieck translations in German. The index which accompanies the thirty-volume collected works suggests the extent of Brecht’s enduring relationship with Shakespeare. The number of references far outstrips those to Goethe or Schiller, Aristotle, even Marx.2 Brecht, as the constructor and tireless reviser of a new approach to understanding the political in the theatre, developed his relationship with Shakespeare in a series of theoretical writings, highlighting certain aspects while underplaying others. Brecht was not a systematic thinker, but preferred to focus on particular themes, discard them, return to them, and think them through further depending on his circumstances at any given time. Consequently, the story of Brecht’s connections to Shakespeare can be contradictory and uneven, with much left implicit. The relationship began, on paper at least, with the enthusiastic registration of the Bard in an early diary entry and some letters that follow.

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The journal of the fifteen-year-old Brecht calls Romeo and Juliet ‘great! This clear, wonderful construction, this composition’.3 So, already, a sense of the play’s dramaturgy has caught the young man’s eye. In a letter of 1916, Brecht listed Shakespeare as one of his favourite authors, and he described Coriolanus in 1917, the play he would adapt in the 1950s, as ‘wonderful!’.4 A couple of years later, Brecht was gripped by Antony and Cleopatra: ‘the more the action appears as the focus, the richer and more powerful is the development of its supports [here he means the characters]. They have no face, they are only voices […].’5 In the mid-1920s, Brecht was to formulate his theories of an epic theatre, which I will consider below. Yet a shift of interest from character to plot suggests how his early tastes were to inform his own approaches to writing plays in which character, even at this time in his career, was rarely the central focus of attention. Beyond these early impressionistic notes, Brecht was to build a more nuanced but no less fragmentary set of positions and attitudes which ran through published and unpublished writings on drama, theatre and performance. Brecht never wrote extensively on Shakespeare; even work directly addressing Shakespeare was invariably short. Walter Hinderer calls the Bard ‘an important point of orientation’ for Brecht and this is a useful way of viewing the relationship between them.6 I shall begin by examining Brecht’s theoretical positions with respect to his Renaissance predecessor before looking more closely at the ways in which Brecht engaged directly with the plays themselves.

Formal Confluences: Brecht Re-reads Shakespeare Brecht approached Shakespeare from a variety of positions and tended towards making generalizing comments which left the relationship to more specific points of reference somewhat opaque. If one cannot locate a point of departure for Brecht, one theme dominates, that of Shakespeare’s utility to the contemporary playwright and theorist, and its evolution shows both how problematic and productive it was to Brecht, and how it opened up other lines of inquiry along the way. He mentions Shakespeare in passing in 19257 as a ‘long dead dramatist’ whose ‘material’ nonetheless could breathe new life into a moribund theatrical system.8 The key word in this early piece is ‘material’. Wilhelm Hortmann proposes a Brechtian definition of material as ‘the re-workable substance of a play’ and this lies at the heart of Brecht’s relationship to Shakespeare.9 Brecht was keen to exploit whatever could be reused or, as

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he preferred to call it, re-functioned, ‘umfunktioniert’. In Shakespeare Brecht valued the richness and the openness of his texts. In January 1929, he defined the dramatic in the plays as being ‘wildly eventful, passionate, contradictory, dynamic’.10 The connection between such expansiveness and its utility for a contemporary audience had been made two years earlier in a speech Brecht wrote as an introduction to his adaptation of Macbeth for the radio: One recognizes in the disjointedness of his acts the disjointedness of a human life [Schicksals]11 when it is narrated by someone who’s not interested in ordering it in order to match an idea, which can only be an imposition, with an argument which isn’t taken from life. There can be nothing more stupid than staging Shakespeare so that it’s clear. He is naturally unclear. He is absolute material.12 The relationship that Brecht posits between the form of the plays and life is reminiscent of Peter Bürger’s theses on the historical avant-garde’s attempts to re-forge a relationship between art and everyday life.13 Such an impulse is reduced by the imposition of order in the form of an ‘idea’, something which makes art contrived and thus falsifies it. The adjective ‘absolute’ reinforces the ways in which readers or spectators may connect their various experiences of reality with the material associatively; the work is connotative rather than denotative. Brecht called the quality ‘the great Shakespearean resource of suggestive transmission [Wirkung]’.14 This formulation describes the way in which Shakespeare’s work can hover above singular meanings because it is less constrained by restrictive interpretations from within the plays themselves. This idea also chimed with Brecht because he sought to activate his audience by deliberately provoking their curiosity and inviting them to produce meaning together with the actors. Later, around 1945, the figure of the Philosopher15 in Brecht’s Messingkauf calls Shakespeare ‘a great realist’ who ‘always shovelled piles of raw material onto the stage, disorganized depictions of events’.16 The idea of realism here is central because it gives context to the praise of the apparently unprocessed dramatic material. The prerequisite for Brecht’s writing and directing practice was an idea of realism. This is defined in Theaterarbeit, the book which documents the first six productions of the Berliner Ensemble, in a quotation from Friedrich Engels as ‘the reproduction [Wiedergabe] of typical people under typical circumstances’.17 This postulate is placed in contradistinction to an unashamedly partisan definition of naturalism as ‘an artistic direction

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which strives for the reproduction of natural appearances with embarrassing precision, which, however, often hides meaningful connections by pedantically accumulating random details’.18 ‘Realism’ has a special meaning in Brecht’s theatre because it includes a generalizing principle which goes beyond the superficial imitation of reality. Realism here is something which applies to society as a whole because it sets out the laws under which the dialectic works, regardless of apparent differences between individuals. The dialectical worldview sees individuals and society in a process of perpetual dialogue which, through contradiction, brings about change in perpetuity. A thesis and an antithesis stand in contradiction, and only when the negation is itself negated does change occur in the form of a dialectical synthesis. This philosophy is political because it proposes that both human behaviour and society are unfixed; there is nothing to suggest that either need continue as it has been. Thus, put rather simply, if one changes society, one changes human beings, as the conditions under which people function will help to produce different behaviours. Brecht was exposed to Marxism in the mid-1920s and while he was beginning to articulate a relationship to what a dialectical dramaturgy might entail in the years that followed, his thoughts had reached a more developed state by the 1930s and 1940s. The quotation from the Philosopher, above, allows one to conclude that the mass of material found in Shakespeare suggested a dialectically materialist grasp of reality avant la lettre. Brecht praised what he perceived to be Shakespeare’s lack of education in connection with his ability to deliver unformed material: ‘Just like the actor who, even if he’s stupid, can play clever people by simply copying their Gestus, the dramatist can also, if unknowing, exhibit knowledge in his plays. He doesn’t need to attain knowledge, he only needs to observe the knowledgeable […].’19 Here Brecht identified a category he found central to his own dramatic enterprise: the naïve. Naïvety is the ability to write or indeed to perform material without reducing it with prejudices or preconceptions, an idea which tallies with Schiller’s famous distinction of 1795 between the naïve and the sentimental. To the writer, this is the ability to perceive reality without collapsing it to fit particular agendas. This did not mean, however, that there was something artless at work here. Brecht wrote disapprovingly that ‘our narrow bourgeois [spectators] can’t imagine naïvety and complexity living together’.20 That is, naïvety about approaching the world does not equate with the world itself being in some way uncomplicated. The dramatist needs to be able to look at the complex world with wonder, thus leaving it open for the spectator to make

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connections between its tensions while at the same time understanding that those tensions contain the ‘right’ kind of material in the first place. Brecht allied a dialectical depiction of reality with special devices which he developed first in the form of his epic theatre. Ilya Fradkin comments: ‘all the virtues of Shakespeare’s realism – the broad apprehension of life, the absence of rationalist construction etc – always bound Brecht to an especially valuable quality in his eyes: the epic.’21 The epic was something of a catch-all term that Brecht used to describe the formal features of a political theatre in which the spectator was to be activated by being presented with dialectical material for his or her consideration. A major role was attributed to interruption or disturbing the flow of the material on offer. The fits and starts of the epic play were to prevent the unquestioned consumption of the performance. In this way, the material would not necessarily succumb to naturalization or universalization, two mechanisms common to the broad dissemination of dominant ideologies as ways to conceal their human origin.22 The principle of Verfremdung23 was established as a way of making the familiar strange, that is, disturbing the audience’s inured faculties of perception by confronting them with people, objects or situations the spectators thought they understood and presenting them in a different light. (Again one notes a link with the naïve: the plenitude of the world is curtailed by the interests of capital, in Brecht’s reading. What is required is a fresh, unencumbered view to allow new connections to be made, for the exploitative system to be criticized and, preferably, overcome.) The question of genre also interested Brecht in his interpretation of Shakespeare, and this, too, was related to the rich textures of the plays. He noted late in his career, around 1954, that ‘the comic aspect appears strongly in the tragic […] or the tragic in the comic as a contrast. (The difference which is often made on this point disappears in the process.)’24 What Brecht suggests here is that the opposition between tragedy and comedy can be deconstructed. At a purely formal level, the richness of the text allows for a critical reassessment which can offer a Verfremdung of the audience’s expectations. The tragic is viewed with the cool gaze of those born later and can be reformulated away from individual ‘tragic flaws’ into contradictions between the individual and social structures. Consequently, Brecht suggested, for example, that Lear tear up the map of his kingdom in I.i on stage as a Verfremdung: ‘thus it would not only direct the gaze onto the empire but, in that Lear is so clearly treating the empire as his own private property, he throws light onto the fundaments of feudal family ideology.’25

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Brecht’s idea that the opening of King Lear distances the spectator from the tragic ending led Georg Seehase to see this strategy as ‘the starting point for changing the specificity of genre in the old tragedy’.26 The tragic, about which Brecht was at best ambivalent, as we shall see below in the discussion of Coriolanus, offered itself as the product of cultural orthodoxy rather than as immutable essence, and could hence be subjected to radical review. The important aspect for Brecht was that this review was not driven by an imposition from outside but found its rationale within the texts themselves. Brecht was keen to uncover aspects of what he perceived to be Shakespeare’s epic form within his texts which either tallied with Brecht’s own or which he could appropriate. His favourite site was the Histories where he found ‘the epic to be most in evidence’.27 He considered the montage principle, which joined scenes of different locations and times, a productive means to disrupt the audience’s sense of continuity. Spectators had to adjust their perspective and understand the ways in which the divergent elements connected to each other, thus foregrounding the productivity of the audience over that of the writer and the director, who are helpless to produce such connections. Although the Histories have often been viewed as the obvious place for Brecht to find traits of his epic theatre, Thomas Metscher argues that Shakespeare’s later works provide perhaps even more fecund ground. Focusing on The Tempest, he suggests that Prospero offers himself as an epic narrator who continually interrupts the action with explanation and commentary; that the diverse styles of the scenes invite different modes of viewing; and that Caliban in particular draws attention to his own use of language, making it worthy of careful consideration from the audience.28 Brecht, through the Dramaturge of the Messingkauf, also considered the Renaissance stage to be one ‘full of V-Effects’. He found, for example, that the empty stage itself compelled the audience to admit that they were in a theatre and not subject to an illusionism which would take hold in the nineteenth century, and noted that boys played women, thus interrupting an easy fit between actor and role.29 R. B. Parker agrees that the Elizabethan actor, subjected to a repertoire in which the same play was never performed on successive days, played ‘parts as roles’, thus countering the uninterrupted flow of empathy between spectator and character.30 John Rouse, however, carefully counsels: ‘I am not trying to maintain that Shakespeare invented Verfremdung, but Brecht knew parallels when he saw them, and learned from what he saw.’31 Consequently, one should note, as Rodney T. K. Symington does, that Brecht ‘sought elements in Shakespeare’s works for which he could find a place in his already conceptualized understanding

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of the epic theatre’.32 Brecht undertook his exploration of Shakespearean form with an agenda which both included and excluded important aspects of the source material. The major problems that Brecht encountered when re-reading Shakespeare concerned the central subject matter of so many of the plays – their great individuals.

The Challenges of Historicizing Subject Matter A key element of what Brecht valued so highly in Shakespeare was that he was writing at the dawn of the modern period. On the one hand, Shakespeare was the perfect chronicler of the new individualism, as Brecht noted in 1927: ‘Shakespearean dramas anticipated the 300 years in which the individual developed himself into a capitalist […].’33 On the other, he was able to contextualize these new formations by contrasting the modern with the feudal, as Brecht’s Philosopher expressed around 1945: ‘there are those precious points of fracture in his [Shakespeare’s] works where the new of his time collide with the old.’34 The two quotations offer further insights into Brecht’s fascination with Shakespeare and suggest why he appealed so much to Brecht qua Marxist. However, Shakespeare’s focus on great individuals posed a problem because of their perceived autonomy within the dramas. Brecht would solve that problem by historicizing such figures, but this required much care, thought and application. If one lingers a little on the first quotation, one finds that the theme of individualism is something of a contradictory attraction to Brecht. On the positive side, Shakespeare provided the most important quality to a socialist reception: he was, according to Brecht, a great realist, which meant that he was a materialist and not an idealist. Such tenets were essential if reality was to be represented on stage, and here Brecht presented the reader with some rare, specific analysis, in this case, of Othello, around 1953. Writing about Constantin Stanislavsky’s theories of acting, Brecht was keen to demonstrate how an actor’s psychological study of Shakespeare’s protagonist missed important social details: Shakespeare specifically chooses a general who hasn’t inherited his position and who, on the contrary, has had to fight for it through his own achievements and has presumably taken it by force from another. […] In short, he lives in a world of struggle for property and position. […] Thus his relationship to his beloved wife reveals itself to be a relationship to a chattel.35

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Brecht’s analysis sets out the material situation which gives rise to the tragedy and offers an historicization. Othello is not only an example of human passion run wild but also behaviour typical in certain sections of a commodity society. Paul Kussmaul argues, however, that the materialist reading is incomplete and thus does not encompass the reality of the historical situation: ‘Indeed, Brecht makes every effort to read the play [Othello] historically but since he only has, so to speak, half the worldview in his sights, his interpretation is skewed and banal.’36 Kussmaul considers the dialectical reading flattening and reductive, bringing everything down to a crude mechanism of economic cause and effect. But this observation in an early modern character does not equate with Brecht’s practice for his own characters. W. E. Yuill warns against this tendency when he comments that the ‘relative simplicity [of Brecht’s theories of textual adaptation] does no justice to the complexity and diversity of Brecht’s actual versions’.37 That is, Brecht’s own characters are not automata, and despite the emphasis on social relations in his plays, they are complex figures. A way of illustrating this is to follow how Brecht countered the charge of reductionism in a dialogue from the Messingkauf in which the Philosopher is discussing the tragic in Shakespeare: philosopher:  The demise of the feudal is seen as tragic. […] All [Shakespeare’s tragic heroes] exist in a new world under which they are crushed. actor: Many would say this explanation flattens the plays. philosopher:  But what could be richer, more important and more interesting than the demise of great ruling classes?38 Brecht suggests that the historicized interpretation of Shakespeare is the starting point for processes which affect the whole gamut of human experience. The cause will connect with a variety of possible effects which make their presence felt in the emotional, the moral and the political spheres. But what is emphasized is that that cause is material and historical. Brecht’s reading of Shakespeare’s materialism brought with it the focus on the great individual, something with which Brecht had to grapple if he was to shift the emphasis from the personal to the social. Looking at the negative side,39 Brecht stated in 1929: the great individuals were the subject matter and this subject matter produced the form of these dramas. […] What was this dramatic form like? What was its purpose? We see this in Shakespeare very clearly.

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Shakespeare drives the great individual, Lear, Othello, Macbeth, through four acts out of all his human relations with the family, with the state, out onto the heath, into complete isolation where he shows greatness in his own demise. […] Later times will call this a drama for cannibals.40 The link of greatness and suffering was, in Shakespeare’s day, one which glorified the individual in a way that was nostalgic and unacceptable to the young Marxist. Over time, though, Brecht developed a series of strategies to make a Brechtian virtue out of a Shakespearean necessity. The key term here is historicization, which Brecht was to understand as a powerful means of ‘making theatre politically’. Brecht was convinced that theatre could be produced in such a way that virtually everything performed on stage could be connected back to the dominant political, economic and social conditions of the particular time. Thus even a simple greeting between two people in a street could reveal something about their social differences or similarities. ‘Making theatre politically’ invokes a formal approach to staging all dramatic material whereas ‘making political theatre’ would concentrate on political themes or issues. Historicization says that no point in history is ever the same and this provides hope for political change, because the human is continually being reconfigured by its dialogue with its environment and is thus capable of change. But as John J. White points out, ‘processes of Verfremdung and Historisierung need to be shown to be ways of treating the present, rather than just the past’.41 That is, it is not so much a question of recreating an accurate image of the past as demonstrating differences between the past and the present with the aim not only of showing that change is possible but also that historical conditions produce different behaviours and attitudes. Thus Brecht was able to muse around 1940 that if Antony lost an empire while dallying with Cleopatra, a contemporary English king would simply lose his job but remain happy under similar circumstances.42 While the parallel of Antony and Edward VIII is hardly exact, and does not take into account what Cleopatra lost, Brecht’s point is that consequences that follow socially prohibited relationships for ‘great’ men have changed markedly over the centuries. Historicization is perhaps most clearly seen as a way of opening up productive contradictions if one turns to Brecht’s thoughts on Hamlet. Brecht’s relationship to this play underwent subtle changes over time, each pointing to the difficulties of interpreting the material historically. Brecht rated this as the great drama which confronted the old feudal order with the new individualistic one; therein lay its fascination for Brecht, away from

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the de-historicized portrait of Hamlet’s character as timelessly vacillating between inaction and revenge, offered by the theatre of the time. An early reading, written around 1928, proposed that Hamlet’s task was to ‘clean out the Augean stables’, a metaphor for considering Hamlet the bringer of a new age by sweeping away the old.43 His vacillation thus becomes historical, concerned with the introduction of new ways of thinking and behaving. Later, around 1940, Brecht contrasted vacillation as a sign of ‘Hamlet’s weakness’ in the value system of the Middle Ages with a more modern interpretation of his failure to act as the positive application of reason. Hamlet does not rush headlong into murder as vengeance, but ponders the validity of the act. In the end, however, Brecht condemned Hamlet’s giving in to old practices as a ‘relapse’. 44 And this relapse had a pedagogical function: ‘the scream for revenge, ennobled by Greek tragedy, then disqualified by Christianity, is still reproduced loudly enough, infectiously enough, in Hamlet to throw the new doubt, inquiry [Testen] and planning into relief.’45 That is, the persistence of bad, ingrained practices of the past in the present requires vigilance and the strength to confine them to history. In a scene written for actors (to which I shall return below), Brecht presented a dialogue between Hamlet and a boatman in which the former asks the latter about a new fort on the river bank.46 The boatman explains that it is used for the export of salted fish to Norway, the former enemy. In this new time, trade trumps war, but the boatman notes that Claudius himself vacillated a full six months before signing the contract, an action which explicitly connects him to Hamlet. Consequently, both are seen as modern men, yet contradictory in their new-found society: both follow the path of reason (for Claudius, a more instrumentalized reason in the case of old Hamlet’s murder) but are undone by the temptation to reason while retaining the old ways of thinking. Brecht’s historicization thus reveals itself as producing opposing outcomes. It sees Hamlet as inevitably contradictory: he is simultaneously a progressive example of the new thinking (preferring trade to war) and a model of the modern bourgeois individual (pursuing his own, ultimately fatal ends). Historicizing Hamlet brings out the different sides of his historical personality as a way of offering the audience a complex set of qualities to assess critically. By extension, the figure of Othello, discussed above, is both the brave and murderous child of his time. Brecht was troubled by the centrality of the individual as subject in Shakespeare’s plays because the emphasis on a single character underplayed the role of the social. However, historicization offered the possibility

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of contrasting the present with the past as a way of dispelling the assumption of a universal human nature which Brecht, like any Marxist, disputed as dependent on historical circumstances and thus changeable. However, historicization admitted one trans-historical feature in Shakespeare: ‘the fallibility of instinct (the indistinctness of the inner voice) [which] cannot be updated.’47 This comment says something important about the apparent economic one-sidedness criticized by Kussmaul in the example of Othello. Human beings are neither mechanical nor mere products of their environment; they are in active dialogue with it and this is why the art of theatre is not a science. Brecht’s model of the human subject is certainly always historical but inflected by an unbridgeable gap between the conscious and the unconscious. Brecht may be asking us to curb the power of instinct but it is a power that cannot be eliminated, merely held in check by raised awareness.

Shakespeare’s Theatre as Paradigm Much of Brecht’s further theoretical speculation about Shakespeare does not focus on specific aspects but refers to the ways in which the implicitly great Shakespeare is so badly served by contemporary theatres themselves. In these references it becomes clear that Brecht was allying his own theatrical innovations with Shakespeare’s: ‘it’s relatively easy to take our plays into the repertoire, but it’s difficult to stage them. (If it’s ever easy to stage Shakespeare again, it’ll be difficult not to take our plays into the repertoire.)’48 Earlier in the same essay Brecht maintained that the theatre as it existed in Germany in the 1920s ‘would certainly have to change itself, and completely at that’ if it were to stage Brecht’s plays.49 Brecht postulates that ‘[theatre] theatres everything into theatre’.50 This critical insight signals a wariness with respect to the processes and ends of theatrical production in the commercial theatre. It suggests that theatre as institution turns challenging text into marketable performance, thus nullifying any possible effect it might have in activating the audience. While Brecht tried to solve this problem in 1949 with the founding of the Berliner Ensemble (BE), his thoughts up until then often used Shakespeare as an example of the kind of play that was ruined by the institution of theatre in a capitalist society. One failure in Shakespeare production arose from the dominant tendency of emphasizing character over plot. Around 1951, Brecht dismissed as thoroughly inadequate ‘the pathos in comportment and speech which was

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appropriate to Schiller and the Shakespeare played in his time’.51 At the same time, he wrote that ‘a false understanding of greatness is an obstacle to staging Shakespeare’s plays’.52 Both observations stress the misplaced focus on character rather than on circumstances or relationships with others. Greatness sees man as an island and pathos links the audience to the actor through overblown emotionality. In both cases, which mutually support each other, Brecht read the production of the a-historically human on the conventional stage as a realization of bourgeois ideology with its emphasis on the individual and its banishment of historical consciousness. The solutions to such problems could not be cosmetic. Brecht criticized modern-dress productions as superficial ‘costume dramas’53 and railed against one of the most famous examples of Shakespeare in cinema history: When the English actor [Laurence] Olivier filmed Henry V, he began the film with a portrayal of the premiere at Shakespeare’s Globe. The acting style was presented as full of pathos, stiff, primitive, practically silly. Then the acting style became ‘modern’. The crude old times were overcome, the acting was differentiated, elegant, superior. Hardly any other film has annoyed me as much as this one. What a suggestion that Shakespeare’s direction could be any more stupid or crude than that of Mr Olivier. […] The old works have their own values, their own differentiation, their own scale of beauty and truth. Those are what need to be uncovered.54 Brecht’s criticisms attack first superficiality, that merely updating the costumes does not update the theatre, then the hubris to suggest that the modern interpretation and practice is qualitatively better than that of Shakespeare’s day. Without considering Olivier’s motives for his decisions, Brecht accuses Olivier of false historicization as he paints the history of the theatre as a journey out of darkness into the light. Brecht’s final comment is the key one here: only by properly understanding the older theatre can contemporary theatre-makers survey the distances between the two properly. In the last two decades of his life Brecht signalled a desire to learn as much as possible about Shakespeare and the Globe, although it is difficult to know quite what he knew or how he used it.55 A recent survey of Brecht’s library reveals only one specific volume concerned with Shakespeare in performance, Ronald Watkins’ On Producing Shakespeare of 1950.56 This is perhaps the place for a short excursus into what Brecht thought he had learned about Shakespeare from consulting academic studies of his time. Sadly, we have very little knowledge of what sources informed such

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reading. At various junctures, Brecht reflected on Shakespeare’s work and working methods, often in ways which linked the two men of the theatre intimately. While simple connections, such as reworking other people’s source material into new dramas,57 were easy to establish, more contentious extrapolations tell us more about Brecht than Shakespeare. In a journal entry, Brecht declared that he believed that Shakespeare’s technique suggested he worked, like Brecht, as the leading member of a theatrical collective, as ‘the head of dramaturgy’.58 While Brecht certainly talks tentatively here, Kussmaul sees Brecht hopelessly mired in the scholarship of the 1920s and 1930s.59 Elsewhere, Brecht’s contention that Shakespeare’s stage directions for Coriolanus were mostly added by editors60 is disputed by Symington when he argues that that play is one of Shakespeare’s bestpreserved texts.61 Here Brecht was hoping to justify the adaptation process, discussed more fully below, by challenging the apparent authority of the received document. In both cases of scholarly error it should be noted that Brecht was working at a time in which research was less reliable and rigorous. That he manipulated what he did find to serve his purposes is also evident. To combat what he saw as lazy, reactionary and unproductive engagements with Shakespeare, Brecht hoped to stage Shakespeare’s plays with the BE, although he died before he was able to realize his plans. From 1949 until 1954, the BE had no theatre building of its own and was the often unwelcome guest at the Deutsches Theater. Even without a proper apparatus of its own, the BE was able to introduce Brecht’s way of making theatre and of undermining traditional hierarchical structures so that the institution was in harmony with the proposed openness of its own productions. One of its early productions was taken from the Sturm und Drang period of the late eighteenth century, when plays were heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, something considered an antidote to the neoclassicism the German theatre had imported from France.62 One of the great Stürmer und Dränger was J. M. R. Lenz, and, in 1950, together with a small team of assistants, Brecht chose to adapt and direct The Tutor (1774), a practically unknown play at the time. The play leaps between times and locations and a set of interwoven plotlines, much in the style of Shakespeare. It offered the BE the opportunity to experiment with a contemporary staging of a classic text. While I will not go into the details of the production itself, Brecht preferred to have the lovers Fritz and Gustchen recite the poet Klopstock rather than Lenz’s own quotations from Romeo and Juliet.63 Klopstock would have been familiar to the audience as the author quoted by Goethe’s Werther and Lotte. The substitution of

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Klopstock for Shakespeare would thus have helped to locate the production in the Sturm und Drang period. Brecht viewed the production of The Tutor as a dry run for the BE’s own attempts at staging Shakespeare. He directed with attention to historical detail and emphasized the differences between contemporary and historical attitudes. His journal records how he considered the production ‘a study of a new way of performing Shakespeare’, something about which he was more specific in a later entry: ‘The Tutor seems well chosen as an exercise for the actors in the realistic and simultaneously the grand style. That is the path to Shakespeare, the way back […].’64 The language of this line suggests that Brecht did not consider himself to be radicalizing Shakespearean performance but excavating it. Whether this is true or not is impossible to judge, as we know so little about how Shakespeare was originally staged. However, the approach taken, mixing what Brecht termed realistic detail with a declamatory style, suggested the amalgamation of artifice and reality Brecht identified in both Shakespeare’s and his own theatre. Of Brecht’s never-completed projects, one was an adaptation of Troilus and Cressida for the BE in the early 1950s. As Robert Weimann argues, the play lent itself to Brecht’s dramaturgical interests: ‘the hitherto tried and tested form of a harmony between being and appearance is broken open and a deep discrepancy between being and appearance is thematized dramatically.’65 Consequently speech and meaning are in a constant state of mutual ‘Verfremdung’.66 The editors of the BFA report that Käthe Rülicke was given the task of working on a sketch of the play’s Fabel in December 1950: ‘According to her, the production […] was abandoned because Brecht couldn’t find a playable Fabel.’67 I retain the German term because it is different from the more neutral ‘plot’ in an important way: the Fabel is the materialist, realistic control element which ensures that what one sees on stage corresponds to reality by clearly articulating the social relations and thus also the contradictions found in reality. The Fabel, consequently, is the dynamic driver of the action as opposed to the attributes of the characters. The Fabel is history, whose laws are created by human beings and which can therefore be altered by them, too. As a dialectician, Brecht was more interested in human relationships than individual human beings because a relationship also tells the audience about the social conditions of any given time in terms of ‘who is allowed to do what to whom’, to paraphrase Lenin’s definition of politics. If social conditions are contradictory, which they inevitably are, then they produce contradictory characteristics in human beings and demonstrate the potential for change. As a result, Brecht continually stressed the Fabel.

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Brecht insisted that every BE production be accompanied by a description of its Fabel as a means of organizing the company’s approach to staging. Without this key analytical tool, work could not take place. Brecht’s ‘playable’ requires qualification because Troilus and Cressida is obviously eminently ‘playable’ as a text for the theatre. Referring to Brecht’s adaptation of Coriolanus, Arrigo Subiotto nonetheless offers a useful definition: ‘for Brecht and his collaborators, it [‘playable’] connotes an interpretation meaningful, as they see it, in terms of a modern audience.’68 That is, the text has to bend according to the dialectical intent of the production team. Brecht’s own way of writing drama meant that the Fabel as an active transformational agent attained a centrality and a clarity which affected the characters. There is no specific information, however, on why Troilus failed this test. (Brecht did not completely drop the project, as reported in the BFA. In a letter of 1954, Rülicke wrote: ‘Brecht thinks we’ll be preparing Troilus, Coriolanus and Lear by Shakespeare.’)69 Shakespeare offered Brecht an exemplary type of theatre, alive with complexity, contradiction, and historical realism, against which he could contrast the shortcomings of the institution of bourgeois theatre. He could also provisionally use it as a model for his own revolutionary theatre practice. In a letter, Brecht wrote that the actor Wolf Kaiser would make a good Shylock, ‘however, the whole Ensemble first has to pass Shakespeare’s acid test [Feuerprobe]’.70 Shakespeare thus represented the bar the BE had to clear to prove itself a first-class theatre company. It had to negotiate textual richness, measure historical distance, and bring out the exigencies of the Fabel. These were all issues with which Brecht grappled in his practical work with Shakespeare, too, and so I shall now turn my attention to the shorter projects he undertook before focusing on the two more major ones.

Approaching Shakespeare Dialectically: Brecht’s Exercises for Actors I have already mentioned an additional scene Brecht wrote for Hamlet, although I did not give its specific context. He devised this and two others (for Romeo and Juliet) as ‘intermezzos’ around 1940 but expressly intended them to be used by actors in preparation for, and not in performance of, the plays in question. As we have already seen, the additional scene for Hamlet was concerned with anchoring the action in a concrete historical setting: the aftermath of the war between Denmark and Norway. The war offers an example of

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a feudal way of pursuing advantage; the new fish trade shifts the emphasis onto economics, an emblem of the rising merchant class. Hamlet is directly compared with Claudius in the text by association as a fellow vacillator at the dawn of the bourgeois era. Brecht maintained that the purpose of this exercise was to ‘prevent an heroic portrayal of Hamlet’ by locating the vacillation in a broader set of perspectives and thus making Hamlet’s actions readable against the backdrop of a society undergoing historical change.71 Brecht also created two further intermezzos at the same time for Romeo and Juliet, and both were designed to be rehearsed between the first and second scenes of the second act, that is, before the so-called balcony scene in which Romeo overhears Juliet’s feelings for him before revealing himself to her. The scenes concern Romeo and one of his tenant farmers, and Juliet and one of her servants. In the first, Brecht clearly reminds the actor playing Romeo of his social position in the upper echelons of Veronese society. Romeo is short of money and plans to sell the tenant’s farm to raise money for an elaborate present for Juliet, who is described socially as a ‘lady [Dame]’.72 Romeo addresses the tenant in a friendly manner, attempting to placate him with the assurance that because he is such a good worker he will still be employed by the future buyer. Romeo then loses his temper and chases the farmer away in a fit of passion for Juliet. A stage direction, however, indicates that the farmer should wander around in the background of the balcony scene, and one may interpret this instruction as a way of showing the audience that the social problem persists. In the other scene, Juliet questions her serving woman about her lover, Thurio, and indirectly asks whether the woman would still love him if he returned from war without his manhood. The woman says she would not because he should have avoided the call to arms in the first place. Juliet thus reproaches the woman for only being interested in ‘earthly love’ but later changes this opinion.73 Juliet permits the servant to go to Thurio, something made urgent when she learns of his desire to see another woman as well. Juliet then hears a twig break and both women realize it is Romeo. Now Juliet needs the woman to distract the door-keeper below so that she can speak to Romeo undetected. Juliet’s need is thus placed above that of her social inferior, and another stage direction tells the woman to be present during the ensuing scene, again as a means of retaining the presence of the social contradiction. It is unlikely that she would be perceived as a chaperone if she expressed her resentment and anger at being coerced into service. Kussmaul criticizes the portrayal of Romeo and Juliet in Brecht’s intermezzos and argues that both the characters ‘break with tradition’ in

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Shakespeare and thus do not receive fair treatment by being portrayed as unreconstructed reactionaries.74 Brecht maintained that the scenes’ main function was to help the actors ‘build these characters with contradictions’.75 Consequently, the dialogues, which, after all, were not designed to be performed, are more about establishing certain social distinctions, and they also contextualize the abstract category of love to the actors. In both scenes, potentially a-historical emotion is placed squarely within the historical moment and love is shown to be something which demands time and money for it to exist in an idealized form. That Romeo neither runs nor manages anything in Shakespeare did not disqualify him from assuming such a role for Brecht; here Romeo embodies the possible behaviour of a well-to-do young man of the time. Such scenes address what Fredric Jameson calls ‘the most troublesome feature of the historicity problem […]: the historicity of feelings and emotions themselves – a subjectivity which has for so long been thought to constitute the principal centre of gravity of the aesthetic anyhow’.76 Thus, while the detail may indeed have provoked Kussmaul, he applies post-Romantic views of character to entities which can be read in a far less consistent manner.77 That Romeo and Juliet can both be located in their period and that love itself can be removed from the realm of abstraction are both materialist interventions aimed at highlighting the Fabel over character. To Brecht, then, the scenes were about inhabiting the figures in rehearsal in ways which could positively and consciously affect the materialist performance itself before an audience. Dieter Hoffmeier argues: ‘the actors’ gestic imagination should not only play itself out in their heads, since it clarifies the relationship between human beings, socially as well.’78 While I will return to the category of the gestic presently, Hoffmeier’s emphasis on theatre practice connects directly to the centrality of working in and not just thinking about theatre. The theatrical experience always evades theory because it is always richer. As Bert O. States puts it: ‘it has become evident to me […] that semiotics and phenomenology are at best seen as complementary perspectives on the world and on art.’79 That is, signification forms one important element in the theatrical process, but there is much more that affects both performers and audiences. Brecht used this preparation for actors twice in what he called a ‘parallel scene’, also written around 1940. Brecht wrote one to accompany Macbeth, the other for Schiller’s Maria Stuart. In both cases, the writing sets a familiar scene ‘in a prosaic milieu’.80 In the case of Macbeth, the scene is entitled ‘The Murder at the Porter’s Lodge’ (not to be confused with the Porter

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scene in the same play). Here a driver brings the porter’s wife a valuable yet fragile Chinese good-luck talisman (a ‘Glücksgott’) which is later accidentally decapitated when she trips over. The porter and his wife, who are obviously working people serving rich masters, then blame a drowsy beggar who is staying in the lodge for the accident when the housekeeper arrives to collect the broken item. The parallels with the murder of Duncan (II.ii) are clear: the porter and his wife are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the talisman Duncan, the beggar the king’s guards, the housekeeper the king’s entourage. However, one immediately recognizes that there is no murder, that the ‘decapitation’ is of an object, and that there is no motivating factor, such as ambition. As Kussmaul notes: ‘here the murder, or the accident, is not the decisive factor, rather the consequences are.’81 What Brecht constructs is a scene that is reminiscent of its original but one in which a different context allows for a review of what was considered familiar: the scene is thus one great Verfremdung for the rehearsing actors. The surrogate Macbeths are lower down the social order. They fear their employers and the cost of breaking their talisman. They worry that their protestations of innocence will fall on deaf ears and observe how power is wielded by a representative of their bosses. They pass the blame onto one further down the social ladder but also suffer for the deception; the closing line of the scene is the wife’s claim made when told that the police will have to be involved: ‘I don’t feel very well.’82 There is a complete absence of psychology: the characters act under the pressure of events within a social context which is quickly established. As a result, one can identify the new basis of Brecht’s approach to acting in the scene, and only when this has been examined can the scene’s utility be properly understood. Brecht resisted a primarily empathetic relationship between actor and role, fearing that too great a proximity both develops a character-based performance at the expense of socio-historical context and forms a bond between audience and actor which disallows the critical activation of the spectator. Brecht’s acting method rested on a careful blending of Gestus and Haltung. Gestus is what Meg Mumford defines as ‘socially encoded expression’.83 This suggests that the body is in constant dialogue with its environment to such an extent that almost every movement reveals something, however grand or minute, about its own insinuation within the larger scheme of things.84 In short, the body is never natural but always articulates particular ways of relating to external stimuli. A refinement of Gestus is Haltung, which is German for ‘attitude’ and also ‘posture’; thus whereas ‘attitude’ is usually a mental state in English, Brecht’s usage includes the whole body in both meanings of the word. Haltung is always

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dynamic because it demands an object: one always has an attitude towards someone or something, and because those objects change with every social situation, so does one’s Haltung. Haltung is the mental and physical expression of a relationship which is more particular than the more generalized Gestus. For example, a teacher on stage may have a Gestus which tells the audience something about the social position of teachers in a particular society. The teacher will then have a repertoire of Haltungen which will change according to the particular situation. A teacher’s Haltung towards the head-teacher will be different from that towards a well-behaved pupil or the ringleader of a group of classroom trouble-makers. In each situation, the character will reveal something different about his or her personality, something which may well be contradictory: the teacher may insist on obedience from a class while defiantly conniving against the head, for example. ‘Character’ as such does not exist in that it is never fixed; it always changes, and this depends on the context within which it is presented. If one compares Brecht’s parallel scene with the original in Macbeth, one finds that it is the action which links the two most closely. Everything in the new scene is relational and the changes in relations occur when events affect the internal dynamics. As a result, the actors are asked to perform away from ‘character’ and to address practical issues that emerge in the course of the dialogue. Just like the intermezzos, the scene was designed with the sole aim of training, and so the actors were encouraged to take the gestic material from the rehearsal and assess its value when performing Macbeth. Brecht himself noted that the scene had worked very well when his wife, Helene Weigel used it at an acting school in Sweden, then let the students work through the material with an improvised scene from everyday life before transplanting their findings back into Shakespeare: ‘the students appear to react vigorously to the techniques of Verfremdung (read with astonishment!).’85 All the above scenes are included in the Messingkauf project, something that would remain a ‘monumental superfragment’, as White puts it.86 The various elements, which are known better to English readers as the Messingkauf Dialogues,87 actually include poems, the rehearsal scenes, and other types of writing. Among these is a translation of King Lear (V.iii 300–64). Brecht offers a corrective to the Romantic tradition, which took root most enduringly in the translations of Shakespeare known by the names of the two principals, August Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, although Lear was actually translated by their collaborator, Wolf Baudissin. Brecht understood language to be just as gestic as the body, and asserted ‘language should follow the Gestus of its speaker’.88 That is, language, too, is not in

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some way immune to the effects of the social and should not be treated as a neutral receptacle of human expression. Its rhythms and its formulation could not only serve as a thematic supplement to the speaker’s Gestus but provide concrete assistance to the actor. Compare, for example, the opening lines of Lear’s speech (l. 300): Shakespeare: Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones: Had I your tongues and eyes, I’ld use them so That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever! Baudissin: Heult, heult, heult, heult! O ihr seid all von Stein! Hätt ich eur Aug und Zunge nur, mein Jammer Sprengte des Himmels Wölbung! – Hin auf immer! Brecht: Heult, heult, heult, heult! O ihr seid Menschen aus Stein! Hätt ich eure Augen, weint ich sie mir aus. Sie ist gegangen. Für immer. Brecht’s first alteration of Baudissin is in fact a return to Shakespeare: he replaces Baudissin’s ‘you are all of stone’ to ‘you are men of stone’. Baudissin’s translation of the following line is closer to Shakespeare’s own metaphors whereas Brecht reduces his rendition to ‘Had I your eyes, I would have wept them dry’, a move which eliminates a metaphysical heaven and focuses on the misery of the suffering man himself. He no longer projects outwards but delivers a report of his own isolation and grief. The translation continues in such a vein – correcting the excesses of Baudissin but also those of Shakespeare to offer a very earthly and human version of the dying man’s last words. The scenes discussed in this section all confirm that Shakespeare was productive material for Brecht, but material which needed to be refashioned if it was going to be productive in a contemporary theatre. His aims were always to harness the power of Shakespeare’s realism and maintain it for an audience which had grown used to character-based productions and interpretations. His intermezzos, the parallel scene and the retranslation are attempts at refocusing interest in the often hidden strengths of Shakespeare’s texts, as Brecht saw them, away from the dominant performance orthodoxies of the day. Re-functioning Shakespeare for the present Over the course of his theatrical career, Brecht adapted Macbeth and Hamlet for the radio, used motifs from A Midsummer Night’s Dream as source for an

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interlude, and integrated one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches into one of his most popular works, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. The examples of these shorter pieces show how Brecht was keen to use Shakespeare’s renown as a means of generating contrast. As Doc Rossi notes: ‘it could be argued that Brecht was using Shakespeare as an example because Shakespeare’s drama is so well known that it can immediately provide an easily recognizable object for V-effekte […].’89 However, as we shall see, the mere generation of discrepancies only tells half the story. Shakespeare’s cultural capital lay not only in its almost universal familiarity, it had dramaturgical values that Brecht esteemed; its adaptation became an actualization as well. Altering the Bard was about taking a cultural artefact which had great value in its own time and effecting a transformation so that its historical specificity might have a new, re-functioned power in Brecht’s day, too. In the following section, I shall survey and examine these usages for what they tell about how Shakespeare could be updated and how his work could be made to generate new effects away from more stultified ones Brecht criticized earlier. Little is known about the radio adaptations, whose scripts are believed to have perished in the bombings of the Second World War. (That the scripts were not a part of Brecht’s extensive archive which he carried around the various points of exile may tell us something about his thoughts on the quality of the work.) Macbeth was adapted in a version co-authored with Alfred Braun, broadcast on 14 October 1927. Brecht’s introduction, to be spoken before the broadcast proper, sketches certain ideas which tally with his recent exposure to Marxism. Brecht declared that ‘this play has nothing more to say about the psychology of a murderer […]’, a point which displays both a focus on action and socio-historical processes, as well as the demotion of a king to the status of a common criminal. He also stressed the closeness of the play’s form to life, quoted above, and identified epic qualities in the dramaturgy which thus called for epic performance methods. Already one notes how Brecht sought to reprocess a play he rated with the formal devices of the epic theatre. Symington concludes from a handful of contemporaneous reviews that the adaptation was ‘revolutionary and pioneering’, especially in its use of the new medium of radio.90 A possible vista on precisely how radically the medium was used is provided by the Hamlet adaptation of 1931 which employed an epic narrator (as did Macbeth). Ophelia’s death was put in the position of III.v instead of the traditional IV.vii and Brecht deleted the final five scenes (IV.v-V.ii). The reordering was designed to offer shocks, by its very nature, but once again, shocks have to be understood within the tenets of Verfremdung, of

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making the familiar strange. Both adaptations received a hostile reception from the critics of the time, which is hardly a surprise, but it is nonetheless difficult to carry out a proper evaluation based on opinions rather than documents.91 What made Shakespeare’s anti-illusionist dramaturgy productive for Brecht is to be found in the playlet The Elephant Calf or the Provability of every Contention, which was designed to be performed in the interval of Man equals Man (1926 version). The playlet is a play-within-a-play in which the characters from the main play offer spectators, who are actors playing soldiers, entertainment in a form not dissimilar to that of a concert party. The actors introduce themselves and their characters, and set out what they are trying to achieve, namely, to ascertain whether the eponymous elephant calf either is or is not the murderer of its mother. The actors comment on the success of their scenes when the on-stage curtain is lowered, and the audience of soldiers also passes judgement as the short piece progresses. The link here is with the play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i. A self-consciously amateur feel pervades the short piece, just as it does with the mechanicals’ performance, and this helps to ironize the events themselves. Yet, while Quince and his actors botch their piece and are criticized by the court of Theseus, the soldiers are more concerned with the action itself, offering themselves as models of spectators at the epic theatre. The players give their own accounts of how they think things are going, and these are supplemented by the opinions of the soldiers. In the opening monologue, Polly Baker, one of the soldiers who features prominently in the main play, offers theatre to his audience that would be very much to Brecht’s liking: the audience is allowed to smoke, bet on the outcome of the play, but is asked to refrain from shooting the pianist. The scene is not that far removed from what would have surrounded the real spectators.92 Rather than the whimsy of watching bad actors in the Dream, Brecht invites the audience critically to examine the premise of the playlet’s subtitle, the provability of any contention. As a result, Brecht turns Shakespeare’s illusion-breaking into something that can promote the activation of the audience. Like Shakespeare’s mechanicals, the actors playing characters announce their new roles, and while the role of the Moon remains, Polly now plays a Banana Tree which is to judge the performed events. Polly informs the audience: ‘Whoever doesn’t understand the action straight-away doesn’t need to give themselves a headache – it’s incomprehensible anyway. If you only want to see something that makes sense, you’ll have to head to the pissoir.’93 Kussmaul writes that the interlude becomes ‘a study of V-effects’.94 Brecht has taken Shakespeare’s

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experiments with metatheatricality and reappropriated them for his own innovations. Consequently, spectators may well compare Shakespeare’s well-known scene with what is offered and discover the new, pedagogical features while nonetheless enjoying the play-within-a-play’s deliberate silliness. The Elephant Calf also allows Brecht to comment on illusionism, and thus the short piece functions as a reflection on the very business of how theatre works and how it might be rethought for an audience of more critical spectators, too. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941), a satire on Hitler’s rise to power, offers an extended example of how Brecht absorbed and recycled Shakespeare. In the name of Verfremdung, Brecht inserted one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches and then used the reference to re-echo in subsequent scenes. Mark Antony’s ‘funeral speech’ in Julius Caesar III.ii, which is explicit in the sixth scene of Ui, had already interested Brecht when he used it as an example of ‘the cunning of spreading truth amongst many’ in his essay ‘Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth’ (1934).95 He praised the speech’s use of irony as a way of criticizing Brutus. Seven years later the speech takes on different qualities as the play’s anti-hero takes a lesson from an actor in demagoguery. Ui, the gangster-turned-politician, lacks the ability to connect with his audience and his gang puts him in touch with an actor who is to teach him the gestures and delivery required of an effective public speaker. In Ui, the speech itself only shares five lines with the original Schlegel translation. Brecht undertook a gestic rewrite, not dissimilar to that of Lear discussed earlier, to make the language more specific to its own contexts. One of the most notable changes is in Shakespeare’s description of Caesar as ‘ambitious’. Schlegel renders the adjective as a noun, ‘Herrschsucht’ (‘imperiousness’), whereas Brecht reverts to the adjectival form but gives it precision as ‘tyrannisch’ (‘tyrannical’). Here dramatic irony is once again in play: the would-be tyrant sets himself up as the opposite, a man of the people – itself a provocative dialectical unity. The intertext thus helped Brecht to sensitize his audience to the violence done to it in the name of rhetorical expedience on Ui’s part. Yet Brecht’s suggested performance style raised the distancing effect to a higher power. One means of exposing Ui and his collaborators was to act the whole play in ‘the grand style’.96 Brecht’s aim was to offer a heightened execution of the lines to invite critique by making acting itself strange. The actor scene, however, benefits from showing how such a style is produced. In a rehearsal note to the Ui production at the BE in 1959 (which became so popular that it ran for over 500 performances), the directors Manfred

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Wekwerth and Peter Palitzsch decided that Ui should enter the scene speaking quite normally and that the actor should teach him to speak in such a way that ‘Ui convinces himself that the unnatural tone is the correct one because it is more seductive for a demagogue’.97 The inclusion of the construction process thus helped to contextualize the speeches that would follow (indeed, there are traces of and allusions to the Mark Antony speech in scenes eight, eleven, fourteen and sixteen). Whenever Ui addressed crowds, his rhetorical strategies were always marked as originating in the actor scene. His bluff emotionalism lacked persuasive force for the spectators because they had witnessed its inception. Consequently, there is always a conscious wedge driven between what Ui subsequently says and why he is saying it. As Ute Baum points out: ‘a social Gestus is, however, not something that can be taken over from models; Ui does not imitate Antony when he plays the Haltung of the man arguing his points, he does it because his own situation demands it.’98 Ui is thus demonstrating a Gestus of demagoguery. There are other traces of Shakespeare in Ui, too. Brecht’s political allegory includes the wooing of a dead man’s wife in the style of Richard III and Lady Anne. There is a scene in which the ghost of a dead gangster returns to haunt Ui, which may remind us of Macbeth, Hamlet or Richard III. These allusions always serve to offer a degree of contrast. After all, Ui, unlike Richard, is not driven by his own ambition or lust for power; our first sight of him shows a gangster fallen on hard times, powerless and out of favour. It is the Cabbage Trust who employ him as hired muscle to help their own business interests. Thus there is nothing psychological that spurs Ui on initially; he is given a task which then grows until he himself calls the shots later in the play. In a similarly contrastive vein, in the wooing of Betty Dullfeet, Ui denies the murder of her husband, unlike Richard, and does not seek marriage but access to lucrative markets in Betty’s city, a merger of a different sort. The divergences emphasize the ways in which a common template can be reworked to suit contemporary ends.

Proximity and Distance: Brecht Rewrites Measure for Measure It is well known that Measure for Measure was the source of Round Heads and Pointed Heads (Die Spitzköpfe und die Rundköpfe – final version 1938). The project began in November 1931 when the theatre and film director Ludwig Berger asked Brecht to adapt Measure for Measure for a contemporary audience. Berger’s dissatisfactions with the original manifested

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themselves in three areas. He found Isabella’s chastity too ‘one-dimensional’, preferring Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Rosalind in As You Like It; he viewed the action concerning Mariana as undramatic, especially as no scene was written in which Mariana goes to Angelo; and he found the harmonious ending unsatisfactory.99 Brecht set about his task with such gusto that the editors of the BFA discern twelve different versions which they narrow down to a shorter series of principal drafts.100 The story of the play’s evolution is convincingly retold by Raimund Gerz and while I will concentrate on the final published version, I shall note some of the transformations Brecht’s script underwent along the way.101 Initially, Brecht was interested in producing an adaptation of Measure and began by Germanizing the names of the characters and shifting the focus from morality to economics and politics. Here one can clearly see the impact of the Great Depression, the single most important economic event in Brecht’s life. As Donald Brett Douglas puts it: ‘what one must mention is the difference between the producer Berger, who views the adaptation model as an entity to be improved upon in places, but generally left intact, and the dramatist Brecht, who approaches the text as material to be exploited and given new life.’102 In his adaptation, the Duke hands over power because the state is now bankrupt. Claudio is ultimately spared not through a universalist quality of mercy but because he is a wealthy noble. Gerz notes that the initial reworking betrays ‘a parodic interest’ on Brecht’s part.103 The rise of National Socialism, however, severed the adaptation from its source. Angelas, as Angelo is now known, is a Hitler figure who offers relief from the economic realities by diverting the people’s interest with his spurious racial theories. He draws attention to the physical difference between two groups in society who had previously coexisted in concord: one group has round heads, the other pointed heads. In this early reworking, though, Angelas is merely ‘a puritanical fanatic obsessed with cleansing [in the sense of racial purity]’.104 However, as the Nazis’ brutality became ever more evident, Angelas became Iberin, a more radicalized and cynical figure, no longer an idealistic dreamer but a dogmatist capable of doing real harm. Gerz concludes that the ‘the race motif’ distinguishes Round Heads from Measure and transforms it into a play of its own.105 The following discussion will consider how Brecht saw his realism as a successor to Shakespeare’s, including his ideas about justice. Above all, by restoring its historical context, I will correct serious misreadings of Brecht’s parable. Round Heads and Pointed Heads has the alternative title ‘reich und reich gesellt sich gern’, which is a pun on ‘gleich und gleich gesellt sich gern’, an adage which approximates to the English ‘birds of a feather flock

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together’. The substitution of ‘gleich’ (‘equal’ or ‘the same’) with ‘reich’ (‘rich’) immediately sets up Brecht’s shift from an unqualified reading of the evangelist Matthew. Brecht noted in 1936 that Shakespeare’s play was doubtless his most progressive. It demands of those on high that they don’t judge by any other measure than that by which they too would be judged. And it shows that they may not demand a moral attitude from their subjects which they can’t adopt themselves. The play Round Heads and Pointed Heads advocates the same progressive point of view in accordance with the circumstances of our times […].106 The reasons why ‘our times’ might qualitatively alter Shakespeare’s treatment are to be found in an undated note: ‘can one lift the people as a whole to a “higher” moral level without due regard for class division in ideology and its perpetuation in practice? […] Can one fulfil the demand for justice on a specific basis when the demand is a symptom that the basis is wrong?’107 Brecht established a materialist critique of a universal call for justice. The argument runs that structurally, a class society can only deliver class-based justice, which, by its very definition, is differentiated and partial. The call for universal justice is thus a call for a different kind of society – revolution and not reform. Brecht wanted to interpret Shakespeare’s idealized concept of justice through the materialist gaze of dialectical analysis. The clearest indication of this desire is to be found in a prologue added to the final version which stresses the argument of the play. The scene is introduced by the theatre’s director who establishes the play’s basic tension, between viewing society in terms of race and in terms of class. Iberin and a rebellious tenant farmer both hold scales and deliver short speeches to illustrate their divergent points of view. The director gives Brecht’s name as the play’s author and describes what will follow as a parable. Brecht makes himself, rather than the Duke, the one who is controlling the action, and the ‘parable’ signals its own artifice and its function as a generalizing tale designed to interrogate a particular theme and teach by example. Economics runs through the play, beginning with the city of Luma’s empty coffers as the Viceroy (no longer a Duke) acknowledges that overproduction, Marx’s favoured cause for the major crises of capitalism, has radically reduced the grain price. There is discontent in the kingdom of Jahoo (a reference to Swift) and an armed socialist insurrection is in progress, under the leadership of the Sickle movement. The Viceroy, as the biggest landowner, is thus the target of the tenant farmers’ hatred; he

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decides to leave and reluctantly hands over power to Iberin. Iberin’s racial policies divide the citizens into the round heads (the ‘Tschuchen’, ‘Tuks’ in the latest English translation) and the pointed heads (the ‘Tschichen’, in English the ‘Tiks’).108 However, to avoid appearing to give any sense of legitimacy to Iberin’s scheme, Brecht instructs the round-headed actors to wear prostheses which are just as ‘abnormal’ as those of the pointed heads.109 The Viceroy’s advisor tells him clearly that Iberin is not against private property and that he is happy to speak equivocally about the existing relations between tenants and landowners. The underlying conditions will remain the same. Brecht thus retains the theme of a morally rigid deputy running the state while the usual leader is away. De Guzman (Claudio), one of the ‘Big Five’ landowners and a Tik, is arrested for raping Nanna, a Tuk, although the charge is exaggerated (since he is one of Nanna’s clients in a brothel). His arrest is received differently by the different classes: Callas, Nanna’s father, believes it is for inordinately high rents and greets the charge with delight; Iberin prosecutes the case ruthlessly as an example of race crime against the Tuks. De Guzman is condemned to death and the brothel in which Nanna works is to be closed – but only to Tiks. While de Guzman’s sister, Isabella, is still a nun in Brecht’s play, we see her enter the convent by trading her wealth for protection out of the public eye. Iberin (unlike Angelo) no longer demands a night with Isabella; instead it is the head of the prison, Zazarante, who makes it known that he will spare de Guzman’s life in return for sexual favours. Nanna says she will go to him in Isabella’s place, and thus she plays a composite figure formed of Shakespeare’s Mariana, but also Juliet. Once the Sickle has been defeated, about two-thirds into the play, Iberin’s value diminishes: the distraction from economics is no longer necessary. Meanwhile, Nanna’s father, Callas is in prison for stealing horses from the convent, believing it to be his right under the new regime. For a price, he agrees to stand in for de Guzman at the execution, but he is told that there is no chance that he will be executed because de Guzman is too rich to be killed by the state. In the final scene, Callas is revealed as the substitute for de Guzman, who is pardoned by the returning Viceroy, and a veiled Nanna, who has been brutally abused and humiliated, is revealed as the substitute for Isabella. Callas is not punished but is given a tin helmet and a uniform; the Viceroy announces that a war with a hitherto overlooked nation of square heads looms, and while de Guzman walks free, the leadership of the vanquished Sickle, characters added by Brecht, faces the gallows. As this synopsis suggests, there are a series of additional features which more clearly distinguish the play from its source. As Pache puts it,

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‘Brecht’s adaptations develop […] out of a process of dialectical realization between the given model and the contemporary situation’.110 Brecht was quick to banish psychology from the play. Psychology too easily attributes innate, unchangeable characteristics to dramatic figures without paying due attention to the social context. Iberin is thus not a copy of Hitler as a personality. As Alois Münch shows, Brecht ‘reduces this character to his essential socio-political functions which Iberin either consciously or unconsciously fulfils through his actions’.111 The audience never learns why Iberin founds his theories on racial grounds, but observes their articulation and their effects. The play’s gestic dimension is most clearly set out in the ninth scene, in which Nanna decides to take Isabella’s place for Zazarante. In order for the impersonation to be successful, Nanna has to assume the Gestus and the Haltung of a nun and thus Nanna is initiated into a different persona from the outside. A central feature of epic theatre is the category of interruption. This quality was designed to give the audience time to think about the relationships of the parts to one another. Consequently, Brecht deliberately dismantled the five-act structure he found in the standard version in a bid to give the episodes greater angularity and autonomy. The eleven scenes of the final version jump from location to location and often feature characters who are not a part of the main action. Scenes two and eight, for example, take place in an alley in the old city and feature the common people who first welcome Iberin’s accession but later show the price they have to pay as the economic system persists and keeps them in check. Brecht also favoured the inclusion of songs as a way of interrupting the flow of the scenes and allowing the actors to comment on their characters. In this play, however, he included the repetition of songs. In a rehearsal note for the BE’s production of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World there is a line that politicizes Heraclitus’ famous dictum about never being able to step into the same river twice: ‘fundamental dialectical themes run through the whole play: the same thing twice is not the same thing.’112 The presentation of the same song more than once, something which happens to two songs in Round Heads, points to the change of circumstance. Callas sings his song ‘What You’ve Got, You’ve Got’ when he believes he has successfully liberated the horses he thought he was owed. The cocky swagger of the song emphasizes that possession is nine-tenths of the law and that one lives through one’s wits to accumulate goods. While the song is met by one of the Big Five as ‘naked revolt’, the deed is praised by a supporter of Iberin as ‘one of the greatest heroic acts’, positions which establish social division.113 But once the political climate changes and the

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Sickle is on the verge of defeat, Callas is forced to sing his song in the very next scene as evidence of his maverick deed in stealing the horses.114 The sheepish delivery contrasts with the cocksure one and casts the same words in a different light. The ‘thing in itself’ is revealed to be a myth, as every object is dialectically defined. The same is true of the Sickle song, which is actually sung three times in the play. Its most memorable repetition is in the final scene: it is first sung defiantly at the gallows after a monologue by the movement’s leader, Lopez. Only two pages later, the landowners sing their own ironic song about how the old order will continue ad infinitum. Their jolly ditty is thrown into relief when a freshly whitewashed wall is revealed to have a red sickle on it. The rebellious tenant farmers who are about to be executed are instructed to sing the Sickle song again ‘dully’ as they confront their fate.115 Their defiance is modified by apparent hopelessness, but still they sing because their revolutionary idea survives. Perhaps the most important, but most overlooked modification Brecht made to Measure was the extension and radicalization of the motif of substitution. While it is clear that Round Heads retains the detail of the state’s head handing over power to a deputy, the implications of that and the several other cases of substitution have not been considered. As we already know, the most obvious example of substitution is that of Iberin for the Viceroy, that the Viceroy uses Iberin as a means of achieving his own ends, not unlike the Duke in Measure, yet in Brecht it is at a time of economic crisis. Little is made, however, of the fact that the lower-class Callas and Nanna both stand in for their social superiors at times of the latters’ personal crises; personal freedom for the upper classes is purchased from the working people and the substitutions made are credible enough to fool everyone until they are finally unmasked. The literature has also failed to mention the shift from the rank of Duke to that of Viceroy, an alteration which is emblematic of an important political shift which resonates throughout the play.116 When considered as a whole, the society of Round Heads is based upon the principle of substitution, one which goes right to the top of the social order: the Viceroy, by definition, is not the king but his representative.117 Indeed, all the important relations in the play are predicated upon the principle of substitution, of one person standing in for another, and in every case the driving factor is money. What Brecht depicts is a society in which capital itself is the ultimate authority, and the Viceroy merely stands in its stead. He weathers the storm, offstage, unlike in Measure where he is disguised but still present, until the crisis of overproduction and the threat from the Sickle are past. Callas is bought to stand in for de Guzman,

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and Nanna, herself a prostitute, learns the outward guise of a nun. Brecht suggests that appearances can deceive as long as the interests of capital are preserved. In this way, the play is not dissimilar to Calderon’s theatrum mundi, but here it is not God but the vicissitudes of capital in an acquisitive society directing affairs. Having taken the initial Shakespearean motif of the deputy and transmitted it through the plots and sub-plots of his new play, Brecht offers a vision of a society which is conspicuous by its inauthenticity. Capitalism alienates those involved in it from their own interests, and creates living husks in their stead, who sell themselves in order to survive. This reading of the play helps to resituate it in a way that runs counter to most critical interpretations. These focus on the play’s allegorical relationship to the persecution of the Jews and the portrayal of Iberin as Hitler. The great problem that has dogged Round Heads (and which has made it one of the most rarely staged plays in Brecht’s oeuvre) is its final scene. That the Tik de Guzman is saved because he is wealthy runs counter to the wholesale slaughter of rich and poor Jews alike in the Holocaust. Such a conclusion, although written in 1938, before the establishment of the death camps, has drawn criticism explicitly from academics and implicitly from theatres. The representative argument is David Bathrick’s: we find the historical emplotment of class struggle pinning to its procrustean bed the dynamics of an infinitely more complicated process. [… It is not that Brecht’s ending] failed to anticipate the very ‘historically irrational’ slaughter of six million Jews. The point is rather that Brecht’s epic voice as the epistemology of productivist-proletarian reason would have to subsume any irrational phenomenon into the larger text of a world without Freud, a history without its discontents.118 The position here reads Round Heads as an allegory of Hitler’s actions in government, something supported, remarkably literally, by Ulrich Weisstein who sees the Viceroy as Hindenburg, ‘covered by von Papen/Mephisto [an allusion to Brecht’s character, councillor Missena] to call Hitler Iberin into office’.119 These readings, more convincing in Bathrick than Weisstein, require careful consideration, because they are so powerful in the context of world history. Indeed, Brecht himself made a peculiar defence of his position towards the end of his life. While he reportedly admitted that the parable itself ‘limped’, he is also reported to have said: ‘the end of the war and the period that followed have shown that the “Aryan” finance capital that supported Hitler has made common cause during and after the war with the capital “closely related to the Jews [jüdisch versippten]” of the USA

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at the cost of the exploited in both countries.’120 That the very formulation may already strike one as naïve at best and racist at worst does little to rescue the play on Brecht’s own terms. A defence is hardly mounted by Baum, who retains the orthodox GDR view of the play from the position that ‘Brecht represents reality, subjects it to Verfremdung in order to show the stupidity of certain types of behaviour and relationships, and thus to accelerate their transience’.121 While one might agree with the pedagogical thrust of Brecht’s parable, one should note a difference between reproducing reality and reproducing realistically. The former suggests a mimetic relationship, the latter the abstracting generalization discussed earlier in this essay. The problem with the allegorical position is that Iberin clearly diverges from Hitler in a series of important details, not least that he defers to the Viceroy on the latter’s return in the final scene. Also, as Münch argues, allegory ‘overlooks the relative political autonomy that Iberin and his popular movement can achieve against a background of social crisis and the civil war it unleashes’.122 Weisstein, who posited the concrete allegorical links above, also offers a way out of this position when he maintains that Measure ‘is not a historical play but a work with parabolic overtones derived from the medieval Morality’.123 While this view may be a crude one, it does emphasize the potential to seek the general over the specific in the original. Brecht’s play as updated parable is readable away from the flatness of allegory which seamlessly maps fictional events to real ones. Tom Kuhn and John Willett make the following suggestion, that the play perhaps needs a firm hand to impose some discipline to rescue what remains of its political insights. We underestimate the play, however, if we read it as just a botched satire on Nazism. […] The analysis of racial politics, although it may in retrospect seem inadequate to Nazism, has a great deal of relevance to later twentieth-century conflicts on several continents.124 Brecht agreed with this position, that strong directorship could avoid the pitfalls of simple allegory, when considering the first performance of the play, before its final textual revisions, in Copenhagen, 1936. He wrote: ‘the performance needed to make possible and suggest to spectators that they abstract.’125 In this way, the play itself may achieve independence from succeeding historical events, which it never intended to represent (unlike in Ui), and offer a retelling of Shakespeare’s play for a contemporary audience. Realism is economic and social, not historically specific.

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Changing Shakespeare? Adapting Coriolanus for the Berliner Ensemble While Round Heads presents itself as a new play which engages with the themes, if not the form, of Measure, Brecht’s adaptation of Coriolanus as Coriolan126 takes the process of adaptation in a very different direction and attempts to deal with Shakespeare on his own terms. Brecht was keen to see what could be left to stand in Shakespeare and what needed to be altered to suit his purposes, and his new experiment started with the decision to retain the five-act structure. Subiotto notes: ‘it was the soundness of [Shakespeare’s] structure that allowed Brecht to dismantle so much of it without impairing its stability.’127 While scenes were moved about to suit a range of purposes, the acts lent the adaptation a solidity which allowed for the clear telling of the Fabel.128 The clearest index of the dilemma between retention and modification of material is to be found in a protocol of a meeting Brecht held with his assistants at the BE who were helping with the adaptation. Brecht noted: ‘we decided only to discuss changes to the interpretation at first so that our analytical method can prove its applicability without the need for alterations [to the text].’129 The ‘analytical method’ was that of materialist dialectics with a focus on the dynamics of the Fabel, and it aimed to pick out what Brecht identified as Shakespeare’s realistic details with a view to extrapolating them for his new audience. As Hans Hunfeld observes, however, by the end of the protocol, Brecht has already abandoned the analytical method in favour of rewrites.130 Brecht was very much taken with Coriolanus as early as 1917. He wrote excitedly about a production of the play in 1925 by future collaborator Erich Engel as an early example of epic theatre in performance.131 It was only, however, in April 1951 that Brecht ‘was immediately enthused’ by Caspar Neher’s suggestion to stage Coriolanus.132 By early May, Brecht had already developed a central element of his interpretation, namely that Coriolanus ‘is convinced that he is indispensable. […] But it turns out: everyone is dispensable. He demands too high a price, submission.’133 Indispensability was a quality Brecht had already singled out in the short story ‘The Indispensable Official’.134 The official in question is indispensable because he has constructed his office so that it cannot work without him, something the story questions and asks how he can be a good official if that is the case. The conclusion reached is that the official is actually a blackmailer who is holding his employers to ransom. Brecht employed the same thematic complex in Coriolan.

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Brecht’s assistants suggested additional Shakespearean texts, from Julius Caesar I.i, Antony and Cleopatra IV.iv and one of the Richard plays III.v.135 The Caesar suggestion was the only one ultimately taken up and was included in II.iii of Brecht’s version when Coriolanus, canvassing the people’s votes, asks after the citizens’ professions.136 As Ulrich Broich writes: ‘the function of the shoemaker section is certainly understood too simplistically under the heading of comic relief. Brecht, in his own dramas too, always takes pains to depict his proletarians not as humourless fanatics but to equip them with both homespun and gallows humour.’137 The insertion is one of the ways of adding social detail to the working people in the adaptation and allowing them to function as a useful contrast to Coriolanus himself. The assistants were key aides to Brecht at this time. They discussed ideas and presented their own, usually having prepared a particular scene for a meeting at Brecht’s behest. An interesting remark was recorded during the first intensive phase of adaptation at the BE, when Brecht rejected work done by Claus Hubalek on the famous scene in which Volumnia confronts Coriolanus in V.iii. The scene ‘did not capture the basic Gestus and will be worked on again’.138 In a note that followed, Brecht reportedly opined that the scenes had to be made ‘as playable as possible, gestic’.139 The great problem with this dialectical approach was that Coriolanus represented a great individual who apparently did not change for the duration of the play. Brecht’s response to this issue was to shift the emphasis away from the hero in his interpretation: ‘What is to be shown is the tragedy of a society, not of an individual. […] Because of the individual, it loses twofold: 1. the individual, 2. it must expend great resources to eradicate the enemy.’140 That shift entailed a relativization of Coriolanus and a valorization of the role of the people. Brecht summarized the position he found himself in: It is obviously a mistake if the people somehow remind us in the role they play in Coriolanus of Shakespearean scenes with louts [Rüpelszenen]. On the other hand, the Roman plebeians can’t be portrayed as an unqualifiedly progressive, strongly class-conscious proletariat for historical reasons.141 A selection of Brecht’s changes illustrates his method and purpose. From the first scene, Shakespeare’s citizens enter with various weapons; Brecht’s first shift is the anachronistic mention of ‘the third district’.142 The sense that the city of Rome is organized into districts already suggests that it has

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reached a certain state of administrative development beyond its time. Before Menenius tells the fable of the belly as a means of quelling the plebeians’ anger, Brecht frames it in two different ways, each of which is designed to make the audience critical of its rhetorical beauty. First, Menenius is introduced by the First Citizen, as ‘senator and sweet talker [Schönredner]’, something which immediately puts the audience on their guard.143 As Menenius then moves to draw the moral of his tale, he alone notices the entrance of Coriolanus with armed men. This gives him the confidence to reach his questionable conclusion that the belly distributes the food to the rest of the body politic and to remonstrate with the First Citizen, who has criticized the fable. From the outset, the people are not portrayed as either simple or simply cantankerous but fighting the good fight against enemies defined by class. Brecht added two further scenes, IV.i and V.vii. The former is a replacement of Shakespeare’s short IV.iii in which a Roman spy recounts the uprising, its dispersal, and more importantly Coriolanus’ banishment. This gives his Volscian interlocutor courage to tell Aufidius, their leader, that an attack will almost certainly succeed without the great general to defend Rome. Brecht’s similarly short scene sees a Roman and a Volscian exchange experiences rather than vital information. While the Volscian asks after Corioli, which is now in Roman hands and whose conquest gave Coriolanus his honorary name, the two agree that their lives are essentially the same, regardless of who is in government: ‘eating, sleeping, and paying taxes.’144 The banishment is mentioned more ‘as an afterthought’ and elicits a sense of relief from both men.145 In this version, the uprising has been successful and both sides look forward to a period of peace now that the bellicose Coriolanus has been sent away. Brecht’s new final scene, which has no equivalent in Shakespeare, is deliberately low-key. It follows Coriolanus’ murder at the hands of Aufidius and his confederates and is thus something of an anticlimax, set as it is in the peaceful chamber of the Senate. We see the restitution of captured Corioli to the Volscians as the news arrives of Coriolanus’ death. There is a short silence before Menenius proposes that his name be inscribed in the Capitol, but Menenius is interrupted by Brutus, one of the people’s tribunes, who proposes they carry on with the business of state. A consul asks whether mourning clothes will be worn for the next ten moons; he receives the answer ‘declined’ as the single-word conclusion to the play.146 The contrast between this scene and its highly charged predecessor in Shakespeare is stark, yet in its brevity and calmness it includes material on politics, economics and, finally, ideology. The Senate is not the seat of plebeian power; Menenius is still there,

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but its work shows how matters can be treated without the malign influence of Coriolanus and in concert with the plebeians. Brutus, who is given the curtain line, together with Sicinius, are the people’s elected tribunes. They are portrayed in Shakespeare as conniving intriguers with a personal agenda against Coriolanus. In Brecht they are more considered, provide good advice and act strategically. Indeed, the uprising is successful in Coriolan and it is the alliance between the plebeians and the patricians which causes Coriolanus to call off his attack. Consequently, the famous plea made to him by his mother, Volumnia, in Shakespeare’s V.iii (Brecht’s V.vi), is transfigured: the tribunes see Volumnia’s intervention as a way of buying time while they continue to arm the populace. Its outcome is irrelevant. The people themselves are presented with wit and guile. That said, Kussmaul argues that ‘Brecht transforms the people from the masses to a class’.147 Subiotto considers the people’s new-found capabilities ‘anachronistic (since it derives from a maturity acquired over a century of working-class struggle)’.148 But when one remembers the deliberate anachronism built into the opening of the play, one may realize that Brecht was more interested in contemporary issues, such as the potential of rebellion if not revolution, and saw Shakespeare’s play as a way of exploring its tenets for a present-day audience. The people were also given a material basis for their struggle through amendments applied to the general construction of the Roman world. As Kamenisch notes, Brecht was keen to downplay any suggestion that the patricians were naturally superior to the plebeians: Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘noble’ in the dialogue is radically reduced.149 Brecht also reduced Shakespeare’s occasional mentions of gods in a bid to undermine any sense that divine providence had played a role in the Fabel. One of the fascinations of the period for the dramatist lay in the fact that ‘only in Rome is a political problem hardly a religious one, and only in Rome does one find this simplification and thus this tight division of classes that is so important for the play’.150 The adaptation itself is not, however, merely concerned with thematic shifts; Brecht was also involved in an extensive retranslation of the play. While he retained the act structure, he was not that enamoured of the standard Dorothea Tieck translation of 1832. Rouse notes that the decision to retranslate was already a challenge to tradition.151 Subiotto has calculated that Brecht reduced Shakespeare’s original to roughly 60 per cent of its original size and that about 17 per cent of the final draft was added by Brecht, which means that Brecht’s version includes half of Shakespeare’s play in Brecht’s new, shorter version.152 The language was simplified and

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concretized, so that ‘the language appears “modern”’.153 The specificity of the language is crucial here. Kussmaul shows that Coriolanus’ lines are made ‘far more earthy’ when addressing the people but are ‘more elegant’ when talking to his fellow patricians.154 Friedrich Dieckmann gives a more precise reading of the same thrust when he writes that Brecht’s linguistic treatment shows ‘a pictorial quality from below [volksnahe Bildhaftigkeit] and modern thought bound closely to each other’.155 The view ‘from below’ is a corrective to the perspective of the dominant class and helps Brecht both to offer a partisan angle and to lend all the scenes a sense of Verfremdung with respect to the more familiar original. Brecht fashions the lines in such a way that the gestic quality emerges: Coriolanus picks his words carefully within contexts defined by social criteria. He is positioned within specific linguistic communities that pre-exist his formulations themselves, again demonstrating the parameters within which Roman society functions. Antony Tatlow concludes: ‘in this gestural method, the shifting dramatic positions and emotional states of the speakers are conveyed in sharpened images and breathe through the specific rhythms of the their language.’156 A question raised by scholars and theatre reviewers has been whether Brecht offered an improvement on Shakespeare’s text in his adaptation. While one might prefer to ask whether the play itself works, the debate itself was partly sparked by Brecht’s own comments. The key quotations that have proved a regular index for the discussion come from the protocol, quoted above, when W asks ‘Can we change Shakespeare?’, to which B replies ‘I think we can change Shakespeare, if we are able to change Shakespeare’.157 While some critics have seen this claim as a measure of Brecht’s arrogance with respect to a hallowed cultural icon, Heinz Ide has provided the following paraphrase of Brecht’s words: ‘we can do this if we have the necessary creative qualities’, which he later qualifies as ‘if we can rationalize him [Shakespeare] by thinking dialectically’.158 One can see the application of this maxim in the ways Brecht approached Shakespeare through an engagement with Roman and Greek historians. We know that, while they did not undertake scholarly research, Brecht and his assistants read Shakespeare’s major sources: Plutarch, Livy and Dionysius of Helicarnassus. Tatlow argues that Brecht takes very few liberties with his historical sources and is thus not guilty of distorting historical reality at all.159 While Brecht makes several changes to Shakespeare, he is actually correcting certain biases and offering a more reliable account according to the sources.160 An example of the dialectical basis for this undertaking is offered by Jürgen Kuczynski, who echoes Brecht’s own Marxist-inflected historical narrative:

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in contrast to Plutarch, Coriolanus is a consistent representative of the patricians – in line with social reality – to Shakespeare. In contrast to Plutarch, Shakespeare, however, has no understanding of the role of the people in history and so he turns Coriolanus – contradicting social reality – into a tragic hero.161 That is, Brecht was keen to identify Shakespeare’s biases and adjust them in line with his own interpretation of history. With respect to Livy, Darko Suvin argues somewhat reductively: ‘Brecht strove to fashion a dialectical synthesis out of Livy’s thesis that only social piety matters, and Shakespeare’s antithesis that only the individual law inside a great person’s breast matters.’162 The inclusion of the Shakespearean aspect in the dialectic shows how Brecht was interested in retaining the great individual whilst simultaneously seeking to delimit his greatness by playing it off the exigencies of the social. As Tatlow puts it, Brecht approached Coriolanus ‘by seeing it as historically positioned and asking how and why’.163 The prime interpretive imbalance to Brecht was Shakespeare’s shift of ‘the centre of force from the historical record to the interplay of human personalities’, as Subiotto writes.164 I have already noted that Brecht was uncomfortable about the role and centrality of the great individual in Shakespeare, yet it was something he felt he nonetheless had to retain: ‘it is not necessary – and in the Shakespearean genre not possible – to disregard the “tragedy of pride” or even merely to blunt it.’165 While Brecht has also been accused of not properly dealing with the individualistic traits of his hero,166 the conclusions drawn by other critics from the portrayal of Coriolanus, however, are questionable. They can be summed up in the two differing but related points of view. First, Ide contends, ‘Coriolanus’ tragedy exists for Brecht in that the historical moment does not allow him to be who he has to be’.167 To Brecht, the very category of tragedy was problematic, as it suggests inevitability and conflicts which cannot be overcome (that is, a dialectical tension for which there is no synthesis). His point is summed up in the following exchange from the Messingkauf: philosopher: The causes of very many tragedies lie beyond the sphere of influence of those who suffer them, as it appears. dramaturge: As it appears? philosopher: Naturally as it appears. The human can’t lie outside the sphere of influence of humans, and the causes of these tragedies are human.168

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The idea, then, that Coriolanus ‘has to be’ anything, as Ide proposes, is undialectical. The ‘has’ suggests an inescapable set of qualities which contradicts the construction of all the characters in the play; all classes change their position in the light of changed circumstances. The plebeians restructure their attitudes to deal with the threat of Coriolanus’ proposed attack by taking up arms and defending themselves. The patricians, who, ultimately, are still the ruling class, realize that only an alliance with the people will firstly assuage the potential for revolution at the beginning of the play and later allow Rome to remain unconquered. A similar problem in interpreting the status of the hero is identified by Nancy C. Michael: ‘neither Shakespeare’s Coriolanus nor Brecht’s Coriolan has a place in society, Coriolanus because he will not condescend, Coriolan because he will not adapt.’169 This position, not an uncommon one in Western Brecht criticism, imputes to Coriolanus an intransigence which borders on existentialism, in which human subjects have complete freedom of choice over all their decisions. In this reading, Coriolanus has the power to choose whether he changes or not, something which contradicts the very nature of the dialectical process. The dialectic does not work exclusively on the conscious mind, and adaptability in human beings is a prerequisite for dialectical movement: its advance cannot simply be held up because a particular character chooses not to be subject to a mechanism which is historically irresistible. It is not, then, that Coriolanus is unable to adapt; he, by definition, adapts to every change of circumstance that runs through the play. His problem is that he continually makes the wrong choices in a society which indulges his individualism. Individualism is thus the tragic component of the play, in that the hero only views it positively while society takes a far more pragmatic approach to it. Coriolan engages in a series of interactions with Shakespeare in order to develop the dialectical method of analysing history with a view to shedding light on class struggles in the mid-twentieth century. A question which has recently been raised with respect to the adaptation as a whole is whether the play needed changing at all. Brecht offered his view in a late interview in 1956. Talking about stagecraft, Brecht opined: ‘if I were putting him [Shakespeare] on today, it is only small changes I would have to make in the production, changes of emphasis.’170 Bryan Reynolds suggests that Brecht’s interventions into Shakespeare’s text are unnecessary because the former’s impulses are already present in Coriolanus when performed in line with Brecht’s interpretation.171 While the account Reynolds gives of the first scene is indeed convincing, there is little attention paid to the centrality of Coriolanus himself and the question of his individualism. That

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said, Reynolds brings attention back to Brecht’s point of 1956 and to the position in the protocol of whether interpretation or adaptation is necessary to deal with Shakespeare’s much-admired realism. With hindsight, Brecht’s powerfully historicizing stagecraft could certainly be entrusted with contextualizing Shakespeare and showing just how Coriolanus was a product of his time. Brecht never completed his adaptation of Coriolanus; work ended in 1953. While much had already been done, he did not rewrite the battle scenes (Coriolanus I.iv–x). These were presented, as they were in the first printed edition, in the Tieck translation at the world premiere of the adaptation at the Schauspielhaus Frankfurt on 22 September 1962 under the direction of Heinrich Koch. The production was not that well received. Yet even if one ignores the addition of unprocessed material, Brecht would not have considered the script finalized before he had had a chance to rehearse it fully. The BE spent many months revising Brecht’s final draft for performance, and their own script is itself a further engagement with the Roman sources, Shakespeare and not least Brecht himself. The production (premiere 25 September 1964) was the company’s last great international success of the 1960s and was lauded at the time for its radical examination of Shakespeare through the Brechtian lens. However, almost 10 per cent of the text was added by adaptors Manfred Wekwerth and Joachim Tenschert, and so even this version cannot be entirely credited to Brecht.172

Brecht and Shakespeare; or the Productivity of a Dialectical Tension The relationship between Brecht and Shakespeare has fascinated scholars for some decades. John Fuegi’s melodramatic description of a ‘lifelong love-hate relationship’ points to extremes which cannot be justified in the light of the analyses conducted above.173 It is not so much that Brecht’s opinion of his Olympian precursor is of import; rather, it is the ways in which Brecht put him to work and to what ends. It should be clear that the one quality that shines before all others to Brecht is Shakespeare’s representations of reality rather than either his characterizations or his language, both of which were criticized in one way or another over the course of Brecht’s engagement with the Bard. (Which is not, however, to say that Brecht did not enjoy Shakespeare ‘in the original’. He approvingly discussed how Charles Laughton trained young actors by reading Shakespeare to them and wrote of the art

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required to read Shakespeare.)174 These facets, exalted by critics who are happy to laud Shakespeare as timeless, were demoted by the materialist as historical and in need of updating, both to reveal their historicity and to make them productive in the present. Indeed, Baum notes how central Renaissance ideas were radically redefined by Brecht’s Fabel for Coriolan: ‘one person, who is too expensive for the world he co-inhabits, is destroyed by it; it continues without any of its single members – and this has little in common with Renaissance humanism.’175 Instead, Brecht valued Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, the organization of plot, character and language, as an insightful, accurate and realistic understanding of how people interacted with their environment at a particularly crucial point of human history, namely when the Renaissance was clearing out the structures of the Medieval period. The clash of histories and their remarkable dramatic rendition proved an inspiration and a model of sorts, which nonetheless required new historical positioning, but this impulse did not only come about because several hundred years had elapsed between Shakespeare’s death and Brecht’s birth. Brecht was keen to connect himself, sometimes erroneously, with Shakespeare, and while he may not have openly compared his gifts with those of his dramatic forebear’s, he did see himself as a great playwright contemplating a new historical period. In the very first fragment of the Messingkauf, Brecht describes his as a ‘theatre of the scientific age’.176 Brecht, who wrote a play about what could be considered the beginning of the modern scientific age, The Life of Galileo, is not, however, referring to the revolution in the natural sciences of the sixteenth century. ‘Scientific’ here is to be understood as the age in which the scientific insights of Marxism can be applied to the world with a view to its betterment. With the Russian Revolution behind him, Brecht hoped that he was now standing on the cusp of a new era, the era of socialism and the liberation of the people from the shackles of capitalism and the isolation of individualism. This monumentally historical link with Shakespeare allowed Brecht to refunction and reconfigure the older works so that they would be suitable for the new age. Shakespeare was not, then, ‘our contemporary’, to quote Jan Kott, but a distant figure who had to be critically evaluated for what could be usefully taken up and further developed.177 Close to the end of his life, Brecht averred that ‘Shakespeare is the greatest bourgeois dramatist’.178 Here his interlocutor Hayman translates ‘bürgerlich’ as ‘bourgeois’, but the adjective is not to be read in a negative way, more as a description of a citizen of the early-modern period. To Brecht, Shakespeare could not be surpassed within his historical confines.

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Shakespeare was not, however, without value in his original form. There was much to learn from him (Brecht recommended in 1941 that anyone interested in studying drama should start by comparing King John with its sources).179 However, Shakespeare had been ossified by bourgeois (in the pejorative sense) theatre practices which had virtually drained any educative vitality from the plays. Thus, Brecht proposed new ways of reading and performing the original throughout his writings. A question mark hangs, however, over Brecht’s influence in the fields of both adapting and performing Shakespeare. On the first count, there is little evidence of that great a permeation, something which is in part due to the fact that Coriolan was left unfinished and was only published posthumously in 1959. Of the two major GDR playwrights most influenced by Brecht, Heiner Müller and Peter Hacks, Müller is the only one who most actively engaged with Shakespeare. His Macbeth of 1971 is a reworking of the text with a heavy accent on class division. The adaptation attempts to ground the play in the material realities of feudalism. He deletes the opening scene with the witches (although the witches remain as characters and appear later), believing that, if he had retained it, ‘then I would open myself fully to this predestination, that the whole course of events is determined by supernatural forces’.180 He disposes of the five-act structure and replaces it with a series of twenty-three scenes, some of which conflate more scenes from Shakespeare’s original. He also adds scenes with peasants and soldiers, the latter often behaving in brutal and barbaric ways towards the former (see scenes 10, 14, 18 and 22). Elsewhere, more sympathetic figures, like Duncan, are presented in a far more grizzly light; the third scene, for example, begins with the stage direction: ‘Duncan, sitting on a pile of corpses’.181 The play ends with a final line from the witches in which they hail Malcolm by echoing their greeting to Macbeth; the cycle is about to start again. The adaptation was denounced in the GDR by Wolfgang Harich, who by this time had spent eight years in political captivity, only to emerge as an attack dog for the ruling Socialist Unity Party. He reproached Müller for ‘historical pessimism’ and criticised the cruelty in this Macbeth as a product of an unchangeable system rather than as the result of individual volition.182 Clearly, Müller had radicalized Brecht’s materialist practice and emphasized darker aspects which may not have appealed to his more rationalist predecessor. The influence can thus only be considered partial in this case, which is nonetheless the closest in the German canon. Identifying influence in staging Shakespeare is a far more difficult matter. Brecht’s new approaches to directing were significant and his insistence on maintaining high-quality documentations of his work meant that they were

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available to interested and curious theatre people in Germany, elsewhere in Europe, and far further afield. Brecht, however, directed and supervised successful new productions of The Tutor, Molière’s Don Juan and George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer as Drums and Trumpets before he died. All these productions contributed to and developed his historicizing stagecraft, and so the great legacy of his theatre practice which deals with earlier plays rests on an aggregate of achievement. The triumphant Coriolan of 1964, which consciously built on Brecht’s work, may well have represented an acme but was ultimately a production in a tradition; it did not employ devices specific to the performance of Shakespeare in a dialectically materialist theatre. Perhaps the most fitting way of summarizing Brecht’s relationship with Shakespeare is to couch it in terms of which Brecht would have approved: it was dialectical. Shakespeare, the thesis, met Brecht, his antithesis, and this led to a wealth of syntheses which, just as in any dialectical process, were non-deterministic. The encounters drew on the myriad qualities of the complex and contradictory antagonists and produced ideas, exercises and works which continually developed the dialogue over time.183

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Chapter 4

Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête: On Poetry, Legacy and Work Timothy Mathews

Who? Where? Why? La poésie ne produit pas de l’universel, non, elle enfante des bouleversements qui nous changent.1 Édouard Glissant No, poetry does not produce universal things, it gives birth to upheavals which change us. When Aimé Césaire died in 2008 at the age of 94, the numerous obituaries celebrated the place he had won in people’s hearts and minds in the francophone world and beyond. His achievements and activities were many and varied: poetry – Caribbean, occupying and stretching the French language; plays – combining the lyrical with the documentary; political tracts – engaged and enraged; and his politics – for some progressive, for others assimilationist, for everyone integrity itself. Césaire’s death was marked by a state funeral held in Martinique, and a commemorative plaque was also placed in the Panthéon in Paris. Césaire is only the fourth writer to be honoured in that way, after Victor Hugo, Paul Valéry and Colette. Where is Shakespeare in this panorama? In The Tempest, and Césaire’s revisiting of this ever-fascinating play. In his adaptive embrace Césaire brings to life the radical transformation of former colonies into independent nations, as well as the black power and civil rights movements in the United States; and in the process he revisits Shakespeare’s long important role in radicalizing French literature and culture. This chapter is devoted to his play. My aim is to explore Césaire’s engagement not only with Shakespeare but with literature: with the power of texts to alert people to the change they can both imagine and achieve. Césaire was born in 1913 in Martinique, then a Caribbean colony of France, and was educated at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, the

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capital. He continued in Paris at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École normale supérieure, taking the Agrégation in Philosophy. Among his contemporaries was Léopold Sédar Senghor, who like Césaire was a poet as well as cultural theorist and politician. Senghor was the first President of the Republic of Senegal, a post he held from 1960 to 1980, and he was the first African to be elected to the Académie française. In 1932 Césaire and Senghor founded the review L’Étudiant noir/The Black Student, with the ambition of creating solidarity among black students by cutting across the barriers of nation and class. After World War II in 1947, the Senegalese politician and academic Alioune Diop (1910–1980) founded the journal Présence africaine, which expanded into the publishing house of the same name in 1949. When Césaire and Senghor joined forces with Présence africaine the Négritude movement started to develop, and it grew into a powerful multicultural and multidisciplinary voice speaking for black francophone experience and identity. Before the Second World War in 1938, Césaire returned to Martinique and the following year he published his seminal Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to My Native Land.2 In this long poem Césaire offered what was to become a touchstone for many anti-colonial movements. Speaking through a poetic voice, and championing poetry itself, the book revitalized, re-conceived and reclaimed the land of Martinique, its life, and the ability to say ‘I’ there, on the island of Martinique; and to say it in French, with French, bending and breaking French. The poem defies the colonizer’s language from within. Voice, place, identity – these continue as central issues in Césaire’s response to The Tempest, as they are in his life and work. It is a complex approach reflecting the Négritude movement itself, which appeals to the aesthetic and the formal as much as the discursive in addressing Black oppression, and claiming Black identity in the positive. The aesthetic and the discursive, poetry and politics: Césaire not only combines them but challenges the relation between them. From as early as 1945 he was engaged in local and national politics, as Mayor of Fort-de-France and Deputy in the French National Assembly; he retired from politics only in 2001. In the years immediately after the war and in opposition to the white colonial elite, Césaire joined the Parti Communiste Français which had fought Nazi oppression almost alone in the politics of Occupied France. But in 1956, after the suppression by the Soviet Union of the Hungarian uprising, Césaire repudiated the Party and in 1958 he founded Le Parti Progressiste Martiniquais. When Césaire returned to Martinique in 1938 he became a teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher, named after the nineteenth-century French abolitionist.

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One of his pupils in the following five years was Frantz Fanon (1925–61), and he also met Édouard Glissant during that time (1928–2011); the three developed a lifelong relationship of both influence and tension. Fanon’s militancy is encapsulated in the title of his key work, Peau noire masques blancs/ Black Skin White Masks of 1952, pitting the pursuit of black identity against the ubiquity and the protean invasion of the white empire in all its forms, ideological, affective and geographical. Glissant, who like Césaire was a poet as well as a theorist, and also a novelist, went on to develop the concept of antillanité, a sense of Caribbean uniqueness by which language, race and place reach out to each other as rhizomes rather than roots. Later he developed the concept of le Tout-Monde/the All-World, in which the languages of the world accumulate and reverberate in a fragile but dynamic totality. Issues of political independence, cultural identity and how to conceive them occupy all three writers in different ways. Césaire’s own politics were those of the federation. He was instrumental in bringing Guyane française, Guadeloupe, Réunion as well as Martinique into the French Republic as Départements d’outre-mer/Overseas Départements (DOM), whose deputies join the others in the French National Assembly. While some challenge a policy which seems to maintain a colonial status quo, others point to Césaire’s efforts to maintain the standard of living in Martinique above Third World levels. Whatever the case, Césaire’s political model was one of autonomy within a larger union. His mission was to fight for economic prosperity for all the DOMs via the economic plenty of the French Republic, and to enrich the Republic as a whole, culturally as well as economically. The island in The Tempest provides Césaire with a stage on which to put these ambitions to the test. What, then, of Césaire’s poetic activism? In 1941 he met André Breton (1896–1966) who, with others, had founded the Surrealist movement with the publication of Manifeste du surréalisme/Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. Breton, fleeing the Nazi Occupation, was travelling from Mexico where he had met Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), and together they had written Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant/Towards an Independent Revolutionary Art, of 1938, co-signed by the Mexican painter Diego Rivera (1886–1957).3 Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) was on the same boat on his way to Brazil, and he asked Breton what the difference is for a Surrealist between a text and a document.4 The question goes to the heart of the relations between history, art and activism, and from there to a belief in the poetic as a practice of change and a philosophy of hope. So is Une Tempête a document of its time, a work of art, or both? The issue hinges as so often on the relation of the individual to the collective. Trotsky

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and Breton had arrived at an understanding: if revolution frees class to the exclusion of the individual, and equally if the individual is not freed by the class struggle, nothing will have been achieved. In this light the purpose of art is to effect freedom, which for Breton means an end to the principle of divide and rule imposed by rationalist categories mentally, politically and culturally. He is captivated by the power of Césaire’s language to bludgeon the rules of thought and reconfigure the imagination: And it is a Black, and not just in the voice of a Black but all of mankind, who is asking every human question, expressing all human anxiety, hope and ecstasy, and forces more and more powerfully a prototype of human dignity on me.5 But Breton is sarcastically taken to task by Fanon for his white man’s way of patronizing the achievements of the black writer. Where is the paradox, he asks, in a black Martinican writing creative French, since Césaire is obviously black and writes in French?6 But whether into the arms of a white poetics of revolt or not, Breton’s piece on Cahier helped bring to a metropolitan French readership the power of Césaire’s particular voice of freedom. By ‘metropolitan’ I am generally referring to the values of Western-style democracy and urban plenty. Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache/An Anthology of the New Negro and Madagascan Poetry, compiled by Senghor and published in 1948, is a further introduction to a metropolitan audience of Négritude and the francophone black struggle against colonization. The title of Sartre’s essay, Orphée noir/Black Orpheus, testifies to the European starting point of his thought on black liberation, but the essay is radicalizing nonetheless.7 It is part of Sartre’s ongoing exploration of the relation of prose to poetry, a distinction to which I shall return. The essay is also part of Sartre’s commitment to commitment itself: to the responsibility of writers to forge an acceptable society in the aftermath of the Holocaust and French collaboration with the Nazi Occupation.8 Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme/A Discourse on Colonialism not only embraces that responsibility but challenges its conception. Published by Présence africaine in 1955, it addresses in prose global history as global genocide.9 Césaire argues with passion that colonization is itself genocidal and remains unchallenged. What’s the answer? In Éloge de la créolité/In Praise of Creoleness, published in 1989 by Gallimard, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant reorientate Caribbean literature towards its own non-African identity. In

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celebrating Creole these writers interrogate the continuing engagement with the metropolitan values of the French Republic which Césaire had come to symbolize. Feminism brings another perspective, and the work of the Guadeloupan novelist writer Maryse Condé stresses that the oppression of women is confirmed rather than addressed by thinking of identity in blocks – race, geography, or class. Césaire himself seems at times to offer a mystical, muse-like voice to women in his writing, rather than exploring a voice embodied in its own living history and challenging his own. In any case, to reclaim history runs the risk of investing in it to the exclusion of others, and the whole cycle of deafness and division starts again. Capitalism and ethnicity – what kind of relation can we hope for there? Adaptation and theatre together stage something of this dynamic tension of voice and its appropration. Césaire’s La Tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christopher) of 1963, exploring the life and times of King Henry Christophe of Haiti (1767–1820), was performed in 1991 at the Comédie française in Paris; and Une Tempête at The Gate, London in 1998. Each is an adaptation from the white to the black. Formally and culturally, each reaches out to new audiences, new combinations of openness and resistance; each underscores the drama in theatre itself of renovation and assimilation. Césaire wrote Une Tempête at the suggestion of the French theatre director Jean-Marie Serreau (1915–73). It was first performed in 1969 at the Théâtre de l’Ouest Parisien. Césaire had worked with Serreau on producing La Tragédie du roi Christophe at the Odéon in Paris in 1965. Actor as well as producer, Serreau had founded the Théâtre de Babylone which ran from 1950 to 1954, staging new plays by Luigi Pirandello and Arthur Adamov as well as Roger Blin’s inaugural production of Beckett’s En Attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot in 1953. In a range of Paris theatres in the 1950s and 1960s before his death in 1973, Serreau produced and acted in plays including ones by Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco and Kateb Yacine. In 1971 he founded Le Théâtre de la tempête at La Cartoucherie, the theatrical complex in Vincennes on the edge of Paris. This is intense and diversified theatrical experimentation, a brutal examination in theory and practice of the idea of self: what an opportunity for Césaire to continue refashioning the expressive possibilities of French. But like Brecht, Césaire asks, is theatre enough, is poetry enough, to refashion the social relation? An early assessment of Une Tempête comes from Ruby Cohn in her pioneering Modern Shakespeare Offshoots of 1976. Cohn gives one of the first accounts of the way Shakespeare’s play inspires other authors, and offers an engaging account of Une Tempête in the light of Négritude.10 More

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recently, in her essay in the volume The Tempest and its Travels of 2000, Lucy Rix highlights the way Césaire’s adaptation stages a rhetorical vomiting of the colonialist historical narrative.11 Pivotal questions of empire emerge in the dialogue of play and counter-play. Where is the island? Who is Prospero? Who is Caliban? And who is Ariel? The mysterious island on which Shakespeare’s Prospero has spent the last twelve years is somewhere in the Mediterranean between Milan and Tunis. In Césaire the island emerges in the idiom he develops to evoke Martinique, which draws on evocations of the whole of the Caribbean, of Central America as well as Africa. Yet in the plays taken together, the island is poised precariously and signals transition: empire building, empire collapse. Some new kind of government will be needed. Shakespeare’s Prospero is an exile and a castaway, seeking to create the terms of a return to his own land and his rightful place in society. That place has been usurped, and the resulting tear in the legitimacy of the social fabric needs to be repaired. Césaire’s Prospero is a conqueror and an administrator seeking an exit route; but what will the future hold? Prospero has servant-slaves in each play. But in Césaire neither of them is white. Perhaps Prospero is black. Serreau’s original idea does seem to have been for a Tempest with a black cast. But as I shall explore, Césaire stipulates that actors will come on stage as though picking up imaginary masks as they go. The effect might have been reminiscent of Jean Genet’s Les Nègres/The Blacks, published in 1958 and first produced in 1959 by Roger Blin: there, some of the black cast wear the masks of whites and some the masks of blacks. But these are real masks and not just imaginary ones. In Césaire, the effect is for Prospero to settle in the role of white master, Caliban in the role of black slave, and Ariel, however provisionally, in the role of a mulatto one. Critical reception of The Tempest, on the other hand, has settled on the relation of Prospero and Caliban, foregrounded by Frank Kermode in his influential edition of the play.12 That relation has become privileged, perhaps symbolic, certainly polarized. If Prospero represents Renaissance knowledge and civilization, Caliban represents unaccommodated man, challenging the authority and the domains of Christianity. Robert Browning’s poem ‘Caliban upon Setebos’ (1864) is a good example. A ‘calibanology’ emerges, as the editors call it in Constellation Caliban; an ever-expanding body of knowledge charting the mobile boundaries of the ‘centre and its margins in cultural history’.13 But that range of knowledge itself can settle into a kind of critical orthodoxy by which Caliban provides knowledge of nature, in conflict with Prospero who provides knowledge of government and technology.14 For stereotypes do not disappear, whether critical or racial; it is not in the

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gift of individuals to divest themselves of orthodox thought or the culture in which it is embedded. An unquantifiable residue remains, which is both silenced and confirmed by the polarizing model of analysis. Ariel comes to disrupt that model. Césaire regroups the elements of The Tempest into A Tempest, a distinction highlighted by Cohn: the play now evokes one conflagration among many. At the epicentre of them is the ongoing, unresolved triangular tension between the white Prospero, the black Caliban and the mulatto Ariel, and this chapter is devoted to that tension. I shall also be wrestling with spells. Spells are not simply the tool of Prospero, the aristocratic magician playing with his different kinds of captive; they represent the fabric of a culture and its binding agent. Aspiration and hope for the future are also caught up in spells, expressed by them and fuelled by them. Césaire’s practice of adaptation asks whether there is a way past polarized, spellbinding conceptions of black and white, master and slave. In presenting Ariel as centrifugally attached to Prospero as well as Caliban, Césaire’s adaptation takes Ariel past a representation of mulatto, petit-bourgeois, and futile collaboration with the colonizer and with empire. His spells are those of poetry – and Césaire gives them the sternest examination in the poetics of his own play. It is that examination which in turn I re-present here; and in that way to wonder how best to respond to poetry and to Césaire’s play with responsibility and without idolatry. What kind of social understanding should we hope for? What capacity should we hope for to invent a voice?

Act 1: Reporting on Community Le principe de la colonisation […] est celui de l’aventurier et du pirate […] avec derrière […] une forme de civilisation qui […] se constate obligée […] d’étendre à l’échelle mondiale la concurrence de ses économies antagonistes.15 Aimé Césaire The principle of colonization is the principle of the buccaneer and the pirate […] and there’s a form of civilization behind it […] which needs to extend worldwide the conflict between its own competing economies. Whose progress? Whose community? On Prospero and Ariel In adapting The Tempest Césaire explores what hope there is for a society based on goodwill rather than conflict. The power of various spells to confuse as well as illuminate remains integral to Césaire’s investigation.

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Adapting the network of spells that is Shakespeare’s play gives Césaire a theatrical laboratory in which to test the limits of belief, of attachment, and of poetry – the aspiration of poetry to understand human society and to redirect it. Writing in 1952 Fanon puts the issue to be addressed provocatively and bluntly: It’s a fact: some Whites believe they are superior to Blacks. Here’s another: there are Blacks who at all cost want to prove to Whites the richness of their thought and the equal power of their intellect. What’s the answer?16 What indeed. What way out is there from this lugubrious narcissistic drama of resentment, projection and counter-projection? Césaire’s language is volatile and his characters are not pure ciphers. Nothing could be more canonically White than Shakespeare’s plays, nor signal European cultural plenty with greater strength. But Shakespeare in France does not only signal literary orthodoxy but literary revolution. Shakespeare was a key figure in orientating French Romanticism towards the real, rather than a rationalist ideal tainted by the Revolution of 1789. I need only mention Mme de Staël, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Eugène Delacroix and Charles Baudelaire. But then in choosing to adapt Shakespeare, Césaire testifies to the effects of dominance even on those who struggle to overturn it. A report is needed on this hall of mirrors, a theatrical one in this case – an investigation of the point of view, its resistance to change, and the confusion of the way it is lived. Prospero quickly settles into a white role in Césaire’s script, and his account of his life story is a blunt statement of the colonizer’s convictions and issues. Nothing remains of his earlier disinterested pleasure in knowledge evoked by Shakespeare. In Césaire Prospero’s explanation of how he and his daughter have come to be castaways on the island deals immediately in power, Lebensraum and theft. Rather than describing his past self as lost in Renaissance learning, Césaire’s Prospero claims he discovered the existence of overseas lands rich in tradable goods; and that his discovery was stolen from him by his rivals in the family, the ruling class of Milan. The interaction of the thirst for knowledge and the thirst for travel, land and cultural goods no longer peeps implicitly through Prospero’s ambivalent metaphors of generosity and paternalism. Césaire’s Prospero loudly trumpets empire and its politics, his focus is the plot which cheated him out of the navigation routes to new colonies – ‘a plot to rob me of this empire in the making’ (20).17 But still, successfully stealing

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Prospero’s discoveries involved reporting him to the authorities of the Inquisition; Prospero’s enemies have staged their aggressive takeover by appealing to the fear of revolt and freedom of thought. They have successfully presented Prospero as a heretic. Humanism and heresy combined chart the routes leading from an ideal of progress to the tactics of a knowledge economy. So Prospero’s heresy-humanism is metropolitan in Césaire, it expresses a centralizing and egocentric instinct, and in his account of democracy fairness is measured in fair trade. In Césaire revenge and humility, discovery and exploitation, self-interest and self-denial, tyranny and socialization are all exposed as hand-in-glove. Furthermore the trading in ambivalence has disappeared; Prospero does not need a show of revenge which he can then abandon so as to educate his villainous usurpers. In Shakespeare Prospero can use his magic to wreck his usurpers’ ship as they return past his island from the celebration of an arranged marriage – another furtherance of empire. But in Césaire there is little metaphor to interpret; Prospero has deduced that his usurpers will use the knowledge stolen from him to make their way into this New World, and he is simply waiting for them. Adapting the play has involved alluding to it; Césaire’s rapid dramatic sketches of the issues which affect him have flattened the distances between 1611 and 1969, and the distances between symbolic and lived experience as well. The tools of poetry and its magic are mapped on to the tools of Machiavellian manipulation and cancelled by them. That cancellation signals the particular integration of form and content in the play, which walks the line between report and drama. In masters as well as slaves, affective attachment and strategic opposition are obscured by each other and condensed in each other. In Prospero’s motivated family story, the phrase ‘histoire de félonie et de trahison’, this ‘story of crime and betrayal’ appeals both to the poetic and the historical or documentary imagination (22). Immersion in history combines with imaginary response, and reportage with melodrama. The combination of impulsiveness and forward planning characteristic of Shakespeare’s Prospero is magnified by Césaire, in his play the fusion of nervous energy and political resolve creates a kind of hysterical fixity in Prospero’s manner from the start. Vision is flattened onto circumstance. Through the figure of Prospero, the adaptation as a whole shows the collapsing distinction between emotion and history in the experience of any individual, and between attachment and analysis. Prospero’s manner of address combines reportage with exaltation. From that combination a laboratory of poetic effects quickly emerges which is

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also, as in Brecht, a laboratory of approaches to activism. Adaptation is one of the elements whose power Césaire investigates. Written in 1963, his La Tragédie du roi Christophe anticipates Une Tempête. Its title signals an adaptative appropriation of Classical tragedy at large, by contrast with Une Tempête which takes the opposite route – an adaptation of a single play reorientating Shakespeare’s impact on French literature. Christophe gives sustained and cumulative voice to exaltation, prose and poetry infiltrate each other and fashion the voice of tyranny. The lyrical poetry of Orpheus enters into conflict with the military one of Pericles in a vast, unresolved conflagration of egoism and political realism. In Une Tempête the emphasis has shifted further towards prose rather than verse, in Césaire’s renewed attempt to fragment the drive of any one voice to dominate others. The interplay of prose and verse allows him both to highlight and disaggregate the confusion he creates in Prospero of egoism and spurious generosity. In the process, a paradoxically anti-metaphorical, but still dramatic intensification of the relation between Prospero himself, Ariel and Caliban begins to envelop the new play. This is a stark triangulation which involves one of the two defining changes Césaire makes to The Tempest: the meeting of the two slaves – Ariel ‘ethnically mulatto’, Caliban ‘negro’ (7). It will prove to be one of the crucial elements in the play’s interrogation of poetry by politics and politics by poetry. The issue is joined early on when Ariel castigates Prospero almost on equal terms, certainly far more firmly than in Shakespeare, for his attack on the ship carrying King Alonso of Naples back from the wedding, the attack which Ariel has used his magic to carry out on Prospero’s behalf. Prospero rapidly counters by claiming the value of the ends over the means: the education of the usurper justifies the suffering caused, even if the suffering is in any case only illusory and short-lived. Clearly the court of Naples has not in reality been shipwrecked, nor has Alonso’s son Ferdinand been drowned. Illusion is still the means of education, as it is in Shakespeare’s play, and as it is in Brecht too as matter of general dramatic practice. But the lessons are not now ones of ethics and inheritance, as in Shakespeare, but more ones of Realpolitik, as in Brecht. Prospero’s metropolitan pursuit of progress by acquisition takes on the colours not just of the colonizer, but the Robespierrean and the Stalinist revolutionary. In figuring Prospero as an admixture of those two, the exploitation produced under the banner of modernization can be explored, at work as much in building colonial empires as the financial ones of today. The circularity of the paternalist attitude to progress, whether from colonizers or bankers, is expressed in the ever more compressed impulsiveness of Prospero’s behaviour and language. Any involvement with nature as well as any cultural sense of

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belonging is retrogressive and superstitious; he asserts: ‘Crush that! I don’t like talking trees’ (23). This is the cleft pine in which Ariel – as opposed to Caliban, as in Shakespeare – has been imprisoned by Sycorax, and freed from there by Prospero. In Shakespeare, Sycorax, Caliban’s mother seems to be a European sorceress, whereas in Césaire it is unclear whether she is indigenous to the island or has come with Prospero. But Césaire’s Prospero is blind to all these distinctions in any case; as he sees it, he is simply a liberator. He asserts the value of progress over the language of the place, and over the Romantic legacy of nature as the language of the soul. But Ariel’s poetry of place is not Romantic at all. In the very first scene of Césaire’s play Ariel aspires to still closer proximity with Sycorax; not just with nature, but nature as it is known to him in his place of birth – his sensations of it, the attachments he has formed with it. The possibility of feeling imprisoned somewhere is eclipsed by breathing the air of belonging. Ariel’s attachment to the island and to nature is not the failure to innovate that Prospero attributes to his slave as justification for enslaving him. For Ariel, rediscovering and reclaiming a sense of place is not simply a quest for origin but for a place in a nomenclature. His magic is a linguistic one which turns poetry towards naming as a source of discovery rather than a means of restraint. His understanding of place is integral to an understanding of language and the right to language. His poetic magic is socialized rather than anarchic, and not only generally critical but aimed at generosity. He thinks of language in relation to experiences known, felt and owned by the user, and on that basis freely shared with others. Beginning with questioning Prospero’s benevolence in liberating him from the tree, Ariel goes on to fantasize about what it would have been like not to have been liberated at all. After all I might have finished up as a tree… Tree, one of the words that exhilarates me! I think about it often. Palm-tree! Blending nonchalance high up like an octopus elegantly swimming in the water. Baobab! Gentleness in the guts of monsters! Ask the hornbill confined in one for a season. Ceiba! Spread out in the proud sun! Bird! Hothouses planted in the quick of the earth. (23) Ariel even identifies for a moment with the tree of his imprisonment. But Ariel moves from expressions of proximity to ones of distance, and that dynamism in his own language expresses the distance of any word from what it seeks to embrace. Ariel’s exaltation is firmly linguistic and, to that extent, poetic; it alternates between the metaphoric – the palm tree waves

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its branches with the elegance of the octopus, its tentacles flowing in the water – and the metonymic – the baobab tree is brought to life through the hornbill which hides in it. Metaphor, metonymy: each is matter of distance, but the distances vary. Ariel is at once transported somewhere and drawn in to where he is. The nature he knows and loves is at once integral to his experience and removed from him as he lives it. This ballet of distances is both expressed in the words of his exaltation and embedded there. Prospero has taken Ariel’s ecstasy for a kind of out-of-body, out-of-this-world spiritualism. But Ariel’s ecstasy is rhetorical, material, outward-looking: a matter of relation. Ariel’s land is his insofar as he names it in relation and in the name of relation. ‘Les serres plantées dans le vif de la terre’: greenhouses are implanted in the quick of the earth, but they are man-made. The natural and the man-made are juxtaposed; there is barely need for Ariel to appeal to a metaphoric relation to bring them together. Horticulture has been brought into the closest proximity with nature, but still they do not merge, and exploitation is held at bay. Distances begin to emerge from within proximity itself, and with them the prospect of free relation. And so the Honduran port of Ceiba opens out to Ariel in the bay of his own island; travel and exchange are embedded in his power to live there. Such is Ariel’s pursuit of dynamism rather than profit in response, and to the social relation. ‘Le nègre n’est pas. Pas plus que le blanc’, intones Fanon at the end of Peau noire masques blancs.18 ‘The negro is not, not yet, any more than the white.’ For Césaire’s Ariel too, neither black nor white is defined, both live their own history in the making. For Césaire’s Ariel here, history is to be made in relation; and the relation he offers is one of proximity without appropriation, interaction without smash and grab. On Caliban: poetry, conflict and the new On dira de moi, avec beaucoup de mépris, il ne sait même pas parler le français.19 Frantz Fanon What they’ll say and with a lot of contempt is that he can’t even speak French. Ariel the mulatto, the humanist, perhaps the intellectual, still waits for Prospero to set him free. Caliban’s black politics of the poetic and of the name are quite different. Césaire’s intensified triangular relation of Prospero, Ariel and Caliban is given another turn: suddenly Sycorax is not the mother of Ariel, nor even transferred back into the mother of Caliban, she is nobody’s mother and everybody’s on the island, binding Ariel and

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Caliban together and pushing them apart with centrifugal energy. She is nature at large, but lived in the nature of the island. For the progressivist Prospero she speaks superstition, but in the triangle at the centre of the play she focuses invisibly on the politics of the right to speak. In reaction to Ariel, Caliban rejects poetry, the given in any form, and asserts his own word. He lays claim neither to nature nor to Sycorax, but to his word. And unlike in Shakespeare too, rather than admitting rather joyously to the attempted rape of Miranda, for which Prospero has enslaved and imprisoned him, Caliban hotly disputes it; for him Miranda holds no appeal or interest. Acts of transgression can only be contaminated by what they seek to transgress, it seems, and Caliban has no wish to be drawn in. His mind is on a clean slate. He has a cry of his own, of ownership; and he has taken a name. His cry is ‘Uhuru!’, and his name is X. Together they assert and affirm the new. Each is a slap in the face of French meaning. A different way of making meaning is proclaimed without compromise and at the expense of meaning itself. At the same time, both in tension with this anti-meaning and supporting it, the cry and the name each carry a paradoxical allusion which is both hidden and apparent. ‘Uhuru’ is the Swahili word for freedom. The modern-day Caliban demands freedom from the systematic abuse of his race by reclaiming his African inheritance, and by reclaiming global history as the history of slavery. In response Prospero calls Caliban’s word ‘a barbarous language’, and a bad-tempered, posturing debate ensues between them which refracts the one in Shakespeare. Prospero demands gratitude for having taught Caliban language – an astonishingly self-glorifying claim. Caliban counters with the accusation that he has only been taught the language of command, in fact obedience, and that knowledge has been secreted from him in Prospero’s books. His ‘I have learnt to curse’ does not appear in Césaire. Or rather, it is given to Prospero to say that all Caliban’s language is good for is cursing and ingratitude. The modernizer’s core claim is expressed in the impulsiveness and impatience characteristic of Césaire’s refashioned Prospero. But is the refashioned Caliban claiming something more than the ability to curse? The question anticipates the one later in both the adaptation and the original of whether any idea of clean-slate revolution contains an idea of government. In the meantime, and in the drama of Césaire’s adaptation, black Caliban and white Prospero are driven both together and apart over the interdependent rights to language, land and inheritance. ‘Uhuru!’ is Caliban’s word. What is his name? I’ve decided I won’t be Caliban anymore.

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And then: Call me X. That’s best. (27–8) ‘X’ joins with ‘Uhuru!’ in juxtaposing anti-sense with sense, relating them without joining them; each makes space for the other. X signals the absence of name and sense, a utopia, an absence altogether of any signifying system at all, an ‘a-topia’ as Roland Barthes would call it: a sense of placing and of naming that is without a sense of imposed place or name. Caliban asserts his right to freedom from the history of the name, of the family, of patronage and the controlled release of wealth. He asserts his right to freedom from the slavery of the name as well as the body. But to assert the absence of name, to assert that anything is no longer there, is to re-engage with ways of indicating it. The opposition of absence and presence remains intact, along with the dominant conventions of the name itself. Caliban clings to the idea of absolute anti-meaning nonetheless. But at the same time, and in a compressed opposition of effects, ‘X’ carries various meanings in addition to its resistance to all meaning. ‘Accouchement sous X’, which literally means to give birth under the sign of X, is the French legal term given to the procedure by which a mother anonymously gives up her child at birth to the authorities. In giving himself the name X Caliban reverses that situation, cuts his own links with his mother and all motherhood; with European colonization of the idea of nature symbolized by Sycorax; and with an idea of individuality in the service of lineage and capital. Césaire’s self-named X is calling an end to white history and its distributions of freedom, and reclaiming Sycorax in the Black. More powerfully still, X evokes Malcolm X, one of the most outspoken of all on the history of racism in America. Convicted of breaking and entering, he emerged from prison in 1952 with his new name: ‘for me, my “X” replaced the white slave master name of “Little” [Malcolm’s original family name] which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears.’20 Under the banner of the Nation of Islam Malcolm X went on to force the view through that social revolution and especially Black self-determination are possible only by the complete separation of Blacks and Whites. This position set him firmly apart from the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King, although his radical views began to change, leading him to leave the Nation of Islam in 1964 and found the Organization of Afro-American Unity, shortly before he was assassinated. In the volatile network of allusion in Césaire’s play, Caliban as X can for a moment evoke the Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam, before he founded

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the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and he is opposed to Ariel, who in this light presents Martin Luther King as a compromised mulatto slave. Prospero not only calls Caliban’s word ‘Uhuru’ barbaric. He also plays on the name Caliban to make it Cannibal, and also Hannibal, and the circular sequence of the wordplay allows him to dismiss the barbaric and claim the value of conquest all at once. All questions of government are left unresolved. At this moment Césaire unites with Fanon in denouncing fraternalism as paternalism. But in the dynamics of the Prospero-CalibanAriel triangle, Caliban and Prospero are natural partners, drawn irresistibly to each other in their opposition, each in his own almost monadic, egocentric and impulsive pursuit of the new; of progress conceived as freedom exploding in the now. At the end of the play the future will be left open for them to resolve, just as it is here at the beginning. Césaire’s Caliban, like Shakespeare’s, has his own poetic voice too. The voice of Césaire’s Caliban is the voice of ownership and the one: but there is an inventiveness in this one-ness nonetheless, an obliteration – however wilful – of a flawed idea of the social relation and of politics. Caliban’s voice turns into incantation in his adoration of Sycorax, and he claims her voice as his, his own, and living. Snake! Rain! Lightning! And I find you everywhere: In the eye of the pond looking at me without blinking through the bulrushes. Narcissus is powerful, as Caliban looks into the pond: looking at himself gives Caliban the sensation of his own voice in his own words, of his voice even in the words of others. In speaking, his voice is snatched from otherness and felt in the sensations of living, of looking at something, at the bulrushes of his own land. The labyrinth of sensation attaching him to his land is concentrated in what he can see in front of him in the pond, and touch if he wants. Self-regard is ripped from the mythology of hubris and pain and given the power of self-awareness: the power to place, and to speak renewed ideas of living. In the manner of Sartre’s vision of the poetic voice of Négritude, Black Narcissus sees himself so strongly he sees others re-made in relation. Nonetheless, Caliban remains vulnerable to a confusion between relation and simple self-affirmation, the loud proclamation of a point of view. As in Shakespeare, Caliban reminds Prospero of what he has taught him, and

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Césaire underscores Caliban’s repeated accusation in the original play that he has taught Prospero everything about the island, its language, the laws of its nature, the ways to exploit its wealth and resources: ‘je t’ai appris les arbres, les fruits, les oiseaux, les saisons, et maintenant je t’en fous…’ (26) ‘I taught you the trees, the fruit, the birds, the seaons and now you can fuck off…’. But the integration of opposites in Caliban’s language, the potency it suggests of metaphysical one-ness and political purpose, disintegrates into impotent cursing, immobility, and the inability to act: ‘je t’en fous’. ‘Le ghetto quoi!’: ‘just a ghetto!’ – now the voice of Caliban sounds passive and rather petulant, his embrace of the urban Black ghettos seems to accept imprisonment rather than re-ground it or reorientate it. The claim to ownership of the present confirms the status quo rather than subverting it. The explosive inauguration of a new, self-defining mythology of the Black offered by Sartre’s approach to Négritude, which combines the prose of reorientation with the poetry of identity, is for the moment unsustainable. Caliban and Prospero are joined in impulsiveness. Each on his own treads the line between trying to scatter history to the four winds and being sucked up in its back draught. The End is in the Beginning: What travel in poetry? Wonder effects the crucial break with an other that can only described, only witnessed, in the language and images of sameness.21 Stephen Greenblatt Now as at other junctures, Césaire telescopes the rhythm of Shakespeare’s play, already a quick-moving one with many surprises. The effect is to translate an arrested ideology into dramatic form; an arresting ideology, trapping people in its spells. When Ariel returns, as he does in Shakespeare, Césaire leaps to the ending of the play and flattens its coup de théâtre onto its start and its heart: Prospero will pardon the usurpers of his dukedom. His planned and staged revenge plot is exposed and abandoned before it starts: Prospero forgives them there and then, and gives new orders to Ariel to that effect. The threat of revenge in the original play is in any case an illusion or an act of creative deception; it cannot be reconciled with Prospero’s plan to arrange a settlement through the marriage of his daughter to Ferdinand, the son of Alonso the usurper. The logic of the spell is integrated with the logic of education in both plays, that is the driving force of each one. Prospero’s spell stages both delusion and its dis-spelling. But Césaire re-presents that logic as a prosaic self-evidence,

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and has Prospero announce early on to those he claims to re-educate that he is very much there and alive. The passage to recognition set up for his rivals is collapsed in the recognition of the situation as it is already. Prospero’s rivals are also his allies. His supposed vision of the future turns into a confirmation of the present and a self-repeating pursuit of power. Prospero’s impatience cannot even allow him to wait for the ending of his own play. His impatience with his own spells shows how far they reach beyond his own understanding, even though they are of his own creation. Self-awareness begins to disperse in spontaneity, and a prosaic expression of an ideology emerges. In Césaire Prospero will pardon Alonso and the others whatever their crimes, because ‘these are people of my own race, and high ranking ones. I myself am at an age where I must think of the future, and leave arguments and quarrels behind’. The arranged marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda is now a self-evident element in Prospero’s metropolitanism and his idea of progress, exposed in the full glare of governance by race and class. Césaire’s decision to conflate the pardon and the marriage further tightens the fixated quality of the whole situation. The performative quality of Prospero’s announcement that he wants his enemies to know that he is not only alive but has already pardoned them emphasizes the static quality of the action, past and future: ‘That’s my plan. I want it carried out’ (29). This formal telescoping, tightening and conflation, interwoven with the humours of impulsiveness and impatience, incarnates in an extreme from the integration of self-awareness and its collapse in the very acts of thinking and speaking. The power of prose to organize and reconceive is overcome by the immersion in circumstance and lived experience expressed in poetry. The two modes serve each other in the exercise of power, the combined spontaneity and self-awareness it requires, as does any form of action. Prospero’s planned – in effect, already achieved – political alliance of Naples and Milan is an impulsive strategy through which to hold out against Caliban’s projected revolution. Such is Césaire’s addition to the drama. Which of the two revolutions, Caliban’s or Prospero’s, the revolution of the people or of investment banking, will break free from the other, and pass from being imagined to being established? This, the first act of only three ends with the scene in which Ferdinand is introduced and he and Miranda meet for the first time – the offspring of the elders whose union will ensure the continuation of their regime. Ferdinand hears only the spells he brings with him; the magic of the island is hand in glove with his own Classical education which continues maternally to train him. For that reason this opening act falls retrospectively

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under the light of Ariel’s poetry, his own spells, especially the song he sings as he leaves to carry out Prospero’s new orders, and which serves as an overture to Ferdinand’s appearance. As W. H. Auden has it in The Sea and the Mirror, his own response to The Tempest published in 1944, Ariel not only executes Prospero’s orders but his poetry executes the smooth-running of the play, its ease of passage to the audience’s expectations and range of understanding.22 But the song Césaire gives Ariel encapsulates the drama as a whole. It signals the involvement of characters as well as audience in the spells cast upon them, the difficulty of identifying spells and stepping beyond. Chestnut of the sands Their mauling The hospice of the tides Pure languor. And the wave is weary. Come here all hold hands all and dance! Blondess of the sands their burning! Languor of the waves The purist hospice Here lips lick and lick again Our wounds. A waterline is being drawn... Nothing is, it’s all becoming The season is nearby and strange. Pupil pure and pearl fair Coral heart, mother-of-pore bone Here the line ends As the sea sloughs in us. (29–30) Césaire writes a song for Ariel whose poetry asks, can poetry speak? Can it reach out to voices other than its own? Ariel’s song stages a stop-go drama in relation to its own capacity to sing. The chestnut sand starts a sequence of things in apposition, and this concentration of meaning rides along with

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one in the grammar as well, especially of pronouns and verbs. Coherence is created through apposition and juxtaposition, which seems to suspend the relations of language, and to recompose them on the basis of proximity – once again, in Ariel’s activity as poet; on the basis of squeezing things together rather than concatenating them. An overall tendency emerges in the song to emphasize space rather than time. The imperative to dance (‘dance, you!’) and hold each other by the hand also sounds like the voice of something happening now, a spontaneous energy and beauty (‘you dance’). But there is the languor and pain of the island as well in the little song, the French Symbolist prosody of the mood-space re-emerges, the paraphernalia of assonance, alliteration and rhythm is once again deployed in an echo of a European fin de siècle idea of poetic musicality. The island is both evoked and swamped in a prosody alien to it, just as the poetry of Paul Verlaine is evoked in the sound of this poem but ripped up in its syntax. Such is Césaire’s own capacity at this point to set the stage for a poetry of renewed relation. In the second stanza a grace of language emerges which is less interrupted – interrupted only by the return of the obscure but melodious ‘mouroir’, a place in which to die, a word which might echo unnervingly with ‘abattoir’. Whether in spite or because of this troublingly easy return of orthodox lyricism, nature, the heat and the eroticism of this place are all conflated with a general idea of wound. Orthodoxy is bloodied and rekindled at every turn. The wound of belonging is equal to the wound of not belonging, each heals over, each bleeds again to the rhythm of the water sloughing in waves up the beaches of the island. The purity of naming is lost in the purity of the names themselves, but the power of poetry is not just embraced but smacked by the condensation of meanings Ariel fashions, and then discards to the rhythm of the dance he offers. Corals which are like hearts re-form as stony corals which are like bones: metaphoric flights of fancy are mapped onto metonymic proximity and the simply visible. Invention in the moment is matched, absorbed and cancelled in timeless archaeology. Naming licks clean the wounds of belonging, but also of losing, of belonging-in-losing; in the same way as erotic attachment both fulfils and wounds. What poetry is this, and what idea of a new beginning?

Act 2: Poetry and Strategy Comment écrire, dominé?23 Dominated, how will I write? Patrick Chamoiseau

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Ariel with Caliban Césaire keeps up the dramatic momentum in the first scene of the following act: why does poetry matter, and why drama, when there is exploitation and suffering? The scene shows the face-to-face argument between Ariel and Caliban that is unique to Césaire’s play, although Auden associates the two voices in the imaginary dialogues of The Sea and the Mirror. Taken as a whole, Césaire’s scene stages judgement – judgements about superstition, culture, modernity. Poetry is once again the catalyst. The scene opens with Caliban’s song, which is an ode to Shango. ‘Shango!’ is the mantra of Caliban’s opening incantation, which is a kind of ode and warning combined: ‘beware!’. Shango is everywhere, welcome him in, without fuss or prevarication, or he will insinuate himself in any case and destroy you from within. He is master of all he sees, even of those who are blind to his presence. Shango is a god, he is everywhere and nowhere; an African god. He crosses the boundaries of mythology and history. He lives in both Yoruba and Voodoo mythology, where he hurls thunderbolts on his own followers, instilling in them violently and unforgivingly the values of self-control. Crossing over into history, he is said to have founded the medieval African Oyo Empire, and along that route he is once again deified as the god of thunder and lightning. In Caliban’s song the imprints of stone axe-blades left by Shango’s thunderbolts suggests the imprints of voice in word: incantation – the imprints of history translated into belief. This belief liberates as well as restricts. And as Caliban busies himself with his jobs or those of Prospero, with work in any case, the sounds and rhythms of his song make ritornellos of free association, in which a sense of placement combines ownership with imprisonment. Caliban’s vocabulary of references is a powerful tool. His way of verbally lassoing world-history and the vast networks of cultural allusion is like a series of short-cuts to the ownership of his own language. They allow him to talk with Ariel as an equal, in a language which is defiantly his own but which at the same time he is still acquiring. Ariel visits him in the cave, where in both plays Prospero has him under house arrest, to discuss the future. Césaire’s Caliban greets him as ‘Alastor’. In Christian demonology Alastor is an evil spirit. Further back, in Roman mythology Alastor is an avatar of Jupiter and a further instrument of revenge. In greeting Ariel in this abusive manner, Caliban seeks perhaps to capture all mythology from the Classical to the Christian in the cloak of his invective. Allusion itself is spellbinding, on the other hand, because of the uncertainty it creates: is there an allusion or not? Who would be expected to pick it up, and why?

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In miniature, these are the questions posed by adaptation itself. Caliban may well reject the Classical civilization in its entirety, and the systematic European patronizing of any culture beyond its own understanding. But his warning against partial knowledge rebounds on himself, his restrictive love of invective is exposed, on which rides his love of place and his aspiration to own mythology and history. In one form or another, restricted vision in all its variety settles over all the voices in the play. Does Césaire’s adaptation allow him some room not only to stage the spells of attachment and restriction but dispel them too? Returning to Caliban, his whole opening interpolation of Ariel is wrapped up and thrown aside in the moment of its utterance. Performance and performativity, form and content match each other perfectly: ‘scoundrel!’. But this circularity is not only energizing – an idea of revolution is no sooner said than done – but also immobilizing – no sooner is an idea of revolution formulated than it is killed in the word. Caliban’s invective is characteristic of the stop-go quality of his way of talking and thinking, and it is characteristic of Prospero’s too; it is a central feature of Césaire’s adaptation of these characters, and it stages the limits of their thinking. And what of Ariel? Is he simply a mulatto slave without integrity, as Caliban is beginning to paint him? He has come to talk with Caliban of his own volition and in his own voice, a step that is not part of Prospero’s scheme. Ariel comes with a message of reconciliation, peaceful negotiation, non-violent resistance, and a re-forming of the social relation. He has come not only to warn against Prospero’s vengeance for Caliban’s supposed revolution, but to warn against vengeance itself. Césaire has made Ariel a self-aware disciple of Shakespeare’s Prospero and of his at least stated mission to educate. Césaire’s Ariel is getting down to work on that mission. Knowingly or not, Shakespeare’s Prospero seeks not only the ability to forgive, but a pardon for his past inability to do so; he seeks passage to a society and an idea of humanity mapped on forgiveness. But Césaire’s Prospero has no conscience: forgiveness is therefore off the agenda, and it is the mission of Césaire’s Ariel to provide him with one – to make him aware of the complacency of the Master, the intolerance and exploitation of the colonizer. That is Ariel’s idea of education, and the liberty of everyone depends on it, including Prospero’s own: ‘I’m not only fighting for my freedom, for our freedom, but also for Prospero, for a conscience in the mind of Prospero’ (37). Ariel as poet assumes responsibility for the future. Césaire’s Ariel is neither servant nor slave; he is a freedom-fighter who refuses terrorism. But he will not find a partner in Caliban, who counters with another cry asserting his own sense of selfhood and self-placing:

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‘Freedom now!’. It both echoes and re-performs the unforgettable demand of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, alive at the time of Une Tempête and commemorated in Philadelphia where the rally was held. The power of the demand turned cry, turned slogan, rings and sings in the ears; it is musical in itself and seems to need music to be heard, then as well as now. In my own imagination Caliban both sings it and cries it in the way he opens the scene with his ode to Shango. It was echoed and re-voiced by the jazz drummer Max Roach and jazz singer Abbey Lincoln in the record released in 1960 called We Insist! Freedom Now Suite. It is an extraordinary duet, a song without words in which drums and voice support each other without accompanying each other. Each independent voice combines with the other to produce the pure sound of voice itself, free and living in the body; it turns into a continuous shriek of violation, violence and despair, and changes again into an unheard of, abstract, breathing and compelling lyricism of hope and life. In such a light Caliban and Ariel seem for the moment to have exchanged roles. In resonating as much, if not more, with Martin Luther King as with Malcolm X, whom he had earlier claimed as his own, Caliban’s ‘freedom now’ embraces the mobility of poetry and affirms the freedom, perhaps imaginary, to be gained in the leaps and bounds of word and art. But still, the poetry Césaire hears in Freedom Now! is not one that seems controlled or digested by his Caliban. It does not have the character of the title of Max Roach’s triptych Prayer Protest Peace, nor of the reconciliation politics of Malcolm X just before his assassination. Rather it is impulsive, made at once out of conflation and dismissal. Confusion is ingrained in Caliban’s voice and exposed in Césaire’s dramaturgy, and though valued for its energy, it is contrasted in the play with the magic of Ariel. Ariel’s magic involves nothing if not work, negotiation, creating the right moments for meaningful confrontation and possible understanding. He is a politician, then, as much as a magician; and his approach is developed in prose as much as poetry. Transforming the image of the empty mulatto go-between, he is pivotal in Césaire’s exploration of the nature of effective poetry; of the need for poetry in pursuit of freedom of thought and spirit. This is not necessarily poetry in its applied or ‘engaged’ dimensions. Ariel’s reputation for spells, for spellbinding entertainment and the smooth running of the plot, is morphed in Césaire’s hands from the blandly educational to the overtly colonial; from the generous to the conflictual. But the training that he offers in spells marches on: Ariel uses it to promote a democratic ideal, utopian as that may be. His message of hope is one of equality and comradeship as opposed to the desperately circular

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and unequal democracy of global trading and debt, which continues unimpaired, it seems, from colonialist paternalism to contemporary global economics. At this point, Ariel conveys his message of resistance to paternalism in all its forms in a language which appeals to poetry as much as practising it: I’ve often had the exhilarating dream that one day you and I, Prospero, we would plan a new world, as brothers, and partners, with everyone bringing their own qualities: patience, vitality, love, also will, and rigour, not to mention the occasional breath of dream without which humanity would stifle. (38) Ariel brings a prose poetry which alludes to the need for poetry, the need to poeticize the social relation and to resist the aggressive social positioning evoked by the idea of prose. Perhaps Ariel still comes as a poet, after all, more than a politician. But what kind of poet? And will it be enough? Gonzalo’s homeland poetry Is Ariel’s poetry compromised from the start? Has it allowed him to understand and distance himself from the comfortable poetry of Gonzalo? Clearly Ariel’s language is a far cry from Gonzalo’s fireside homilies and the fogey-ish optimism of the old and well-off. Shakespeare’s Gonzalo responds to his captivity, to the wreck of the ship, to the apparent death of the heir to the throne which is both a constitutional and a personal catastrophe for him – he responds to his grief by falling prey to the magic of the island, which he voices as a utopia: freedom remains immune to the exploitation of labour. The message of Césaire’s Ariel is also somewhat utopian, but voiced nonetheless in terms of effort, of work, and active human and social relation. Gonzalo’s message, on the other hand, is each to his own deserts: each desert is of equal intrinsic value, and each individual already has equal access to plenty. Does Ariel’s trade in illusion promise a less complacent image of freedom? In Shakespeare, Ariel’s physical visibility is indeterminate, as well as the visibility of his sprites and his general stage management. So the question is what visibility can illusion promise? What ability can illusion promise to see illusion itself, absorb it and step beyond? Does the example of Ariel inspire people at the end of the play when Césaire leaves Prospero and Caliban facing each other, facing together the task of reorganizing the stage of their relation?

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The example of Gonzalo remains unencouraging. In Césaire, Gonzalo stays true to his Shakespearean form and knows little irony. Overwhelmed by the exoticism of the island, and like Ferdinand but with still less hope of self-awareness, he quotes the literary models of exoticism he brings with him. Exoticism is like a home-coming for him and he finds words for his nostalgia in Baudelaire, the French ‘poète maudit’, the ‘accursed poet’ turned cultural icon. In Gonzalo’s canonical reading, Baudelaire’s poetry voices an unadulterated transport to somewhere better, free, sensual, forever of the moment, no sooner felt than consumed and enjoyed: Une île paresseuse où la nature donne Des arbres singuliers et des fruits savoureux; Des hommes dont le corps mince et vigoureux, Et des femmes dont l’œil par sa franchise étonne. A lazy island where Nature bestows Peculiar trees and savoury fruit; Men with bodies slim and virile, Women with eyes of astonishing candour.24 This is the whole of the second stanza of ‘Parfum exotique’/‘Exotic Perfume’, from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal/The Flowers of Evil (1857 and 1861). Gonzalo only quotes the last two lines, and Césaire leaves it to his audience to recognize them or not. Inadequately aware of his own reading and his own cultural language just as any audience might be, Gonzalo translates what he remembers of the poem into an old man’s fantasy of male vigour and female sexual willingness. But he is betrayed by his fantasies; they turn him into a symbol of his own culture and his psyche, on which his vision of himself depends, the young sexed-up entrepreneur he clings to with the help of Baudelaire’s magic. Taking Shakespeare and Césaire together, the figure of Gonzalo shifts from the airy social idealism of labourless equality to the bourgeois liberal colonizer’s vision of the happy native. The colonizer should appreciate, enjoy, consume, disseminate and profit from the lands and peoples he finds, without foisting on them his own faults and values: I mean that if the island is inhabited, as I believe it to be, and that we colonize it, as I hope we will, we must avoid like the plague bringing our own faults, yes our own faults, what we call civilization. Let them stay as they are: savages, good savages, free, without any complexes or

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complications. Something like an eternal fountain of youth where we would come from time to time to refresh our aged metropolitan souls. (40–1) Gonzalo imagines an invisible colonization, everywhere and nowhere, like God. It takes everything but leaves no trace of removal or theft: a colonization which magically frees both the noble savage and the colonizer himself from the alienation of their own labour. But it is the colonizer who is blinded: ‘Silence! Ideology at work.’ Césaire’s Gonzalo is steeped in the canonical Baudelaire, educational and character-forming, and has suppressed Baudelaire’s irony. This blindness to irony stages the problematic nature of self-awareness, and of the distinction itself between blindness and insight, to revisit the title of Paul de Man’s collection of essays. In ‘Parfum exotique’ taken as a whole, Baudelaire’s narrator is travelling no further than his lover’s body and the lingering smells of sex. None of that appears in Gonzalo’s schoolboy bit of recitation, and Baudelaire’s own exoticism has disappeared, any trace of his ability to ask the question to which even Odysseus has no answer: does anyone travel at all? Les Fleurs du mal is a metropolitan book which stages the desire for more, as well as its own deafness precisely to the metropolitan-inspired ‘more’ and ‘beyond’ it seeks. It sings the songs it cannot hear, made of its own hearing. In that very way, Césaire’s Gonzalo is tied in symbolically with Caliban: colonizer and colonized, each to his own poetry. Each stages selfawareness infiltrated by impulsiveness, motivation infiltrated by the heat of sensuality. If ever an idea of giving without taking were needed, Gonzalo’s reading of Baudelaire exemplifies that need, still to be met. Where Gonzalo is a man of goodwill in Shakespeare, for Césaire his sense of wonder confirms the colonizer’s complacency, however cloaked in generous impulse. It is Ariel’s mission to reinstil self-awareness in Prospero, a conscience, an awareness of his position and place, the nature of his relation to others, and the range of possible different ones. But is Ariel’s campaign for self-awareness associated with Gonzalo’s ineffectual liberalism, and compromised by it? Feasts, spells and coups In Césaire’s play there is now a further concentration of Shakespeare’s. Prospero in both plays has ordered a feast for his captives, usurpers and former allies, a tantalizing one which it is Ariel’s job to create. In Césaire the charade begins immediately. Audience and stage participants alike are

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tantalized with the same question in each play: can colonizers enjoy the land of plenty they have only just discovered, which they imagine virgin and there for the taking? In Césaire they take their historical supremacy for granted just like their next meal, and when they are offered one by the magic of the island they feel on home turf, despite all the loud theatricality of the moment: Gone! Vanished! But who cares, they’ve left the victuals. Never has a meal come at a better time! Be seated, Gentlemen! (42) The servants who have set the table have suddenly disappeared; no matter, it seems. Have the master-colonizers and travellers travelled at all? In Shakespeare’s play – and by now we have reached its centre point, Act 3 Scene 3 – the feast appears by a magic invisible to the would-be colonizers. As ever, there is a logic to Shakespeare’s magic and Césaire retunes it to his own hearing. In both plays Alonso and his court, which includes Gonzalo as well as Antonio, still welded to his impulse as a political assassin, are shipwrecked coming home from the wedding ceremony of Alonso’s daughter to the King of Tunisia. Indeed Sebastian is emboldened earlier in Shakespeare’s play to blame the shipwreck itself on King Alonso and his far-flung, empire-building enterprises. Taken together, the scene in the two plays asks what is needed to educate the educator-colonizer? In the breathless, all the more active sense of conflict in Césaire’s account, the scene of the make-believe feast has drifted unforgivingly and satirically towards a display of exploitation. Education and exploitation are explored together; each remains in the hands of the other. In Césaire, the spirits in the service of Ariel are visible to Alonso and his courtiers: ‘living marionettes!’, he calls them. As in Shakespeare, Ariel himself remains invisible to Alonso and the others, but visible to the audience. But in Césaire, Prospero appears with Ariel in the zone of audience visibility, and together they continue their debates over the heads of the others – bad-tempered from Prospero, peace-making from Ariel. Each challenges the other on whether or not to tease and manipulate the captives by promising them chimerical food, only magically to take it away; on whether it is right or wrong to bully the bullies. Alonso and his courtiers will never recognize themselves in the marionettes. Césaire’s Alonso barely responds to them at all other than in his patronizing, if evocative way. But the spectators of Une Tempête are steered towards a position where they can appreciate the symbolism of this puppetry: who is yanking whose chains? In Shakespeare, Ariel’s

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sprites-puppets-puppeteers might be visible or invisible, depending on the production. There or not there, they populate the stage and shroud their captives in the mists of the captives’ own expectations and ways of imagining. Such is the message of indeterminate visibility in Shakespeare, as transformed into the inveterate visibility of Césaire’s adaptation, where all the players in the scene are visible at least to some. Ariel and Prospero see each other, the sprites, and the court of Milan; and the audience sees everyone. In both plays the charade of the feast stages the limits of the captives’ understanding – but also the audience’s. Who has the capacity to see his own illusions and abandon them? And in favour of what? The visibility crammed onto the stage in Césaire’s version of the scene serves only to drive the question home, common to Brecht as well as Césaire and Shakespeare: who can see the ideology of their own way of seeing? In Césaire, Prospero is implicated in this interrogation not only in this scene but in the fabric of the play. The visible presence of Prospero during the charade – visible to Ariel and the audience – makes his attachment to making his rivals suffer all the more apparent. The fixated quality of his behaviour is tied in to the equally static quality of the colonizer’s fantasies, as voiced just before by Gonzalo. Prospero’s respect in Shakespeare for Gonzalo as the one who spared him at the time of the coup, who gave him his books and a ship to sail away in, turns in Césaire into a symbolic partnership whose power is confirmed as much as dispelled in any attempts to formalize it. The project of Césaire’s Ariel is to dispel this power, to break the magical attachments of class, race, culture and habit, and to forge equality and community. In Shakespeare’s play, it is Prospero who plans to insert conscience into Alonso and Antonio; to instil a politics still based on property but able to draw back from the violence of acquiring it. In Césaire, as the audience has already heard, it is Ariel’s project to eke out a conscience in Prospero. And here Césaire’s adaptation turns The Tempest on its axis, thematically and formally. Conscience starts to refract; the idea of a conscience enacts only the criteria for conceiving it, embedded in each character alone. Césaire’s Prospero has little patience with Ariel. He begins to mirror himself in his impulsive efforts to conflate his plans with the outcomes he wants. With pleasure and without conscience, he teases his victims with their own hunger, and begins to stage an aggressively voyeuristic form of Gonzalo’s complacent image of the plunderer who leaves no traces of his actions. Gonzalo believes in the purity of colonization. And so does Prospero: in his adaptation of Prospero Césaire shows the vulnerability of moral purity, the supposedly civilizing power of forgiveness, to the

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pure energy of power and the pursuit of it. Conscience is absent in both Césaire’s Gonzalo and his Prospero. But Prospero is actively driven by this lack of self-awareness, it fires him. Ariel tries to convince Prospero of the immorality of offering food only to take it away; but Prospero responds by having Ariel make Alonso try and take the food despite the fact he, Alonso, now sees the trap. Prospero wants to be all-powerful, to be seen as such symbolically and still to be seen in person. Gonzalo’s pleasure in his own lack of self-awareness, the fantasmatic pleasure of the colonizer and consumer leaving no traces of himself, is intensified in Prospero’s glorification of his own lack of conscience: ‘I am Power’ (45). He celebrates the pure energy of power in his own person, an energy which knows no contradiction or limit, which is universally self-evident, and which cannot be placed, limited or seen. Education, in the hands of Ariel, is ineffectual, so far; and in the hands of Prospero, it is tyrannical, so far. Ariel has found no receiver for his message of creative and generative relation; and Prospero’s only teaching is survival by exploitation. The supreme power of grow or die knows no limit, dialogue or conscience. It never looks over its shoulder, only forwards with egoism and conviction. Is Prospero preparing himself as the prophet of dictatorship? Just as Césaire concentrates the crucial elements in the charade-banquet, he concentrates the elements leading to it and from it. He conflates the conditions of the feast, which is both chimerical and visible, with its aftermath. Symbolic as well as sequential conflation is a feature of Césaire’s staging of fixity in the relations of race, politics and psyche. Fixity of relation drifts towards assassination. Antonio’s opportunist idea of a coup to dispose of King Alonso appears now in Césaire’s play. In Shakespeare’s play the idea occurs to Antonio earlier, when Alonso and Gonzales have been sent to sleep by Ariel, which has the effect of leaving Antonio free to corrupt Sebastian, Alonso’s brother. This concentration of elements in Césaire stages the immobilizing effects of power, of a pursuit of power so ingrained it blurs the distinction of passive and active. In neither Shakespeare nor Césaire is Antonio presented as a simple villain. Instead he unrepentantly, and with simple spontaneity, seeks opportunities to further the politics of assassination. Like Edmund in King Lear, Antonio’s opportunistic energy comes from challenging the superstitions of religion and the affective ties of kinship. He is a rationalist, in other words he thinks synchronically: the flow of history begins now, and brings an end to determinism now. So is Antonio’s energy destructive or creative? His situation is the same in Shakespeare and Césaire. He has succeeded, as far as he knows, in disposing of Prospero and in gaining the duchy of

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Milan, even at the cost of fealty to Naples and King Alonso. Now he is on the prowl to free himself from Naples as well, or at least modify that allegiance to his own advantage. If Sebastian could be turned, become a fellow-conspirator and then king instead of Alonso, that would certainly help. In other words, Antonio’s logic of political progress is the logic of the purge, not one of consensus or agreement. His message is one of hard rather than soft transition, of violence rather than process. But Césaire emphasizes an Antonio whose vision is not purely tactical. In The Mirror and the Sea, W. H. Auden singles Antonio out for particular poetic admiration and awe. The short and the long term seem always to be a reflection of each other in this reading of Antonio’s attitude, keeping his opportunism alert and creative. Unlike in Prospero, Antonio’s plans evade capture at the hands of their own outcome, and his logic is not one of disappointment. His energy is not limited to a particular mission. It is synchronic but also intransitive; it asserts freedom itself, always on the move, alert, opportunist, dismissive. Is it sustainable? Antonio is survivor, executioner, rogue trader, business executive and Realpolitiker rolled into one. Combining capital with terror, his activism is more adaptable and more elusive than the pure tyranny of Prospero’s fantasy. In Césaire’s play, an Ariel visible rather than invisible to Antonio and Sébastien is on call to prevent their aggressive takeover of MilanNaples, or perhaps management buyout. The battle lines are clear. Césaire once again gives Ariel the pivotal role of turning The Tempest on its axis. Because of Ariel the play veers from the spiritual to the ethical: it charts not so much a route from egoism to community, as from conflation to federation. Property and ownership are central to both plays, but the politics of Césaire’s Ariel is a practical one, and his is a practical idealism too – the ends justify the means only if they produce better communication and better citizens. Ariel is a committed poet after all, then, to the extent of being committed to results rather than simply to aesthetic pleasure, let alone the magic of expectations fulfilled. His imagination is critical. He seeks to foster an understanding of the terms of engagement, of interpreting and responding. He fosters alertness to the fragility of education, its vulnerability to the dominant point of view and its insidious ambience. His mission is not to prompt inward journeys to generosity, with the help of whatever imagination and sensibility he can rekindle in his lordly pupils, and his powers are no longer incorporated in Prospero’s wizardry. In Césaire, Ariel has turned the tables on Prospero and Prospero is part of Ariel’s own educational project. Powerful diplomacy rather than powerful magic is needed: a diplomacy up to the task of dispelling Ariel’s own

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magic, his own expertise in delivering plays about human relations which work to a system beyond anyone’s understanding. He has not given up on breaking apart the magic by which cultural and economic self-interest, self-interest of any kind is absorbed in the idea itself of a conscience. This entire symbolic shift in Ariel’s dramatic mission is encapsulated in Césaire’s adaptation of Antonio’s plot and the way it is uncovered. Ariel is plainly visible and speaking in his own voice, he acts like the police on a raid. This is not a stage-managed phase in the plotters’ spiritual progress; here Ariel is confronting criminals in prose with evidence and known facts. His swift and peremptory revelation of Antonio’s plot expresses his impatience with illusion, including the wonder of Prospero’s fake shipwreck and of Shakespeare’s play generally. The effect is to put Prospero and plotters in the same category, and all of them in the same dock. So what next? Will lived confusion be kept apart from willed conflation?

Act 3: Relation and the Collapse of Forgiveness Adapting mirrors and plots This is now the start of Act 3, the last in Césaire’s play. At the end of Act 2, as part of Ariel’s revelations about Prospero to Antonio and Sébastien, King Alonso has learnt that Ferdinand, his son and heir, is still living. In the rhythm of Césaire’s adaptation, Alonso’s relief and gratitude is under immediate attack at the start of Act 3 with the sudden appearance of another key element in Shakespeare’s play. In both plays the audience has seen Prospero setting Ferdinand to work as his slave, visiting on the son punishment for the sins of the father, and showing in the process the manipulative type of civilization he has in his gift. For such sins as they are belong to Prospero as well. It is the tendency of an ideology to become consistent, and Césaire shows that here by having Prospero put Ferdinand and Caliban together on the same job and in the same pen. Divide and rule, as in Shakespeare, where Prospero keeps the two firmly apart, gives way in Césaire to a kind of hysterical fixation, a straddling of all difference in Prospero’s blind pursuit of an idealized, immaterial and purely egoistic power. The same passage from pragmatism to tyranny, via a paradoxical, prose-poetry lyricism, is explored in La Tragédie du roi Christophe; and also in Césaire’s provocative account of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister of Congo, in Une Saison au Congo (A Season in Congo, 1967), whose title echoes Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell). There Césaire

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seems to ask, what speaking of the truth, what speaking of the violent wars of race and freedom will inspire freedom and understanding? In Une Tempête, Césaire builds on Shakespeare to corral together Alonso, Gonzalo, Prospero, Antonio and Sebastian, different as they all are; and for now the unsustainable logic continues of supremacy by suppression and assassination, whether implied or actual. The distance between the acquisition of knowledge and the acquisition of territory has been repeatedly flattened in all these characters, individually and as a group. Each is the cipher of his own inability to sense the past and to read history in a voice other than his own. What sense of place, what claim to place and voice will help reground the ability of people to relate? Adaptation itself is a way of testifying to the life of ideas, but is it a lesson in hearing or silencing the past, and does it illuminate, or simply confirm the terms of present thinking, present appropriation? The play-within-a-play structure, the mirroring of main plot in subplot is a formal manifestation of these questions. Is knowledge or ignorance involved when the framing play is recognized in the framed one, given the extent to which recognition itself deals in received knowledge and crashes against its own values? These questions are redoubled as well as again flattened in Une Tempête, where the effects of the play-within-aplay combine with the effects of adaptation. What is now to come is not so much an adaptation of a play-within-a-play, but a recasting of adaptation as a play-within-a-play. Who mirrors whom, who will criticize what, and who will escape from what? And who will be further ensnared? Une Tempête in form just as much as content inflects these questions as a meditation on the possibility of cultural translation, freedom at large and the kind of relation needed. The play-within-a-play, or subplot mirroring the main plot, is a common device in Shakespeare; I need only mention A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet and King Lear here. A hall of mirrors creeps up not only on each play thematically but on them all structurally, taken as a group including Césaire’s. That effect is compounded formally in adaptation, and compounded thematically in an adaptation where colonization is the central theme. Adaptation mapped onto the play-within-a-play formally articulates acquisition and projection, just as much as the efforts to be aware and free. And efforts they remain: in being adapted, the original Tempest is engulfed in the metaphor of ‘all the world’s a stage’. And if Caliban has been cast as a symbolic Malcolm X earlier, how will radical politics fare now, and the politics of stamping the authority of cultural ownership onto present living? What will adaptation as form and practice

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reveal about the ability of ideas to travel? Or about the fashioning of everything in the image of the traveller? Césaire has moved the alliance of Caliban with Trinculo and Stephano to the later stages of his play, whereas in Shakespeare it kicks off in Act 2. Although Césaire has kept the character of the original encounter, the different timing in the adaptation changes the meaning and the questions asked. A drunken Trinculo, a servant at the court of Naples, stumbles across a sleeping Caliban with his mind as open as that of any package holidaymaker looking for the next bar. He runs into his servant-colleague Stephano through exactly the same piece of physical, linguistic and cultural slapstick as in Shakespeare. Stephano has climbed under the blanket with the sleeping monster of his fantasy, leaving Trinculo to discover what he imagines is an indigenous beast with a head at each end. But exploiter and exploited are soon in agreement: self-proclaimed masters see slaves everywhere in every imaginable form, and self-aware slaves catch sight of masters in every word and glance. Together the Europeans and the natives speak the same language. Not only are they given the same language to speak in Shakespeare as well as in Césaire, their plot to take over the island comes as naturally to natives and slaves as it does to employers and masters. Césaire’s Caliban, like Shakespeare’s, promises the other two all the magic of the island, and power not only over the island but over their lords and masters. In return he wants their help in getting rid of the real tyrant, Prospero himself, the tyrant who pulls all the magical, affective and economic strings of a society he believes he will forever own, independent or not. In hilarious keeping with their overblown and limited sense of injustice, Trinculo and Stephano are interested in the money and the wine to be made out of selling natives as circus performers. The Shakespearean symbolism has tightened in Césaire and for his Trinculo, all inhabitants of foreign lands are good for a freak show of some sort. But in the dramatis personae Césaire specifies an ‘psycho-drama atmosphere’ for the play. With Prospero’s impulsiveness at its epicentre this atmosphere involves all the actors, not just Trinculo’s, coming on in a rush picking up masks as they go (7). What sort of masks are these? Une Tempête is a script waiting to come to life. The masks are not simple disguises, they are imaginary, their symbolism is mobile and unsettling; and for Césaire as much as Brecht, critical theatre depends on a poetic response from the viewer. The earlier castings of Ariel and Caliban as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are not just documentary but volatile, and this continues throughout the play. Caliban’s masks shift, they express the fits and starts of thought and discovery, as well as the volatility of economic life and its strategies.

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Césaire gives a new song to Trinculo and Stéphano and when Caliban joins in, this is a song for an alliance of cultural ownership and asset stripping. In unison, Caliban and his new allies sing the chorus to freedom: La Liberté ohé! La Liberté! which might translated as ‘Freedom ahoy! Freedom!’, but it is the sound in French of the call itself which is expressive (64–5). Just before, Caliban sings of the language of his land, its untold, unshaped, uncatalogued variety, specificity and energy: Pecking black in the savannah the grackle paces in the new day thick in feathers and brisk in his haughty armour. Zip! The sharp hummingbird plays in a corolla lunatic, or liquored, his lyre reforms our frenzy Freedom ahoy! Freedom! The grackle is part of the Icterid family of birds found in North and South America. Icterids are part of the passerines which comprises more than half the existing species of bird and signifies simply a perching bird and sometimes a songbird as well. But the grackle itself is exotically coloured with yellow explosions on its black plumage. And while passerine birds are found everywhere, the grackle might be known specifically to Césaire as Caribbean. What a telling bird for Césaire to have chosen: it allows him to stage the relation of ownership to understanding. The bird is indexical, it belongs to its place, but for the same reason it can be imagined by those to whom it does not belong and who do not belong on its land. This is the destiny of any living thing and any lived moment: to be given life in language and in that way to be translated into the living of others – but also to be lost there. The process is alienating and rich in equal measure. The obscurity and exoticism of the grackle is produced as much as dispelled in hunting down its meaning. People familiar with it know what it is already. But this search for meaning also disturbs the self-seeking magic the traveller-cum-colonizer brings with him and in which he is ensnared. Approach without appropriation is once again at stake. A sense of belonging without the corollaries of exclusion, aggression and renewed

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alienation is at stake too in the poetry of Caliban’s little song. The grackle wanders in the light of the bright new day, improvising his way around the savannah for food, striding around his space with his own type of confidence, colourful, fleshy, armoured in life itself. At the same time the hummingbird, rather than bouncing along like the grackle, dives in with his long beak, ripping and zipping apart the petals of the corolla and spreading pollen everywhere. The juxtaposition of the two birds confirms the uniqueness of each one: relation based on uniqueness emerges, inviting dialogue as much as calling a halt to an illusory dialogue of equal exchange. The birds each belong to their own place or space, they create meaning but undermine reference to symbolism, value or purpose. The fascination of the hummingbird derives from the sheer range and beauty of the effort the male bird puts into getting a mate, far exceeding the demands of procreation. Césaire’s hummingbird likewise signifies excess itself in the same way: alliteration, assonance and rhyme erupt and drift all over these five lines of Caliban’s song, offering freedom through delirium not only in content but form. Grackle and hummingbird belong to their species by belonging to a place, perhaps Martinique, in any case a sense of place communicated on the basis of indigenousness in partnership with commonality: the feeling common to anyone, but uniquely, of belonging to a unique place. A sense of the moment and a sense of temporality, a sense of genus and uniqueness, a sense of place and universality, utterance and symbolism, all seem to walk the same line in this little song; they both meet and cancel each other out. This highly constructed surface tension forms Caliban’s cry of freedom. ‘Caliban’ himself is obviously a construction. What has Césaire carved out from the precedent of Shakespeare? Can the ‘new’ Caliban be extricated from precedent, from the living presence of given meaning? Is Césaire’s Caliban made in the same unresolved drama of colonization whose only exits are assassination or forgiveness, or does he reach beyond its repetitive magic? What is the voice of a place-other-thancolony that Césaire might have in store for us? ‘La Liberté ohé! La Liberté!’ For the moment there is still the metaphorical tension between grackle and hummingbird. One bounces along well-armoured and spry, the other pierces to the centre. Each triggers delirium and creativity; but they are still juxtaposed, still in tension. ‘La Liberté ohé! La Liberté!’ Juxtaposition signals the abbreviation, curtailment, the kind of ironic impatience characteristic of Césaire’s frantic and impulsive Prospero. The nature of this relation is left unresolved: open? or fixated? Can the process of relation be made to produce equality rather than support the inbuilt appropriativeness of the speaking voice? Are its outcomes open or foreclosed? ‘La liberté

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ohé! La liberté!’: Stephano and Trinculo now weigh in and with Caliban the three sing together in chorus – the colonized and the revolutionary, the colonizers and the assassins: assassins all, each in his own strangely singular bubble of attachment to a model: Freedom ahoy! Freedom! Pigeon stop in our woods Wanderer of the isles rest is here Miconia does nothing but pillage purple blood of the ripe bay daub blood more blood on your plumage voyager And shout at the backs of broken days Freedom ahoy! Freedom! (64–5) The wood pigeon is one of the various types of feral pigeon that have flown or been carried from the ‘Old World’ and settled in the ‘New’. There is little to distinguish this ubiquitous type of bird except travel itself, and also the porous boundary between the domesticated and the wild characteristic of all pigeons. It is in the nature of these birds to roam free; but they also colonize and are themselves colonized. That distinction disappears as the pigeon dissolves in the fabric of human civilization in a combination of husbandry, leisure, communications and the free air. Freedom combines with economic organization and progress, here as everywhere in human culture, as do free will and subservience. But the ubiquity of the pigeon signals not only the indefinite variety of these combinations but also their thoughtlessness, their imbeddedness in the spontaneous reactions and impulses of everyone. The condensed chorus ‘La Liberté ohé! La Liberté!’ signals the commodification of liberty in the appeal of the song itself, an appeal which is specific to each one but belongs to no one specifically. Is this solidarity or incoherence? In the poetry of Césaire’s song and its place in the drama, liberty takes a disturbing turn towards the assimilated and the flat. The ubiquitous, feral but categorized wood pigeon combines with the miconia, a tree originating in Central America and known in Tahiti as ‘green cancer’, where it is a parasite of catastrophic proportion. The miconia does nothing but pillage, the purity of its pillaging combines with its ubiquity and its invasiveness. It stretches geographically across the Pacific, but it is rooted in the places of French colonization by its appearance in this song. The miconia is potentially obscure to the Westerner; but the pigeon has become commonly

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known to everyone. Where is the line drawn between them in Césaire’s song, where is the distinction between obscurity and communication, understanding and ownership? The dynamic relativity of what is open to being recognized is again staged in Césaire’s rhetoric of juxtaposition – the juxtaposition of the pigeon and the miconia, as well as Caliban and Trinculo-Stephano. Juxtaposition in the song hinges on freedom and violence, freedom and ownership. Caliban-Trinculo-Stephano, colonizercolonized, freedom fighter, poet, fashion victim all sing as one, each in discordant tension with the others and himself. Their song evokes the wood pigeon settling in spontaneous and easy domestication, which from one line to the next appears as the devastation brought by the parasitemiconia. And now devastation, travel, pillage and freedom all combine in the same rhyming colours and the same cry freedom. There is no symbolism in play, no sign of transition either, only transition itself. The suspension of symbolic relation suggested by juxtaposition offers a poetic and theatrical space in which to construct free relations; but equally, the intransitive embrace of anything and everything which is also suggested by juxtaposition offers only acquisitive brutality. Can reaching out be kept apart from imprisoning? Does the song of Caliban-Trinculo-Stephano reach past the sound of its own voice? In Césaire’s voice grackle, hummingbird, wood pigeon and miconia semantically, geographically and culturally affirm their own uniqueness, their imperviousness to appropriation; and they do so through associations of travel just as much as place. Nomadism and rootedness are not mutually exclusive here; Césaire puts each in suspended juxtaposition to the other; each is related to the other but also right up at the limit of any relation at all. But if place and rootedness suspend symbolic relation, each in their own way, does that suspension give voice to resistance and freedom, or still to appropriation and aggression? The resistance in the song to cultural translatability is itself open to translation, even vulnerable to it. Who can draw a steady line between your place as yours and your place as mine, wrapped up in my understanding of what it would be like to be in yours? Does translation open and embrace, or enclose and strangle? Can the vitality and volatility of a sense of place escape the organized, but equally volatile rapaciousness of travel? In Césaire as well as Shakespeare, the Caliban-Trinculo-Stephano triangulation doubles the plotting of Antonio and Sebastian. In Césaire the desire to reclaim a sense of self is sung in the same violent incantation as the desire to consume like everyone and all the masters. The violet of the bay on the island inspires the war paint of invasion, and the war cries of independence are inspired by the

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same colour. Love the country, or break the back of the country: each to his own, in parallel; cry ‘freedom’ in the country, together, apart. purple blood of the ripe bay daub blood more blood on your plumage voyager And shout at the backs of broken days Freedom ahoy! Freedom! Progress in harmony with nature and a generative sense of place; or progress in conflict with nature, in an organized disrespect for what was. Those two voices sing in both harmony and discord. Without meeting, each seeks relation in the suspension of relation itself. This little song of unresolved progress sings the drama of Césaire’s adaptation, of adaptation itself in the miniature: history is flattened in the present. What hope is there for relation renewed? Myths and legacies In Act 4 Scene 1 of The Tempest, Juno and Ceres appear at Prospero’s command and enact the vision of fertility, peace and understanding to which he still lays claim, and to which he wishes finally to attach his name. Césaire’s account of Prospero’s show combines satire and hilarity. Orchestration and stage-management combine with impulsiveness in this further account of Prospero’s paternalism, self-pityingly strong-arming others into taking up the opportunities he claims to provide: ‘Entertainment’? Much more than that. I want to give them here and now the spectacle of our world to come and inculcate it in their minds: a world of reason, of beauty, and harmony, whose foundations I have dug by my will alone. Because at my age, sad to say, I have to give up thoughts of doing and think about transmitting. (67) History is a narrative of victors, as Benjamin says, and the spoils of the exploitation of labour go to the hero-plunderer. Prospero is under the sway of the moment and of an ideology which covers his movements like a skin, silencing his forgotten victims. Prospero’s prophecy of a future utopia is more elaborate than Gonzalo’s imaginings, but it still speaks in the voice of the books he is given to understand, which is another reason why his knowledge is so impulsive and instinctive, orientated to the light of his own

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time. The prophetic, in other words egoistic seeing of Césaire’s Prospero is simply blind to non-Western history in its entirety. Eshu bursts on the scene to disabuse him, the ‘negro god-devil’: But nobody did invite me, that’s the point. (7, 69) Eshu bursts into Prospero’s charade in the lived time of the adaptation: Césaire loudly interrupts Shakespeare, all the more so as such a step is not characteristic of Une Tempête as a whole. Césaire’s mode of adaptation suggests that interruption and attempts to break the lines of history do not give new voice or bring new understanding; or if newness there is, it is deaf to the old, to itself, and to any process of relation rather than imposition. As though to confirm that, Eshu’s interruption here is stage-managed iconoclasm. But a knowing one, nonetheless. In Eshu’s language, as in the play as a whole, Césaire has again combined prose and poetry; once again, which is which? Which atrophied in command and which associative and subversive? ‘Naiads’, cries Iris in opening the show, ‘come, celebrate a union made in pure love!’ (67). Iris personifies the rainbow, she is one of the many messengers of the Gods including Morpheus and Hermes. Naiads are fresh-water rather than salt-water Nymphs; perhaps we can imagine them as messengers of the Classical already transported into the nature and culture of this island. The Naiads serve Iris, who with Ceres serves Juno herself, and who in turn combines with Prospero to put on this pageant to peace and love. Greek, Roman; godly, human; Pagan, Christian, all are in the service of each other in this perfect circle, Césaire’s momentary satire on Prospero’s ode to reconciliation. His rapid, allusive, concertinaed approach to adaptation reaches an apogee, and enacts the colonizer’s active rapaciousness welded into his passive self-enclosure. All the easier for Eshu to gatecrash the party and shatter Prospero’s Elysian Fields, his pastures of democracy and fertility. Eshu is a god in a ‘foreign’ mythology, unwanted and unwelcome, and simply rude; he guzzles the wine but prefers the blood of dogs: ‘Not bad your drink! But mind you I like dogs better!’ (69). He prefers dogs in general to poultry and goats. Cooking and culture; cooking and mythology; mythology and religion: all these interrelations articulate the conflict between Juno and Iris, Prospero and Ariel on the one hand, and Eshu on the other. This is another struggle for place and the right to speak. Eshu figures in the Yoruba mythology, just as Shango does to whom

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Caliban sings at the start of the play; Eshu also belongs in the Ifa and Lukumi religions. He appears to emerge consistently as the messenger of God in the texture of this mythological diaspora, an elemental spirit standing at various crossroads and voicing his wide message of human diversity and its suppression. Heard as loudly in Brazil as in Nigeria, Eshu appears in many different colours and is marked out as something of a trickster. Is he tricked by his own capacity to trick? Do his guises wrap him in confusion as much as they confuse others? If religiosity is another agent binding people to the dominant culture of the moment, what power does Césaire offer to reach beyond ideological dominance himself? In prose, Eshu has barged his way into yet another reconstruction of Apollonianism, the aspiration to purity of thought and body offered by the faithful Naiads. But is his own Dionysianism anarchic or purposeful? Does Eshu have the puff to cry freedom from his oppressor, and from the wrap-around film of oppression which envelops him? Can he govern? His mobility between mythologies and religions seems to mix with an investment in transubstantiation, in which light the whole idea of world dominance might resume under the guise of a protean afterlife, in effect a protean life force. But then the following questions arise. Is the magnificence of the Diaspora relieved here from an alienated sense of displacement, espousing instead the plural and the mobile and reclaiming life? Or is the figure of Eshu simply reclaiming the power to dominate? In which case, should the energy generated by his mythological travel be embraced or allowed to dissolve? Ultimately, should Eshu wish for order or disorder? Eshu is a trickster Sacrifice him twenty dogs Or he’ll do you dirty Eshu. […] Eshu! The stone he threw yesterday Kills the bird today. Order from disorder, and disorder from order Eshu! A jolly hoaxer. […] Eshu is a cheery fellow With his penis He strikes, And he strikes… (69–70)

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Quite enough for the affectedly demure Ceres and Juno; and quite enough for Prospero as well, driven to private self-doubt and another chastisement of Ariel for allowing this vulgarity. In Césaire’s brief and allusive little song Eshu’s wordplay threatens the distinction between man and animal; and it short-circuits sexual difference as well as intensifying it, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the collapse of these distinctions itself remains in the civilized realm of wordplay; and this wordplay is by definition in French. Sacrifice a load of my favourite animals to me or I’ll play rotten tricks on you, says Eshu. The threat is not only made but replicated in his language; playing dirty tricks is expressed in the idiom ‘to play pig tricks’ – pigs being thought of as dirty in French as well as English. In yet another form, Césaire has made the metaphoric collapse into the metonymic and the circular: animals-tricks-animals. Perhaps this is the perfect Freudian unmotivated joke, a wordplay which targets meaning itself and socialization at large. But the circularity of this linguistic attack involves being trapped in conventions still further. Is Césaire extending the interrogation staged in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? What powers of resistance does his Eshu show to an orthodoxy of the natural, which allows for the human to be played off against the sub-human in the first place? So in highlighting superstition Césaire questions the power to contest it. His Eshu might allude to the Fool in King Lear who even relishes the inverted values he lives under, and by which opportunism and profit are the measure of ethics and progress; perhaps they should be. Order cannot be distinguished from disorder – that is exactly the message of the Fool. So what is purposeful revolt? Césaire gives his play as a whole the job of addressing that question. What is the part of poetry in revolt, faced with transgression passing into fashion and the sheer ease of consumption? To the further consternation of Juno and Ceres, at the end of Eshu’s short but powerful interruption he beats the sound of revolt with his penis, which might also be an attack club, and his incantation turns into the sound of a drum: Eshu is a cheery fellow With his penis He strikes, And he strikes… A caricatural image of the beauteous black savage is joyously affirmed in this alliance of regular metre, free verse and prose poetry. It is a rhetorical flat slap, there is no looking backwards or forwards, but at the same time there is allusion embedded there, and its presence puts cultural consumption

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centre stage. The drum of revolt, of the non-European and the black; political freedom and utopia all appear several times in the prose poetry of Rimbaud, looming large over any poet writing in French for his simultaneous mastery and abandonment of poetry. Each strikes out the implacable and irrepressible awareness of Rimbaud’s narrator that ‘we never leave’. Travel, then, does not produce travel of the mind or the imagination, it charts progress-as-colonization and ineradicable learning. Is there a way out of the endless superimposition of the known on the unknown? A way past believing in given belief? Do translation, adaptation, all the travels of the word involve travel at all, or further empire-building from home? ‘We never leave.’ Or might there be the sound of a different beat: ‘a touch of your finger on the drum discharges every sound and now is the new harmony.’ The opening utterance of ‘À une raison’, Rimbaud’s ode to a reason, a new reason, still unheard. The drum, barely touched, starts the new language for the new reason, for a harmony made in each individual’s understanding of it. In ‘Démocratie’ the drum appears again, but it is stifled now in the word for a drum, not illuminated in the poem but limited by the patois of subjective understanding, in which the new is no sooner born than re-owned, re-branded, and conquered. ‘The flag drifts to this squalid landscape, and our dialect stifles the drum.’ It seems democracy survives in seeking a language for the lost language of the drum. In that light, the drum of Césaire’s Eshu is found wanting, Césaire gives him no words for it, for its loss, or for its regeneration. Affirming difference without seeking relation emerges again as immobilizing. Une Tempête is still on its journey to the meeting of the staged and the non-staged, where readers and spectators start to make their own future. On the way to Césaire’s closing scene, two key moments in the original play are treated with Césaire’s customary allusiveness, his own Rimbaud-like impatience: the young lovers chatting and playing chess, and Prospero’s magnificent closing speech seeking indulgence. The flattening effects of the adaptation continue to the end, and the ever-decreasing circles tighten the question ever further: what now? what future relation? Love, resistance, work Ma liberté ne m’est-elle pas donnée pour édifier le monde du Toi ?25 Frantz Fanon Isn’t freedom given me to build the word of You?

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Remember Miranda and Ferdinand talking: Césaire retains the striking symbolism of choosing a game of chess as the scene for the young couple bickering and loving. Strategy; the Mappa Mundi: the point is deftly made of the geopolitical importance of arranged marriages. To what extent are Ferdinand and Miranda shown as self-conscious participants in the game or unwitting ones? To what extent can any performance keep a hold of that distinction rather than show its mobility? What secure distinction is there between self-awareness and spontaneity, alienation and the ease of living, between the impulses of giving and taking? The question seeps everywhere into Shakespeare’s closing speech for Prospero. But the equivalent remarks for Césaire’s Prospero come before the end of the play and not at its conclusion. Césaire’s Prospero is not given the last word, Césaire gives as little space as possible to both these canonical moments in the play – the chess game and Prospero’s speech. The effect is of an imperative to see beyond their symbolism. This is what Césaire’s Prospero says, looking at the mess of his show which Eshu has made, and of the knowledge Prospero would have liked to offer as a legacy: At last, he’s gone. But the harm’s been done. I’m fretful. My tired brain is confused. Power! Power! All that will pass like foam, like the clouds, like the world! What’s the good of power if I cannot tame my anxiety. Another of Prospero’s mood swings jerks him into some sense, at least, of his relativity and of his responsibilities: His insubordination defies the whole world order. God the Divine could care less! At least I’ve got a sense of my responsibility! (71) An intimate understanding of contingency and solitariness is the moment when a sense of responsibility might begin to germinate – responsibility to others, and responsibility for an idea of humanity. But in Césaire’s Prospero still, responsibility is steeped in caricatural egoism and an obstinate sense of ownership, all of which is confirmed by the renewed rapidity of his allusion to any idea of responsibility at all. He gestures to circumstance rather than living it in the body. Ariel’s mission to instil a conscience in the mind of Prospero still seems some way from being accomplished. And yet in Shakespeare, Prospero’s speech at the end of the play is addressed to everyone, not just himself; and to all artists, Césaire included. Why else would Césaire turn to Prospero’s books at all? At the end of The Tempest, it is easy to indulge the simple conceit by which the character of

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Prospero supposedly speaks for the author. But since everything in the play exists in Shakespeare’s language, the question is not how to step into but out of someone’s shoes, and from the past. This is a question of adaptation then, as well as renewal. How might Césaire have heard it, how might we hear it differently through his play? Shakespeare’s Prospero pleads for ties, but also the loosening of the ties which bind him to his audience. How can attachments be felt and abandoned at once? The audience is asked to imagine that spells are no longer there, simply because Prospero has said he has given them up, given up trying to take charge of images, everything from resentment to generosity. But Prospero pleads in a language which is his own, even in casting it off; that is how his poetry is heard. If that paradox cannot be resolved, how is the pursuit of ownership to be modified? And would there be a way out from the futile drama of projection and counter-projection identified by Fanon, with which we began? Prospero asks the people to let him go, but they cannot release him from his own language – or from their own either, from their own manner of hearing and seeing. Can we let go together, as individuals? The figure of Prospero pleads not to be left alone on his island, now that he has got rid of any way of making anybody take him, or of making anybody listen to him. The metaphor of the broken-down old man and equally tired wordsmith is a weak expression of anyone’s ‘charms’; but it it is still affecting, otherwise there would be no bonds to be loosened or any need to loosen them. Weakness might still be performative. For me a different Prospero is appearing, one who can imagine looking at himself and talking about himself to others; as envisioned by Césaire’s Ariel, perhaps Prospero has acquired a conscience. But this is not simply the new Prospero bidding farewell to the old. In the manner of Rimbaud’s farewell at the end of Une Saison en enfer, there is no real farewell at all, either from Shakespeare to his craft or from one Prospero to the new one, or from Césaire to Shakespeare. Rather, there is a continuous farewell, which takes the same form as a greeting, a continuous search for a farewell to the old and for a renewed relation with others. In abandoning the power to hold an audience, in theatrically abandoning theatre through the figure of Prospero, just for this moment, Shakespeare seems not to abandon anything but to plead for a community – a community of people open to being affected. This poetry itself is an act of dissolving boundaries and refashioning them in a loose partnership of speaker and audience. But that partnership still needs to be created. Prospero’s pleas for mercy, for indulgence and reinclusion appear as vestiges of the very clothes he seeks to lose. Who can reach beyond the stage of their own understanding?

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Such is Césaire’s question, and he begins his final reply with a dramatic reversal of the outcome of Shakespeare’s play. Prospero will not leave ‘his’ island. He decides to stay. The situation is balanced on a knife-edge and the stakes are high. Is Prospero keeping hold of his life’s work or letting it go? By staying, is he retreating and entrenching himself still further, or is he reaching out? Equally by leaving, rather than setting anybody free, would he simply be abandoning responsibility for the civilization he still claims as his own? In Auden’s reading, in which Prospero’s final speech is adapted poignantly and sardonically by Caliban, no one in any case is in a position to set anyone else free. The slave-owner can only set free in the manner of the slave-owner. The pretension to give freedom is imprisoning and selfimprisoning. Where is the freedom in leaving, if the ambition is simply to bury the past in a perpetual present? And if such is leaving, in what way will staying make a difference? It seems that the relation between the ideas of leaving and staying need to be reconceived. But at this, the opening of Césaire’s conclusion, the prospects of changing the manner of relation do not look good. In the perspective of the colonizer Prospero is unprepared to let go, his creations have become part of the fabric of his attachments; he is unwilling to leave his life’s work to the natives still in need, he maintains, of his knowledge and vision. And in the perspective of the colonized, Césaire’s Caliban, like Shakespeare’s, recognizes how far he has to go to see past his own enthralment with what he despises: Tying myself up in those rascals! What a fool I am! How could I’ve believed that fat stomachs and red faces would make a revolution! Anyway, good! History won’t think any the worse of me for not liberating myself on my own. It’s you and me now, Prospero! (78) Caliban is thrown back on Prospero, and knows he has to sort it out there. But will the manner of his relation to Prospero be changed? Will something emerge other than his still instinctive attachment to models? And will the cycle of inclusion and exclusion, visibility and invisibility, come to an end? Caliban’s dialectics seem to perform rather than resolve the issue, and this is emphasized by Prospero’s limited sarcasm in response, followed predictably by his out-of-place and undesired indulgence: The world really is upside down. That beats everything: Caliban the dialectician! But I like you anyway, Caliban… Let’s make peace… We’ve

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lived together ten years and worked shoulder to shoulder! Ten years, that must count for something! We’ve become compatriots! (87) Indulgent and paternalist, how will Prospero step outside the webs of his own creation and of his own attachments? The attempt to bring attachments out into the open is compromised by the notion of openness involved. We see what we see and not what we do not, as Césaire’s Prospero now confirms: My friends, gather round: I bid you farewell. I shall not leave. My destiny lies here: I shall not flee it. Prospero belongs here, even if only in this theatre and in this play. This is the form taken by Césaire’s adaptation of the Prospero who asks to be released from his stage, and to be welcomed back into the fold of his audience and his community. But for Césaire, society is not to be made with forgiveness alone, even though Shakespeare’s Prospero pleads for it himself, and a wider reformation of the social relation is needed. But will the gesture of Césaire’s own Prospero remain immune to the logic of forgiveness and pity, and the alliance it risks of indulgence, self-indulgence and complacency?26 The impatience of Césaire’s Prospero and his fixated impulsiveness fail him almost immediately – and decisively. His poetry here sounds Gaullist in its confusion of democracy with patronage and salvation; he cannot escape his own voice. Understand me, friends. I am not in any mundane sense the master as this savage believes, But the conductor of a vast score: this island. Summoning voices, I alone, joining them together at will Organising past confusion the only line straight and true. Without me, who would know how to bring out this music? Without me the island is mute. So here my duty lies. I shall stay. (90)

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Shakespeare composes forgiveness to the music of agape and a re-composition of legitimate social organization. Césaire’s Prospero lacks that poetic voice and vision; he is reduced to singing the praises of Classical harmony in his claim to a role in the future. His notion of a unique line of intelligibility from the past to the future is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s ironic evocation of a Classical beauty which expresses contempt for anything which disrupts the lines of pure perspective.27 This is also a colonialist beauty then, for these are the imaginary lines which seamlessly join here to there, and which silence brutality in the name of progress. Prospero’s notion of responsibility is integrated in his impulsiveness and egoism. He stays to maintain, rather than rebuild or reconceive, and he voices his own confusion of the two. A little earlier, Prospero has finally given Ariel his promised freedom. But since freedom is not in his gift, he can only be outraged at the freedom beyond his understanding which Ariel begins to sing: ‘That’s a very disturbing programme!’ Ariel’s ‘programme’ is in fact to voice a message of unpositioned and unmediated hope. Of the three protagonists’ interludes of poetry and song in these final moments of Césaire’s play, Ariel’s is the only one that is not fetishized in the lyric, and is able to make use of the lyric. In their relation to each other, the voices of Césaire’s Prospero and Caliban have become atrophied in the I: the Orphic lyre gives access only to the first person, and the ego remains blind to the underworld and the other world. Prospero composes only the poetry in his own gift, the poetry of legacy, of territory and tradition. Caliban’s poetry is equally selfenclosing, it is voice made in the ‘monolingualism of the other’, as Derrida calls it: an I enclosed in the way I manufacture you, and fetishized by you and me together.28 You have to understand, Prospero: for years I’ve kept my eyes down accepted everything for years accepted everything: your insults and your ingratitude and worst of all, more degrading than everything, your condescension. But now it’s over! It’s over, you hear? Of course now you’re the strongest But I don’t care about your force of arms

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or your dogs either or your police, or your inventions. And you know why? Because I know I’ll get you! Impale you! On the pole you’ll have sharpened yourself! Impaled on yourself! (88) Fetishism, sado-masochism, spells and counter-spells: all creativity is stickily restricted to what is permitted or dashed by the father-inquisitor. And as a consequence free verse disintegrates into a list of impulsive and futile affirmations. But for Ariel, the aspiration to create creativity itself has not been abandoned. It takes the form of trying to translate the untranslatable. The purity of the island, the uniqueness of its nature as well as its history, is the basis of a language of freedom rooted in uniqueness itself, and Ariel is now its servant. His poetic cry is one of imagination, self-criticism and work. Where the cecropias glove in silver the impatience of their hands Where the ferns in green screams free the obstinate black stump of their scarified corpse Where the intoxicating bay ripens the stopover for the wild wood pigeon from the throat of the bird musician by my hand will drop one by one each more delectable four notes so gentle that at the last a burning shall rise in the hearts of the most forgetful slaves Nostalgia for freedom! (83) The cecropia is a tree native to the Caribbean and also the rain forests of Central America. Sometimes the leaves have silver edges. Ariel’s metaphor of impatience comes to life precisely because silver has little recognizable connection with impatience; and in reality, the cecropia only occasionally does have silver trimmings. The fragile metaphor is threatened with collapse at every turn; but from nowhere, and from its own obscurity, the connection of the cecropia with impatience is made sensual and living. A

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vestigial appeal to metaphor is still effective. The silver trimmings shine with their belonging to the island of Martinique and its neighbours; the impatience they are made to sing depends, to be understood, on some idea of belonging. But this impatience also lies beyond the range of the reader even if s/he shares the feeling of belonging in Martinique, or just the feeling of belonging. Whoever s/he is, impatience comes to the reader in new colours and in a different voice. Sensations of place produce new understandings of place, and also restriction. That circular relation is made explosive in Ariel’s opening utterance. The uniqueness of the sensations of belonging is reimagined in a challenge to metaphor and its allure of transport somewhere else. In suspending the heroism of metaphor, as much through syntax as sense, Césaire invites readers to rediscover the distance in proximity which is the hallmark of any form of respect.29 Voice is rekindled in this accumulation of explosive circularity. Caribbean ferns are now the carrier of a ‘green’ voice which makes metaphor out of the literal: ferns are green, the greenness of the green Martinican fern forms a cry, a loudly expressive utterance found nowhere but in the greenness of the fern, but still irreducible to it. Césaire asks people to imagine some kind of coloured touch, voiced nowhere but in Ariel’s song. Perhaps paradoxically, perhaps utopianly, Césaire seeks to have Ariel’s voice communicate at the same time as resisting communication – resisting the assimilation that comes with any act of exchange. In Césaire’s hands, adaptation as a whole stages that paradoxical desire to have ideas travel while still voicing an experience of the unique. Like in Baudelaire’s exploration of synaesthesia, it is not the magic of the senses working together that matters – sight and sound in this case. That ‘magic’ is nothing more than the reality of human beings using all their senses together. But by exploring the way the senses do work together, Baudelaire and Césaire show that the senses can also be drawn apart, reconfigured; how new kinds of meaning can be generated in the diverse ways that people use their senses together. In Ariel’s voice, the plurality of environmental responses remains plural, survival is not reduced to economic metaphors of progress, sensual life and thought remain resistant to global commodification and the ideology of the global. Conversely, notions of rootlessness and transparency as necessary to progress in the developed world are suspended. Adherence to a sense of place, environment and context is both affirmed and resistant to any affirmation. For the moment, the affirmation of a sense of place can neither be realized nor dismantled; it is both circular and open-ended. Indeed the organization of Ariel’s metaphor of the green cry suggests

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that it both delivers something and is delivered from something. It is uttered on its own terms, simply loud and green. But the cry is also an expression of the violence done to the fern: the black inside of its stem is exposed because it has been cut and scarified, caught up in agriculture generally. Scarification belongs to the vocabulary not only of agriculture but surgery and also tattooing. All these associations related to cutting through surfaces, to the successes and traumas of culture, fraternize with nature, with ‘the ferns’, and with the green scream which gives nature its voice and form here. But this republic of associations remains implicit, democracy is yet to be discovered, or not. The open-ended green cry is given to anyone able to imagine letting go. Whether enforced or espoused, loss is ingrained in the impassioned vision of freedom Césaire voices through Ariel at the point of Ariel’s own disappearance. Ariel’s song of nostalgia shows the past both remembered and remembered in being forgotten: the past is not retrieved or reclaimed, nor recolonized under a cloak of many colours. This is a past still waiting to be voiced, while also being voiced loudly now, in a waiting which has become part of the fabric of acting. Ariel shows the desire for freedom reawakened even in the most enslaved mind through his music, through pure, single notes, and the words to imagine them. That freedom is not immaterial, or unreal, or unrealizable or de-realizing. It is not made out of a passive nostalgia which waits for others to resolve it. It is a freedom made in the work of relation, expressed in the song through moments of displacement, re-emergence, displacement again: the living experiences of language. But what of Prospero? In Césaire he swings from an impetuous, retrospective affirmation of fair government at home to the imposition abroad of the unfairness he has brought with him. At the end of the play, Prospero’s decision to stay on the island lurches between a sense of rolling up the sleeves and getting down to making a new world, and a sense of carrying on in his old clothes and making sure his legacy survives intact. Either way, his focus is on Caliban. At the end of the script which is Une Tempête, Césaire positions Prospero with Caliban, Prospero looking for Caliban, who is there only in his renewed, but still compromised and cloudy cry of ‘La Liberté, ohé! La liberté!’. Is Prospero trapped in his own pathos, in his adherence to the illusions of his power, now exposed as an endless search for slaves long since gone? What about Caliban, how far has he travelled and what is the sound of his cry? Is it a cry of worldwide freedom, unattached, everywhere reconfigured and renewed? But it is heard only on this imaginary island, and in this

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theatre, where it cannot escape its relation to Prospero’s plaintive rooting around in the empty cave for a pupil to indoctrinate. Either way, the confusion of revolution and its decline has been suspended for a moment. Here at the end of Une Tempête there is a space where as an audience, people can gauge their own capacity to imagine. The space is empty, yet full of conflicting voices and the historical avalanche of their confusion. How will the voices of a new relation be discovered and disentangled from the old? And how will the cry of freedom be made to live and not die in the voice of each one of us uniquely, in each body and each way of knowing?

Relation, Translation Spells and the ability to step outside them. Spells upon spells of attachment turned ownership. Power and the ability to divest it of egoism and tyranny. Such are the issues which Césaire finds more ways of voicing in his account of Shakespeare’s play. Identity is reclaimed, but will it be in the name of renewed relation? These are stories of violence to life and freedom, a violence both unimaginable and evident, so protean as to defy the telling. They need telling nonetheless, even though the attempts are vulnerable to further exploitation arising spontaneously in the life of any hegemony. Black freedom, African and Caribbean freedom, the separate and combined freedoms of race and place: how are these voices to be situated and claimed in open relation? And how is the hydra of Western democracy and its collapsing ethics to be escorted from its place centre stage? I have tried in this chapter to hear these issues in the voices of Césaire’s play and of his poetic approach to drama. But I have heard these voices in my own way, and translated them into an idiom which is somehow mine, and which I can only hope will engage with those life-and-death issues in your minds as readers. The Martinican Édouard Glissant writes of the living importance for him of translation in forging a voice, in the midst of his own exploration of chaos, opacity, and the spaces and places of relation. In the same way, translation today is a practice of putting totalities in touch, always saying carefully that totalities need not be totalitarian. So now we not only cross the distances between one language and another, we enter the mystery of a multirelationality where all the languages of the world, audible as well as secret, together make a warp of paths and as many echoes. Echoes of multiplicity.30

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Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête: On Poetry, Legacy and Work

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Reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s vision in ‘The Task of the Translator’, this is an understanding of languages in open and regenerative relation to each other, rekindling an understanding of diversity in ever-increasing echoes.31 Perhaps these echoes are memories, and Glissant’s ‘mystery’ an indication of the poetry, the poetic mentality required to pick them up, and to take part in this multirelationality of life in language. Perhaps his ‘echoes of multiplicity’ are an example of what can be produced in the active and affirmative nostalgia of which Ariel sings at the end of Césaire’s play. And perhaps adaptation itself is a way into this open-ended diversity, this living intertextual web. Yet this pursuit of a poetic translation is not enough on its own to resolve the conflict Césaire paints between Prospero and Caliban, between economic progress and ethnic identity. Césaire still champions the need for poetry in effecting freedom of thought and life. But the poetry he introduces through Ariel offers a working relation which is specific, materially placed, and mirrored in Césaire’s own practice of adaptation: a partnership in which he both hears Shakespeare and reshapes him. Models are there to be reshaped. But the work needs to be done in miniature and in detail for it to grow; it has to be begun again each time; it is as provisional as it is creative. Adaptation for Césaire seems to work like his collaboration with a living artist – a living partnership, then, rather than an adaptation. Corps perdu (Frenetic Body) is a collaboration between Césaire and Picasso, poem on one page, drawing on the facing one. It is a collaboration between a Martinican and a Spaniard.32 The dialogue between them is made exactly because the formal language deployed by each is not the same as the other and cannot be reduced to it. The work of translating word into image and back is as resistant as it is open-ended; one will not be absorbed in the other here, and because of that they may illuminate each other. A power is provisionally discovered to give equal voice, in an unresolved tension, to suffering and creativity, and to damage and life.

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Notes

Introduction See Nicola Watson’s essay on Scott in Volume V. Une Saison au Congo (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1966), first performed 1967. Malcolm X, who was to have been his third protagonist, survives in the ‘X’ Caliban chooses as his new name. 3 Paris (Présence Africaine, 1963). The Tragedy of King Christophe: a play by Aimé Césaire, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, Grove Press, 1969). The order of scenes was slightly changed in revision. Ruby Cohn first spoke of the play’s Shakespearean sweep and tragedy in her ‘Black power on stage: Emperor Jones and King Christophe’, Yale French Studies 46 (1971), 44. 4 In a brilliant and original programme note, ‘Aimé Césaire. Le Destin et la volonté: sur quelques aspects shakespeariens de la Tragédie du roi Christophe’ in Les Cahiers de la Comédie française (Paris, 1991.2) 25–33. My thanks to the librarians at the National Humanities Center for retrieving this obscure piece. 5 We are grateful to Roger Toumson, the Guadeloupean poet, critic and Césaire expert, for help with Césaire’s reading (p.c.). 6 ‘Introduction’, in Claude Rawson, ed., Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone, Great Shakespeareans Vol. 1 (London, Continuum, 2010), quoting Samuel Johnson, ‘Dryden’, Lives of the Poets (1779–81), Roger Lonsdale ed., 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. 2, 119. 7 There are now numerous national studies, among them: Shakespeare in the New Europe, Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova and Derek Roper (eds) (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994); Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, A. Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars (eds) (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press London, 2003); Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century Romania, ed. Monica Matei-Chesnoiu (Bucharest, Humanitas, 2006); and a series of ‘national’ numbers of The Shakespeare Yearbook. The University of Basel houses a bibliographical site for the European Shakespeare Research Association at http://pages.unibas.ch/shine/. The use of intermediary or previous translations rather than direct engagement with an English text was common. 8 Harold Bloom, The anxiety of influence: a theory of poetry (London: Oxford University Press 1975 [1973]); George Steiner, After Babel: aspects of language and translation (London, Oxford University Press, 1975); Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Caliban (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993). 9 The Editor expresses her gratitude to the National Humanities Center for the award of the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Fellowship during the academic year 1 2

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2012–13, which made it possible for her both to write the introduction and bring Volume 14 to completion.

Chapter 1 Pasternak, transcription and translation courtesy of Ann Pasternak Slater, p.c. ‘As much as Dante, Shakespeare allows a vision of conjecture’s dusky horizon. In one as in the other there is the possible, that dream window open on reality. As for reality, we emphasize, Shakespeare overflows with it; everywhere living flesh; Shakespeare has emotion, instinct, the true cry, the right rhythm, the rumbling of the whole human multitude’, Œuvres Complètes, Jean Massin ed. (Paris, 1969), 188b, my translation. Quotations from Hugo are from this edition, abbreviated as OC unless otherwise indicated. I have occasionally compressed Hugo family expansiveness; the originals are always indicated, and many are now easily available on line through the Bibliothèque nationale ‘Gallica’ collection. Subsequent translations accompany the texts. I am grateful to my colleague, Ann Grieve, herself a skilful translator, for her careful reading of text, translation and paraphrase. 2 For Hugo’s biography I depend upon the brilliant, original, and muck-raking work of Graham Robb, Victor Hugo (London: Picador, 1997). 3 Like her father’s brother, she seems to have suffered from a serious mental illness, and, like her uncle, was confined in an asylum. Truffaut made a muchpraised film about her obsessions, L’Histoire d’Adèle H (1975). 4 ‘Sur Walter Scott, à propos de Quentin Durward’ appeared in the first number of La Muse française in 1823; collected in Hugo’s Littérature et philosophie mêlées (Paris, 1834); quoted here from Hugo, Œuvres Complètes V, 131. 5 For one brilliant demonstration of Scott’s Shakespeare, see Diana E. Henderson, ‘Othello Redux?: Scott’s Kenilworth and the Trickiness of “Race” on the NineteenthCentury Stage’, in Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 2: Literature and Culture, eds Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole (Houndsmills: Basingstoke, 2003), 14–29. 6 ‘This is a man living in a different world from Scott, who professes sturdily (in one of his introductions) that he does not believe in novels having any moral influence at all; but still Hugo is too much of an artist to let himself be hampered by his dogmas; and the truth is that the artistic result seems, in at least one great instance, to have very little connection with the other, or directly ethical result. Hence those individual interests that were supreme in Fielding, and even in Scott, stood out over everything else and formed as it were the spine of the story, figure here only as one set of interests among many sets, one force among many forces, one thing to be treated out of a whole world of things equally vivid and important. So that, for Hugo, man is no longer an isolated spirit without antecedent or relation here below, but a being involved in the action and reaction of natural forces, himself a centre of such action and reaction or a unit in a great multitude, chased hither and thither by epidemic terrors and aspirations, and, in all seriousness, blown about by every wind of doctrine.’ First published in Cornhill Magazine 30 (Aug 1874), collected in Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London: Chatto & Windus, 1882). 1

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208 Notes See, among others, F. W. M. Draper, The Rise and Fall of the French Romantic Drama: with special reference to the Influence of Shakespeare, Scott, and Byron (London: Constable, 1923); Edwin Preston Dargan, ‘Scott and the French Romantics’, PMLA 49 (1934) 599–629; Albert W. Halsall, Victor Hugo and the Romantic Drama (University of Toronto Press, 1998); and the discussion below. 8 The short reminiscence is printed OC III 67; it often appears in essays collected with William Shakespeare. 9 Her chapter demonstrates how Scott’s knowledge of Shakespeare became a way of thinking with Shakespeare. See also F. W. M. Draper, The Rise and Fall of the French Romantic Drama: with special reference to the Influence of Shakespeare, Scott, and Byron (London: Constable, 1923); and the Balzac specialist, Edwin Preston Dargan, ‘Scott and the French Romantics’ PMLA 49 (1934) 599–629. 10 ‘Scott was the first nineteenth-century novelist to provoke comparison with Shakespeare, and he became one of the main conduits through which a certain idea of “shakespeareanism” continued to flow until nearly the end of the century. The idea connotes scale, plenitude, multiplicity, and extensiveness and inclusiveness both social and generic, the sense of a “whole world” in which no person high or low is too insignificant for attention, and no single genre sufficiently elastic to encompass the range of human fortunes, of sorrow and joy’, Adrian Poole, Shakespeare and the Victorians (London: Arden, 2004), 7. 11 Albert W. Halsall, Victor Hugo and the Romantic Drama (University of Toronto Press, 1998), ch. 2. 12 See the discussion in John Golder’s ‘Voltaire, Ducis et le Néo-Classicisme Révolutionnaire: de Zaïre à Othello’, in Shakespeare, les français, les France, Ruth Morse ed., Cahiers Charles V 34 (2008), 139–60. 13 John Golder engages with this problem throughout his Shakespeare for the Age of Reason: the earliest stage adaptations of Jean-François Duçis 1769–1792 (Oxford, Taylorian for the Voltaire Foundation, Studies in Voltaire, 1992). 14 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale, 1976), esp. ch. 2. The great study of Hugo’s melodramas is Anne Ubersfeld, Le Roi et le buffon: étude sur le théâtre de Hugo de 1830 à 1839 (Paris: José Corti, 1974), the first study to take his melodramas seriously. See also the unpublished thesis by Catherine TreilhouBalaudé, Shakespeare Romantique: La Réception de Shakespeare en France de Guizot à Scribe (1821–1851) (Paris, 1994). 15 OC III, 1857, my italics. 16 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale, 1976). 17 Louis J. Iandoli, ‘Melodrama and Hugo’s Mille Francs de récompense’, in The French Review, Vol. 66, No. 5 (1993) 730–41. 18 The translations were far from the close and accurate renderings we demand now. Scott’s principal translator, Defauconpret, compressed, rearranged and presented Scott’s dialect and social varieties of speech in higher, more decorous registers. See E. Preston Dargan, ‘Scott and the French Romantics’, in PMLA 49 (1934) 599–629 and, in greater detail, Paul Barnaby, ‘Another Tale of Old Mortality: The Translations of Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret in the French Reception of Scott’, in The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe, Murray Pittock ed. (London: Continuum, 2006), 31–44. 7

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This story, with its emphasis on the theatre, provides a corrective to such histories as Georg Lukács’ The Historical Novel (1937). 20 John Golder, Shakespeare for the Age of Reason: the earliest stage adaptations of Jean-François Duçis 1769–1792 (Oxford: Taylorian for the Voltaire Foundation, Studies in Voltaire, 1992); idem., ‘Voltaire, Ducis et le Néo-Classicisme Révolutionnaire: de Zaïre à Othello’ in Shakespeare, les français, les France in Cahiers Charles-V 45 (2008). 21 See Claude Duchet’s introduction to Cromwell in volume III of the Œuvres Complètes (1967), 30. A still useful early examination of this transmission is F. W. M. Draper, The Rise and Fall of the French Romantic Drama: with special reference to the Influence of Shakespeare, Scott, and Byron (London, Constable, 1923). 22 First remarked by F. Baldensperger, in his Etudes d’histoire littéraire, deuxième série (Paris: Hachette, 1910), essay II, 155–216. Baldensperger’s student, Allwyn Charles Keys, produced a thesis which is still valuable: Les Adaptations musicales de Shakespeare en France jusqu’en 1870 (Paris, 1933). 23 Preface to Cromwell, in OC Cromwell appears in vol. III, 5–87, 89–430; William Shakespeare in vol. XII (1959), 127–48, 149–333. I have also benefited from editions prepared for schoolchildren for whom the Preface was set as part of the National Exams. Such textbooks are a repository of approved attitudes to Hugo, the theatre, and the historical evolution of ‘correct’ views of later periods, such as William Shakespeare, notes by Dominique Peyraches-Leborgne (Paris: GF Flammarion, 2003), which amalgamates the book with related texts,such as À Reims. 24 In this section I am indebted to Albert W. Halsall’s Victor Hugo and the Romantic Drama (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1998), esp. ch. 2. 25 The story is told by Peter Raby, ‘ “Fair Ophelia”: a life of Harriet Smithson Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Almost immediately after this visit, Berlioz began sketching what eventually became Béatrice et Bénédict thirty years later, working from a translation by Benjamin Laroche first published in 1839; his Tempest fantasy appears within his Lélio. See Béatrice et Bénédict, Hector Berlioz: New Edition of the Complete Works, vol. 2, Hugh Macdonald ed. (Bärenreiter Kassel Basel and London, 1980). Operatic interpretations of Shakespeare were being sniffily criticized soon after, a sign that Shakespeare’s status had reached unassailable heights, in Henri Lavoix ed., Les Traducteurs de Shakespeare en musique (Paris: Liepmannsohn et Dufour, 1869). 26 Robb 134–6. 27 The tightness of these Parisian friendships includes Hugo delivering the eulogy at Balzac’s funeral and Berlioz delivering one for Hugo, represented by an empty chair, at the 1864 Shakespeare centenary dinner. 28 William Shakespeare, OC II, from the first edition (Paris: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, 1864). 29 January 17, 1874, as part of an overseas correspondent’s ‘Parisian Gossip’ column dated December 1879. 30 Hugo consistently employs the editorial ‘we’ that was then required; the edition was his work and his responsibility. I. Observations générales, 6. 31 ‘quel autre que Shakespeare pourrait alors la signer?’ (Les Apocryphes 2, XVII.42). 32 Charles Baudelaire, L’Art romantique, Henri Lemaitre ed. (Paris: Garnier, 1990 [1869]). 19

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210 Notes Frances Vernor Guille’s French doctorate barely discusses the Shakespeare translation at all, and, when it does, it focuses on the public life and the son’s role in his father’s work. See her François-Victor Hugo et son oeuvre (Paris, Nizet, 1950). 34 What looks like a comprehensive bibliographical listing of translations into French is in fact a compilation of holdings in Paris libraries and archives: M. Horn-Monval, Les Traductions françaises de Shakespeare, à l’occasion du 4e centenaire de sa naissance, 1564–1964 (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique), 1963. 35 Jacques Derrida, ‘What Is a “Relevant” Translation?’, trans. Lawrence Venuti, Critical Inquiry 27 (2001), 174–200. The original text of the essay was an address to the professional Translators’ Association. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’, in Quinzièmes Assises de la Traduction Littéraire (Arles 1998) (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999), 21–48. Reprinted ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’, in Jacques Derrida, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud (eds) (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 2004), 561–74. 36 Œuvres complètes, Henri Fluchère ed. (Gallimard, 1959): Hugo was responsible for all the English histories, almost all the comedies, and six tragedies (including Cymbeline); Gide’s preface praises them as the closest and most comprehensive existing translations. They were also out of copyright. It is hard to overestimate the prestige of this long series of editions, which confer honour upon their subjects as well as those who compile them. 37 Both versions of the edition have long been out of print (Gallimard: Paris, 1961–4). The editor, J.-B. Fort, was a scholar and himself a translator of Shakespeare. He reproduced the translations and a very few of the notes in a purported chronological order of composition, with the traditional act and scene divisions, and with an error- and prejudice-riddled introduction of his own, including observations such as the insistence that anything good in the translations must have been the work of the more famous father. 38 I am grateful to Prof. Ton Hoenselaars for calling to my attention his ‘Shakespeare for “the People”.’ François-Victor Hugo Translates Henry V’, Documenta 13 (1995), 243–52. All early continental Shakespeareans worried about suitability for representation; the limiting case is obscenity, and, as with the first edition of the OED, obscenities were habitually censored in print as well as on stage. The use of the commonplace ‘mouchoir’ in high tragedy was too low, too indecorous, for early nineteenth-century theatre-goers, and ruined Vigny’s attempt to represent Othello. 39 This is from the opening of Hugo’s William Shakespeare (Brussels and Paris: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie and Librairie internationale, 1864) and constantly reprinted since. See Robb, 399–401. 40 These terms distinguish translations meant for bilingual reading from those intended to stand alone, without reference to the original; I developed the implications of this divide in Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Reality, and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; 2005). 41 It is the self-styled second edition with its mixed plates which the Bibliothèque nationale makes available without comment on its website; I have worked from my own copies. For obvious reasons few libraries obtained or obtain translations if they have the original texts. 33

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Marie-Claire Pasquier, ‘François-Victor Hugo traducteur de Shakespeare’, in 13ème Assises de la Traduction Littéraire (Arles 1996) (Paris: Actes Sud, 1997), 93–112. Mme Pasquier acknowledges a correction by Jean-Michel Déprats in a footnote, but records it as a belief among Anglo-Saxon scholars. It appears to be impossible to conceive of a great author ignorant or unpersuaded of the truth of five-act structure. Very little has been written about Hugo, and what there is tends to be derivative and inaccurate, e.g. Nicole Mallet, ‘Hugo, père et fils, Shakespeare et la traduction’, in TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 6:1 (1993), 113–30. 43 See Daniel Albright’s essay on Verdi in Great Shakespeareans Vol. XI (2012). 44 The Young Verdi and Shakespeare, by David R. B. Kimbell, in Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 1974, 59–73. 45 See Philip Gosset, ‘The Hot and the Cold: Verdi writes to Antonio Somma about Re Lear’, in Variations on the Canon: Essays on Music from Bach to Boulez in Honor of Charles Rosen on His Eightieth Birthday, Robert Curry, David Gable and Robert L. Marshall (eds) (Rochester and New York: University of Rochester Press, Eastman Studies in Music, 2008, ch. 12). 46 ‘The Othello Music’, in The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy (Oxford, 1960 [1930]). Hugo-fils is at pains to repudiate Schlegel’s powerful interpretation, and succeeds. Daniel Albright also discusses this point in his chapter in Vol. XI. 47 James A. Hepokoski, Giuseppe Verdi, Otello (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 48 Hepokoski, 182. 49 My paraphrase. The text is easily available at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k200691q.image.f80.pagination.langEN. Les Jaloux, 2, 82–4. 50 I have discussed this, taking examples from Lear and Titus, in ‘Reflections in Shakespeare Translation’, Yearbook of English Studies 36 (2006), 79–89. 51 ‘ “Mon divin silence”: Shakespeare, les femmes et les puritains’, in Shakespeare: préjugés et tolérance Cahiers Charles V 24 (1998), 103–29. It must be said that François-Victor Hugo gives ‘Salut, mon gracieux silence!’ in William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Jules César, Antoine et Cléopatre, Coriolan, intro. and notes by Germaine Landré (Paris: Flammarion, 1965), 358. 52 I am using Alan Hughes’s New Cambridge Shakespeare (1994) here, because it is a conflated text. He gives no alerting note, and nor does Eugene Waith in the Oxford (1984). I have relied on Marvin Spevack’s Harvard Concordance, which is keyed to the Riverside edition, which is also silent here. Titus Andronicus, Jules César, Antoine et Cléopatre, Coriolan, trans. François-Victor Hugo, intro. and notes by Germaine Landré (Paris: Flammarion, 1965 [orig. c. 1859]). 53 A new, bilingual Pléïade Shakespeare is currently in progress; although one might have reservations about the newly produced English edition, Déprats’ facing page translations are a Shakespeare for our time (Paris: Gallimard, 2002–). Stuart Seide directs the Théâtre National Lille Tourcoing Région Nord-Pas-deCalais, and has translated five Shakespeare plays for production. 54 For example, with Prof. Pavel Drábek, who was in the audience at Stratford when I gave the first version of this argument, we were able to ascertain that Bohumil Štěpánek (1902–85), more comfortable in French than in Early Modern English, used Hugo’s translations in the course of the 1920s as accompaniment 42

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212 Notes



55



56 57



58

translations to assist his own work of translation into Czech. I was able to consult a thesis by his student, Miss Seibertová, written in English, for details. I am grateful to them both. There must be many more such examples, but they will only come to light by accident, given the reluctance of translators to announce their use of cribs. I am grateful to have been able to see their chapters before publication, and, for encouragement at the earliest stage, I thank Prof. Marta Gibinska. Kott’s book appeared in French two years before its publication in English with a preface by Peter Brook. The translations often differ: the off-hand dismissal of melodrama is clearly about Victor Hugo in French, but in English more diffusely about ‘Romantics’. Cp. Jan Kott, Shakespeare notre contemporain, trans. Anna Posner (Paris: Julliard, Temps Moderne, 1962), 253 with Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Taborski Boleslaw, preface by Peter Brook (London: Methuen, 1964), 211. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, preface, ix. By a historical repetition neither tragic nor farcical, Marx’s often-cited epigram comes from the first chapter of his 18th Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon, written in 1852, two years after Louis-Napoleon had exiled the Hugos. There is no indication that Hugo read Marx, but Marx was certainly aware of Hugo. In a collection of discussions celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Kott retold the story of the Hugos’ conversation at the beginning of their exile. It is an approximative account of the lines quoted above p. 000, unaccompanied by any scholarly references. See Kott’s opening statement to the conference, in Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?, ed. John Elsom, (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). My debts in this chapter are numerous, and some were quite unforeseen. I am grateful to Timothy Mathews for his insistent advocacy and conversation in my research on Victor Hugo, especially where Hugo’s manifestos are concerned. I thank the organizers and participants in the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford in 2010 who invited me to test my ideas on FrançoisVictor’s edition; to the central Europeans there present, who confirmed some of my wilder guesses, I owe more than can be recorded in the notes above. Prof. Clara Calvo found and gave me a book when I despaired of locating it. Prof. Philip Gossett generously gave me much-needed advice and preprints – from Brazil – and corrected and refined the section on Verdi’s experience of François-Victor’s criticism which appeared in Shakespeare Survey 64 (2011), 220–30. Very late in the writing, I had the good fortune to be able to consult the writers of the Kott chapter in Volume XIII of this series. For their attentive reading (some more than once), I thank A. E. B. Coldiron, Stefan Collini, Philip Gossett, Russ McDonald and R. N. Watson. To the National Humanities Center I repeat my gratitude for generosity, support, kindness and friendship; to Carl Pforzheimer, ‘I can no other answer make but thanks, and ever thanks’.

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Chapter 2 Everyman edition, first published, 1906; this issue December 1913. This must have been the volume he was using for his translations in Chistopol in 1941–3. I copied Pasternak’s annotations in this volume in the late 1960s. Most are cross-references to repeated images and phrases reappearing in the tragedies he translated: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Antony & Cleopatra. Repetitions within a single play are raised as proof of Shakespeare’s authorship in Pasternak’s ‘Notes on Translating Shakespeare’s Tragedies’ (1956). See Sochineniya (Boris Pasternak’s Works), G. P. Struve and B. A. Filippov ed. (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press 1961), III, 203–4. Hereafter Works III. 2 Selected Translations (Moscow: Sovietsky Pisatel, 1940). These included Shakespeare’s Sonnets 66 and 73, ‘Winter’ from Love’s Labour’s Lost, and ‘Music’ from Henry VIII. 3 Evgeny Pasternak: Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years 1930–60, trans. M. Duncan (London: Collins Harvill, 1990), 109. Hereafter Tragic Years. 4 Alexander Gladkov: Meetings with Pasternak, ed. and trans. Max Hayward (London: Collins & Harvill, 1977), 39. Hereafter Gladkov. 5 Nicolas Pasternak Slater trans., Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence 1921–1960 (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 2010), 305; July 1936. Hereafter Family. 6 Hayward: Introduction to Gladkov, 15–16. Hereafter Hayward. His material comes from Mikhail Koriakov, writing in The New Review (New York, 1958). 7 See Tragic Years, 73. Akhmatova and Mandelstam’s wife independently recorded Pasternak’s account of the call soon after the event. See N. Mandelstam: Hope Against Hope (London: Collins & Harvill, 1971), 145–9. 8 Boris’ brother Alexander told me how his wife’s family sheltered a Ukrainian who fled to Moscow. He lived in the family’s roof-space for three years, begging on the streets for black bread to dry on the roof, and returned to the Ukraine every winter with sacks of crusts. Over four years he and all his children died. His widow came ten years later: she had been sent into hard labour. 9 In Boris’ Russian ‘gained fame’ is ‘slaven’ echoing Slavinsky’s surname. Leonid habitually referred to him by the diminutive ‘Slavushka’. 10 Mitrofan is a character in the play The Ignoramus, by the eighteenth-century author Fonvizin. The allusion allows Pasternak to raise Slavinsky’s patronymic, Mitrofanovich, in a diminutive echoing Leonid’s nickname of ‘Slavushka’. 11 Family, 331; 12 January 1939. Following quotations from Hamlet II.ii.241ff. (the Ghost also ‘hies / To his confine’ in Purgatory, and is there ‘confined to fast in fires’, I.i.155, I.v.11) and Macbeth III.iv.23–4. Boris begins his letter by saying he’s writing ‘absolutely straight, so you needn’t waste time looking for hidden meanings’. 12 Family, 325–6, 329; 6 January 1938, 30 October 1938. 13 By an odd coincidence, one of the major events in the Moscow Art Theatre’s history was a production of Hamlet in 1912, co-directed by Stanislavsky and Gordon Craig. Boris’ father Leonid made a fine portrait sketch of Craig at this time. 1

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214 Notes V. Livanov: Uninvented Boris Pasternak (Василий Ливанов: Не Выдуманный Борис Пастернак; Moscow, ‘Drofa’, 2002), 24. Henceforth Livanov. 15 Family, 352–3. 14 February 1940. Leonid was 78, Boris 50. NemirovichDanchenko must have last met Leonid before he left Moscow in 1921. 16 Pasternak’s letters to Livanov, an autograph notebook with working drafts of the Hamlet translation, containing notes and sketches by Livanov, and six pages of Pasternak’s working drafts of ‘To be or not to be’ were auctioned by Sotheby’s (Sale of Fine Continental Books and Manuscripts, Science and Medicine, London, 5 December 1991, Lots 547–54). The drafts take groups of lines, not always consecutive, and carry page references, presumably to the text Pasternak was using. See the catalogue, 222–6. 17 Cited in Tragic Years, 116. 18 Tragic Years, 118. For a different translation of the same letter to Olga Freidenberg, see The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak & Olga Freidenberg 1910–1954, edited and translated by E. Mossman and M. Wettlin (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982), 183–4. Henceforth Freidenberg. Olga was the younger sister of ‘Sashka Konfaind’, and a highly regarded classicist at Leningrad University. 19 Family, 335; 29 April 1939: ‘Ah, Shakespeare, Shakespeare! […] But who am I telling this to? You have always known this better than us. And the passages that have become familiar sayings that everyone has heard in their childhood, in the old translations – I heard them from Papa, and they still sound in my ears, resisting any substitution as unthinkable.’ 20 Personal communication from Evgeny and Elena Pasternak, 12.x.2011. 21 See Tragic Years, 119, for both quotations. The first version was published in the journal Molodaya Gvardiya; the second by Goslitizdat. For bibliographical details and a discussion of all Pasternak’s published versions of Hamlet, see Anna Kay France: Boris Pasternak’s Translations of Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1978), 261–4, 266. 22 Tragic Years, 133, citing a retrospective remark of 1956. 23 Gladkov, 37–8. The images come from a poem of 1922, ‘Ты в ветре’ (‘You in the wind’). 24 In 1937 Pasternak had been attacked for being ‘an aesthetically-minded formalist’ (Tragic Years, 184). 25 The first two quotations come from Hugo’s William Shakespeare, Part II. I.5, the third from Part II. II.5. See Victor Hugo, Oeuvres Complètes, Jean Massin ed. (Paris, 1969), vol. 12 pp. 240, 240, 248–9. In his personal communication of 12.x.2011, Pasternak’s son Evgeny points out that the family archives in Moscow include Pasternak’s Chistopol notes on Hugo, which refer only to the first of the passages cited by Gladkov and peter out before the end of Hugo’s work. Pasternak subsequently wrote to a friend advising him to read Hugo on Shakespeare, but warned that everything of interest comes early on; thereafter it degenerates into the empty verbiage habitual to Hugo. Evgeny Pasternak doubts the authenticity of Gladkov’s memories, many of them being extended by unacknowledged quotation from Pasternak’s works unpublished at the time of writing. However, as far as Hugo is concerned, Gladkov could have asked Pasternak for the references for his quotations, 14

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either copying them in Chistopol or subsequently locating and quoting them with what is otherwise surprising accuracy when writing his memoir. Certainly Gladkov’s report of Pasternak’s views on Shakespearean authorship (Gladkov, 68–9) tallies with Pasternak’s Notes on Translating Shakespeare’s Tragedies, as well as the annotations in his Chistopol copy of Shakespeare’s tragedies, described in note 1. 26 Family, 257–8. 19 June 1941. 27 Fadeyev’s report to the Union of Writers, 30 December 1943. 28 Freidenberg, 237, 239; 16 June and 30 July 1944. 29 All three quotations in this and the preceding paragraph relate to the autumn of 1945; Tragic Years, 158. 30 All three quotations from Tragic Years, 161–2. 31 Freidenberg, 275; 8 September 1947. 32 ‘Notes on Translating Shakespeare’s Tragedies’, Works III.196–7. My translation. 33 Poems of Boris Pasternak, Chosen and translated by Lydia Pasternak Slater (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1984), 67. The last line is a Russian proverb. 34 57% of the Soviet POWs had died in Nazi hands, as opposed to 3.6% among the British and Americans. They were deemed not to be protected by the Geneva Convention, and 3.3 million were executed, starved to death, eliminated as slave labour or died of exposure. Under the terms of the Yalta Conference all refugees and POWs were repatriated without necessary consent. In the USSR 80% of the forcibly repatriated workers and POWs were sent into penal labour camps. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_Soviet_POWs (accessed 30.08.2011), and R. H. T. O’Kane: Paths to democracy: revolution and totalitarianism (London: Routledge, 2004), 164. 35 M. Ellmann: ‘The Soviet 1947 Famine and the Entitlement Approach to Famines’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 24 (2000), 603–30. Cannibalism, whether by scavenging or murder, is well documented in all four Soviet famines of 1919–22, 1932–3, 1941–5 (famine conditions during the war) and 1946–8. It also occurred during the Siege of Leningrad and among German and Romanian prisoners of war after the battle of Stalingrad. See Ellmann, 617, fn.1. ‘Isolated cases’ are mentioned in Doctor Zhivago. The two italicized quotations following come from Macbeth IV.iii.164ff. and 31–3. 36 Tragic Years, 268. 37 Evgeny Pasternak, then aged 23, remembers attending his father’s first reading from Doctor Zhivago, in Peredelkino, in the summer of 1946. He had to return to military service, missing the next readings, as the novel progressed – in the winter of 1946 in the flat of the pianist Maria Judina; then at the Konchalovskys and Serovs in the spring of 1947. His mother, Pasternak’s first wife, attended a reading in the flat of Boris’ brother Alexander, and told Evgeny that when Pasternak was asked how realistic his subject was, his father protested: ‘Forgive me, it is perfectly true to life; the hero could be my oldest son.’ Pasternak used to read from the novel’s latest chapters and poems for a couple of hours; this would be followed by tea and discussion. The company was varied: sometimes young, sometimes older people, particularly fellow-Christians. He was always interested to hear what people had to say. (Personal communication, 12.x.2011)

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216 Notes CompactDisk:Б.Пастернак.Полноесобраниеавторскогочтения;Государственный литературныймузей,2002(BPasternak:Completecollectionofauthorialreadings (Moscow, State Literary Museum, 2002). Audience reactions are particularly audible in the recording of ‘The Wedding’ (Cвадьба). 39 Introduction to Gladkov, 20–3. Pasternak was 56 at this time. Two collections of his poetry, annotated by him for this reading, have been preserved (Tragic Years, 164). 40 ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent…’ The speech, warning against Soviet expansionism and tyranny, was delivered on 5 March 1946. 41 See Freidenberg, 169, Diary for October 1936. She had herself just suffered an extended attempt to squeeze her into silence. 42 Mikhail M. Morozov: Shakespeare on the Soviet Stage, trans. D. Magershak, introduced by J. Dover Wilson (‘Soviet News’, London 1947). Hereafter Morozov. 43 Morozov, 36, and 71 for the response of the Tashkent audience. In his introduction, Dover Wilson is surprised that Morozov mentions no productions of Macbeth in the Soviet era. British readers had very little idea of what was going on in the Soviet Union. They could hardly have guessed Stalin’s sensibility to dramatic representations of despots from Macbeth and Claudius to Boris Godunov and Ivan the Terrible. 44 Masterstvo Perevoda VI, 1969 (Moscow: ‘Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1970), 342. Letter to A. O. Naumova, 23 May 1942. All quotations from this correspondence are in my translation. Henceforth Masterstvo VI. 45 Morozov, 22. 46 sic: we can hear Pasternak’s English pronunciation in his misspelling here. Masterstvo VI, 346; letter of 15 July 1942. 47 ibid, 343. Pasternak uses the same root, знахарь, three times – for the expertise of Morosov, of the world in general, and, with qualification, of himself. It can mean, variously, sorcerer, quack, witch-doctor, wise-man (or woman). In Pasternak’s Russian the colouring in each case has been left ambiguous. **** replaces Pasternak’s aposiopesis and is a silent obscenity – very unusual in Pasternak. 48 Morozov, 20. He also mentions Romeo and Juliet’s 1944 publication by Detgiz, in a run of 50,000 like the earlier Hamlet, which he must have recommended. 49 Pasternak marked the following essays: Granville-Barker on ‘Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art’; Rylands: ‘Shakespeare the Poet’; T. S. Eliot: ‘Shakespeare Criticism from Dryden to Coleridge’; J. Isaacs: ditto ‘From Coleridge to the Present Day’; Mackail: ‘The Life of Shakespeare’; Sisson: ‘The Audience’ and last page only of ‘The Theatres & Companies’; Harrison: ‘The National Background’ (particularly heavily marked); St Clare Byrne: ‘The Social Background’. In his small library he also had Onions’ Shakespeare Glossary, Tillyard’s Elizabethan World Picture, and Fluchère’s Shakespeare and the Elizabethans (all unmarked). 50 G. B. Harrison: ‘The National Background’, A Companion to Shakespeare Studies. In his Notes Pasternak refers to Harrison’s reminder that, lacking newspapers, no free discussion of state matters was tolerated and the Elizabethans ‘existed in a state of perpetual gossip and scandal’. Remembering Falstaff’s press-ganging, 38

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he marks (for instance) an account of constables locking parishioners into their churches during Easter Communion until 1,000 men had been forced into service in the war against Portugal. For Whitworth, see David Hume’s The History of Great Britain (1754–62). Pasternak annotated passages relating to Whitworth on 29 May 1571 and his remarkable speech on liberty in 1579. 51 ‘Немногосложность английского языка открывает богатейший простор для английского слога’ (‘Notes of a Translator’, Works III, 184). 52 G. T. White: ‘Hendiadys in Hamlet’, PMLA 96, 168 ff, followed by F. Kermode’s chapter on Hamlet in his Shakespeare’s Language (London, 2000). 53 Preface to his edition of Shakespeare, Works of Samuel Johnson VII, ed. A. Sherbo (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1968), 73. 54 King Lear I.iv.174. Kozintsev’s film of King Lear, in Pasternak’s translation, has ‘shtanishki’. Later printed editions of the translation have ‘shtanui’ (‘pants’) – not a diminutive, and less violently indecorous. 55 Nemirovich-Danchenko here relocates Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet’s prose letter about the pirates from IV.vi.15–21, inserting it into this skeletal version of V.ii.1–70. 56 For this correspondence, see Voprosy Literatury (Бопросы Литературы) 1 (Moscow, 1975), 212–23. 57 Freidenberg, 323–7 and 333; 11 April and 27 July 1954. 58 Hamlet in Pasternak’s translation: directed by Grigori Kozintsev; director of photography Yonas Gritsius; music by Dmitri Shostakovich; lead played by Innokenti Smoktunovski (Sovscope, Lenfilm, 1964). King Lear in Pasternak’s translation: directed by Grigori Kozintsev; director of photography Yonas Gritsius; music by Dmitri Shostakovich; lead played by Yury Yarvet (Lenfilm, 1970).

Chapter 3 See Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv (ed.), Die Bibliothek Bertolt Brechts: Ein kommentiertes Verzeichnis (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 180–4. 2 See Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei and Klaus-Detlef Müller, (eds), Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Registerband (Berlin and Frankfurt/Main: Aufbau and Suhrkamp, 2000), 492–3 for Shakespeare. All subsequent references to this edition appear as ‘BFA’ followed by volume and page numbers. 3 Journal entry for 6 December 1913, BFA 26: 90. Translations from the German are mine. 4 Brecht to Therese Ostheimer, July 1916, BFA 28: 21; and Brecht to Max Hohenester, 8 June 1917, BFA 28: 27, respectively. 5 Journal entry for 17 August 1920, BFA 26: 133. 6 Walter Hinderer, ‘Shakespeare als ästhetisches Modell bei Schiller, Büchner und Brecht’, Études Allemandes et Autichiennes, 37 (1989), 217–26, here 221. 7 All dates attributed to the theoretical writings are taken from the apparatus that accompanies the BFA. 8 Brecht, ‘[Welche Stoffe liefert die Gegenwart dem Dramatiker?]’, BFA 21: 113. 1

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218 Notes Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 440. 10 Brecht, ‘[Neue Dramatik]’, BFA 21: 272. 11 ‘Schicksal’ is German for ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’, yet clearly in this quotation Brecht is talking about life in the raw, without teleology. As a Marxist, he had no time for such metaphysical speculation. 12 Brecht, ‘Vorrede zu Macbeth’, BFA 24: 55. 13 See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. by Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Originally published in German in 1974. 14 Brecht, ‘[Neue Dramatik]’, BFA 21: 274. 15 Brecht is clearly his own model for this figure, and in the Messingkauf fragments, the Philosopher is sometime referred to as ‘the Augsburger’ (BFA 22: 722 or 738, for example). Augsburg was Brecht’s home town. 16 Brecht, ‘[Messingkauf: Fragment B 141]’, BFA 22, 807. 17 Ruth Berlau, Bertolt Brecht, Claus Hubalek, Peter Palitzsch and Käthe Rülicke, (eds), Theaterarbeit: 6 Aufführungen des Berliner Ensembles (Dresden: VVV Dresdner Verlag, 1952), 434. The Berliner Ensemble is the theatre company Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel founded in 1949. 18 Ibid., 433. 19 Brecht, journal entry of 8 December 1940, BFA 26: 444. I shall return to the term Gestus below. 20 Brecht, journal entry of 11 December 1940, BFA 26: 447. 21 I[lya] Fradkin, ‘Brecht, die Bibel, die Aufklärung und Shakespeare’, Kunst und Literatur, 13: 2 (1965), 156–75, here 171. 22 See Terry Eagelton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1996), 56–60. 23 This term is often translated into English as ‘alienation’ but this is misleading. ‘De-familiarization’ or ‘distanciation’ are closer and less loaded than ‘alienation’ but I prefer to retain the untranslatable German term. 24 Brecht, ‘[Vom epischen zum dialektischen Theater 2]’, BFA 23: 300. 25 Brecht, ‘Kurze Beschreibung einer neuen Technik der Schauspielkunst, die einen Verfremdungseffekt hervorbringt’, BFA 22: 653. 26 Georg Seehase, ‘Brecht, Shakespeare und König Lear’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 115 (1979), 59–62, here 60. 27 Brecht, ‘[Epische Züge bei Shakespeare]’, BFA 22: 613. 28 See Thomas Metscher, ‘Shakespeares Spätstücke, als episches Theater betrachtet’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 115 (1979), 35–50. 29 Brecht, ‘[Messingkauf: Fragment B 60]’, BFA 22: 737. 30 R. B. Parker, ‘Dramaturgy in Shakespeare and Brecht’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 32:3 (1963), 229–46, here 233. 31 John Rouse, ‘Shakespeare and Brecht: The Perils and Pleasures of Inheritance’, Comparative Drama, 17 (1983), 266–80, here 273. 32 Rodney T. K. Symington, Brecht und Shakespeare (Bonn: Bouvier, 1970), 118. 33 Brecht, ‘Sollten wir nicht die Ästhetik liquidieren?’, BFA 21: 203. 34 Brecht, ‘[Messingkauf: Fragment B 141]’, BFA 22: 807. 35 Brecht, ‘Stanslavski-Studien [6]’, BFA 23: 231. 36 Paul Kussmaul, Bertolt Brecht und das englische Drama der Renaissance (Frankfurt/ Main et al: Peter Lang, 1974), 28. Here he is referring to what he considers 9

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Brecht’s overemphasis on the freedom of the individual and social mobility at the time (27). 37 W. E. Yuill, The Art of Vandalism: Bertolt Brecht and the English Drama (London: University of London, 1977), 11. 38 Brecht, ‘[Messingkauf: Fragment B 54]’, BFA 22: 735. 39 Helge Hultberg proposes that ‘Shakespeare is […] the synonym of that which is to be opposed and Brecht never really discarded this attitude in reality’, in ‘Bert Brecht und Shakespeare’, Orbis Litterarum, 14: 1 (1959), 89–104, here 90. This rather unsustainable opinion is roundly refuted in my essay. 40 Brecht, ‘[Neue Dramatik]’, BFA 21: 272. These ‘later times’ are post-revolutionary, when a collective understanding of the individual will replace its bourgeois implications. 41 John J. White, Bertolt Brecht’s Dramatic Theory (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 96. 42 See Brecht, ‘[Zeitenunterschiede]’, BFA 22: 611. 43 Brecht, ‘Jiu Jitsu (= die leichte, die fröhliche Kunst)’, BFA 21: 243. 44 Brecht, ‘[Hamlets Zögern als Vernunft]’, BFA 22: 611. 45 Brecht, journal entry for 25 November 1948, BFA 27: 284. 46 Brecht, ‘Hamlet: Fährenszene’, BFA 22: 840–2. 47 Brecht, journal entry for 20 September 1945, BFA 27: 232. 48 Brecht, ‘[Gegen Ihering’], BFA 21: 297. 49 Ibid. 50 Brecht, ‘Anmerkungen zur Dreigroschenoper’, BFA 25: 58. 51 Brecht, ‘Kontrolle des “Bühnentemperaments” und Reinigung der Bühnensprache’, BFA 23: 169. 52 Brecht, ‘[Größe bei Shakespeare]’, BFA 23: 190. 53 Brecht, ‘Über experimentelles Theater’, BFA 22: 541. 54 Brecht, ‘Bessons Inszenierung des Don Juan beim Berliner Ensemble’, BFA 24: 414–15. 55 See two of Brecht’s letters in which he asks friends to send him books of Shakespeare and the Globe, in BFA 29: 162 and 30: 99. In another, he bemoans the fact that he knows too little about original staging practices (BFA 30: 230). 56 See Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv (ed.), Die Bibliothek Bertolt Brechts, 282. He also had Edmond Malone’s Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage and of the Economy and Uses of the Ancient Theatres in England (ibid., 278) but this book, published around 1800, can hardly be described as being at the cutting edge of modern research. 57 See Brecht, ‘Über Plagiate’, BFA 21: 175. 58 Brecht, journal entry for 8 December 1940, BFA 26: 444. 59 See Kussmaul, Bertolt Brecht, 25. 60 See Brecht, ‘Studium des ersten Auftritts in Shakespeares Coriolan’, BFA 23: 394. 61 See Symington, Brecht und Shakespeare, 182. 62 See, for example, Simon Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage: 1586–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–24. 63 See Brecht, Der Hofmeister, BFA 8: 323. It is likely that Brecht used Klopstock due to his association with the most famous Stürmer und Dränger, Goethe. Klopstock is recited by Werther in The Sufferings of Young Werther and provided an ironic, metadramatic nod to the period as opposed to a possibly more

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220 Notes clichéd reference to the archetypal lovers, an a-historical idea which Brecht, in any case, was keen to undermine, as we shall see below. 64 Brecht, journal entries for 22 December 1949 and 5 March 1950, respectively: BFA 27: 309 for both quotations. 65 Robert Weimann, ‘Shakespeare, Brecht und die deutsche Klassik: Troilus und Cressida als wirkungsgeschichtliches Paradigma’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 115 (1979), 25–34, here 26. 66 Ibid., 27. 67 The Editors, BFA 9: 342. 68 Arrigo Subiotto, Bertolt Brecht’s Adaptations for the Berliner Ensemble (London: MHRA, 1975), 187 fn.11. 69 Käthe Rülicke to Peter Palitzsch, 5 May 1954, in Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv (henceforth BBA), 732/2. 70 Brecht to Kaiser, 7 January 1956, BFA 30: 412. 71 Brecht, ‘Zwischenszenen’, BFA 22: 840. 72 Ibid., BFA 22: 843. 73 Ibid., BFA 22: 845. 74 Kussmaul, Bertolt Brecht, 113. He does, however, approve of the realistic painting of Juliet’s serving woman, and finds the Hamlet scene appropriate as a rendition of a character caught between two epochs. 75 Brecht, ‘Zwischenszenen’, BFA 22: 840. 76 Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), 176. 77 See, for example, Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 52–79. He concludes that ‘it is essentialist humanism […] that has the narrow view of human potential’ (79). 78 Dieter Hoffmeier, ‘Voll Bewunderung und Kritik. Arbeitsbeziehungen Brechts zu Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 115 (1979), 7–24, here 17. 79 Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 8. 80 Brecht, ‘Parallelszenen’, BFA 22: 830. 81 Kussmaul, Bertolt Brecht, 105. 82 Brecht, ‘Parallelszenen’, BFA 22: 833. 83 Meg Mumford, Bertolt Brecht (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 53. She also provides an excellent description and analysis of Caucasian Chalk Circle, which Brecht directed at the BE in 1954, in which the terms I gloss in the following sections are discussed more fully (91–129). 84 Brecht himself states: ‘Not every Gestus is a social Gestus’, in ‘Über gestische Musik’, BFA 22: 330. Brecht gives the example of swatting a fly as serving no social end, for example. 85 Brecht, journal entry for 14 January 1940, BFA 26: 354. 86 White, Brecht’s Dramatic Theory, 255. 87 Edited and translated by John Willett in 1965. 88 Brecht, ‘Über reimlose Lyrik mit unregelmässigen Rhythmen’, BFA 22: 359. 89 Doc Rossi, ‘Brecht on Shakespeare: A Revaluation’, Comparative Drama 30 (1996), 158–87, here 183. 90 Symington, Brecht und Shakespeare, 87. 91 See ibid., 87 and 98.

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The editors note, however, that there is no evidence that this interlude was ever performed in Brecht’s lifetime: BFA 2: 420. 93 Brecht, Das Elefantenkalb oder die Beweisbarkeit jeglicher Behauptung, BFA 2: 158. 94 Kussmaul, Bertolt Brecht, 116. 95 Brecht, ‘Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit’, BFA 22: 85. 96 Brecht, Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui, BFA 7: 8. 97 Joachim Tenschert, ‘Notate von den Durchlaufproben am 16. und 17.3.1959 Ui’, undated, 8, here 6 (Berliner-Ensemble-Archiv [henceforth BEA], File 27). 98 Ute Baum, Bertolt Brechts Verhältnis zu Shakespeare (East Berlin: Brecht-Zentrum der DDR, 1981), 167. 99 See Ludwig Berger, ‘Lust an der Kooperation’, Theater heute, 8 (1967), 27–9, here 27. 100 See the Editors, BFA 4: 470. 101 See Raimund Gerz, Bertolt Brecht und der Fascismus (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983), particularly 110–54. 102 Donald Brett Douglas, ‘Bertolt Brecht’s Development of a Minor Shakespearean Motif in Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe’, AUMLA, 57 (1982), 40–50, here 49. 103 Ibid., 129. 104 Walter Pache, ‘Measure for Measure und Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe. Zur Shakespeare-Rezeption Bertolt Brechts’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Spring 1976, 173–96, here 182. 105 Gerz, Bertolt Brecht, 130. 106 Brecht, ‘Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe’, BFA 24: 203. 107 Brecht, untitled, undated, n.p. (BBA 266/58). 108 See Brecht, Round Heads and Pointed Heads, trans. by Tom Kuhn, in Brecht, Collected Plays, vol. 4, by Kuhn and Willett ed. (London: Methuen, 2001), 1–114. 109 Brecht, Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe, BFA 4: 148. 110 Pache, ‘Measure’, 174. 111 Alois Münch, Bertolt Brechts Faschismustheorie und ihre theatralische Konkretisierung in den ‘Rundköpfen und Spitzköpfen’ (Frankfurt/Main et al: Peter Lang, 1982), 89. 112 Anon, ‘[Notes on Playboy]’, 22 January 1956, n.p. (BEA File 22). 113 Brecht, Rundköpfe, BFA 4: 202. 114 The horse motif itself is taken from a different intertext, Heinrich von Kleist’s story Michael Kohlhaas (1811) and the name ‘Callas’ is a nod to this source. Without going into great detail: Kohlhaas has horses wrongfully confiscated when travelling between German states in the sixteenth century. He leads a relentless campaign to gain justice. The contrast between Kohlhaas and Callas is that the latter is driven by economic necessity, not a sense of right and wrong. Again the materialist angle is clear in Brecht’s update. 115 Brecht, Rundköpfe, BFA 4: 263. 116 Fritz Breithaupt, in ‘Inversion der Tautologie: Die Waage und die Gerechtigkeit in Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe’, The Brecht Yearbook, 18 (1993), 85–103, makes a series of arguments about how the characters become defined by their roles in the play and that naming particularly functions as speech act, especially in the racial context, but does not focus on the motif of substitution. 117 Kussmaul is thus mistaken when he observes: ‘in terms of the Fabel, the Viceroy is naturally the ultimate authority. […] Brecht adheres to Shakespeare here’, in Bertolt Brecht, 102. 92

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222 Notes David Bathrick, ‘One-Sided History: Brecht’s Hitler Plays’, in Leonard Schulze and Walter Wetzels (eds), Literature and History (Lanham et al: University of America Press, 1983), 181–96, here 188. 119 Ulrich Weisstein, Links und links gesellt sich nicht. Gesammelte Aufsätze zum Werk Heinrich Manns und Bertolt Brechts (Frankfurt/Main et al: Peter Lang, 1986), 442. 120 Brecht reported in Ernst Schumacher, ‘Er wird bleiben’, Neue deutsche Literatur, 10 (1956), 18–28, here 25 for both quotations. 121 Baum, Brechts Verhältnis, 93. 122 Münch, Brechts Faschismustheorie, 94. 123 Weisstein, Links und links, 430–1. 124 Tom Kuhn and John Willett, ‘Introduction’, in Brecht, Collected Plays, vol. 4, Kuhn and Willett ed. (London: Methuen, 2001), vii–xxix, here xi. 125 Brecht, ‘Anmerkung zu Die Spitzköpfe und die Rundköpfe: Beschreibung der Kopenhagener Uraufführung’, BFA 24: 207. 126 Publisher Siegfried Unseld suggested that editor Elizabeth Hauptmann differentiate Brecht’s play from Shakespeare’s by dropping the ‘us’ in a letter of 1959 (see the Editors: BFA 9: 344). I will maintain this practice for clarity. 127 Subiotto, Brecht’s Adaptations, 150–1. 128 For a comparison table of the scenes in Shakespeare and Brecht, see The Editors, BFA 9: 364. 129 Brecht, ‘Studium des ersten Auftritts in Shakespeares Coriolan’, BFA 23: 395. Although there are four participants, each indicated by a single letter (‘B’ for Brecht, for example), Brecht almost certainly edited the document to bring out the most relevant points and so this is not a genuine protocol of the meeting but a useful indication of what Brecht thought was most central. 130 See Hans Hunfeld, ‘Shakespeare – Brecht – Grass: Die konstrative Analyse am Beispiel des Coriolanus’, in Rüdiger Ahrens (ed.), William Shakespeare: Didaktisches Handbuch, vol. 3 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1982), 933–52, here 940. 131 See Brecht, ‘Der Piscatorische Versuch’, BFA 21: 196–7. 132 [Käthe Rülicke], ‘Coriolan’, undated, BBA Z40/73. 133 [Käthe Rülicke], ‘Diktat Brecht am 3. 5. 51’, undated, BBA Z40/82. 134 Brecht, ‘Der unentbehrliche Beamte’, BFA 18: 450. 135 See [Käthe Rülicke], ‘Besprechung am 7. 5. 1951’, undated, BBA Z40/83. 136 See Brecht, Coriolan, BFA 9: 31–2. A comparison between government and gardening reminiscent of Richard II III.iv follows. 137 Ulrich Broich, ‘Montage und Collage in Shakespeare-Bearbeitungen der Gegenwart’, Poetica, 4:3 (1971), 333–60, here 343. He also considers the intertext well dovetailed into the scene, whereas Symington believes that such a well-known scene must be ‘striking’ and represents a ‘break in style’ and a ‘travesty’ (all 197). This view is difficult to accept, as Brecht submits the fragment to the same linguistic patterning as the rest of the scene and there appears to be nothing to ironize the dialogue. It is also questionable whether an audience would be that familiar with the intertext. 138 [Käthe Rülicke], ‘Besprechung am 9. 6. 1951’, n.d. BBA Z40/84. 139 Ibid., BBA Z40/85. 140 Brecht quoted in [Käthe Rülicke], ‘G[espräch] Brecht 11. 6. 1951’, undated, BBA Z40/88. 118

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[Brecht], ‘Bemerkungen zu Coriolanus’, undated, BBA 672/67. Brecht, Coriolan, BFA 9: 9. 143 Ibid., BFA 9: 10. 144 Ibid., BFA 9: 54. 145 Paula Kamenisch, ‘Brecht’s Coriolan: The Tragedy of Rome’, Communications from the International Brecht Society, 20: 1 and 2 (1991), 53–69, here 61. 146 Brecht, Coriolan, BFA 9: 81. 147 Kussmaul, Bertolt Brecht, 85. 148 Subiotto, Brecht’s Adaptations, 173. 149 See Kamenish, ‘Brecht’s Coriolan’, 58. 150 [Brecht], ‘Bemerkungen zu Coriolanus’, undated, BBA 671/67. 151 See John Rouse, Brecht and the West German Theatre: The Practice and Politics of Adaptation (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), 173. 152 See Subiotto, Brecht’s Adaptations, 150. 153 Symington, Brecht und Shakespeare, 187. 154 Kussmaul, Bertolt Brecht, 81. 155 Friedrich Dieckmann, ‘Die Tragödie des Coriolan: Shakespeare im BrechtTheater’, Sinn und Form, 17: 3 and 4 (1965), 463–89, here 479. 156 Antony Tatlow, Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 184. 157 Brecht, ‘Studium des ersten Auftritts’, BFA 23: 395. 158 Heinz Ide, ‘Die Geschichte und ihre Dramatiker. Coriolan als Thema für Shakespeare, Brecht und Günter Grass’, in Göttinger Arbeiterkreis (ed.), Festschrift für Hans Jessen (Würzburg: Holzner, 1967), 121–43, here 129 and 132 respectively. 159 See Tatlow, Shakespeare, Brecht, 162–9. 160 It should be noted, however, that Coriolanus’ status as an authentic historical figure is questionable (see Subiotto, Brecht’s Adaptations, 147). Tatlow is therefore proposing that Brecht is presenting historically accurate fiction. 161 Jürgen Kuczynski, ‘Coriolanus: Plutarch – Shakespeare – Brecht’, Forschen und Wirken, 3 (1960), 585–96, here 586–7. 162 Darko Suvin, To Brecht and Beyond: Soundings in Modern Dramaturgy (Sussex: Harvester, 1984), 190. 163 Tatlow, Shakespeare, Brecht, 160. 164 Subiotto, Brecht’s Adaptations, 148. 165 Brecht, ‘Das Vergnügen am Helden’, BFA 24: 402. 166 See, for example, Broich, ‘Montage und Collage’, 345, or Suvin, To Brecht, 186. 167 Ide, ‘Die Geschichte’, 133. 168 Brecht, ‘[Messingkauf: Fragment B 13]’, BFA 22: 711. 169 Nancy C. Michael, ‘The Affinities of Adaptation: The Artistic Relationship between Brecht’s Coriolan and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’, Brecht Yearbook, 13 (1984), 145–54, here 152. 170 Brecht quoted in Ronald Hayman, ‘A Last Interview with Brecht’, London Magazine, 3: 11 (1956), 47–52, here 50. 171 See Bryan Reynolds, ‘“What is the City but the People?”: Transversal Performance and Radical Politics in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Brecht’s Coriolan’, in Donald 141 142

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224 Notes Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds (eds), Shakespeare without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 107–32. 172 See Ingeburg Gentz to Friedrich Wolff, 30 June 1970, Joachim-Tenschert-Archiv, unnumbered box: ‘BE interne Korr./Dramat. 1959–1970’. 173 John Fuegi, ‘The Form and the Pressure: Shakespeare’s Haunting of Bertolt Brecht’, Modern Drama, 15: 3 (1972), 291–303, here 291. 174 See Brecht, Aufbau einer Rolle: Laughtons Galilei, and ‘Die Kunst, Shakespeare zu lesen’, BFA 25: 19 and 23: 252 respectively. 175 Baum, Brechts Verhältnis, 230. 176 Brecht, ‘[Messingkauf: Fragment A 1]’, BFA 22: 695. This was not the first time he used the phrase and he would use it often afterwards as well. 177 See Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary, second edition, trans. by Boreslaw Taborski (London: Methuen, 1967). 178 Brecht quoted in Hayman, ‘A Last Interview’, 47. 179 Brecht, journal entry for 26 October 1941, BFA 27: 20. 180 Müller, in Programme to Heiner Müller’s ‘Macbeth’, Theater Basel 1971/72, 2. 181 Müller, Macbeth, in Müller, Werke, vol. 4, ed. by Frank Hörnigk, 261–324, here 269. 182 Wolfgang Harich, ‘Der entlaufene Dingo, das vergessene Floß’, Sinn und Form, 23: 1 (1973), 189–218, here 214. 183 I should like to thank the British Academy for the Research Development Award which has allowed me to research and write this essay.

Chapter 4 Édouard Glissant, ‘Traduction, Relation’, in La Cohée du Lamentin, Poétique V/ The Cohee from Lamentin, Poetics V (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 108. Unless otherwise stated, all translations in this chapter are my own. 2 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, translated by Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard, with an introduction by Mireille Rosello (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets 4, 1995), 47, 90. 3 André Breton, Œuvres complètes, Marguerite Bonnet ed., vol. III (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1999), 684–91. 4 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Regarder, écouter, lire/Looking, Listening, Reading (Paris: Plon, 1993), 138–46. 5 André Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. III, 402. 6 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire masques blancs/Black Skin White Masks (Paris: Éditions du seuil, Points, 1975 [1952]), 31. 7 Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française/An Anthology of the New Negro and Madagascan Poetry in French, Léopold Sédar Senghor ed., précédée de Orphée noir Black Orpheus par Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002 [1948]). 8 For a discussion of Sartre’s essay Orphée noir/Black Orpheus, see Timothy Mathews, Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 and 2006), 73–8. 1

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Notes

225

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). 10 Ruby Cohn, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 295–308. 11 Lucy Rix, ‘Maintaining the State of Emergence/y: Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête’, in ‘The Tempest’ and its Travels, Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (eds) (London: Reaktion Books, Critical Views, 2000), 236–49. 12 The Tempest, Frank Kermode ed. (London: Methuen, Arden 2, 1954). 13 Constellation Caliban: Figurations of a Character, Nadia Lie and Theo D’haen (eds) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), i-iii. 14 Modern Shakespeare Offshoots, 306. 15 Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme/A Discourse on Colonialism (Paris  : Présence africaine, 1992 [1955]), 6–7. 16 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire masques blancs/Black Skin White Masks (Paris : Seuil, 1992 [1952]), 7. 17 Page numbers in brackets in the text refer to Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête, d’après ‘La Tempête’ de Shakespeare  : adaptation pour un théâtre nègre/A Tempest, after Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’: an adaptation for negro theatre (Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1969). Where there is more than one quotation from a single page the reference is given only once. 18 Peau noire masques blancs, 187. 19 Peau noire masques blancs, 16. 20 The Autobiography of Malcom X, with the assistance of Alex Haley, with an introduction by Paul Gilroy (London: Penguin, Penguin Classics, 2001 [1965]), 229. 21 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 135. The remark is discussed by Jürgen Pieters in Constellation Caliban, 65. 22 W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 401–46. See Jeremy Noel-Tod’s chapter on Auden in Great Shakespeareans, vol. XII. 23 Partrick Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé/Writing in a Dominated Land (Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 2004 [1997]), 17. 24 Translated by Geoffrey Wagner, in Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (New York: Grove Press, 1974). 25 Peau noire masques blancs, 188. 26 Such an alliance is discussed by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science (1887). 27 ‘La Beauté’/‘Beauty’, in Les Fleurs du mal. 28 Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, La prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996). Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, translated by Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 29 From within his perspective of metropolitan capitalism, Theodor Adorno writes that ‘estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people’. Minima Moralia, translated by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978 [1951]), 41. 30 ‘Traduction, Relation’/‘Translation, Relation’, in La Cohée du Lamentin, 143. 31 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923), in Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1970), 69–82. 9

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226 Notes Aimé Césaire, Pablo Picasso, Corps perdu (Paris: Fragrance, 1950). See also Césaire & Picasso, ‘Corps perdu’, histoire d’une rencontre, édition présentée et commentée par Anne Egger (Paris: HC éditions, 2011).

32

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Index

Aristotle 19, 21, 113 Balzac, Honoré de 12, 18, 30, 208n. 9, 209n. 27 Baudelaire, Charles 34, 162, 178, 179, 200, 202, 209n. 32, 225n. 24 Beckett, Samuel, 52, 159 Benjamin, Walter 4, 191, 205, 225n. 31 Berlioz, Hector 16, 29, 31, 34, 209nn. 25, 27 Bloom, Harold 9, 206n. 8 Boito, Arrigo 41, 48 Brecht, Bertolt and Berliner Ensemble, 123, 125, 135, 144ff Introduction, passim see also Shakespeare, characters, Shakespeare, plays Works Coriolan 4, 114, 144–52 The Elephant Calf 134–5 Macbeth (parallel scene) 129–33 Messingkauf Dialogues 115, 118, 120, 131, 149, 152, 218nn. 15, 16, 29, 34, 218nn. 38, 223n. 68, 224n. 176 Round Heads and Pointed Heads 136–43, 144, 221nn. 108–16 Theaterarbeit 115, 218n. 17 The Tutor (adaptation) 125–6, 154 Breton, André 157, 158 Brooks, Peter 25, 208nn. 14, 16 Césaire, Aimé Introduction, passim Life 49, 155–61

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see also Shakespeare, characters, Shakespeare, plays Works Cahier d’un retour au pays natal 156, 158, 224n. 2 Discours sur le colonialisme/A Discourse on Colonialism 158, 225nn. 9, 15 L’Etudiant noir 156 La tragédie du roi Christophe 5–6, 159, 164, 184, 206nn. 3, 4 Une saison au Congo 184, 206n. 2 Une Tempête, d’après ‘La Tempête’ de Shakespeare: adaptation pour un théâtre nègre 5, 161ff Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial 5 Chekhov 63–4 Dante 11, 22, 42, 207n. 1 Derrida, Jacques 35, 44, 200, 210n. 35, 225n. 28 Diderot, Denis 28 Dryden, John 7, 98, 206n. 6, 216n. 49 Ducis, Jean-François 19, 27, 31, 34, 208nn. 12, 13, 209n. 20 Dumas, Alexandre 17–18, 24–5, 26, 28–9, 40 Fanon, Frantz 157–8, 161–2, 166, 169, 195, 197, 224n. 6, 225n. 16 Gide, André, 36 49, 56, 210n. 36 Gladkov, Alexander 56, 70, 71–5, 80–4, 96, 105, 213nn. 4, 6, 214nn. 23, 25, 216n. 39

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232 Index Glissant, Édouard 155, 224n. 1 Goethe, Johan Willem von 8, 33, 93, 113, 125, 219n. 63 Guizot, François 27, 31, 40, 208n. 14

Kott, Jan 49–52, 152, 212nn. 55–8, 224n. 177 Kozintsev, Grigori 70, 109–11, 217nn. 54, 58

Hugo, Victor-Marie Introduction 1–4, 5–6, 8 Life 73–4, 95, 155, 162, 207n. 1 see also Shakespeare, characters, Shakespeare, plays Works ‘À Rheims’ 18 Amy Robsart 26 Cromwell 2, 20, 24, 39, 209n. 21, and Preface 17, 20–1, 34, 50, 209nn. 21, 23 Han d’Islande 13 Hernani 12, 24, 27, 33 La Lyre 14 Le Roi s’amuse 24 see also Verdi Les Misérables 48 Marion de Lorme 26 Notre Dame de Paris 3, 48 Quatrevingt Treize 3, 48 ‘Sur Walter Scott...’, in Littérature et philosophie mêlées 13–14, 18, 207n. 4 William Shakespeare 2, 3, 11, 27, 30–1, 34, 37, 49, 50, 73–4, 208n. 8, 209nn. 23, 28, 210n. 39, 211n. 51, 214n. 25 Hugo, François-Victor Introduction, passim see also Shakespeare, characters, Shakespeare, plays Works Oeuvres complèts de Shakespeare 3, chapter 1 passim see individual plays Faust, 32 Shakespeare, Théâtre Complet: Traduction de François-Victor Hugo, ed. J-B Fort 36 see also individual plays

La Place, Pierre-Antoine de 19, 27, 31 Le Tourneur, Pierre 19, 27, 31, 34, 40 Lukács, Georg 4, 56, 209n. 19

Johnson, Samuel 19, 34, 96, 99, 206n. 6, 217n. 53

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Mandelstam, Osip 56–8, 76–7, 213n. 7 Marienstras, Richard 5–6, 206n. 4 Marx, Karl 4, 50, 56, 113, 116, 119, 121, 123, 133, 138, 148, 152, 212n. 57, 218n. 11 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 63–5, 69, 70, 72, 74, 88, 107 Molière 15, 25, 154 Morozov, Mikhail Mikhailovich 88–95, 99–100, 109, 216nn. 42, 43, 45, 48 Müller, Heiner, Macbeth 153, 224nn. 180, 181 Nodier, Charles 17, 21 Pasternak, Boris Introduction, passim see also Shakespeare, characters, Shakespeare, plays Works 1–2 Henry IV 76 Antony and Cleopatra 70 Doctor Zhivago, 3, 57, 61, 63, 67, 70, 76–8, 80, 84–5, 109, 215nn. 35, 37 Hamlet (translations) 63–75, 77–95, 108 ‘Hamlet’ (poem) 78 King Lear 109 Notes on Translating Shakespeare’s Tragedies 95–107 On Early Trains 63 Othello 76 Romeo and Juliet 70–1 Second Birth 63 Pasternak, Leonid 56, 60, 61, 68, 76, 213nn. 9, 10, 13, 214nn. 15, 16 Pasternak, Lydia 61, 78, 215n. 35 Pope, Alexander 19, 34, 206n. 6

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Index Racine, Jean 13, 16, 21, 25, 28, 31 Rowe, Nicholas 33–4 Sartre, Jean-Paul 49 ‘Orphée noir’ 158, 169–70, 224nn. 7, 8 Schiller 113, 116, 124, 129, 217n. 6 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 8, 113, 131, 135, 211n. 46 Scott, Walter 2–3, 11–18, 20, 22–3, 26, 31, 48, 206n. 1, 207nn. 4–6, 208nn. 7, 9, 10, 18, 209n. 21 Scribe, Eugène 25, 29 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 156 Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française 158, 224n. 7 Serreau, Jean-Marie 5, 6, 159–60 Shakespeare, Characters Antony 81, 121, 135–6 Ariel 6, 9, chapter 4 passim Caesar 20, 135 Caliban 6, 9, 118, chapter 4 passim Claudius 68, 89–90, 102–3, 111, 122, 128, 216n. 43 Cleopatra 81, 121 Coriolanus 144–52, 223nn. 160, 161 Desdemona 18, 42–2, 103 Falstaff 9, 97, 216n. 50 Fool (Lear) 6, 103, 105, 194 Gertrude 104 Gloucester 45 Goneril 85, 88, 101–2 Gower 47 Hamlet 9, 41, 59, 67–8, 69, 74, 77–8, 85–7, 97, 99, 101–3, 105–11, 122–8 Hermione 46 Horatio 90, 105, 107–10 Iago 41, 43, 96 see also Verdi Juliet, 128–9 Lady Macbeth 9, 40, 130 Lear 35, 42, 103, 105, 109, 117, 120, 131–2 Macbeth 6, 9, 40, 42, 105, 121, 130, 153, 216n. 43 Nurse 103

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Ophelia 85, 104 Othello 18, 39–45, 103, 121, 122, 207n. 5, 209n. 20, 211n. 46 Paulina 45 Polonius 33, 85, 98, 103–5, 111 Posthumus 41 Prospero 9, 118, 160, chapter 4 passim Regan 88, 101–2 Richard III 51, 136 Romeo 9, 42, 128, 129, 213n. 1 Tamora 46 Titus Andronicus 46, 47 Shakespeare, Plays and Sonnets Antony and Cleopatra 36, 70, 75, 81, 97, 114, 121, 145 As You Like It 137 Coriolanus 4, 45, 114, 118, 125, 127, 144–52, 211nn. 51, 52, 219n. 60, 222nn. 129, 130, 132, 136, 223nn. 141–6, 149,155, 158, 160, 161, 169, 171 see also Brecht, Coriolan Cymbeline 41 Edward III 33 Hamlet 3, 32–3, 36, 38, 61, 63–70, 75, 77–95, 98–102, 108–12, 113, 121–8, 132–3, 136, 185, 213nn. 1, 11, 13, 214nn. 16, 21, 48, 217nn. 52, 55, 58, 219nn. 44, 46, 220n. 74 Julius Caesar 87, 97, 135, 136, 145 King Henry IV 3, 24, 55, 76, 97 King Henry V 6, 124, 210n. 38 King Henry VIII 213n. 2 King John 17, 50, 153 King Lear 6, 35, 50, 76–8, 87–8, 101, 105, 109, 111, 118, 127, 131, 135, 182, 185, 194, 211nn. 45, 50, 213n. 1, 217nn. 54, 58, 218n. 26 Macbeth 6, 40–1, 43, 50, 61, 63, 74, 87, 105–6, 113, 115, 129–33, 136, 153, 213nn. 1, 11, 215n. 35, 216n. 43, 218n. 12, 224nn. 180, 181 Measure for Measure 40, 136–43, 221n. 104

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234 Index The Merchant of Venice 137 The Merry Wives of Windsor 48 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 46, 132, 134, 185, 194 Othello 17, 28, 39–45, 76, 94, 96, 103, 119–20, 123, 208n. 12, 210n. 38 Pericles 33, 47 Richard II 222n. 136 Richard III 50, 187, 136 Romeo and Juliet 70–1, 75, 81, 89, 92–3, 97, 100, 114, 125, 127–9, 213n. 1, 216n. 48 Sonnets 3, 32, 55, 98, 110, 213n. 2 The Tempest 5–6, 8, 49, 118, chapter 4 passim and Une Tempête 155–205 Titus Andronicus 33, 45, 47, 211nn. 49, 51, 52 Troilus and Cressida 126–7 The Two Noble Kinsmen 33 The Winter’s Tale 45 Staël, Germaine de 17, 21, 162 Stalin, Joseph 1, 2, 4, 9, chapter 2 passim, 216n. 43

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Stanislavsky, Constantin 63, 64, 65, 119, 213n. 13 Steiner, George 9, 206n. 8 Stendhal (i.e. Marie-Henri Beyle) 13, 15, 17, 21, 31, 162 Stevenson, Robert Louis 15, 49, 207n. 6 Verdi, Giuseppe 16, 24, 40, 44–5, 47–50 Works Macbeth 40–3 Otello 39–44 Re Lear 40–1, 211nn. 43–8, 212n. 58 Vigny, Alfred de 17–18, 21, 27, 39, 210n. 38 Voltaire 7–8, 18–20, 25, 31, 34, 74, 96, 208nn. 12, 13, 209n. 20 Wagner, Richard Das Liebesverbot 40 Watson, Nicola 18, 206n. 1 Willems, Michèle 7, 18 Zeffirelli, Franco, Otello 43

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