Performing Shakespearean Appropriations: Essays in Honor of Christy Desmet (Shakespeare and the Stage) 1683933605, 9781683933601

Citation preview

Performing Shakespearean Appropriations

Shakespeare and the Stage Series Editor: Matthew Kozusko (Ursinus College, mkozusko​ @ursinus​.​edu). The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series on Shakespeare and the Stage publishes scholarly works on the theatrical dimensions of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Both individual studies and collections of previously unpublished essays are welcome. On the Web at http://www​.fdu​.edu​/fdupress

Publications in Shakespeare and the Stage Series Darlena Ciraulo, Matthew Kozusko, and Robert Sawyer, Performing Shakespearean Appropriations: Essays in Honor of Christy Desmet (2022) Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy, Like a King: Casting Shakespeare’s Histories for Citizens and Subjects (2020) Laury Magnus and Walter W. Cannon, Shakespeare’s Auditory Worlds: Hearing and Staging Practices, Then and Now (2020) Paul Menzer and Amy Cohen, Shakespeare in the Light: Essays in Honor of Ralph Alan Cohen (2019) Peter Lichtenfels and Josy Miller, Shakespeare and Realism: On the Politics of Style (2018) Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight, Stage Matters: Props, Bodies, and Space in Shakespearean Performance (2018) Louise Geddes, Appropriating Shakespeare: A Cultural History of Pyramus and Thisbe (2016) Travis Curtright, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Persons (2016) Joseph Candido, The Text, the Play, and the Globe: Essays on Shakespeare and His World in Honor of Charles R. Forker (2016) Catherine Loomis and Sid Ray, Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage (2015) Cary Mazer, Double Shakespeares: Emotional-Realist Acting and Contemporary Performance (2015) R.S. White, Avant-Garde Hamlet: Text, Stage, Screen (2015) Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kathryn R. McPherson and Sarah Enloe, Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2013)

Related Recent Publications Kristine Johanson, Shakespeare Adaptations from the Early Eighteenth Century: Five Plays (2013) Laury Magnus and Walter W. Cannon, Who Hears in Shakespeare?: Shakespeare’s Auditory World, Stage and Screen (2011) Peter Kanelos and Matt Kozusko, Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage (2010) James C. Bulman, Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance (2008)

Frank Occhiogrosso, Shakespearean Performance: New Studies (2008) Paul Menzer, Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage (2006) Nancy Taylor, Women Direct Shakespeare in America: Productions from the 1990s (2004) James E. Hirsh, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (2003) Hardin L. Aasand, Stage Directions in Hamlet: New Essays and New Directions (2002) Susan Young, Shakespeare Manipulated: The Use of the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare in Teatro Di Figura in Italy (1996)

Performing Shakespearean Appropriations Essays in Honor of Christy Desmet

Edited by Darlena Ciraulo, Matthew Kozusko, and Robert Sawyer

FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Vancouver • Madison • Teaneck • Wroxton

Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for scholarly publishing from the Friends of FDU Press. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ciraulo, Darlena, editor. | Kozusko, Matthew, editor. | Sawyer, Robert, editor. | Desmet, Christy, 1954–2018 honouree. Title: Performing Shakespearean appropriations : essays in honor of Christy Desmet / edited by Darlena Ciraulo, Matthew Kozusko and Robert Sawyer. Description: Lanham : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2022. | Series: Shakespeare and the stage | Includes index. | Summary: “This collection of essays brings together innovative scholarship on Shakespeare’s afterlives in tribute to Christy Desmet. Contributors explore the production and consumption of Shakespeare in acts of adaptation and appropriation across a range of performance topics, from book history to the novel to television, cinema, and digital media”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022016640 (print) | LCCN 2022016641 (ebook) | ISBN 9781683933601 (cloth) | ISBN 9781683933618 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Adaptations—History and criticism. | Cultural appropriation. Classification: LCC PR2880.A1 P47 2022 (print) | LCC PR2880.A1 (ebook) | DDC 822.3/3—dc23/eng/20220510 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016640 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016641 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.​

Figure 0.1  Christy Desmet. Source: University of Georgia Department of English file photo.

Contents

Foreword: “Appropriation and Collaboration” Robert Sawyer

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Introduction 1 Darlena Ciraulo and Matthew Kozusko PART I: PAST

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1 What’s in a Game?: Handy-Dandy, War, and Foreign Relations in King Lear 15 Jonathan Baldo 2 Strawberry Hill: The House that Hamlet Built Anne Williams

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3 What’s Past Is Prologue: Shakespeare the Romantic Katherine Scheil

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PART II: PRESENT

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4 Shakespeare’s Bust and the 1960s Batman TV Show Darlena Ciraulo

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5 On the Shakespeare Trail Peter Holland

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6 Shakespeare in the Dorm: The Rhetoric of Character in YouTube Shakespeare Richard Finkelstein

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Contents

7 Why Are Shakespeare’s Characters So “Relatable”? Matthew Kozusko PART III: FUTURE

127 143

8 Levinas, Jessica, and Memory in Productions of The Merchant of Venice 145 Lisa S. Starks 9 Transgender Theory and Global Shakespeare Alexa Alice Joubin

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10 Quoting Machines: Shakespearean Things in and Beyond HBO’s Westworld 179 Stephen O’Neill 11 On Character, Character Criticism, and The King is Alive: For Christy Desmet Sharon O’Dair Afterword: Characterizing Christy Desmet Sujata Iyengar

199 221

Index 231 About the Editor and Contributors

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Foreword: “Appropriation and Collaboration” Robert Sawyer

The “Foreword” for this volume focuses on the initial concept of “appropriation” as articulated by Christy Desmet (figure 1) and Robert Sawyer in their 1999 monograph which engaged with an emerging field; however, it will also illuminate the collaborative nature during that time between mentor (Christy) and newly minted PhD student (Robert) in the shaping of this theoretical approach in their subsequent book, Shakespeare and Appropriation (Routledge Press) and enabled in part by Terry Hawkes’s encouragement. While the essays in this collection will examine the past, present, and future of Shakespearean Appropriation, this foreword merely highlights the genesis of our collaboration at the University of Georgia in the late 1990s. More a personal account than a theoretical overview, it centers on our response over the years when asked how we came to work on “appropriation” together. Whenever we were queried about this collaboration, my answer, with which Christy concurred, was always the same: “I couldn’t have done it without her, and she wouldn’t have done it without me,” since I did not at the time possess the credentials to propose such a book project, and since her primary interests then lay in character criticism and rhetorical studies. As we now assemble this tribute, and after my own re-viewing of our project, I believe this phrase also applies to “appropriation” itself; if one thinks of the intertextual relationship between a precursor text and its later afterlives, it seems—not unlike my joint work with Christy—that these texts also work in a collaborative manner: interacting, sharing, and, hopefully, articulating new ways of examining earlier works. Equally important, our two decades of working together before her untimely death in 2018 depended on a number of performance-like elements: organizing and traveling together to presentations in the United States, the

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Foreword: “Appropriation and Collaboration”

UK, and Canada, plotting and then rehearsing our methods for directing a successful and productive gathering; and dealing with impromptu formal and informal challenges and changes in real time. Although we never encouraged attendees at our gatherings to “help with their good hands” to show their appreciation at the conclusion of any presentation, we knew when they did do so that we had achieved our goal to both inform and entertain our “audience.” While the final act of our collaborative ventures may have already been staged, my hope is that this volume will appear not only as an Epilogue to Christy’s original and enduring legacy—in Shakespearean appropriation and in scholarly collaboration, both professional and personal—but also as a Prologue to other works and theoretical ideas which her work continues to influence and impact. The essays that follow are just one small sampling of Christy’s influence, encouragement, support, and, towering above all, Christy’s rigorous intellect, which she so generously shared with each of the contributors in this collection.

Introduction Darlena Ciraulo and Matthew Kozusko

This book presents a collection of essays that celebrates the remarkable scholarship of the late Christy Desmet. Christy was Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia where she taught Shakespeare and early modern literature to undergraduate and graduate students for over thirty years. A specialist in rhetoric as well, she served as composition director at UGA until her untimely passing in 2018. During her prolific career, Christy forged new and exciting paths in the field of Shakespeare and Appropriation by first publishing a collection of groundbreaking papers on the topic and later cofounding and coediting the first fully open-access, online, multimedia, and peer-reviewed journal devoted exclusively to the subject. This volume, edited by three of her former students, is specifically dedicated to Christy’s pioneering work in the field. The essays that comprise this Festschrift fall into three distinct but overlapping categories: “Past,” “Present,” and “Future.” This temporal classification provides a structural way in which to commemorate the impact of Christy’s scholarship, both as foundational and inspirational. Christy’s own words and ideas help to position these papers in their respected groupings and confer a critical context for their placement; however, the categories ultimately shed light on the fluidity of such divisions by showing their interconnectedness rather than disunity. The title of Christy’s cofounded journal with Sujata Iyengar—Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation—is a good place to begin this discussion. The phrase “borrowers and lenders” comes, as we know, from Act one, scene three of Hamlet. The meddling Polonius supplies a list of dos and don’ts to his son Laertes, who will be shortly traveling to France. Among the advisements, he states, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be, / For loan oft loses both itself and friend, / And borrowing dulleth th’ edge of husbandry” 1

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(1.3.74–76). Analyzing this phrase, Laura Kolb has pointed out that credit in the early modern era “was a ubiquitous currency. It was also a profoundly personal one.”1 Polonius views borrowing and lending, the push and pull of taking and giving, as intimately dangerous or hurtful: these activities portend personal and monetary loss, not to mention the industry. As a critical concept, however, borrowing and lending functions as an effective metaphor for understanding acts of individual and artistic appropriations. Although the word “appropriate” connotes unlawful seizure, “to take possession of for one’s own” (OED), it also in the Shakesperean period carried the meaning of shaping and reconfiguring, “To make proper, to fashion suitably” (OED). This latter signification suggests the reciprocity of appropriation by which recreated objects bear the impression of their creators, simultaneously acted on and recast by their reworkings. In Christy and Sujata Iyengar’s words, “To appropriate Shakespeare is to make it part of one’s own mental furniture as well as to extend the solitary self out toward the broader world of Shakespeare and what Shakespeare touches.”2 The process of give and take, or in these critics’ terms “rhetorical ‘oscillation,’” helps define a fruitful aspect of this mutual exchange: in short, the process of borrowing and lending transforms the interpretative and aesthetic outcomes of both appropriator and appropriated. In the context of such reciprocal “Shake-shifting,” Diana E. Henderson emphasizes the necessity of acknowledging the interdependence of appropriation and “collaboration”: the rapport between individual agency and its social nexus. As she remarks, “collaboration focuses attention on the connections among individuals, allowing artists credit and responsibility, but at the same time refusing to separate them from their social location and the work of others.”3 Collaboration in this sense directs its energy on the link between creators and the complex network of social forces that shape the (re)created works. The economic underpinning of borrowing and lending, as Polonius has it, dovetails well with the notion of Shakespeare’s cultural capital in the global marketplace. Barbara Hodgdon aptly calls the appropriation and exploitation of such capital, including the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras to which the playwright belongs, the “Shakespeare trade.”4 Christy’s analysis of the Shakespearean stock-and-trade coincides with Michael Bristol’s term “big-time Shakespeare.” This expression encompasses both the celebrity of Shakespeare in different time periods, as well as his global “durable permanence.”5 As Christy explains, “‘Big-time Shakespeare’ serves corporate goals, entrenched power structures, and conservative cultural ideologies.”6 In this sense, the currency of Shakespeare as a brand caters to a matrix of sociopolitical systems that seek to appropriate the Bard for commercial or institutional purposes. Christy provides a counterbalance to commodification and “big-time” usage by coining “little-time” to refer to individual

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and idiosyncratic acts of Shakespearean “‘re-vision’ that arise from love or rage, or simply a desire to play with Shakespeare.”7 Such playful or serious reworkings of Shakespeare bear the unique imprint of the (re)creator, as the appropriative process undermines the stability of the source text to produce new imaginings. In Shakespeare and Appropriation, Christy argues for the elasticity, or the give and take, of big and little acts of re-creations to reveal how these divisions intersect with each other in complicated and surprising ways: the cultural authority of Shakespeare can arise in private re-visions and vice versa, demonstrating that “big-time and little-time Shakespeare cannot always be so easily separated from one other.”8 This collection uses the term “appropriation” to signify the borrowing and lending—whether big or little or both—that occur across diverse texts and media (including print, electronic, and digital). Julie Sanders defines “appropriation” as a method of remediation or reforming a work to critique or improve it: “a political or ethical commitment” shapes the reinterpreted material.9 According to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, “The goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media.”10 This creative exchange carries sociopolitical implications that point to appropriation as a counteractive and corrective tool. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin have advocated for the inherent relationship between ethics and Shakespearean appropriations, specifically in terms of “a responsibility to cultural otherness.”11 Thus remedial appropriation is often pitted against “adaptation,” a term Sanders correlates with “mediation,” or homage and tribute. In this way, adaptation acknowledges source material as the standout “canonical precursor,” even though acts of adaptation and appropriation can differ by degree rather than kind.12 Offering a more pointed definition of adaptation as “an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works,” Linda Hutcheon uses the term “salvaging” to characterize adaptation as the artistic process of repetition, not simply faithful replication of a source text: moving beyond fidelity discourse, adaptation therefore becomes a palimpsest of borrowed stories that amplify and evolve ever-shifting values in diverse cultural contexts.13 This circular, or “There and Back again,” overlay recalls the theoretical give and take of repurposing and recycling, as well as the cultural economy of borrowing and lending.14 Adaptation as a form of intertextual salvaging speaks to Bakhtin’s and Kristeva’s intertextual theories, which posit that all texts are composed of a web of reclaimed intertexts, a mesh of interlaced quotations and allusions that diachronically interact, build on, and refract each other. As Yvonne Griggs puts it, “The adaptive process works to ensure a story’s ongoing rebirth within other communication platforms, other political and cultural contexts.”15 In dialogue with these ideas, Desmet and Iyengar articulate an ongoing engagement with the inherent hybridity of appropriation and

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adaptation, exploring the pliancy between these concepts and their “attitudes toward artistic production, assumption, and social regulation.”16 Appropriation as a post-humanist enterprise re-engages with electronic Shakespeare by dismantling, reassembling, and recreating Shakespearean texts in and for digital platforms. Appropriation practices in virtual modes allow for an exploration of Shakespearean applications on the World Wide Web. In “Alien Shakespeare 2.0,” Desmet considers the multiform usages of internet Shakespeares in New Media. Drawing on Ian Bogost’s theory of “alien phenomenology,” she considers digital objects (units and systems) as possessing both “individuated integrity” and “shifting relationships.”17 Desmet offers a rapprochement between the division of New Media Shakespeares (YouTube being the most popular) and Shakespeare in the Digital Humanities: in both fields, the non-linear aspect of information distribution on the internet reconstitutes Shakespeare in novel parts and disparate arrangements. As Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes point out, “Shakespeare is seized in a series of a potentially limitless archive of cultural memory, constructed through its willful disregard for the traditional avenues of canonicity.”18 Shakespeare 2.0 encompasses such rhizomatic theory— which posits nonhierarchical and nonorganic chains of data connections and reconnections—to situate Shakespeare in combinations of digital units or objects.19 Many of the performance media treated in appropriation mix and fuse data to reformulate expressions of Shakespeare in fresh configurations. This collection of ten essays, along with the forward and afterward, brings together scholarship that reveals the extent to which Christy’s innovative work has contributed to and helped shape research in Shakespeare and Appropriation studies. The following essays focus on the production and consumption of Shakespeare in acts of adaptation and appropriation, and they range in specifics provocatively from print to television, cinema, digital, and other media. Although we have given the volume a formal organization by grouping contributions into three chronological sections—past, present, future—it is perhaps the gap and slippage between these timeframes that bridge the essays together, uncovering the rich and dynamic mediums in which the plurality of Shakespeares reveals itself in art and society. The notion of “performance” that informs the book’s title is construed broadly to include performances of selves, of communities, of agencies, and of authenticity—either Shakespeare’s, or the user’s, or an object’s, or all. Most authors here treat specific performances, with a balance of stage, screen, and digital media; they cover the full range of modes, from professional to amateur, and from the tradition of theater festivals to the casual, the itinerant, and the irreverent. Jonathan Baldo opens section one, “Past,” with a look at Shakespeare himself as an appropriator, a playwright who manipulates material in the “the

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art of remix.” Baldo anchors the collection to show that appropriation is not something done only to Shakespeare. As Christy reminds us, “Shakespeare himself was an entrepreneurial appropriator of others’ texts,” as well as of societal artifacts.20 Baldo examines the timeworn children’s activity of “Handy-Dandy” in King Lear. The game’s frenetic movement of give and take provides a powerful metaphor of the political mobility (trades and inversions) that form a pattern of transactions and negotiations in King Lear. The game illuminates the play’s dominant themes as well. In particular, Shakespeare’s use of Handy-Dandy elucidates external relations between Britain and France in the early Jacobean era, in addition to exposing internal psychological states and conditions between family members. Baldo considers Shakespeare as an adaptor at play, as it were, and in treating variations between Q and F of King Lear, he also demonstrates how Shakespeare’s borrowing and lending, not unlike the exchanges of the game itself, transpires across textual variants. In the framework of “Past,” Anne Williams and Katherine Scheil establish early treatments of appropriation with a look at Shakespeare in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Williams argues that the Romantic-era writer Horace Walpole draws on Hamlet to work through submerged personal drama not only in The Castle of Otronto (1764), but also in the architecture of his lavishly styled Gothic Revival Villa, Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham, London. Williams finds that the “family romance” of Hamlet supplies a Freudian subtext for the paradoxical treatment of women in his novel. In their coedited book, Shakespearean Gothic, Christy and Anne write that “Walpole’s narrative experiment, which he rationalized by appealing to Shakespeare, brought to consciousness the shadows cast by his house, the secrets lurking in the immaterial dudgeons of what would be called the unconscious.”21 Just as Gertrude is both idealized and othered, so too are Walpole’s female characters, and this ambiguity, which the author attempts to rectify, is echoed in the very structure of Strawberry Hill itself, as Williams illustrates. Katherine Scheil’s essay considers how decontextualized quotations endlessly refashion “Shakespeare” as the sage authority on various aspects of socially situated selves. Although Scheil examines the plethora of Shakespearean memes that circulate and recirculate across social media today, she roots her analysis in past seventeenth- and eighteenth-century quotation books and anthologies, ones that construct Shakespeare as the undisputed genius of human nature. This type of Bardology invested Shakespeare’s language with moral prerogative, so that his words, divested of context, emerged as instructional tools and inspirational guides for a general reading public. Unlike their predecessors, however, memes on digital platforms often demonstrate little authenticity to Shakespearean passages and do not derive from the actual dramas or poems themselves. These faux quotations evince

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the conundrum of what Christy, Natalile Loper, and Jim Casey explore in Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare: that a phenomenon can at “once ‘be’ and ‘not be’ Shakespeare.”22 These digital memes and misquotations show how Web users remix and reinvent Shakespeare, or “not Shakespeare,” for aesthetic and moralistic purposes. Williams and Scheil bring into focus how appropriations of Shakespeare have a long and storied past that not only emerges alongside Shakespeare himself but continues on in new technologies. The second set of essays represents the “Present,” referring to the midtwentieth and twenty-first centuries. These contributions center to varying degrees on modes of parody and appropriation in Shakespearean performances and Shakespearean character criticism across media. Darlena Ciraulo examines how Shakespeare is staged in the 1960s Batman television program to represent both global erudition and camp aesthetics. This paradoxical signification attests to what Doug Lanier writes about “Shakespop”: the contested ways modern popular culture has appropriated and redeployed Shakespeare as a cultural icon.23 A symbol of highbrow learning, a bust of Shakespeare resides in the aristocratic Bruce Wayne’s (aka Batman) library to convey his wealth and refinement. As an object of camp, this bust also functions as a Bat device that allows Batman and Robin to descend into the Batcave. Shakespeare’s Bust not only contributes to the famous campy flare of the series, but it also lightheartedly critiques the cultural capital of Shakespeare as a universal figure of authority. Peter Holland discusses the relationship between Shakespeare films, marketing, and popular consumers, with a focus on prospective audiences recruited through Shakespeare trailers. His essay considers how the formal traditions and constraints of modern and contemporary demos shape Shakespeare for the perceived needs of different potential viewers. In another appropriation essay, “Shakespeare Abbreviated,” Holland examines the long tradition of condensing and cutting Shakespeare, so that “Shakespeare becomes a deliberate intervention in a history of cultural reception that negotiates concepts of high/low and popular/elite cultural formations, often, though not always, as a means of burlesque of cultural pretension.”24 Similar to such abbreviations, film trailers are generally constructed in the spirit of remix and collage, non-linear montages of shots, words, and images. In new media, however, clips for live broadcasts and theatrical productions utilize marketing images or pre-scripted sequences. Holland looks at a range of Shakespeare trailers, for both screen and stage, from Hollywood to Facebook, to investigate how Shakespeare is remade by new technologies, continually renegotiated to attract paying audiences and patrons. While Holland’s essay introduces the topic of Shakespearean productions in new electronic artforms, Richard Finkelstein’s contribution follows with a detailed examination of YouTube Shakespeare set specifically in the

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niche of high school and college dormitory rooms. The microniche of what Finkelstein calls “Dormitory Shakespeare” allows the participants to find their own authentic relationship to the Bard, while simultaneously acknowledging a disconnected, or inauthentic, rapport with “Elizabethan” characters and cultures. With its motto of “Broadcast Yourself,” YouTube encourages, in the words of Stephen O’Neill, “the vitality and interpretative openness of Shakespeare.”25 Analyzing three video blogs on YouTube, Finkelstein discusses the connectivity that amateur actors cultivate between Shakespeare and themselves: this connectivity stems from the users’ improvisational methods, as young actors appropriate the playwright to create identities that are both fluid and self-referential. Matthew Kozusko explores the popular notion that Shakespeare’s characters are “relatable,” in the emerging sense of the word as familiar and accessible. Tracing this notion across a selection of recent marketing campaigns and film reviews, he suggests that the “relatability” of Shakespeare’s characters is fundamentally bound up in the process of appropriation. While the notion of Shakespeare’s accessibility is central to marketing campaigns (here Kozusko echoes Holland’s account of trailers as advertisements straining to recruit audiences), it struggles to counter the opposite perception, far more entrenched, that Shakespeare is difficult and inaccessible, whether in film, live theater, or education. This paradox is not unlike Christy’s assertion in Reading Shakespeare’s Characters (1992), that characters continue to exert a profound presence on readers, even though they, as rhetorical constructions, lack coherent unified, and accessible selves.26 Because Shakespeare’s language—and by extension, the particulars of his characters—is typically unfamiliar to new users, the invitation to make a personal connection to these timeless characters tends to yield renderings of Shakespeare that don’t square with academically sound readings and that are better understood as appropriations. The third and final section, “Future,” refers to Shakespeare in performance and appropriation through the more densely and urgently theorized approaches the contributors take as they tackle critical issues such as gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, nationalism and globalism, and Shakespeare in the Anthropocene. Alexa Alice Joubin looks at emerging spaces and imperatives for refiguring how we read gender and identity in Shakespeare. She focuses on gendered pronouns in Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957) and on gender presentation in The King and the Clown (Lee Joon-ik, 2005) in a survey of prominent filmic productions. Joubin ends with a genealogy of queer theory that highlights the indispensable role transgender studies assume in performance theory and Shakespearean appropriation. As Melissa E. Sanchez writes, “[Shakespeare’s] oeuvre offers a significant archive for examining past and present representations of desire and identification.”27

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Joubin’s essay, bridging past and present, provides a foreword looking approach to intersections of sex and gender in borrowings of Shakespeare. Lisa Starks’s essay addresses ethnic and racial concerns in post-Holocaust adaptations of The Merchant of Venice. Drawing on Anna Herzog’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s theories of memory, Starks investigates how performances of Shakespeare engage both conscious and ethical, or “immemorial” memory. These two forms of memory gesture toward a transcendent “memory loop,” one that incorporates historical realities and ethical awareness, defined by Levinas as the “said” and “saying.” Looking at several stage performances of Merchant of Venice, as well as Michael Radford’s 2004 cinematic version, Starks reads the staging of “Leah’s ring” as a metaphor for the circularity in which the two forms of related memory are linked. The theatrical and filmic interpretation of Jessica, along with Leah’s ring, powerfully elucidate representations of Jewish identity and heritage in Shakespeare’s play, ultimately showing how history and otherness come together with redemptive possibilities. Starks brings to the fore Christy’s posthumous coedited book with Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson, The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Shakespeare (2020), which demonstrates, in part, how transcultural and intercultural Shakespeares “can enable new conversations.”28 Sharon O’Dair and Stephen O’Neill close the collection of essays with a discussion of Shakespeare and the Anthropocene. O’Dair surveys the range of critical responses to Kristian Levering’s 2000 The King is Alive in order to challenge the trend of hope we can see in responses to Levering’s appropriation of King Lear. Seizing on one critic’s account of how the film’s setting evokes a sense of source depletion, both of renewable and nonrenewable natural resources, she uses this evocation to sketch the problem of depleted and exhausted resources—principally oil—in the Anthropocene. And the sketch is unsettling. It implicates as contributors to the depletion of resources, not just the performances at the heart of the Shakespeare industry, but the academics who write about those performances. Stephen O’Neill works with HBO’s Westworld to assess the role played by electronic agents in mediating users’ access to Shakespeare. He considers platforms like Twitter and YouTube, which shape how users consume and produce Shakespeare, as well as the search algorithms that determine which parts of Shakespeare users initially see on search engines that compute websites and keywords. O’Neill acknowledges the limits of Shakespeare for mapping out and understanding the Anthropocene and “the prospect of ecological apocalypse” but suggests that Shakespeare’s “increasingly digital forms” trouble both the humanism and the anthropocentrism that animates these anxieties. O’Neill and O’Dair both engage directly with Christy Desmet’s work, bringing the third section to a conclusion with a focus on Christy’s vast contributions to Shakespeare studies in appropriation, rhetoric, and character criticism.

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As a tribute to Christy, this volume rightfully highlights her work and career by showcasing the influence she had on students, colleagues, and collaborators. This influence is taken up directly in the bookends to the volume. In his foreword, Robert Sawyer—Christy’s student and earliest collaborator with Shakespeare and Appropriation (1999)—looks at the inception of Christy’s work in the field. And in her Afterword, Christy’s colleague and final collaborator, Sujata Iyengar, looks at the history and future of Borrowers & Lenders, the award-winning journal on Shakespeare and Appropriation Christy cofounded in 2007.

NOTES 1. Laura Kolb, Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 2. 2. Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar, “Adaptation, Appropriation, or What You Will,” Shakespeare, vol. 11 (2015): 5. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2015 .1012550 3. Diana E. Henderson, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 8. 4. Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press), xi. 5. Michael D. Bristol, Big-time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996), 10. 6. Christy Desmet, intro., Shakespeare and Appropriation, eds. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (London: Routledge, 1999), 3. 7. Desmet, Shakespeare and Appropriation, 2. 8. Desmet, Shakespeare and Appropriation, 3. 9. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2016), 3. 10. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 56. 11. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin, eds., Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2. 12. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 3. 13. Linda Hutcheon with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2013), 8. 14. See Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, “‘There and Back Again’: New Challenges and New Directions in Adaptation Studies,” in Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, eds. Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1–16. 15. Yvonne Griggs, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies (London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), 5. 16. Desmet and Iyengar, “Adaptation, Appropriation,” 8.

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17. Christ Desmet, “Alien Shakespeares, 2.0,” Société Française Shakespeare, vol. 35 (2017). https://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/3807. https://doi. org/10.4000/shakespeare.3807. See also Christy Desmet, “Youtube Shakespeare, Appropriation, and the Rhetorics of Invention,” in OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation, ed. Daniel Fischlin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 53–75. 18. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, eds. The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave), 3. 19. Desmet, “Alien Shakespeares, 2.0.” Rhizome theory draws on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. For its use in Shakespeare studies, see Douglas Lanier, “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value,” in Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, eds. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 21–40. 20. Christy Desmet, “Appropriation 2.0,” in Shakespeare in our Time, eds. Dymphna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), 239. 21. Christy Desmet and Anne Williams, eds. Shakespearean Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 17. 22. Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey, eds. Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2017), 2. 23. See Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 24. Peter Holland, “Shakespeare Abbreviated,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 28. 25. Stephen O’Neill, Shakespeare and You Tube: New Media Forms of the Bard (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2014), 3. 26. See Christy Desmet, Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). 27. Melissa E. Sanchez, Shakespeare and Queer Theory (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2019), 15. 28. Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2020), 4.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Bristol, Michael D. Big-time Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1996. Bruhn, Jørgen, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, eds. Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Desmet, Christy. “Alien Shakespeares, 2.0.” Société Française Shakespeare 35 (2017). https://doi.org/10.4000/shakespeare.3877 Desmet, Christy. “Appropriation 2.0.” In Shakespeare in Our Time, edited by Dymphna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Introduction

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Desmet, Christy. Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Desmet, Christy. “Youtube Shakespeare, Appropriation, and the Rhetorics of Invention.” In OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation, edited by Daniel Fischlin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Desmet, Christy and Sujata Iyengar. “Adaptation, Appropriation, or What You Will.” Shakespeare 11 (2015), 1–10. Desmet, Christy and Robert Sawyer, eds. Shakespeare and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 1999. Desmet, Christy and Anne Williams, eds. Shakespearean Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009. Desmet, Christy, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2020. Desmet, Christy, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey, eds. Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2017. Fazel, Valerie M. and Louise Geddes, eds. The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2017. Griggs, Yvonne. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies: Adapting the Canon in Film, TV, Novels and Popular Culture. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Henderson, Diana E. Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. Hodgdon, Barbara. The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Holland, Peter. “Shakespeare Abbreviated.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, edited by Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Huang, Alexa and Elizabeth Rivlin, eds. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Hutcheon, Linda with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Kolb, Laura. Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Lanier, Douglas. “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, edited by Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. O’Neill, Stephen. Shakespeare and You Tube: New Media Forms of the Bard. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Sanchez, Melissa E. Shakespeare and Queer Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2016. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006.

Part I

PAST

Chapter 1

What’s in a Game? Handy-Dandy, War, and Foreign Relations in King Lear Jonathan Baldo

Yearly all boys seem to know the actual time for the revivification of a custom, whether it be of whipping tops, flirting marbles, spinning peg-tops, or playing tip-cat or piggy. This survival of custom speaks eloquently of the child influence on civilisation, for the conservation of the human family may be found literally portrayed in the pastimes, games, and songs of the children of our streets. —Percy B. Green, A History of Nursery Rhymes (1899)1

Of the numerous sources that Shakespeare appropriated in writing his plays, games and pastimes that he most likely knew from his Stratford childhood have received small attention. Like the diminutive people who play them, they are all too easily overlooked, even though references to them are abundant.2 According to Paul Brewster, “Shakespeare mentions nearly fifty different games and sports in the plays,”3 many of them children’s games. King Lear is especially replete with references to games of all kinds as well as nursery rhymes: not surprisingly, the play is bookended by references to second childhood. After the great breach opens in his family, one that he had sought to prevent but instead hastens, Lear announces that he had “thought to set my rest / On her [Cordelia’s] kind nursery” (1.1.124–5).4 Near the end of the play, Cordelia implores the gods, “Th’untuned and jarring senses, O, wind up / Of this child-changed father” (4.7.16–7). In the middle of King Lear, the myriad references to children’s rhymes and games contribute to the play’s overwhelming sense of regression at both 15

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a personal and political level. We witness the aged king returning to childhood, Edgar as “a poor, bare, forked animal” (3.4.) reverting to a pre-civilized condition, and Britain reverting to an early and primitive stage of its history: a severe regression in time that reflected the growing antiquarian movement in early Jacobean England and King James’s interest in the idea—or fiction—of an originally unified Britain.5 Even the gods are not immune from a childish reversion. Gloucester at his lowest point likens them to “wanton boys” who “kill us for their sport” (4.1.38–9). While the play may tempt us to regard such references with detachment, with mixed amusement and horror as the nation descends into a primitive, ferocious egotism and its king into second childishness, it ultimately refuses to grant us immunity, for the play is written in such a way as to fully implicate us in its references to childhood. The play begins and ends, I will argue, with the children’s game of handydandy: a game in which one player covertly takes a small object into both hands, closed upon one another, and then discreetly moves it into one hand, subsequently extending both. A second player guesses which hand contains the object. If that player guesses correctly, the two exchange roles. At the beginning of King Lear, a variant of handy-dandy is played between father and daughters; at the end, I will attempt to show that it is we who are being played. Games often have the effect of sublimating conflict, diverting or channeling violent antipathies into less violent ends and, through a mutually agreedupon set of rules, granting structure to experience. The game of flattery at the beginning of King Lear bypasses the condition of rules that are mutually agreed upon. Lear has apparently lived his entire life beyond the need for mutual agreement, as Cordelia’s “nothing” indirectly reminds us. Her “nothing” amounts to a rejection of the very game itself, a refusal to play or to play along. In the game invented by Lear, he symbolically extends two hands, one containing the better third of the kingdom and the other, nothing. This opening gambit echoes a game that Shakespeare plays with us at the end, as our affections and loyalties are tested. We face the disturbing prospect of choosing between divided loyalties: to an English army defending the realm from invasion and to a French force apparently led by Cordelia. Lear’s youngest daughter is confronted with an impossible choice at the beginning of the play; we face an equally impossible choice at the end. Furthermore, between its two published versions, the quarto of 1608 and folio of 1623, England’s relations with France flipped, as the former Huguenot Henri IV, or “Good King Henry,” was assassinated and replaced by a militant Catholic ruler. The probable revision of King Lear, I want to suggest, responds to a highly charged version of handy-dandy involving international politics and played on the world stage.

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CHILD’S PLAY The longer thou livest more fool thou art. —W. Wager, title of a black-letter book (1560)6

Shakespeare’s references to games are often more than passing allusions: rather, the games are sometimes woven into the very fabric of the play. Thus, the Dauphin’s gift of tennis balls in Henry V, intended as a mock, proves to be an invaluable gift of motivation, adding fuel to the English monarch’s desire to wage war against France. King Henry tells the ambassador that he perceives the meaning of the gift, but he reads it only in a personal sense: “[W] e understand him well, / How he comes o’er us with our wilder days, / Not measuring what use we made of them” (1.2.267–9).7 We may read further. Behind the personal insult to the king lies a national one, better grasped by the play’s Elizabethan audience, perhaps, than by the medieval monarch at the play’s center. The game of tennis originated in France, the continental import becoming increasingly popular in England during the reigns of the first Tudor monarchs, Henry VII and Henry VIII. Thus, the tennis balls may stand for not only the youthful prince’s wildness but also the precedence of French culture over English. England, home to a conquered people, had already lost the first set, if not the entire match, to France. Adults who indulge in giddy behavior in Shakespeare frequently provoke references to children’s games. The game of tops is referred to in several plays. In the Twelfth Night, evoking the giddiness produced by too much drink, Sir Toby blusters, “He’s a coward and a coistrel that will not drink to my niece till his brains turn o’ th’ toe, like a parish top” (1.3.38–40). In 2 Henry IV a reference to the childhood game of shoeing the wild mare, a game in which a youth is “pursued by his companions with the object of being [shod],”8 vividly epitomizes the kingdom’s wild mare, Prince Hal, who is about to be re-shod with a king’s footwear. The prince, according to Falstaff, loves Poins because he “rides the wild mare with the boys” (2.4.249).9 Children’s games also proliferate when madness is the issue. Hamlet invokes the game of blind man’s bluff, or “hoodman blind,” to his mother in the closet scene (3.4.75) and that of hide-and-seek when evading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s questions about the location of Polonius’s body: “hide Fox, and all after” (4.2.28, folio ed.). In a play that explores manifold forms of blindness, in which even in the most public of scenes so much remains hidden from view, the games seem an apt symbol of the many ways in which Hamlet, and indeed nearly all the play’s characters, fairly “burst in ignorance” (1.4.46).

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King Lear begins with the familiar courtly game of flattery, with a twist. The impression at the beginning of the play is of a new and unknown game whose rules are known only to the king. The play contains references to other adult games and sports as well, including football, cards, and dice. Kent trips Goneril’s servant Oswald and spurns him as a “base football player” (1.4.85). Football was a rough and tumble, potentially deadly game in Shakespeare’s time, not the “beautiful game” we know it as today. When asked by Lear, “What hast thou been?” Edgar as Poor Tom says he was a “serving-man”: “Wine loved I deeply, dice dearly” (3.4.83, 88–9). His half-brother Edmund alludes to a card game when he says in a soliloquy, “And hardly shall I carry out my side”: “to carry out a side” meant to carry out the game with your partner successfully.”10 It is to children’s games, however, that the play assigns the most important roles. King Lear may appropriate more materials from childhood in the form of both games and rhymes than any other play by Shakespeare. For Bennett Simon, King Lear’s many references to “childish games,” especially in the Fool’s songs, “a mixture of taunting and therapy,” indicate “Lear’s inability to recognize the realities of aging, mortality, and separation.”11 The Fool laments, “That such a king should play bo-peep, / And go the fools among” (1.4.168–9). Whether the equivalent of peekaboo (“a nursery amusement, which consisted in peeping from behind something, and crying ‘Bo!’”12) or hide-and-seek, “bo-peep” refers to a game either for or by children before it became documented as the famous nursery rhyme, Little Bo Peep, about a child sheep keeper who loses a sheep.13 Simon speculates that if the Fool is indeed referencing the famous nursery rhyme derived from the game, then it is a highly condensed and complex allusion: Lear is at once and alternately both shepherd and lost sheep. His daughters were originally his sheep, and he is lost as a leader. As a (female) shepherd, he is weak and impotent. Shall he meekly await the sheep’s return home, hoping that they will be both penitent and joyful to be reconciled with him? He is also a shepherd who does not know how many sheep he has or wants. Is Cordelia one of them, or only Goneril and Regan?14

Insofar as it evokes the game of peekaboo, the allusion raises the question, “Who is the nursemaid or mother, and who the baby? Lear, again, alternately takes both roles, mother and baby, playing a game of appearance and disappearance.”15 Considered in light of the Fool’s later reference to “bo-peep,” Lear’s lines to Cordelia—“Hence, and avoid my sight” (1.1.125) and to Kent—“Out of my sight!” (1.1.158)—seem like a particularly cruel version of the game played by grown-ups with babies. Edgar probably alludes to the similar nursery rhyme “Little Boy Blue,” thought by many to be about

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Cardinal Wolsey and his fall from royal favor, as evidenced in the lines “Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd? / Thy sheep be in the corn; / And for one blast of thy minikin mouth / Thy sheep shall take no harm” (3.6.41–4).16 According to Arden editor R. A. Foakes, Edgar as Poor Tom “may be glancing at Lear as a ruler (shepherd) whose subjects have gone astray.”17 Edgar’s line “Pillicock sat on Pillicock hill” (3.4.75) is most likely an early version of the nursery rhyme, “There Was an Old Woman Who Lived Under a Hill.”18 Although it is not usually glossed this way, Edmund’s repetition of the word “base” in the lines, “Why brand they us/ With base? With baseness, bastardy? Base, base?” (1.2.9–10) might very well evoke the popular children’s game of “Base,” to which Shakespeare refers in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Cymbeline, and Venus and Adonis, while Spenser alludes to it in The Fairie Queene (Book V, canto 8). As he turns the word over in his mind, it revolves from adjective (“base”) to noun (“baseness”), and the apparently redundant “Base, base?” may perform a similar turn. Paul Brewster describes the early modern version of the game known as “prison base” as follows: “the members of the one group try to make prisoners of those of the other, and keep them in a special place. They can be released by their comrades if the latter are able to approach near enough to touch them.”19 All versions of base involve two parties or groups, each “having a base or home, as it is usually called, to themselves.”20 According to T. F. Thiselton Dyer, the base was played by grown men as well as by children. It was popular enough that in the reign of Edward III it was “prohibited to be played in the avenues of the palace at Westminster during the session of Parliament, because of the interruption it occasioned to the members and others in passing to and fro as their business required.”21 By means of a gesture (perhaps simply extending hands),22 or movement of the body, Edmund’s line might recall this game and express his own state of exile and bitterness at being deprived of a “home base.” As his father informs Kent, “He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again” (1.1.31–2). The childhood game in King Lear that is most revealing, however, is that of “handy-dandy.” It is referred to only once by Shakespeare, in the extraordinary recognition scene between Lear and Gloucester. Handy-dandy crystallizes nearly all of the plays’ dominant images and concerns: injustice, inversion, the eclipse of sight, the compulsion to choose, and, ultimately, nothingness. It is the game that gives the game away, in a manner of speaking. As Lear plays with the blind Gloucester, we may very well recognize our own involvement and implication in the game. James O. Halliwell-Phillipps writes of handy-dandy, “Sometimes the game is played by a sort of sleight of hand, changing the article rapidly from one hand into the other, so that the looker-on is often deceived,

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and induced to name the hand into which it is apparently thrown. This is what Shakespeare alludes to by changing places.”23

The extension of hands was accompanied by one of the following rhymes: “Handy dandy, riddled ro, / Which hand will you have, high or low?” or “Handy-dandy, Jack-a-dandy, / Which good hand will you have?”24 I will attempt to show how the game powerfully connects internal concerns with external ones, patterns of imagery with contemporary historical developments. In particular, handy-dandy serves as an image of foreign relations between Britain and France in the early years of James’s reign and even as a commentary on its author’s putative revision of the play between the quarto and folio editions. A SHOW OF HANDS One image that continually changes hands, so to speak, over the course of the play is that of hands themselves.25 According to Quintilian, “As for the hands, without which all action would be crippled and enfeebled, it is scarcely possible to describe the variety of their motions, since they are almost as expressive as words. For other portions of the body merely help the speaker, whereas the hands may almost be said to speak.” (Book XI.III.85–6)26

Hands join the extremes of our emotional lives. In the play they are used for supplication, prayer, and betrothal; for expressing promise, trust, loyalty, submission, friendship, solidarity, love, commitment; for supporting, guiding, and restraining; for offering sustenance; for striking, waging war, wielding weapons, plucking beards, grasping, rejecting, banishing, dividing the kingdom,27 putting out eyes, and seizing power.28 Lear’s reference to the children’s game of handy-dandy marks a prominent moment in a good deal of stage business and rhetoric having to do with hands. To grasp the full importance of the game it is helpful to see it as fitting a pattern of references not only to childhood and children’s games but also to hands.29 Most references to hands toward the beginning of the play suggest their capacity for violence and a pervasive thirst for power and control. The imagery of hands then moves through a phase where hands play alternating benevolent and malevolent roles, only to end on a note of love, reverence, and benediction. In the opening scene, Cordelia’s hand is the prize sought by the rival suitors France and Burgundy. Even in the context of a betrothal, hands are subtly associated with grasping, compulsion, and possession. The word appears twice in connection with the Duke of Burgundy’s suit (1.1.100–2, 243–6) and not at all in connection with the King of France. In the scene immediately

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following, “hand” in the sense of “handwriting” becomes tainted by deception and murderous intent. Edgar’s “hand,” forged by Edmund, incriminates him in a supposed parricidal plot: “It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is not in the contents” (1.2.67–8).30 Turning Regan’s hands into agents of vengeance against Goneril, Lear predicts, “When she shall hear this of thee with her nails / She’ll flay thy wolvish visage” (1.4.299–300). When Lear protests seeing his servant (a disguised Kent) in the stocks, Regan and Goneril join hands to express solidarity. “O, Regan, will you take her by the hand?” to which Goneril responds, “Why not by the hand, sir?” (2.2.383–4). As Foakes observes, this gesture has the twin effects of “symbolizing their union, and recalling the visual image of Burgundy taking and relinquishing Cordelia’s hand as in promise of marriage.”31 The next reference to hands in the play continues this pattern of linking them to darker purposes. Referring to the crimes that seek to remain concealed from the gods, Lear mocks, “Hide thee, thou bloody hand” (3.2.53). We wait for nearly half of the play for the gesture of the handshake, which here serves as the sign of a pledge.32 In a brief scene between Kent and an anonymous “Gentleman,” the latter urges, as the sign of a commitment or promise, “Give me your hand” (3.1.46), after Kent has entrusted him with his purse and a ring to confirm the still disguised Kent’s identity, in case the Gentleman were to encounter Cordelia. The handshake becomes a token of the trust that seems to be in short supply throughout Lear’s kingdom. From this point on, the darker associations of hands alternate with restorative ones. Their association with betrayal returns in Lear’s complaint to Kent: “Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand / For lifting food to’t?” (3.4.15–16). The benevolent side of hands appears just a few lines later, when in response to the Fool’s “Help me, help me!” Kent responds, “Give me thy hand” (3.4.40–1). In the same scene, in a self-accusatory speech Edgar as Poor Tom describes himself as “bloody of hand,” and he further associates hands with lechery: “Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets” (3.4.90, 94–5). Holding a letter stolen from Gloucester, Cornwall is told by the scheming Edmund, “If the matter of this paper be certain, you have mighty business in hand” (3.5.15–16). It is a vicious and violent hand that Cornwall’s anonymous servant seeks to restrain from blinding Gloucester: “Hold your hand, my lord” (3.7.71). Although he does not share many qualities with his wife, the Duke of Albany shares an association of hands with violence. He threatens Goneril, “Were’t my fitness / To let these hands obey my blood,/ They are apt enough to dislocate and tear / Thy flesh and bones” (4.2.64–7). Regan and Goneril both use the plural “hands” to designate power and control. Regan, for example, accuses Gloucester of aiding the kingdom’s enemies: “To whose hands / You have sent the lunatic king” (3.7.45–6). Goneril implies that she must take military action into her own hands, mocking the

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reversed gender roles she plays with her husband: “I must change names at home and give the distaff / Into my husband’s hands” (4.2.17–8). A diabolical version of the first rivalry in the play (between France and Burgundy) brews when Regan tells Oswald that Edmund is a more suitable a match for her than for her sister Goneril: “Edmund and I have talked, / And more convenient is he for my hand / Than for your lady’s” (4.5.32–4). In this checkered pattern of light and dark, of destructive and healing associations with hands, it is as though Shakespeare were playing handy-dandy with the very meaning of hands themselves. Toward the end of the play, which begins to trace Gloucester’s and Lear’s revivals or restorations to life, if not to rule and property, the very imagery of hands is resuscitated. They begin to show a consistent pattern of association with help and healing. Gloucester says to Lear during their recognition scene, “O let me kiss that hand,” to which Lear responds, “Let me wipe it first, it smells of mortality” (4.6.128–9). This shows that Lear has dissociated his royal hand from what he had known it to be, a sign of absolute authority, which it bears in medieval English uses of “hand” to mean something like an agent of authority. Gloucester’s gesture of kissing the hand of his sovereign implicitly seeks to restore Lear to sovereignty and Lear’s hand to a sign of command: the traditional gesture of an officeholder of loyalty and fealty to a sovereign.33 Lear, however, resists. The hand must be wiped clean not only of its festering mortal smell, but also of its association with obedience and command in order to become a sign of connection and love. When hands return momentarily in this scene to their once dominant association with violence, it is in the context of restraint. “Thou, rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand,” Lear directs an imagined constable about to whip a vagabond (4.6.156). In restraining the imaginary beadle, he is also restraining the established association of hands with injustice, assault, brutality, and betrayal. When a Gentleman catches up with Lear, he instructs an attendant, “Lay hand upon him” (4.6.184), which sounds like restraint (as indeed Lear thinks he has now been taken prisoner) but is in fact a token of love. It is Oswald’s hand, ironically described by Gloucester as “friendly,” that threatens the old man’s life: “Now let thy friendly hand/ Put strength enough to’t” (4.6.226–7). Of all the references to hands toward the end of the play, it is Edgar’s refrain of “Give me thy hand” that rings most memorably. A disguised Edgar urges his blind father, “Give me your hand,” and we know they clasp by Gloucester’s urging, “Let go my hand” (4.6.25, 27). Edgar’s line, by the way, is echoed a few lines later by his direction, “Give me your arm. / Up, so. How is’t? Feel you your legs?” after Gloucester has complained about his lack of eyes (4.6.60, 64–5). Hands form part of the broken body of Gloucester, imagined to have fallen, in a parade of body parts referred to by Edgar: eyes, hands, arms, legs, noses. The rhetorical division of the body is appropriate,

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given the humpty-dumpty nature of Gloucester’s “fall,” which is both imaginary (physical) and real (psychological). As his father’s emotional surgeon, it falls to Edgar to reassemble the broken parts of his father back into something resembling a whole. Edgar will repeat, “Give me your hand; / I’ll lead you to some biding” (4.6.219–220) and “Give me your hand. / Far off methinks I hear the beaten drum” (4.6.279–80). After the forces supporting Lear have been defeated, Edgar urges his father, “Away, old man, give me thy hand, away! / King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta’en. / Give me thy hand; come on!” (5.2.5–7). As Lear is restored to himself, hands are restored to a sign of benevolence at the end of the play. After a daze Lear wonders where he has been and where he is, he questions his own identity by questioning the ownership of his own hands: “I will not swear these are my hands” (4.7.55), which he seeks to confirm with a pinprick.34 Cordelia then instructs her father, “O look upon me, sir, / And hold your hands in benediction o’er me!” (4.7.57–8). In this image of Lear’s hands uplifted in prayer,35 they have come a long way since Regan’s “robbers hands” by which she plucks Gloucester by the beard (3.7.40) and Cornwall’s, which steal the old man’s sight. As the imagery of hands makes its tortuous journey toward redemption, the game of handy-dandy plays a signal role, encouraging audiences to imagine alternate scenarios not only for the play but for their country: in this respect, perhaps, it serves as an apt symbol of Shakespeare’s stagecraft itself. Bruce Smith writes of Gloucester’s “I see it feelingly” that the adverb within the line “insinuates touch as the one dependable medium in a world where appearances have deceived, where sight and sound have disjoined, where words have been used as physical weapons.”36 Seeing is eclipsed not only for Gloucester, but in a larger sense as well. After Gloucester is blinded, touch begins to be regarded with a kind of reverence, as words progressively fail toward the end of the play, reduced to either a childlike simplicity or a stammering repetition. Edgar’s repeated “Give me your hand” drives home the point that hands and touch may take precedence oversight, especially but not exclusively for the blind Gloucester. The eye, as the sense organ most associated with intellection or thought in the English language (both “history” and “idea,” for instance, are rooted in the Greek idein, to see), appears to have been dethroned by hands. It has abdicated control, much like Lear, with language giving way to gesture and the mind surrendering its control of the body. Like Lear’s dominion, that of the eye has been severely reduced by the end of the play. As Gary Taylor observes, in the play’s (anti)climax, “Everything takes place offstage; the audience sees nothing; like Gloucester, it can only sit and listen.”37 Harry Levin has shown how the audience is in a sense as blind as Gloucester as we watch the cliff scene between Gloucester and Edgar unfold, not knowing as we do whether the two stand at the cliffs of Dover or whether the cliffs have been imaginatively reproduced by Edgar’s

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language.38 As in the children’s game that Lear has refashioned as a powerful symbol of social inversion and potentially of revolt, the sense of sight has surrendered control of its kingdom and must now be rescued by touch. And in that game it is hands that both frustrate and command the eye, concealing the desired object from view until the moment of revelation.

A PLAY THAT STOPS AT NOTHING In one of King Lear’s several recognition scenes that, as Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard observe, come either “too soon or too late, are avoided, aborted, or ineffectual,”39 the blinded Gloucester responds to Lear’s rantings: “O ruined piece of nature, this great world / Shall so wear out to naught” (4.6.130–1). The Globe Theatre had been famously reduced to “this wooden O” by the Chorus of Henry V, but as in everything else, King Lear goes one step further, figuring not just the Globe but “the great globe itself” (Prospero) as a grand “naught,” a zero writ large.40 A few lines later not only the ultimate object, the world, but the all-unseeing subject will be similarly reduced. Commanded to read a document, Gloucester protests, “What? With the case of eyes?” to which Lear responds, with the chiastic “Oh ho,” a phrase that is as round as an eye socket or a coin. It is followed by “Are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light, yet you see how this world goes” (4.6.141–4). Gloucester’s empty eye sockets become ciphers, and the human face itself a numerical sum written in blood: a shocking pair of naughts or zeroes, an emphatically doubled version of the play’s “nothing.” Perhaps the bloodied abacus of Gloucester’s face suggests to the king a macabre pun on “countenance” (“you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master,” Kent tells Lear, 1.4.27–8).41 Through Lear’s juxtaposition of eye sockets and coins, Gloucester’s missing eyes become symbols of the poverty whose conditions the play so relentlessly explores: actual poverty, to be sure, but also poverties of the sensory, affective, and spiritual kinds.42 Yet Gloucester immediately establishes that, even lacking eyes in his head and money in his purse, he does not suffer from emotional poverty. Instead he startles us with the uncharacteristically poetic line, “I see it feelingly.” Throughout most of the play he had seemed to possess a rather pedestrian mind. It is as if the formerly prosaic speaker has been hurt into poetry, as Auden said of Ireland’s effect on Yeats in his elegy to the poet (“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”).43 Gloucester delivers the memorable, punning line (meaning both “as a blind man, I see by feeling” and “I see with a new depth of feeling”) to one who seems shockingly devoid of empathic feeling: a king

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who thus far has offered only prolific wordplay rather than compassion and comfort to his friend. In short, Lear and Gloucester seem to have changed places, handy-dandy: the blind man recognizing the other while the sighted character apparently fails at recognition. Having changed places, Lear responds to Gloucester’s line with a speech about changing places: What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? (4.6.146–50)

For the blinded Gloucester, Lear adapts a game that ordinarily turns on seeing and not-seeing to the auditory sense. It is especially intriguing that between the quarto and folio versions of the play, the justice and the thief become reversed syntactically. The 1608 quarto reads, “which is the thief, which is the justice”; the folio inverts the order to read, “which is the justice, which is the thief.” It is as though Shakespeare, in revising the text of Lear, were playing a game of handy-dandy. The inversion calls attention to a larger dilemma, for in Shakespeare’s deft hands, the reference to the game is hard to pin down. To some it alludes to the brutally oppressive conditions of the poor; to others, it suggests the unnatural inversion of hierarchically ordered social and familial relationships, with daughters ruling their father and a fool instructing his king. Lear’s reference to the children’s game may bear regressive or progressive implications: perhaps, in the manner of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ostensibly conformist sentiments bearing latent subversive ramifications. Handy-dandy, in other words, is an apt image of the game’s own binary significance to the play. The game brings us round to the beginning of the exchange, back to Gloucester’s “naught.” Handydandy rounds it out by circling back, as if the whole conversation between Lear and Gloucester were trying to trace the figure zero. For in the game of handy-dandy, one of the hands, it must be remembered, bears “nothing,” that all-powerful word whose wintry howl may be heard throughout the play. The quarto and folio versions of Lear play handy-dandy not only with a phrase—“which is the thief, which is the justice”—but also with the larger question of England’s war with France. The game reflects on the peculiar conditions of war in the play, and especially on the divergent ways in which the war is interpreted in the quarto and folio texts. Handy-dandy may stand as a fitting symbol for Anglo-French relations in the play, and perhaps even for the whole history of such relations dating back to the Norman Conquest.

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THE HANDY-DANDY OF BRITAIN’S FOREIGN AFFAIRS King Lear was written for a patron whose motto was beati pacifici, blessed are the peacemakers, and who regarded the prospect of war with dread. Although none of Shakespeare’s plays paints an unequivocally heroic picture of war, his Jacobean plays seem particularly skeptical about martial values and the value of military action. Among these, King Lear gives an especially confusing account of war, leaving us unsure of the composition of the force that invades England toward the end of the play. The folio and quarto versions of the play allow different answers to this question, as Taylor has argued, treating “the nationality of Cordelia’s army in consistently different ways.”44 Whereas the quarto repeatedly reminds audiences that “Cordelia’s army may be primarily French, . . . the Folio encourages us to forget it, systematically removing verbal and visual reminders of the French presence, so that Cordelia seems to lead not an invasion but a rebellion.”45 The folio leaves the question of the invasion much more ambiguous “because it does not explicitly state who is making the invasion, though it is clearly led by Cordelia.”46 Taylor has suggested that the differences between the two versions were the result of the playwright’s revision, and further that those revisions were made “to strengthen the structure of act IV . . . by cutting superfluities . . . and strengthening the narrative line, largely by accelerating and clarifying the movement toward war.”47 At least as significant, however, are extraliterary considerations: certain historical developments that might have caused the playwright to reconsider staging an invasion of Britain by a large French army of liberation. What events influencing Anglo-French relations after the publication of the quarto in 1608, the so-called Pied Bull quarto, might help to account for changes in the depiction of war in King Lear? In the first years of James’s reign during which King Lear was written and staged, relations between England and France were cooperative owing to a shared interest in backing the Dutch in their revolt against Spain.48 James needed French diplomatic cooperation in order to help pressure Spain to accept a peace with Bohemia, which hampered his ability to lend support to French Huguenots: “The French government naturally resented his occasional attempts to make representations on the Huguenots’ behalf, and whenever James wanted French diplomatic cooperation . . . he had to cease to be their advocate.”49 Because of James’s commitment to peace and the longstanding mutual mistrust between England and France, Maurice Lee, Jr. maintains that “the opportunity for the development of a working entente” between the two countries in the early years of the new reign “was let slip.”50 The Huguenot monarch who later converted to Catholicism, Henri IV, was assassinated in 1610 by a fanatical Catholic a day after the coronation of his second wife, Marie de’Medici, as Queen of France. Marie subsequently assumed the regency for her son, Louis XIII, from 1610–1617. During this

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period, France abandoned its traditional anti-Habsburg policies, assumed a pro-Spanish stance, and suppressed Protestantism at the urging of Italian representatives of the Roman Catholic Church. The gap between the publication of the quarto and folio saw worsening relations between England and France that might have caused Shakespeare to rethink and diminish France’s role in the invasion of England in King Lear.51 Even though Henri IV had renounced his Protestant faith for pragmatic reasons, in order to help maintain the peace in France, a largely Protestant English audience in 1606 would have regarded a France ruled by “Le Bon Roi Henri” or “Good King Henry,” as he was sometimes known, as a much more likely and palatable ally than Marie de’ Medici’s France. Henri himself had very nearly been a casualty of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. He had led Huguenots against the royal forces during France’s Wars of Religion (1562–1598), and as King of France (1589–1610) he put an end to those wars with the Edict of Nantes (1598), which guaranteed French Protestants considerable rights and protections within the Catholic kingdom. Henri’s aim in promulgating the edict was to promote civil unity. At the time King Lear was first staged, France was ruled by a king who, like England’s Scottish monarch, sought to promote religious peace and toleration and bring civil unity to a divided nation. A few years later and, handy-dandy, France had arguably become the more internally divided of the two nations. Even before Henri’s assassination in 1610, there was fear of a renewal of religious hostilities in France. Soon after his accession to the English throne, James worried about Henri’s health, seriously impaired following a hunting accident: “Since his heir was only three years old and of uncertain legitimacy it was feared that France could be plunged back into civil war at any time.”52 At least some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries might have thought that France now bore more than a little resemblance to Lear’s fractured kingdom and would have seemed less likely a cure for Britain’s internal divisions, motivating Shakespeare to obscure the nationality of Cordelia’s army. The popular children’s game to which Lear alludes might also evoke another aspect of international affairs: James’s Project for Union. Leah Marcus, among others, has sought to puzzle out King Lear’s implicit engagement with James’s principal political aim, but France’s opposition to the union is rarely mentioned in discussions of the play.53 As Bruce Galloway points out, the possible statutory union of England and Scotland was hotly debated outside as well as inside the kingdom, threatening as it did the strength of the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France. Such a union became in the summer and autumn of 1604 the subject of intense diplomatic activity, involving particularly the French ambassador. De Beaumont regarded the union in the same light as many of the tracts—namely, as a project strongly detrimental to French interests. In practice, it would remove the threat of Scots

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involvement in Anglo-French disputes, or even switch that involvement to support for England. This might make English policy toward France more aggressive, and effective. Union could also be used by England as a lever to break the formal diplomatic links between France and Scotland, the “Auld Alliance.”54

The possible weakening of the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland was particularly troubling to the French in light of James’s policy of pursuing peace with Spain, which had the effect of isolating France diplomatically. The French ambassador urged King Henri to finance “a specifically anti-unionist party among the more malcontent Scots nobles.”55 Henri called the Auld Alliance France’s “bridle on England”56 and he was afraid to lose the benefits of the alliance, although he decided to take a more cautious approach than the one advocated by his ambassador De Beaumont. As it turned out, “French fears of danger to her Scots Alliance were justified.” English members of the Anglo-Scots Union Commission frequently brought up as arguments against union “the inequity of Scots trading privileges and naturalisation in France.”57 Therefore, one of the greatest ironies to the French subplot to the play, borrowed from the old play King Leir, is that the very nation that in the quarto is credited with putting the kingdom back together actually feared and strenuously opposed the union of England and Scotland. Many English, in turn, disliked Scotland’s French connection and, much like the French but for opposite reasons, mistrusted the Project for Union. The French opposed the Union on the grounds that it would cause it to lose its old advantages with Scotland; English merchants feared that “a Scots domination in Anglo-French trade was likely to result from union.”58 Within this complicated scenario, with both the English and the French opposing the Scottish King’s push for the statutory union of England with Scotland, Shakespeare wrote a play in which an English audience is asked to do the impossible: to imaginatively “change places, and, handy dandy” cheer on an invading French army, in the quarto version at least. Shakespeare’s history plays had staged repeated English invasions of medieval France; King Lear reverses that familiar scenario, staging an invasion of England by its perennial enemy. Which is the justice, which is the thief? In the play, at least, the thieves are English—two factious daughters and two sons-in-law who battle for control of the kingdom—and the just cause appears to lie with France. Furthermore, the motivation for invasion is inverted. In Macbeth, a divided kingdom invites the prospect of conquest from without. Henry V himself took advantage of a divided France to wage his expansionist war, although that historical circumstance is obscured in the earlier play. In King Lear, internal division indeed invites an invader, but one whose purpose, presumably, is the restoration of England to itself: a political and national equivalent of Cordelia’s psychological action of restoring her father to himself.59

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GAMING THE AUDIENCE Finally, the ending of the play resembles nothing so much as the children’s game of handy-dandy. Shakespeare in many respects departs from the earlier anonymous play of King Leir (entered in the Stationer’s Register on May 14, 1594, published in quarto in 1605), as Jay Halio notes in his New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the play: besides presenting Cordelia’s death as a murder rather than a suicide, Shakespeare “introduced several new characters and episodes that King Leir lacks, such as Lear’s madness, the storm, Oswald, and the Fool.”60 Moreover, the Gloucester subplot with Edgar and Edmund appears nowhere in the earlier play. But nothing prepares audiences for the radical departure from the ending of the earlier play or indeed from his source material in Holinshed. In the anonymous play, Lear lives and is restored to his kingdom. In Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), after an army led by Cordeilla and her husband Aganippus restore Leir to his kingdom, Leir rules for two years. On his death, Cordeilla inherits the throne and rules for another five years before her nephews rise up against her. The shocking swerve away from his sources serves to remind us that Lear’s fate is quite literally in Shakespeare’s hands. One hand holds the keys to the kingdom; the other, nothing. Playing handy-dandy with his audience, he challenges us to choose. And if we happen to know the legend of Lear—as many doubtless would in 1606, if not from the earlier Queen’s Men’s play or from Holinshed, then from Spenser’s The Fairie Queene or Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia Regum Brittaniae—we are almost certain to guess wrong. As if displaying his wiles, Shakespeare opens the hand we most likely chose to reveal an empty palm. Whether the play’s final lines are spoken by Edgar (as in the 1608 quarto) or Albany (as in the folio), the empty hand is a fit symbol for a kingdom that no one wishes to inherit, no one eager or even willing to accept power and bear the crown. In James Baldwin’s great story “Sonny’s Blues,” Sonny’s brother, the narrator, hears outside his classroom one of the boys “whistling a tune at once complicated and very simple.” Perhaps Baldwin’s line applies to all art that aspires to appeal to both hearts and minds: the one demanding simplicity, the other delighting in complexity. In any event, the game of handy-dandy in King Lear strikes me as such a tune. At once very simple and complicated, handy-dandy manages to synthesize all of the place-swapping implied by Lear’s image of being “bound upon a wheel of fire”—fathers asked to obey daughters, the old expected to obey the young, a fool instructing his king, a king asked to obey his subjects, and a French army taking on the role of liberator against the English—as well as the hollow sounding and resounding of Cordelia’s, the Fool’s, and Lear’s shared leitmotif of “nothing”: apt, impoverished shorthand for the manifold forms of poverty in the play, including the

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richest ones. For as Kent reminds us, “Nor are those empty-hearted, whose low sounds / Reverb no hollowness” (1.1.154–5). NOTES 1. Percy B. Green, A History of Nursery Rhymes (London: Greening & Co., 1899), 58–9. 2. A version of this paper was presented at the Shakespeare Institute’s International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford-upon-Avon, July 2018. It was shared among the participants of Silvia Bigliazzi’s marvelous and memorable seminar, “‘Invad[ing] us to the skin’: Staging Territory and Invasion in King Lear.” Christy Desmet was particularly fond of the biennial International Shakespeare Conference, and I continue to associate that meeting with Christy’s lively and intelligent presence. In 2018, she could not attend due to failing health, and we learned the tragic news of her untimely passing in the middle of that weeklong meeting in Stratford. 3. Paul Brewster, “Games and Sports in Shakespeare,” in The Study of Games, eds. E. M. Avedon and B. Sutton-Smith (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1971), 27. 4. Unless otherwise noted, all citations from the play refer to the Arden Third Series edition, ed. R. A. Foakes (Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997). Comparisons of the quarto and folio editions refer to King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition, ed. René Weis, Longman Annotated Texts (London and New York: Longman, 1993). 5. On the early history of antiquarianism in England, see W. H. Herendeen, “William Camden: Historian, Herald, and Antiquary,” Studies in Philology 85 (1988): 192–210. 6. Cited in Green, 107–8. 7. All references to the plays are to the Arden Third Series editions, unless otherwise noted. 8. Brewster, 43. 9. In his Third Arden Series edition of the play, James C. Bulman reads the reference differently, as a reference to either see-saw or a variant of leap frog: King Henry IV, Part 2 (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2017), 271. 10. T. F. Thiselton-Dyer, Folk-lore of Shakespeare (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1884), 401. 11. Bennett Simon, Tragic Drama and the Family: Psychoanalytic Studies from Aeschylus to Beckett (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 110. 12. Thiselton-Dyer, 399–400. 13. Iona and Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 93; Simon, 111. 14. Simon, 111–2. 15. Simon, 111–2. 16. Opie, 99. 17. King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Third Series (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997), 289. 18. Opie, 432.

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19. Brewster, 41. 20. Joseph Strutt, Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, revised ed., ed. John Charles Cox (London: Methuen, 1903), 68. 21. Thiselton-Dyer, 397. 22. According to Strutt, The performance of this pastime requires two parties of equal number, each of them having a base or home, as it is usually called, to themselves, at the distance of about twenty or thirty yards. The players then on either side taking hold of hands, extend themselves in length, and opposite to each other, as far as they conveniently can, always remembering that one of them must touch the base; when any one of them quits the hand of his fellow and runs into the field, which is called giving the chase, he is immediately followed by one of his opponents; he is again followed by a second from the former side, and he by a second opponent; and so on alternately, until as many are out as choose to run, every one pursuing the man he first followed, and no other; and if he overtake him near enough to touch him, his party claims one towards their game, and both return home. They then run forth again and again in like manner, until the number is completed that decides the victory (68).

23. James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales: A Sequel to the Nursery Rhymes of England (London: John Russell Smith, 1849), 117. 24. Halliwell-Phillipps, 116. 25. The first books in English that are devoted entirely to gesture are those of John Bulwer (1606–56): Chirologia: or the Naturall Language of the Hand (1644) and Chironomia: or the Art of Manuall Rhetoricke (1644). 26. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, v. 4, Loeb Classical Library 127, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922), 289. 27. See the brilliant study by Farah Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment, Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), for the role of the hand in the division of the kingdom (79) and the banishment of Cordelia (86). 28. In a more general way, early modern actors may have used hand gestures to give one another their cues: in Darren Tunstall’s words, “to indicate ‘stop talking,’ or ‘my/your turn to speak,’ or ‘I am (or I’m not) finished.’” Shakespeare and Gesture in Practice, Shakespeare in Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 67. See also Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page, Accents on Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2004). 29. Karim-Cooper does not mention handy-dandy in her otherwise thorough and brilliant account of hands on the Shakespearean stage. 30. Karim-Cooper connects this scene to the palm-reading in Antony and Cleopatra through the notion of reading someone’s character by means of the hand (22–3). 31. Foakes, 251. 32. According to Herman Roodenburg, “Shaking hands . . . clearly goes back to the sixteenth century at least,” in Britain as well as the Netherlands. “But its history is far from linear. The gesture was gradually displaced by more hierarchic ways of greeting or taking leave and even became a polemical instrument in the hands of the Quakers against all deference and worldly vanity. Then, as manners were relaxed, the handshake became popular again: first in England . . .” (178). “The Hand of

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Friendship’: Shaking Hands and Other Gestures in the Dutch Republic,” in A Cultural History of Gesture, eds. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 152–89. 33. John Bulwer writes in Chirologia: or, the Natural Language of the Hand (1644; rpt. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1974), “To apprehend and kiss the back of another’s hand is their natural expression who would give a token of their serviceable love, faith, loyalty, honorable respect, thankful humility, reverence, supplication, and subjection” (97). 34. Karim-Cooper discusses the relation of hands to identity: “according to early modern chiromantic theory, hands should, by their very appearance, speak volumes not only about the type of person you are but also the kind of life you will lead” (25). 35. On the use of hands in supplication and prayer in Shakespeare, see Tunstall, 60–5. 36. Bruce R. Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), 133. Karim-Cooper observes the close association between the senses of sight and touch in the early modern period: “sight was . . . viewed as a tactile, projectile form of sensing” (163). 37. Gary Taylor, “The War in King Lear,” Shakespeare Survey 33 (1981): 27. 38. Harry Levin, “The Heights and the Depths: A Scene from King Lear,” in Scenes from Shakespeare, ed. Gwynne B. Evans (New York: Routledge, 2013), 89–106. 39. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993), 223. 40. As Daniel Tammet observes, Shakespeare “became one of the first generation of English schoolboys to learn about the figure zero.” “Shakespeare’s Zero,” in Thinking in Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2012), 56. The textbook from which he would have learned arithmetic, Robert Recorde’s The Ground of Artes (1543), taught reckoning in Arabic numbers rather than Roman numerals. 41. The word “countenance” is used four times in the play: twice by Edmund, and twice by Kent. 42. In addition, the lines may recall the common practice of placing coins on the eyes of the deceased, and in so doing, reinforce the sense that Gloucester will continue to be denied the wished-for comforts of death. 43. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in Selected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 80–3. 44. Taylor, 31. 45. Taylor, 31. 46. Stuart Elden, “The Geopolitics of King Lear: Territory, Land, Earth,” Law and Literature 25, no. 2 (2013): 155. 47. Taylor, 28. 48. Maurice Lee, Jr., Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 271. 49. Lee, 272. 50. Lee, 271.

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51. Following Henri’s assassination England did not fear an ideological war with Catholic France: “it seemed more likely that domestic turmoil would immobilize her than that she would indulge in ideologically motivated foreign adventures.” Lee, 263–4. 52. Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth: The Rise of James of Scotland and the Struggle for the Throne of England (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005), 203. 53. See Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 148–59 for a brilliant reading of Lear in relation to James’s Project for Union. 54. Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland, 1603–1608 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1986), 58. 55. Galloway, 58. 56. Quoted in De Lisle, 77. 57. Galloway, 59. 58. Galloway, 70. 59. James’s leadership was marked by ambiguity and contradiction: uncertainty, for instance, about his own religious identity and that of his wife, Anne of Denmark, who attended private Catholic services while accompanying her husband to services of the reformed church. The early years of James’s reign might have seemed to many English a time of political handy-dandy, with the king challenging his subjects to guess his religious convictions and allegiance, and with the Scots and English trading places in power and privilege—or at least so many English noble families feared. See Albert J. Loomie, “King James I’s Catholic Consort,” Huntington Library Quarterly 34 (1971): 303–16. 60. Jay Halio, ed., The Tragedy of King Lear, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Auden, W. H. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” In Selected Poems. New York: Vintage Books, 1979: 80–3. Brewster, Paul. “Games and Sports in Shakespeare.” In The Study of Games, eds. E. M. Avedon and B. Sutton-Smith. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1971: 27–47. Bulman, James C., ed. King Henry IV, Part 2. Arden Third Series. London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2017. Bulwer, John. Chirologia: or, the Natural Language of the Hand. 1644; rpt. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974. De Lisle, Leanda. After Elizabeth: The Rise of James of Scotland and the Struggle for the Throne of England. New York: Ballantine Books, 2005. Elden, Stuart. “The Geopolitics of King Lear: Territory, Land, Earth.” Law and Literature 25 (2013): 147–65. Foakes, R. A., ed. King Lear. Arden Third Series. Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997.

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Galloway, Bruce. The Union of England and Scotland, 1603–1608. Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1986. Green, Percy B. A History of Nursery Rhymes. London: Greening & Co., 1899. Halio, Jay, ed. The Tragedy of King Lear. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard. Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales: A Sequel to the Nursery Rhymes of England. London: John Russell Smith, 1849. Herendeen, W. H. “William Camden: Historian, Herald, and Antiquary.” Studies in Philology 85 (1988): 192–210. Karim-Cooper, Farah. The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Lee, Jr., Maurice. Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Levin, Harry. “The Heights and the Depths: A Scene from King Lear.” In Scenes from Shakespeare, ed. Gwynne B. Evans. New York: Routledge, 2013: 89–106. Loomie, Albert J. “King James I’s Catholic Consort.” Huntington Library Quarterly 34 (1971): 303–16. Lupton, Julia Reinhard and Kenneth Reinhard. After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Marcus, Leah S. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Opie, Iona and Peter. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951. Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria, v. 4. Loeb Classical Library 127. Trans. H. E. Butler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922. Roodenburg, Herman, “‘The Hand of Friendship’: Shaking Hands and Other Gestures in the Dutch Republic.” In A Cultural History of Gesture, eds. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Simon, Bennett. Tragic Drama and the Family: Psychoanalytic Studies from Aeschylus to Beckett. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Smith, Bruce R. Phenomenal Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Stern, Tiffany. Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (Accents on Shakespeare). London: Routledge, 2004. Strutt, Joseph. Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, revised ed. Ed. John Charles Cox. London: Methuen, 1903. Tammet. Daniel. Thinking in Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2012. Taylor, Gary. “The War in King Lear.” Shakespeare Survey 33 (1981): 27–34. Thiselton-Dyer, T. F. Folk-lore of Shakespeare. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1884. Tunstall, Darren. Shakespeare and Gesture in Practice. Shakespeare in Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Weis, René, ed. King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition. Longman Annotated Texts. London and New York: Longman, 1993.

Chapter 2

Strawberry Hill The House that Hamlet Built Anne Williams

Christy Desmet and I were colleagues for more than three decades. While she devoted so much creative energy to Shakespearean appropriation, I worked on the Gothic tradition, which began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764). For some years I had been pondering his eccentric, multifaceted, and prolific life (1717–1797). His correspondence in the Yale edition occupies forty-eight hefty volumes, and he wrote about contemporary politics, gardening, English noble authors, a defense of Richard III, and a Shakespearean blank-verse tragedy, among others. From 1749 to 1776 he built Strawberry Hill, his fantasy of a “Gothic castle.” I regaled Christy (a canine lover) with tales of Horace’s dogs: Tory, King Charles Spaniel snatched by a wolf while crossing the Alps in 1739; Bettina, fatally fallen from a balcony in 1741; and Tonton, un-housebroken and ill-tempered, bequeathed to him by the Marquise du Duffand, along with a snuff box bearing the little dog’s portrait in gold. (His most famous pet, however, was a cat, “the pensive Selima,” in Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes.”) When Christy proposed that we coedit a collection of essays on “Shakespearean Gothic,” I decided to explore Walpole’s attraction to Hamlet, which he mentioned fifty-nine times in the Correspondence. Realizing that this play haunted him, I experienced myself what Horace meant when he coined the word “serendipity” in 1752. SHAKESPEARE’S PROTÉGÉ: A HEAD FILLED WITH GOTHIC STORY Horace Walpole’s most important literary legacy is his imaginary haunted house, the Castle of Otranto, which inspired an explosion of “Gothic” fiction. 35

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Ann B. Tracy introduces her “Index to Motifs” in The Gothic Novel: 1790– 1830 by noting that she had excluded “castle” from her list: “Castles . . . are so pervasive a device that no purpose can be served by the recitation of the two hundred novels that have them.”1 Though most of Walpole’s imitators are now forgotten, his Castle of Otranto has been in print since 1764. Few editors have failed to quote his testament to its origin, written to William Cole in February 1765: Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head like mine filled with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate . . . I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from . . . about six o’clock till half an hour after one in the morning.2

Walpole and Cole, an Anglican clergyman, regularly corresponded about the pains of gout and the pleasures of antiquarian research. Cole had already read Otranto, which begins when a giant helmet falls from the sky, killing Prince Manfred’s sickly son Conrad on his wedding day. Desperate for a male heir, Manfred pursues Conrad’s fiancée Isabella and in a mistakenly jealous rage stabs his daughter Matilda to death. Various other pieces of the armour materialize, and at last a gigantic ghost, fully armed, appears and pronounces that Manfred is not the rightful heir. His grandfather, the valet Ricardo, had murdered his master Alphonso, who returns to restore his line. The Castle of Otranto collapses and Manfred, bereft of his identity, retires to a “convent.”3 Thus Walpole’s belated “confession” reduces his nightmare—a dream so disturbing that it awakened him—to an amusing anecdote, already rationalized as a symptom of his interest in the medieval, that is, “Gothic” past. Most remarkably, however, he reveals that in writing to explicate his nightmare, he stumbled upon Freud’s method of dream interpretation: free association. Writing with no conscious intention of what to say, he produced a complex semi-rational web of improbable genealogies, family violence, and inherited guilt. Walpole remarks in his preface that he is disappointed by the banality of its apparent theme: “the sins of the fathers are visited on their children unto the third or fourth generation” (7). But in Otranto the Law of the Father appears as an inexorable, spectral, uncanny presence. Walpole declared that he could “recover” very little of his dream. But in its historical context the letter to Cole constitutes a “cover story.”

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Cole had already read the first edition, including Walpole’s first preface, which encloses his violent fantasy behind a series of defensive displacements. He poses as an anonymous editor publishing an unknown medieval text. Otranto, he writes, had been translated “from the purest Italian” by “William Marshal, Gent. from the text of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto.” “Found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England, it was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1539” (5). This strategy greatly expands the subtle defensiveness of his letter to Cole; his fantasy confesses that the law of legitimate patriarchal succession generates terror. His first preface also affirms his apparently irresistible impulse to conceal by confessing and confessing to conceal. He ends the preface by hinting that the Castle of Otranto shares the floor plan of Strawberry Hill, his private “Gothic castle” under construction since 1749: I cannot but believe that the groundwork of the story is founded on truth. The scene is undoubtedly laid in some real castle . . . The author seems frequently, without design, to describe the particular parts. The chamber, says he, on the right hand; the door on the left hand. . . . (8)

A dream is the most intimate genre possible, but Walpole distances himself both from the nightmare and the fantasy it inspired, as if compelled to confess its deeply personal meaning and at the same time to deny that it confesses anything at all personal. Otranto’s first edition (December 1764) sold out quickly; the second appeared in April 1765. Walpole’s much longer second preface deploys a different defensive strategy. He confesses authorship and concludes by declaring himself Shakespeare’s protégé: “The result of all I have said is to shelter my own daring under the cannon [sic] of the brightest genius this country, at least, has produced” (14).4 In subtitling the second edition “A Gothic Story,” he defiantly celebrates Shakespeare’s medieval “barbarity” that French neoclassical critics decried: ignorance of the “three unities,” a mixing of high and low characters, comedy and tragedy, poetry and prose, and above all, the inclusion of the supernatural. He attacks Voltaire, who had once praised, Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” and then changed his mind (10). But instead of teasing us that his imaginary Otranto follows the “groundwork” of Strawberry Hill, Walpole mocks Voltaire’s admiration for Racine’s couplet, “De son appartement cette porte est prochaine / Et cette autre conduit dans celui de la reine.” (According to Horace: “To Caesar’s closet through this door you come, / And t’other leads to the queen’s drawing room.”)5 Here Racine precisely describes another imaginary palace, that of the Roman emperor Titus, more ancient than Otranto, and even farther from Strawberry

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Hill. Decrying Racine as a pedant of floor plans, Walpole ventures on a Shakespearean reductio ad absurdum: Unhappy Shakespeare! hadst thou made Rosenkrantz inform his compeer Guildenstern of the ichnography of the palace of Copenhagen, instead of presenting us with a moral dialogue between the prince of Denmark and the gravedigger, the illuminated pit of Paris would have been instructed a second time to adore thy talents. (14)

Walpole’s technical term “ithnography” masks his previous term “groundwork.” But he unconsciously confesses that shadowy, indeterminate, haunted Elsinore is his ideal Shakespearean “shelter.” HORACE READS HAMLET Walpole displays his investment in Hamlet in an unpublished piece he later wrote protesting David Garrick’s omission of the graveyard scene from a recent production: The skull of Yorick and the accounts of his jests could have no effect but to recall fresh to the Prince’s mind the happy days of his childhood, and the court of the King his father, and then make him [see] his uncle’s reign in a comparative shew that must have rendered the latter odious to him . . . consequently the scene serves to whet his almost blunted purpose. Not to mention that the grave before him was destined to his love Ophelia. What incident in this scene but tends to work on his passions?6

This proto-psychoanalytic criticism contains a Freudian slip. The phrase “almost blunted purpose” does not belong in the graveyard scene, but is spoken by the ghost when urging his son to berate his mother Gertrude’s vile female sexuality (3.4.100).7 Hamlet begins with an armoured ghost commanding remembrance; Otranto ends with an armoured ghost “remembered.” Noting Walpole’s appropriation of Hamlet in Otranto, critics have often focused on the son’s tragic relation to his murdered father.8 But Marjorie Garber observes in Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers that “Hamlet is a play not only informed with the uncanny but also informed about it.”9 “The uncanny, Freud writes, has two causes: “beliefs that have been surmounted, and repressed complexes.”10 That the ghost reappears in Gertrude’s closet, though invisible to her, suggests that “repressed complexes” involve her. Horace’s uncanny mistake in commenting on the graveyard scene links it with Old Hamlet’s misogynist disgust.

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Gertrude, Old Hamlet declares, has married “that incestuous, that adulterate beast” who seduced “my most seeming-virtuous queen” (1.5.42; 46). Female sexuality is corrupt, dangerous: “So Lust, though to a radiant angel linked / Will sate itself in a celestial bed / And prey on garbage” (1. 5. 55–57). The ghost commands his son to slay his father’s usurper Claudius literally but his mother only figuratively, with words to wound her mind, not her body. As ordered, he “leave[s] her to Heaven” (1.5.86), to be judged by the most powerful father of all. Obeying the paternal prohibition of matricide, Hamlet resolves to “speak daggers but use none” (3.2.386). Hamlet’s words have indeed been sharply whetted. He eloquently excoriates Gertrude’s union with her brother-in-law: “In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty” (3. 4. 83–84). Thus Gertrude cries, “These words like daggers enter into mine ears” (3.4.86); “Oh Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain” (3.4.147). To which he bitterly responds, “O throw away the worser part of it / And live the purer with the better half” (3.4.148–149); “Assume a virtue if you have it not” (3.4. 58). He forbids her to return to Claudius’s bed and leaves, himself burdened by inherited guilt: “For this same lord / I do repent, but heaven hath pleased it so, / To punish me with this, and this with me” (3.4.156–158). The sins of the mother have been visited upon the son. Though patriarchy defines a woman as inferior, weak, carnal, irrational, dangerous, her sexual desire and her fertility are vital to its survival. But to give birth is also to give death. Hence Horace’s unconscious association of Gertrude’s closet with the graveyard. Having once acknowledged maternal desire as loathsome, in the graveyard scene he confronts death, such desire’s inevitable result. Yet this scene’s mixture of pathos and defensive laughter also exorcises Gertrude as an embodiment of terrible maternity. She reappears in Act 5 as the good woman reproducing patriarchy, strewing flowers on Ophelia’s grave: “Sweets to the sweet, Farewell / I hoped that thou should’st have been my Hamlet’s wife: / I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid” (5.1.240–242). Walpole’s confusion unlocks the imaginative matrix that birthed the Gothic novel. For Horace Walpole knew that his adored and long dead mother, Lady Walpole, was an unfaithful wife, another Gertrude.

ANOTHER GERTRUDE: HORACE WALPOLE’S FAMILY ROMANCE Eighteenth-century gossip whispered that Horace was not Sir Robert’s son. Born eleven years after the other Walpole children (including two males), he was physically, intellectually, and temperamentally quite different from the

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man whose name he bore. During those eleven years Sir Robert and his wife amicably led quite separate lives. Sir Robert’s biographer J.H. Plumb considers it highly unlikely that the two were briefly reconciled, because they were never in the same place nine months before Horace’s birth.11 Lady Walpole was notorious for her “gallantry”; she inspired the Lilliputian “Treasurer’s Lady” whose virtue Gulliver so hilariously defends in Gulliver’s Travels. Meanwhile Sir Robert had an acknowledged mistress and an illegitimate daughter. Although politically ruthless, he was personally genial and tolerant, and might well have chosen to shelter his wife and her son under his name. But W. S. Lewis, Horace’s twentieth-century editor and champion, adamantly denied these rumors, a denial that remains received literary opinion. As Peter Sabor concluded in 2011: “Though there were rumours that Horace was illegitimate, there is no evidence that he ever heard them.”12 I surmise that Horace, aged nine, first consciously confronted these rumors upon his arrival at Eton in 1727. Six weeks later, the child begged Sir Robert to arrange for him an audience with the king. Given Eton’s snobbishness, it seems likely that Horace’s schoolmates maliciously reported their parents’ gossip. He childishly responded by dramatizing his filial power over Sir Robert. A few weeks later, nine-year-old Horace met George I. A second episode occurred thirteen years later, an inexplicably bitter quarrel with his intimate friend from Eton, Thomas Gray. The two had made a Grand Tour of France and Italy from 1739 to 1741. On the way home they parted and returned separately. Horace returned to London, demanding that messages relating to this incident be destroyed. After Gray’s death in 1771, his biographer William Mason asked Walpole to explain. He replied: I was too young, too fond of my own diversions . . . too much intoxicated by indulgence, vanity, and the insolence of my situation as a Prime Minister’s son . . . He freely told me of my faults.13

Two-and-a-half years of foreign travel might test any friendship. But Walpole, who was paying the bills, reveled in social prestige while his companion reveled in scholarly research. I suspect that Gray finally lost patience with his patron and blurted out the unforgivable: “Everybody knows you’re not really Sir Robert’s son.” Traumatized by this outburst, Horace returned to Sir Robert, who apparently reassured him. Father and “son” became increasingly close until Sir Robert died in 1745, willing him a comfortable income. Horace was now affirmed a rightful heir. Shortly afterward, he and Gray were reconciled. The Castle of Otranto, like almost all early Gothic novels, is a “family romance” in that their plots unfold within the structures and taboos of the patriarchal family. But Freud’s more precise use of the phrase contained Gothic

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complications for Horace. Freud writes that as a child begins to recognize that his parents are flawed human beings rather than the seemingly omnipotent figures of infancy, he compensates by imagining nobler antecedents; my “real” father is a king, and my mother a queen.14 But the man Horace knew as “father” was already supremely powerful, the first British “Prime Minister,” who had led the governing Whig party since Horace’s fourth year. So if this “king” was not his father, then his mother was no queen, but a quean, that Shakespearean term for “whore,” and Sir Robert a symbolic replacement for his absent biological father.15 According to H. V. Ketton-Cremer, Horace’s “love for his mother was the most powerful emotion of his entire life.”16 At the same time, however, the secret of his birth, which was not so secret, terrified him.

FINDING SHELTER IN SHAKESPEARE: THE KEYS TO THE BEAUCLERC CLOSET After Sir Robert’s death Horace’s career reflects his struggle to confess and to conceal the paradox of his birth by constructing an identity for himself. He simultaneously emulated and idealized Sir Robert, but evolved changing strategies to mask his mother’s shameful legacy. In 1749 he decided to build himself a country house, but one opposite in style and scale to the Prime Minister’s massive, Palladian mansion, Houghton Hall in Norfolk. His first choice in dealing with his mother was flat denial. In 1758 he erected a monument to her in Westminster Abbey, extolling her character. He adorned it with a statue of modesty. (Hamlet had called Gertrude’s marriage “Such an act / That blurs the grace and blush of modesty” (3.4.40–41). On lustful Catherine he imposed Hamlet’s advice to Gertrude: “Assume a virtue if you have it not” (3.4.56). But the construction of Strawberry Hill (1749–1776) would enable him to work through the paradox of his family romance. The house, and the Gothic novel it inspired, provide abundant evidence that Horace knew and feared the rumors. Shakespearean moments from Hamlet provide a lens through which to consider Walpole’s ambivalence toward his mother. Preparing to assault and to denigrate Gertrude verbally, Hamlet’s imagery invokes what later generations would identify as “Gothic”: “‘Tis now the witching time of night / When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out / Contagion to the world” (3.2. 377–79). Hamlet’s lines, preceding the closet scene, evoke the human female and nature as terrible mother. Moreover, medieval Gothic architecture embodies patriarchal conceptions of “the female” that both debase female sexuality and idealize motherhood. As art historian Peter Fingestein observes, the great Gothic cathedrals of the fourteenth century (dedicated to “Notre Dame”) symbolize the virgin’s womb, that repository

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of irrational mysteries.17 (The greatest of these is patriarchy’s dearest wishfulfillment fantasy, virgin birth.) Moreover, literary historians have conventionally linked the Gothic novel’s characteristic fascination with death with the “graveyard poets” of the 1740s, meditations on death that belong in the tradition of Hamlet’s graveyard scene. By 1764, Strawberry Hill contained a “great staircase” three stories high, with an “armoury” on the second level. The Castle of Otranto is a version of Hamlet without Gertrude; however, she reappears symbolically in his setting, characters, and plot. Christened Horatio (though he preferred “Horace”), Walpole implicitly positions himself as Hamlet’s friend, more observer than participant, and from this perspective the shadowy presence of both an idealized and “othered” Gertrude is felt in Otranto’s women. Manfred’s wife Hippolita, his daughter Matilda, and Conrad’s fiancée Isabella are sexless stereotypes, objects or victims of masculine desire. Hippolita is past the age of childbearing, and Matilda is declared a virgin in the first sentence. Isabella embodies the ideal, unattainable feminine “other.” Yet all are named for warrior queens. Hippolita was Queen of the Amazons, who reappears suitably domesticated in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Matilda was the wife of William the Conqueror and her namesake the daughter of Henry II, who as a widow of a Holy Roman Emperor, returned to claim the English throne and foment a civil war. Isabella led the triumphant armies of Castile. Walpole’s young women are as devout as Isabella in Measure for Measure and just as threatened. Pursuing Isabella, Manfred accidentally kills Matilda, with a real, not verbal, dagger. But this is a third-person narrative; having said to Cole that he had no idea what he would write, Horace positions himself on the sidelines with Horatio to fashion his mother after Gertrude, who is a victim of patriarchy as well as the terrible mother. Elsinore encloses murder, madness, and threatening female sexuality, and Otranto is similarly a space “disjoint and out of frame” (1.2.20). After the lethal helmet incident in the novel, Otranto’s second uncanny event occurs when the portrait of Manfred’s supposed grandfather sighs and walks out of his frame. Similar to Elsinore, the haunted castle and its female inhabitants displace threatening maternity while enclosing the reader within its haunted spaces. Furthermore, Walpole’s supernatural machinery implies an even more archaic experience of the mother’s body. After the helmet, other gigantic pieces of armour appear. In her discussion of Shakespeare, Janet Adelman observes that a disjointed body invokes a primitive infantile terror derivative from the period when the mother or her surrogate was not seen as a whole and separate person, when she—or the body parts through which she was imagined—had the power to make or unmake the world and the self for her child.18

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But if much of Otranto, like Hamlet, symbolizes infantile fears, the severed hand that inspired it evokes a complementary developmental trauma, the Oedipal crisis. Manfred fatally desires to father another son, but fails. The gigantic father figure Alphonso destroys his identity and emasculates him. Garber quotes Lacan’s statement that “if a child forecloses the idea of castration, he (or she) rejects the Name of the Father in favor of the Desire-ofthe-Mother.”19 Ed Cameron agrees that Otranto describes such “perversion,” and adds that an unsuccessful resolution of the Oedipal crisis marks the son’s failure to symbolize the mother’s desire, that is, to put it into words. (Thus he reads Otranto as constituting the infancy of the early Gothic novel.)20 Hamlet did appropriately wound Gertrude with his dagger words, though he mistakenly kills the wrong father, Polonius, and cannot bring himself to kill Claudius, which would have affirmed his accession to his father’s kingdom. I have argued that The Castle of Otranto does express the desire of the mother, however evasively. Indeed, the climax to which his chain of associations leads (his spontaneous self-analysis) is a conscious recognition of the father’s power, and how that power excludes his doomed protagonist, Manfred. But in building Strawberry Hill, his “Gothic castle,” Walpole also stumbled on the psychoanalytic concept of the “compromise formation,” a dream or symbol that simultaneously expresses contradictory feelings.21 Before drawing on the family romance of Hamlet, Horace had dreamed of the severed hand within an “ancient castle” in which he “thought himself,” dreaming of castration, the foremost threat of the Father’s Law, here enclosed within the structure of the mother’s power. The word “castle” derives from the Indo-European kes (to cut)—as does “chaste,” “caste,” “incest” and “castration.” A castle defends and identifies its owner. Walpole’s Gothic bricolage declares his desire to be notably eccentric. But “Gothic” was inherently dark and complex, mysterious. He coined the word “gloomth” as the effect he desired in its interior spaces: a mixture of darkness and warmth.22 A womb. The early stages of construction at Strawberry Hill echo kes as “chaste,” a desire to be cut off from sexuality altogether, an evasion particularly associated with ecclesiastical Gothic architecture.23 Strawberry Hill comprised several monastic spaces: a refectory (1754), the little Cloister (1759), the Great Cloister (1760), the Oratory (1760), and the Cabinet or Chapel (1763). On June 12, 1753, Walpole wrote to Horace Mann: “My house is so monastic that I have a little hall decked with long saints in lean arched windows which we call the Paraclete, in memory of Eloise’s cloister.”24 (“Paraclete” is Greek for “holy ghost.”) “Eloise” is the lyric speaker of Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717), an exercise in female impersonation validated by a classical genre, the heroic epistle. Eloisa confesses her enduring, maddening, hopeless passion for Abelard, the man castrated by her cruel uncle to punish their love. Abelard forced her to take the veil. Pope portrays her as a passionate, indeed

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hysterical, woman imprisoned by the Law of the Father, a case study of claustrophobia, tormented by erotic fantasies and nightmares. Pope imagined her convent as anachronistically Gothic, implying that this shadowy, complex architecture expresses a woman’s secret fears and desires. On March 23, 1758, Walpole signed a letter to Charles Lyttelton as “Yr affectionate Beadsman, the Abbot of Strawberry.” But Horace’s reincarnation of Elsinore as Strawberry Hill ironically provides a chaste, quasi-monastic retreat, it eventually encodes Horace’s increasing attempts to reconcile Old Hamlet and Gertrude, that is Sir Robert and Catherine Walpole, by celebrating them both. It began for him as a childish diversion, joking that it was “a little play-thing house,” bought from Mrs. Chenevix, owner of a London toy shop. It then included five acres; by 1797 the estate had grown to a total of forty-two. He commissioned an idealized portrait of his dead parents (c. 1746) by John Giles Eccardt and John Wooten—a seated Sir Robert with his hunting hounds in the background, while Lady Walpole stands beside a table containing items signifying her artistic tastes. Through the years, the rooms Walpole added became larger and more ambitious. The library’s painted ceiling (1757) portrayed glamourous ancestors of dubious authenticity. The gallery (1763) was the largest room in the house. On one side a series of tall windows interspersed with full-length portraits overlooked the Thames. The opposite crimson damask walls held gold-bordered mirrors reflecting the pictures, creating, he thought, a ghostly effect—as if inviting other spirits to join the shades of his parents who had impelled his construction. Eventually, Strawberry Hill became a tourist attraction. Eager to show off his creation, in 1774 Horace published A Description of the Villa, listing his vast collection of items on display. Then he complained about the number of people wanting to visit. The antiquarian Horace prized the old, not necessarily the authentic over and beyond its connection to Elsinore. The original cottage was always already spurious, derisively called “Chopped-Straw Hall,” because the coachman who built it supposedly bought cheap straw instead of quality hay to feed his master’s horses. Masquerading as “Gothic,” Strawberry Hill encompasses motifs and designs copied from many sources in flagrantly ersatz materials. His battlements were built of lathe and plaster, and he chose wallpapers printed to resemble stone. He copied designs from Dugdale’s Old Saint Paul’s, a record of the medieval cathedral burned in the Great Fire of 1666. Its engravings gave no sense of the proportion or scale of its Gothic features, which Horace made no attempt to justify. Gothic motifs appeared in wood as mantels for his many fireplaces. The gallery’s fan-vaulted ceiling was copied from the chapel of St. George at Windsor, but constructed of papier maché. He designed a series of arches at ground level on one of the exterior walls. About eighteen inches high, they were fitted with bars suggesting that

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a dungeon lay underneath. Despite its celebrated status as a “Gothic” castle, Strawberry Hill was flamboyantly fake. After appropriating Hamlet to dis-cover the terrors of illegitimacy in Otranto, Walpole constructed two other Shakespearean shelters to work through his family romance. His Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard the Third (1768) is a scholarly essay, defending a king vilified (like Sir Robert) by his political enemies. He also published (on his Strawberry Hill Press) fifty copies of his blank-verse tragedy, The Mysterious Mother (1768). The seemingly virtuous, widowed Countess of Narbonne seduces her son Edmund by means of a bed trick, implicitly justified by that of Helena of Narbonne in All’s Well that Ends Well. When he returns and unwittingly marries his resulting sister/daughter, this mysterious mother confesses her sin and kills herself with her son’s dagger. Horace’s friend Lady Diana Beauclerc drew a series of black-and-white illustrations. They pleased him so much that he added a tower, the “Beauclerc Closet” to display them (1776). Strawberry Hill was at last completed by a phallic structure built to both conceal and confess his mother’s sins. Finding shelter in Shakespeare, Horace finally expressed—however indirectly—his murderous rage at her behavior. He had finally wielded Hamlet’s daggers to fatal effect, in words. So what more can we associate with Walpole’s dispassionate description of that “gigantic hand in armour”? Though a fragment, its position “at the top of a great staircase” might imply anxiety about achievement and ambition. The antique setting as well as the fragmented body imply an infantile regression to the Kristevan “semiotic,” in which images and sensations have not yet been repressed by language. A hand in armour is a heavy hand, at once defensive and impotent. Or perhaps it is the hand of fate. In the language of British Common Law it is a “mortmain,” a term concerning the will of a dead hand to control inheritance, a law Parliament debated in 1737.25 It is the hand of Sir Robert Walpole, representing the Law of the Father: “To Caesar’s closet this way you come / And t’other leads to the Queen’s drawing room.” In ridiculing Racine Horace had concealed—and confessed—that Strawberry Hill, like Elsinore, housed a ghostly father and a guilty mother.

NOTES 1. Ann B. Tracy, The Gothic Novel 1790-1840: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981), 195. 2. W.S. Lewis et al., eds., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1939–1981), 48 vols. 1, 88. Further references will be identified in the text by date and correspondent.

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3. Walpole, Horace, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, 3rd ed. Eds. W.S. Lewis and E.J. Clery, Oxford World Classics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 115. All quotations come from this edition. 4. Most editors silently change W.S. Lewis’s “cannon,” to “canon.” His misspelled (?) “cannon” reinforces one’s sense of his defensiveness. 5. The lines come from Bérénice (1670), which concerns the Emperor Titus’s renunciation of his beloved Queen of Palestine. 6. “Notes by Horace Walpole on several characters of Shakespeare in Miscellaneous Antiquities,” ed. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (Windham, CT: Hawthorne House, 1940), 5–7. 7. William Shakespeare, Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). All quotations from the 1623 text. 8. Dale Townshend argues that the play portrays inadequate rituals of mourning in Gothic Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 60–97. In “Hamlet and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto,” Robert B. Hamm, Jr. shows how Garrick and others enacted “terror” in Hamlet’s scenes with the ghost, and describes Otranto’s many allusions to the play. “Hamlet and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 49, no. 3 (Summer, 2009), 667–692. 9. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality, Routledge Classics (New York: Routledge, 2010), 170. 10. Garber, 171. 11. J.H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole (London: Cresset Press, 1956–60), vol. 1, 258. For a summary of Lewis’s arguments, see R.W. Ketton-Cremer, Horace Walpole [1940] 3rd ed. (London: Metheun, 1964), 25–30. 12. Peter Sabor, “Horace Walpole, His Life and Character,” in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. Michael Snowdon (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 1. 13. Ketton-Cremer, 71. 14. The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1989), 297–300. 15. Believed to be Carr, Lord Harvey who died in 1723. He was the elder halfbrother of the Hervey excoriated as “Sporus” by Pope. 16. Ketton-Cremer, 44. 17. Peter Fingestein, “Topographical and anatomical aspects of the gothic cathedral,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,” 20, no. 1 (Autumn, 1961), 20. 18. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4. 19. Garber, 177. 20. The Psychopathology of the Gothic Romance: Perversion, Neuroses and Psychosis in Early Works of the Genre (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2000), 65. 21. The Freud Reader, 66. 22. Anna Chalcraft and Judith Viscardi, Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Castle (London: Francis Lincoln Limited, 2007), 39.

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23. W.S. Lewis, “The Genesis of Strawberry Hill,” Metropolitan Museum Studies, 5 (1934–36), 57–92. All dates of Walpole’s construction are cited from this essay. 24. Edward Pierce, The Great Man: Sir Robert Walpole: Scoundrel, Genius and Britain’s First Prime Minister (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 331–363. 25. Pierce, 331–363.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 2002. Cameron, Ed. The Psychopathology of the Gothic Romance: Perversion, Neuroses and Psychosis in Early Works of the Genre. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2000. Chalcraft, Anna and Judith Viscardi, Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Castle. London: Francis Lincoln Limited, 2007. Drakasis, John and Dale Townshend, eds. Gothic Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 2009. Fingestein, Peter. “Topographical and Anatomical Aspects of the Gothic Cathedral.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 20, no. 1 (Autumn, 1961): 3–23. Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. Routledge Classics. New York: Routledge, 2010. Gay, Peter, ed. The Freud Reader. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1989. Hamm, Robert B. “Hamlet and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto,” Studies in English Literature 1500-190, 49, no. 3 (Summer, 2009): 667–692. Ketton-Cremer, R.W. Horace Walpole: A Biography. 3rd ed. London: Methuen, 1964. Lewis, W.S. “The Genesis of Strawberry Hill.” Metropolitan Museum Studies, 5 (1934–36): 57–92. Lewis, W.S. “Notes by Horace Walpole on several characters of Shakespeare.” Miscellaneous Antiquities. Windham, CT: Hawthorne House, 1940. Lewis, W.S. et al., eds. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1939–1981, 48 vols. Pierce, Edward. The Great Man: Sir Robert Walpole: Scoundrel, Genius and Britain’s First Prime Minister. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Plumb, J.H. Sir Robert Walpole. London: Cresset Press, 1955. Sabor, Peter. “Horace Walpole, His Life and Character,” in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, edited by Michael Snowdon. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623. Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Tracy, Ann B. The Gothic Novel 1790-1814: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Oxford World Classics. 2nd ed. Edited by W.S. Lewis and E.J. Clary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Chapter 3

What’s Past Is Prologue Shakespeare the Romantic Katherine Scheil

“The act of quotation,” writes Christy Desmet, “engages persons, texts and words in tangled webs of relations,” and “is a deeply embodied and powerfully affective act that has within it something beyond language.”1 This essay looks at the long history of “the act of quotation,” via the practice of taking lines from Shakespeare’s plays out of context and reinserting them in a new context in order to craft a particular area of Shakespearian expertise, specifically related to romantic love.2 While the practice of commonplacing is not new, recently through contemporary formats such as Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and other online venues, a specialized construction of Shakespeare as an authority on love, romance, and friendship has emerged, circulated mainly through memes.3 I explore what is at stake in this modern form of quotation (and fabrication), and what needs these various manifestations serve for users. The process by which memes are circulated, involving replication and variation, keeps a current and nimble version of “Shakespeare” available through extensive forms of social media. This “Shakespeare” can be copied, replicated, adjusted, adapted, and varied to suit contemporary values and ideals, reinforcing the relevance of a constantly shifting “Shakespeare” that is both created and circulated by users according to their needs.4 As early as the seventeenth century, quotations from Shakespeare’s works were excised from his plays and reinserted in new contexts, under topics of interest for contemporary readers, covering subjects from friendship to war.5 Neil Rhodes points out that Shakespeare was “anthologized during his own lifetime” in collections such as The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), John Bodenhan’s Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses (1600), and in Robert Allott’s England’s Parnassus (1600), where Shakespeare was planted among “the choysest Flowers of our Moderne Poets,” as the title page proclaimed.6 Joshua Poole’s posthumous The English Parnassus: or, a Helpe to English 49

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Poesie (1657) continued this increasingly popular practice, with three editions of Poole’s work available by 1678. As part of the commonplace tradition, Shakespeare in the seventeenth century thus becomes a “detachable verbal unit that can be reconnected to become part of a new textual whole.”7 In 1702, Edward Bysshe capitalized on the vogue for quotations from Shakespeare by publishing his The Art of English Poetry which went through seven editions by 1724. Detaching Shakespearian passages from their plays, Bysshe’s collection mixed passages from Shakespeare in with other writers, organized according to various subjects. Presented “as naked, and stript of superfluities” as possible, quotations from Shakespeare were divorced from their original context in the plays, and set free to speak to various subjects of readerly interest, rather than representing particular views of characters. Bysshe’s The Art of English Poetry had a substantial influence on writers in the eighteenth century including Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Richardson, Horace Walpole, William Oldys, and Henry Fielding, all of whom owned copies. It perhaps is not surprising that William Hogarth’s illustration of “The Distressed Poet” of 1736 depicts a frustrated author composing his poem on “Poverty” next to an open copy of Bysshe’s The Art of English Poetry. The anonymous collection Thesaurus Dramaticus, first printed in 1724, included only the dramatic excerpts from Bysshe’s volume and encompassed selections from most of Shakespeare’s plays, even those not regularly performed. This compiler’s practice suggests a reading audience for these works, separate from a theater-going audience, and a readership not dependent on knowledge of the plays or their plots. The same year the Thesaurus Dramaticus was printed (1724), new editions came out of Charles Gildon’s The Laws of Poetry (initially printed in 1721) and Bysshe’s The Art of English Poetry, aimed at capitalizing on this growing reading audience. Once disembodied from textual and character specificity, these passages can then represent the voice of Shakespeare himself, which can be shaped according to desirable areas of expertise and thought. Early editors of Shakespeare engaged in a similar process of selective and judgmental excerpting of Shakespeare’s works. In his second edition of 1714, Nicholas Rowe included a “Table of the most Sublime Passages in this Author.” Alexander Pope’s 1725 edition famously relegated passages which he deemed “excessively bad” to the bottom of the page, noted “some of the most shining passages” with marginal commas, and prefixed a star to any scene “where the beauty lay not in particulars but in the whole.” As Rhodes points out, in Pope’s edition “the reader is given a complete Shakespeare, but also the means to dismember him again.”8 The well-known disputes between Pope and rival editor Lewis Theobald reveal a growing number of readers outside the bounds of the theater, who often sought out Shakespeare as material for illustrative quotations.

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In her work on anthologizing Shakespeare in the eighteenth century, Kate Rumbold outlines the continuing use of extracts to actively construct a version of “Shakespeare” with “seemingly inherent qualities” of beautiful language, uncanny understanding of human nature, and Englishness.9 Rumbold shows that by the end of the eighteenth century, Shakespeare was celebrated as “an immortal genius and master of human nature.”10 Likewise, the idea of using Shakespeare as a moral compass became an additional “selective filter” in collections such as Elizabeth Griffith’s The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated (1775).11 In the nineteenth century, anthologies and books of quotations from Shakespeare proliferated, designed for both the home and for school. This “virtuous Shakespeare” was celebrated, according to Rumbold, as “an embodied, moral figure upon whom people can call directly for wise counsel.”12 Disembodied from his plays, this version of “Shakespeare” allowed a variety of people to engage with his work and legacy in new ways. Anne Isherwood remarks that in the early twentieth century, many people “became aware of Shakespeare’s texts and engaged with them by means of secondary sources such as poetry anthologies and birthday books.”13 These works constructed a Shakespeare who is “the provider of moral guidance,”14 without necessarily linking him to his complete literary oeuvre. In the later eighteenth century, passages from Shakespeare were thus available as a moral resource for use in everyday life, through works such as Mary Cowden Clarke’s collection Shakespeare’s Proverbs (1848) and George Johnston’s Cupid’s Birthday Book: One thousand Love-darts from Shakespeare gathered and arranged for every day in the year (1875).15 One surviving copy of Cupid’s Birthday Book from the collection at the University of Michigan offers evidence that readers not only prized these collections for their apt quotations, but they also used them to engage directly and personally with passages from Shakespeare. Amateur Shakespeare scholar Joseph Crosby, the owner of this copy of Cupid’s Birthday Book, included commentary on nearly every page and even cross-referenced passages. His comparison of Falstaff’s letter to Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, “Ask me no reason why I love you; for though Love uses Reason for his physician, he admits him no for his counsellor,” is linked to the lines “My love is as a fever, / my reason, the physician to my love,” from Sonnet 147. The “love darts” that George Johnston collected in Cupid’s Birthday Book (1875) were part of a growing number of anthologies of Shakespeare, organized around the topics of love and romance. From C. B. Jones’s The Lover’s Shakespeare (1900) to Benjamin Darling’s Shakespeare on Love (2000) one hundred years later, to Seduction by Shakespeare: Advice, Observations, and Quotes on Love, Lust, Beauty and Desire (2006), Shakespeare’s poetry has been excerpted from its context and harnessed to create a version of “Shakespeare” who is an authority on love and romance and whose “personal

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experience of romantic love authorizes his insights.”16 Wayne F. Hill and Cynthia J. Ottchen’s Shakespeare and the Art of Verbal Seduction (2003), for example, promises readers that through Shakespeare, they will discover a “sexy new sensibility” that will “energize your entrances and exits.” Hill and Ottchen encourage their readers to “learn the art of seduction from the greatest seducer of all time, and get what you want,” because “it doesn’t matter now who said what to whom.”17 This disembodied Shakespeare serves not only as an authority on love and romance but also is promoted as an active agent in successful sexual trysts. The quotations used to set up Shakespeare as a romantic authority today often have little allegiance to authenticity, nor do they necessarily derive from actual words from one of the plays. One of the most commonly reproduced faux Shakespeare quotes is “When I saw you I fell in love and you smiled because you knew” (figures 3.1–3.4). Replicated on dozens of venues, from temporary chalkboards (figure 3.3) to consumer items for home display (figure 3.1), this expression has only a distant and tenuous connection to Shakespeare, since it derives from the libretto to Verdi’s 1893 opera Falstaff (written by Arrigo Boito), based on The Merry Wives of Windsor. While the “When I saw you” passage resonates with Romeo and Juliet, and with the general idea of love at first sight, it has no direct correlation to an actual passage from Shakespeare. It is impossible to trace the actual origin and circulation of this faux quotation; as Stephen O’Neill remarks, “to quote Shakespeare, users do not have to seek out the texts themselves, but can find pre-packaged selections as part of general quotation websites, mobile apps or dedicated Shakespeare quote sites.”18 As the numerous replications of this quote attest, once it has entered the realm of social media, the possibilities for circulation are endless. Most of these faux Shakespeare quotes are designed for personal and public display—circulated as memes on social media such as Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter, but also manufactured for display in the home. A recent search on the online marketplace etsy​.co​m, for example, elicited nearly 200 results for the “When I saw you” passage, replicated on numerous prints for home use and on jewelry for personal use as “independent gems of wit and wisdom,” to use Zoltán Márcus’s phrase.19 The many visual variations of this meme, from an old-fashioned typewriter font to a handwritten chalkboard, attest that there is something about the content that is compelling to contemporary users. Further, the passage is replicated with slight variation (figures 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3 use quotation marks; figure 3.4 does not). The quotation marks suggest that the passage was spoken directly by Shakespeare the man (and expert on love), whereas the passages unadorned with quotation marks simply stand as maxims about the experience of love, underlined by the authoritative name of Shakespeare in order to “raise the cultural stakes,” as Marjorie Garber puts it.20

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Figure 3.1  “When I saw you” meme. Source: Pinterest, 21 February 2022, i​.pin​​img​.c​​om​ /or​​igina​​ls​/38​​/69​/f​​d​/386​​9fdb4​​c739b​​a35cd​​9ebe0​​​efdcb​​0716.​​jpg.

Attributing the “When I saw you” passage to Shakespeare himself suggests that users are privy to a private side of Shakespeare, to an expression of his actual love experience, rather than to the words of a fictional character. This construction speaks of the desire to locate a personal story for Shakespeare; as Michelle K. Yost remarks, Shakespeare’s celebrity and iconography are the fuel of fannish imagination, remaking him into their own folk hero. His life is an incomplete story that some authors yearn to fill because missing puzzle pieces are a source of irritation. Others want to see the object of their admiration reflect (and embody) their own desires for success, love, and acceptance.21

Because this passage is not linked to a character or play (of course, it would be impossible to do this because there is no source in the Shakespearean canon), the result is to fabricate a life experience for Shakespeare. Figure 3.4, which reproduces the line in a typewriter font, even looks as if it has come directly from Shakespeare’s keyboard, modernizing his mode of writing for contemporary users. Like the “When I saw you” form, most of these faux quotations, out of necessity, are attributed to “Shakespeare,” not to a specific play, because no source play exists. The effect of this attribution

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Figure 3.2  “When I saw you” meme. Source: Picturequotes​.co​m, 21 February 2022, pictu​​requo​​tes​.c​​om​/wh​​en​-i-​​first​​-saw-​​you​-i​​-fell​​-in​-l​​ove​-a​​nd​-yo​​u​-smi​​led​-b​​ecaus​​​e​-you​​-knew​​ -quot​​e​-51.

Figure 3.3  “When I saw you” meme. Source: QuotesBerry​.co​m, 21 February 2022, quote​​sberr​​y​.com​​/fell​​-in​-l​​ove​-s​​miled​​-shak​​​espea​​re/.

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Figure 3.4  “When I saw you” meme. Source: Falsescribes, 21 February 2022, false​​scrib​​ es​.wo​​rdpre​​ss​.co​​m​/201​​3​/07/​​12​/wh​​en​-i-​​sa​w​-y​​ou​-bo​​ito/.

to “Shakespeare” is to construct a set of personal views and a private life for Shakespeare, what Marjorie Garber calls the “Shakespeare says” form of creating “Shakespeare as omniscient Wise Person.”22 Another popular faux romantic Shakespeare quotation involves the idea of eternal love: “Time is very slow for those who wait. Very fast for those who are scared. Very long for those who lament. Very short for those who celebrate. But for those who love, time is eternal” (figure 3.5). Although this passage is attributed to Shakespeare, the source is American author Henry Jackson van Dyke (1852–1933), from his poem “For Katrina’s Sun-Dial,” in Music and Other Poems (1904). The substance of this quotation positions Shakespeare as an authority on love, not based on his creation of characters, plots, and plays, but speaking as an individual out of his own experience. The colloquial style and easy-to-understand diction of these passages formulate a “Shakespeare” who can resonate with contemporary demands for authoritative and easily understandable wisdom on love. Likewise, the statement on figure 3.6, “Let no one who loves be unhappy . . . even love unreturned has its rainbow,” delivers a brief, pithy maxim about the value of unrequited love. Opening with “Let,” the passage is reminiscent of the well-known opening line to Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” though the quotation actually comes from J. M. Barrie’s 1880 novel The Little Minister, set in a Scottish weaving village. Evoking echoes of Shakespeare’s famous sonnet, and attributing the quotation to Shakespeare, must have been a more plausible and attractive option, than attributing a maxim on unrequited love to the author of Peter Pan.

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Figure 3.5  “Time is very slow” meme. Source: Pinterest, 21 February 2022, pin​.it​/4VjCFF​7.

Figure 3.6  “Let no one who loves” meme. Source: quotepixel​.co​m, 21 February 2022. pin​.it​/6e8zmQ​y.

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Figure 3.7  “Absence from those we love” meme. Source: quotepixel​.co​m, 21 February 2022. pin​.it​/yofYLf​m.

Another often-circulated faux Shakespeare passage involves a pared-down version of Valentine’s lines from The Two Gentlemen of Verona: “Absence from those we love is self from self—a deadly banishment.” Figure 3.7 is based on the passage: To die is to be banished from myself, And Sylvia is myself: banished from her Is self from self. A deadly banishment. (3.1.172–4)

Rewording the passage into prose from poetry, and simplifying the diction, turns Valentine’s lines about Silvia into an easier to read generic aphorism about absence and love, attributed to Shakespeare himself rather than to a specific character or play. Further afield from any explicit or implicit connection to Shakespeare, the passage reproduced in figure 3.8 relates to the idea of the uncertainty of love, with a repeated phrase to an unnamed beloved: “you say you love rain, but open your umbrella. you say you love the sun, but you find a shadow spot. you say you love the wind, but you close your windows. this is why i am afraid, you say that you love me too.” This “Shakespeare” admits to fear and anxiety about love and normalizes the experience.23 Reproduced

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Figure 3.8  “You say you love rain” meme. Source: quoteburd​.co​m, 21 February 2022, pin​.it​/kkU6kq​3.

without capitalization, in a typewriter font, the image suggests that the passage reflects Shakespeare’s personal, informal confession about love, and the alternative spelling of his name further links this passage to Shakespeare the man rather than the formal author (with the conventional spelling of his name). Collectively, these simulated quotations create a “Shakespeare” who is experienced in the joy and pain of love, and whose words can resonate with contemporary users who adorn their homes, phones, and computer screens with this “Shakespearianh” love wisdom. Other faux Shakespeare quotations extend this idea of Shakespeare as a wise sage, particularly on love, romance, and friendship, venturing far afield from any connection, resonance, or allusion to a work or passage actually from Shakespeare. Figures 3.9, 3.10, 3.11 offer concise bits of advice about friendship and love, given additional weight and authority by attaching Shakespeare’s name: “There are many many things to appreciate about a beautiful friendship, especially when that friendship is turning to love”; “A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow”; and “Never play with the feelings of others, because you may win the game but the risk is that you will surely lose the person for a life time.” All have no link to a Shakespeare plot or passage. Instead, they are completely fictional quotations that construct a Shakespeare who is experienced in friendship and wise in a variety of relationships, further extending his manufactured expertise and

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Figure 3.9  “There are many many things to appreciate” meme. Source: pinstamatic​. co​m, 21 February 2022, pin​.it​/EMpju​Kr.

wisdom. Any user familiar with the Shakespeare canon, or even with early modern prose, would recognize the suspect nature of this diction. One of the furthest departures from any connection to authentic Shakespeare is the passage reproduced in figure 3.12, where “Shakespeare” utters a series of pronouncements on his own life and on life in general: Shakespeare said: I always feel happy. You know why? Because I don’t expect anything from anyone, Expectations always hurt. Life is short, So love your life, Be happy. & Keep smiling. Just live for yourself & Before you speak, Listen. Before you write, Think. Before you spend, Earn. Before you pray, Forgive. Before you hurt, Feel. Before you hate, Love. Before you quit, Try. Before you die, Live.

This example is so far from an actual quotation, in both form and content, that one wonders who could mistake this for a passage from a Shakespearian play. Yet the contents work to construct a specific “Shakespeare,” a wise sage who is “happy” because he does not expect anything from others, who advocates smiling, living for yourself, listening, working hard, forgiving, feeling,

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Figure 3.10  “A friend is one that knows you” meme. Source: Pinterest, 21 February 2022, pin​.it​/DNsmXV​y.

and loving—Shakespeare as life coach. The informal wording of this passage, with mixed capital and lower case letters, extra periods, and ampersands, coupled with the reproduction of the Droeshout engraving in the bottom right, suggest that this advice originates from a timeless Shakespeare who is both contemporary and early modern, who can dispense advice in a present-day format while underlining his authority with a historical image. Another instance of extreme faux Shakespeare is a maxim on the meaning of life: “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” In some versions, Shakespeare is in competition with Picasso as the source of this wisdom. “The Meaning of Life” passage is neither from Shakespeare nor from Picasso; it originated in David Viscott’s 1993 book Finding your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations.24 Nevertheless, users can choose between the expert authority they would prefer behind this didactic pronouncement. As Peter Kirwan notes, “quotation is, at its core, an act of creative appropriation,” and “the creative act is not the writing of new words, but the skillful arrangement of pre-existing words to a new purpose.”25 These various maxims create a “Shakespeare” who is a down-to-earth, understanding, and compassionate sage, who offers advice in a contemporary idiom, in a format ripe for mass circulation, often with little regard for authenticity.

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Figure 3.11  “Never play with the feelings of others” meme. Source: Pinterest, 21 February 2022, pin​.it​/3HAEbF​A.

Lest this essay become simply a collection of intriguing and playful faux Shakespeare adages, it might be worth pausing over the effects of these quotations, through two final examples of how these maxims gain an extended life and circulation through the actions of specific users. The first concerns a sham romantic Shakespeare quotation about the permanence of love: “LOVE ME OR HATE ME, BOTH ARE IN MY FAVOR . . . IF YOU LOVE ME, I’LL ALWAYS BE IN YOUR HEART . . . IF YOU HATE ME, I’LL ALWAYS BE IN YOUR MIND.” The use of all caps in this passage presumably increases the potency of this wisdom, as if Shakespeare were shouting this admonition on love and hate. Personal trainer, nutritionist, and “physique coach” Melanie Daly includes this “Love me or hate me” passage in a blog post, and her engagement with this quotation can offer some evidence as to how these memes function for actual users.26 Daly begins her blog by professing her love of quotations: I am a quote girl. I mean, I really love quotes. Inspirational, thought-provoking, motivating . . . I love finding new ones, re-visiting old favorites, printing those that are pertinent at a particular moment in time so I can review them frequently . . . maybe the quotes are more like mantras for me. They are the sword that I choose to yield at a particular moment against all of the chaos, challenge, difficulty, and obstacles that the world throws at us.

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Figure 3.12  “Shakespeare said” meme. Source: Facebook, 21 February 2022, faceb​​ook​ .c​​om​/Da​​ilyHe​​althG​​en​/ph​​otos/​​a​.745​​31547​​55055​​48​/89​​7​7542​​33595​​004/.

For this user, quotations are a source of motivation and inspiration, and serve as a panacea in troubled lifetimes. In this blog post, Daly offers advice on how to help children deal with hatred. Here, her “sword” against adversity is the bogus Shakespeare quote: In my house, I refer back to how Shakespeare said it: “Love me or hate me, both are in my favor. If you love me, I’ll always be in your heart. If you hate me, I’ll always be in your mind.” After all, who does that hating really hurt? Sure, it stings to think that other people don’t value you or what you do, but ultimately, it is that hating person who is hurting him or herself by fixating on all the negative energy it takes to hate in the first place. Yes . . . that sounds kind of new-age-y.27

Daly bolsters her counsel with the authority of Shakespeare, further circulating this meme to readers not necessarily in search of wisdom from Shakespeare, but who would encounter it nonetheless by reading the personal blog of a physical trainer. This fake quotation both celebrates and circulates a version of Shakespeare that does not exist. As Zoltán Márcus remarks, “quotations are vehicles of commemorating and celebrating the cultural status of the author, but they are also acts of forgetting, suppressing, and rupture.”28 In this example, the

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Figure 3.13  “Shakespeare Pinterest board.” Source: Pinterest, 21 February 2022, pinterest​.com​/kwscheil​/Shakespea​re.

“Shakespeare” celebrated is an authority on love and hate, but this distinction necessitates disregarding the illegitimacy of the counterfeit quotation itself. A final example of how these fabricated quotations are used suggests their wide-reaching influence. Most of the Shakespeare quotes cited in this essay can be found on Pinterest, where they can be curated onto boards to create a visual and verbal collage of “Shakespeare,” both by mixing actual passages from the plays with fake Shakespeare (figure 3.13) and fabricating a Shakespeare anthology of advice on romance, love, friendship, and life. This “Shakespeare” may bear little resemblance to his actual canon, and the online format produces an alternative virtual anthology that is easily updated and replicated according to the desires of individual users. Individual boards on Pinterest can then be copied by other Pinterest users, their contents remixed and recirculated to an even broader audience, where “users can mash together quotations and misquotations of Shakespeare with new visual images,” and Shakespeare is “shaped not by political or cultural acts of appropriation but by personal selection,” as Kate Rumbold describes it.29 The proliferation of online quotation sources that frequently repeat the fake Shakespeare quotations further circulates these passages as “by Shakespeare,” in an almost untraceable variety of venues, to a wide virtual community.30 Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes note that these online platforms “provide access to a discursive network of Shakespeare users” where “what is

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collectively represented or defined as Shakespeare is continuously being reimagined and reconstructed in accordance with the affordances of the medium in which he appears and the purposes to which he is put to task.”31 Indeed, the various online platforms allow for an adaptable, malleable, and resilient “Shakespeare” who is available for never-ending user accommodation. There are a few online resources that attempt to set the record straight about Shakespeare’s actual verbiage, including Thatsnotshakespeare​ .c​ om and notbyshakespeare​.co​m. These policing sites seem to have little effect on the widespread appeal of a “Shakespeare” who is a wise sage and can offer advice and platitudes on love, friendship, and life, in an age where demand for such advice is often met with circulated memes that can deliver succinct “truths,” backed by the name brand recognition of “Shakespeare.” As Stephen O’Neill points out, veracity, accuracy and provenance have less currency in a digital culture structured upon a logic of remix and upon practices of mash-up or creative repurposing. In participatory digital cultures, Shakespeares get quoted insofar as they are texts that can be used and shared in order to generate new meanings.32

In turn, these maxims also work to cement Shakespeare’s position as a moral authority, particularly on love, romance, and friendship, based on reproduced, mutated, and often simulated statements. These practices support Margreta de Grazia’s observation that in the twenty-first century, “one is free to quote Shakespeare out of context, inaccurately, without attribution, with omissions and substitutions, and to any purpose.”33 Like the nineteenth-century reader Joseph Crosby who personally engaged with Shakespeare in his copy of Cupid’s Birthday Book by writing his responses to passages, so too these contemporary users are reacting to and creating an idea of Shakespeare, making him their own through the latest influential forms of social media. The “tangled webs of relations” in this “affective act,” as Christy Desmet puts it, generate a new version of Shakespeare who is responsive to, and created by, the needs and desires of contemporary users. NOTES 1. Christy Desmet, “Quoting Shakespeare in Contemporary Poetry and Prose,” in Shakespeare and Quotation, ed. Julie Maxwell and Kate Rumbold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 246. 2. In a recent example, Director Ellen Geer has remarked that Shakespeare’s “words are a natural therapy. Many people and nations use the Bible for a life resource and for examples of how to live. I use Shakespeare.” Geer notes that her father gave

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her a book of Shakespeare when she was a teenager, and told her, “read what he writes of love, and you’ll never need a psychiatrist.” Paul Edmondson and Peter Holbrook, eds., Shakespeare’s Creative Legacies: Artists, Writers, Performers, Readers (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 141. David Thatcher provides a useful discussion of Shakespeare phrases that have “‘caught on’ as stock expressions,” in “Shakespeare as Phrasemaker: Attributions and Misattributions,” The Shakespeare Newsletter 52.4 (Winter 2002): 95+. 3. Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976, describing it as “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions” that would be the “new replicator.” The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 206. See also Fran Teague, “Using Shakespeare with Memes, Remixes, and Fanfic,” Shakespeare Survey 64 (2011): 74–82. Teague discusses memes, remixes, and fanfic as strategies used by Shakespeare. 4. Julie Maxwell and Kate Rumbold contrast this type of user-created and circulated quotation of Shakespeare, with that “offered up to consumers by film-makers, broadcasters, advertisers and novelists.” Shakespeare and Quotation, 210. 5. Unlike the majority of collections, which organized quotations by topic, John Bartlett’s 1855 A Collection of Familiar Quotations, initially existed to “give a pedigree or provenance for fragments of literature that had survived in common discourse,” and Bartlett organized his quotations chronologically by author, in order to “foreground author over idea; to give credit where credit is due; and to construct an epitome of English and American literary (mostly poetic) history.” Michael Hancher, “Familiar Quotation,” Harvard Library Bulletin 14.2 (2003): 22. See also Helen M. Whall, “Bartlett’s Evolving Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare After Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 287–294. 6. Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 171. 7. Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English, 150. See also Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier, “Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590–1619,” in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew R. Murphy (Malden, Oxford, and Victoria: Blackwell, 2007), 35–56; Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass. “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays.” Shakespeare Quarterly 59.4 (2008): 371–420; and Laura Estill, “Proverbial Shakespeare: The Print and Manuscript Circulation of Extracts from Love’s Labour’s Lost.” Shakespeare 7.1 (April 2011): 35–55. 8. See Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English, 177–178. 9. Kate Rumbold, “Shakespeare Anthologized,” The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 88. 10. Rumbold, “Shakespeare Anthologized,” 91. 11. Rumbold, “Shakespeare Anthologized,” 94. Margreta de Grazia’s work is of course the standard for the eighteenth century. See Shakespeare Verbatim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 12. Rumbold, “Shakespeare Anthologized,” 95. 13. Anne Isherwood, “Invisible Women: Mary Dunbar and The Shakespeare Birthday Book,” in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception and Performance,

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ed. Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 174. 14. Isherwood, 180. Maxwell and Rumbold remark that “quotation has had a constructive, as well as reflective, relationship to Shakespeare’s pre-eminence.” Shakespeare and Quotation, 4. 15. Cupid’s Birthday Book: One Thousand Love-darts from Shakespeare (London: W.P. Nimmo, 1875). 16. Rumbold, “Shakespeare Anthologized,” 101. See also her essay “Shakespeare Anthologies,” in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. Bruce R. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 2:1692. 17. Wayne F. Hill and Cynthia J. Ottchen, Shakespeare and the Art of Verbal Seduction (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), x–xi. 18. Stephen O’Neill, “Quoting Shakespeare in Digital Culture,” in Maxwell and Rumbold, Shakespeare and Quotation, 278. The phrase “faux Shakespeare” has also been used in Michael Macrone’s Brush Up Your Shakespeare! (New York: Harper Collins, 1990). 19. Zoltán Márcus, “Shakespeare in Quotation Marks,” in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. Bruce R. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 2:1695. 20. Marjorie Garber, “Bartlett’s Familiar Shakespeare,” in Profiling Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2008), 281. 21. Michelle K. Yost, “Stratford-Upon-Web: Shakespeare in Twenty-FirstCentury Fanfiction,” in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 200. 22. Garber, “Bartlett’s Familiar Shakespeare,” 283, 285. 23. Duane, who runs the website notbyshakespeare​.co​m, remarks that “the best I’ve been able to find is that this quote is a Turkish poem called ‘I Am Afraid (Korkuyorum)’ which is attributed even in the original to William Shakespeare. The source material has long since disappeared from the net, but with a little help from the Wayback Machine—here it is, ‘I Am Afraid (Korkuyorum),’ in the original Turkish along with English Translation. Enjoy. If anybody knows the actual author, please let us know. It’s just not Shakespeare. UPDATED May 29, 2012 — It appears that the original author’s name might very well be Qyazzirah Syeikh Ariffin.” http://www​ .notbyshakespeare​.com​/2011​/10​/19​/you​-say​-that​-you​-love​-rain​-but​-you​-open​-your​ -umbrella​-when​-it​-rains/ 24. The online service The Quote Investigator has tracked the lineage of this passage, originating in Viscott’s book, and then appearing in a number of places, including a column by Dale Turner in The Seattle Times (1994) and in the 2006 book Just Do It!: The Power of Positive Living by Eray Honeycutt, ascribed to public lecturer Joy J. Golliver. http://quoteinvestigator​.com​/2014​/06​/16​/purpose​-gift/. 25. Peter Kirwan, “Mis/Quotation in Constrained Writing,” in Maxwell and Rumbold, Shakespeare and Quotation, 247. 26. Over a decade ago, in 2008, Marjorie Garber observed that motivational speakers are “the most insistent quoters and citers of Shakespeare.” “Bartlett’s Familiar Shakespeare,” 290.

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27. http://melaniedaly​.com​/uncategorized​/love​-me​-or​-hate​-me 28. Márcus, “Shakespeare in Quotation Marks,” 2:1695. 29. Kate Rumbold, “Quoting and Misquoting Shakespeare,” in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. Bruce R. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 2:1297. 30. See Peter Holland, “Shakespeare in Virtual Communities,” in Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, ed. Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 160–175. 31. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, eds. The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 2. 32. Stephen O’Neill, “Quoting Shakespeare in Digital Culture,” in Maxwell and Rumbold, Shakespeare and Quotation, 285. 33. Margreta de Grazia, “Afterword,” in Maxwell and Rumbold, Shakespeare and Quotation, 298.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cupid’s Birthday Book: One Thousand Love-darts from Shakespeare. London: W.P. Nimmo, 1875. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. De Grazia, Margreta. “Afterword,” in Maxwell and Rumbold, Shakespeare and Quotation, 295–300. De Grazia, Margreta. Shakespeare Verbatim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Desmet, Christy. “Quoting Shakespeare in Contemporary Poetry and Prose,” in Maxwell and Rumbold, Shakespeare and Quotation, 231–246. Edmondson, Paul and Peter Holbrook, eds. Shakespeare’s Creative Legacies: Artists, Writers, Performers, Readers. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Estill, Laura. “Proverbial Shakespeare: The Print and Manuscript Circulation of Extracts from Love’s Labour’s Lost.” Shakespeare 7.1 (April 2011), 35–55. Fazel, Valerie M. and Louise Geddes, eds. The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Garber, Marjorie. Profiling Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 2008. Hancher, Michael. “Familiar Quotation,” Harvard Library Bulletin 14.2 (2003), 13–54. Hill, Wayne F. and Cynthia J. Ottchen, Shakespeare and the Art of Verbal Seduction. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003. Holland, Peter. “Shakespeare in Virtual Communities,” in Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, ed. Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014: 160–175. Isherwood, Anne. “Invisible Women: Mary Dunbar and The Shakespeare Birthday Book,” in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception and Performance, ed.

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Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury, 2014: 173–182. Kirwan, Peter. “Mis/Quotation in Constrained Writing,” in Maxwell and Rumbold, Shakespeare and Quotation, 247–259. Macrone, Michael. Brush Up Your Shakespeare! New York: Harper Collins, 1990. Márcus, Zoltán. “Shakespeare in Quotation Marks,” in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. Bruce R. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 2: 1694–1696. Maxwell, Julie and Kate Rumbold, Shakespeare and Quotation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Moss, Ann. Printed Common-Place Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. O’Neill, Stephen. “Quoting Shakespeare in Digital Culture,” in Maxwell and Rumbold, Shakespeare and Quotation, 275–285. Rhodes, Neil. Shakespeare and the Origins of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Rumbold, Kate. “Quoting and Misquoting Shakespeare,” in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. Bruce R. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, 2: 1290–1297. Rumbold, Kate. “Shakespeare Anthologies,” in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. Bruce R. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, 2:1688–1694. Rumbold, Kate. “Shakespeare Anthologized,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete, and Ramona Wray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011: 88–105. Stallybrass, Peter. “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays.” Shakespeare Quarterly 59.4 (2008), 371–420. Teague, Frances M. “Using Shakespeare with Memes, Remixes, and Fanfic,” Shakespeare Survey 64 (2011), 74–82. Thatcher, David. “Shakespeare as Phrasemaker: Attributions and Misattributions,” The Shakespeare Newsletter 52.4 (Winter 2002), 95–98. Whall, Helen M. “Bartlett’s Evolving Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare After Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002: 287–294. Yost, Michelle K. “Stratford-Upon-Web: Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Fanfiction,” in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018: 193–212.

Online Sources http://www​.notbyshakespeare​.com​/2011​/10​/19​/you​-say​-that​-you​-love​-rain​-but​-you​ -open​-your​-umbrella​-when​-it​-rains/ http://quoteinvestigator​.com​/2014​/06​/16​/purpose​-gift/ http://melaniedaly​.com​/uncategorized​/love​-me​-or​-hate​-me

Part II

PRESENT

Chapter 4

Shakespeare’s Bust and the 1960s Batman TV Show Darlena Ciraulo

“Holy Hamlet”—Robin1 The 1960s live-action television series Batman introduced a new incarnation of the Caped Crusader that drew on the global prestige of Shakespeare.2 Produced and narrated by William Dozier, Batman aired for three seasons from January 1966 to March 1968 on the American ABC network where it occupied a coveted primetime slot. Anticipating the wide appeal of the thirty-minute show, Batman’s producers ran weekly episodes on two consecutive nights; this crowd-pleasing, cliffhanger format was eventually scaled back, however, in the final year of production. Many eager TV goers who first tuned into the program—especially those diehard fans who cheered to see their favorite comic book superhero triumph over Gotham City’s villains on the tube—expressed surprise, if not disdain, to encounter instead what has been called a campy batman.3 This newfangled batman (played by Adam West) possessed a perversely sophisticated appeal: he danced chicly to the batusi; drove a sleek Lincoln Futura batmobile; and utilized a broad assortment of state-of-the-art bat devices and gadgets in the cavalier vogue of James Bond.4 Batman’s outlandish bat paraphernalia and charm in this television program helped to fashion the so-called Dark Knight, as well as his sidekick Robin (played by Burt Ward), into amusing avatars of crime fighting. One bat device in particular, Shakespeare’s Bust, uniquely stood out from the rest as a regular staple of the Batman TV show. Located in the study of Wayne Manor, Shakespeare’s Bust (figure 4.1) activated a secret entrance to the Batcave. By tipping back the statue’s head, a switch appeared inside and unlocked a moving bookcase that revealed two Batpoles. These Batpoles, 71

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Figure 4.1  Adam West as Bruce Wayne in the 1960’s Batman TV show, pictured with Shakespeare’s Bust. Source: Adam West Holding Telephone Receiver by Bettmann. Getty image #517432692 by permission of Getty images.

labeled “Access to Batcave Via Batpoles,” led directly to the underground headquarters of the Dynamic Duo.​ On the one hand, Shakespeare’s Bust contributes to the intellectual cachet of Batman’s alter ego: the multimillionaire Bruce Wayne, president of Wayne Foundation, philanthropist of Gotham City, aristocratic playboy, and dilettante of the arts. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s Bust bears witness to the global dissemination of Shakespeare as a commodity of what Barbara Hodgdon calls “Bardic consumer culture.”5 The ubiquity and marketability of Shakespeare’s imprint lends itself in the Batman series to parodies of the playwright as a worldwide symbol of poetic genius. Shakespeare’s Bust not only points to Bruce Wayne’s distinguished standing in society as a cosmopolitan socialite, but its farcical use as a kitschy bat mechanism lightheartedly ridicules the cultural capital of highbrow Shakespeare, thereby collapsing the two binary distinctions. In essence, Shakespeare’s image serves as an icon of worldly erudition, but the bust itself operates as a humorous object of camp. As will be shown, this twin representation of the Bard, as both an elite and pop figure, assumes a key role in the commercial viability of the Batman TV show memorabilia.

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SHAKESPEARE AND GOLDEN AGE BATMAN In the 1960s Batman television series, Shakespeare’s Bust epitomizes core components of Batman’s persona: his powerful intellect and learning. These defining characteristics, ones that directly relate to the superhero’s expertise in deductive reasoning, can be traced back to Batman’s first appearances in Detective Comics #27 (1939). Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, the Batman comic book hero, right from his initial conception, boasts a formidable intelligence that coincides with the character’s life of immense wealth and refinement. Bruce Wayne’s privileged life of leisure and superior intellect enabled him to solve crimes that elude the collective manpower of the Gotham City police department. Especially evident in the Golden Age of Comics, which runs approximately from 1935 to 1956,6 Bruce Wayne’s fashionable standing in society as a beau monde encourages participation in a wide range of elitist pastimes that exude money and intellectualism. As William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson point out, the superhero’s wealth and remarkable brainpower, “with an IQ comfortably in the genius numbers,” constitute essential aspects of the Batman identity throughout the character’s many iterations (along with physical prowess and a staunch devotion to crime fighting).7 Eventually called the World’s Greatest Detective, Batman also cultivates his superior intelligence by fostering an ethic of diligent study. Lacking superpowers, he assiduously toils to achieve his own weapons of resourcefulness and strength; he liberally imbibes facts and data to sharpen his wits, thereby fortifying his mental artillery.8 By having recourse to an inherited fortune, as well as countless hours for scholarly exploration, Batman enhances his powers of deduction by obtaining cutting-edge technology and pursuing scientific knowhow.9 The correlation between Batman’s intellect and Shakespeare expresses itself fully in the 1960s TV series. Even so, the use of Shakespearean allusions that evoke the Bard as a symbol of erudition can be discerned early on in the Batman comics of the Golden Age. As Marco Arnaudo contends, the comic book genre itself utilizes a “baroque tendency” of “citations and reworkings of previous texts,” ones that acknowledge the artistry and hybridity of the form.10 One Batman episode from this period of DC Comics distinctly demonstrates this baroque technique by interweaving references to highbrow Shakespeare into the storyline. The episode runs as follows. An upper-class villain, Henry Guile III, imagines himself a renowned man of theater and fine arts. Alluding to Jaques’s “All the world’s a stage” speech from As You Like It,11 the evildoer renames himself “The Globe-Trotter of Crime” because “the world will be [his] stage” for acts of wrongdoing (Detective Comics #160). One might also note the nod to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in the theatrical refashioning of Henry Guile III’s name. In the same story, The Globe-Trotter

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of Crime flies to London where he derails The Lord Mayor’s Show, a grand civic procession: the event is described as “old pageantry dating from 1215. It features costumes and tableaux glorifying British life” (Detective Comics #160). To illustrate the parade, one panel from the comics delineates a float that consists of a Shakespearean-looking effigy: the manikin wears a Tudor cuff, has a quill in hand, and sits on a writing desk stacked with books (artist Dick Sprang).12 By using a pastiche of visual iconography, the picture links Shakespeare’s dramatic ingenuity with the celebrated and enlightened accomplishments of the Elizabethan age. Readers understand this association precisely due to what Martin Barker perceives as a “‘contract’ between text and audience” that reinforces socially constructed beliefs systems in comic books.13 A Shakespearean image, standing broadly for Renaissance art and scholarship, represents the apex of intellectuality and the éclat that accompanies that exalted designation. A similar contract between picture-text and audience, one that also evokes Shakespeare as an image of highbrow culture, recurs in an earlier Golden Age episode that features Batman and Robin. In the “Phantom of the Library” (Detective Comics #106), Bruce Wayne and his ward, Dick Grayson (aka Robin), visit the Gotham City Public Library. Called in the title page caption the “Wonder-filled Chambers of That Modern Temple of Knowledge,” the upscale establishment contains five million books, along with ancient maps, a commodious Braille reading room, and an extensive stamp collection. The interior of the building is ceremoniously decorated with objects that connote pretentious intellectualism notwithstanding their public utility. Adorned with elegant chandeliers, the library houses sixteenth-and seventeenth-century portraits as well as at least one prominent Elizabethan-styled bust. These venerable artifacts imbue the library with the sacred air of learning, and they also invite the reader to regard the putative Shakespearean era, to which many of the aforementioned items arguably belong, as an epoch of great intellectual discovery and insight. Thomas E. Wartenberg observes that the genre of comics “give equal weight to the text and the pictures” in the conveyance of meaning.14 Indeed, the library’s décor visually indicates erudition, and Bruce Wayne’s intimacy with the collection suggests his wide reading in a range of literature, even though he and Dick Grayson show particular interest in the criminology section, having visited it before.15 Given this interest in book learning, it is hardly surprising that Batman and other characters demonstrate knowledge of Shakespeare in some of the comics of the Golden Age. For instance, in the episode “The Famous Name Crimes!” (Detective Comics #183) Batman and minor characters correctly state that Julius Caesar suffered stab wounds at the hands of his assassins and that the Earl of Warwick died from a sword injury; the death of both these historical figures, one near the Roman capital, the other on an English

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battlefield, appear most notabley in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and 3 Henry VI respectively. Or in “The Rescue of Robin Hood,” Batman makes a tonguein-cheek reference to Shakespeare’s MacDuff, while slugging it out with a group of scoundrels in the Sherwood Forest. This spirited appropriation of Macbeth attests to a comfortable ease with the playwright, although Batman conflates medieval Scotland with England in this instance (Detective Comics #116). In “Acrostic of Crime,” a Shakespearean allusion even becomes part of the crime game that The Joker, Batman’s arch nemesis, puts into play (Detective Comics #114). To begin the story, the splash page depicts a series of public billboards that contain letters that spell out “ha ha” (the Joker’s laugh), and one advertisement reads “Shakespeare’s Hamlet” (my emphasis) to create the phrase “ha ha.” As the story unfolds, the Joker commits thefts that are associated with letters in his name. For “O,” Batman successfully hypothesizes that the Joker will burglarize the performance of Othello at the Orpheum: an art theater with which Bruce Wayne shows clear familiarity. Inside the opera house, one panel depicts a man on stage in early modern garb with an orchestra below most likely performing Verdi’s opera Otello. In a later DC Comics episode, “The Joker’s Aces!” the Joker attempts to raid the Raleigh Clown Collection. Set in the tycoon P. W. Raleigh’s private gallery, the room garishly displays “giant paintings of Puck, Falstaff, Shakespeare’s comical pranksters,” and other beloved clowns of history.16 Batman’s relationship to the Bard, which includes placing the hero in graphic backdrops that conjure the Shakespearean era, helps to shape the character’s identity as a learned socialite: a man who possesses smarts and the financial freedom to dabble in academic endeavors or curiosities. Yet Batman’s experience with Shakespeare’s oeuvre also encompasses formal training, and it reveals a darkly tragic side to Batman’s identity. By building on Batman’s Golden-era roots as an intellectual, a later DC Comics story from the 1980s recounts Bruce Wayne’s transformation into a Shakespearean-esque superhero. The episode, “Secret Origins Starring the Golden Age Batman,” traces the Dark Knight’s early years as he grows up in the shadow of his parents’ brutal murders during a street mugging. Enrolled in Gotham University as a young man, Bruce Wayne participates in the college production of Hamlet. While rehearsing the part of Polonius, he meets his soon-to-be-girlfriend, Julie Madison, who performs Ophelia. Lauded as a brilliant and topnotch student, Bruce Wayne feels more comfortable “amid the musty shelves of darkened libraries” than socializing with his peers or engaging in collegiate activities other than theater, or so it seems.17 Acting as Polonius—the meddling pantaloon in Shakespeare’s tragedy—doesn’t quite fit Bruce Wayne’s youthful disposition, even though he will later become a meddler in crime. Traumatized in childhood, Bruce Wayne’s reputation for moody seclusion and morose hours of introspection reminds Julie of

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the broody and troubled character Hamlet. She states, “Hello, Bruce. The way I hear it, you ought to be playing Hamlet, instead of just Polonius.”18 Incidentally, in “Clayface Walks Again!” from the Golden Age, Julie is an upstart actress; she adopts the stage name “Portia Storme” because, like “Shakespeare’s Portia,” she is “kind, gentle, sweet,” over and beyond taking the cinematic world by “storm”: a pun on her name, Portia Storme (Detective Comics #49). Julie Madison’s statement in the above paragraph reflects a critical tendency to epitomize Hamlet as the pensive and intensely self-absorbed Prince of Denmark. As Margreta de Grazia contends, Hamlet in the modern tradition has been designated the archetypical intellectual: “a deep thinker turned in on himself with his back to the world.”19 This definition echoes Virginia Woolf’s statement that Hamlet’s character is “highbrow,” exactly because he, like other highbrow individuals, “is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.”20 Although Bruce Wayne and Julie Madison will also take the stage as the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet (thereby cementing their romantic and vexed bond), the superhero’s playacting in college ultimately gives him valuable adeptness in disguise in order to successfully metamorphose into a costumed winged protector; moreover, Bruce’s apprenticeship in dramaturgy connects him, as Julie aptly remarks, to his Shakespearean prototype: Wittenberg student and avenger Hamlet. Brandon Christopher convincingly argues that Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy serves as a framing, or paratextual, device for Bruce Wayne’s vindicatory characterization, one that, like Hamlet’s, is based on “parental loss, disguised identity, and vigilante justice.”21 Similar to Hamlet, the proverbial deep thinker, Batman is motivated by an intense yearning to redress his father’s (and mother’s) unjust murders. In an early episode from the Golden Age, with the diegetic inscription “The Batman and How He Came to Be,” the storyline traces Bruce Wayne’s overriding compulsion to eradicate all unlawful activity. Witnessing a robber gun down his parents in cold blood during a stick-up, the heartbroken child promises to requite their senseless and heartless deaths. Kneeling in an act of earnest prayer, he declares the following: “I swear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals.”22 This oath of vengeance takes place shortly after the shocking killing of Bruce Wayne’s parents on the gritty streets of Gotham City, and the pledge eventually arises as the driving impetus for Batman’s masked identity as an adult: Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot. So my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible [. . .] A Bat! That’s It! It’s an Omen. I shall become a Bat! And thus is born this weird

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figure of the dark [. . .] this avenger of evil, “The Batman.” (Detective Comics #33)

This “weird figure of the dark” and “avenger of evil” shares compelling characteristics with Hamlet, who likewise moodily exhibits a “nightly colour” in both clothes and psychology (1.2.68).23 In Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy, Hamlet vows to seek retaliation for his father’s cruel death at the hands of his self-serving and corrupt uncle, Claudius. Responding to the Ghost of Hamlet’s request for vengeance, Hamlet states, “with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love / May sweep to my revenge” (1.5.29–31). Like Hamlet, Batman views revenge as a private vendetta by which to punish and, in the long run, expunge the immoral and depraved elements of society. Unlike Hamlet, however, Batman’s target is to obliterate all criminals, and he tenaciously, if not obsessively, trains his mind and body to achieve this goal. As Arthur Asa Berger maintains, Bruce Wayne is an aristocratic vindicator driven in part “by a sense of noblesse oblige to labor for mankind.”24 If Hamlet functions as a literary forerunner of Batman, then the resemblances between these two avengers (such as high status, intelligence, masked identity, studiousness, introspection, disguise, and self-isolation) give credence to Batman’s role as a noble and tragic righter of wrongs. These diverse uses of Shakespeare—either to convey Batman as an intellectual hero or to craft funny witticisms in the comics—concur with what Christy Desmet posits as “big-time” and “little-time” Shakespeare. Drawing on Michael Bristol’s Big-time Shakespeare, “big-time” pertains to the institutionalization and durability of the playwright as a signifier of cultural clout and authority. By contrast, little-time Shakespeare involves “individual acts of ‘revision,’” ones that can stem from “a desire to play with Shakespeare.”25 Both these uses of “big” and “little” Shakespeare occur in the cited comics that chronicle Batman’s and Robin’s life and adventures, and the slippage between the two usages reveals, in the words of Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes in The Shakespeare User, “the network of influences and associations that an artist uses to articulate an iteration of the text.”26 For comic books, the single “artist” expands into a web of contributors (scriptwriters, cover artists, pencil artists, ink artists) who utilize the image and/or words of Shakespeare in multivalent applications. The reader of these comics partakes in this complex act as the interpretative agent of language and pictures. Such a network of influences is enlarged in the 1960s Batman TV series to include, without being limited to, producers, writers, directors, cameramen, and actors. The television viewer likewise engages in a matrix of significations that touch on the interplay of words and images. In the context of “big-time” and “littletime,” Shakespeare’s Bust appears simultaneously as an emblem of high culture and also a playful, metatheatrical object of camp.

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CAMPY SHAKESPEARE In the 1960s television series Batman, Shakespeare’s Bust resides in the study of Bruce Wayne’s palatial mansion and significantly aids in the portrayal of the fabulous wealth and dilettantism of Gotham City’s favorite son. The exterior camera shots that capture the stateliness of Wayne Manor—actually a 1924 Tudor Revival house located in Pasadena, California—optically communicate the sense of Bruce Wayne’s riches and societal sway. A prominent stage prop, Shakespeare’s Bust possesses a critical function, and its importance is highlighted by the object’s positioning near the red emergency bat phone. Utilized in the television production design of Batman, the prop contributes to the upper-class furnishings of Wayne Manor. As Peter Maccoy explains such “set dressing is an integral part of design and helps to define an environment.”27 In the study room of Wayne Manor, a bronze bust of Shakespeare, approximately twenty inches high, sits on a desk next to silverplated writing accoutrements. The statue of the playwright’s head signals to the audience the trappings of polished refinement along with the attainment of knowledge. Moreover, random items that suggest learning are often stationed near the bust to embellish the atmosphere of edification. Further props that enhance the set dressing in the study (the interior scenes were shot in sound stages), involve the presence of a globe, bookcases, wooded paneling, animal trophies, a model ship, Queen Ann chairs, art prints, and a fireplace. Taken together, these effects elicit the mythos of a private library filled with genteel tradition and old-world charm. Roland Barthes’s theory of the mythologization process, by which cultural artifacts and the ideologies they connote became woven into the fabric of a society, applies to Shakespeare’s Bust as a recognizable signpost of erudition.28 Other props in the Wayne Manor household add to the upper-crust setting of the estate, and they work in conjunction with Shakespeare’s Bust: a baby grand piano, chessboard, a telescope, textbooks, and binoculars, for instance. These objects intermittently appear on the program, and their properties suggest activities that entail schooling or the economic prerogative to liberally cultivate hobbies or indulge whims. A few examples from the Batman TV series substantiate this point. Dick Grayson practices Chopin on a piano with Aunt Harriet Cooper (played by Madge Blake); he and Bruce Wayne challenge each other to chess (on a fancy triple-decker set); they star gaze at home with an impressive telescope; Dick conjugates French verbs or frets over algebra problems while pouring over textbooks; he also solves puzzles in Latin or bird watches with field glasses. Other more frivolous items, such as a surfboard and drum set, show that Dick Grayson is, after all, still a sportive teenager. One “brainy” prop, an old dusty tome of paleontology, even materializes at the Gotham City Public Library to accentuate the cleverness

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of Barbara Gordon (aka Batgirl); played by Yvonne Craig, she is the quickwitted daughter of Commissioner Gordon and works at the said library. In “The Million Dollar Debit of Batgirl!” (Detective Comics #359), Batgirl has even received a PhD from Gotham State University, graduating summa cum laude. Some of Bruce Wayne’s avocations and diversions do not involve stage props, but simply suggest the goings-on of the bon vivant nonetheless: he gives lectures on Latin America, possesses knowledge of botany, falconry, and architecture; he collects art and rare books, boasts of his virtuosity in sculpture, and, like a good blueblood, speaks of tiger hunting. Unlike these above examples, Shakespeare’s Bust is not connected to any one scholarly exercise or amusement; rather, it doubles as a “practical prop.” According to Peter Maccoy, practical props “fulfill a specific function” that “may often be in conflict with its actual everyday use.”29 Not only does Shakespeare’s Bust enrich the opulent setting of Wayne Manor, but it is also employed as an operational bat mechanism that permits the Dynamic Duo entrance to the Batcave. In the Golden Age of Batman, the superhero accessed the Batcave first through a sliding panel that opened down into a concealed stairway (Detective Comics #75). Later, a hidden opening behind a grandfather clock, positioned in Bruce Wayne’s study, led down to the underground headquarters (Detective Comics #205). The grandfather clock passageway was most likely inspired by the serial movies Batman (1943) and Batman and Robin (1949) produced by Columbia pictures: in these films, the subterranean Batcave is reached by opening the glass panel of a grandfather clock that resides in Bruce Wayne’s den.30 In subsequent renderings, the hands of the clock “had to be set to ten forty-seven, the time Bruce’s parents were slain, to unlock the secret entrance.”31 As a stage prop in the 1960s Batman, however, Shakespeare’s Bust departs from these recognizably mysterious and gothic contrivances by appealing to the show’s upbeat comedy. More specifically, Shakespeare’s Bust heightens the famous camp hilarity of the Batman TV series. Although camp is notoriously difficult to define, Susan Sontag in her seminal essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964) identifies significant elements of camp as “the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of thingsbeing-what-they-are-not,” besides its central metaphor of life as theater.32 One storyline in the Batman show, which artfully mocks bookish pretension, exemplifies camp’s mode of stylized exaggeration. Boarding a ship sailing to England, Bruce Wayne drolly states that he’s carrying onboard the vessel “one thousand key works of literature, biological specimens, and his desk” for Dick Grayson’s education, when in reality he’s packed a load of bat gear and the batmobile.33 One can presume that Shakespeare’s plays would be among these one thousand key works of literature. At least back in Wayne Manor, Dick studiously tackles Shakespeare. One scene from the show dramatizes Dick’s campy, over-the-top recitation of “Is this a dagger which I see

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before me” (2.1.33) soliloquy for his high school’s performance of Macbeth. Sprawled out on the floor, Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s British butler (played by Alan Napier) pretends to be King Duncan, asleep, at Macbeth’s castle. When the scene ends, Alfred reminisces, “I’ve always had a fondness for Shakespeare,” as the TV camera pans to Shakespeare’s Bust propped up conspicuously on Bruce’s study desk.34 This fondness for Shakespeare rings true, for Napier worked with such preeminent Shakespearean actors and directors as Sir John Gielgud and Margaret Webster. An Oxford Player and accomplished London thespian, Napier was not unaccustomed to Shakespearean roles, playing both tragic and comic parts. In films, Napier appeared in Orson Welles’s Macbeth (Republic 1948) in the interpolated role of the Holy Friar and in Julius Caesar as Cicero (MGM 1953).35 As a stage prop, Shakespeare’s Bust—an esteemed emblem of learning as well as a quirky bat contraption—reifies camp’s sensibility of buoyancy, triviality, and non-seriousness: an aesthetics that is, in Sontag’s words, “playful, anti-serious.”36 Camp gestures and revels deliciously in the theatrical metaphor of life as spectacle and artifice: a metatheatrical theme that repeatedly surfaces in Shakespeare’s plays in such beloved lines as “All’s the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” (AYLI, 2.7.138–39): a passage, as mentioned previously, that is alluded to in “The Globe-Trotter of Crime” episode of DC Comics (#160). A similar theatrum mundi metaphor recurs in the very Scottish play that Dick rehearses in which he plays Macbeth, who somberly ruminates that “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more” (5.5.23–25). Even Batman’s literary archetype, the avenger and mad-actor Hamlet, has recourse to theatrical analogies and practical prompts, describing nature—the earth, air, and heavens—in terms of the “goodly frame,” “canopy,” and “majestical roof” of the Globe theater (2.2.290–91). Shakespeare’s Bust catered to the entertainment of a viewing audience who interpreted the Batman show through the lens of camp. While children enjoyed watching the crazy antics of the Dynamic Duo come to life in their living rooms, adults could find laughter and wink at the show’s playful uses of irony; this double-edged humor included the homoerotic romping and horseplay of the Batman and Robin pair. On account of Frederic Wertham’s notorious attack on the immorality of American comic books in the Seduction of the Innocent (1954), the comic book industry during the Silver Age (1956– 1970) turned its attention to implementing moral storylines and enforcing ethics of heterosexuality.37 Born out of this agenda, the Comics Code Authority (1954) was created as a regulatory and censorial association. Referring to this movement, Andy Medhurst in “Batman, Deviance, and Camp” distinguishes between “innocent” camp as manifest in the early Golden Age Batman comics—geared especially to the semiotic coding of a gay subculture—and “the

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self-mockery version of camp” in the 1960s Batman series: “Batman in its comic book form had, unwittingly, always been camp—it was serious (the tone, the moral homilies) about the frivolous (a man in a stupid suit).”38 To be sure, the script of the Batman TV show exploited Shakespeare, not innocently or unwittingly, but in the manner of satirical self-mockery. Screenplay writer and executive story editor of the 1960s Batman, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., states that he intentionally rendered Batman and Robin in the spirit of this highly theatrical, self-reflexive style of camp: “it never crossed my mind to do it any other way.” Echoing Medhurst’s above commentary, Semple had also uncovered the humorous undertones of the early comic book Batman, while researching material for the TV script: Batman was “an action hero, a superhero, who is, plainly in my mind, insanely comic.”39 Semple originally fabricated Shakespeare’s Bust to reflect the fun-and-games sense of camp, an aesthetic that keeps an ironic and public detachment from the queer inflections of “innocent” camp.40 Recollecting on the 1960s Batman TV show, Adam West notes that Shakespeare’s Bust “was simply a bit of studied whimsy.”41 In addition to Shakespeare’s Bust as “studied whimsy” (a ridiculously cool but funny bat tool), several enemies of Batman and Robin playfully camp it up by quoting Shakespearean lines. Their recitations of the Bard are full of artful self-mockery; they gratify mature viewers, the ones in the know, who correctly get the poetic citations. The sexy villain, Catwoman (played by Julie Newmar), purrs “there’s the rub” from Hamlet (3.1.67).42 The Archer, a Robin Hood criminal (played by Art Carney), histrionically states that “Parting is such sweet sorrow” from Romeo and Juliet (2.1.229), wryly clarifying that the quotation comes from “some obscure playwright.”43 In another episode, the Riddler (played by Frank Gorshin) melts a wax image of Batman, fantasizing that the wax dummy was actually the real man: “‘tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wished,” he rhapsodizes. The Riddler then carries on with yet another passage from Hamlet’s soliloquies, injecting Batman into his thoughts: “Oh, that his [Batman’s] too, too sallied flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew” (3.1.65–66, 1.2.129–30). In addition, The Riddler takes credit for Shakespeare’s words by proclaiming, “I wrote it myself.”44 Another episode featuring the evildoer King Tut is jokingly titled, “The Unkindest Tut of All”: a “for grins” interpolation of Anthony’s line from Julius Caesar (3.2.177).45 The line resurfaces when Alfred, the butler, is subjected to the “unkindest cut of all,” while the defeated villain, the Archer, invokes Caesar’s demise and betrayal at the hands of Roman Brutus by lamenting, in the Bard’s words, “Et tu, Bruté” (3.1.76).46 These instances of comedy, which borrow Shakespearean moments for facetious effect, befit camp’s sensibility of irreverent playfulness and its enthusiasm for self-referential ridicule.

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As a campy stage prop, Shakespeare’s Bust calls attention to Batman’s over-the-top knowledge of the playwright, even in his battles with certain villains. Not only do Batman’s foes quote Shakespeare, but the hero himself squares off with a few bad guys who hold a penchant for the Bard of Avon. The Bookworm (played by Roddy McDowell) attempts to rob Gotham City’s august Morganbilt Library which harbors seven Gutenberg Bibles and eleven of Shakespeare’s First Folios. One would think that such a bibliophile would accurately cite Shakespeare, but Bruce Wayne effortlessly corrects Bookworm’s misquotation of the immortal “Poet.” After donating 5,000 dollars to the state prison’s library, Bruce Wayne confronts the newly arrested Bookworm: Bruce Wayne: What are you smiling at, Bookworm? Bookworm: Oh, I’m so much cleverer than all of you, you see. Oh, as the Poet says, “They who lose today may win tomorrow.” Bruce Wayne: Wrong, Bookworm. Bookworm: Not the Poet. Bruce Wayne: That line’s from Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Part one, book one, chapter seven. Bookworm: Poof! That devil. This fellow, he is almost as obnoxious as Batman.47

With an airtight memory, Bruce Wayne dispels any of Bookworm’s pretensions about his preeminence in Shakespeare; moreover, he outshines Bookworm by publicly exercising an extraordinary capability with another preeminent Renaissance writer, Miguel de Cervantes. As a stage prop, Shakespeare’s Bust allows for laughable interpretations of the “Poet”; in this light, it is not a stretch of the imagination to suggest that Shakespeare’s head translates into Batman’s own absurdly over-the-top intellect: by opening up Shakespeare’s pate, Batman figuratively gets into the mind of the poet and dramatist. This metaphor deploys itself with humorous effect in two Batman TV episodes devoted to a Shakespearean-quoting baddie, the Puzzler. The eccentric villain, the Puzzler (played by Maurice Evans), adores aviation and all things Shakespeare. Not only does the Puzzler recite profusely from approximately fifteen plays, but he also drops clues to his larceny by articulating them in Shakespearean riddles. In a two-part episode, the Puzzler cites lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, 1 Henry IV, 3 Henry VI, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, and Twelfth Night, but he prefers declaiming from Hamlet and Macbeth. The real-life actor, Maurice Evans, was a premier Shakespearean performer both on stage and screen. In

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the late 1930s and 1940s, Evans had curried wide favor in the United States on Broadway, topping the bill in Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, 1 Henry IV, and Twelfth Night under the acclaimed direction of Margaret Webster. In 1944, he produced the successful “G.I. Hamlet,” a wartime version of the play that reinvented the melancholy Prince of Denmark into a combat-ready fighter. A few years before the Batman TV show, Evans had achieved further notoriety for producing and starring in the NBC Hallmark Hall of Fame anthology: “Maurice Evans Presents” from 1953 to 1960. In this produced-for-television broadcast, Evans took the lead in six Shakespearean dramas, winning an Emmy Award for Macbeth.48 In the Batman TV show, more specifically, Maurice Evans transmogrifies into a foppish parody of himself. In the alliterative words of the Boy Wonder, the Puzzler is a “shady, pseudo Shakespeare swindler.”49 Ostentatiously colorful, the Puzzler hides out in the equally colorful Old Globe Balloon Factory, a campy reference to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre; here he baffles the Dynamic Duo with his malicious schemes. As Robin puts it, “Even Shakespeare didn’t have words for such villainy.”50 Yet Batman deftly unravels the Puzzler’s conundrums with speed and exactitude. In fact, Batman showcases a ludicrously photo-perfect recall of Shakespeare. For example, he can off-the-cuff quote Falstaff’s lines from The Merry Wives of Windsor: “there is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance, or death” (5.1.3– 4), though he humorously misidentifies the quotation as “Act 3, scene 4, line 22.”51 However, the Caped Crusader does accurately correct the Puzzler’s use of Shakespeare. At the end of the finale episode, Batman gently reprimands the Puzzler for an incorrect attribution of Claudius’s line in what appears to be Act Four of Hamlet. After having been apprehended, the Puzzler overdramatically spouts, “My soul is full of discord and dismay.” The rest of the scene runs as follows: Batman: Hamlet Puzzler: Act Four Batman: Scene 1 Puzzler: Line 46 Batman: 45. Puzzler: Egads, sir, you’re right.52

The Puzzler surrenders to Batman’s mastery of Shakespeare, acknowledging with surprise his foe’s seriously powerful command of the playwright. The Batman critic Will Brooker maintains that the camp of the 1960s Batman TV show resides partly in the actor’s (Adam West) ludicrous seriousness, delivering cut-up funny script lines in a deadpan manner “as if they were Shakespeare, as if they contained ambiguities that his performance must

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make clear.” Brooker also adds, “he acts out each nuance in Batman’s train of thought, quite literally as if it were one of Hamlet’s soliloquies.”53 In the same vein of “ludicrous seriousness,” one might add that Adam West as Batman seems to have committed to memory the whole corpus of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. With the Puzzler and his gang imprisoned, the story concludes back at Wayne Manor with Alfred, the Butler’s, observation that “Well, all’s well that—that ends well, sir?”: a sardonic query to Shakespeare’s questionably happy comedy of the same title. 54 Shakespeare’s Bust as Commodity The close rapport between camp aesthetics and the American Pop Art movement of the mid-twentieth century bespeaks a link between Shakespeare’s Bust and the popular commodification of the playwright’s image in the 1960s Batman show. As Anna Malinowska states in her citation of Sontag, “Camp tastes—theatrical, flamboyant, tacky and deeply ironic—linked it to Pop Art, which although very different, ‘embodied an attitude that it related.’”55 Similar to camp, Popism destabilized traditional artistic boundaries; however, unlike camp, it drew inspiration largely from commercial industry and mass media by valorizing, though with ironic detachment, everyday products and iconography, such as comic books, commercial goods, or even superstar celebrities. In their discussion of the 1960s Batman series, Lynn Spigel and Henry Jenkins claim that “ABC used the Pop aesthetics as a promotional and publicity vehicle, giving the show cultural status by hyperbolically referring to its Warholian aspects.” These critics single out Batman’s “cartoonish characters,” “gimmicky special effects,” and the “flattened out and exaggerated sense of color,” among other aspects, to evidence the chic style of Pop Art in the vein of Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein.56 Shakespeare’s Bust resonates with the ideals of Popism, as well as camp, through its satiric comment on the commodification of Shakespeare as a product of mainstream culture. To underline this idea, Pop Artist Steve Kaufman, Andy Warhol’s former assistant, took the celebrity of Shakespeare as his subject for “Shakespeare State Two” (1996), a portrait of the Bard, hand-painted oil on canvass silkscreen, in purple, yellow, and gold. The screen print painting is now part of the permanent collection maintained by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.57 Similarly, this use of Shakespeare’s Bust has recently become part of the essential memorabilia of the Batman TV show. Diamond Select Toys has come out with a replica of the Shakespeare Bust, called the Shakespeare Vinyl Bust Bank, as seen on the sixties television series. Like its prototype, the toy statue is bronze, stands approximately twenty inches high, and has a head that opens to reveal a dial and knob. This toy not only functions as

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part of the TV show’s campy memorabilia, but it is also a reminder of Bruce Wayne’s scholarly characterization. Furthermore, the Vinyl Bust Bank obviously links Shakespearean figurative culture capital with the capital of the marketplace. The image of Shakespeare transfigures into an actual container for money (the money slot is hidden on the bottom of the statue). The hidden bank plays into Bruce Wayne’s hidden identity as a crime fighter, but it also reflects the unseen “symbolic” cultural capital of Shakespeare. Most recently, gaming and playful uses of Shakespeare’s Bust as a merchandizing commodity can be seen in The Lego Batman Movie (Warner Brothers, 2017), which reproduces Bruce Wayne’s study in the Lego mode of the 1966 Batman show; Batman: Arkham Knight (Warner Brothers, 2015), in which Batman interacts with Shakespeare’s Bust in this actionadventure video game; the comic book series Batman ‘66 (2013–2016, DC Comics), which replicates the set design of the TV show, including, of course, Shakespeare’s Bust; and the TV series Gotham (Fox 2014–2019) in which a bust of Shakespeare can be viewed on Bruce Wayne’s mantelpiece for those viewers “in the know.” These appearances of Shakespeare’s Bust indicate the ongoing legacy of the object as an entity that denotes multiple meanings. The object, Shakespeare’s Bust, is associated with diverse, often conflicting, cultural states simultaneously. As Timothy Morton states, “Objects are contradictions.”58 Shakespeare’s Bust is an object that not only serves to define Batman’s erudite character and the camp of the TV series but also the cultural capital of Shakespeare as well. The slippage of significations associated with Shakespeare’s Bust reminds us of Adam West’s statement about playing the star role of Batman in the 1960s series. West says, “It’s like Hamlet. When you’re a teenager, you read the play and it’s ‘Hey, I get it! Hamlet’s having a few problems at home and they drive him crazy.’ Twenty years later you’re not sure and you can’t sum it up so succinctly.”59 So, too, Shakespeare’s Bust.

NOTES 1. “The Puzzles are Coming,” Batman, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, directed by Jeffrey Hayden and written by Fred De Gorter (1966; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014), DVD. 2. For studies that explore Shakespeare in global contexts on screen and stage, see World-Wide Shakespeares, ed. Sonia Massai (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 3. For the use of this term in relation to the character of Batman, as well as a discussion of negative reactions to the camp aesthetics in the Batman TV series, see

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Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), especially 71–101. 4. For the influence of American superheroes on the James Bond character and films, see John Shelton Lawrence, “The American Superhero Genres of James Bond,” in James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films Are Not Enough, eds. Robert G. Weiner, B. Lynn Whitfield, and Jack Becker (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 330–348. 5. Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 233. 6. See Paul Levitz, The Golden Age of DC Comics, 1935–1956 (Cologne: Taschen 2013). In general, the Golden Age era saw the stellar rise of the superheroes (such as Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman of DC Comics) and the rapid increase in the mainstream popularity of comic books. 7. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, “‘I’m Not Fooled by That Cheap Disguise,” in The Many Lives of The Batman, eds. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: Routledge, 1991), 186. According to Pearson and Uricchio, the core traits of Batman are the following: “wealth, physical prowess; deductive abilities and obsession” (186). 8. See, for instance, the episode “The Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom” (with the diegetic inscription “The Batman and How He Came to Be”) in which Bruce Wayne diligently studies science to improve his crime fighting skills (Bill Finger and Bob Kane, Detective Comics [New York: DC Comics, 1939) #33. https://readcomiconline​.to​/Comic​/Detective​-Comics​-1939​/Issue​-114​?id​=5117​ #1. Unless otherwise indicated, further citations of Detective Comics will be cited parenthetically in text and refer to this site. 9. For Batman/Bruce Wayne’s characterization, see Matthew K. Manning, Batman: Character Encyclopedia (New York: DK Publishing, 2016), 4–5. Jeffrey K. Johnson argues that Batman’s acuity, hard work, and resourcefulness make him a Post-Depression hero, even though the character is privileged with wealth and playboy socialite status (Super-History: Comic Book Superheroes and American Society: 1938 to the Present [Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Company, 2012], 21–25). 10. Marco Arnaudo, The Myth of the Superhero, trans. Jamie Richards (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 139–140. 11. Citations from Shakespeare’s As You Like It refer to The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, second edition (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 2.7.138–165. Further citations of Shakespeare’s work will be indicated parenthetically by act, scene, and line number. 12. For a discussion of artists during the Golden Age of DC Comcis, see Mark Cotta Vaz, Tales of the Dark Night: Batman’s First Fifty Years: 1939–1989 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), 28–29. 13. Martin Barker, Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989), 261. 14. Thomas E. Wartenberg, “Wordy Pictures: Theorizing the Relationship between Image and Text in Comics,” in The Art of Comics: A Theoretical Approach,

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eds. Aaron Meskin and Roy T. Cook (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 87, 87–104. 15. The mythos of Batman’s studious nature is recorded by Robert Greenberger: Bruce Wayne attended the “finest institutions around the planet including the Berlin School of Science, Cambridge University in England, and the Sorbonne in France” (The Essential Batman Encyclopedia [New York: Ballantine Books, 2008], 28). 16. Bill Finger and Bob Kane, “The Joker’s Aces!” in World’s Finest Comics (New York: DC Comics, 1952), #59. https://readcomiconline​ .to​ /Comic​ /World​ -s​ -Finest​-Comics​/Issue​-59​?id​=47973#1 17. Robert Greenberger and Roy Thomas, “Secret Origins Starring the Golden Age Batman,” in Secret Origins (New York: DC Comics, 1986), Second Series #6. 18. Secret Origins, #6. 19. Margreta de Grazia, “Hamlet the Intellectual,” in The Public Intellectual, ed. Helen Small (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 104, 89–109. 20. Virginia Woolf, “Middlebrow,” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: The Hogarth Press, 1942), 113. 21. Brandon Christopher, “Paratextual Shakespearings: Comics’ Shakespearean Frame,” in Shakespeare / not Shakespeare, eds. Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 151, 149–167. 22. “The Batman and How He Came to Be,” in Batman Chronicles, ed. Dale Crain, vol. 1 (New York: DC Comics, 2005), 63. 23. Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, third edition, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016). 24. Arthur Asa Berger, The Comic-Stripped American (New York: Walker Publishing Company, 1973), 162. Berger argues that Batman symbolizes important American values: “The most important of these is the belief in the pietist-perfectionist, the individual who makes it his duty to right all wrongs” (166). 25. Christy Desmet, Shakespeare and Appropriation, eds. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 2. 26. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 7. 27. Peter Maccoy, Essentials of Stage Management (London: A&C Black Publishing, 2004), 195. 28. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972). 29. Maccoy, Essentials of Stage Management, 196. 30. For a discussion of the movie versions of Batman, see James Van Hise, Batmania II (Las Vegas NV: Pioneer Books, 1992). 31. Robert Greenberger, The Essential Batman, 22. 32. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of Formalist, Avant-Garde, Contextualist, and Post-Modern Thought, ed. Sally Everett (Jefferson, NC. and London: MacFarland & Company, 1991), 99.

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33. “The Londinium Larcenies,” Batman, directed by Oscar Rudolph, written by Elkan Allan and Charles Hoffman (1967; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014), DVD. 34. “Dizzoner the Penguin,” Batman, directed by Oscar Rudolph, written by Stanford Sherman (1966; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014), DVD. 35. Alan Napier and James Bigwood. Not Just Batman’s Butler: The Autobiography of Alan Napier (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015), 81–96, 361–374. 36. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 99. 37. For a larger discussion of the Silver Age of DC Comics, see Paul Levitz, The Silver Age of DC Comics: 1956–1970 (Cologne: Taschen, 2013), especially 17–48. 38. Andy Medhurst, “Batman, Deviance, and Camp,” in The Many Lives of the Batman, eds. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: Routledge, 1991), 156. 39. Lorenzo Semple, Jr., “Lorenzo Semple, Jr.” Interview by Lee Goldberg, September 25, 2008. https://interviews​.televisionacademy​.com​/interviews​/lorenzo​ -semple-. 40. Medhurst, “Batman, Deviance, and Camp,” 155. 41. Adam West with Jeff Rovin, Back to the Batcave (New York: Berkley Books, 1994), 123. 42. “The Purr-fect Crime,” Batman, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, directed by James Sheldon and written by Stanley Ralph Ross and Lee Orgel (1966; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014), DVD. 43. “Shoot A Crooked Arrow,” Batman, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, directed by Sherman Marks and written by Stanley Ralph Ross (1966; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014). DVD. 44. “The Ring of Wax,” Batman, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, directed by James B. Clark and written by Jack Paritz and Bob Rodgers (1966; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014), DVD. The Riddler appears to cite from Q2 of Hamlet’s first soliloquy. 45. “The Unkindest Tut of All,” Batman, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, directed by Sam Strangis and written by Stanley Ralph Ross (1967; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014), DVD. 46. “Walk the Straight and Narrow,” Batman, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, directed by Sherman Marks and written by Stanley Ralph Ross (1966; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014), DVD. 47. “While Gotham City Burns,” Batman, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, directed by Larry Peerce and written by Rik Vollaerts (1966; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014). DVD. 48. Laury Magnus, “Shakespeare on Film and Television,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. Arthur F. Kinnery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 486. 49. “The Puzzles are Coming,” Batman, 1966. 50. Ibid.

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51. “The Duo is Slumming,” Batman, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, directed by Jeffrey Hayden and written by Fred De Gorter (1966; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014). DVD. 52. Ibid. 53. Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (New York and London: Continuum, 2001), 202. 54. “The Duo is Slumming,” Batman, 1966. 55. Anna Malinowska, “Bad Romance: Pop and Camp in Light of Evolutionary Confusion,” in Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture, ed. Justyna Stępień (New Castle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 11, 9–22. 56. Lynn Spigel and Henry Jenkins, “Same Bat Channel, Different Bat Times: Mass Culture and Popular Memory,” in The Many Lives of the Batman, eds. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: Routledge, 1991), 122–123. 57. Warholian Shakespeare (based on the Droushout portrait in non-representational coloring) is a recognizable Pop image, but Warhol apparently did not produce an image of Shakespeare as part of his silkscreen projects, or in other artworks. 58. Timothy Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History, 43.2 (2012): 205–224, 210. 59. Adam West, Bat to the Batcave, 1–2.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnaudo, Marco. The Myth of the Superhero. Translated by Jamie Richards. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Barker, Martin. Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972. Batman. “Dizzoner the Penguin.” November 3, 1966. Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Directed by Oscar Rudolph. Written by Stanford Sherman. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014. DVD. ———. “The Duo is Slumming.” December 22, 1966. Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Directed by Jeffrey Hayden. Written by Fred De Gorter. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014. DVD. ———. “The Londinium Larcenies.” November 23, 1967. Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Directed by Oscar Rudolph. Written by Elkan Allan and Charles Hoffman. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014. DVD. ———. “The Purr-fect Crime.” March 16, 1966. Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Directed by James Sheldon. Written by Stanley Ralph Ross and Lee Orgel. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014. DVD. ———. “The Puzzles are Coming.” December 21, 1966. Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Directed by Jeffrey Hayden. Written by Fred De Gorter. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014. DVD.

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———. “The Ring of Wax.” March 30, 1966. Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Directed by James B. Clark. Written by Jack Paritz and Bob Rodgers. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014. DVD. ———. “Shoot A Crooked Arrow.” September 7, 1966. Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Directed by Sherman Marks. Written by Stanley Ralph Ross. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014. DVD. ———. “The Unkindest Tut of All.” October 19, 1667. Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Directed by Sam Strangis. Written by Stanley Ralph Ross. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014. DVD. ———. “Walk the Straight and Narrow.” September 8, 1966. Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Directed by Sherman Marks. Written by Stanley Ralph Ross. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014. DVD. ———. “While Gotham City Burns.” April 21, 1966. Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Directed by Larry Peerce. Written by Rik Vollaerts. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2014. DVD. The Batman. Directed by Lambert Hillyer. Los Angeles. Columbia, 1943. Film. Batman ‘66. Written by Jeff Parker and Tom Peyer. Cover Art by Mike Allred. New York: DC Comics, 2013–16. Batman: Arkham Knight. Developed by Rocksteady Studios. Los Angeles. Warner Brothers, 2015. Video Game. Batman and Robin. Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet. Los Angeles. Columbia, 1949. Film. Berger, Arthur Asa. The Comic-Stripped American. New York: Walker Publishing Company, 1973. Bristol, Michael D. Big-Time Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Brooker, Will. Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon. New York and London: Continuum, 2001. Christopher, Brandon. “Paratextual Shakespearings: Comics’ Shakespearean Frame.” Shakespeare / not Shakespeare. Eds. Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 149–167. Crain, Dale, ed. Batman Chronicles. New York: DC Comics, 2005. De Grazia, Margreta. “Hamlet the Intellectual.” The Public Intellectual. Ed. Helen Small. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002, 89–109. Desmet, Christy. Shakespeare and Appropriation, Eds. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Fazel, Valerie M. and Louise Geddes, Eds. The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Gotham. “A Dark Knight: A Beautiful Darkness.” Episode 13, Season 4. Directed by John Stephens. Written by Tze Chun. Fox, March 8, 2018. TV Series. Greenberger, Robert. The Essential Batman Encyclopedia. New York: Ballantine Books, 2008. Greenberger, Robert and Roy Thomas. “Secret Origins Starring the Golden Age Batman.” Secret Origins. Second Series #6. New York: DC Comics (September 1986).

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Greenblatt, Stephen. Ed. The Norton Shakespeare. Third Edition. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2016. Hodgdon, Barbara. The Shakespeare Trade. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Johnson, Jeffrey K. Super-History: Comic Book Superheroes and American Society: 1938 to the Present. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Company, 2012. Kane, Bob and Bill Finger. “Acrostics of Crime.” Detective Comics. #114 (August 1946). https://readcomiconline​.to​/Comic​/Detective​-Comics​-1937​/Issue​-114​?id​ =5117#1 Accessed January 10. 2020. ———. “The Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom.” Detective Comics. #33 (Nov. 1939). https://readcomiconline​.to​/Comic​/Detective​-Comics​-1939​/Issue​-114​ ?id​=5117#1 Accessed January 10. 2020. ———. “Clayface Walks Again!” Detective Comics. #49 (March 1941). https:// readcomiconline​.to​/Comic​/Detective​-Comics​-1937​/Issue​-49​?id​=5182#3 Accessed January 10, 2020. ———. “The Famous Name Crimes!” Detective Comics. #183 (May 1952). https://readcomiconline​.to​/Comic​/Detective​-Comics​-1937​/Issue​-183​?id​=5282#2 Accessed January 10, 2020. ———. “The Globe-Trotter of Crime!” Detective Comics. #160 (June 1950). https://readcomiconline​.to​/Comic​/Detective​-Comics​-1937​/Issue​-160​?id​=5215#1 Accessed January 10, 2020. ———. “The Joker’s Aces!” World’s Finest Comics. New York: DC Comics, 1952, #59. https://readcomiconline​.to​/Comic​/World​-s​-Finest​-Comics​/Issue​-59​?id​ =47973#1 Accessed January 10, 2020. ———. “The Million Dollar Debit of Batgirl!” Detective Comics #359, January 1967. https://readcomiconline​.to​/Comic​/Detective​-Comics​-1937​/Issue​-359​?id​ =5601#1 Accessed January 10. 2020. ———. “The Origin of the Batcave.” Detective Comics. #205. March 1954. https://readcomiconline​.to​/Comic​/Detective​-Comics​-1937​/Issue​-205​?id​=5342#1 Accessed January 10, 2020. ———. “Phantom of the Library.” Detective Comics. #106 (December 1945). https://readcomiconline​.to​/Comic​/Detective​-Comics​-1937​/Issue​-106​?id​=5100#3 Accessed January 10, 2020. ———. “The Rescue of Robin Hood.” Detective Comics. #116 (October 1946). https://readcomiconline​.to​/Comic​/Detective​-Comics​-1937​/Issue​-116​?id​=5121#1 Accessed January 10, 2020. ———. “The Robber Baron.” Detective Comics. #75 (May 1943). https://readcomiconline​.to​/Comic​/Detective​-Comics​-1937​/Issue​-75​?id​=5292​#1​#59. Accessed January 10, 2020. Lawrence, John Shelton. “The American Superhero Genres of James Bond.” James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films Are Not Enough. Eds. Robert G. Weiner, B. Lynn Whitfield, and Jack Becker. Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. The Lego Batman Movie. Directed by Chris McKay. Los Angeles. Fox Studios, 2017. Film.

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Levitz, Paul. The Golden Age of DC Comics, 1935–1956. Cologne: Tashen, 2013. ———. The Silver Age of DC Comics, 1956–70. Cologne: Tashen, 2013. Maccoy, Peter. Essentials of Stage Management. London: A&C Black Publishing, 2004. Magnus, Laury. “Shakespeare on Film and Television.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare. Ed. Arthur F. Kinnery. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 474–498. Malinowska, Anna. “Bad Romance: Pop and Camp in Light of Evolutionary Confusion.” Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture. Ed. Justyna Stępień. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, 9–22. Manning, Mathew K. Batman Character Encyclopedia. New York: DK Publishing, 2016. Massai, Sonia, ed. World-Wide Shakespeares. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Medhurst, Andy. “Batman, Deviance, and Camp.” The Many Lives of the Batman. Eds. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio. New York: Routledge, 1991, 149–163. Morton, Timothy. “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History, 43.2 (2012): 205–224. Pearson, Roberta E. and William Uricchio, “‘I’m Not Fooled by That Cheap Disguise.’” The Many Lives of The Batman. Eds. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio. (New York: Routledge, 1991), 182–213. Semple, Lorenzo Jr. “Lorenzo Semple, Jr.” Interview by Lee Goldberg, September 25, 2008. https://interviews​.televisionacademy​.com​/interviews​/lorenzo​-semple​-jr​ ?clip​=30727​#interview​-clips. Accessed January 10, 2020. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of Formalist, Avant-Garde, Contextualist, and Post-Modern Thought. Ed. Sally Everett. Jefferson, NC, and London: MacFarland & Company, 1991, 96–109. Spigel, Lynn, and Henry Jenkins, “Same Bat Channel, Different Bat Times: Mass Culture and Popular Memory.” The Many Lives of the Batman. Eds. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio. New York: Routledge, 1991, 117–148. Van Hise, James. Batmania II. Las Vegas NV: Pioneer Books, 1992. Vaz, Mark Cotta Vaz. Tales of the Dark Night: Batman’s First Fifty Years: 1939– 1989. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989. Wartenberg, Thomas E. “Wordy Pictures: Theorizing the Relationship between Image and Text in Comics.” The Art of Comics: A Theoretical Approach. Eds. Aaron Meskin and Roy T. Cook. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2012, 87–104. Weldon, Glenn. The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. Wertham, Frederic. Seduction of the Innocent. New York and Toronto: Rinehart and Company, 1954. West, Adam. With Jeff Rovin. Back to the Back Cave. New York: Berkley Books, 1994. Woolf, Virginia. “Middlebrow.” In The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: The Hogarth Press, 1942, 113–119.

Chapter 5

On the Shakespeare Trail Peter Holland

On November 17, 1998, and for a while after, something very strange happened in cinema-going.1 Across the United States and far beyond, people bought tickets at their local movie theaters with no interest in watching the movie that was playing but only in order to watch the trailers or, to be more precise, to watch one trailer, the first teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, a movie scheduled for release the following year. Dubbed the “most anticipated two minutes of film ever,” this was the first footage from the world of the Star Wars franchise since 1983 when Return of the Jedi had appeared.2 Star Wars fans, in their tens of thousands, were desperate to see what George Lucas had created. As, according to CNN, Variety reported, “nearly two-thirds of the 500 people in an afternoon showing of ‘The Siege’ in Los Angeles walked out after seeing the trailer. Movie theaters across the country reported other fans doing the same thing.”3 By the first evening, several fans had uploaded the trailer onto websites—this was, of course, years before the start of YouTube. In the first forty-eight hours, 200,000 fans downloaded the trailer from those sites.4 In many ways the trailer was more successful than the movie. And, of course, the tease was intended for an audience already totally committed to the hype of the next episode, first in sequence, fourth to be made, in what had then been planned as a ninefilm sequence of the narrative, long before extra spin-off episodes had been announced. It is rather like the moment when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men announced in, it would seem, 1595 that they would be playing Richard II, episode one, though the fifth to appear, of what would be an eight-play sequence, though nobody, perhaps not even Shakespeare, knew that at the time. The most the Lord Chamberlain’s Men probably did was to announce the new play from the stage and on the bills stuck up around town. Now, of course, marketing is central to and an expensive part of the economics 93

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of film, and trailers are a crucial part of this operation. Trailers were made by the studio in the old days, now usually by independent trailer production companies—the work that, in the popular 2006 rom-com The Holiday, we see Amanda, the character played by Cameron Diaz, doing in LA. At one moment in the film we watch her at work. Here is a script excerpt of the moment, though, of course, we are not shown the trailer she is working on: Amanda. Amazing! It finally looks like a hit. Ben. And that is why they pay you the big bucks. Amanda. I think we should go back to the original cut on the end. It’s so much stronger. Ben. I agree. Amanda. And make “Christmas Day” twice as big . . . but try it in a red. Like a happy red, not like a Scorsese red. Ben. Happy red. Amanda. OK, so we’re done.5

Trailers are extensively analyzed and researched and tested on audiences before distribution, creating their own ancillary companies for market research. They mark a point where the filmmakers are far from being in control of what we might now call messaging, instead of becoming a mediating moment between production and consumption, a representation of the film but not a representation by the film. Their complex interventions in the constructions of anticipated meanings in the movie being trailed are part of their effectiveness as they seek the particular responses that will encourage us—or those of us they wish to encourage—to choose in the future to buy a movie ticket. At their best these are two-minute miniature works of art that beautifully make their marketing points, works of great density that make full analysis exhausting as I would need to work shot by shot to show how the choices of clips sequence into structures of meaning. Yet Shakespeare trailers are a barely noticed part of Shakespeare’s studies. I started this project by looking on the World Shakespeare Bibliography Online, searching its more than 123,000 records and came up only with a 1989 play called “Shakespeare in the Trailer Park,” which played at the Deep Ellum Theater Garage in Dallas. There is scholarly work out there on the topic, of course, especially in Emma French’s 2006 monograph, Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood, with its focus on “what the manner in which Hollywood marketed Shakespeare, and Shakespeare was marketed to Hollywood, reveals about high/low hybridity in global consumer culture.”6 I shall be considering some of the same concerns but my focus will be a little wider, dominated by, but not exclusive to, Hollywood. I am, though, concerned only with Anglophone films and their Anglophone trailers. I am

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hoping that, if any of my readers are intrigued by the topic, even if not necessarily by my approach to it, they will explore the Shakespeare trailers for work in their own languages and cultures. How, I wonder, do the trailers for, say, Shakespeare in Love work in China or the Philippines? What work did trailers for Ran or Maqbool do? I shall be concerned with two poles of trailer style that I will set up shortly. I will be primarily examining words rather than images, words on screen and words in voice-over, words spoken by characters and words that the trailer speaks. Think of a recent movie trailer, say over the last thirty years, and you are aware that you are thinking of a template. Take one obvious but peculiar fact: the voice-over for US trailers, for the long period in which trailers used that device (it has now fallen out of fashion), was always male, the same gravelly, dark, comfortingly authoritative kind of voice every time, a voice that spoke very slowly. Quite why, as Andy Medhurst put it in an article on “The Big Tease,” “To trail . . . is male” isn’t fully answered by his suggestion that “When the lights go down, and we’re helpless in the dark, we still want masculinity in that godlike voice from the ether booming out its otherworldly sales pitch” for there can be many reasons apart from the godlike cultural capital bound up in the male voice for what was then (but now no longer) a convention.7 The epitome of the male trailer voice was that of Don LaFontaine, nicknamed “The Voice of God” and supposedly the inventor of the clichéd opening phrase “In a world where . . .”. The male dominance of the voice-over industry is the subject of In a World . . . (2014), a brilliant film comedy, written by, directed by and starring Lake Bell who plays a woman voice-coach trying to break into the voice-over market dominated by her father and his protégé.8 It wasn’t always quite like that: British films of the 1940s and 1950s used a voice-over that spoke in the best BBC version of RP, speaking at a speed about three times that of the current US norm and one most often used for the voice-over for newsreel of the period like British Pathé News. The best presentation of the template, though, is in a superb parody called “How to Make a Blockbuster Movie Trailer,” first posted on YouTube in August 2017, which is, as a trailer expert said to me, “scarily accurate.”9 It would spoil its brilliance to attempt to describe it in cold print and I urge all to follow the link and watch it. What happens, though, when a trailer works strongly against the template? The trailer for Oliver Parker’s 1995 film Othello opens with an unusually long narration in voice-over, the usual way of dealing with substantial pieces of text: In the time of heroes there was but one great general. His bravery in battle was legendary. His devotion to his love unchallenged. His name was Othello. Under the cover of darkness and against her father’s will, he took Desdemona

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into his heart. The great general and his true love were secretly wed. Some men die for glory, some men fight for love. One man lived for revenge. His was the soul of a traitor and the opportunity he seized would change their lives forever.

By the time this is complete, portentous underscore and all, we are well over halfway through the trailer, some 76 seconds out of a total of 112. The extent to which this trailer resists conventional formatting is itself a marker of the inherent structural problematic posed by Shakespeare, for these are plays that pose a refusal of film modalities. A line from Iago and one from Othello follow. And then the voice-over returns with the identification of the production company and a three name cast-run, the term for the list of the stars of the film. One brief line from Iago and then a one word ending from the voice-over, the title, “Othello” to go with the single word on screen in a fake early modern script and we’re out with the billing block, the panel with far too many words on it that lists stars, composer, director, producer, executive producer, and so on. The choice of lines from the play deserve a little further thought: Iago. Beware my lord of jealousy. Look to your wife, observe her well with Cassio. Othello. If she be false, I’ll not believe it. I’ll not believe it. V/O. Castle Rock Entertainment is proud to present Laurence Fishburne, Irene Jacob, and Kenneth Branagh. Iago. Strangle her in her bed. V/O. Othello.

First, three of the snippets of Shakespeare are culled from one scene: Iago at the start of the jealousy scene and then later in it; Othello later in the same scene with a repetition that isn’t in Shakespeare; then Iago from a while later (3.3.167, 200, 282–3, 4.1.204).10 Given the opening emphasis on the linearity of narration, in which the setting-up of the plot is as tightly compacted by synopsis as the trailer-makers dare, the snippets of Shakespeare act as strong pointers: the crucial start of the jealousy plot and the proposal for the climactic act of violence. That selection is as nothing, of course, compared with the grabbing of shots from all over the film throughout the trailer. Trailer montage is based on the immediacy of response and a shot here of, say, Cassio in bed with Desdemona, a shot that only makes sense as a visualization, literally a projection, of Othello’s jealous imaginings, still functions effectively in the trailer as a signifier of the film’s—and the play’s—endless fascination with what can and cannot be seen, its voyeurism and teasing with the sight of sex, permissible or not.

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Trailers work—pardon the pun—to unmoor a shot from its position in the thread of the film’s unraveling, dislocating it into a montage sequence that denies the linearity of narrativity and localized meaning to construct that other effect that trailers yearn to create: the emphasized collection, or collocation, of similar shot materials to define the generic particularities of the movie. If you want to entice the audience demographic (or “demo” as it is usually called) that likes one kind of film, make sure your trailer has as much as possible of that genre visible. I will return to the denomination, indeed nomination, of genre soon. Second, let me note the structure of the cast-run sentence: “Castle Rock Entertainment is proud to . . .” It’s an unusual form for trailers in mentioning the stars’ names and I hear it as a kind of displacement from the much more common use of this kind of register as a signal of a high-culture film, not only, though also, carrying the implications of a piece of art-house cinema packaged for general distribution. Production companies do not manifest their pride in, say, a Batman movie or in horror franchises. The pride is not in the particularity of Fishburne, Jacob, and Branagh as leading cast members but, implicitly, in the company’s involvement in a Shakespeare film, that ultimate marker of high culture, a culture assumed to be predicated on elite exclusivity that is, still, implicitly, formulated as antithetical to the popularity of cinema. Let me compare this with moments in trailers for two of Olivier’s Shakespeare films. The first is the rolling title at the start of a trailer for Olivier’s 1944 Henry V: The Rank Organization Presents with Profound Pride THE CHRONICLE HISTORY OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S “HENRY” THE FIFTH” The rest of this roll is itself indicative of marketing strategy: Never has the Screen Unfolded such Pomp and Ceremony . . . Such excitement and Spectacle as this Wondrous Cavalcade of

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Men, Might and Majesty! Now Filmed in Breath-Taking SUPERSCOPE and Painted in the Splendor of Technicolor this Panorama of Unforgettable History Comes to Thrill American Audiences as few Motion Pictures Ever Have! I note that it is explicitly directed at US audiences, that it is about thrill and excitement and the use of the latest technology. Superscope was a brief 1950s rival to Cinemascope. (And how, one might be wondering, was a 1944 film reshot in the new technology of a decade later? It wasn’t. This, the trailer for the 1950s re-release of Henry V, was possible because the original film was cropped top and bottom so that its aspect ratio now matched the widescreen of scope format, whether super- or cinema-.) Incidentally, the 1944 original trailer lasts six minutes and is one of the dullest I have ever seen. But my primary point is that use of “profound pride” as the metonymic sign for Shakespeare. When a film company speaks of pride it is probably speaking of Shakespeare. But the second parallel is from the trailer for the 1965 Othello, starring Olivier but directed on stage by John Dexter and on film by Stuart Burge, made after the end of the stage-run at the National Theatre. This trailer is almost entirely a shot of Olivier, perched on the edge of a desk in an elegant room, supposedly at Shepperton Studios where the film was made, talking to camera for four minutes. Toward the end, Olivier’s script splits the potential audience into two in thinking about their future response to the film: Many of you may reawaken an interest in the works of Shakespeare. But, for most, we will have succeeded if, during its limited engagements in your theater or cinema, we provide the evening of full-blooded entertainment that the author intended Othello to be.

This is spoken over shots and a certain amount of sound from the swordfighting and chaos of the mutiny provoked by Iago’s getting Cassio drunk. I am fascinated by the careful choice of that first verb: not that some of the audience may “awaken” an interest in the plays but “reawaken,” defining

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them as that broad group of averagely educated people who had to study Shakespeare in school and now need to have the pleasure reawakened. And that use of “full-blooded” and choice of clips is designed to reassure viewers that the film isn’t dull, precious, and difficult to follow. Sit back, enjoy the fighting, it’s OK, even if it is Shakespeare. The division in audiences can be reflected in a release strategy. Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet was first shown in the United States on a very limited number of screens, all in major cities, with plenty of emphasis on the film as an educational opportunity for schools and colleges. After it won the 1949 Best Picture and Best Actor Oscars, it was given a new release on the first-run circuit, shown with a new tagline clearly designed for a broader audience demo, “The greatest ghost story of them all,” and with a caption on the posters that said it all: “Shrouded in mist, clad in rusty armor, a horrifying spectre stalks the great stone battlements of the ancient castle. Its one command is . . . kill . . . kill . . . KILL!”11 And that brings me to my third and last point about the script for the 1995 Othello and indeed the full extent of its images and onscreen text: nowhere does the word “Shakespeare” appear. The suppression of the word, rendering it invisible, something that is not uncommon in Shakespeare film trailers, seems to me to function differently in different circumstances—and I shall come back to one later. Here I suspect it is the pitch of the movie as sexy costume drama that means the Shakespeare fear factor must be avoided. If you are going to see it because of one or more of the stars or because of the gorgeous location photography or the bedroom scenes, then you may not want to be reminded that it is by Shakespeare. This is essentially different from, say, the suppression of Shakespeare in the trailer for Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), for that film, not only in the trailer but also in its film credits, completely erases Shakespeare from its text. When I used to use the film in class a while back—not now when it so clearly belongs to a pre-history of film-watching for 99 percent of my students—I would always have a student or three surprised to find that this film which they had seen and enjoyed was a Shakespeare adaptation. I have been using the 1995 Othello as a representation of the aberrancy of seeking to represent narrative in a trailer. It is often, plainly, difficult to discern from trailers how the plot is operating. One well-known example is the trailer for Thelma and Louise (1991) which, because of MGM’s concern to make sure the female demographic was locked in, was revised to ignore “such plot basics as why the two friends were on the lam, in favour of shots that emphasized their relationship.”12 Sometimes, though, the remaking is designed to accommodate problems of recognition. Let me use as an example the first trailer released for the truly terrible 2013 version of Romeo and Juliet directed by Carlo Carlei, starring Hailee Steinfeld as Juliet, then

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basking in the afterglow of an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress in the remake of True Grit. The film would appear in October 2013 but the trailer appeared in April, six months earlier. Voice-over, the standard male voice, quotes the Prince’s last couplet: “For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” The first title card announces “Adapted for screen by Academy award winner Julian Fellowes.” And it follows that with a set of six text cards, which I number below, interspersed with plenty of action shots and love shots and sexy shots from the film before the castrun and title: 1. From the greatest playwright ever known 2. Comes the most powerful love story ever told 3. A timeless tale 4. Of love 5. Longing 6. And loss None of this seemed to work, especially the foregrounding of Fellowes, whose name carried no recognition. The second trailer, released in July, starts with the same v/o but then a sequence of texts on screen in which Fellowes name has gone and only his work survives: 1. Adapted by Academy Award winner and creator of “Downton Abbey” 2. The most dangerous love story ever told 3. Innocent hearts 4. Forbidden desires 5. Sworn enemies 6. This fall 7. Risk it all for love 8. Romeo and Juliet 9. Coming Soon #forbiddenlove Note, too, how the greatest love story has become the most dangerous and the active force of “Risk it all for love”—is it that Romeo and Juliet risk it all or is it an encouragement to us to risk it all? It seems imperative. And at the end the hashtag “forbidden love” reminds us that we are in the Twitter world and we might feel enthusiastic enough about the movie to follow this lead—and the lead is not Romeo and Juliet but another noun phrase like the ones that have become items three to five in the sequence. The list effect here and, to a lesser extent, in the first trailer is a frequent mode by which trailers define the kind of content they are wanting to make us believe the film to be about. There are other ways of doing it. As a marker

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of the long tradition, let me use the trailer for the 1953 Mankiewicz Julius Caesar. In a combination of v/o and onscreen text, it announces itself as: M G M presents the greatest drama of all time Wm. [sic] Shakespeare’s Immortal Play Julius Caesar with these great stars in the famous roles [. . .] Rome’s immortal characters portrayed by the finest talents of our day. With flawless performance they recreate Caesar’s Rome. The struggle for power, the clash of arms. All Hail! Julius Caesar, the tremendous timeless drama that will thrill the world forever.

If one can ignore the magnificently excessive Hollywood hype, stop being fascinated by the list of stars that actually makes it look as if the women in the play (Greer Garson and Deborah Kerr) have major roles, and manage to avoid the fact that the location for the battle of Philippi is a canyon north of LA more familiar from dozens of cowboy movies (think Sioux ambush), one might think instead of that ambiguity between play and history, between the immortal drama of historical event and the equally immortal drama of Shakespeare. This is in one sense just another sword-and-sandal movie, a term we sometimes replace with the rather less pejorative term “peplum movie,” its plural nicely Latinate as in “Steve Reeves pepla.” But it is also unsure whether it is the equivalent of, as it were, Hamlet or Cleopatra. Shakespeare is of course the English history we know, and Richard III equals “Now is the winter” equals Olivier. But he is also the Roman history we know. So here it is, the great cast that “with flawless performance recreate” not Shakespeare’s but Caesar’s Rome. Note, too, that we hear not a word of dialogue—it’s all in the visuals. So, punningly, the “All Hail” (are we thinking Roman ave or the weird sisters in Macbeth?) invites us to the film/play/moment of history that will transcend time. This is, I want to emphasize, the perfect classic (as in Hollywood, not as in ancient Rome) template. Yet the distinction between two forms of trailer is most potently present in a comparison I want to make now, in the two very different trailers for Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999),13 the first for the film and the second for its move to video, two trailers that, for me, exemplify the tension between the poles of narrative and plot material at one extreme and the fragments of clips chosen to show generic identities at the other. What is for me most impressive in the first is not the tagline: “The fall of an empire is nothing compared with the descent of a man.” Nor is it the joke in “For those who think revenge is sweet, taste this,” followed by the shot of Hopkins carefully referencing Hannibal Lecter in the snap of the teeth. Nor even is it the circling back to the Thyestean banquet in the final tag: “From Tony award winner Julie Taymor comes a feast of power, lust, madness and the ultimate sacrifice of love.”

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Rather it is the remarkable way in which the brilliant selection of phrases together constructs a perfectly formed and acceptable synopsis of the plot of a play that 99.9 percent of the potential audience will barely have heard of, let alone read or seen. Here the primary concern of the trailer is to use narrative to define genre and form. There is no shortage of indication of the kind of spectacle that Titus is, no lack of suggestion of the Fellini-esque vision that shapes the film’s visual vocabulary. But all of it is placed less in the service of the tagline culture that is so powerful a driver in trailer-making—as if taglines are the only way we have of making sense of a movie in trailers or on posters—than it is in the service of inviting our engagement with a sequence that is predicted: Titus’ descent and a complex web of revenge. If one had to create a two-minute summary of Titus I don’t know that one could do much better than what this trailer achieves. The video trailer is radically different: not a single moment of speech, not a single line of v/o, not a care in the world for narrative, not a fragment of interest in predictive plotting. Instead, it offers a sequence of shots interspersed with nouns. This is an equally brilliant demonstration of the polar opposite of how to construct a trailer. The supreme flashiness of this style of the presentation shows what a different audience might want: not story, not character, just sex, rock, camp, and spectacle, all of which Titus magnificently and sensationally provides. We might say that the opposite of a trailer as a synopsis of a narrative is a synopsis of illustration of a noun-string. What better way to describe both Taymor’s Titus and perhaps Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus than as a representation of “Decadence Lust Madness Passion Betrayal,” the five nouns that, one at a time, intersperse this montage of shots, adding up to a list a statement of the generic mode of the movie? Well, that might be overly sympathetic to this reading of the film, let alone the play, but if the aim—and what other aim is there?—is to encourage a demo to explore something that otherwise they would steadfastly resist and deny and interest in, then the tagline “If you think you know Shakespeare . . . Think again” is remarkably effective. The choices made by the two Titus trailers are extreme precisely because of the unfamiliarity of the play. The same is true in the case of Fiennes’ Coriolanus (2011). This uses a series of six title cards, followed by review quotes, title and cast roll: “From the ashes of war / He won glory / At the hands of his people / He was betrayed / In the arms of an enemy / He will claim vengeance.” This is intercut with a series of thirteen spoken lines, from a strikingly wide range of characters: Coriolanus, Aufidius, Virgilia, Brutus, Sicinius, Volumnia, Menenius. But the visuals place most of the emphasis on war and that enemy-buddy thread that the Coriolanus-Aufidius relationship is played as being. Plenty of explosions, people falling through windows, macho troops in military dress, Coriolanus here becomes a war film action movie. Its

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politics are simplified by the trailers’ slogans (Is Coriolanus really betrayed by his people?) in ways that the film itself is not quite so guilty of doing. The ambivalences of the play and of the film are flattened by trailer-ese and, if your interest is not in action movies, you might quickly decide to give this a miss. If I had offered the Titus trailer’s noun-string “Decadence Lust Madness Passion Betrayal” without identifying the Shakespeare play it was used to describe, it probably would not have taken too long for Shakespeareans to guess the right answer. Run through Shakespeare’s plays with mad characters and combine that with decadence and it’s a short step. This string of twelve, though might be rather trickier to guess: Obsession Hatred Friendship Love Loyalty Power Deceit Truth Sex Dishonesty Devotion Deception It is a sequence in a trailer for Joss Whedon’s 2013 Much Ado About Nothing. But the list nouns does not frame and control the rhythm of the trailer. We are 77 seconds into a trailer that lasts 102 seconds before these words start to appear, and then they appear at a rapid pulsing rhythm in groups of four. You might retain the five abstractions for Titus but, unless your memory is simply exceptional, you stand no chance of holding these, each quartet appearing on screen for barely a second. One might have thought that, by this late point in the trailer’s extent, the style, the genre of the film, had been or should have been adequately identified. But what both this trailer and the second, so-called international trailer for the film are much more concerned to wrestle with is the unlikely collocation of playwright and film director. When the film is defined on screen as being “From the director of Avengers Assemble,” the early title for what would be better known simply as The Avengers, there is clearly anxiety about what the conjunction of Whedon and Shakespeare will produce. How Shakespeare functions here is less a matter of how the list of abstract nouns functions to suggest accessibility than how to bridge between a Marvel Comics movie director and Shakespeare. In part it is done by the opening text of the trailer on two text cards: “The course of true love / Never did run smooth.” Yes, Shakespeareans know that this doesn’t come from Much Ado, but it functions as a quotation that is familiar enough and accessible enough to work efficiently. Sometimes, the problem with which a trailer is trying to grapple can be solved by judicious use of quotations from reviews. Here there are three, about 45 seconds in, the first brilliantly split into two: “Whedon has created a Shakespeare adaptation / That will please just about everyone.” The second

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reassures us that it is a comedy—“This is the funniest Shakespeare film I can recall”—with the clips showing, for instance, visual gags of Beatrice missing a step, letting us know that this is not going to be as heavy as a King Lear. The third conveniently resolves the conjunction of the two names: “Joss Whedon and Shakespeare are a match made in heaven.” The source of each review is carefully given but the critic’s name and the venue are not in themselves significant: it’s the quotation, not the critic that matters here in easing Whedon’s fans toward the film. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer via The Avengers to Much Ado might seem to them a deviation but the trailer reassures us. The second trailer does much less, as if it is newly confident that the messaging will work. It offers first a statement of the nature of the adaptation, combining vision with cliché, spread across four screens: “From Joss Whedon / Acclaimed director of Avengers Assemble / Comes a bold new vision / Of a timeless classic.” Then come three different comments from critics: “You’ve never seen Shakespeare done like this. / A masterpiece / Second to none.” I take it that the first is encouraging rather than a warning. The second is quality reassurance. The third suggests the frequency of—well, what, exactly? Certainly not screen versions of Much Ado, since Branagh’s was the first significant one and Whedon’s the next. The critic’s quote is, in effect, a meaningless standard, but nonetheless, when aligned with the festival laurels that garlanded it, suggestive of a high quality film. It is as if the first is aimed more deliberately at an audience with little interest in Shakespeare while the second reassures a more high-cultural market that this is a version for them. Let me return to the use of a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a trailer for a film of Much Ado. This kind of dislocation is not uncommon. The trailer for Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999)14 quotes these lines as well. But it opens with a text that is plainly not Shakespeare, though it parodies a line from the play. “Hold on to your heart” comes first, then “Cupid,” followed by a shot of a renaissance mural of Cupid, “is armed and dangerous.” We might just catch the echo of Oberon’s “That very time I saw, but thou couldst not /. . ./ Cupid all armed” (2.1.155–7) but we also know that “Hold on to your heart” is just a little too convenient to be a quotation and “armed and dangerous” is a modern phrase, warning us of a suspect the police want to catch. The voice-over, speaking across images of the four lovers in various degrees of confused difficulty, chosen seemingly at random from across the film but showing us firmly that the film is set early twentieth century, asks questions that plainly cue up plot threads and also tracks the magical, fairy world of play and film: What do you do if the one you love loves someone else? How do you get the one you don’t want to leave you alone? And how far does a man have to go to get a woman’s attention?

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This spring for one incredible night everyone will fall in love at first sight when magic lends fate a hand. Then, after the cast-run, using five names in alphabetical order, comes the link to Shakespeare, now not a playwright but a storyteller: “From the greatest storyteller of all time, comes the romantic comedy that proves the course of true love never did run smooth. Love makes fools of us all.” The phrase “Love makes fools of us all” sounds as if it might be from Shakespeare but is actually from Thackeray. Pseudo-Shakespeare is, then, just as good as the real thing. And, by the end, after the title, “William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; after we see Kevin Kline as Bottom waking up with the awareness that “I have had a most rare vision”; after not one but two equally illegible billing blocks, there is time for one last reveal of an encouragement, lit by passing magical fireflies: “This May get to the bottom of love,” a bad enough pun to work, given that most know Bottom’s name. Shakespeare is, to some extent, here being used as a consumingly imperialist force, absorbing Thackeray as needed. In one trailer, though, there is a delightful reversal. Here is the opening v/o for another film: “In the tradition of Some Like It Hot, Tootsie and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert comes the classic romantic comedy that proves sometimes clothes really do make the man, William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.” Now Trevor Nunn’s 1996 Twelfth Night is in the tradition of Tootsie rather than Tootsie being in the tradition of Twelfth Night. Film is the dominant tradition here, absorbing the history of theater into itself so that a Shakespeare movie belongs in the chronology of the film, not the long history of cross-dressing performance. These negotiations with Shakespeare as name, as source, as quotation and misquotation work very differently when the film is not of Shakespeare but about Shakespeare. For Shakespeare in Love the distribution company made twenty different thirty-second spots for tv. It is not the representation of Shakespeare that intrigues me in this sequence, except by absence—there are remarkably few shots of him as a writer used anywhere in the entire set of trails—but rather something we could identify as a generic indeterminacy about the film oddly (and entirely accidentally) analogous to that polyvalency that so annoyed W. B. Yeats, Shakespeare’s resolute refusal to write anything that Yeats would be willing to identify as tragedy. Though Shakespeare in Love is not exactly Polonian in achieving the tragical-comical-historicalpastoral apex of generic multiplicity, it gets surprisingly close to it, and that made it difficult to be sure quite how to market it. One reason for the sheer number of spots is the success arc of the film. New spots were made when reviews started to appear, then for the six Golden Globe nominations, then the three Golden Globe wins, then the thirteen Oscar nominations and then the seven Oscar wins.

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From the first, though, the company found it had to create multiple spots in an attempt to include the variety of character and genre approaches the film encouraged and hence the range of demographics it sought to attract. One could be focused on Viola de Lesseps as a young lover, one on her as a would-be actor, one on sword-fighting and action excitement, one on visual comedy, one on Shakespeare and writer’s block, and so on. Given that, with the inevitable tops and tails of information and the need for the v/o always to give the title and rating (rated R primarily, it has always been alleged, because of the shots of Gwyneth Paltrow’s nipples), there is not much time to cover anything much in thirty seconds of trail, the campaign’s refusal to settle on one definition of the film worked in its favor. Very few spots have anything much to hint at a plot. One playfully, and for me very effectively, uses lines from the film’s dialogue to comment on the film’s title: V/O. The nation’s top critics have a new favorite film. Fennyman. What’s it called? V/O. Shakespeare in love. Shakespeare. Good title.

The first line is set against a shot of the Globe audience applauding wildly near the film’s end. The second comes from the opening sequence. There is a time during the third for two shots: one of Shakespeare kissing Viola and one of the two in bed together. The fourth is Shakespeare’s response to Marlowe’s telling him the title of the play he is writing: The Massacre at Paris. It can be followed in the spot by no fewer than five review quotes, each shown on screen and heard in v/o: “Romantic and ravishing” from Time magazine, “Two enthusiastic thumbs up” from Siskel and Ebert (shot of Henslowe whooping enthusiastically at the end of the premiere of Romeo and Juliet) and the New York Times “raves it’s an ‘Intoxicating and glamorous romance’” while Newsweek calls it “a glorious film that makes moviegoing fun again” and Entertainment Weekly calls it “the most satisfying film of the year.” All of this is a virtuosic mini-celebration of the film. And the word “celebration” itself becomes key when, for one spot only, they try a tagline defining the film as “A celebration of life, love, and the creative process.” It is only late in the sequence and perhaps as a consequence of her Golden Globe, that the range of Gwyneth Paltrow’s performance is noted: “Gwyneth Paltrow as Viola, as Thomas Kent, as Romeo and Juliet, four extraordinary turns.” And the very last of the twenty finally uses the adjective that the sequence has been skirting around: as the v/o puts it, “The sexiest movie of the year is now the best picture of the year and the winner of 7 academy awards, including Best Actress Gwyneth Paltrow in the film critics say has it all: adventure, comedy, and romance.” That list finally uses the film’s genre range as a

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marketing ploy, justifying the final review quote from the LA Times: “It’s everything you want a movie to be.” Trailers often don’t have the chance to be everything their makers want them to be. Just as, on occasion, they may include a clip that hit the cuttingroom floor by the time the film is released, so they are often unable to use the film’s music soundtrack since that is often not completed and recorded until a later stage in post-production. Hence, for instance, the music is somewhat arbitrarily chosen. Carl Orff’s “O fortuna” from Carmina Burana appears with remarkable frequency. The trailer for the Trevor Nunn Twelfth Night uses Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik but the film doesn’t, while the Loncraine/McKellen Richard III uses William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, primarily because it has a big choral sound, like the Orff, but, if one recognizes the source, the fall of one kingdom can become an appropriate intertextual reference. Again, the Walton doesn’t appear in the film score. But what, finally, if there is no film? What would a trailer look like if there were nothing to see or hear that would be part of the finished product? This is something the RSC confronted in its first-ever live broadcast in 2013, “the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Richard II, with David Tennant in the title-role, live from Stratford-upon-Avon, in cinemas around the world,” as the female v/o puts it at the end of the trail. But prior to that, we are shown a sequence of shots of the English countryside, with threatening clouds speeding across the sky, while a male voice-over speaks, slowly and portentously, eleven lines of John of Gaunt on “This royal throne of kings” (2.1.40–50). Cleverly, the sequence moves from a long shot to a tight closeup of a tiny patch of ground on which a crown has been placed and then, as the camera draws back, we can see that this heap of the earth is in the middle of the Stratford stage, seen from a camera position upstage looking across it at the auditorium, as the female v/o kicks in. In the run-up to a “live from” broadcast, there is no film material to use. It is different when the broadcast will be constructed out of the taping of two or three different performances, as, for instance, has been the case at the Globe. Different, too, when the broadcast is some time after filming. But if it is indeed live at the moment of transmission as well as filming, then there is no film to trail. All there is is the marketing image, which was also used for the dvd box, showing Tennant in jacket, jeans, and sneakers, sitting casually on a throne, holding a scepter exactly aligned with the image of Richard in the portrait in Westminster Abbey behind him. This image is itself based on a photoshoot many, many months before the design decisions about costume, and Tennant’s costumes in the production bear no relation to his modern-day garb in the shot. The v/o for the speech isn’t even that of Michael Pennington, who played John of Gaunt. By the time of the 2016 RSC Hamlet, starring Paapa Essiedu directed by Simon Godwin, there were three web trailers created for the production. The

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first, a trailer primarily for the theater production, is the 2016 graduation party at Wittenberg University, filmed, as it were, on someone’s cellphone, and allowing the soundtrack to pick up names like Hamlet. It ends with someone bringing Hamlet his cellphone which is ringing and, when, in shock, he holds it up to his ear, we hear a voice from it calling “Remember me.” The production itself opened with a graduation ceremony and so this proves to anticipate the production, though few could know that. Its real impact is to push a young student-y atmosphere, with a predominantly Black British cast and a modern setting. This new concept of something scripted and filmed for the trailer with resonances for the production but filmed neither on stage nor using a moment from the production becomes a new template for the RSC’s trailer making. Advance publicity for Chris Luscombe’s 2017 Twelfth Night made much of Adrian Edmondson’s being cast as Malvolio as in the marketing still, and so the trailer has the actor’s voice-over in the letter scene as we watch him, in a room, not a stage-set, musing to the sound of his own thoughts as he dresses in yellow stockings slowly generating the image that brands the production. The second Hamlet trailer, also a trail for the theater production, splices comments from the director with vox pop interviews of, predominantly, American college students, apparently a deliberately chosen demographic—compare, for instance, the largely British middle-aged audience interviewed for a similar trailer for the 2017 Twelfth Night. Finally, for each, there is a full-scale trailer for the cinema simulcast, using footage of the production, now filmed in advance of the screening precisely to make the “proper” kind of trailer possible. The RSC’s 2017 Julius Caesar was trailed with a sequence showing Caesar, first dropping a breastplate onto a flower-strewn path and then walking away from us, bending to pick up a flower with a hint of a grin, as we hear Cassius on Caesar as a Colossus (1.2.134–7), ending with a growing chant from a crowd of “Caesar! Caesar!” Again, it works by uncoupling voice from image. Nothing in the production looked like this, least of all the bizarre blue light that swamps the shots. Its message is clear: Cassius’ description is offered as authoritative and the focus of the image is Caesar’s contempt for everything other than his own glory. In its simplicity—and simplicity is not noticeably a characteristic of trailers—it is really rather powerful. But it also signals that this is a betoga-ed Rome, not some modern setting, obeying that old rule, used for the BBC/TimeLife Complete Works cycle, that the setting must be either early modern or the historical moment of the fiction. It also encodes its Shakespeare-ness with a familiar speech, though not “Friends, Romans,” a reassuringly accessible moment of text. And what might one make of the trailer, though not the poster, for the National Theatre Live broadcast from the Donmar Warehouse of a production of Coriolanus starring Tom Hiddleston that manages never to say it is

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a Shakespeare play, again that suppression of the word “Shakespeare” that I have already referred to? That it assumes that everyone knows it is or that the fans of Hiddleston don’t care who the play is by? New technologies, new trailers. What the RSC is engaged in, like most theater companies, is the creation of internet trailers for theater productions irrespective of the possibility of live-cast screenings. I am not at all sure when such theater trailers begin but my files include one for the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s The Taming of the Shrew at the Lansburgh Theatre in Washington, DC, in 2007, a mixture of stills and onstage film, with a music soundtrack and with no voices heard. These stage, not film, trailers are a wholly new phenomenon in the conceptualization of theater marketing that now demands our attention. Even student productions at Notre Dame by the nicely named Not-So-Royal Shakespeare Company have at least one online trailer on YouTube or Facebook. From the epic grandeur of the 1940s bombast to the homemade quality of these multiply amateur pieces, film-making trails both film and theater. A new site for study. A new global Shakespeare phenomenon for scholars to explore. New trails to follow.

NOTES 1. Over many years, though still too few, Christy Desmet opened up so many brand-new fields for the study of Shakespeare in popular culture and new technologies that profoundly affected my own and many others’ work. I loved and still love, as I re-read her work, her light touch, her scholarly playfulness and her rigorous seriousness in her thinking about such things. I hope she would have enjoyed this piece—and she would certainly have told me where she thought I’d gone wrong! I miss her wisdom, kindness, and sense of humor all the time. 2. Quoted in Keith Johnston, “‘The Coolest Way to Watch Movie Trailers in the World’: Trailers in the Digital Age.” Convergence 14.2 (2008), 147. 3. CNN, “Star Wars.” 4. Keith Johnston, Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 136–7. 5. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from films and trailers are my transcriptions. 6. Emma French, Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006), 1. 7. Medhurst, Andy, “The Big Tease,” Sight and Sound 8.7 (1988), 26. 8. My thanks to Charles Edelman for alerting me to the film. 9. Auralnauts, “How to.” Thanks to Jessica Ritter-Holland, the trailer expert. 10. All Shakespeare quotations are taken from the relevant edition in the Arden Shakespeare 3rd Series. 11. Sarah Street, Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the United States (New York: Continuum), 108.

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12. Bronwen Hruska, “The Trailer Hitch,” Entertainment Weekly (3 December 1993), 41. 13. Both are on the “Special Edition” of the DVD (2013). 14. Multiple trailers circulate. In this case, I am referring to the one on dvd and not the trailer available on YouTube.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Auralnats. 2017. “How To Make A Blockbuster Movie Trailer.” YouTube. https:// www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=KAOdjqyG37A. CNN. 1998. “Star Wars’ Trailer Gets Sneak Preview.” 20 November. http://www​.cnn​ .com​/SHOWBIZ​/Movies​/9811​/20​/star​.wars​.01/. French, Emma. 2006. Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. Hruska, Bronwen. 1993. “The Trailer Hitch.” Entertainment Weekly. 3 December, 40–1. Johnston, Keith. 2008. “‘The Coolest Way to Watch Movie Trailers in the World’: Trailers in the Digital Age.” Convergence 14.2, 145–60. Johnston, Keith. 2009. Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Medhurst, Andy. 1998. “The Big Tease.” Sight and Sound 8.7, 24–6. Street, Sarah. 2002. Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the United States. New York: Continuum.

Chapter 6

Shakespeare in the Dorm The Rhetoric of Character in YouTube Shakespeare Richard Finkelstein

Always able to surprise us, Christy Desmet finds that the most prolific posters of Shakespeare videos are high school students and young college filmmakers. Because YouTube’s model is “broadcast yourself,” the medium is an invitation to self-display, as she notes,1 and may reflect a frustration that authentic selves are no longer possible within a post-modern culture bombarding subjects with stimuli.2 The frequency of adolescent appropriations of Shakespeare for YouTube is unexpected for several reasons. Shakespeare is inescapably identified with what used to be called “high culture,” which in the American milieu is associated with inauthenticity. It is thus paradoxical that, in an era that has exacerbated struggles to establish a self and experiment with identity, high school and college students are expressing themselves by appropriating the work of a centuries dead playwright whom they should find inauthentic. Of course, many if not most YouTube productions by high school and college students derive from course assignments. In other words, institutional demands mediate their use of YouTube to develop self-expression and assert that they own their own lives. (We have no way of acquiring data that would say which are independently motivated and which are done by directive.) It is ironic, then, that in many videos, from necessity or choice, while seeking free expression of a self, students visually portray that they are in thrall to institutions by setting their Shakespearean appropriations within intimate spaces inside them—frequently their dorm rooms and flats (if boarding at university) or their bedrooms (if living at home). Alexandra Juhasz uses the term niche-tube to describe sites that have a relatively modest following or, more precisely, play “a small role in the 111

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conventionalizing standards of this new form.”3 Adolescent appropriations of Shakespeare rarely rise to this level but that isn’t to say that they don’t establish conventionalizing standards within their small sub-genre of Shakespearean appropriations. Within this video genre, I want to examine a microniche which I am calling Dormitory Shakespeare: videos of Shakespearean appropriations set in college dormitories, high school bedrooms, and related locations. Although created by amateurs, these productions have broad resonance for thinking about the emergence of character in appropriations on the YouTube platform. I will focus on three videoblogs: Jules and Monty, filmed at Tufts University in the United States; Nothing Much to Do, filmed in Auckland, New Zealand;4 and Kate Minola, from Toronto, Canada. Although only one of these, the Tufts videoblog, actually sets many scenes in a dormitory room, and although created in different national spaces, they all follow strict conventions: most entries occur in a bedroom, first apartment, parental home, or at university; they always have no scenery or, at the most, generic posters and bric-a-brac with rare reference to Shakespeare; most primarily feature young women; most of the actors are white and operating within educational systems associated with white, Anglophilic, English-speaking privilege; with little exception the majority of actors appear to be cis-gender (although the gender of the actors can’t be confirmed, with small exception they give cisgender reads of characters in whose sexualities scholars recognize fluidity); all depend on a single camera, usually fixed in place; acting is generally adlibbed or presented with the aura of having had few rehearsals; the performers move in and out of character; and the actors either look directly into the lens during the entirety of the production or for most of it. Except for the gender imbalance, each of these factors helps establish authenticity for both the actors and productions. So too do frequent comments from the actors about what they have been doing between episodes, and their frequent selfeffacement or self-referentiality about the process of creation. Barbara Hodgdon is right to see the threat of “any glimmer of Benjaminian aura, authenticity or sensory engagement going missing” on YouTube, and she is also right not to worry about such loss.5 We’re able to let go of anxieties about losing aura both because we recognize that appropriations are themselves legitimate recreations, and because we know that both appropriations and originals, particularly for drama, are fluid, open texts continually recreated in performance.6 But aura still plays a significant role with regard to dormitory Shakespeare. As Hodgdon notes, audiences on YouTube tend to feel that they are preserving performances as they take place, even though they may know they’re engaging in a second-hand experience—they feel themselves participating in a kind of knowledge making experience associated with having “been there.”7 Inventing YouTube is to a great extent about

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connecting: obviously so with others but also with oneself, since, unlike a staged theatrical performance, one can be an actor and audience too, along with producer, editor, writer, director, and production designer, roles dispersed to specialists if done as a corporate, even indie-based film. Although almost all actors, as Meredith Skura shows, revel in having an audience, actors on YouTube openly seem more driven than most actors to gain a feeling of connectivity, and for several reasons: because they make many references to fictionalized versions of their own lives; show off knowledge about Shakespeare’s plays; display hopes for success with a class assignment; and show an eagerness to have fun with their fellow actors, among many possible motivations.8 Perhaps most importantly, these young people want to show us their lives, which is why they set their productions within intimate quarters. As a result, appropriating Shakespeare for adolescents with YouTube is inherently an exercise in connecting with others to connect with the self. They imagine that the audience with whom they make such connections participates in confirming the authenticity of the work and of themselves. This process occurs at least in part because YouTube performers borrow from conceptions of individual Shakespearean characters more than they do from plots, a common discursive practice throughout cultural appropriations of dramatic or fictional works, be they in the popular press or in filmic and theatrical productions. (Journalists, for example, might refer to a public figure as “Lady Macbeth” even though the public would be unlikely to know the plot of that play.) Because the creators of dormitory Shakespeare share assumptions similar to those found in Desmet’s arguments about dramatic character—that the presence of characters can persuade audiences to identify with them—actual identification remains an illusion.9 Watching dormitory Shakespeare, framed and mediated by institutional contexts which it displays, shows us an eagerness to connect, a readiness to feel authentic, but a sense of incompleteness to these exercises in character. We witness unfinished states of personal development embodied in iterative forms of the videos, unfinished series, and disappearances from the platform.

JULES AND MONTY Filmed as a videoblog for a communications course at Tufts University in 2014, Jules and Monty waxes and wanes in its appropriation of Romeo and Juliet throughout eighteen episodes, plus three bonus segments spliced together after the end of both filming and the spring semester. Usually facing frontal to a single camera, the students not only adapt the Shakespearean plot to suit collegiate life, they weave into it discourse about experiences at Tufts. Their allusions to university life don’t always correspond to the

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dramatic plot or characterizations. Caution should rule when thinking about the references to college: although they make clear allusions to real facts and places (such as the course assignment, late night work to get good grades, fraternities, roommates, packed-up rooms at the end of the term), gestures and facial expressions, as well as dialogue, indicate that they should be read as simulacra of their undergraduate experiences, staged for the camera and occasionally related to Shakespeare’s story. We see the bricolage that, as Desmet notes, Lévi-Strauss associates with amateur culture; but unlike what is seen in more general uses of Shakespeare on YouTube, we see relatively little imitation and parody. The irony or parody usually associated with YouTube Shakespeare is primarily directed toward the performers themselves, as they grin at their self-displays and/or at their limited acting skills.10 All of the settings are on the Tufts campus or nearby, and most are in dorm rooms. With occasional exceptions, as when the Romeo figure and his roommate don suits to attend the Capulet ball, costumes consist of daily wear. There is also an absence of makeup but for one character: Juliet’s roommate Nancy, who in the later episodes emerges as something of a villain when she forges a breakup letter from Romeo that ends the lovers’ relationship. Nancy wears bright red lipstick—in this context, playing out a convention of the female villain as vamp. This presentation of character is confirmed in episode 21. There we see Nancy alone, celebrating the fact that the videoblog has attracted 100,000 followers. She confesses that it’s hard to rewatch all the videos, and “to relive all the stress,” and that she’s “in shock” at the audience numbers. Thanking the audience for its love and support, she lip syncs to Keri Hilson’s music video, “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful.” Nancy’s remarks draw attention to the fact that, although the videoblog began as a class assignment, it became an exercise in which the participants could revel in gaining an audience. Perceiving there to be an extensive set of internet followers helps them to feel a kind of love that relieves the tension they associate with living in the hothouse university setting. In fact, talk about tensions with roommates, about workload, about sadness when leaving for the summer, about extrusion and isolation, and about boyfriend and girlfriend problems—whether or not they are happening to the actors in the film or just simulated—are real to most university students. The affective states depicted in the videos approximate those found in Shakespeare’s tragedy of youth even though they arise from divergent origins and have very different consequences. The writers set up an analogy between the threats and tragedy that emerge in the play and those feared in the videoblog. The heroes don’t die in Jules and Monty but Juliet is distraught at having to transfer from the “University of Verona” at the end of the series. Monty’s separation from her and her impending return and transfer to the west coast, counseled by Dean

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Lawrence, stand in for the false poison taken by Shakespeare’s Juliet and the double suicide that follows. The performers explore their identities through three routes: from the frisson of imagining the large audience to their blog; from finding a set of affects which they can borrow if not share; and through a set of self-referential observations that apparently derive both from their discomfort with acting before the camera and nervousness about adlibbing dialogue for their assignment. The self-referentiality, along with the clothes and unadorned dorm settings, create a sense that these are authentic young people, not actors. Particularly in the early and late scenes, we see this as part of the students’ struggle to assert that they are real people even as they create characters. Early in the series, for example, to help Jules feel less self-conscious before the camera, Nancy says “let’s think of this as the opportunity to be the girls we’ve wanted to be” (#1). Although the actors rarely make similar remarks directly, they generally feel a tug between being authentic and creating internet personalities for themselves. The distinctive alternation between, and occasional blending of, the actors’ lives and the lives of the characters they are playing underscore the fact that creating an internet personality is entwined with fashioning a self, but that the latter remains an open, iterative endeavor. However, the implicit equation between Jules’s return to the west coast and Juliet’s death suggests that Monty and Jules sees the self as contingent on protective and privileged institutions. Leaving the nearly all-white, privileged, seemingly heterosexual Tufts/University of Verona is dangerous, scary, implicitly fatal. One might also add “male” to this list, for the reconciliation that takes place at the end of Romeo and Juliet is mimicked in a conference between representatives from real or fictional but apparently all-male fraternities, during which peace is vowed. Nancy defends her having forged a letter in Monty’s name by explaining to the rejected lover that she is protecting Jules from her dangerous brother, who physically assaulted her out of anger at the love match. Ironically, Nancy is enforcing the violent brother’s hegemony over his sister and thus within the small college community. Monty and Jules may be an appropriation but despite its bricolage, its use of Shakespeare to explore adolescent selves within an institutional environment prevents it from countering the mainstream.

NOTHING MUCH TO DO Temporally overlapping, mainly created between April 2014 and November 2017, Nothing Much to Do features a slightly younger set of videobloggers attending their final year of high school in Auckland, New Zealand, where they live at home. Also filmed with a stationery camera, locations

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are somewhat more varied than they are in Monty and Jules but nonetheless when not in rooms at home they are primarily situated around the grounds of their school, with several episodes featuring interactions on or adjacent to the school’s football (American soccer) field. The stated reason for video blogging is less clear than it is in Monty and Jules—it’s encapsulated in the title and, early in the series, related to parental absence. The actors give no evidence that their performances are responding to a classroom assignment; given the fact that the more than eighty episodes11 span nearly three years, it seems a self-initiated production by a group that later in the series calls themselves “The Candle Wasters.” The final installment of the videoblog gives the actual names of the organizers, writers, and actors. Very much a collaborative effort in which writers, directors, and producers overlap and also act, it is also a female-led production. The parental absence, if real, serves two functions: it associates the 81 episodes that appropriate Much Ado about Nothing with holiday, as in many Renaissance comedies. (At episode 78, characters refer to the parents as having returned. This seems to cause filming to wind down and the actors begin to talk about what they’ve learned.) From the actors’ point of view, parental absence presents them with a liberation from constraints, with nothing to do and nothing they have to do, which is why they create the videoblog. Paradoxically, though, we see them as not liberated at all: they almost always remain in their rooms or on school grounds, with just occasional forays into nearby city locations. Their limited spatial movements obviously derive from their ages, their filming needs, and policies set by the town’s elders and vendors, but the effect is nonetheless that the adolescents show themselves more deeply rooted within institutions than they think they are. Indeed, in the first episode the actor who has appropriated Beatrice orients us—and herself—by describing her family, referring to her high school, and telling us about her parents’ situations and her location in Auckland. Beatrice concludes the first episode by articulating pride in creating the blog—“feeling pretty successful”—and “go me!” Except for the reference in the title, we hear nothing of Shakespeare. In fact, except for the appropriation of characters’ names, we have self-introductions and nothing of him or Much Ado About Nothing until the fourth episode when concern is expressed that “Pedro Donaldson” might have stolen someone’s girlfriend, updating Claudio’s fears that Don Pedro competed with him for Hero at the Messina ball. As in the other videoblogs, early episodes show the actors introducing themselves. In Nothing Much to Do, all define their adolescent selves in terms of favorites (music, TV shows, activities), the source of the clothes they are wearing, instruments they play, and other activities. Perhaps because they are primarily answering questions about themselves, and not solo in front of the camera, the actors show less personal self-consciousness and

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self-conscious acting than they do in other episodes. It is as if even more so than in Monty and Jules, they are comfortable defining themselves in terms of consumption and thrilled to be presented to us for the consumption of entertainment. Hodgdon’s remark that on YouTube there is no clear division between producers and consumers12 is apt here: the actors are obviously enjoying being watched and preparing to watch themselves. They seem to express a jouissance at establishing a reign of the self,13 absent from their parents and, to them, freely disseminated on line. However, they present the self as an agglomeration of goods from within the late capitalist system that has shaped them. Why seize Shakespeare? Taking names from and sporadically appropriating the plot from Much Ado appears to anchor their presence in a somewhat chaotic holiday world to whose dispersiveness they occasionally pay tribute. Perhaps less so than we will see in Kate Minola, there is nonetheless a way in which the actors occasionally present their characters as having merged with those of the culturally capitalized and familiar roles they are playing. Managing these impulses is less a part of the process in Jules and Monty, perhaps because of more fixed structuring elements: the videoblog time is more compressed, there are fewer episodes, and the sequence is responding to a class assignment. Even more prominently than for the Tufts students, this Auckland group is struggling with one of the paradoxes of authenticity which Adorno recognizes. In the wake of fascist, racially charged definitions of authenticity, following World War II Adorno takes issue with Heidegger’s vision of authenticity and the related belief that there can be a resolution between inner and outer worlds. The Jargon of Authenticity recognizes that the authentic existence is itself dispersed, and for a variety of reasons: “What remains solely by itself, as one’s authentic existence, becomes no less impoverished than that which dissolves into situations.”14 The mechanisms of high capitalism drive this impoverishment of the self: “Dispersion, which is the consequence of consumer habit, is an original evil. Consciousness, however, has already been disowned in the sphere of production, which trains individuals to disperse themselves.”15 In some respects, YouTube Shakespeare lies outside the capitalist sphere of production because it isn’t profitable, as Desmet notes,16 but the adolescent subjects that speak through it display their training within a hegemonic economy and the consequent dispersion of self it promotes. When the Candle Wasters identify themselves by rattling off the activities and items they enjoy, we have a confirmation that self-dispersion has taken place even before the camera is set up. Although the line between such appropriations and parody is blurry, Hodgdon’s observation about Shakespearean parodies is applicable here: we see them “assert users’ right of individual ownership.”17 Trained to think of themselves in terms of what they buy and consume,

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owning their niche on YouTube enables a feeling of subjective integrity and wholeness. As with Tufts’s Nancy, being watched helps them feel further confirmed. However, the frisson associated with the feeling that a successful search for wholeness has healed self-dispersion is rooted in a paradox. It is easy to forget that Benjamin’s interest in the aura and in authenticity (of the art object, not the self, as for Adorno) was a response not just to the growing dissemination of photography but also to the rise of film. Relevant to thinking about Dormitory Shakespeare is his interest in how actors experience the camera: For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else. One of the first to sense the actor’s metamorphosis by this form of testing was Pirandello. Though his remarks on the subject in his novel Si Gira were limited to the negative aspects of the question and to the silent film only, this hardly impairs their validity. . . . What matters is that the part is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance—in the case of the sound film, for two of them. “The film actor,” wrote Pirandello, “feels as if in exile—exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence. . . . The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.” This situation might also be characterized as follows: for the first time—and this is the effect of the film—man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.18

Benjamin doesn’t think Pirandello’s discoveries are any less applicable to talkies. The exile leading to a sense of emptiness, the actors’ discomfort from knowing that they are being transformed into images, these are sensations that reveal themselves with surprising intensity within Dormitory Shakespeare. The feelings show themselves in the frequent self-consciousness of the actors and their repeated digressions into personal “sharing” even as they are portraying their characters. In episode two of Jules and Monty, Nancy criticizes Jules for being “super self-conscious” when she introduces herself as Juliet. Jules then reintroduces herself even as we recognize that

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the actor is conflating her own nervousness with that of a thirteen-year-old character. This nervousness about establishing the self before an audience which is really a camera shows itself with greater intensity in Nothing Much to Do. We see both self-consciousness and meta-dramatic gestures: in episode five, when the girls assemble to watch football, exaggerated or styled gestures show them pretending to enter the roles they’re playing while worried about Leo’s (Leonato’s) rules about what they can film; alone in his bedroom in episode nine, with no allusion to a Much Ado plot, Benedick performs a humorous monologue about “serial bird-killing” using a toy car and a chicken puppet. (In this episode his performance isn’t very different from the appearances of Dogberry and Verges who, in Much Ado, often behave digressively with respect to forward plot movement.) He is very much performing for a camera and perhaps for an imagined audience of viewers; in a manner only more exaggerated but no different than what the other actors in dormitory Shakespeare, he is, as Benjamin would say, representing himself to the public rather than representing someone else. He and the actor playing Beatrice seem to know that. Together in an empty bathtub during episode 77, they insist that “one thing we’ve learned from these videos is that communication is key” so we won’t need to share many more with you.” They advise viewers, “talk to people, not just to the internet about your emotions, even if they don’t know what you’re feeling or what they’re feeling.” One discovery Benedick makes during the lovers’ final pairing is that Pedro Donaldson, who goes off with Balthasar, is bisexual. Nothing in Shakespeare hints at this possibility for Don Pedro. Benedick, who, Don John says, is one of “some people, they can be so oblivious to the obvious,” didn’t recognize that referring to Pedro as “an all around great guy” is Messina high school code for bisexuality. In the context of Benedick’s later musings about communicating, the inclusion of this discovery underscores the YouTube paradox to which Benedick alludes in the bathtub: feeling connected by communicating to the internet may actually diminish connectedness. The videoblogs testify to the difficulty of feeling authentic, especially when disseminating oneself through YouTube. Benedick’s excitement at his solo performances, and posing for the camera of his peers, bespeak a need for an implied audience which all refer to as “you”; but in telling us that communication between flesh and blood people is key, he recognizes that dissemination through the internet leaves the selves they are exploring decidedly incomplete. In the final episode before the credits, Benedick expresses the feeling that “I’d like to think we’ve grown” while talking to fans from whom he says he’s heard: he is committed to the idea of an organically constituted self while, like his fellows, he is elsewhere anxious about its evanescence.

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KATE MINOLA While actors in Dormitory Shakespeare exhibit problems of the self identified by Benjamin, they also unwittingly address the transmission of Shakespeare’s aura. Given their inventiveness with plot and character, the videoblogs indicate that at least some of the high school and college actors, or at least the ones billed as writers, have a reasonable familiarity with the plays they are appropriating, and have had some instruction about the functions the characters play within the plot. (Leo, for instance, sets up some rules in Nothing Much to Do, as would a father; Dean Lawrence, like his namesake Friar, is perhaps too helpful a facilitator in Jules and Monty). However, with so much attention paid to verbal digressions that seek to validate their own selves before the YouTube audience, and with so much discursive adlibbed dialogue even when advancing the plots, the connection to Shakespeare feels very remote; one wonders if plots from another source would have served as well except for the players’ awareness that from Shakespeare’s aura emanates a particularly useful kind of capital. Although it risks condescension to say so, it is amusing to see Dormitory Shakespeare as the latest extension of what Benjamin calls “the fabric of tradition” when he is defining aura: The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura.19

Perceiving the aura of a thing or creation involves seeing it as autonomous, simultaneously disconnected from us and immersed in traditions. Benjamin’s remark could be rephrased to say that despite the relatively tenuous connection to Shakespeare’s plays, Dormitory Shakespeare affirms that 400-yearold works remain an object of veneration. As for the statue of Venus in the middle ages, the context of YouTube Shakespeare gives it a specialized cultural function—in this case, primarily as part of a psychological search for feeling autonomous by connecting to something that seems autonomous. Although Benjamin is to some extent thinking of artworks in terms of social and fiscal economies, for this particular group of YouTube writers and actors, for whom videoblogs haven’t become profit centers, the capital conveyed by the aura is primarily psychological even though their longings for autonomy and a feeling of authenticity are shaped by such economies.

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The phenomenon of Dormitory Shakespeare also departs from Benjamin’s analysis. Central to his argument is that even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original.20

Dormitory Shakespeare at best only temporarily exists in time and space for numerous reasons: technology changes; videos get deleted from the web or become hard to find; there is no history to their physical condition because they have no corporeality; and ownership doesn’t exist in any conventional sense of that term or is rarely understood in legal terms by the videobloggers under discussion. One consequence of the difficulty in identifying a Benjaminian Shakespearean aura in Dormitory videos is that the importance of character increases. As Benjamin notes, the actors may be well aware that there is little aura enveloping themselves or the figures they portray. However, that awareness only serves to intensify the actors’ investment in character as a means of gaining an imaginative connection to the aura of Shakespeare’s work. They yearn to feel more than shadows dispersed by the internet. That character is the principal conveyance of aura in Dormitory Shakespeare is intensified by the convention of using a stationery, single camera at which we generally see one or very few people staring. Kate Minola, created between January and October of 2014, vividly relies on this as a means for feeling connected. The high school creators are quoted as saying, “Another reason why we did Shakespeare over a full length novel is that there is more freedom with Shakespeare. In a novel, there are set plot points and with Shakespeare you pretty much just have the dialogue. So you can sort of take it to mean what you want.”21 Dialogue is the driver of this videoblog that is much more consistent than most for the degree to which its actors stay “in character.” That with Shakespeare “you pretty much just have the dialogue” thus seems to mean that you favor building a connection to the original works through personal identification with characters rather than moving through appropriated plots. Of course, there are some plot elements in Kate Minola that seem appropriations from The Taming of the Shrew: occasional references, mainly in the

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early episodes, to the father’s insistence that Britt, the Bianca figure, not be involved in activities without Kate; an early date with James for which he appears late and unwashed; a weekend at a cabin lent by James’s aunt where, although many friends are present and Kate isn’t tortured, she and her female companions feel sidelined. However, Emily Lubbers, who plays Kate, inhabits her character with remarkable consistency and doesn’t follow a pattern of change, unlike Shakespeare’s Kate, over the course of her thirty episodes. She is putting us in touch with the archetype, to which Shakespeare has contributed, of the shrewish woman. As she does so, she conveys to us something of the aura of Shrew even though, like most Dormitory Shakespeareans, she frequently makes us aware that she knows she is adlibbing before a camera. After the opening moments of the first video, when she appears shy and must be coaxed to speak before the camera by her friend Megan, who remains her loyal companion through the series, Kate becomes anything but shy; she is energetic, forceful, irritable, and with a tendency to anger in almost every episode. She is significantly more labile than any of the other characters, including James (the Petruchio figure) and Megan, the other principle actor who is presented as her real-life friend, confidante, and cocreator. Because of her consistency and occasional presentations about the details of her early life, and because there are far fewer references to daily activities than in, for example, Nothing Much to Do, Kate’s personality seems distinctly less acted and more authentic than the other Dormitory Shakespeare productions we have examined. Even when she does speak about verifiable events, her character changes not at all from that of the Kate Minola she is portraying. In the fourth video, for example, Kate and Megan discuss the history of their friendship even as Kate also describes a relationship with Britt (Bianca) which reveals antagonism common with both Shakespeare’s play and conventional representations of sisters’ relationships.22 After filming her reading aloud from Britt’s emails, the fifth videoblog shows Kate speaking into what seems a selfie videocam about her fury at being grounded for two weeks by her father. Her anger spills over into attacks on James Wright (Petruchio) for his expressed interest in dating her. By tying the archetype which Shakespeare helped create to conventional portraits of sisters, and by blurring the boundaries between the actor and the character she is creating for that archetype, this scene conveys a strong sense that we are witnessing something authentic—that the affect expressed is real. Perhaps most visible in Kate Minola, it is a reminder that in the universe of YouTube, authenticity relates to both sides of the camera: to the performer, but also to the audience. By creating videos in which the camera regularly focuses just on her, the actor communicates a sense of authenticity in a medium that disperses identities within a capitalist marketplace that exerts more control over them than do individuals over themselves. Strong and

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consistent affect tells the audience that what they’re watching is authentic. Even scholars praise performers for sincerity and find the confessional mode well suited to the audience for online videos.23 The first part of episode four shows that the actors are aware of such dynamics. Kate is celebrating her birthday with Megan but says she’d rather not do it before the camera. She wants to know why everybody has to share everything; in fact, she says, she’d rather have her birthday alone in her room. Megan points out the irony of someone in a videoblog making such remarks. Kate is longing for a private, non-dispersed self but is reminded that in the YouTube world having one is impossible. Megan then proposes that they begin a game of Jeopardy in which Kate will answer questions about her childhood. The cinematographer imitates Jeopardy in the filming by using placards for categories that correspond to the questioning. The video then gives us a framing mechanism that affords Kate some sense of objective distance from emotions that she might experience with the more private reflection for which she had hoped; yet that framing mechanism is itself a powerful trace from the longest-running, commercially produced TV game show in history. A show about gambling, the acquisition of capital, and celebrity helps Kate negotiate between a private self and a media one. By appropriating a tool of capitalism she confirms that her character is created by that system, sponsored by an internet site run by one of the world’s most successful corporations. The episode itself is a reminder to us that a perception of authenticity is predicated on emotional display but that such displays are themselves conventions mediated by the system of political economy in which we move. The split which Kate plays out by letting her friend frame her life with Jeopardy is a synecdoche for much of what the creators of Dormitory Shakespeare experience. Their activities reflect assumptions similar to those found in Desmet’s arguments about dramatic character: that real identification between audiences and characters is limited because there is always a recognition of division.24 Because YouTube creators watch and respond to themselves, they experience this division as both a growing self-identification and frustration that such a process can’t be completed. (Kate Minola amusingly represents the success and failure of this process in episode 15, when James is angry or surprised that Megan knows his real first name is Percy because she watched a video of Kate discussing that with him. He wants only to be called James, even when he goes to university). Whether as an assignment or because there’s nothing else to do, creating Dormitory Shakespeare provides us with a spectacle of incomplete adolescent selves anchored in the most familiar of networks: school, university, family, circumscribed domestic spaces, especially bedrooms, representations of Shakespeare’s characters that educational settings introduce, and

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representations of Shakespeare’s characters that have circulated and been reshaped by cultural discourses. Reaching out to Shakespeare displays a yearning for the authentic as well as an impulse to communicate the authentic. Within a noisy media culture that almost infinitely replicates characters and images, and threatens to drown out a sense of authenticity, Dormitory Shakespeare helps adolescents blur the boundaries between the youthful selves from which they are emerging and a character they may not particularly want to be but who is, at least, recognized. They are searching for the familiarity of home even as they prepare to leave it—whether they are moving from Auckland to Wellington for University, leaving Tufts for the American west coast, or giving up Toronto for college in Ottawa.

NOTES 1. Christy Desmet, “Teaching Shakespeare with YouTube.” The English Journal 99, no. 1 (September 2009), 65–70. 2. Stephen O’Neill, “Ophelian Negotiations: Remediating the Girl on YouTube.” Borrowers and Lenders 9, no. 1 (Summer 2014), unpaged. 3. See “Learning from YouTube: An Interview with Alex Juhasz, Part two,” https://civic​.mit​.edu​/2008​/02​/22​/learning​-from​-youtube​-an​-interview​-with​-alex​ -juhasz​-part​-two/ 4. Its successor, Lovely Little Losers (which bears scant resemblance to Love’s Labors Lost) portrays some of the same actors in their university flats and is somewhat more fluid with regard to gender and sexuality. 5. Barbara Hodgdon, “(You)Tube Travel: The 9:59 to Dover Beach, Stopping at Fair Verona and Elsinore.” Shakespeare Bulletin 28.3 (Fall 2010), 326. 6. See, for example, O’Neill’s point that Shakespeare is both an “aggregate of texts by a historical figure” on the one hand and on the other, “an aggregate of adaptations, citations, allusions, uses, transpositions, appropriations, revisions.” O’Neill, Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 5. 7. Hodgdon, 314. 8. Skura, Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 9–28. 9. See Desmet, Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 6–34 for a discussion of the history, beginning with antiquity, of theories about readers and authors identifying with dramatic characters. As she notes on page 32, “total identification remains a dream.” 10. On these characteristics generally associated with the YouTube Shakespeare genre, see Desmet, “Teaching Shakespeare,” 66–68. 11. It should be noted that the episode numbers marked at the start of each video don’t always match the episode numbers listed on YouTube.

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12. Hodgdon, 314. 13. I am borrowing this term from Juhasz, quoted in Desmet, “The Economics of (In)Attention in YouTube Shakespeare,” Borrowers and Lenders 10, no. 1 (Spring/ Summer 2016), unpaginated. 14. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973), 72. 15. Adorno, 71. 16. Desmet, “Economics,” 2. 17. Hodgdon, 322. 18. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken/Random House, 1969. Accessed at https://web​.mit​ .edu​/allanmc​/www​/benjamin​.pdf, 10. 19. Benjamin, 6. 20. Benjamin, 3. 21. https://bardbox​.net​/2016​/06​/28​/kate​-the​-cursed/ 22. For the way in which popular culture both creates bleak archetypes and exposes their presence in “the oldest works of art and which still gives the maturist their power,” see Richard Burt, “What is Called Thinking with Shaxxxespeares and Walter Benjamin,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16, no. 5 (Summer 2016), 94–115. 23. See, for example, Luke McKernan, “Shakespeare and Online Video,” in Bruce Smith, ed. The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1970–74. 24. Desmet, Reading Shakespeare’s Characters, 32.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor. The Jargon of Authenticity. Translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken/Random House, 1969. Accessed at https://web​.mit​.edu​/allanmc​/www​/benjamin​.pdf. Burt, Richard. “What is Called Thinking with Shaxxxespeares and Walter Benjamin.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16, no. 5 (Summer 2016): 94–115. Desmet, Christy. “The Economics of (In)Attention in YouTube Shakespeare.” Borrowers and Lenders 10, no. 1 (Spring/Summer, 2016), unpaginated. Desmet, Christy. “Paying Attention in Shakespeare Parody from Tom Stoppard to YouTube.” Shakespeare Survey 61 (2008): 227–38. Desmet, Christy. Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Desmet, Christy. “Teaching Shakespeare with YouTube.” The English Journal 99, no. 1 (September 2009): 65–70.

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Desmet, Christy, and Sujata Iyengar. “Rebooting Ophelia: Social Media and the Rhetorics of Appropriation.” In Kaara Peterson and Deanne Williams, editors, The Afterlife of Ophelia. Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012: 59–78. Hodgdon, Barbara. “(You)Tube Travel: The 9:59 to Dover Beach, Stopping at Fair Verona and Elsinore.” Shakespeare Bulletin 2813 (Fall 2010): 313–30. Juhasz, Alex “Learning from YouTube: An Interview with Alex Juhasz, Part two.” Interview by Henry, audio, https://civic​.mit​.edu​/2008​/02​/22​/learning​-from​-youtube​-an​-interview​-with​-alex​-juhasz​-part​-two/ Lanier, Douglas. “Shakespearean Rhizomatics.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, edited by Alex Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin, 21–40. New York: Palgrave, 2014. McKernan, Luke. “Shakespeare and Online Video.” In The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, edited by Bruce Smith, vol. 2, 1970–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. O’Neill, Stephen. “Ophelian Negotiations: Remediating the Girl on YouTube.” Borrowers and Lenders 9, no. 1 (Summer 2014): unpaged. O’Neill, Stephen. “Shakespeare and Social Media.” Literature Compass 12, no. 6 (June 2015): 274–85. O’Neill, Stephen. Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Rowe, Katherine. “Crowd-Sourcing Shakespeare: Screen Work and Screen Play in Second Life.” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 58–67. Skura, Meredith. Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Chapter 7

Why Are Shakespeare’s Characters So “Relatable”? Matthew Kozusko

“Relatable”—quotation marks compulsory. Ideally, they would be audible. The word, in its increasingly dominant sense of “accessible” combined with “familiar,” is becoming a kind of favorite usage anathema among teachers of Shakespeare. It is the student misstep you love to hate. Your thoughts run reflexively to examples that would demonstrate proper usage: Othello will a round, unvarnish’d tale deliver; Othello will do this because his tale is relatable. The Messenger in 3 Henry VI dares not relate the few words from France to King Edward without first securing special pardon: relatable words, related reluctantly. In Macbeth, for Ross to relate the fate of Macduff’s relations was to add the death of Macduff.1 “Relatable” is, in three successive definitions: (1) “Able to be told or narrated; suitable for relating” (OED, from 1621); (2) “Able to be brought into relation with something else; capable of being related or connected (to something),” emphasis OED (1868); (3) “That can be related to; with which one can identify or empathize”—yes, also in the OED, and perhaps equally surprising, current in 1965. Here is the OED example from that year: “the research indicated that boys saw teachers as more directive, while girls saw them as more ‘relatable.’” When Lodovico shall the unlucky deeds of Othello relate, speaking of Othello as he is and extenuating nothing, setting down naught in malice, and so forth, he shall do so because Othello’s story is relatable. Which brings us back to Othello and which leads us to our problem: Othello’s story is a thing to be told and retold, relayed and related, and it is a story to which an audience can relate; it is familiar, imaginable as one’s own, exciting pity and fear, and so forth. This is true because Aristotle says so and because, presumably, that is how drama works. Especially Shakespeare’s. 127

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So Othello’s story is both relatable, and “relatable”-with-quotation-marks. My suggestion in this essay is simple: academics need to take seriously the relatability of Shakespeare in both of these senses. In support of this suggestion, there is the usage argument: “relatable”-with-quotation-marks has made its way into popular usage and will move along the language-change index until, like “impact” for “affect,” it becomes acceptable, and the quotation marks drop away. Which means our students will be justified, which means in turn that it is probably about time for us to stop being “directive,” as in the OED’s 1965 example, and start being relatable as instructors and academics, who serve, along with theater practitioners, as the most prominent stewards of Shakespeare. Sort of like the argument with regard to “Character Criticism”: if everybody else is doing it, why shouldn’t we? And even if we cannot bring ourselves to treat the English language, and Shakespeare, like everyone else does, should we not at least concede this matter of relatability and move on to a more productive quibble? The revival of critical interest in Character Criticism, not to mention the humanist subject, suggests that the academy has suffered itself to concede certain points of ideological struggle, and maybe even to join the fun. Several recent books and collections from academic presses—Shakespeare and Character (Yachnin and Slights, 2009); Shakespeare’s Sense of Character (Ko and Shurgot, 2012)—have followed some prominent earlier books, such as Christy Desmet’s Reading Shakespeare’s Characters (1992), to suggest the seriousness with which Shakespeare scholars have returned to the topic. Even those who remain skeptical of the value of taking Character Criticism seriously are bound by the logic that drives the critique of essentialism to grant that different communities use Shakespeare differently, producing different, but equally legitimate, kinds of Shakespeare experience and Shakespeare knowledge. This last notion, broadly speaking, is the current orthodoxy in the field of Shakespeare and appropriation, which deals with Shakespeare’s afterlives and which this volume, in its tribute to Christy Desmet, treats in several essays. Shakespeare circulates ever more widely and vibrantly in contemporary culture, across media and modes, as users repackage, repurpose, and reinvent Shakespeare with varying degrees of regard for or interest in or even awareness of the relationship between Shakespeare and the object (or practice, instance, event) of appropriation. The various terms and myriad metaphors used today to define the study of Shakespeare and adaptation— from appropriation to remediation; from algorithms to rhizomes—suggest the range of “Shakespeares” and their uses under consideration. The focus of what Desmet and Sujata Iyengar called the “taxonomic imperative,” however—that is, what to call this activity—is on capturing the relationship between Shakespeare and the user, more than on identifying the parties involved: neither party in the relationship is delimited, let alone defined.2

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But appropriation is perhaps underused as a critical framework for looking at the relationship between Shakespeare’s characters, on the one hand, and on the other, the narrative entities people produce and circulate and consume as they interact with those characters. Appropriation, in other words, might be the best way to describe what happens when users interact with Shakespeare under the governing concept of “relatability.” This use frequently involves moving a Shakespeare character away from its text, and decoupling it from the requirements of plot and genre, or from medium or mode. And when people approach Shakespeare expecting to find characters who are relatable, what they end up with is typically a version of a Shakespeare character that suits their needs. Such use patterns are most readily and most reliably understood as appropriations. In reframing this essay for inclusion in this volume, then, I want to draw attention to this underutilization and suggest that the decades-old debate over fidelity in appropriation studies might now inform how we understand the relationship between “Shakespeare” and the entities users generate when operating with the understanding that the characters in the plays are “relatable.” I also want here to draw attention to yet another potentially useful metaphor (hinted at but not addressed directly in this essay) for describing the relationship between Shakespeare and his users: usage, in the lexical and syntactical sense, and the corresponding tradition of prescriptive versus descriptive grammars. Popular versus academic engagement with Shakespeare might be understood in ways comparable to how we parse popular versus academic usage in diction. As with grammar, a range of practices obtains even inside of prescriptive use. Is this range wide enough to accommodate the variety of “academically sound” readings of Shakespeare without stumbling into determinism? If appropriation resists the notion of fidelity, but if the user’s deliberate intentions to get Shakespeare “right” matter, then the concept of usage has potential as a metaphor for this essay and even for appropriation itself. There is an academic gap between “Shakespeare’s characters,” a concept difficult to define in its own right, and what users do with those characters, and while it is unfashionable to think about this gap in terms of fidelity, the notion of Shakespeare as accessible to all remains a problematic ideal: “accessibility” is a thing stewards of Shakespeare often profess as a principal means of bringing about the very accessibility they seek to achieve in the course of their stewardship. Accessibility is the goal, but it is often offered as the precondition for engagement, presumably in the fear that without the assurance up front, the target users will not be interested enough to engage Shakespeare to begin with. And so we end up with the notion that Shakespeare’s characters are familiar and accessible—which is to say, “relatable.” There is, of course, no set of qualifications anybody is, or can be, required to meet in order to make use of Shakespeare, and despite the fact

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most new users of Shakespeare—students in formal schooling especially— will encounter Shakespeare as part of a curriculum, with the understanding that mastery of the material is the goal, there is no “right” or “wrong” way to produce or consume or experience Shakespeare (whatever “Shakespeare” even is). But the silent assumptions most users make about their encounters with Shakespeare nonetheless do have, as a context, an academic experience: some critical facility with the texts, their history, and their meaning, is presumed, and critical mastery is the teleology. A working academic ability is understood to be the ultimate goal, and in this light, Shakespeare’s “relatability” sits in uneasy tension with the notion of mastery: mastery suggests precise, academically defensible readings, but relatability carries the promise that Shakespeare is really, at the core, something users can access informally, personally, on their own terms, without an academic shepherd. For the purposes of this essay, then, the argument that academics should embrace relatability and Character Criticism because everybody else is doing so does not fully persuade, and I want to try out a different reason for why we should meet our students on their own terms and think about Shakespeare’s characters as relatable: Shakespeare’s characters are not, in fact, all that relatable. More typically, they are unfamiliar and difficult. Their language is archaic and confusing: thee’s and thou’s are likely to be heard as instances of formal address; “Wherefore?” is heard as “Where?”; and generally speaking, it is not their basic familiarity, but their fundamental inaccessibility that tends to mark Shakespeare’s characters for readers and audiences today. Here is an excerpt from an advertisement e-mail that Lorenz Educational Press sent to academic addresses in October of 2013: Let’s face it: Shakespeare can be difficult to understand. With his complex themes and deep philosophy, and with that language! [emphasis not added]. We’re willing to bet that your students sometimes struggle with it. We have a secret weapon that can fix that.

“How fares our cousin Hamlet?” the e-mail quotes. “Excellent i’faith, of the chamelion’s dish. I eat the air, promise crammed. You cannot feed capons so,” followed by a parenthetical citation, and then “Wait . . . what? So Hamlet’s doing . . . excellent?”3 The Lorenz e-mail suggests what I am calling the fundamental inaccessibility of Shakespeare’s characters. More precisely, it is Shakespeare’s language that Lorenz notes is difficult, but the Hamlet example brings us to the point of character. How is Hamlet doing? He says he is “excellent,” but that’s not exactly—or not at all—what he means. His manic mood might help audiences hear in performance the sarcasm that undercuts the word

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“excellent,” but even onstage, the reference to eating air and crammed capons does not make sense to modern playgoers. In order to understand how Hamlet is doing—in order to relate to Hamlet the character—contemporary readers and audiences need help. Julian Fellowes recently explained the modernization of the language in his new Romeo & Juliet: “to see the original in its absolutely unchanged form, you require a kind of Shakespearian scholarship and you need to understand the language and analyse it and so on.”4 Understanding and analysis are component activities in the consumption of all popular entertainment. Fellowes’s observation points out the historical separation between contemporary consumers and Shakespeare’s first audiences: you need a kind of scholarship to engage Shakespeare because the codes, while they still signify clearly enough at the level of general storytelling, are not easily resolved without specialist training. So if Fellowes’s phrase “and so on” suggests an ignorant homogenization of the dynamic activity of producing Shakespeare—it does to me—he nonetheless has a point. Teachers and producers of Shakespeare habitually push back against this idea of Shakespeare as distant and dense. Globe Education’s Fiona Banks responded to Fellowes with the standard line: “Shakespeare’s for everybody. We can all understand him.”5 But “we” (academics) all know that “we” (popular audiences) can all misunderstand him, too. To the extent that Shakespeare’s characters are familiar, familiarity is increasingly a matter of things external to the “character” as mapped out in the text: People—let’s call them “users of Shakespeare”—rely on performance, analog, reference, rumor, and so forth to make sense of what or whom they meet in Shakespeare.6 They understand the characters by supplementing, and in some cases supplanting, the experience of the text with what they already know about Shakespeare’s characters when they engage the text. Punchdrunk’s New York City production of Sleep No More, so successful it is now apparently permanent, illustrates the extent to which the performer can constitute a Shakespearean character without the use of any of the language we traditionally take to be the DNA of character.7 We recognize Lady Macbeth in Punchdrunk’s disbursed dance piece, part drama and part haunted house for adults, through iconic gestures and through “characteristic” performed emotions. How do we know she’s Lady Macbeth? Because the publicity campaign tells us so, and because the performers who enact her rehearse the character’s defining gestures: because she unsexes herself and scrubs away at imaginary bloodstains and sleepwalks and kills herself. Shakespeare’s characters are not relatable so much as related—related over and over again in accreted layers of remediation—“appropriations,” in the context of this volume of essays—that have turned character topoi into character. Lady Macbeth is a trope, a pantomime, a celebrity.

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A writer for The Telegraph, trying to find something nice to say about Fellowes’s Romeo & Juliet, offered this: In an attempt to be as faithful as possible to the original play, producers of the latest version cast Hailee Steinfeld, who was 15 at the time of filming—about the age Shakespeare intended Juliet to be. They have also used traditional costumes and sets.8

If The Telegraph’s understanding of “faithful” accidentally gets something right—a young performer in the role of Juliet—it gets everything else wrong, and its general confusion bears traces of a number of misunderstandings about Juliet’s character and theater history, not to mention history: first, the factoid with which students of Romeo and Juliet are armed in high school, about all early moderns marrying as teens; second, the notion, presumably driven by contemporary ideas of verisimilitude, that personator and personated in Shakespeare are ideally the same age; third, an argument about costumes that begs the question and raises all kinds of questions. Julian Fellowes and Lorenz Educational Press are not the only ones willing to mediate Shakespeare for popular users. Getting Shakespeare right matters to all of us, professionally. It matters to The Telegraph, too, even as it gets Shakespeare wrong. If academics take care to be open to the terms in which other users talk about Shakespeare, we can manage encounters with Shakespeare before the characters become foreign, unfamiliar—and unrelatable. So far, I have suggested that the best reason to join students in the notion that Shakespeare is “relatable”-in-quotation-marks is that their relationships with his characters need a chaperone. But we need to consider more seriously the darker alternative, which is that Shakespeare’s characters are in fact the subject and realm of the specialist and require a lot of academic “and so on,” to borrow Fellowes’s language, in order to be understood; and that Shakespeare’s characters are translatable and appropriable, available as types, but that they are not otherwise or actually “relatable.” In fact, the idea that Shakespeare’s characters are relatable, at its best a benign hope, has the potential to create so much distance between the play text and the understanding of the play text as to derail the project of reading Shakespeare altogether. ON SHAKESPEARE, CHARACTER, AND SHAKESPEARE’S CHARACTERS As is evident in Shakespeare and Character and Shakespeare’s Sense of Character, the two recent essay collections mentioned above, definitions of “character” for English literary academics working on early modern drama

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tend to begin with Aristotle and proceed through etymology and usage and the OED. They tend to be carefully historicized, so that they avoid the error of suggesting that the way we think about character today matches the way early moderns thought about character. Academic discussions of character tend also to avoid essentialist slips in which character as a measure or index of “disposition” reflects assumptions about a stable, unified subject with agency and internal self-governed and self-renewing continuity. In this, English literary academics are most distinct from other discursive communities who think about character, and not merely popular users of Shakespeare.9 In a recent Oxford University Press monograph, philosopher Gregory Currie offers two whole chapters on character without so much as mentioning Aristotle.10 His approach reminds us that it can be useful occasionally to look outside the conversation in which we have been immersed, for new perspectives. In Arts & Minds, Currie frames character by outlining what he calls “Nietzschean super essentialism,” which says that of these two statements, the first is true, and the second, false: (1) Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy. (2) Nietzsche might not have written The Birth of Tragedy. The second is false because it offers a “Nietzsche” who is slightly different, as the result of a total “qualitative history,”11 from the Nietzsche who did write The Birth of Tragedy. Currie disagrees, insisting that both 1 and 2 are true, and not only of people but of characters in fiction as well. Thus, Currie proposes that both of the following statements are true: “Anna Karenina fell for Vronsky,” and “Anna Karenina might not have fallen for Vronsky.”12 Currie argues that readers (for our purposes, this category has to include audiences, though the assumption could bear further inquiry) experience the actions of characters in fictions as “contingent,” meaning we understand the things they say and do as not inevitable. “The story,” he says, “would affect us in a quite different way if it were thought to be the working out of necessity.”13 It can be inferred here that contingency involves choices that make narratives hold our attention: actions, by accumulation, result in character. Currie may thus seem at first to square with Aristotelian character theory. And having acknowledged the freshness of an account of character that does not turn to Aristotle, I now turn to Aristotle: While men do have certain qualities by virtue of their character, it is in their actions that they achieve, or fail to achieve, happiness. It is not, therefore, the function of the agents’ actions to allow the portrayal of their characters; it is, rather, for the sake of their actions that characterisation is included.14

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Aristotle always allows for people to be of a certain nature or disposition, but his tendency to focus on action as the root of character is the best remembered feature of Poetics. Contingency in character actions is an implied requirement of Aristotle’s model, because the actions a character performs are what form the substance and purpose of the narrative. For Aristotle, especially in Nicomachean Ethics, actions become character: virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.15

Nonetheless, Aristotelian action is not oriented with regard to character along the same axis as Currie’s contingency argument. Currie is interested in contingency not as the point of character, but as the condition that allows character ontologically—and as one of the conditions that allows character, in narrative, to be revealed. Against this background, I want to ask, “How does character work in Shakespeare?” A broad definition of Shakespeare’s characters takes them to be complex discursive events or matrices that articulate, draw on, or derive from, any number of sources, including classical Character types (Theophrastus, and later Thomas Lodge and Overbury); dramatic character types; formal requirements attributable to regular dramatic structure; the larger set of social and discursive expectations that govern the production of speaking subjects (also requirements of a sort); and, crucially, the complex dynamic formed when characters depart in their speaking or acting from the pattern suggested or required by any and all of those categories. That is, part of what generates our sense of “character” comes from the way dramatis personae act and speak against character types and expectations. These categories can be mingled and refigured. William Dodd offers a model he calls a character’s “discourse biography,” or “the unique history of interactions that accrues to [a] character and is more than the sum of its social determinations.”16 Dodd points to “the interplay between a dramatis persona’s pragmatic behavior (what it ‘does with words’ and how it interacts with others) and its semantic attributes (the social, cultural, and moral identity ascribed to it).”17 And the categories are by no means an exhaustive list of everything that determines or contributes to the effect of character. As Andrew Hartley notes, much of what we call “character” is the result of the role embodied by a particular actor, or by the embodiment implied and on some level realized by the reader of a drama.18 As Hartley’s discussion and, to some extent, Currie’s work suggest, the etiology of Shakespeare’s characters

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reproduces the logic of bibliographic models of Shakespeare’s “works,” the character equivalent of Joseph Grigley’s “polytext,”19 as in some sense the cumulative effect and sum of an ever-expanding field of production and consumption. In this context, what is most interesting about Currie’s “contingency” approach to character is its contrast to the ways people—both academic and non-academic—tend to talk and write about Shakespeare’s characters in particular. To explore this a little further, we could note that the argument that Currie makes about Anna Karenina is likely to hold true for Shakespeare’s characters as well, because we would presumably agree, on a technical level, that Hamlet might not have killed Polonius or that Falstaff might have reformed himself over the course of 2 Henry IV. What these characters do, versus what they might have done, helps establish who and what they are. But coming to such an agreement would take us out of the mode in which we habitually think and talk about Shakespeare’s characters. It is one thing to agree that Hamlet might not have rhymed “move” and “love” in his letter to Ophelia; it is another thing to agree that Hamlet might not have killed Polonius and another again to agree that Hamlet might not have gone with Horatio and company to the castle’s battlements to look for ghosts. Some of the things Hamlet does allow the plot to move forward, whereas some of the things he does may help enable the plot but are more expressive of Hamlet’s “character.” Some have their origins in dramatic form and character prototype: Hamlet is a revenger (Empson); Hamlet is a clown or Vice (de Grazia); Hamlet is a principal character in the drama (critical consensus assumed).20 As a revenger in a revenge tragedy, Hamlet can be expected to seek redress for wrongs by taking justice into his own hands. As a clown or Vice, Hamlet can be expected to extemporize, to speak irreverently to his superiors, and to draw out the play by delaying the anticipated movements of the genre. As a principal character, he can be expected to do much of the talking and to offer an understanding of and orientation toward the events of the play with which audiences are generally invited to sympathize. To make use of Currie’s “contingency” principle in assessing Shakespearean character, then, do we need to parse actions as incidental versus plot-driven versus constitutive of character? And at what point does dealing with contingencies become a matter of Character Criticism? In other words, setting aside for a moment the full discussion of the word “character,” its history, and the various concepts it involves from context to context and from age to age, at what point does a contingency question in the Currie since become more practically problematic than it is technically true? To acknowledge that Falstaff might have reformed himself over the course of 2 Henry IV is, ultimately, to say that Falstaff might not have continued to be Falstaff over the course of 2 Henry IV: the traits that actors and readers and writers tend to

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identify as the things that make Falstaff, Falstaff, have to continue to be present in Falstaff in order for us to have the Shakespearean character we know. Falstaff’s character is, in this sense, the inability to reform. He cannot amend his ways, not so much because it would alter his circumstances and disrupt the play as we know it, but because reform would not be Falstaffian.

HOW DO ACTUAL PEOPLE ACTUALLY READ SHAKESPEARE’S CHARACTERS? The question I am working toward here is whether a defining constraint to contingency21 (such as Falstaff’s inability to reform himself) should be attributed to something standard about Shakespearean characters—their roots in dramatic types or in classical characters, perhaps—or attributed to Shakespearean characters—that is, whether there is something about Shakespeare’s characters that makes them signify and circulate differently from other characters (and if so, whether that is a property of the characters, or of the way we read them). So: is Falstaff unable to reform because of his dramatic heritage in the Vice figure, whose purpose is to persist in vice while the hero breaks off their association? Is he unable to reform because he is Shakespeare’s riff on a Character type like Theophrastus’s Coward or Joseph Hall’s Unthrift or Thomas Lodge’s Beelphogor, “prince of belly cheere”?22 Or is it his realistic departure from—his exceeding of—these Character types that makes him so admired as a literary creation? To phrase it in terms of relatability and Character Criticism: Is Falstaff best read as a character, with the tools of literary criticism, or as a person, to whom we can relate? The answer I have in mind here returns us to the notion that Shakespeare’s characters are not relatable. The real problem is not relatability or Character Criticism. Both errors, the one a matter of usage and the other a matter of disciplinary discretion initiated by L. C. Knights, are easily excused as matters of popular behavior that cannot, by virtue of their popularity, be wrong except on a technical (or disciplinary) level. The real problem is that the imperative to find Shakespeare’s characters relatable has so conditioned the activity of reading Shakespeare as to require a personal identification between the user and the character, even if that identification comes at the expense of the academic value we place on reading well. The hopeful pronouncement that governs and guarantees the popular circulation of the plays—that notion that Shakespeare is relatable—turns out to have an insidious and powerful gravity that draws most users of Shakespeare into its orbit. It proceeds to determine their paths so that they are not reading Shakespeare or his characters so much as rehearsing the idea that Shakespeare’s transhistorical genius means we can all understand him.

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Encounters with Shakespeare are so heavily inflected with extra-Shakespearean influences that we as readers—or actors or audiences or others—become characters ourselves, part of a containing drama that governs encounters with Shakespeare and that is every bit as scripted as the plays. Not only do the characters in the plays have no choice but to behave in certain ways when we read them, but those constraints on behavior are a feature not of Shakespeare’s text but of our text, the story in which we take part when we read Shakespeare today. We, too, are stuck in a text, without recourse to choice or contingency. Everybody can read Shakespeare, the story goes, and you do not need a fancy education to connect to the characters. In other words, popular users are stuck, when they talk about reading Shakespeare, with the notion that his characters are relatable, because that is what teachers and actors and instructors and professors and directors have been telling them for decades. Shakespeare is difficult, but accessible; Shakespeare is a challenge, but his themes and his characters are ultimately familiar; Shakespeare matters to your life, so you should not be scared to engage with the plays: if you give Shakespeare a chance, you will find that he is relatable. People thus come to Shakespeare with certain expectations about what the user experience will be like—what it will entail, and what kind of experience it will have given the reader in the end. They expect the plays to be difficult and profound, and they expect to experience challenge and reward. This is because Shakespeare’s plays and characters are thought to contain the truth of what it means to be human. Since such truths are abstract and difficult, and since Shakespeare’s poetry is complex and profound (the two are to some extent functions of each other), the encounter will be a challenge, but the user will emerge on the other side in at least partial triumph and in possession of at least some part of the truth. As I have argued at greater length elsewhere, both the expectations and the experience are part of the way we talk in popular representation about what happens when we read (see, perform, etc.) Shakespeare.23 Consider everything from Hollywood (Dead Poets Society, Shakespeare in Love) to art film and documentary (Shakespeare Behind Bars, The Hobart Shakespeareans, Caesar Must Die, This American Life’s “Act V,” episode 218) to popular television (Slings & Arrows) to classroom anecdotes about student triumph and even, on some occasions, the luncheon talk at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America: they all involve struggling populations passing through the challenge of Shakespeare, making an important connection to Shakespeare’s characters, and coming out on the other side refreshed and renewed or otherwise vindicated. The notion that Shakespeare’s characters are relatable is tied up in all of this as the enabling assumption that users can find in the plays something familiar and accessible.

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Academic stewardship of Shakespeare is actually part of the problem, then, making its own contributions to the expectations users have of encounters with Shakespeare. The pedagogical imperative to package Shakespeare as exciting, accessible, and good for you rehearses the value argument. And though it typically works against the notion that Shakespeare is difficult, the same pedagogical imperative also constitutes a user experience “curated” by an expert (whether scholar or practitioner), which only further encourages the challenge-and-reward model: “here is the bit of code you need to crack this difficult material and access its thrilling and delicious contents.” Expertcurated encounters with Shakespeare also tend to rely heavily, even exclusively, on the language of the plays for producing knowledge of Shakespeare, which has two principal effects: it further mystifies the already mysterious language, and it invites users to form a profound, authentic connection to the language. As a result, I am arguing, users tend to rely even more extensively on their expectations—on what they think the text should mean and on what they expect the characters to be doing and saying. Faced with archaic and unfamiliar codes, and an injunction to find personal meaning within them, users turn to contemporary context for help, which means they end up reading not Shakespeare, but what they expect to find in Shakespeare. This is how we get performers in prison Shakespeare programs, for example,24 forging unlikely connections to characters based more on a personal need than on an academically defensible (which is to say textually sound) reading. The actor who plays Claudius in This American Life’s “Act V” uses the character’s failed, private attempt at repentance to work through his own genuine, public penance. The murderous king who tries to repent but realizes that he cannot becomes the contrite criminal who weeps for what he has done. The actor playing Macbeth in another recent prison production reads “to be thus is nothing / But to be safely thus” as an articulation of the difficulty of maintaining a false public posture of hardened criminality: “to be thus is nothing” comes to mean “this persona of menacing gangster is not really me.”25 In both cases, and in countless others, the opacity of the language makes a precise reading quite difficult even as it provides cover for a reading that engages the general subject of the language but that is quite different in its particulars. Because Shakespeare is understood to be relatable, users end up forming relationships with “characters” very different from those that actually inhabit the plays. As adaptations or appropriations of Shakespeare, such readings are part of a centuries-long tradition and could hardly be dismissed as somehow wrong. But when figured as straight readings, proceeding from a fundamental relatability between user and character, the project of reading Shakespeare is pulled impossibly in opposite directions: the momentum of a powerful, inspiring, personalized reading versus the academic imperative of a critically

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sound close reading. The relatability fallacy is especially pronounced when such appropriations are figured as critically astute readings. This is often the case with commentary on prison Shakespeare, which tends to celebrate connections between users and Shakespeare’s criminal characters as something only “real” criminals can achieve. In such instances, Shakespeare’s character, Claudius or Macbeth, is replaced with the idea of “criminal,” while the idea of “Shakespeare” promises access (because Shakespeare is relatable) and guarantees that the relationship to be formed is profound. The real problem we face with the notion that Shakespeare’s characters are “relatable,” then, has little to do with usage. It has to do instead with the demand to draw in new users with the notion of a familiar, dynamically modern Shakespeare who can speak to and through audiences today because this demand does not sort well with the real difficulty posed by a set of texts that do in fact require effort and guidance if their poetic value is to be accessed and activated. Our own critical reluctance to talk about such value is surely part of the problem, but that is a subject for a different approach to this problem. I propose here only that we think more carefully about how we characterize Shakespeare’s characters and how we respond to what’s wrong with “relatability.” NOTES 1. This essay originally appeared in Shaping Shakespeare for Performance, edited by Catherine Loomis and Sid Ray (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2015). This current version is lightly revised for inclusion in this collection. 2. Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar, “Adaptation, appropriation, or what you will,” Shakespeare 11, no. 1 (2015): 3. 3. Lorenz Education Press, “Straight Forward Shakespeare—Special Offer,” 17 October 2013, , accessed 17 October 2013. 4. Quoted in Sabrina Sweeney, “Julian Fellowes views on Shakespeare ‘misguided,’” BBC News, 11 October 2013, http://www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/news​/ entertainment- arts-24489450. 5. Quoted in Sweeney, “Julian Fellowes views on Shakespeare ‘misguided.’” 6. The notion of a “Shakespeare user” predates this essay’s original publication and has since gained considerable critical currency. For a prominent early example, see Margaret Jane Kidnie’s Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (Routledge, 2009). For more recent academic work on the concept, see especially Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (editors), The Shakespeare User (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 7. Since the date of this essay’s initial publication, the New York City Sleep No More remains the central theatrical piece at a performance venue that itself has grown in scope and purpose. Details about the New York City production of Sleep No More can be found online at http://sleepnomorenyc​.com/. For some early academic

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responses to Sleep No More, see Borrowers & Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 7.2 (2012/2013), which features several reviews. 8. Claire Duffin, “Romeo, Romeo, what’s Julian Fellowes done to you?” The Telegraph, 1 September 2013, http://www​.telegraph​.co​.uk​/culture​/theatre​/williamshake​spear​e/102​78154​/Rome​​o​-Rom​​eo​-wh​​ats​-J​​ulian​​-Fell​​owes-​​done-​​to​​-yo​​u​.htm​​l. 9. In the remainder of this essay, I follow a sensible trend in recent scholarship that uses “character” to refer broadly to literary characters and to the many various definitions the term supports, and that uses “Character” to refer either to the classical or Renaissance genre of character types. 10. Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chapters 10 and 11. 11. Gregory Currie, Arts & Minds (Oxford University Press, 2005), 28. 12. Currie, Arts & Minds, 29. 13. Currie, Arts & Minds, 28. 14. For Poetics, I cite from The “Poetics” of Aristotle, Translation and Commentary, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). This passage appears on page 37. 15. Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2. I cite from The Internet Classics Archive edition, trans. W. D. Ross, http://classics​.mit​.edu​/Aristotle​/nicomachaen​.2​.ii​.html. 16. William Dodd, “Character as Dynamic Identity: From Fictional Interaction Script to Performance,” in Shakespeare and Character, ed. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 62–79; 62. 17. Dodd, “Character as Dynamic Identity,” 61. 18. See Andrew Hartley, “Character, Agency, and the Familiar Actor,” in Shakespeare and Character, ed. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 159–76. 19. Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 99. 20. See Margreta de Grazia, “Hamlet” Without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See especially chapter 6, “Hamlet’s Delay,” in which de Grazia discusses the critical history of Hamlet. 21. I use the formulation “defining constraint to contingency” to keep the discussion running with Currie’s terms. Falstaff’s inability to reform himself is a fairly straightforward example of the characteristic I am suggesting defines a character and therefore does not take well to a “might not have” contingency argument. Finding a parallel question for other characters is actually quite difficult: Hamlet might not have reflected on his circumstances so much? Lady Macbeth might not have had any interest in power and status? 22. Thomas Lodge, Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse: Discouering the Deuils Incarnat of this Age (London, 1596), 78. 23. See Matthew Kozusko, “Monstrous!: Actors, Audiences, Inmates, and the Politics of Reading Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Bulletin 28.2 (2010): 235–51. 24. Or more accurately, in documentary accounts of those programs, the distinction between what performers in prison Shakespeare programs say or experience as part of those programs, on the one hand, and the way that experience is

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represented in documentary accounts, on the other, is important. See Kozusko, “Monstrous!” 248. 25. I take this example from the 2014 Shakespeare Association of America talk given by Steve Rowland, “Globe to Globe Shakespeare Visits Prison: or To Whom Does Shakespeare Belong?” Global Shakespeare in Prisons, Villages, and Opera Houses, organized by Sheila T. Cavanagh.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2. The Internet Classics Archive edition, trans. W. D. Ross. http://classics​.mit​.edu​/Aristotle​/nicomachaen​.2​.ii​.html. Aristotle. The “Poetics” of Aristotle, Translation and Commentary. Ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Currie, Gregory. Arts & Minds. Oxford University Press, 2005. Currie, Gregory. Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. de Grazia, Margreta. “Hamlet” Without Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Desmet, Christy, and Sujata Iyengar. “Adaptation, appropriation, or what you will,” Shakespeare 11, no. 1 (2015): 1–10. Dodd, William. “Character as Dynamic Identity: From Fictional Interaction Script to Performance,” in Shakespeare and Character, eds. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights. New York: Palgrave, 2009, 62–79. Duffin, Claire. “Romeo, Romeo, What’s Julian Fellowes Done to You?” The Telegraph, 1 September 2013, http://www​.telegraph​.co​.uk​/culture​/theatre​/williamshake​spear​e/102​78154​/Rome​​o​-Rom​​eo​-wh​​ats​-J​​ulian​​-Fell​​owes-​​done-​​to​​-yo​​u​.htm​​l. Grigely, Jospeh. Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Hartley, Andrew. “Character, Agency, and the Familiar Actor,” in Shakespeare and Character, eds. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights. New York: Palgrave, 2009, 159–76. Kozusko, Matthew. “Monstrous!: Actors, Audiences, Inmates, and the Politics of Reading Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Bulletin 28.2 (2010): 235–51. Lodge, Thomas. Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse: Discouering the Deuils Incarnat of this Age. London, 1596. Lorenz Education Press. “Straight Forward Shakespeare—Special Offer,” 17 October 2013, LEPTeam​@Lorenz​.c​om, accessed 17 October 2013. Sweeney, Sabrina. “Julian Fellowes Views on Shakespeare ‘Misguided,’” BBC News, 11 October 2013, http://www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/news​/entertainment- arts-24489450.

Part III

FUTURE

Chapter 8

Levinas, Jessica, and Memory in Productions of The Merchant of Venice Lisa S. Starks

At the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, there is a very small, seemingly insignificant object on display—a little ring, like one used by a young girl, that was found in a boxcar used for deportation to concentration camps.1 Although the object is staged in an exhibition without extensive narrative, it communicates far beyond what I could capture here through language, its resonances always exceeding my words. This object, the ring, evokes memory both of the Holocaust as an actual historical event and of something beyond any literal narrative of the past. For Emmanuel Levinas, the former (the historical event) would constitute the “said” (a move to conceptualize the object into a narrative, to interpret or encapsulate its meaning in terms of conventional morality or dominant cultural viewpoints); the latter would be an example of the “saying” (a gesture toward the other), which exceeds the limits of the “said.”2 Objects, both present and absent, can suggest ways of knowing and evoking memory on stage. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice thematically revolves around such objects—namely, rings. Unlike Portia’s and Nerissa’s rings, the turquoise ring that Shylock received from his late wife Leah, which Jessica reportedly stole and traded for a monkey (3.1.93–97),3 is cited in the text but is not physically present on stage. In her examination of objects and memory on the early modern stage, Lina Perkins Wilder notes that objects on stage often evoke what has been lost, and those that are often mentioned but are not present onstage become “something like fetishes” that “‘body forth’ an absence.”4 As such an object, Shylock’s (later Jessica’s) ring does appear in the meaningful coda with Jessica in Michael Radford’s 2004 film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, which provides a cinematic example of the “saying” noted above. 145

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In addition to a physical object like the ring, an extra-textual moment— a visual tableau or musical break in the action, for instance—may offer movement beyond the “said” to the “saying” in theatrical representations of memory. In post-Holocaust stage productions, such as Jonathan Miller’s 1970–1971 (Royal National Theatre; television film 1973, dir. John Sichel), Trevor Nunn’s 1999–2000 (Royal National Theatre; television film, dir. Chris Hunt, 2001), and Jonathan Munby’s 2015–2016 (Shakespeare’s Globe; Globe on Screen, 2016, dir. Robin Lough), the inclusion of a Hebrew prayer—either associated with or sung by Jessica herself—functions in similar ways to the presence of the absent ring. In these aforementioned productions, the added episode with Jessica’s prayer or ring is prominently featured at the close of the play in a coda that suggests her own history, revolving around the loss and potential recovery of her Jewish identity; yet the significance of the prayer or ring itself and its impact on other related moments move beyond this narrative level of the production. In these theatrical and cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s play, the prayers or ring break up or haunt the narrative with memory that demonstrates the “saying,” thereby pushing the boundaries of dramatic representation beyond that “said,” or literal representation. Employing Levinas’s dual theory of memory, I argue that particular post-Holocaust performances of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice explore the relationship articulated by Levinas between the “saying” of ethical memory, which gestures toward transcendence—the desire to move beyond oneself to “something otherwise than being.” For Levinas, this intersubjectivity is constructed through, by, and for the other.5

LEVINAS, MEMORY, AND PRODUCTIONS OF MERCHANT Since these productions of Merchant dramatize specific moments of Jewish history, at the level of narrative they treat the first type of memory in Levinas’s theory, related to the “said”: conscious or ontological memory (memory as the conception and representation of past events). Nevertheless, these productions gesture beyond this first type toward the second type of memory in Levinas’s theory, related to the “saying”: immemorial or ethical memory (memory that exceeds conscious conceptualization, representation, or encapsulation into a narrative). In Levinas’s theory, the latter—immemorial or ethical memory—intersects with his idea of transcendence as the human need to move beyond the self toward something “otherwise than being,” which is an a priori, ethical memory of the other that precedes everything else. When

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triggered, immemorial memory “makes an impact, traumatically, in a past more profound than all that I can reassemble by memory, by historiography, all that I can dominate by the a priori—in a time before the beginning.”6 As Levinas puts it, “When man truly approaches the Other he is uprooted from history.”7 Indeed, for Levinas, consciously knowing the past necessitates a distance from its experiential truth, a distance that enables a rational piecing together of previous events. Employing Levinas’s theory, Michael Bernard-Donals describes the act of narrating the past as “forgetful memory.” Since an event is unrecoverable in its full experience, representing it necessarily involves forgetting as much as remembering. Bernard-Donals explains that “the event intrudes upon the witness’s ability to place it into the fabric of narrative, tearing it, or tugging at it, haunting the narrative and the witness both.” He describes this “phenomenon, particularly the representations that are produced, as a kind of ‘excess’ of the event, which haunt both the one who was there and the one who only catches a glimpse of the event secondhand.”8 This excess, that which eludes the “said” of historical, conscious memory, may be described as an eruption of immemorial memory in Levinas’s theory. Attempts to gesture toward this immemorial memory would constitute the “saying.” Levinas’s two kinds of memory—conscious (related to the “said”) and immemorial (related to the “saying”)—at first appear to be contradictory; but, as Annabel Herzog explains, they intersect with each other in a kind of loop, with conscious memory breaking into immemorial memory, and then immemorial memory reconnecting back to conscious memory. When memory returns to consciousness after experiencing immemorial memory, however, it is reshaped by an ethical sense, “led back not merely to consciousness, but to a remembrance transformed by ethics.” Herzog terms this reconnected, ethically refigured conscious memory Levinas’s “memory of the immemorial.”9 In the contemporary performances of Merchant listed below, Jessica’s prayers and ring may be seen as a metaphor for this endless circular loop of consciousness and transcendence through memory. I argue that Shakespearean performance has the potential to figure and refigure this loop, to trigger the memory of the immemorial. For example, at particular moments—such as the Hebrew prayers in Miller’s, Nunn’s, or Munby’s theatrical productions or Jessica’s ring in Radford’s film—these stage and film productions attempt to move beyond conscious memory toward the memory of the immemorial, enacting Levinas’s radical ethics. Post-Holocaust productions of The Merchant of Venice are linked, in complex ways, to the memory of past and present oppression of the other. Miller’s, Nunn’s, and Munby’s stage productions and Radford’s film are

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all set in specific, carefully designated historical settings, yet they gesture beyond these settings to evoke centuries of Jewish persecution, the Holocaust, and the antisemitism, racism, and Xenophobia occurring at the time of their production. In so doing, they represent a literal past, but that representation is infused with memory beyond that conscious level, in Levinasian terms. The productions move toward a deeper, ethical sensibility, one that suggests a compassionate sense of the other that does not attempt to narrate, encapsulate, or nullify that other’s alterity. These productions urge the spectator to share in this loop of memory, to transcend boundaries of selfhood, and to assume ethical responsibility for the other. As part of the loop memory explained above, these productions evoke the “saying” as well as the “said” by developing and embellishing the character of Jessica in scenes with Shylock, later ones in Belmont, and in a final coda or epilogue that involves Hebrew prayers, either associated with or sung by Jessica, and/or the emblematic presence of the turquoise ring. These moments with Jessica disrupt the production’s conscious depiction of an historical era and break open the narrative, creating the memory of the immemorial loop described above. The moments may trigger various kinds of memory—some experiential, others mediated—for different audience members, memory related to past and present Jewish persecution, feelings of alienation and otherness, generational relationships to Jewish tradition, and representations of the historical treatment of Jews stage, in film, and other popular culture. JESSICA’S PRAYERS Memory and tradition are central to Judaism itself. Ritual—particularly the chanting or singing of Hebrew prayers—provides a conduit to deep memory, for the sound of the ancient words themselves, sung and chanted for thousands of years, resonate with collective, as well as personal, memory. The repetition of these prayers, sung over and over again, thus enact Levinas’s loop of memory: starting at the conscious level, then moving beyond and returning to consciousness with a renewed ethical sensibility. Given the centrality and significance of Hebrew prayer to memory and Judaism, it is especially meaningful that important productions of The Merchant of Venice incorporate this loop along with the embellished character of Jessica to push Shakespeare’s play beyond the limits of its surface narrative. Jonathan Miller’s (1970–1971), Trevor Nunn’s (1999–2000) and, the most recent of my examples, Jonathan Munby’s (2015) stage productions incorporate Hebrew prayers and align them with the character of Jessica, evoking the memory of the immemorial at the close of the play.

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JONATHAN MILLER, 1970–1971 Jonathan Miller’s 1970–1971 National Theatre stage production (adapted for television in 1973), ushered in post-Holocaust productions that stressed this memory loop in its representation of history and transcendent moments. The set visually brought to mind images of a nineteenth-century novel in many respects. Set in 1880s Venice, the theatrical production (and later television version) consciously evoked pre-World War I modern capitalism, one in which Shylock (Laurence Olivier) appeared as a businessman among others in the Rothschilds Banking House. Miller and Olivier situated Shakespeare’s play in an historical moment in which a character like Shylock could garner a great deal of wealth and prestige, but nevertheless be subject to antisemitic hatred from a modern capitalist society that his own financial enterprises had enabled.10 To further associate Shylock with this era, Olivier brought in resonances of antisemitism from English political history by physically modeling his Shylock on Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli.11 Besides these models, the setting resonated with the memory of the antisemitism that propelled the Dreyfus affair in France in the following decade; and although the time depicted in this version of Shakespeare’s play preceded that of the Holocaust, the production nevertheless invoked it, as late-nineteenth-century antisemitism led directly to that horrific genocide. Notwithstanding, this version of Shakespeare’s play also attempted to shed light on antisemitism and bigotry occurring in the 1970s, when the production was staged, during which time hatred was bubbling beneath the surface of modern, everyday life and commerce—antisemitism inherited from this earlier era, one in which Jews were stereotyped as global conspirators of wealth and power. Miller’s production evoked conscious memory of past and present historical events and places that have been mediated through narratives, paintings, and other representations of the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it gestured beyond this literal level to that of immemorial memory in Shylock’s memories of his late wife Leah and, especially, through the enhanced role of Jessica (Jane Lapotaire on stage; Louise Purnell in the television film). Influenced by Henry Irving’s sympathetic portrayal of Shylock in the 1880s, Olivier’s Shylock was dignified but deeply emotional, profoundly influenced by memory and loss. He openly expressed that emotion when told of Jessica’s flight, stroking her picture and then smashing it; and he deeply grieved when he heard the report that Jessica had traded his ring from Leah, lovingly looking at his picture of his late wife, kissing it, and then sobbing, his tallit (prayer shawl) over his head. Jessica herself struck a melancholy note early on and amplified it in later scenes, suggesting a lingering connection to her own past and Jewish identity, despite her rejection of it and conversion to Christianity. Her dismay was

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apparent when she uttered, “what heinous sin is it in me / To be ashamed to be my father’s child!” (2.3.15–16) in a downcast tone, which then deepened in her interactions with Lorenzo (Malcolm Reid) and other Christians. Treated as an outsider in Belmont, Jessica remained present but silent, upstage from the action, so much so that Portia (Joan Plowright) momentarily forgot her name when leaving for Venice. In the television adaptation, Jessica, obviously disconsolate and forlorn, averts her gaze when Lorenzo speaks at the start of Act 5. When Lorenzo replies, “On such a night / Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew” (5.1.14–15), Jessica walks away from her husband, visibly disturbed. After exclaiming, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (5.1.69), she looks down at her wedding ring (which could possibly be the turquoise ring, though it isn’t explicit), sadly twirling it around her finger. At the end, as others exit, Jessica crosses in front of the camera, intensely scrutinizing the deed of inheritance ordered from the trial. Lorenzo attempts to point to it over her shoulder, but she shakes him off and continues to examine it, her brows knit in consternation. He leaves, followed by Portia, who makes a slight gesture toward Jessica before exiting. When Jessica reaches the part in the document concerning her father, she touches her neckline, grieved. Standing on the porch behind her, Antonio (Malcolm Reid) reaches out his hand, but she ignores him and walks away, still reading. The camera follows Jessica while a male cantor’s voice (Heinz Danziger) singing the Mourner’s Kaddish swells and continues through the final credits. (In the stage production, as Jessica moved upstage, the sound was cued for Kaddish, which was then heard reverberating in the darkness.) The Mourner’s Kaddish was thus aligned with Jessica in this production, even though she did not actually vocalize it. Although Kaddish is often described simply as a Jewish prayer for the dead, its meaning and significance exceed this definition. The prayer explicitly deals with holiness and the wonder of life—not death—and its role is to “transform the pain of loss that results from a loved one’s dying into a mitzvah, a ‘sacred act of consciousness,’ honoring the way she or he lived and will continue to live in . . . [one’s] memory as a source of love, learning, and inspiration.”12 Although the use of Kaddish in this production has often been interpreted as a dirge for the figurative loss of Shylock for Jessica, I would argue that it points toward something else—a transformation of the situation in which Jessica finds herself at the end of the play. Although I agree with J. C. Bulman that Miller’s use of the prayer is “inspired,” that it “unsettles rather than affirms, it counters comic reconciliation with tragic isolation, and it crystallizes the process of alienation that Miller has used the play to explore,”13 I contend that this moment of disruption does more than point out isolation and alienation; it triggers an ethical response, the memory of the immemorial, which resonates both within and beyond the boundaries of the production.14

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TREVOR NUNN, 1999–2000 Like Miller’s, Trevor Nunn’s The Merchant of Venice at the National Theatre was set in Venice at a particular historical moment. However, rather than the 1880s, this production was set in the thirties, with fascism and antisemitism on the rise in Europe. In the television version (2001), the opening newsreel credits, costumes, make-up, set for the stage, Bob Fosse-inspired choreography, and the camerawork attempt to evoke not only the literal historical memory of pre–World War II Venice but also, especially in the night-club scenes, the sense of that time period (though more Berlin than Venice) as mediated through the play and film Cabaret, with Launcelot Gobbo (Andrew French) acting as the Emcee.15 On the conscious memory level, Nunn’s stage production even more closely aligned itself with the Holocaust than Miller’s, as it brought to mind the escalating violence and increasing oppression of Jews and other minorities in the thirties. Nevertheless, Nunn, like Miller, clearly wanted his 1999–2000 stage production to speak to oppression and ethical concerns in his own time as well. The program for the play stresses the importance and difficulty of ethical choice in the contemporary world, which the production itself addresses. In an excerpt included in the program, Mary Warnock discusses the struggle to identify some kind of “Global Ethics” in education amidst postmodern relativism in the contemporary world and its conflicting values and choices.16 This historical reality of the thirties for Jews was especially emphasized in the domestic life of Shylock (Henry Goodman), who speaks with a subtle Yiddish accent, and Jessica (Gabrielle Jourdan). In the PBS television adaptation, their home is starkly juxtaposed with the cabaret culture of Venice, modest and darkly lit, closed in and tucked away from the increasing and impending threat of the antisemitism lurking outside its doors and windows. In this domestic scene, with Yiddish music in the background, the adaptation gestures beyond the literal historical narrative to one resonating with both warmth and pain—once again through Hebrew prayer. After reciting the line “Jessica my girl” to his daughter, Shylock sings verses 10–11 in Hebrew of the prayer Eshet Chayil, “A Woman of Valor,” which is traditionally sung on Friday night (Shabbat or Sabbath) in praise of the woman of the house— Jessica, in this case—with Shabbat candles burning next to the picture of the late woman of the house, Leah.17 Jessica then follows, singing in Hebrew verse 11 of the prayer; and Shylock joins in with her for verse 12 (in translation): “She is good to him, never bad, / All the days of her life.”18 Besides the meanings of this song—the praise of traditional Jewish womanhood and Shabbat itself—its insertion in this scene conjures images of Jewish families huddled in closed quarters, recreating through this ritual the loop of memory and transmission of it to the younger generation. And, as with the Mourner’s

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Kaddish in Miller’s production, the Hebrew prayer—even to those unfamiliar with it—touches a deep sense of memory, love, and loss. These meanings are strengthened by the actors’ performances in the television film, as in the original stage production. When singing the last verse, Jessica appears to be weighed down by her guilt and conflicted loyalties. The camera in shot-reverse-shot captures Launcelot who looks on, touched by the scene, which moves him to tears. The pressure of Shylock’s oppression surfaces when he slaps Jessica as he shouts, “Clamber not you up to the casements then / Nor thrust your head into the public street / To gaze upon Christian fools with varnished faces” (2.5.30–32), but then gently rebounds to make amends with the line, “But stop my house’s ears—I mean my casements” (2.5.33). Goodman’s Shylock, clearly under stress, passes the abuse that he has suffered onto his daughter, which other actors playing the role, including Jonathan Pryce (discussed below), have brought to this scene. Shylock then, hand to his forehead, prays while looking at a photo of Leah and grieves, in a moment reminiscent of Olivier’s Shylock, though much more understated. Shylock’s pain at the loss of Leah is then worsened when Tubal (Lawrence Werber) tells him about Jessica supposedly trading his ring from Leah for a monkey. In Nunn’s stage and television production, Jessica’s feelings of remorse and loss are foregrounded in Act 5, returning to the memory loop initiated in the earlier domestic scene with Shylock. In the television adaptation, Jessica, now appearing as a very “modern woman” sporting a Louise Brooks hairstyle, lounges with Lorenzo (Jack James) while they listen to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Suddenly, as if stricken with a traumatic memory, she bolts up, extremely upset, crying while Lorenzo comforts her, just before she says the line, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (5.1.69). As in Miller’s production, Jessica’s sorrow continues to build in the scene, especially after Portia (Derbhle Crotty) hands the deed to Lorenzo. After Portia and Bassanio (Alexander Hanson) kiss, Jessica bursts out singing verse 12 of Eshet Chayil in Hebrew, the prayer that she and Shylock had sung together earlier in the play. Jessica kneels and continues to sing, Lorenzo kneeling behind her. At this point, the meaning of the Hebrew lines from Proverbs (“She is good to him, never bad, / All the days of her life”) are full of poignancy, regret, memory, and extreme sadness. The production thus ends on this note of deep traumatic memory, the past which haunts Jessica and disrupts the comedic ending of Shakespeare’s play. JONATHAN MUNBY, 2015 The 2015 Globe production (directed by Jonathan Munby) revisited this deep, traumatic memory. Its literal historical setting reached back further than

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Miller’s or Nunn’s productions to early modern Venice, as does Radford’s 2004 film. However, this Globe production, employing original stage practices, represented Venice emblematically, as opposed to Radford’s film, as discussed in the next section, which depicts it with cinematic realism. The Globe’s staging and the hybrid (then and now) temporal layers of Shakespeare’s plays lead to productions that carry with them not only mediated resonances of the historical past, including theatrical history, but also immediate relevance to the present day. For Jonathan Pryce, who played Shylock, Munby’s production of The Merchant of Venice spoke to “the political situation in the world today, the fear of the alien, fear of the immigrant—it became a very relevant piece, and it has huge resonances and echoes of what’s happening today.” He saw Shylock as “every immigrant, every person who’s trying to escape.” Besides the analogies to the contemporary world, the production evoked traumatic memories of Jewish persecution in the early modern era and subsequent centuries. Moving beyond a conscious sense of this history, Munby, like Miller and Nunn, further developed the role of Jessica and emphasized her domestic life with Shylock. Rather than incorporating a Shabbat prayer in Act 2, scene 5, Munby instead inserted dialogue in Yiddish, the language of the Jewish home at that time. In this scene, Jessica (Phoebe Pryce, Jonathan Pryce’s real-life daughter) entered with a letter, followed by her father, who hollered, “Jessica!” They then argued in Yiddish. Here is that inserted dialogue in English, which was then translated into the Yiddish that was spoken on stage: SHYLOCK: Jessica, Jessica, don’t walk away from me When I’m talking to you. Listen to me. Listen to me. You never do as I ask It’s for your own good, not mine. Dzshesika, Dzshesika, gey nisht avek Ven ikh red tsu dir. Her zíkh tsu. Her zikh tsu. Du tust keynmol vos ikh farlang Sîz tsulib dir, nist tsulib mir. JESSICA: Stop, father, just stop. I don’t understand what you’re talking about. What ARE you talking about? You never stop. Always going on. Why do you keep going on like this? What is it you want? Her oyf, tate, her oyf nor. Ikh farshtey nisht vos du zogst.

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Vegn vos redstu? Du herst keynmol nisht oyf. Tomid plaplstu! Far vos hakstu mir a tshaynik? Vos vilstu fun mir?19

The harshness of Shylock’s tone here, like the slap in Nunn’s production, established the context for Jessica’s actions and emotional state. Speaking about this scene, Pryce describes Shylock as “a human being who has been constantly abused, then reviled and spat upon and treated badly,” representing the idea that the “person who’s abused becomes the abuser.”20 This father-daughter fight, especially in Yiddish, echoed a deeply rooted and mediated memory, not only of Jews in the early modern period, but also of those who lived in Shtetls and cities through centuries of persecution and pogroms before the Holocaust, and those who emigrated elsewhere, such as the United States, where generational conflict and assimilation strained the communication between parent and child. Shylock’s difficulties with Jessica and grief from his Leah’s death were then even more meaningful when he reacted to the report that his daughter had traded his turquoise ring by looking at his finger and breaking down in tears. Jessica’s own struggle with these issues of assimilation dominated Act 5, signified emblematically in a scene after her elopement with Lorenzo (Ben Lamb). In this mini-dumb show, Jessica crossed downstage left, upset, then stood and stared into the audience. Lorenzo followed behind her, offering her a gift box to cheer her up. Jessica opened the box to find a cross pendant, which Lorenzo fastened around her neck; she then shuffled off her consternation and danced with Lorenzo. Jessica’s ambivalent feelings returned, however, when she was brushed off by Portia (Rachel Pickup), who interrupted them and handed her champagne flute to Jessica for her to hold, like a servant, while Portia danced with Lorenzo under Jessica’s disheartened gaze. Jessica, clearly an outsider in Belmont, responded awkwardly to Portia during the rest of the scene. It is in the inserted coda to the play, though, that Jessica’s character gestured beyond the “said” of the production to its “saying”—once again through Hebrew prayer. Jessica started off Act 5 in better spirits than in the previous productions cited, but she still became downcast when uttering, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (5.1.69). As in both Miller’s and Nunn’s versions, Jessica’s demeanor changed when she was confronted with the deed. She first appeared overwhelmed, perhaps with joy; but this emotion abruptly shifted as she turned away, visibly upset. Crossing downstage right, Jessica then broke from the play’s narrative and, filled with obvious pain and remorse, sang a Hebrew prayer from the Jewish High Holidays.

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This prayer, sung on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, asks for God’s forgiveness both for the self and for the entire Jewish people. Significantly, Yom Kippur stresses communal forgiveness, not for one’s sin against another person, which must be atoned for with the injured party, but rather for sins committed as a people—including all those forced to convert to other religions in times of antisemitic oppression. Moreover, since Yom Kippur emphasizes mercy and forgiveness, the staging of Jessica singing this particular prayer directly following Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech and her lack of mercy in the trial scene carried an edge of bitter irony. Jessica’s rendition of this prayer onstage therefore registered on multiple levels: on the plot level, it suggested Jessica’s plea for forgiveness and Shylock’s suffering; on a broader level, it offered a call for mercy that extends to all Jews. The prayer itself taps into a deep well of memory, echoing centuries of these ancient words reverberating on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. As Jessica’s voice soulfully rang out the words, “Avinu Malkeinu,”21 the audience was drawn into this moment beyond the conscious narrative to this deep level of memory and suffering. When she then passionately exclaimed, “Baruch atah Adonai” (“Blessed are you, Lord”) and knelt in deep remorse, the sound of slow drums, which signal the Day of Atonement, were heard; the drums simultaneously ushered in the procession for Shylock’s forced baptism on stage, accompanied by clergy singing the Te Deum. During this incredibly powerful scene, which staged Shylock’s forced baptism and emblematically represented all of the forced conversions of Jews throughout history, Jessica remained onstage, kneeling and sobbing. She then stood, facing her father. The two exchanged one pointed, face-to-face look at one another—the daughter who willingly rejected her Jewish identity and the father who was forced to do so—suggesting the generational conflicts noted above and the loss that both had experienced. Jessica then joined in the singing, rather than exiting, which signaled a departure from the other Jessicas discussed above, as well as the one on screen in Radford’s film. JESSICA’S RING: RADFORD (2004) Like Munby’s later stage production, Michael Radford’s 2004 film is set in early modern Venice. Using historical period drama film conventions, it opens with the caption “Venice 1596” displayed across the screen, followed by a brief written description of Jewish oppression and life in the Jewish Ghetto in early modern Venice.22 The film depicts a sharp visual distinction between the Jewish Ghetto and Christian Venice, with its religious fanatics spouting antisemitic rants from Paul and Martin Luther, market scenes, and numerous bare-breasted prostitutes. Reflected through the lens of Renaissance paintings

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and architecture, Radford’s Venice and Belmont are mediated through visual arts and accented with period music. As in the other stage productions, however, Radford’s film works on multiple historical layers; it attempts to depict the early modern oppression of Jews but also suggests that of later centuries, which culminated in the Holocaust. The film engages with its own contemporary moment as well, produced following the attacks of September 11, 2001. The film’s stress on the violent consequences of religious fanaticism, emphasized by the opening shots of burning Hebrew books, a hate crime (the shot of a Jew thrown from a bridge), and the antisemitic diatribes mentioned above, comment on the fanaticism that led to the 9/11 attacks. In this way, the film speaks to the hybridity of Shakespeare’s plays in its multiple historical layers, then and now. The film’s historical perspective has sparked disparate critical points of view, though most have noted this hybridity in one sense or another. For L. Monique Pittman, the film’s early modern setting serves to mark it as legitimate or authentic “Shakespeare,” which it posits as universal in response to a “desire for harmony” at its own historical moment following September 11, 2001.23 In contrast, for Mark Thornton Burnett, the Renaissance setting is layered with visual, cinematic citations of Holocaust films, so that while depicting a contemporary view of early modern Venice, thereby situating itself in an imagined past, the film also references our mediated memory of twentiethcentury genocide.24 As Burnett argues, the film explicitly requires an ethical response, and “such an emphasis enables . . . [it] subliminally to contemplate the images and ideologies that have determined its direction, while the film’s methodology allows a work that is implicitly concerned with Holocaust testimony to become a testimony to the Holocaust in its own right.”25 Through its multiple layers of memory, I would argue, the film brings forth mediated images of the past, encouraging the spectator to respond to the present with a renewed ethical awareness. In this film the character of Jessica (Zuleikha Robinson) provides a way to break through this conscious historical level to that of immemorial memory, looping back to conscious memory infused with ethical awareness, symbolized by her turquoise ring. Utilizing cinematic conventions, Radford is able to enrich Jessica’s role throughout, the camera catching the turquoise ring on her finger at different points in time. He emphasizes Jessica’s tie to Jewish tradition early on through inserted visual shots of her and Shylock (Al Pacino) during services at the synagogue. Later, in the scene at Shylock’s house, the camera captures Jessica’s complicated emotions, what Radford describes as “both her resentment for her father and also her desire to leave, and also her shame and her guilt at leaving him.”26 The interior of Shylock’s house is shot on a small set, which feels claustrophobic like that in Nunn’s production; in this case, however, the dwelling is imagined in the Jewish Ghetto.

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In this film, like the other stage productions, Jessica’s presence—even in her absence—is given strong emphasis, providing the spectator with a deepened sense of Shylock’s loss at the death of his late wife and the betrayal of his daughter. Suffering from extreme grief when he learns that Jessica has left him, Shylock breaks down and sobs into his draperies, then, despondent, wanders aimlessly in the rain. When Tubal (Allan Coruner) gives him reports of Jessica spending the money she stole from her father, Shylock has brief, visual fantasies of Jessica, resembling a Venetian prostitute, living it up lavishly and extravagantly with Christians; and when Tubal tells him that Jessica has supposedly traded his ring from Leah for a Monkey, Shylock painfully imagines that scene, too, picturing Jessica gleefully trading her mother’s keepsake for a pet monkey. These imaginary scenes make the final coda, discussed below, even more powerful. Radford then develops the role of Jessica, showing her shifting emotions, at important junctures throughout the rest of the play. Radford moves up the banter between Jessica and Lorenzo (Charlie Cox) to precede Shylock’s trial scene, using it to show Jessica’s change of heart earlier on. Her visual dismay in this scene thus indicates “the beginning of her remorse over what she’s done,” in Radford’s words,27 and it builds to the memorable final coda that most fully pushes the film beyond the “said” to the “saying” level of representation. After the trial, Jessica visibly denotes her sorrow and selfreproach, particularly when she looks down and away at Nerissa’s reference to her father as “the rich Jew” (5.1.292). At the end of Act 5, Launcelot Gobbo (Mackenzie Crook), who has been in love with Jessica all along, also registers her pain and shows remorse for his betrayal of Shylock. Carrying his bindle, Launcelot exits right to leave Belmont, and, crucially, Jessica exits left. It is unclear whether or not she is leaving Belmont for good, but either way, Jessica has distanced herself from the others. She runs down the steps, where she overlooks men in boats shooting arrows into the water, with birds hovering, under a hazy morning sky. The scene reenacts Vittore Carpaccio’s painting Hunting on the Lagoon (1490),28 situating Jessica in a conscious historical moment mediated through Venetian Renaissance art. But the moment breaks from this level to one beyond it in the film’s final moments. Overlooking this scene, Jessica glances down at her hand, and the camera catches her ring—the turquoise Ark of the Covenant, the ring that Leah gave to Shylock—as she stares ahead. The presence of the absent ring in Radford’s film brings together various levels of meaning and history. It signifies Jessica’s unbroken tie to her Jewish identity and heritage, to the memory of her mother, and to the father she abandoned.29 It also resonates on a larger historical level, imagining the ways that Jews have maintained their cultural identity and carried forth their traditions, even in the midst of persecution, forced conversion, and genocide.

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For Laury Magnus, the coda “remind[s] its audience once again of the Jews’ eternal expulsion and diaspora, their need to draw their strength from within.”30 For Burnett, the coda may also be interpreted that Jessica’s suffering is that “of nations and people, and her testimony, the film makes clear, will not be ignored.”31 Burnett notes that Andreas Scholl’s voice, overheard singing the final lines from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, points to a brighter future and a move away from tragic prior events, especially in light of the film’s “preoccup[ation] with the traumatized relationship between the past, the present, and the future.”32 From the perspective of Levinasian memory, this coda with Jessica’s ring—like Jessica’s prayers in Miller’s, Nunn’s, and Munby’s stage productions—breaks with conscious memory and gestures toward the immemorial, finally looping back to conscious memory inflected with ethical awareness. In these examples, the use of this memory loop enables adaptations to move beyond the “said” levels of the narrative to gesture toward the “saying,” to evoke profound, reciprocal exchanges of deeply rooted emotional responses, meanings, and ethical sensibility in their audiences.

NOTES 1. In response to my inquiry concerning the ring, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections Erin M. Blankenship explained, The ring was found in our boxcar when it was conserved 20 years ago and has been scientifically confirmed to be consistent in style and materials to the time period of the Holocaust. While our boxcar is of the type used by the Nazis for deportations to concentration camps and killing centers, it has not been positively confirmed. However, the existence of the ring is evidence that would point towards such history as it is not a ring that would have been worn by a member of the military. (Before the Holocaust, boxcars were also used to transport soldiers, livestock and freight.) Also, it is not necessarily a little girl’s ring. It is indeed small in size for a very small finger. (email correspondence, 30 January, 2020)

2. For Levinas on the “saying” and the “said,” see especially Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press), 100. 3. All references to Shakespeare are taken from The Merchant of Venice, edited by Charles Edelman, Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 4. Lina Perkins, Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2. 5. Significantly, when Levinas redefines the term transcendence and the transcendent to refer to this deeply rooted human need or metaphysical desire and ability to pass over or “transcend” the self to encounter the other, he is not using the term to suggest one’s movement toward a heavenly plane, absolute truth, absolute negativity

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(as in existentialism), or logos—even when he employs it in a religious sense. As he writes, “[t]he metaphysical desire tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other” (Levinas, Time and the Other [and Additional Essays], translated by Richard A. Cohen [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987], 33). Explaining this concept, Cohen points out that Levinas’s notion of transcendence “is not that of the logos, which is always reducible to immanence, whether personal and existential or world-historical and ontological, but rather the otherness of the other person encountered morally” (Cohen 2010, 311). 6. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 88. 7. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 52. 8. Bernard-Donals, Forgetful Memory: Representation and Remembrance in the Wake of the Holocaust (Albany, NY: New York State University Press, 2009), 3. 9. Annabel Herzog, “Levinas, Memory, and the Art of Writing” Philosophical Forum 36.3 (2005): 333. On his theory of memory, see esp. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Interiority, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 136; Otherwise than Being, 9 and 57; and Time and the Other, 358. 10. Miller, Plays and Players, “Director in Interview: Jonathan Miller Talks to Peter Ansorge,” Plays and Players 17.6 (1970): 53; also cited in James C. Bulman, Shakespeare in Performance: The Merchant of Venice (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), 77. 11. Olivier, On Acting (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 119, 236; also see Bulman, Shakespeare in Performance, 80. 12. Rabbi Goldie Milgram, Meaning and Mitzvah: Daily Practices for Reclaiming Judaism through Prayer, God, Torah, Hebrew, Mitzvot, and Peoplehood (Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2005), 39–40. 13. Bulman, Shakespeare in Performance, 98. 14. Other productions following Miller’s also incorporated Jewish prayers, such as Bill Alexander’s 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company production, in which Shylock (Antony Sher), as a Turkish Jew resembling an Islamaphobic stereotype, chanted a grossly misappropriated prayer from a Jewish Seder while conducting an invented ritual before attempting to extract the pound of flesh from Antonio in the courtroom scene. Although this production’s supposed intent was to focus on racism and expose fears and hatred of the other, it ended up staging and inflaming racism, in my view. The use of the Seder prayer here tapped into antisemitic myths, such as blood libel, that many at that time (including critics) assumed were no longer present in the contemporary cultural imagination. Sadly, they were, and still are, and the performances of this play often elicited antisemitic responses from audiences, as was the case when I saw it at the Barbican in London during its run. Because his production and others that have incorporated Jewish prayer fall outside the focus of this essay, I will not be discussing them at length. For a full discussion of this production, see Bulman, Shakespeare in Performance, 117–153. 15. The stage musical, with music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb (book by Jose Masteroff), premiered in 1966 and was adapted for film in 1972, directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse. It is based on John Van Druten’s 1951 play I Am

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a Camera, which is an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin. Other reviewers and critics have noted that this production cites Cabaret, such as Kenneth S. Rothwell, “The Merchant of Venice,” Cineaste 29.4 (Fall 2004): 56 and Charles Edelman, “Introduction” to The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare, edited by Charles Edelman. Shakespeare in Production. (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 84. 16. Mary Warnock, “The Morality of the Merchant,” The Merchant of Venice, Program, 1999, n.p. Royal National Theatre Archives, accessed January 9, 2020. 17. This prayer is based on Proverbs 31.10–31. (In this production, verses 10–12, 15, 20, and 25–31.) The prayer itself is sequential, each verse starting with a different Hebrew letter to build this ideal of the Jewish woman. It is sometimes read allegorically as praise for the “bride of Shabbat,” the figure for Shabbat itself, or the feminine presence of God (Shekhina). The prayer is typically sung in households just before Kiddush (blessing over wine) preceding Shabbat dinner. Although this prayer is a “tribute” to the woman of the house, many progressive, Reform Jews no longer include it in the Shabbat service, because it praises the woman for values such as sacrifice and selfless marital duty that conflict with contemporary feminist values. For an excellent discussion of this prayer in Nunn’s production, see Edelman, The Merchant of Venice, Appendix 2, 265–266. 18. Proverbs 31:12 in JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh: The Traditional Hebrew Text and the New JPS Translation, second edition (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1999). 19. Prompt Book for The Merchant of Venice (2015), directed by Jonathan Munby, Globe Theatre Archives, accessed January 15, 2020. 20. Jonathan Pryce, interview. All Things Considered. National Public Broadcasting, July 29, 2016. https://www​.npr​.org​/2016​/07​/29​/487831441​/new​-merchant​-of​-venice​-recasts​-shylock​-as​-a​-sympathetic​-everyman. 21. In English, “Forgive me, forgive me, our Father; You are Father, you are King; You are merciful, you have compassion; Forgive us, forgive me” (translated by Cantor Pamela Siskind). 22. Mark Thornton Burnett sees this opening as an example of documentary film conventions, but—given its coupling with the film’s use of Renaissance painting and architecture in its art design—I see it more as typical of historical period drama films. See Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 92. 23. See L. Monique Pittman, “Locating the Bard: Adaptation and Authority in Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Bulletin 25.2 (Summer 2007): 29. 24. Burnett, Filming Shakespeare, esp. 88. 25. Burnett, Filming Shakespeare, 106. 26. Michael Radford, director’s commentary, The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons (Sony Pictures Classics, 2004), DVD. 27. Radford, director’s commentary, The Merchant of Venice. 28. Frank P. Riga provides an alternative reading of this scene. He argues that this painting, used within the context of Merchant, may be interpreted as a symbolic

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reenactment of the antisemitism of the play. He points out that “Shylock” in Hebrew is “Shalach,” which means “cormorant,” a bird of prey that is an icon of the usurer, and that the fish constitutes a symbol of the Christian. Therefore, for Riga, the scene can be read as “reintroduc[ing] anti-Semitism” (“Rethinking Shylock’s Tragedy: Radford’s Critique of Anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice.” Mythlore 28.3/4 [Spring/Summer, 2010]: 123.) 29. Samuel Crowl argues that the ring symbolizes her “divided loyalties” (“Looking for Shylock: Stephen Greenblatt, Michael Radford and Al Pacino,” in Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Ramona Wray and Mark Thornton Burnett [Edinburgh University Press, 2006], 121), but I disagree. I aver that her departure from Belmont and her possession of the ring as an indicates her commitment to her Jewish heritage. 30. Laury Magnus, “Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice and the Vexed Question of Performance,” Literature-Film Quarterly 2 (2007): 118. 31. Burnett, Filming Shakespeare, 103. 32. Burnett, Filming Shakespeare, 100–101.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernard-Donals, Michael. Forgetful Memory: Representation and Remembrance in the Wake of the Holocaust. Albany, NY: New York State University Press, 2009. Blankenship, Erin M. Email correspondence. 30 January, 2020. Bulman, James C. Shakespeare in Performance: The Merchant of Venice. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991. Burnett, Mark Thornton. Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cohen, Richard A. Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010. Crowl, Samuel. “Looking for Shylock: Stephen Greenblatt, Michael Radford and Al Pacino.” In Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Ramona Wray and Mark Thornton Burnett. Edinburgh University Press, 2006: 113–126. Edelman, Charles. The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare. Edited by Charles Edelman. Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Herzog, Annabel. “Levinas, Memory, and the Art of Writing.” Philosophical Forum 36.3 (2005): 333–343. JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh: The Traditional Hebrew Text and the New JPS Translation. Second edition. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1999. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1981. ———. Time and the Other [and Additional Essays]. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. ———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Interiority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1969.

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Magnus, Laury. “Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice and the Vexed Question of Performance.” Literature-Film Quarterly 2 (2007): 108–120. The Merchant of Venice (2015). Directed by Jonathan Munby. Prompt Book. Globe Theatre Archives, accessed January 15, 2020. Milgram, Rabbi Goldie. Meaning and Mitzvah: Daily Practices for Reclaiming Judaism through Prayer, God, Torah, Hebrew, Mitzvot, and Peoplehood. Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2005: 39–40. Miller, Jonathan. “Director in Interview: Jonathan Miller Talks to Peter Ansorge.” Plays and Players 17.6 (1970): 52–53, 59. ———. The Merchant of Venice. Royal National Theatre. 1970–1971. Television film. Directed by John Sichel and Jonathan Miller. 1973. Shout Factory, 2016. DVD. Munby, Jonathan, dir. The Merchant of Venice. Starring Jonathan Pryce and Phoebe Pryce. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, 2015–2016. Globe on Screen, 2016. DVD. Nunn, Trevor. The Merchant of Venice. Royal National Theatre. 1999–2000. Television film. Directed by Chris Hunt and Trevor Nunn. Public Broadcasting Service. 2001. Image Entertainment, 2004. DVD. Olivier, Laurence. On Acting. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986. Pittman, Monique L. “Locating the Bard: Adaptation and Authority in Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Bulletin 25.2 (Summer 2007): 13–33. Pryce, Jonathan. Interview. All Things Considered. National Public Broadcasting, July 29, 2016. https://www​.npr​.org​/2016​/07​/29​/487831441​/new​-merchant​-of​-venice​-recasts​-shylock​-as​-a​-sympathetic​-everyman Radford, Michael, dir. The Merchant of Venice. Starring Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons. Sony Pictures Classics, 2004. DVD. Riga, Frank P. “Rethinking Shylock’s Tragedy: Radford’s Critique of Anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice.” Mythlore 28.3/4 (Spring/Summer, 2010): 107–127. Rothwell, Kenneth S. “The Merchant of Venice.” Cineaste 29.4 (Fall 2004): 56–57. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Edited by Charles Edelman. Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Warnock, Mary. “The Morality of the Merchant.” Program for The Merchant of Venice (1999, n.p.), Royal National Theatre Archives. Accessed January 9, 2020. Wilder, Lina Perkins. Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and Character. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 9

Transgender Theory and Global Shakespeare Alexa Alice Joubin

Even though Shakespeare’s plays were initially performed by all-male casts, they were designed to appeal to diverse audiences. Many modern adaptations reimagine those plays as expressions of gender nonconformity. Over the past decades, prominent films and theater works have fostered new public conversations about the politics of appropriating gender identities in Shakespeare’s plays around the world. Since drama gains efficacy through the act of embodiment, Shakespeare’s plays accrue new cultural meanings as they move through time and space, offering venues where embodied differences play out. When actors embody a role, their own identities—perceived or self-claimed—enrich the meanings of the performance. Gender is one of the most important vectors bearing diagnostic significance in performance, but transgender performances remain marginal even to feminist scholarship. This chapter makes an intervention in both transgender and Shakespeare studies by reading traditionally binary characters as transgender to shed new light on performances of gender practices in a global context. As we will see, gender variance is more than just a dramatic device derived from the early modern practice of cross-gender casting. Our understanding of the comedies and romance plays would change dramatically if some characters are interpreted as transgender or played by transgender performers, such as Viola who presents as pageboy Cesario in Twelfth Night, Falstaff as the Witch of Brainford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Rosalind as Ganymede in As You Like It, and Imogen as the boy Fidele in Cymbeline. Different kinds of trans practices, however, elicit contrasting reactions. While trans masculine acts, such as those staged by Viola’s Cesario, are often performed in the vein of empowerment, trans feminine characters, such as Falstaff’s Witch of Brainford, are ridiculed by other characters and by the audiences. Performance criticism has created hierarchical, evaluative models which 163

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have not registered fully gender nonconformity. This chapter proposes new methods to read these characters. Viola as Cesario, for instance, is a trans masculine character, as he does not “dress up” for entertainment or mischief. He never recovers the so-called “maiden’s weeds” at the end of Twelfth Night. The assumed demise of his twin brother Sebastian is a pivotal moment for Viola not only to mourn him through impersonation but also to live an authentic life. This reading of Viola is inspired by Christy Desmet’s interrogation (or “prosecution”) of the motives of characters as they manifest themselves in the characters’ rhetoric. What is “true” in a fictional character can be determined by the rhetoric in various dramatic conventions such as trial scenes and formal debates.1 By taking into consideration a character’s actions and choice of words we can deduce their personal truth in a performative context.

GENDERED PRONOUNS IN TRANSLATION: TWELFTH NIGHT AND THRONE OF BLOOD Since gender variance is coded linguistically and culturally, performing Shakespeare in translation entails purposeful treatment of personal pronouns. Twelfth Night is a good example. When Viola, presenting as Cesario and finding himself pursued by the lovelorn Olivia, declares that “I am the man [of the hour] and a dream” in Twelfth Night (2.2.25–26), he traverses a transgender space.2 On the early modern English stage, Viola would speak with double irony as a doubly cross-dressed boy actor. In modern times, Viola would challenge audiences’ normative assumptions when played by an adult male actor, as with Johnny Flynn in Mark Rylance’s all-male production at the Globe Theatre in London in 2012 (dir. Tim Carroll). As an otokoyaku (male impersonator) in the all-female Broadway-style Takarazuka musical production (dir. Kimura Shinji, 1999; starring Yamato Yuga) derived from shōjo (teen girl) mangas, Viola embodies enticing gender fluidity when speaking Japanese, a language that often elides the subject. In addition to making the right choice of employing the familiar or the polite register based on the relation between the speaker and the addressee, male and female speakers of Japanese have to choose from gender-specific firstperson pronouns. This grammatical feature makes it difficult to create a queer space. However, it can be rewarding to work with semantic ambiguity within syntactical restrictions. For example, former Takarazuka actress Kei Otozuki offered an intriguing doubling performance. She employed gendered code-switching to play the twins Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night (Nissay Theatre, Tokyo, March 2015), the second Shakespeare production with a Japanese cast by John Caird, honorary associate director of the Royal

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Shakespeare Company. Kei specializes in male roles in Takarazuka musicals. In Twelfth Night, she played Viola, Cesario, and Sebastian, thereby bringing new layers of gendered meanings to the narrative. Generally speaking, limitations create linguistic and cultural opportunities in articulating anew some gender dynamics. Another example from Twelfth Night involves Orsino’s comments about love from a masculinist perspective and Cesario’s apology for a woman’s love (2.4.78–125). Gendered discourses in As You Like It would also acquire new meanings, such as in the exchange between the aforementioned Rosalind in disguise as Ganymede and Oliver on her “lacking a man’s heart” when she swoons, nearly giving herself away in the pastoral comedy As You Like It (4.3.164–176). In both cases, the character, if speaking in Japanese, need not specify the subject by using a gendered first-person pronoun, since it is common for Japanese speakers to omit or elide the subject. Without naming the subject in a sentence, Japanese speakers have room to present gender ambiguity in new ways. Uses of pronouns are as important in the film as they are in theater. Gendered personal pronouns shape the dynamics in several scenes in Akira Kurosawa’s film Throne of Blood (Toho Company, 1957), a samurai adaptation of Macbeth. While obscured by English subtitles, the uses of personal pronouns and salutations reflect moral and political agency or the lack thereof. When conversing with each other, Washizu (Macbeth) and Miki (Banquo) refer to each other with first names, deepen their voices, and use informal language and the informal, masculine “I” (ore). They often laugh things off, as in the scene when they are lost in the forest, as part of their performance of bravura. Singular first-person pronouns in Japanese serve important discursive functions, according to discourse and cognitive linguistics. In addition to ore, other first-person pronouns include the informal boku, typically used by young men, and the more formal but more feminine watashi, commonly used by women.3 Washizu and Miki eschew formality to build male camaraderie and assert their masculinity. The bravura around the pronoun ore buttresses their denial that they are lost in the woods in the opening scene. Yet even if they are, they remain brothers, lost together in the woods. Washizu attempts to create a similarly intimate bond with his wife Lady Asaji (Lady Macbeth) in private, but she rejects his attempt and maintains verbal and physical distance. It is notable that when Washizu addresses Asaji, he does not use any honorific; he does not address her as tsuma (wife) or okusan (lady of the house). Meanwhile, Asaji uses the most formal, singular first-person pronoun watakushi, rather than the informal, feminine atashi (or atakushi), which would be what a private conversation between a husband and a wife normally entails. Moreover, she addresses Washizu with the general second-person pronoun anata. This word, though often used in television

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commercials to refer to a general audience—that is, in the absence of information about the addressee’s age, gender, or class—is also used by women to address their husbands. Asaji’s combination of the formal watakushi and usually more casual anata—the latter here spoken in a register that conveys condescension and rejects intimacy—creates another layer of the uncanny beyond the atonal music. The use of these pronouns creates tension and conflicts between desired intimacy and rejected informality. Washizu is at a loss about how to respond. In contrast to Anglophone films of Macbeth that tend to build tensions through mise-en-scène, blocking, and lighting, Throne of Blood uses personal pronouns to convey subtle changes in interpersonal dynamics. These layers of linguistically marked transgender meanings in the gendered interpersonal relationships are unfortunately lost in translation. Subtitles are as much filtering devices as they are heuristic tools. Indeed, “transgender and translational narratives flicker around the . . . divisions of language [and] the body . . . in ways that confound orderly linguistic categories.”4 These cases point to “regional production of trans meanings that negotiates between local subjectivities and globalized categories.”5 The next section turns to the question of gender presentation.

A TRANSGENDER OPHELIA Gendered language and uses of pronouns play just as important roles in recent works. One example is the acclaimed South Korean film The King and the Clown (dir. Lee Joon-ik, Eagle Pictures, 2005).6 Based on Kim Tae-woong’s 2000 play, Yi (The Clowns), the tragicomic film chronicles the life of a masculine and a trans-feminine vagabond performers—Jang-saeng and Gong-gil—in the fifteenth-century Joseon Dynasty during the reign of King Yeon-san (1494-1506).7 The traveling actors, always performing on a tight rope, stage multiple plays-within-a-film using the conventions of the historical all-male vagabond theater with masks, or namsadang nori (a UN Intangible Cultural Heritage). The feminine jester Gong-gil’s sexuality is deliberately kept ambiguous throughout the film. When the two “clowns” are recruited as the king’s jesters in court, the narrative evolves to echo several themes and characters of Shakespeare’s plays including the revenge plot in Hamlet, the device of a bawdy play-within-a-play in Taming of the Shrew, and the love triangle (among the king, Gong-gil, and Jang-saeng) in Twelfth Night.8 After the king hires the traveling players to help him appeal to the conscience of corrupt court officials, the film’s version of the “mousetrap” play (the play-within-a-play that Hamlet designs to “catch the conscience of the king” who murders Hamlet’s father) becomes the primary narrative.

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I would like to note my use of pronouns for the key character. I use gender-neutral pronouns to refer to Gong-gil out of respect for who the character is.9 Unlike most transgender films, The King and the Clown takes Gong-gil’s identity at face value without question or scare quotes. Most characters accept the Gong-gil as a feminine person and do not question their gender identity. Only two characters, a eunuch and a consort, attack Gong-gil’s gender expression in scenes in the royal court. Unlike other trans films such as Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night (Renaissance Films, 1996) that probe questions of being and becoming, The King and the Clown does not feature gender transformation scenes or dramatize the pains of transition. The film codes Gong-gil’s relationship with the king as erotic, and shrouds Gong-gil’s relationship with the brother-like fellow jester in ambiguous terms. However, the director and actors repeatedly refer to Gong-gil with masculine pronouns during interviews. Reviews and studies in English and Korean, to the best of my knowledge, also misgender Gong-gil via masculine pronouns. As a catalyst for the twists and turns of the plot, Gong-gil is an Ophelia figure. They are unable to express themselves and lack inner direction, and their path in life is determined by the men around them. The innocence of Gong-gil/Ophelia contrasts with the calculations and intrigues of other characters, such as the consort Nok-su who frames them for the crime of defaming the king and the courtier who conspires to kill Gong-gil during an imperial hunt in the woods. Like Ophelia, Gong-gil is objectified by the male gaze as a love interest. Similar to Ophelia, Gong-gil remains innocent of sexuality and court politics. In one scene Gong-gil wears an opera headdress ornately decorated with flowers, similar to Ophelia’s garland. In another scene, Gonggil is found lying in a pool of their blood after a suicide attempt. Notably the trans protagonist is neither in flamboyant drag nor struggling with gender transition. They present as female throughout the entire film. There is no gender crossing to speak of. They are not moving between different identities. They appear to simply live in their social role without questions. The King and the Clown enables its central trans-feminine character to simply exist as themselves without being compelled to justify their existence. The film opens with Jang-saeng and Gong-gil performing lewd banters on a tightrope. Alluding to The Taming of the Shrew, Gong-gil plays a rude coquette while Jang-saeng’s character attempts to tame her. Walking on a tight rope to the drumbeats of the musicians, the shrewish character taunts her would-be lover with lewd and provocative postures and language. The transgression of ideal femininity onstage gives way to Gong-gil’s feminine identity as a restorative force off stage. There is a stark contrast between Gong-gil’s on-stage persona and off-stage personality. On stage, Gonggil’s character lifts her skirt, opens her legs, and speaks of checking out the

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manhood of Jang-saeng for size. Offstage, Gong-gil is reserved, traditionally feminine, and exploited sexually. Gong-gil’s trans femininity is expressed in the context of the culture of flower boys. The term flower boy, or kkonminam, refers to an effeminate singer or actor whose gender is fluidly androgynous. Above all else, the subculture highlights the youthful beauty of these singers. The factor of age is part of the positive stereotypes that connect youthfulness to femininity. In contemporary Japanese and South Korean subcultures of flower boys, heterosexual female fans live vicariously through beautiful, often androgynous characters without fear of being stigmatized as being promiscuous.10 The figure of the flower boy fulfills female fans’ fantasies about idealized male partners. The desire and sexuality of the female fans are complex. The fans may have lesbian tendencies, or they may desire ideal heterosexual men who only exist in flower boy narratives. Jeeyoung Shin has identified these subcultures as “an alternative to the patriarchal mainstream culture,” where homosexuality remains controversial and where female sexuality is confined to “the biological function of reproduction within marriage.”11 Two weeks before the film’s release, a promotional interview with Lee Joon-gi highlighted his feminine beauty and androgyny, which Jeeyoung Shin sees as a “conscious effort to attract female audiences . . . who would willingly consume a . . . film with a stunning kkonminam character.”12 The King and the Clown emerged from such subcultures and used its connection with kkonminam to market itself to young female audiences. Over time, King Yeon-san, a composite of Hamlet and Claudius, becomes fond of Gong-gil. The king is clearly drawn to Gong-gil’s appearance as an exotic object, while Gong-gil seems to have sympathy for the unhappy king. King Yeon-san frequently asks Gong-gil to put on private finger-puppet shows in his chamber. As the king goes back and forth between Gong-gil and his consort Nok-su, his emotional needs are unclear. In one scene, Nok-su storms in on the king and Gong-gil in an intimate scene and taunts Gong-gil about their “real” gender. She tries to undress Gong-gil in front of the king, creating a great deal of tension. Presumably, Nok-su’s dramatic act of “gender reveal” is to expose Gong-gil as an abject subject with alleged physical deficiencies and thereby dissuade the king from bestowing further favors on Gong-gil. Gong-gil does not say a word and seems rather docile in this moment when they are expected to respond to Jang Nok-su’s pent-up anger. The king freezes in shock. Jang Nok-su is as frustrated by Gong-gil’s version of femininity as she is jealous of the newcomer who is replacing her as the king’s favorite subject. The act of peeling the dress off Gong-gil is symbolic of her desire to authenticate embodied identities, as if to up the ante in the competition. It also reveals Jang Nok-su’s anxiety about the king’s sexuality.

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The king eventually uses brute force to throw her out of the room in order to protect Gong-gil. Such revelation scenes are a familiar trope in transgender narratives. The scene peels back the clean sutures of cinema—however briefly—to reveal what Timothy Murray calls “cinematic dirt,” grainy details that are best left to audiences’ imaginations.13 These scenes are part of what is known as the reveal in trans cinema, a device of exposure and a “cinematic shock device [about a] bodily truth.”14 Such scenes subject trans characters to “the pressures of a pervasive gender/sex system that seeks to make public the ‘truth’ of the trans person’s gendered and sexed body.”15 Such revelation scenes reenact struggles over the body’s meanings. Gendered pronouns emerge as the focal point in another scene. In Nok-su’s chamber, a eunuch tells her that the king “is with her, my lady,” alluding to sex as a perennial subtext in court politics. The consort is surprised by the use of feminine pronoun to describe Gong-gil. She asks “Her?” When forced to clarify, the eunuch slips into biological essentialism: “That clown . . . ah . . . she’s a man, pardon me.” Nok-su angrily presses: “What is the king doing with that girly man [sic]?” It would seem Nok-su already knows the answer but wants to hear the eunuch say it. The eunuch resorts to euphemism for the king’s intimate affairs as he looks down and says: “That . . . you know, ahem.” In an aside, the eunuch muses: “Man? . . . look at what he’s wearing. Man, woman, it’s so damn confusing.” The royal court’s assumption that Gong-gil may not be cis-gendered would come from troupe members’ uses of pronouns and the court’s knowledge of the conventional setup of all-male vagabond troupes. The eunuch and the consort put Gong-gil in a double bind as an “illusory” figure.16 If Gong-gil is visibly trans, they are a pretender. If they “pass” as female, they risk forced disclosure. The aforementioned undressing scene and this scene of confusion over personal pronouns reveal that trans bodies on screen—in comparison to cis and normative bodies— bear the additional stress of authentication processes based on assumed indexicality of anatomical features. In untangling the love triangle in its denouement, the film does not privilege, as Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, Universal Pictures, 1998) does, heterosexual norms in romantic love as reparative of queer desires. Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow)—in the guise of the boy actor Thomas Kent—and actor-playwright Will (Joseph Fiennes)—who cross-dresses as de Lesseps’ female cousin in one scene—fall in love with each other when both present as male, and they are cast in cross-gender roles during rehearsals of Romeo and Juliet. They eventually stop cross-dressing and are “straightened up” onstage and off.17 In contrast, The King and the Clown suggests no corrective is needed for trans bodies. Gong-gil—despite their position as the king’s new favorite subject—abandons the king in the chamber to join Jang-saeng on the tight

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rope in the final scene. Their final performance morphs into mutual confessions in which they renew their commitment to each other. As the king’s army approaches the inner court to kill the traitors, Jang-saeng and Gong-gil—standing at opposite ends of the tight rope—prepare to die by asking each other what they would like to be in their next life. Gong-gil vows to be reborn in exactly the same body. The film concludes with a freeze frame of the two jesters jumping up simultaneously on the tight rope, a trope known as the Bolivian army ending which suggests but does not show the characters’ ultimate doom. As such, The King and the Clown does not fall into the trap of what Sara Ahmed has called “a queer politics of unhappiness,” a tendency among queer films to fetishize or aestheticize the suffering of sexual minorities who are forced to “live with the consequences of being an unhappiness-cause for others.”18 Ahmed has theorized that the de rigueur unhappy endings of queer narratives—a result of social imposition and self-censorship—are tolerated by queer communities for the sake of increased visibility, because “more important was the fact there was a new book about us.”19 In this light, the tragicomic King and the Clown succeeds as an atypical trans narrative by sustaining the queer space. The trans practice of Gong-gil has been overlooked by scholarship and deliberately repressed by Korean audiences who more readily accept heterosexuality—even if practiced between a cis and a trans character—than homosexuality. The strongest evidence of Gong-gil’s trans identity comes from rehearsal notes. Lee Joon-gi, who played Gong-gil, identifies as a cis man, but has conceived his character as a trans woman. He recounted going with the film’s director to “special bars” to “study the attitude of trans people.” Lee remained in his role during recess since he adopted Method acting—an immersive, emotion-oriented technique derived from Konstantin Stanislavski in which an actor identifies fully with their character. This approach to “authentic” representation does not completely resolve the lack of trans self-representation. Lee is an able-bodied, cis actor. To prevent Lee from being separated from the role of Gong-gil, the film’s director forbade him from interacting with other actors when not on the set. Lee went so far as to “shut himself in a ladies’ room . . . to immerse himself in his role as Gong-gil” at the studio.20 Lee’s idea of transgender identity as “a man in women’s space” is problematic, because transgender practices are not superficial, adoptable behaviors in a trans bar. However, The King and the Clown makes a contribution to world cinema by registering multiple ways in which “gender” is practiced. A GENEALOGY OF TRANSGENDER THEORY The works analyzed here reveal that transgender communities past and present have included a wide range of identities, many of which may be

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inconvenient truth not only for conservatives but also, as the case may be, for activists who may selectively focus on identities that more directly support their causes. At least a century of development was behind the concept we now regard as common sense, namely that gender is a social script on a continuum. In the twentieth century, transgender theory evolved historically from a binary toward a continuum model. In German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s 1910 book, Transvestites, gender nonconformity was seen as an independent phenomenon from same-sex desires. He coined the word “transvestite” by combining the Latin words for crossing and clothing: trans and vestis. He observed individuals who experienced a “feeling of peace, security and exaltation, happiness and well-being . . . when in the clothing of the other sex.”21 He found that “transvestites” could be asexual, bisexual, or have any given sexual orientation. Hirschfeld’s conception of the transvestite overlaps with what we may call crossdressers today. Homosexual individuals were thought to be gender inverted, but Hirschfeld distinguished transvestism from what was then known as homosexuality. With the endocrinological discovery of the universal presence of male and female sex hormones in humans in the 1930s, psychoanalysts and biochemists began developing a theory where humans have inherent features of both sexes. Following the discovery, Lewis Terman and Catherin Cox Miles proposed a seven-part scalar instrument for diagnosing sex psychology, and anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead laid the groundwork for relative gender norms. In 1953, Alfred Kinsey popularized his homosexualheterosexual scale that was built on a continuum model. The distinction of gender and sex was a major milestone in the 1950s. Based on his research of the condition of intersex, New Zealand-American sexologist John Money used gender to refer to a person’s “outlook, demeanor, and orientation” in 1955. He further defined a gender role as “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman.” Despite his contributions to the notion of gender as distinct from sex and to the increased acceptance of transgender individuals and gender affirmation surgery, Money’s involvement in the involuntary surgery of David Reimer at eighteen months old has been controversial. Transsexualism was officially diagnosed in 1966 and treatment protocols were established by clinical endocrinologist Harry Benjamin. Mapping gender nonconformity across history, Benjamin distinguishes transsexualism which he sees as a medical condition, from transvestitism, a term coined by Magnus Hirschfeld to describe sartorial preferences. Benjamin writes with graphic specificity: “true transsexuals feel that they belong to the other sex, they want to be and function as members of the opposite sex, not only to appear as such. For them, their sex organs . . . are disgusting deformities

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that must be changed by the surgeon’s knife.”22 Following the publication of Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon, the Johns Hopkins University opened the first gender identity clinic in the United States in 1966. Its hospital in Baltimore carried out the first gender affirmation surgery in the United States, and the first transsexual support group, Conversion Our Goal, emerged in San Francisco the following year. In the 1990s, the critical consensus shifted away from a focus on anatomy to social articulations of gender practices. New theories began seeing transsexualism as a link to queer identities and spaces, such as Kate Bornstein’s 1994 book, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, which reveals unspoken assumptions behind earlier critiques of trans femininity as an “attack” on womanhood. The fusion of queer and trans theories was followed by calls to de-pathologize gender dysphoria in the twenty-first century. “Trans” has evolved recently into a capacious umbrella term covering a wide range of practices. There are three approaches to understand the trans experience: open-ended, destination-driven, and the framework of a continuum. Jack Halberstam uses trans* to describe categories around “but not confined to” gender variance. In this particular usage, transition is not defined by a destination, “a final form,” or “an established configuration of desire and identity.” The asterisk opens up the possibilities of transitivity.23 In contrast, transgender identities can also be mapped on a more linear journey from a gender someone was assigned at birth against their self-recognition to a gender that they embody. The journey would cross over boundaries between binary gender roles. Offering a third approach, Howard Chiang proposes to examine not the who but the what in transgender. Inspired by Adrienne Rich’s concept of a lesbian continuum, Chiang develops a structuralist model of continuum that questions even internal coherence of “transgenderism.” Instead of focusing on who counts as transgender, his approach is concerned with how different factors relate to one another through the category of transgender.24 Today, transgender theory analyzes the positionality of gender, principally by recognizing that gender practices have relational meanings that are contingent upon other vectors. Transgender theory examines the future and nature of gender in the lived experiences of transgender, intersex, and transsexual individuals with an eye towards the future. As Alexis Lothian surmises, “how could attempts to envisage possibilities outside [normative] structures not involve a certain futurity?”25 The keyword of transgender theory is intersectional embodiment. Similar to the emergence of one feminist strand out of the women’s suffrage movements, transgender theory is rooted in activism and social advocacy.26 Specifically, building on the feminist movement in the 1960s–1970s, feminist literary criticism emerged alongside new historicism and cultural materialism in the 1980s and replaced New Criticism,

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Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, and Poststructuralism as a new critical paradigm. Judith Butler writes, in a hopeful tone, that “if identities were no longer fixed,” a new political future “would surely emerge from the ruins of the old.”27 While trans serves as an umbrella term, not all trans practices are nonbinary, fluid, or queer, and some arcs of transition are more visible than others.28

CONCLUSION At this junction, let us return to the questions raised at the beginning of this chapter: Why is Violas as Cesario often performed as a courageous and empowering act, but Falstaff as the Witch of Brainford a farcical interlude? What does the “anatomy verification” scene in The King and the Clown tell us about perceptions of trans feminine characters? Why is Asaji in Throne of the Blood (and Lady Macbeth in many films) often regarded as a masculinist character? Is trans masculine cross-dressing necessarily liberating? Do all-female productions of Shakespeare always emancipate characters and actors from prescriptive gender roles? While it is important to recognize that all-female productions offer more equal opportunities to women who are traditionally underrepresented in classical theater, the practice may not always succeed in deconstructing gender roles. For example, Elizabeth Klett regards all-female productions as “less challenging to normative gender ideology than selectively cross-cast productions” where “the presence of male bodies on stage” highlights the “gap between actress and character.” As a result, productions such as Deborah Warner’s National Theatre Richard II (1995) “made it harder for spectators to fix a stable gender identity on the actress’s anomalous embodiment of a male.”29 Modern audiences tend to regard trans masculine performance as empowering, but trans feminine acts as comedy material. Examples of drag as a mockery of femininity and therefore as clownish jokes include White Chicks (dir. Keenen Ivory Wayans, Revolution Studios, 2004) and Some Like It Hot (dir. Billy Wilder, Ashton Productions, 1959). As Sawyer Kemp observes, in some cases, “male-to-female cross-casting” is used to “downplay sexist violence” or behaviors in all-male or all-female performances (e.g., all-male productions), while in other cases it leads to intended or unintended “comedic effect.”30 In contrast, a cis actress’s cross-dressing is sometimes seen by second-wave feminism as liberatory and empowering. Scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s tends to interpret trans masculinity as emancipating because the act enables the female character to access male-exclusive social spaces. The act is seen to reveal gender roles as socially constructed.31 There is a gap between social perceptions of gender

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crossing in drama and of gender transition in real life. A trans person’s crossing—particularly that of trans women—is often taken by popular culture as farce, deceit, or worse, as an illegitimate act. In their widely circulated early 1990s studies, psychologists Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough still conflated sexuality with gender expression. The Bulloughs argued that trans men are motivated by gaining independence and freedom, while trans women wish to access women-only spaces for sexual titillation or “indulge” in homosexual encounters.32 In contemporary performance, “female-to-male drag” is usually considered radical or “reclamatory” of misogyny in the classics.33 Transgender theory enables us to reclaim gender-variant performances and expand our collective archive of global Shakespeare. Multiple gendered crossings in Throne of Blood and The King and the Clown, among other works, disrupt cisgender presentation on stage and on screen. By reading narratives of flower boy actors as trans feminine and Viola/Cesario as nonbinary, we build a more capacious theoretical model to elucidate not only performance histories of sexual transformation, such as Montaigne’s story of Marie Germain34 or Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe,35 but also less explicit representations of trans practices such as double crossdressing. We could deploy transgender theories to examine other cases as well, such as the practice of cross-gender casting (Julie Taymor’s 2010 film The Tempest), gender-bending performances (contemporary productions of Jacob Gordin’s 1898 play The Jewish Queen Lear), and postgender adaptations, in which gender is not treated as a meaningful denominator of characterization (Michelle Terry’s 2018 Globe productions). Performance theories inflected by transgender studies destabilize the line between normalcy and the deviant in and beyond scripted performance.

NOTES 1. Christy Desmet, Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 84–85. 2. William Shakespeare, Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Second Edition, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 3. Tsuyoshi Ono and Sandra A. Thompson, “Japanese (w)atashi/ore/boku ‘I’: They’re Not Just Pronouns.” Cognitive Linguistics 14, no. 4 (2003): 321–47. 4. David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta, “Introduction. Special issue on Translating Transgender.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3.3–4 (November 2016): 333–356; 334.

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5. Helen Hok-Sze Leung, “Always in Translation: Trans Cinema across Languages,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3.3–4 (November 2016): 433– 447; 433. 6. Having grossed $85 million USD, The King and the Clown was a box-office hit. Its record rivals that of the Titanic in South Korea. It was seen by more than 12 million people—a quarter of Korean population. 7. Kim Tae-woong, The Clowns, trans. Will Kern (Carlsbad, CA: Hollym, 2013). 8. Adele Lee, Nafees Ahmed, and Antara Basu, among others, have identified key Shakespearean references in the film. Adele Lee, “The Player King and Kingly Players: Inverting Hamlet in Lee Joon-ik’s King and the Clown (2005),” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 12.1 (Fall 2018), http:// www​.borrowers​.uga​.edu​/784121​/show, accessed January 10, 2020. Nafees Ahmed, “The King and the Clown (2005) Review: A Shakespearean Tragedy.” High on Films, June 23, 2019, https://www​.highonfilms​.com​/the​-king​-and​-the​-clown​-2005​-review/, accessed April 14, 2020. Antara Basu, “Film Review: The King and the Clown.” The Medium, May 21, 2017, https://medium​.com/​@antarabasu​/film​-review​-the​-king​-and​ -the​-clown​-2005​-c76bc6816bf1, accessed April 30, 2020. 9. While now widely accepted and used, singular gender-neutral pronouns were initially seen by some as controversial. A vocal minority was University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson who cited freedom of speech to oppose Canadian human rights legislation that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity or expression in 2016. Kelefa Sanneh, “Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity,” The New Yorker, March 5, 2018. https://www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2018​/03​/05​/ jordan​-petersons​-gospel​-of​-masculinity 10. Mark McLelland, “The Love between ‘Beautiful Boys’ in Japanese Women’s Comics,” Journal of Gender Studies 9.1 (2000): 13–25. 11. Jeeyoung Shin, “Male Homosexuality in The King and the Clown: Hybrid Construction and Contested Meanings,” Journal of Korean Studies 18.1 (Spring 2013): 89–114; 100. 12. Ch’oe Kyõnghúi. “Chorong tanghal surok sesang ún chúlgõwõjinda” [The more ridiculed, the merrier the world becomes], www​ .movist​ .com, December 29, 2005, http://www​.movist​.com​/article​/read​.asp7type​=32​&id​=11293; quoted in English in Shin, “Male Homosexuality in The King and the Clown,” 101. 13. Timothy J. Murray, Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera and Canvas (New York: Routledge, 1993), 104; 106–107. 14. Eliza Steinbock, Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019) 4. 15. Danielle M. Seid, “Reveal,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.1–2 (2014): 176. 16. Talia Mae Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion,” Hypatia 22.3 (2007): 50, 59. 17. David Alderson, “Acting Straight: Reality TV, Gender Self-consciousness and Forms of Capital.” New Formations 83 (2014): 7–24; John M. Clum, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

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18. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 89 and 109. 19. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, vii. 20. Interview of Lee Joon-gi, MBC Goldfish Talk Show, April 29, 2009, script published on a fandom website About My Jun, http://aboutmyjun​.blogspot​.com​/2009​ /05​/20090429​-lee​-jun​-ki​-mbc​-goldfish​_22​.html​?m​=1, accessed May 1, 2020. 21. Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross Dress, trans. M.A. Lombardi-Nash (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1991), 125. 22. Harry Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon (New York: Julian Press, 1966), 13–14. 23. Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 4. 24. Howard Chiang, Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming), chapter 1. Manuscript. Cited with author’s permission. 25. Alexis Lothian, Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility (New York: NYU Press, 2018), 5. 26. In contrast, scholars historicize several black feminist movements as emerging from transnational anti-lynching campaigns. 27. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 1999), 189–190. 28. Lynne Bradley, Adapting King Lear for the Stage (New York: Routledge, 2010), 187–188. 29. Elizabeth Klett, quoted in James C. Bulman, Introduction, Shakespeare Re-dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 18. 30. Sawyer K. Kemp, “Transgender Shakespeare Performance: A Holistic Dramaturgy,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 11.2 (forthcoming, 2020): 12. 31. Jean E. Howard, “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39.4 (1988): 418–440. 32. Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 305–308. 33. Sawyer K. Kemp, “Transgender Shakespeare Performance: A Holistic Dramaturgy,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 11.2 (forthcoming, 2020): 12 34. In a travel journal entry dated 1580, Michel de Montaigne records the transformation of Marie Germain from a village girl into a young male weaver. The Complete works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1948), 869–870. 35. Book Nine of Ovid’s Metamorphoses depicts the Greek mythological story of Iphis. Born female but raised as a boy, Iphis—whose gender identity remains concealed—falls in love with a woman named Ianthe but is unable to marry her. Eventually Isis transforms Iphis into a man who then marries Ianthe.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Alderson, David. “Acting Straight: Reality TV, Gender Self-consciousness and Forms of Capital.” New Formations 83 (2014): 7–24. Bettcher, Talia Mae. “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion,” Hypatia 22.3 (2007): 43–65. Desmet, Christy. Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Gramling, David Gramling Aniruddha Dutta, Introduction. Special issue on Translating Transgender. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3.3–4 (November 2016): 333–356; 334. Kim, Tae-woong. The Clowns, trans. Will Kern (Carlsbad, CA: Hollym, 2013). Lee, Adele. “The Player King and Kingly Players: Inverting Hamlet in Lee Joon-ik’s King and the Clown (2005)”, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 12.1 (Fall 2018), http://www​.borrowers​.uga​.edu​/784121​/show. Leung, Helen Hok-Sze. “Always in Translation: Trans Cinema across Languages,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3.3–4 (November 2016): 433–447; 433. McLelland, Mark. “The Love between ‘Beautiful Boys’ in Japanese Women’s Comics,” Journal of Gender Studies 9.1 (2000): 13–25. Murray, Timothy J. Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera and Canvas (New York: Routledge, 1993). Ono, Tsuyoshi and Sandra A. Thompson. “Japanese (w)atashi/ore/boku I: They’re Not Just Pronouns,” Cognitive Linguistics 14, no. 4 (2003): 321–47. Seid, Danielle M. “Reveal,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.1–2 (2014): 176–177. Shakespeare, William. Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Second Edition, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Shin, Jeeyoung. “Male Homosexuality in The King and the Clown: Hybrid Construction and Contested Meanings,” Journal of Korean Studies 18.1 (Spring 2013): 89–114; 96. Steinbock, Eliza. Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Chapter 10

Quoting Machines Shakespearean Things in and Beyond HBO’s Westworld Stephen O’Neill

“Bring yourself back online” and “These violent delights have violent ends” are among the memorable phrases embedded into the diegesis of Westworld Season 1 and that are echoed in Season 2.1 Welcome to Westworld, HBO’s hit show about an American West-themed visitor experience where the robot hosts not only provide a pleasure garden for the human guests through the park’s series of algorithmically controlled narrative loops but occasionally quote Shakespeare too. As fans of the show and of Shakespeare will recognize, the second phrase quotes Romeo and Juliet, in particular Friar Laurence’s cautionary note to Romeo to moderate his love.2 The phrase “goes viral,” as Katarzyna Burzynska puts it, and its repetition within the narrative suggests not so much the familiar phenomenon of quoted Shakespeare as a figure for the pathos of the human condition but a posthuman Shakespeare, a catalyst for robot sentience that develops throughout Season 1.3 The phrase further suggests a series of Shakespeare intertexts that underpin the diegesis of Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s show, itself an adaptation of Michael Crichton’s 1973 film, and that are amplified through Anthony Hopkins’ extra-diegetic star turn as park creator Dr. Ford, his presence and RP accent inviting associations with his Shakespearean performances. Westworld is clearly doing something with Shakespeare beyond casual or accidental quotation of the ubiquitous author. The show’s use of Shakespeare is consistent with its status as quality or complex TV, synonymous with earlier HBO shows such as The Wire, and in particular that form’s range of literary and cultural references that variously reveal, extend, and exacerbate the show’s “puzzle plot.”4 With a rich referential palette that, in addition to Shakespeare, includes Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (which features 179

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prominently in the title sequence imagery), Gertrude Stein, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, viewers of Westworld can play a game of recognition and identification that becomes entangled with their aesthetic experience and enjoyment of the show. This spectrum of viewer engagement is indicative of complex TV, which as Jason Mittell explains “is suffused with and constituted by an intertextual web that pushes textual boundaries outward, blurring the experiential borders between watching a program and engaging with its paratexts.”5 Through these elements, all part of what Mittell calls complex TV’s “poetics of storytelling,” a show like Westworld “works on numerous levels, providing both surface pleasures and deeper resonances for different groups of viewers” who feel that they do—or do not—speak the show’s language.6 Shakespeare is part of the show’s language and, along with other cultural references, brings an “attendant pleasure of intellectual expenditure” as it “requests its spectators to possess certain cultural capital” and “rewards those dedicated viewers who have paid sufficient attention.”7 For critics and fans alike, the show’s intermedial connections to Shakespearean elements might provide a key to its mysteries.8 Its inclusion of Shakespeare further rewards those viewers historically aware of how common performances of the plays were in the American West, a detail reflected in Western films such as John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), where Hamlet makes a cameo.9 Some viewers may enjoy the show’s hyperreal Western theme park as a homage to the Western film, or even to a specifically American Shakespeare. Perhaps more interesting still, however, and contrary to the suggestion that the show employs Shakespeare as “a fading classic, a representative of the old world,” or reflects Shakespeare’s attrition as “the common cultural code of humanity,” Westworld intuits Shakespeare’s contemporary iterations as digital, algorithmic, and interoperable as part of its broader investment in exploring and theorizing our posthuman moment.10 These Shakespeares are, as Christy Desmet recognized, often unseen things, yet the invisibility of their operations does not mean they are any less significant or any less constitutive of Shakespeare than human readers, actors, or users of the texts. In fact, these non- or post-human functions might be agential, as captured in Desmet’s enticing question, “What is it like to be a Shakespearean thing?”11 This question comes at the end of Desmet’s article, “Alien Shakespeares 2.0,” where she outlines a theory of posthuman agency that prompts us as Shakespeare scholars to consider how the digital age has transformed our object of study. Desmet challenges seemingly stable relations of human / non-human, sentience / machine in ways that resonate with Katherine Hayles’ work on technogenesis (the claim that humans are defined by their co-evolution with various tools and technologies).12 Desmet further prompts a deeper consideration of the processes in play when cultural productions like Westworld make the very familiar move of quoting Shakespeare. The

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field of international Shakespeare studies has witnessed the introduction of new paradigms and terms from other fields—the rhizome, the network, the assemblage, the user—that simultaneously express, theorize, and shape digital Shakespeares. But we need to be more conceptually expansive, as Desmet recognized in her essay. The rhizome, for all its emphasis on a diffuse Shakespeare, “is still an organic model rooted in the familiar world of human beings.”13 The network similarly entails a consideration of objects as agents but only insofar as they remain significant to people. Desmet instead moves us toward an understanding of Shakespeare as the consequence of often hidden computational operations by using Ian Bogost’s idea of tiny, unseen units that exist for themselves but also relate to each other, often in disorderly ways, of things that we don’t see, yet that possess their own agency. As Desmet summarizes, Bogost wants to see all kinds of “units,” from people to pixels, xylophones to XML markup, as they exist for themselves and as they relate to one another and to do so without either resorting to anthropomorphism or dematerializing altogether the object within its networks.14

Her focus on the intersection of Shakespeare and digital technologies is the “beginning of a conversation” for our field.15 In what follows, I want to pursue this conversation, with due recognition of the fact that Desmet’s work has already given us a critical vocabulary and toolkit to do so; in this sense, even though she is no longer with us, the work of Christy Desmet continues to shape Shakespeare’s hermeneutics. Tracking Westworld’s Shakespearean intertexts, I argue that the show reflects, simulates, and shapes contemporary understandings and constructions of Shakespeare and, in turn, that it illuminates King Lear in particular. Before turning to Westworld in more detail, it’s worth teasing out the implications of that question, “What is it like to be a Shakespearean thing?”, for it points in several directions. First, it invites us to consider what that Shakespearean thing might be—certainly, the tiny, computational units as mentioned by Bogost, but perhaps other objects too: a text, a screen, a tweet, perhaps even a quotation or a character? These latter, more human-seeming things become post-human when we begin to read them in light of objects. Second, the question invites consideration of objects as possessing a form of ontology, especially those non-human things such as algorithms and computational operation—that is, possessing what Desmet labels, through the work of Bogost, “alien phenomenology.” This in turn prompts us to step outside our anthropocentric gaze and to imagine other things or objects on the horizon. These unseen objects or external phenomena enable and shape human perception and human subjectivity in ways that imbue them with an agency—they too are actors in the production of meanings. For Shakespeare

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studies, there are several illustrative examples ranging from YouTube’s algorithm that orders and aggregates videos on the platform’s page to the XML code that works behind online, open-access interfaces such as Open Source Shakespeare, which provides fully searchable text, or the Folger Shakespeare. These applications, while distinctive, each instance the various ways that all Shakespeares are now digital. As W. B. Worthen has highlighted, “not only is our access to Shakespearean drama mediated by digital technology . . . , but our imagination of Shakespearean drama is shaped by the forms and moods of digital culture.”16 From the texts we access, to the articles we write, from the quotes we tweet to the theater productions that incorporate motion-capture technology, bringing a liveness to The Tempest’s already non-human—or post-human—Ariel, Shakespearean things are a function of a human-technological dynamic.17 These non-human users or things may be placed on a par with human users because they do not merely transmit Shakespeare but transfigure it, shaping where and how readers, viewers, or users encounter and interact with the texts. We come to accept them— although some Shakespeare scholars remain less convinced than others—as Shakespearean; they become part of the conceptual furniture. Desmet’s question is, then, not exclusively one of identity regarding what are we dealing with or experiencing, but of affinity too, as it invites us to recognize how Shakespeare is constituted through digital as well as human actors. Third, it is a question that gets us to the heart of contemporary Shakespeares, which are always already media Shakespeares, and which entail the co-presence of human and post-human, or human beings and agential digital things, a reality that unsettles claims both for a transcendent Shakespeare and for the sovereign liberal humanist subject with which “it”—or he—has traditionally been associated. As Desmet outlines, Alien phenomenology continues the theoretical effort to debunk the sovereignty of this liberal humanist subject, not only by placing people on the same ontological level with other objects, but also by discovering in “things” many of the qualities previously seen as the sole property of people.18

She notes how for Bogost, “the posthuman is still too human,” and so part of her essay’s purpose concerns decentring the human in the encounter with Shakespearean texts and their afterlives.19 As well as at the level of argument, Desmet conveys this visually in her essay, showing the reader two images, the first, the online Folger Shakespeare Othello, an accessible interface and reader-friendly Shakespearean text; and the second, the code, or what the interface conceals, which entails “a whole host of units/objects/agents necessary to convey Iago’s scripted words” that “are indeed alien to anyone familiar with Othello as an acted, screened, or printed text. ‘Iago’ and his

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speech acts are merely two units in a complex configuration of agents.”20 We are no longer dealing with the human author or human authored texts but an entity, or an assemblage, that is in fact now characterized by its non-human “thingness.” Some of these terms that one might turn to in order to describe Shakespeare’s contemporary constitutions recall those employed in theorizations of quoted Shakespeare in pre-digital culture as a series of repetitions that almost seem mechanical such is their frequency. Marjorie Garber’s work is a highlight here, especially her account of the uncanny property of the quotation as “the return of the expressed,” a temporally strange thing that carries a past, intervenes in or ghosts the present and that will, in the future, come back to haunt again, as well as her broader categorization of Shakespeare as “simulacrum, a replicant, a montage, a bricolage,” or “a collection of found objects, repurposed as art.”21 Writing before the explosion of digital platforms, Garber’s terms themselves take on the prescient quality of the quotation to provide a vocabulary for the kind of Shakespeare Westworld produces: at once modern and postmodern, a self-generating assemblage, a machine that can bring itself back online. Some of these terms could, in turn, be applied to Westworld itself as a show that draws on the American Western and on sci-fi to produce a hybrid cultural form that is postmodern in its bricolage of these discrete genres, as well as in its interrogation of history through old and futuristic narratives simultaneously.22 What is it like to be a Shakespearean thing? Watch the opening episode of Westworld where one of the park’s earliest robots, Peter Abernathy, played by Louis Herthum, quotes Shakespeare, his expressions an amalgamation of Shakespearean fragments, a bricolage—to echo Garber—that signal a form of machine writing. The first set of Shakespeare references come in an exchange between Dolores and her father Abernathy in a scenario that has played out again and again as part of their programmed narrative iterations or loops. Westworld, as a TV show, simulates machine writing in its depiction of the hosts and in particular the centrality of Dolores, played by Rachel Evan Wood, to the overall plot. In this iteration, Abernathy has found a photo of a woman standing in a modern urban surrounding, a very different world to his Wild West setting. He says “Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” quoting The Tempest to warn Dolores about the nature of her world. He then whispers into her ear, “These violent delights have violent ends” from Romeo and Juliet. This isn’t any form of words; they are Shakespearean and emblematic of the selective essentialization of the plays and their author into found and recyclable fragments. Yet within the show’s diegesis, they are a command phrase to Dolores that will trigger her own emerging consciousness, as well as a desire among the other hosts for vengeance against their human creators that develops across Season 1. In

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episode 2, for example, Dolores will repeat the same line in a seemingly chance encounter with the show’s other major character Maeve, played by Thandie Newton, causing this host to also have flashbacks of prior storylines and past traumas that propel her toward the possibility of her freedom. The phrase reappears in Season 2, occurring, for example, in episode 3, when a host Ganju is heard to mumble it before firing at his human guests. The second set of Shakespeare quotes occur in the workshop of the Westworld complex, as Dr. Ford, the park’s master creator, and his assistant Bernard run diagnostic tests on Abernathy. He is experiencing a series of glitches as a consequence of the software updates Ford has introduced, the so-called reveries that allow aspects of the hosts’ prior narratives or stories to remain or survive, a form of memory designed to make the robots more lifelike but that also imbue them with agency and a desire for vengeance. In Abernathy’s case, these reveries mean that his function in a former story as a teacher of Shakespeare begins to return: FORD: Tell me, what happened to your program? ABERNATHY: Shivering. When we are born, we cry we are come to this great stage of f-f-fools. FORD: That is enough. Tell me, do you have access to your previous configuration? ABERNATHY: Yes. FORD: Access that, please. What is your name? ABERNATHY: Mr. Peter Abernathy. FORD: Mr. Abernathy, what are your drives? ABERNATHY: Tend to my herd. Look after my wife. FORD: Your final drive? ABERNATHY: Well, my daughter Dolores, of course. I must protect Dolores. I am who I am because of her, and, well, I . . . I wouldn’t have it . . . I . . . I . . . I wouldn’t have it any other way . . . I . . . I . . . I have to warn her. FORD: Warn who? ABERNATHY: DOLORES! The things you do to her . . . the things you do to her. I have to protect her . . . I have to help her . . . I . . . I . . . She’s got to get help. FORD: Very good Mr. Abernathy. That’s enough. BERNARD: This . . . behaviour . . . we’re miles beyond a glitch here. FORD: Access your current build . . . please. What is your name? ABERNATHY: Rose . . . is a rose is a rose. FORD: What is your itinerary? ABERNATHY: To meet my maker. FORD: Aha . . . well, you’re in luck. And what do you want to say to your maker?

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ABERNATHY: By most mechanical and dirty hand. I shall have such revenges on you . . . both. The things I will do, what they are, yet I know not. But they will be the terrors of the Earth. Peter Abernathy abruptly gets off the chair and grabs Dr. Robert Ford by the shoulders with both arms and stares intensely into his eyes. ABERNATHY: You don’t know where you are, do you? You are in a prison of your own sins. CULLEN: Turn it off.23

The scene places Westworld’s viewer in a rich citational field. The inferential walk, in Umberto Eco’s classic description of how a reader is taken “outside the text” in order to make meaning of its world within, takes the viewer from Hopkins to Shakespeare, and beyond.24 Hopkin’s presence in the scene, and the extra-diegetic journey it invites the audience to take, invokes associations with the actor’s Shakespearean roles on stage and screen as well as his iconic performance as Hannibal Lecter. However, in the robot’s citing of King Lear, and with it the tragic pathos Shakespeare gives the title character through the theatrum mundi trope, and then Henry IV, Part 2, we move into a different space: less a coherent set of quotations, this is glitch Shakespeare, a set of fragments or bits of code that exemplify how Westworld itself simulates Shakespeare’s contemporary digital or computational thingness. Ford’s reveries “transfor[m] the hosts from one-dimensional into multilayered beings,” making Abernathy seem more human and more complex too, a fully post-human thing that we see in operation.25 This is Shakespeare as code, and code that does not fully work, yet appears to have its own “tiny ontology”—to return to Desmet’s phrasing—and that exists independent of the larger text and its own frame of reference. That includes Erasmus, who Shakespeare seems to have had in mind when writing Lear given the play’s deeply proverbial language. As Craig Dionne has suggested, the characters speak as if “haunted by the citational quality of expression,” the idiomatic nature of their language translating them into “automata of written predispositions.”26 Westworld’s Shakespeare-quoting robot might remind us, then, of Shakespearean characters as themselves curiously or uncannily human/ humanoid given their capacity to come back, to speak again. Like their Shakespearean precursors, Westworld’s robots do not yet seem fully aware that they are speaking idiomatically or quoting Shakespeare but nonetheless they “need the words of a wise poet to tell them the bitter truth about their condition, and it is Shakespeare’s verse that serves as an unveiling.”27 Unlike Caliban, the hosts have not explicitly identified their master’s curse. The strangeness of the effect is the viewer’s as they hear in Abernathy’s utterances something recognizably Shakespearean, with the Lear lines implying those traditional associations with the human condition,

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and also something uncanny, as the robot combines and converges different parts in a way similar to a writer’s use of bricolage to form new meanings. Abernathy goes from Lear’s “When we are born . . .” (4.5.181–82) to Gertrude Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose” to Henry IV Part 2 and Pistol’s allegation that with “mechanical and dirty hand” (5.5.29), Hal has had improper relations with Doll. Pistol’s suggestion that Doll is socially akin to the “rude mechanicals” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is transformed into an allusion to Abernathy’s creators, who use 3D printers to make the hosts, as well as his own non-human, robotic makeup. Abernathy then reverts to Lear again, except that Lear’s misogynistic tirade against his daughters is here directed at Abernathy’s makers, Ford and Bernard. Shakespeare is used to augment the dramatic dilemma and the viewer is invited to interpret the Shakespearean quotes as bread crumbs to deeper meanings in the diegesis. At the same time, Shakespeare functions lyrically, providing an affect or mood that, amplified by Ramin Djawadi’s moving score, less soundtrack than a character in its own right, will develop over the course of Westworld as the “voice of the budding android rebellion.”28 In the show, each individual Shakespeare quotation both gives weight to and is in turn weighted by what surrounds it. Westworld’s Shakespeare scene becomes a showcase of how to see or disclose the workings of a machine or, more precisely, an algorithm. It allows the viewer to imagine the operations of such a thing in ways that reverberate with Annie Dorsen’s play, A Piece of Work.29 Dorsen developed a computer code to produce the corpus of Hamlet as told by machines, thus actualizing Hamlet’s desire in Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine to become non-human and in turn realizing a new art form, “algorithmic theatre,” a performance that may not require human actors to be a performance.30 As Dorsen puts it, “Algorithms are in a way rewriting the world. They’re written by humans, but they’re in the wild.”31 But algorithms have also gone mainstream: as Tarleton Gillespie explains, the word has “achieved some purchase in broader public discourse about information technologies” and is now “coming to serve as the name for a particular kind of sociotechnical ensemble, one of a family of systems for knowledge production or decision making: in this one, people, representations, and information are rendered as data, are put into systematic/ mathematical relationships with each other, and then are assigned value based on calculated assessments about them.”32 Gillespie’s inclusion of people in his definition suggests how human-designed technologies come to shape human lives and interactions in ways that, as Desmet argues too, we cannot fully see or apprehend. This is the stuff that Westworld is made on. Through its focus on the hosts, the show forges a sense of what it might be like to be other than human—to be an algorithm, or an object. In this way, Alex Goody argues, “Westworld shows us our intersection with machines, foregrounding the assemblages of human and technology that characterize

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the twenty-first-century world wherein we experience our agential selves distributed across the analogue and digital networks of our exteriorities.”33 As such, Abernathy is not simply a Shakespeare quoting machine or a figure for the works as culturally embedded but signifies our relation to them: we too are Abernathy, returning to the Shakespearean code, and meaning by—or through—Shakespeare in digital contexts. Like Dorsen’s algorithmic Hamletmachine, Abernathy’s Shakespearean predispositions might signal a slip into the “uncanny valley,” the term Masahiro Mori coined to express the almost but not quite resemblance of robots to humans.34 In both instances, Shakespeare operates as a synecdoche for the human as well as a computational, interoperable thing that can be generated each time and replicated. As Siobhan Lyons notes, Westworld takes advantage of the undecidability of the encounter between human and non-human to draw the viewer into a relation of empathy with the latter. For Lyons, the show articulates a redefinition of humanity through the hosts, who must “struggle to attain consciousness” and who “earn their humanity in ways that an ordinary human takes for granted”; human excellence comes to mean a “way of behaving or acting, rather than as a way of being.”35 So, although Abernathy’s vengeance can be immobilised—he is shut down and removed from the park’s storylines—the Shakespearean code has been embedded within the other robots. Ultimately, it will be Abernathy’s daughter, Dolores, who secures the viewer’s empathy and that gets to pursue Lear-like ontological questions, to ask who or what she is. Thus, beneath Westworld’s range of Shakespeare quotations are deeper adaptational processes that entail the revision of Shakespeare plots and the redistribution of agency from those who have traditionally held it, such as Lear, to those who have not. So far I have been suggesting that the Shakespeare scene highlights the central dynamic of Westworld, the interrelation between humans and uncannily sentient androids. But Shakespeare also contributes to the show’s arc and its coaxing of the viewer from an androcentric order into a posthuman experience. Abernathy’s Shakespeare exemplifies the show’s distinctive architecture and affect, as it variously immerses, alienates, and challenges the viewer. Over ten episodes of Season 1, the androids emerge as artful expressions of the posthuman and critiques of the hubris, primitive accumulation and sexual deviance that characterizes humans. There are exceptions to the show’s characterization of humankind, not least in its web of cultural references that suggest human accomplishments, among them the articulation of complex emotions and an evolving history that has brought man to the point of technological sophistication that the Westworld park and its corporate owner Delos imaginatively instances. As Burzynska argues, the show reaches back to earlier points of human achievement such as the Italian Renaissance, with Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man prominent in the visual aesthetic,

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along with Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.36 The centrality of Vitruvian imagery in the title credits and in the mise-en-scène invites viewers to interpret the park’s original creator Dr. Ford as a Da Vinci like master creator, whose accomplishments seem unbounded. The viewer may pursue the “inferential walk” from Vitruvian Man to Ford, played by Hopkins as star and also Shakespearean actor, to the Shakespearean quotations from The Tempest and Lear to those plays’ central patriarchs, to find metonymic connections in the combined expressions of Renaissance humanism that are gendered male or, as posthuman theorist Rosa Braidotti puts it, that reiterate the “humanistic arrogance of continuing to place Man at the centre of world history.”37 As if taking its cue from Braidotti, Westworld decentres and debunks human exceptionalism to imagine new ways of conceptualizing subjectivity in a digital age. As Burzynska argues, the show uses its humanist palette to sketch a new form of humanity based on “the value of empathy” in and for a posthuman world.38 The relation of humanism to posthumanism is staged and negotiated through the show’s imagery, cultural references and overall aesthetic, in particular the manner in which it converges and blends different intertexts. For example, the title sequence for Season 1 alludes to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and also, I would argue, Victor Habbick’s Robot in the Style of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, to remind us that man is now “cybernetic.”39 Similarly, in its handling of Shakespearean quotations, the show remediates Renaissance literary culture as memory fragments uttered by humanoids in high-tech scenarios on screen. Both Leonardo and Shakespeare (re)appear in this show not so much as master world builders in their own right but as revenants of an earlier technological, cultural, and political epoch that contribute to and licence Ford’s own world making in the form of the visitor park, “Westworld” and, as we discover in Season 2, the other worlds available to guests. For Season 2, the title credits feature a robot mother and baby, symbolizing Maeve’s search for her daughter, but also hinting at the host’s capacity to self-generate by their own mechanical hand, if you will, a gesture that draws the viewer into a posthuman world. As the show foregrounds such host stories as Dolores’ and Maeve’s and allows the viewer to imagine or experience host time, it becomes evident that we are being invited to potentially leave behind these remnants of human culture and the dualisms they have traditionally implied in favor of a new, posthuman phenomenology. In this way, Westworld reads as a visualization of cyborg imagery as theorized in Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” where she argues that in a high tech context the “maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves,” including self/other, mind/body, male/female, maker/made, God/man, start to collapse.40 As Haraway elaborates, “There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical

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and organic.”41 Westworld capitalizes on Haraway’s description of machine agency—they are, she writes, “disturbingly lively”—as well as machine ubiquity and invisibility—“they are everywhere and they are invisible”—in its presentation of robots and the simulation of their consciousness.42 That Westworld intuits a post-human experience, enabling its viewers to imagine what it is to be like a post-human thing is, I would argue, among its major enticements. This can be potentially alienating and confusing for the viewer as the show plays with nonlinear plots and multiple timelines, as well as flashbacks and flashforwards. As any viewer of Westworld knows, the show is interpretatively demanding. By playing with temporality and in fact making that creative play the experience of the show as much as the content, viewers find themselves realizing that what they understood as happening in real time was in fact the androids’ own diagnostic playback of their narrative. These aspects alone do not, however, make the show especially innovative but rather itself a repetition of countless prior iterations of humanmachine encounters in film and TV. As Florent Favard argues, Westworld is written in the knowledge that TV and film have already explored artificial consciousness as well as the associations of posthuman discourse with paranoia about technological advances. What does make Westworld highly original is the way that it, to quote Favard, “embed[s] that discourse in a highly reflexive plot,” so much so that Westworld “appears to be aware it is a series.”43 As Favard explains, for the hosts, “memory usually comes with accumulated pain,” as if these “episodic characters stuck in repetitive loops were suddenly struck by long-term serialised storytelling.”44 In other words, the robots have found in long-form TV the ideal medium for their life story. Abernathy’s Shakespearean recollection instances this self-awareness, or the play with self as well as medium knowledge. Just as the show teases us with the degrees of consciousness the hosts possess, so too it teases its audience with its own status as yet another postmodern sci-fi show. This is evident in the way Westworld quotes texts, but also its “Easter eggs,” such as the “blink and you’ll miss it” visual of the original “Man in Black,” Yul Brynner’s character in Crichton’s 1973 film. Westworld reminds its audience that the show is itself a consequence of a dense adaptational process, a fact that, as Reto Winckler notes, links it to Shakespeare’s own creative transformations of texts.45 The show’s presentation of the host’s narrative loops can be read metafictionally, as well as allegorically, intimating the spectator’s own relation to big tech, surveillance capitalism and the commodification of personal data. If the show forges in the viewer a learned empathy with the hosts in a way that is posthuman, with their difference celebrated, it secures that empathy through an uncomfortable recognition of similarity because, like the hosts, we too become habituated to technological devices and are coaxed—or perhaps

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even programmed—by a corporate-technological environment into behaving as prosumers and users. In this way too, we might be like the hosts in (re) turning to the poetic reassurance embedded within a Shakespearean quotation even as we experience it as itself a post-human thing, a command phrase no longer simply or fully our own. What is it like to be a Shakespearean thing? Watch Westworld. But we can also find multiple examples of the alien, digital, and post-human Shakespeare that Desmet’s essay theorizes when we turn to vernacular uses of digital technologies and to the practices enabled by such participatory platforms as YouTube. Here too we can find Shakespeare quoting machines, as in the animated video “All the World’s a Stage,” where an image of Shakespeare moves to the sound of Sir John Gielgud’s 1932 recording of the speech.46 The video is one in a series called poetry reincarnations that avail of the computer software available open access online or as an app that can be downloaded to a phone. A link to the original recording allows us to listen to Gielgud’s voice without the uncanny visual of an animatronic Shakespeare, reminding us of Barbara Hodgdon’s reflection on such Shakespearean sounds as tied to bodies and to past performances even when they are ventriloquized through a technological proxy.47 For Shakespeare studies, YouTube has become something of an archive of diverse Shakespearean things, of actors, both professional and vernacular, of human and otherwise. The platform itself is structured on hidden, unseen algorithmic operations that shape what we, as users, see on the watch page of the interface. But with the As You Like It video, in its intermediality, its combination of what we see (a humanoid Shakespeare) and what we hear (the voice recording of a renowned Shakespeare actor), we also apprehend the video’s and its human creator’s reliance on computational things. These too are constituent elements of this YouTube Shakespeare production. What is it like to be a Shakespearean thing? Search online. Digital Shakespeare things are everywhere, should we choose to pursue them, which in part explains why Westworld’s Shakespeare takes the form it does: the show reflects back, compresses, and reimagines modern cultural practices around how Shakespeare is used and understood. GIFs, short for Graphics Interchange Format, are illustrative of the tiny, unseen agential things that make up our contemporary Shakespeares. A quick search on a site such as GIPHY, a platform that archives GIFs and also enables users to generate their own, reveals a diversity of options for the human user to select and adapt to their chosen context: a row of Droeshout Shakespeare from the First Folio sticking out their tongues—“Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?” (1.1.35) we might reply; a languishing Olivier as Hamlet; a Chandos Shakespeare winking at us; a cartoon Shakespeare holding a skull.48 They are, to borrow Desmet’s words, “posthuman actors on a vast cyber-stage coming together

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in varying configurations through chance encounters,” the consequence of hidden algorithmic operations triggered by our search on the GIPHY site.49 These small digital objects, looping visuals with no sound, are themselves not simply micro-archives of past, present, and future Shakespeares but also archives of already, or ready to be, shared emotions as mediated through digital Shakespeares. And yet, as meaningful as they may be to their human users, who variously create, like, and share them in chance encounters, GIFs are also Shakespeare in code. In moving from Westworld’s Shakespeare to these select examples from digital culture, the point is not to collapse their medium specificity or indeed the distinctive viewer/user engagement that is generated or afforded by a medium. Rather, it is to highlight how these productions, in aggregate, exemplify Shakespeare’s digital iterations. As a TV show, Westworld itself reflects this back to its viewing audience and, as I suggested at the outset, intuits a very posthuman Shakespeare. These different texts might each and collectively answer Desmet’s question, helping us to apprehend what it might be like to be a Shakespearean thing, a category that now must include the spectral traces of Shakespeare himself, the “thing itself” as it were. The author comes back through the work, the thing itself leaves a trace, memories resurface, as Westworld’s hosts discover. The early moderns already had a technology for bringing things back—theater itself and “playwrights often articulated the spectatorial energy between audience and performance as one that contained something ineffable and incredibly potent.”50 Among these is Thomas Nashe’s account in his social satire Piers Penniless (1592) as to the affective intensity of seeing history on stage: How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding?51

Nashe reminds us how proverbial the sense of theater as ghostly was in Shakespeare’s culture. The text’s preoccupation with the reanimation of a distinctly English history, imagining as it does the vainglorious Talbot threading the wooden O—as if seen again, all living, bleeding English masculine matter—is largely about staking a claim for an emerging theater as the place of national moral instruction rather than the staged temptations of Puritan nightmares. Westworld actually invokes this older technology of re-animation in Season 1, episode 3 “The Stray,” when Dr. Ford is assessing Teddy, one of the androids who gets killed repeatedly by park guests. “Cowards die many time before their deaths. The valiant taste of death but

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once,” Ford says, “Of course Shakespeare never met a man quite like you Teddy. You’ve died at least a thousand times, and yet it doesn’t dull your courage.”52 Here quoting Julius Caesar to capture the host’s tragically repetitive loop, the show more generally allegorizes its own survival—it too will go on, to be played again long after its initial broadcast or in fan curated sites as well as in its repetition of earlier cultural productions and their use of Shakespeare, since the particular quote also appears in the Western, Frontier Marshal (1939). In the language of Westworld, Teddy has “brought himself back online” to play his role in a preassigned narrative loop over and over again. In the language of a GIF, the staged Talbot constitutes “unique spatio-temporal visual patterns that make it appear to loop forever.”53 The actor playing Talbot might be said to have brought something into life, that is to have become human in the sense that the character seems a sentient, embodied thing. Nashe’s conscious theatricalization of history is contingent, as is Westworld’s virtual, algorithmic theme park, on the participation of audience—Talbot’s reanimation only means—in the sense of having the affective range Nashe imagines here—if there’s biosemiotic motor, the audience, present to make him present too. Play, players, and audience are all interlinked, agential actors in the production of Shakespearean things that range from Nashe’s Talbot to Westworld’s Shakespeare quote-machine, Abernathy. These characters can be read as cyborgs, in Haraway’s definition of that term, because “they are about consciousness—or its simulation.”54 We become through them and, by implication, we too become cyborgs or “fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.”55 We know characters are semantic constructions, but they nonetheless take on a series of reality effects. King Lear, as noted above, produces this effect through proverbs and idiom: the characters speak as “automata of written predispositions,” as if they are back again.56 This could also describe the hosts in Westworld, who are programmed by Dr. Ford’s master narrative that they are always striving to break out off. But Westworld arguably pursues the feminism of the Cyborg Manifesto in its foregrounding of two host storylines, those of Dolores and of Maeve, that see them exorcise the ghost of the park’s patriarch. As it potentially debunks such literary forefathers, and as it plays with them through their uncanny returns in post-human scenarios, Westworld illuminates something in Lear, allowing us to get inside the play’s characters—to contemplate their ethereal thingness. “Men must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is all” (5.2.10–11), Edgar reminds his suicidal father. Here, and in its final lines about the “weight of this sad time” (5.3.344), the play reveals survival instincts; it is a lesson in how to go on.57 Westworld discloses the play’s own machine-like generation of proverbs. Like the hosts, the play’s characters somehow go on. Lear, that is, never really dies but rather brings “itself” back online and, like

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the hosts in Westworld, inhabits and plays out a narrative over and over again, doing harm to others but also learning to be a better version of humanity. Perhaps these sentiments in Lear explain why it is this Shakespeare play more than any other that emerges as Westworld’s most prominent Shakespearean intertext: in Season 2, episode 3, Abernathy once again echoes Lear—“I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead”—he says, a robot that feels what it is like to be at the mercy of human hands. “Is man no more that this?” asks Lear in what is arguably the play’s most humanist, Anthropocentric moment and also its undoing, as the character comes to identify troubling proximities between the human and other life forms. Both texts become mutually illuminating. It might just as easily be a question Westworld’s cyborgs ask of their human counterparts as they identify and suffer the cruelty of their human guests. Shakespeare and especially Lear might seem a curious place to unpack humanism, yet the play proves responsive to such manoeuvres. It simultaneously instances that maze of explanatory, discursive dualisms applied to bodies and technologies and, via Westworld and cyborgian imagery, starts to read like a catalogue of their calamitous effects, or “How not to be Man.”58 It is in this way that we can begin to appreciate how Westworld not merely quotes Shakespeare but contributes to Shakespearean hermeneutics, prompting us to wonder “what is it like to be a Shakespearean thing” and to continue the conversation that Christy Desmet inaugurated.

NOTES 1. Westworld, Season 1, episode 1, “The Original,” directed by Jonathan Nolan, written by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, aired October 2016, on Sky Atlantic. 2. Romeo and Juliet, 2.6.9. All quotations are from the RSC Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (London: Macmillan, 2007) and are given in the text. 3. Katarzyna Burzyńska, “‘A new god will walk’: Shakespeare, the Renaissance, and the birth of the Posthuman in Westworld,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 100, no. 1 (2019): 9. 4. Kim Wilkins, “These Violent Delights: Navigating Westworld as ‘Quality’ Television.” Reading Westworld, ed. Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan / Springer 2019), 31. 5. Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 7. 6. Mittell, Complex TV, 209. 7. Wilkins, “These Violent Delights,” 39; 31. 8. See Burzyńska, “‘A new god will walk’,” 6–23. Fan sites have curated the show’s Shakespearean references and pondered their significance. See David Rodemerk,

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“Here Are All The Shakespeare Quotes Found in Westworld,” Fansided, accessed February 19, 2020, https://winteriscoming​.net​/2018​/01​/14​/shakespeare​-quotes/ 9. Scott Simmon, “Concerning the weary legs of Wyatt Earp: The classic Western according to Shakespeare,” Literature/Film Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1996): 114–127. 10. Földváry, Kinga. “Fragmented Shakespeare in Science Fiction: The Case of Westworld,” Foundation 48, no. 134 (2019), 8; 17. 11. Christy Desmet, “Alien Shakespeares 2.0.” Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 35 (2017), 1–20, doi: 10.4000/shakespeare.3877 12. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (University of Chicago Press, 2012). 13. Desmet, “Alien Shakespeares 2.0,” 3. 14. Desmet, “Alien Shakespeares 2.0,” 3. 15. Desmet, “Alien Shakespeares 2.0,” 6. 16. W.B. Worthen, “Performing Shakespeare in Digital Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 228. 17. On the CGI Ariel that featured in the RSC’s 2016 production of The Tempest, see Pascale Aebischer’s Shakespeare, Spectatorship and The Technologies of Performance (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020). 18. Desmet, “Alien Shakespeares 2.0,” 2. 19. Desmet, “Alien Shakespeares 2.0,” 3. 20. Desmet, “Alien Shakespeares 2.0,” 7 21. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (New York: Anchor, 2008), xvii. 22. See Sherryl Vint, “Long Live the New Flesh: Race and the Posthuman in Westworld” in Reading Westworld, ed. Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan / Springer 2019), 141–160. 23. Westworld, Season 1, episode 1, “The Original,” directed by Jonathan Nolan, written by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, aired October 2016, on Sky Atlantic. Script available at https://www​.scripts​.com​/script​/westworld​_749 24. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 32. 25. Florent Favard, “‘The maze wasn’t made for you’: Artificial Consciousness and Reflexive Narration in Westworld (HBO, 2016–).” TV/Series 14 (2018): 5, doi: 10.4000/tvseries.3040 26. Craig Dionne, Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene (Punctum books, 2016), 77; 78. 27. Burzyńska, “‘A new god will walk’,” 9. 28. Burzyńska, “‘A new god will walk’,” 8. 29. Annie Dorsen, A Piece of Work (New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2017). 30. See Thomas Cartelli, Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 260–261. 31. Annie Dorsen, quoted in Claudia La Rocco, “To Thine Own Algorithm Be True.” New York Times, December 15, 2013, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2013​/12​/16​/ theater​/annie​-dorsens​-a​-piece​-of​-work​-at​-bam​.html

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32. Tarleton Gillespie, “Algorithm,” in Digital keywords: a vocabulary of information society and culture, ed. Benjamin Peters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 22. 33. Alex Goody, “The Theme of Forking Paths: Text, Intertext and Hypertext in Westworld,” in Reading Westworld, ed. Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan / Springer 2019), 273. 34. Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” Energy 7, no. 4 (1970): 33–35. 35. Siobhan Lyons, “Crossing the Uncanny Valley: What it Means to be Human in Westworld,” in Westworld and Philosophy: If You Go Looking for the Truth, Get the Whole Thing, ed. James B. South and Kimberly Engels (Wiley, 2018), 48; 42. 36. Burzyńska, “‘A new god will walk’,” 6–23. 37. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (London: Polity, 2013), 23. 38. Burzyńska, “‘A new god will walk’,” 9. 39. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 91. The image of Habbick’s “cybernetic” Vitruvian Man is included in Braidotti’s book. 40. Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” in Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 67. 41. Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” 60. 42. Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” 11–12. 43. Favard, “The maze wasn’t made for you,” 2. 44. Favard, “The maze wasn’t made for you,” 6. 45. Reto Winckler, “This great stage of androids: Westworld, Shakespeare and the World as Stage,” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 10, no. 2 (2017): 169–188. 46. Poetryincarnations, “All the World’s a Stage – William Shakespeare – Poem –Animation,” YouTube, November 4, 2015, https://www​ .youtube​ .com​ /watch​ ?v​ =SdBvB3jxKks​&t​=5s 47. Barbara Hodgdon, “The Shakespearean Phonograph,” Shakespeare Bulletin 35, no. 1 (2017): 1–14. 48. GIPHY, https://giphy​.com​/search​/shakespeare 49. Desmet, “Alien Shakespeares 2.0,” 5. 50. Amy J. Rodgers, A Monster with a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 37. 51. Quoted in Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 114. 52. Westworld, Season 1, episode 3, “The Stray,” directed by Neil Marshall, written by Daniel T. Thomsen and Lisa Joy, aired October 16, 2016, on Sky Atlantic. The line from Julius Caesar is “Cowards die many times before their deaths, | The valiant never taste of death but once” (2.1.33–34). 53. Michael Gygli, Yale Song, and Liangliang Cao, “Video2gif: Automatic generation of animated gifs from video,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2016), 1001. 54. Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” 13. 55. Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” 7. 56. Dionne, Posthuman Lear, 178.

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57. Dionne, Posthuman Lear, 35. 58. Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” 52.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. London: Polity, 2013. Burzyńska, Katarzyna. “‘A new god will walk’: Shakespeare, the Renaissance, and the birth of the Posthuman in Westworld.” Cahiers Élisabéthains 100, no. 1 (2019): 6–23. Cartelli, Thomas. Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Desmet, Christy. “Alien Shakespeares 2.0.” Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 35 (2017): 1–20. doi: 10.4000/shakespeare.3877 Dionne, Craig. Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene. New York: Punctum Books, 2016. Dorsen, Annie. A Piece of Work. New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2017. Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Vol. 318. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Favard, Florent. “‘The maze wasn’t made for you’: Artificial Consciousness and Reflexive Narration in Westworld (HBO, 2016–).” TV/Series 14 (2018): 1–16. doi: 10.4000/tvseries.3040 Földváry, Kinga. “Fragmented Shakespeare in Science Fiction: The Case of Westworld.” Foundation 48, no. 134 (2019): 8–18. Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare and Modern Culture. Anchor, 2008. Gillespie, Tartleton. “Algorithm.” In Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture, edited by Benjamin Peters. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. GIPHY. https://giphy​.com​/search​/shakespeare Goody, Alex. “The Theme of Forking Paths: Text, Intertext and Hypertext in Westworld.” In Reading Westworld, edited by Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay, 255–275. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan / Springer 2019. Gygli, Michael, Yale Song, and Liangliang Cao. “Video2gif: Automatic generation of animated gifs from video.” In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 1001–1009. 2016. Haraway, Donna, “The Cyborg Manifesto.” In Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Hodgdon, Barbara. “The Shakespearean Phonograph.” Shakespeare Bulletin 35, no. 1 (2017): 1–14. Joy, Lisa and Jonathan Nolan, dir. Westworld (2016–). HBO, 2016. La Rocco, Claudia. “To Thine Own Algorithm Be True.” New York Times. Dec. 15, 2013. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2013​/12​/16​/theater​/annie​-dorsens​-a​-piece​-of​ -work​-at​-bam​.html

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Lyons, Siobhan. “Crossing the Uncanny Valley: What it Means to be Human in Westworld.” In Westworld and Philosophy: If You Go Looking for the Truth, Get the Whole Thing, edited by James B. South and Kimberly Engels, 39–49. Wiley, 2018. Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: NYU Press, 2015. Mori, Masahiro. “The Uncanny Valley.” Energy 7, no. 4 (1970): 33–35. Poetryincarnations. “All the World’s a Stage – William Shakespeare – Poem – Animation,” YouTube, November 4, 2015. https://www​ .youtube​ .com​ /watch​ ?v​ =SdBvB3jxKks​&t​=5s Rackin, Phyllis. Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Rodemerk, David. “Here Are All The Shakespeare Quotes Found In Westworld.” Fansided. Accessed February 19, 2020. https://winteriscoming​.net​/2018​/01​/14​/ shakespeare​-quotes/ Rodgers, Amy J. A Monster with a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Simmon, Scott. “Concerning the weary legs of Wyatt Earp: The classic Western according to Shakespeare.” Literature/Film Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1996): 114–127. Wilkins, Kim. “These Violent Delights: Navigating Westworld as ‘Quality’ Television.” In Reading Westworld, edited by Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay, 23–41. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan / Springer 2019. Winckler, Reto. “This great stage of androids: Westworld, Shakespeare and the world as stage.” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 10, no. 2 (2017): 169–188. Worthen, W.B. “Performing Shakespeare in Digital Culture.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, edited by Robert Shaughnessy, 227–247 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Chapter 11

On Character, Character Criticism, and The King is Alive For Christy Desmet Sharon O’Dair

Christy Desmet and I are contemporaries. She was born in late summer 1954 and I in late spring 1955. They say you know you’re getting old when your contemporaries begin to die. Or become very ill. At a clip. Another contemporary, another 1955’er, was diagnosed recently with Parkinson’s, and another, a 1953’er, with prostate cancer. And the women, the women, all born in the 1950s, with breast cancer, some living, some dead. People tend to keep their diseases quiet, for as long as they can, and in a community like ours, one that stretches far and wide, nationally and internationally, news of a colleague’s passing, especially an untimely one like Desmet’s, may come into view shockingly fast. Having just corrected my contribution to what became Desmet’s last coedited volume, having just sent those corrections to her, I heard. Almost immediately, it seemed. She had died, with her boots on. She had to. I learned in the days that followed, having survived cancer twenty years ago, work kept her going. Her dear friend and collaborator, Sujata Iyengar, wrote in memoriam: She often told us that she felt she was “writing for her life”—that her scholarly work had pulled her through two life-shattering bouts with cancer and that as long as she was writing, grading, and editing, she knew she was still alive and could fend off Death once more.1

Work kept her alive. Until it didn’t. This is not a choice I would make. I would stop working. Or slow down, a lot. But when you’re sixty-four, as Desmet nearly was when she died, and as I just am, writing this in 2019, it is less pleasing to think “never send to know for whom the bell tolls . . .” than it 199

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is to ask, thinking longingly about one’s youth, “will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?” And you do what you must. Desmet faced physical death more than once, and years before that, early in her career, she faced professional death, the death of character criticism. As did I. Desmet and I, on the West coast—she at UCLA and I at Berkeley2—produced dissertations that would soon be obsolete, if not dead on arrival. It was in 1994, two years after Desmet published Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity,3 that Jonathan Culler, writing about changes in literary study between 1973 and 1993, questioned whether “character in literature” could be taken for granted anymore.4 Culler, I would say, was being generous. Certainly in Renaissance studies, the 1980s had seen character blasted beyond recognition—linked as it was to liberal humanism’s alleged notion of a unified, essential, and autonomous self—by, among others, Jonathan Dollimore in Radical Tragedy (1984) and Catherine Belsey in The Subject of Tragedy (1985).5 In 1982, a conference was held at Yale University, which resulted in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe.6 This volume included an influential essay by Peter Stallybrass, in which he argues that Othello does not present one Desdemona, a unified character, but two Desdemonas, with different functions: The Desdemona of the first half of the play is an active agent, however much she may be conceived of as the “spiritualization” of Othello’s legitimation. She is accordingly given the freedom we tend to associate generically with the comic heroine . . . It is only when Desdemona becomes the object of surveillance that she is reformed within the problematic of the enclosed body. . . . In other words, the play constructs two different Desdemonas: the first, a woman capable of “downright violence” (1.3.249); the second, “A maiden, never bold.” (1.3.94)7

Here, Stallybrass builds upon Susan Snyder’s also influential argument from ten years earlier, in 1972, that Othello’s “action up until the reunion of Othello and Desdemona in Act II, scene I, is a perfect comic structure in miniature.”8 Snyder’s suggestion is that Shakespeare interrogates his own comic premises about love by incorporating those premises into his tragedy, by giving us, that is, a comedy in the first act. This insight allows Stallybrass to posit “two Desdemonas,” a move Snyder does not make—and I am sure would not have made. Snyder writes of “particular people,” “individual characters,” and “individual essence[s].”9 And the play is not about race, gender, or difference: what Snyder suggests “is that the action of Othello moves us not only as a chain of events involving particular people as initiators and victims, but as an acting out of the tragic implications in any love relationship.”10 A universal, if you will. Shakespeare uses difference, indeed emphasizes difference, between his lovers—skin color, age, experience, sex, religion even,

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making Othello “everything Desdemona is not” and heightening the source story’s depiction of the lovers’ difference.11 But the playwright does this not to indict his society for racism or even to demonstrate that it exists but to address his principal philosophical and artistic interest: the precariousness of human love, its vulnerabilities, especially to contested but powerful understandings of reason and nature. Ten years, 1972 to 1982. In 1984, Desmet filed her dissertation, “Rhetorical selves: Shakespeare’s problem characters and their critics.” Dispiriting it must have been to come up against the exploded self, now labelled a subject, after pushing against liberal humanism from a different angle, an angle less radical, more reasonable, and more accurate than that of the newly ascendent poststructuralists. “Drawing on rhetoric from Aristotle to Kenneth Burke and on role theory,” Desmet argued along with the poststructuralists that “dramatic characters, like people, do not have ‘essential selves’”; but she did not argue that dramatic characters or people do not have selves; instead, she argued that those selves, though not “essential,” were nonetheless real, “evolv[ing[from the roles they play in everyday life.”12 Worse must have been facing the new consensus about character, one that furthered and heightened L. C. Knights’s decades-old critique of character in “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” If Knights conceded that “real people actually exist” and might be represented in, say, the novel, the new consensus insisted (and pardon my quoting at length, but Michael Bristol bristles) that notions of character or unified subjectivity don’t pertain even to actual persons, let alone to their representations in fictional texts. Unified and autonomous subjectivity on this account is an ideologically constructed fiction devised to serve the interests of political and economic elites under capitalism. Any concern therefore with discovering the attitudes or assessing the praiseworthiness of a literary character conceived as a distinct and autonomous individual is not just an egregious ontological blunder but an ideologically motivated and fundamentally pernicious cultural misrepresentation or outright falsehood. For Knights the discussion of a character’s life experience in a Shakespeare play was intellectually naive. For many poststructuralists, on the other hand, such discussions are thoroughly disingenuous.13

Thoroughly disingenuous! Imagine having finished one’s dissertation only to feel the weight of that judgment bearing down on one: years of labor, disingenuous. Egregiously wrong. “[N]o people in Shakespeare, just words,” wrote Edward Pechter in 2014, summing up decades of anxiety among academic Shakespeareans about the problem of character and of our identifications with characters. But it is an anxiety that took a new form in the 1980s, as the politicization noted above

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(d)evolves into an historicist claim: “no people in Shakespeare, just paper and ink” or, as Bristol put it twenty years earlier in his review of Reading Shakespeare’s Characters, “the term character is forced back from its application to the dignity or moral condition of actual persons to an earlier range of its meanings as a mark, inscription, or sign engraved on a blank surface.”14 What’s especially brutal in this anxiety about character, about our work having anything to do with “the dignity or moral condition of actual persons,” is not just that it expresses the profession’s anxiety about, say, a hegemonic and individualist Western culture but that it expresses the profession’s anxiety about its status as a mode of serious inquiry, compared to say, science. Many have made this point, including me, but may I stay with Pechter? “Popularity is the underlying problem here . . . It is bad to apply the wrong critical standards but worse that the wrong people are applying them,” he writes, and this is the reason character criticism must be controlled or sequestered or better yet, renounced: we, the critics, the PhDs, are special kinds of people—the ones whose training elevates [us] above popular taste and justifies [our] claim to “critical Authority.” As an endorsement of professional values, the continued currency of “How Many Children” makes sense. Bad critical standards can be forgiven, but for deviations from professional norms no statute of limitations applies.

The brutality of this “continued currency,” of our desperate need to be “special,” is its enforcement not of intellectual value but of professional status. Certain questions cannot be asked, and certain avenues of inquiry must be closed in order to protect status. Needless to say, I hope, this sort of policing is at odds with the politicized and supposedly democratizing literary criticism of the 1980s, a criticism that, also supposedly, continues to this day. Pechter tells a story about the policing of professionalism in which “character criticism can stand as a synecdoche for Shakespeare studies and . . . Shakespeare studies can stand as a synecdoche for literary studies in general.”15 This policing is aimed not just at “ordinary people [who] indulg[e] in [character criticism] every time they discuss the plays,” but, as Frank Kermode puts it in his 1993 review, “Hawkesbiz,” even at those who, like Desmet, offer a failed but “serious attempt to give it . . . intellectual respectability.”16 This is effective policing, for a while, but the police play (and have played) a slow game of whack-a-mole, as the recent rise of character criticism attests. Even Reading Shakespeare’s Characters was reclaimed recently as part of that rise, in a footnote, by Yu Jin Ko, who offered that “One could add Christy Desmet’s work from 1992 . . . to the list of ‘new’ character criticism.”17 I wonder if Desmet liked being placed via footnote in a genealogy, a story, of character criticism’s recent rise? I wonder because reviews of

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Reading Shakespeare’s Characters, which I would wager she read, tell a different story. Book Review Index Plus and Book Review Digest Plus reveal the following: a review in Shakespeare Quarterly and in Renaissance Quarterly, a mention in an omnibus review in Shakespeare Survey, and a mention in a review of several books on the Bard, the aforementioned “Hawkesbiz,” written by Frank Kermode and published in the London Review of Books in 1993. The story emerging from the reviews places Reading Shakespeare’s Characters differently. Not as avant-garde character criticism, paving the way for younger scholars or for peers who came to this question later in their careers, like Paul Yachnin. Rather, the young Desmet finds herself between, in the middle, and caught, like one straddling an earthquake fault as it shifts apart, violently. In 1994, David Lindley’s “The Year’s Contributions to Shakespeare Studies” reminds us that attacks on Bradleian notions of character predate current theoretical squabbles, but character-study is still often seen as one of the major symptoms of a regrettable allegiance to “liberal humanism.” It is perhaps a sign that the hegemony of theory is waning that new attempts are being made to find ways of talking about character that do not simply lapse into novelistic, nineteenth-century descriptive modes. Two books this year attempt the task, neither, it must be said, with complete success.18

One of the books is Reading Shakespeare’s Characters, whose argument Lindley judges to be “not yet fully thought through.”19 The reason Reading Shakespeare’s Characters seems “not yet fully thought through” (and why the “hegemony of theory” was not waning) is provided by Michael Bristol in Shakespeare Quarterly and Harry Keyishian in Renaissance Quarterly, both of whom imply that Desmet worked really really hard to try to please the hegemon. Both reviewers approve of what Desmet is trying to do—Bristol calls Reading Shakespeare’s Characters “original and persuasive” and Keyishian thinks important its attempt to build a rhetoric of Shakespearean character, focusing on “the processes and ethical implications of identification.”20 But, like Lindley, both also find the book unsuccessful. Explaining that Desmet “invokes an enormous variety of classical, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary rhetorical theories”—from Plato and Aristotle to Coleridge and Bradley to Booth and Burke to de Man and Derrida—Keyishian thinks this deluge “presents enormous obstacles to the reader trying to follow her argument” and that her “method makes more sense when she focuses on classical, Renaissance, and later authorities.”21 Similarly, Bristol’s deep praise comes with this caveat: Reading Shakespeare’s Characters is both original and persuasive, although Desmet’s conclusions often seem hedged, evasive, or anticlimactic. In my

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opinion this is because Desmet concedes too much to the teachings of deconstruction and other related poststructuralist literary theory. Discretion may well be the better part of valor here, and Desmet is likely to earn a wider readership because of her thoughtful treatment of these ideas.22

Keyishian implies and Bristol hypothesizes that Desmet was aware of theory’s power in the field; Bristol implies and I suggest now that she rewrote her dissertation with that power in mind. Doing so was indeed “the better part of valor”—the book was published in 1992 and Desmet was awarded tenure in 1991, on the strength of the book’s acceptance. What Ko’s genealogy and his footnoted recuperation of Desmet’s work fails to get, what Lindley’s wishful thinking about the hegemony of theory fails to get, and what Pechter’s far more ambitious genealogy fails to get, even with its correct emphasis on professionalization and distancing from “the people” (including even actors), is the effect of these comings and goings in critical fashion on individual professionals, like Desmet.23 What do you do when you’ve spent six, eight, or ten years reading, learning, incorporating, synthesizing, and writing a doomed tome? The one you thought you could perhaps turn into a book, thus securing tenure? I cannot claim to know Desmet’s emotions in the 1984, but I do know I became scared, frightened, a few years later.24 I became angry, and then determined to adapt. You take what was doomed and you build upon it. After publishing Reading Shakespeare’s Characters, Desmet published “Shakespeare’s Rhetoric of Comic Character: Ethos and Epideictic in Cymbeline” in 1994, as part of a collection edited by her colleague Fran Teague. She did not write about character again until 2003; then she wrote about it again in 2006 in the Shakespeare Studies forum, “Is There Character after Theory?,” a clear sign of character criticism’s comeback; and she wrote about character once more in 2012. During that time, from 1994 to 2012, however, Desmet was editor or coeditor of three books, three special issues of journals, three edited anthologies, and she wrote or cowrote thirty-nine articles.25 She was a scholar of rhetoric interested in ethics, and if colleagues told her the analysis of character was not a viable application for her expertise, she applied it differently, including even in the field of composition studies,26 which by the end of that period had largely disappeared from the purview of literary critics, and in venues prestigious and mundane. But most significantly for Shakespeareans, the success of her coedited collections, Shakespeare and Appropriation (1999) and its companion, Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare (2001), led to 2005’s founding, with Sujata Iyengar, of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Desmet applied her expertise by “defin[ing] and legitim[izing] a new field in Shakespeare studies—the study of adaptations, appropriations, offshoots, riffs, remixes, mash-ups, remediations—readers’, writers’, performers’ and

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other creators’ ongoing what you will with Shakespeare’s plays, poems, characters, words, and biography.”27 Ironically, if Pechter is right, the policing of status that motivates the profession’s policing of character criticism resulted in, according to Iyengar, the legitimation of an enormous corpus of statusbusting popular and non-professional instantiations of Shakespeare. This analysis of Desmet’s intellectual and professional life should offer hope and guidance to young scholars and to those who support literary and humanist education. Desmet’s education, her intellectual development at the University of Virginia and at UCLA, allowed her to shift focus successfully when the intellectual landscape changed, posing serious obstacles to publishing or even promoting the work she had done. Many of us in the 1980s navigated similar currents, and our training and seriousness as thinkers served us well as we reinvented ourselves intellectually, finding new outlets for research and publication, even finding new intellectual waves to surf: appropriation and composition in Desmet’s case, and ecocriticism and the politics of literary studies in mine. Others left the academy for careers in writing or law or government, just as many more are doing today, often finding more opportunities and better remuneration than academia affords. You do what you must. In what follows, I offer a different tribute to Desmet, a short ecocritical reading of Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive, an appropriation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, followed by a brief plea for slow scholarship and slow pedagogy, for doing what you must in the Anthropocene. The ecocritical reading of the film is a modestly updated version of what had to be cut from my “‘the great globe itself . . . shall dissolve’: Art after the Apocalypse in Station Eleven,” which appears in Desmet’s final coedited volume, published posthumously.28 This seems fitting to me. This reading’s link to part one of this essay is an analogy: What happens when you are stranded, not in a professional role, but in a desert? Stranded, that is, in a time of post-apocalypse or rather, of a slow social collapse, the likelihood of which seems to be greater and greater as the months and years pass? I have been writing about Shakespeare and matters ecological since 2000, when I published Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars, a book that cemented my swerve from character criticism, my reinvention into the politics of literary study and then into ecocriticism. Thinking green, swerving green, emerged naturally from a chapter in that book titled, “Shakespeare in the Woods: The Class Politics of Cultural Tourism,” a chapter that focused on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s relationship to southern Oregon’s transformation from a place of working-class woodswork to a place of upper-middle-class cultural tourism. Essays on My Own Private Idaho, A Thousand Acres, and Big Business followed, the latter in the first number of Desmet and Iyengar’s new journal,

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Borrowers and Lenders. And in 2008, I published two essays decrying the growth of ecocriticism in our field; one was titled “Slow Shakespeare . . .” And I have subsequently published another twenty essays or so on matters ecocritical, every one of which continues the plea to slow down.29 Yet every year, the subfield grows, the field grows, the Shakespeare Association of America grows, and every year more and more Shakespeareans fly across continents and oceans to talk or read or watch productions of plays. Like most everyone else on the planet, every year more and more Shakespeareans read official reports about the status of the climate and journalistic assessments of those reports, all of which have slowly become more and more insistent that time is running out to prevent a rise in global temperature of 1.5 degrees centigrade. Increasingly scientists worry that a rise of 3 or even 4 degrees centigrade is likely by the end of this century. So insistent are these judgments that, in 2019, children have become faces of climate change activism.30 So insistent are these judgments that, in 2019, scientists and journalists today squabble not over the reality of the threat but whether one should be optimistic or pessimistic about it.31 Optimism or pessimism isn’t really the point, however, other than in a squabble about the effect of either on behavior. Whether one is optimistic or pessimistic about the future, the point is behavior and changing the ways we live. What does this mean in this context for us, as professional scholars of literature? The post-apocalyptic, “what comes after cataclysm,” is, according to Carolyn Jess-Cooke via James Berger, the “study of what disappears and what remains, and of how the remainder has been transformed.”32 A postapocalyptic novel or film is, therefore, fundamentally hopeful. And JessCooke reads Kristian Levring’s film, The King is Alive, an appropriation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, in just this way, with hope: The transition from one state of being is precisely the film’s design; Lear has changed [the stranded tourists], and for the most part the transformation has been a catastrophic yet necessary one. Not closure, but transition and rebirth are denoted at the film’s end. . . . In displacing decay with rebirth, the postapocalyptic plurality of ends and beginnings, then, is surely something to be optimistic about. (167)

Surely? Perhaps. Or perhaps not, as I shall suggest shortly. But what is sure is that Jess-Cooke’s optimism about the post-apocalypse, now thoroughly secularized, fits well with the apocalyptic strain in Shakespeare’s late tragedies and especially in King Lear, where “the promised end” is only an “image of that horror.”33 In his thorough exploration of Lear as an apocalyptic text, Joseph Wittreich observes that “the play contains numerous . . . signatures of Apocalypse”—blaring trumpets, thunder and earthquakes, the wheel of

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fire, the sulphurous pit, and monsters of the deep, among others.34 Wittreich argues that Shakespeare’s understanding of the book of Revelation differs from that of many of his contemporaries: rather than the death of nation and world, “the apocalypse in King Lear is a mind-transforming event that culminates in a king’s redemption.”35 As such, “Shakespeare’s is very much ‘a Revelation’ like St. John’s as it is currently understood,” a revelation that says, “those who survive the crisis are not simply the saved: they are the saviors of history. . . . Now we will see the fulfillment of history in history—the emergence of a new world that is the work of man.”36 To Craig Dionne in his recent Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene, Wittreich’s reading might exemplify the tendency of critics to “wince” or “recoil . . .” at the “stark reality” of King Lear, its “profound skepticism,” and then to find something, anything, to signal “some hope in its silences.”37 After all, what could be more hopeful than the notion that Shakespeare thinks “men like Albany, Kent, and Edgar . . . will piece together the fragmented world”?38 Dionne is correct to say that hope pervades criticism on the play; it pervades criticism of The King is Alive, too. Jess-Cooke is not alone in finding hope at the film’s end nor is she alone in offering a compelling reading of this film. The King is Alive is a “remarkable film,” as Peter Holland rightly observes,39 which tells the story of a group of tourists—British, French, and American—stranded without food or water when their bus runs out of fuel at a ghost town in an African desert. Certified as a Dogme95 film, and made, more or less, according to that movement’s manifesto of filmic restraint, its “vow of chastity,”40 The King is Alive itself was shot, metaphorically, without food or water, and literally in a desert, a once-diamond-rich portion of Namibia. Its minimalism protests “the multinational monolith subsumed under the name “Hollywood,” the production values associated with it, and the self-involved, know-nothing philistinism of Euroamerican bourgeois culture.”41 With different emphases, almost every commentator on the film has noted that The King is Alive protests mainstream and particularly Hollywood filmmaking, but I think Holland is again correct to observe that the film “can also be read against the Shakespearean theatre, a space of authenticity, a memory of a triumphant form of theatre-making with which the techniques of twenty-first century theatre seem in tension and which has come to function for us as a dream and memory.”42 What Holland means, I think, is that twenty-first century theater is as “produced” and as “bourgeois,” perhaps one might say, as spectacularly mediated, as any Hollywood film, and further that, despite its bare stage, Shakespeare’s theater itself was deeply illusionistic and thus a target, along with today’s theater and film, for Dogme95’s filmmaking, its searing quest for authenticity. The only inhabitant of the ghost town is Kanana, an elderly African, who directs one of the stranded party, “the cock-sure, survival-savvy Jack . . .

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across the desert to the nearest village, some days’ walk away.”43 As Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe point out, Kanana (Peter Kubheka) “seldom budges from the shaded and elevated stage-like structure on which he sits for the duration of the film and from which he supplies subtitled commentary on the ‘story’ that is about to unfold before our eyes.” It is a story that has ended already; all of Kanana’s commentary is offered in the past tense.44 For the stranded, there’s nothing to do but wait, pass the time. They collect dew, argue, weep, drink their remaining booze and dance to Hot Chocolate’s “Every 1’s a Winner,” playing on a small boom box. They send smoke signals, hit chip shots from the sand into the sand, and despair. Kanana says, “Out here there is silence. For days they waited for the man who walked into the desert. I don’t think they talked about him. They didn’t understand the desert.” In the film’s next lines, Henry (David Bradley) agrees; they don’t understand the desert. Or themselves: Assholes. Fucking assholes, repairing a roof out here in dead-man’s land. It won’t be long before we’ll be fighting each other over a drop of water, killing for a carrot. Some fantastic striptease act of basic human needs. Is man no more than this? It’s good old Lear again. Perfect.45

In this moment, Henry—an Englishman and perhaps a former director or actor in London now working as a script reader in despised Hollywood—conceives a plan. In the next scene, Henry sits, writing out on the back of a film script as much of Lear as he can remember—”Death, dearth, menaces and maledictions against a king and nobles”—creating roles for his fellows, they who are stranded, no longer on holiday, but waiting. “Just imagine,” he soon tells Catherine (Romane Bohringer), the French intellectual-cum-Cordeliacum-murderous Goneril, “if we put on King Lear out here, in this godforsaken place, with all these lost souls.”46 Catherine is skeptical: But “we’re on holiday, aren’t we?” And Henry answers, “oh, really?”47 As commentators on the film have noted, The King is Alive fractures King Lear, focusing on a mere scene or two and offering characters only awkwardly related to those in Shakespeare’s play. Holland correctly judges that “this both is and is not Lear, the memory both a recall and an impossibility; the play both made memorably present and permanently, appallingly absent.”48 Still, as mentioned above, almost all commentators find hope at the end of the film, in which, sitting around a fire, the stranded spill lines from King Lear, until two “truckloads of sympathetically rendered Africans . . . circle the fire.” Cartelli and Rowe find hope in this, that “the soft expressive eyes of one of the younger men establish compassion as the dominant mood of the rescuers,” but also in the lines from King Lear spoken by the stranded Westerners before the Africans arrive, lines spoken with “dignity,

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seriousness, and self-possession.” These are not “guilty” people, they conclude.49 In marked contrast, and in one of the few readings that edges from hopefulness,50 John Joughin thinks Levring’s characters perform a diminished bit of theater in “a setting which aptly evokes a sense of depletion and exhausted resource,” in which the “power of performance is reduced.” Indeed, Joughin thinks Lear an “exemplary text [for contemporary revisioning] precisely because it continues to remind us of the limits of our attempts to engage in meaningful interpretation.” In teasing out the implications of these limits, Joughin finds value and hope: the play helps us perceive “that modern culture is increasingly found to be lacking in value; and thus, in the same process, Lear’s ‘value’ is somehow simultaneously to survive the experience of outliving its own utility.”51 Joughin is clever, and Lear’s value, as Joughin describes it, the play’s hope, is a clever paradox. It is the kind of hope I can endorse. But in concluding this brief discussion of the film, I want to build upon Joughin’s seemingly throwaway comment that The King is Alive offers “a setting which aptly evokes a sense of depletion and exhausted resource.” For Joughin that resource, depleted and exhausted, is performance and interpretation, or rather our abilities to do either convincingly well in modernity. For me that depleted and exhausted resource is oil, or perhaps more accurately, cheap oil. Oil has a direct causal relationship to the performances and interpretations we do have and we do make, which are, regardless of what Joughin thinks, technically sophisticated and spectacular, whether in The King is Alive, Hollywood movies, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet at the National Theatre in London, or essays published in Shakespeare Quarterly. Though not yet argued in the critical literature on the film, The King is Alive allegorizes the end of oil; do not forget that the story begins when the tour bus runs out of fuel. In their readings, critics have focused on Kolmanskop, the ghost town where Levring shot the film, a ghost town of decidedly German tone built from the fruits of diamond mining in the early twentieth century and abandoned since the middle of that century, a ghost town slowly being retaken by sand, its Germanic buildings half buried. Critics have focused on the mining of diamonds in South West Africa (now Namibia), and more generally on the West’s scramble to colonize Africa; no one I know of has noted the genocide of the Herero and Nama indigenous peoples in South West Africa by the German state in the early part of the twentieth century.52 I want to ask, contra Cartelli and Rowe, what if compassion is not the dominant mood of the rescuers? What if the rescuers aren’t rescuers, or “itinerant African workers,” as Holland thinks,53 but an unfriendly army? A militia? The descendants of the nearly exterminated Herero and Nama, looking for revenge? What if The King is Alive asks us to think not only about the West’s exploitation of Africa’s resources

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but also about possible internecine or indigenous struggle among African peoples over oil reserves?54 Given the cinematography, which is disjointed and frantic, and given the clothing worn by the Africans, some of which is camouflage and most of which is dirty, my questions are not unreasonable. What if the ending promises death for most, and Henry’s “dearth, menaces and maledictions” for those who survive? Holland thinks The King Is Alive is and is not Lear, and mostly is not, but I would suggest that The King Is Alive embraces Shakespeare’s play in one significant way. The King Is Alive is a deserted town in the middle of a desert, bleak and cruel. And despite the grandeur of the court in the first act, Lear is the heath, blasted, alternatively fiery and soaking wet. Each is a world of scarcity and danger, where, as Dionne points out, “one survives by taking shelter from the elements and by hiding from others,” others who may be armed and vicious, out for blood or whatever it is you’ve got that they want.55 Without fuel, without wood, without electricity, without water, without food, without antibiotics: What awaits the survivors in The King is Alive?56 As suggested in multiple scenarios produced today by scientists and journalists, what awaits is a slow deterioration of social life, if not an apocalypse, a life fundamentally different from and poorer and more violent than life today. Earlier, I suggested that optimism or pessimism, hope or despair, isn’t really the point; the point is changing human behavior to slow climate change or to adapt to it, whether that means moving hundreds of millions of people from India to, say, the Arctic; or banning the export of plastic waste from developed to developing countries; or brewing coffee at home; or cooking from scratch, at home; or riding a bicycle from home to work. Controversial, if not heretical,57 professor of Sustainability Leadership, Jem Bendell, posits changes such as these as part of a “deep adaptation agenda” of resilience, relinquishment, and restoration. In addition to relinquishing a life by the sea or the plastic that envelopes contemporary life, Bendell asks us to restore ways of living, ways of organizing societies, that our hydrocarbon-fuelled civilisation eroded . . . [such as] re-wilding landscapes, so they provide more ecological benefits and require less management, changing diets back to match the seasons, rediscovering non-electronically powered forms of play, and increased community-level productivity and support.58

It is here, in thinking about “non-electronically powered forms of play, and increased community-level productivity and support” that Shakespeareans and other professors of literature (and performance and philosophy, the humanities in general) hold a distinct advantage over others in changing our behavior to benefit social life and the planet. We need only a book, after all. It is Shakespeare, after all.

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Recently, I wrote an afterword to a cluster of essays on global ecoperformance of Shakespeare’s plays. I was fortunate to discover thereby the existence of the Willow Globe Theatre, the subject of Evelyn O’Malley’s fascinating essay, “‘To weather a play’: Audiences, Outdoor Shakespeares, and Avant-Garde Nostalgia at The Willow Globe.” The Willow Globe is “a living willow theater modelled on the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe in London. Planted on a working, organic farm in mid-Wales, the theater is powered by solar panels and a wind turbine,”59 and if we are required to relinquish and to restore, then, as I suggested, it is unavoidable that the Willow Globe, not Shakespeare’s Globe, become the standard for eco-performance and indeed, of performance generally. But further, I wrote, if we are required to relinquish and restore, we must challenge “the status quo of personal or professional ambition, of ever-more complicated and technological intellectual and theatrical endeavors, of ever-higher carbon footprints for researchers, critics, and practitioners.”60 What I say now is that we need to follow Christy Desmet; we must learn to adapt. Desmet began her career thinking about character, ethics, and rhetoric. Facing intellectual roadblocks, she reinvented her intellectual self, especially in regard to the ethics and legitimacy of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation. I believe that if she were with us today, facing ecological roadblocks, she would reinvent herself again, perhaps to focus on the ethics of the ways we work, and to legitimize a lighter, more local, less carbon-intensive understanding of what scholarship, pedagogy, and performance mean. You do what you must.

NOTES 1. Sujata Iyengar, “Remembering Christy Desmet,” Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, University of Georgia, https://willson​.uga​.edu​/remembering​ -Desmet​-desmet/, n.d. Accessed May 21, 2019. 2. UCLA and Berkeley are about 400 miles apart. Georgia, where Christy taught, and Alabama, where I taught, are about 300 miles apart. Georgia and Alabama are football rivals, and Christy was a fan of Georgia’s team. I know Georgia’s victory over Alabama in the 2022 National Championship game would have pleased her so much. That game is for you, Christy! 3. Christy Desmet, Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, Identity (Amherst: U. Massachusetts P, 1992). 4. Jonathan Culler, “New Literary History and European Theory,” New Literary History 25, no. 4 (Autumn, 1994): 873. Edward Pechter alludes to this essay in his forthright examination of the long-standing, vexed status of character criticism in our field. See his “Character Criticism, the Cognitive Turn, and the Problem of Shakespeare Studies,” Shakespeare Studies v. 24 (2014): 196–228.

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5. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985). I have argued that these attacks on liberal humanism were classed-based, that most people in the West and in the world did not and do not have access to a unified and autonomous self. See my “On the Value of Being a Cartoon, in Literature and in Life,” which was published in Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, ed. Desmet Desmet and Robert Sawyer (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 81–96. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argues similarly about Cartesian dualism: most intellectuals assume that Descartes destroyed understanding of the “elements of agency and consciousness that humans share with many other beings, and even perhaps the planet itself.” Instead, writes Ghosh, most people never “lost this awareness in the first place.” Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 63–64. 6. The editors note that “although the present collection of essays is by no means a record of the proceedings of the conference ‘Renaissance Woman/Renaissance Man: Studies in the Creation of Culture and Society’, . . . it is true that all of the authors represented in this volume were present at the conference, either as speakers or as members of the audience.” Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, “Acknowledgments,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), ix. 7. Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchial Territories: The Body Enclosed” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 141. 8. Susan Snyder, “Othello and the Conventions of Romantic Comedy” Renaissance Drama, ns, 5 (1972): 128. [123–141] 9. Ibid., 136, 124, 131. 10. Ibid., 136. 11. Snyder writes, In the original novella Giraldi’s Moor is handsome, apparently fairly young, and a long-time Venetian resident. Apart from sex, his only real difference from Desdemona is one of color, and Giraldi does not dwell on it much. But Shakespeare dwells on it a great deal; black-white oppositions continually weave themselves into the verbal fabric of Othello. Indeed, the dark skin of Giraldi’s hero, which the author capitalizes on so little, may have been one of the story’s main attractions for Shakespeare. Certainly he alters other details of the story to reinforce this paradigmatic separation into black and white, to increase Othello’s alienness and widen the gulf between his experience and Desdemona’s. (135–136)

One could, I suppose, retort that Giraldi’s Italy was less racist at the time than Shakespeare’s England, and that Snyder doesn’t address this possibility, which is true, but she is not unaware of the history of racism in Britain or the United States. I

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think her racial politics are clear in this sentence, which follow directly the line that “Othello is everything Desdemona is not”: The image of black man and white girl in conjunction, so repellent to earlier critics that they had to invent a tawny or café-au-lait Moor, is basic to the play’s conception of disjunction in love, giving visual focus to the other oppositions of war and peace, age and youth, man and woman. (136)

12. Christy Desmet, “Rhetorical Selves: Shakespeare’s Problem Characters and their Critics” (PhD Diss, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984), ix. In looking at Desmet’s dissertation, all 489 pages of it, I was shocked to find that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she and I were working in similar directions and reading similar thinkers: Richard Lanham, Kenneth Burke, Elizabeth Burns, and sociologists like Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, and Erving Goffman. I went deeper into this line of work; Christy much deeper into classical and Renaissance rhetoric. 13. Michael D. Bristol, rev. of Christy Desmet, Reading Shakespeare’s Characters, in Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 226–227. 14. Pechter, “Character,” 206, 208; Bristol, “Review,” 227. In Reading Shakespeare’s Characters, Desmet dramatically expands her understanding of character from that of the dissertation, reflecting the changed critical landscape: I use the term “character” specifically in four ways: to refer to written characters or alphabetical letters; to refer to Shakespeare’s dramatic personae; to refer to the ethical identity or ethos of those dramatic persons; and to refer to the Renaissance genre of Character. 7–8

15. Pechter, “Character,” 196. 16. Frank Kermode, “Hawkesbiz,” London Review of Books, 15, 3 (11 February 1993): https://www​.lrb​.co​.uk​/v15​/n03​/frank​-kermode​/hawkesbiz. Accessed May 20, 2019. 17. Yu Jin Ko, “Introduction,” in Shakespeare’s Sense of Character: On the Page and From the Stage, ed. Yu Jin Ko and Michael W. Shurgott (New York: Routledge, 2016), 8. 18. David Lindley, “The Year’s Contributions to Shakespeare Studies,” Shakespeare Survey v. 47 (1994): 225. Perhaps Professor Ko took inspiration from these words of Lindley’s, but I find Lindley’s observation to be a bit muddled: theory is waning but character criticism remains regrettable because it is tied to liberal humanism, but if character criticism might distance itself from nineteenth-century novelistic tendencies, by which I assume he means liberal humanism, it could perhaps be legitimate again. Such logic suggests to me that theory wasn’t waning much at all in 1994. Certainly I did not then judge it to be. 19. Ibid. See also note 11. 20. Bristol, “Review,” 228; Harry Keyishian, “Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity” Renaissance Quarterly. 49.2 (Summer 1996): 430. For a recent reappraisal of the political effect of refusing identification with characters, see Denise Albanese’s “Identification, Alienation, and ‘Hating the Renaissance’,” in Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production

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of Inequity, ed. Sharon O’Dair and Timothy Francisco (New York: Palgrave, 2019), 19–36. Character continues to be rehabilitated, as in Aaron Kunin’s Character as Form (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019) and at the very top of the professional status hierarchy, in Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi’s Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 21. Keyishian, “Reading,” 430. 22. Bristol, “Review,” 228–229. Desmet set herself an enormous task in revising the dissertation, nothing less than an “attempt to generate a rhetoric of Shakespearean character” (3–4) in the face of the postructuralist challenge. Desmet’s engagement with deconstruction can be quantified: in the dissertation, she cites Paul de Man once in a footnote; in the book, she engages him in the text and in footnotes, his name mentioned sixty-one times. Neither J. Hillis Miller nor Jacques Derrida is mentioned or cited in the dissertation; in the book, she engages Hillis Miller ten times and Derrida eight times. A more fruitful way for Desmet to engage the changed critical landscape was via feminist criticism of Shakespeare, which she does in a long chapter new to the book on rhetoric and gender. According to her curriculum vitae, Desmet published three essays before 1992, all having to do with women and rhetoric. Thanks to Sujata Iyengar for providing me with Desmet’s current curriculum vitae. 23. A similar “coming and going” or rather “going and coming” of reputations surrounds E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture, which was strongly rejected in the 1980s, only to be rehabilitated in 2006 and 2015 by Gabriel Egan in books on early modern ecocriticism. See Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2006) and Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). 24. Desmet’s dissertation had the word “selves” in the title; mine had the word “self.” See Sharon O’Dair, “The social self of the hero in Shakespearean tragedy” (PhD Diss, University of California, Berkeley, 1988). With selfhood demonized even more by the late 1980s; how could I please the hegemon requiring a subject, a subject position, a non-self? As it turned out, not well. I did not publish the dissertation as a book. 25. These numbers are by my count. 26. Though this would be fodder for another essay, I wonder if Christy Desmet was the last literary critic to run a composition program. And I wonder what English departments and literary criticism would be like if literary critics had not ceded composition to compositionists. 27. Iyengar, “Remembering.” 28. Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson, The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 2019). Iyengar and Jacobson completed the Handbook’s editorial work after Desmet’s death. 29. See my “Slow Shakespeare; An Eco-Critique of ‘Method’ in Early Modern Ecostudies,” in Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare, ed. Ivo Kamps, Karen Raber, and Thomas Hallock (Palgrave, 2008), 11–30. And my “The State of the Green: A Review Essay on Shakespearean Ecocriticism.” Shakespeare 4.4 (December 2008): 474–492.

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30. Too, in 2019, the notion that serious sacrifice will be necessary, that we will have to dramatically change the ways we live, has moved from academia to the popular press. See, for example, Emily Atkin, “You Will Have to make Sacrifices to Save the Planet,” The New Republic (June 3, 2019): https://newrepublic​.com​/ article​/154036​/will​-make​-sacrifices​-save​-planet. Accessed June 4, 2019 and Samuel Miller McDonald, “The Green New Deal Can’t Be Anything Like the New Deal,” The New Republic (May 31, 2019): https://newrepublic​.com​/article​/153996​/green​ -new​-deal​-cant​-anything​-like​-new​-deal. Accessed June 4, 2019. Atkin is a journalist; McDonald an academic. 31. Note 2019’s contretemps between Jem Bendell and Jeremy Lent over Bendell’s unpublished essay, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” For “Deep Adaptation,” see http://www​.lifeworth​.com​/deepadaptation​ .pdf and https://jembendell​.com​/2018​/07​/26​/the​-study​-on​-collapse​-they​-thought​-you​ -should​-not​-read​-yet/. Accessed May 27, 2019. For Lent’s response and an additional response by Bendell, see https://www​.resilience​.org​/stories​/2019​-04​-15​/our​-actions​ -create​-the​-future​-a​-response​-to​-jem​-bendell/. Accessed May 27, 2019. 32. Carolyn Jess-Cooke, “‘The Promised End of Cinema’: Portraits of Cinematic Apocalypse in 21st Century Shakespearean Cinema,” Literature/Film Quarterly 34.2 (2006): 161, 166. Jess-Cooke draws on James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 7. 33. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Thomson Learning, 1997), 5.3.261–262. 34. Joseph Wittreich, Image of that Horror: History, Prophecy, and Apocalypse in King Lear, (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1984), 95–96. 35. Ibid., 95, 33. 36. Ibid., 129. 37. Craig Dionne, Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene, (Earth, Milky Way: Punctum Books, 2016), 30, 31. 38. Joseph Wittreich, “‘Image of that horror’: the Apocalypse in King Lear,” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance thought and literature: patterns, antecedents and repercussions, ed. C.A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 198. [175–206] 39. Peter Holland, “On the gravy train: Shakespeare, memory and forgetting,” Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, ed. Peter Holland, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 227. [207–234] 40. For an archival overview of the Dogme95 project, including the vow of chastity, see http://www​.dogme95​.dk/. Accessed May 21, 2019. 41. Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, “Surviving Shakespeare: Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1.2 (Fall/Winter 2005): 8–9. [1–29] 42. Holland, “Gravy Train,” 230. 43. Ibid., 227. 44. Cartelli and Rowe, “Surviving Shakespeare,” 6. 45. The King is Alive, dir. Kristian Levring, perf. David Bradley, Bruce Davidson, Janet McTeer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and David Calder. MGM, 2000. DVD. Chapter 4.

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In an unpublished paper, Seth Swanner takes issue with Henry, who, when he speaks these lines is mocking the stranded travelers’ attempts to maintain order—playing golf, fixing roofs, and so on. Swanner argues that these activities—like the play Henry decides to put on—do not make them assholes, but allow them to “secure an ‘I’ in the voiceless, de-voicing dialect of vast, dry Namibia.” He continues: “The carrots, the sand, and the colors of the film represent a chromatic attack on the travelers, who must keep themselves visually and biologically distinct in a visual schema that threatens to dissolve them into gritty yellows and dead ‘as earth’ browns. Closing oneself off from the desert in The King is Alive also means closing oneself off from others, speaking words only for the self to keep the desert out of one’s head. . . . In the end, the diseases and dialects of Namibia place the travelers in destructive intimacy with the Lear playtext and vice versa. The king is alive, sure, but only insofar as he can howl. Even dead wind can howl ‘in the funeral dance,’ in a certain language.” Seth Swanner, “‘The Word in the Desert’: Visual, Textual, and Gastrointestinal Separateness in Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive.” Manuscript courtesy of the author. 46. The King is Alive, dir. Kristian Levring, perf. David Bradley, Bruce Davidson, Janet McTeer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and David Calder. MGM, 2000. DVD. Chapter 5. 47. The King is Alive, dir. Kristian Levring, perf. David Bradley, Bruce Davidson, Janet McTeer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and David Calder. MGM, 2000. DVD. Chapter 4. 48. Holland, “Gravy Train,” 229. 49. Cartelli and Rowe, “Surviving Shakespeare,” 23–24. 50. I would place Swanner’s unpublished essay in this category. 51. John J. Joughin, “Lear’s Afterlife,” in Shakespeare Survey 55, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 74, 72, 72. [67–81] 52. Political theorist John Gray observes, “The near-extermination of the Herero and Nama indigenous people of South West Africa (now Namibia) between 1904 and 1907 was publicly debated in the Reichstag and justified in terms of scientific theories of racial hierarchy. . . . Concentration camps were established where most of the inmates died from disease and overwork. The camps were also sites for medical experiments. . . . [and] Herero women were required to boil the heads and clean the skulls of inmates who had died or been executed so that the remains could be dispatched to German universities to be studied.” John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2018), 88. 53. Holland, “Gravy Train,” 227. 54. Nigeria is Africa’s largest producer. Angola, Namibia’s neighbor to the north, is the continent’s second-largest producer. As of 2019, the oil industry continues to probe the waters off Namibia and the government there, as well as industry in Europe and the United States, is optimistic significant deposits will be found, perhaps surpassing those of Angola. See for example, Eveline de Klerk, “Southern Africa oil discoveries vital for Namibia,” New Era Live (April 25, 2019): https://neweralive​ .na​/posts​/southern​-africa​-oil​-discoveries​-vital​-for​-namibia. Accessed September 25, 2019; Jacinta Windham, “Namibia’s exploration drive goes on despite setbacks,” Petroleum Economist (November 21, 2018): https://www​.petroleum​-economist​.com​ /articles​/politics​-economics​/africa​/2018​/namibias​-exploration​-drive​-goes​-on​-despite​ -setbacks. Accessed September 25, 2019. In February, 2022, “one of the biggest oil

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and gas discoveries on the continent” was announced by Total Energies and Shell, offshore in Namibia. See Nosmot Gbandamosi, “Can Namibia Avoid the Resource Curse?,” Foreign Policy (March 23, 2022): https//foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/23/ namibia-oil-resource curse. Accessed May 14, 2022. 55. Dionne, Posthuman, 132. 56. In his unpublished paper, Swanner argues fascinatingly that the color palette of the film, including the skin tones of the stranded travelers, mimics that of the desert, but that their bronzed skin is not the result only of exposure to the sun. Rather, and speculatively, Swanner thinks their bronze skin results too form ingesting the tinned carrots found on the site: “an accumulation of beta-carotene can eventually cause a condition called carotenoderma, which presents as an orange or yellow hue in the subject’s skin . . . as the characters eat and are burned by the sun, they come to reflect the color palette of the desert. As with Gina’s eventual infection, the biological defenses that keep the desert out there and the subject in here break down—in this case on a chromatic level” (“Word,” 5–6). 57. Bendell is controversial, if not heretical, because he begins not with sustainability but social collapse: “The paper offers a new meta-framing of the implications for research, organisational practice, personal development and public policy, called the Deep Adaptation Agenda. Its key aspects of resilience, relinquishment and restorations are explained. This agenda does not seek to build on existing scholarship on ‘climate adaptation’ as it is premised on the view that social collapse is now inevitable.” Bendell argues that “we need to expand our work on ‘sustainability’ to consider how communities, countries and humanity can adapt to the coming troubles. I have dubbed this the ‘Deep Adaptation Agenda,’ to contrast it with the limited scope of current climate adaptation activities” (“Deep,” 2,7). 58. Ibid., 23. 59. Evelyn O’Malley, “‘To weather a play’: Audiences, Outdoor Shakespeares, and Avant-Garde Nostalgia at The Willow Globe,” Shakespeare Bulletin 36. 3 (2018): 409. [409–427] 60. Sharon O’Dair, “Afterword,” Shakespeare Bulletin 36. 3 (2018): 509. [501–509]

BIBLIOGRAPHY Albanese, Denise. “Identification, Alienation, and ‘Hating the Renaissance’.” In Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity, edited by Sharon O’Dair and Timothy Francisco, 19–36 New York: Palgrave, 2019. Anderson, Amanda, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi. Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Atkin, Emily. “You Will Have to make Sacrifices to Save the Planet.” The New Republic, June 3, 2019. https://newrepublic​.com​/article​/154036​/will​-make​-sacrifices​-save​-planet. Accessed June 4, 2019.

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Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. London: Methuen, 1985. Bendell, Jem. “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” July 27, 2020. http://www​.lifeworth​.com​/deepadaptation​.pdf. Bendell, Jem. “The Study on Collapse They Thought You Should Not Read – Yet.” July 26, 2018. https://jembendell​.com​/2018​/07​/26​/the​-study​-on​-collapse​-they​ -thought​-you​-should​-not​-read​-yet/. Accessed May 27, 2019. Berger, James. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Bristol, Michael D. rev. of Christy Desmet, Reading Shakespeare’s Characters. Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 225–231. Cartelli, Thomas, and Katherine Rowe. “Surviving Shakespeare: Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1.2 (Fall/Winter 2005): https://borrowers-ojs-azsu.tdl.org/ borrowers/article/view/82/162. Accessed May 14, 2022. Culler, Jonathan. “New Literary History and European Theory.” New Literary History 25.4 (Autumn, 1994): 869–879. de Klerk, Eveline. “Southern Africa oil discoveries vital for Namibia.” New Era Live, April 25, 2019. https://neweralive​.na​/posts​/southern​-africa​-oil​-discoveries​-vital​-for​ -namibia. Accessed September 25, 2019. Desmet, Christy. Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, Identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Desmet, Christy. “Rhetorical Selves: Shakespeare’s Problem Characters and their Critics.” Ph.D. Diss, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984. Desmet, Christy, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson. The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2019. Dionne, Craig. Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene. Earth, Milky Way: Punctum Books, 2016. Dogme95​.​dk – a tribute to the official Dogme95. http://www​.dogme95​.dk/. Accessed May 14, 2019. Dollimore, Jonathon. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Ferguson, Margaret W., Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers. “Acknowledgments.” In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Gbandamosi, Nosmot. “Can Namibia Avoid the Resource Curse?,” Foreign Policy (March 23, 2022): https//foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/23/namibia-oil-resource curse. Ghosh, Amtiav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Gray, John. Seven Types of Atheism. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2018.

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Holland, Peter. “On the gravy train: Shakespeare, memory and forgetting.” In Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, edited by Peter Holland, 207–234. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Iyengar, Sujata. “Remembering Christy Desmet.” Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, University of Georgia. https://willson​ .uga​ .edu​ /remembering​ -Desmet​ -desmet/, n.d. Accessed May 21, 2019. Jess-Cooke, Carolyn. “‘The Promised End of Cinema’: Portraits of Cinematic Apocalypse in 21st Century Shakespearean Cinema.” Literature/Film Quarterly 34.2 (2006): 161–168. Joughin, John J. “Lear’s Afterlife.” In Shakespeare Survey 55, edited by Peter Holland, 67–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kermode, Frank. “Hawkesbiz.” London Review of Books, 15.3 (February 11, 1993): https://www​.lrb​.co​.uk​/v15​/n03​/frank​-kermode​/hawkesbiz. Accessed May 20, 2019. Keyishian, Harry rev. of Christy Desmet. “Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity.” Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996): 430–431. The King is Alive, dir. Kristian Levring, perf. David Bradley, Bruce Davidson, Janet McTeer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and David Calder. MGM, 2000. DVD. Chapter 4. The King is Alive, dir. Kristian Levring, perf. David Bradley, Bruce Davidson, Janet McTeer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and David Calder. MGM, 2000. DVD. Chapter 5. Ko, Yu Jin. “Introduction.” In Shakespeare’s Sense of Character: On the Page and From the Stage, edited by Yu Jin Ko and Michael W. Shurgott. New York: Routledge, 2016. Kunin, Aaron. Character as Form. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Lent, Jeremy. “Our Actions Create the Future: A Response to Jem Bendell.” resilience, April 15, 2019. https://www​.resilience​.org​/stories​/2019​-04​-15​/our​-actions​ -create​-the​-future​-a​-response​-to​-jem​-bendell/. Accessed May 27, 2019. Lindley, David. “The Year’s Contributions to Shakespeare Studies.” Shakespeare Survey v. 47 (1994). McDonald, Samuel Miller. “The Green New Deal Can’t Be Anything Like the New Deal.” The New Republic, May 31, 2019. https://newrepublic​.com​/article​/153996​/ green​-new​-deal​-cant​-anything​-like​-new​-deal. Accessed June 4, 2019. O’Dair, Sharon. “Afterword.” Shakespeare Bulletin 36, (2018): 501–509. O’Dair, Sharon. “On the Value of Being a Cartoon, in Literature and in Life.” In Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, edited by Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer. New York: Palgrave, 2001. O’Dair, Sharon. “Slow Shakespeare; An Eco-Critique of ‘Method’ in Early Modern Ecostudies.” In Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare, edited by Ivo Kamps, Karen Raber, and Thomas Hallock. Palgrave, 2008. O’Dair, Sharon. “The Social Self of the Hero in Shakespearean Tragedy.” Ph.D. Diss, University of California, Berkeley, 1988. O’Dair, Sharon. “The State of the Green: A Review Essay on Shakespearean Ecocriticism.” Shakespeare 4 (December 2008): 459–477.

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O’Malley, Evelyn. “‘To weather a play’: Audiences, Outdoor Shakespeares, and Avant-Garde Nostalgia at The Willow Globe.” Shakespeare Bulletin 36.3 (2018): 409–427. Pechter, Edward. “Character Criticism, the Cognitive Turn, and the Problem of Shakespeare Studies.” Shakespeare Studies v. 24 (2014): 196–228. Shakespeare, William. King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes. London: Thomson Learning, 1997. Snyder, Susan. “Othello and the Conventions of Romantic Comedy.” Renaissance Drama, ns, 5, (1972): 123–141. Stallybrass, Peter. “Patriarchial Territories: The Body Enclosed.” In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Swanner, Seth. “‘The Word in the Desert’: Visual, Textual, and Gastrointestinal Separateness in Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive.” Manuscript courtesy of the author. Windham, Jacinta. “Namibia’s Exploration Drive Goes on Despite Setbacks.” Petroleum Economist, November 21, 2018. https://www​ .petroleum​ -economist​ .com​/articles​/politics​-economics​/africa​/2018​/namibias​-exploration​-drive​-goes​-on​ -despite​-setbacks. Accessed September 25, 2019. Wittreich, Joseph. Image of that Horror: History, Prophecy, and Apocalypse in King Lear. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1984. Wittreich, Joseph. “‘Image of that Horror’: The Apocalypse in King Lear.” In The Apocalypse in English Renaissance thought and literature: patterns, antecedents and repercussions, edited by C.A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich, 175–206. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.

Afterword Characterizing Christy Desmet Sujata Iyengar

The essays in this volume represent many aspects of Christy Desmet’s character and achievements, often overlapping in fascinating ways. Sharon O’Dair comments both on Desmet’s prescient work integrating character-criticism with the challenges of post-structuralism (Christy read “high theory” avidly, bequeathing literal bookshelves of volumes on visual art and rhetoric, new media studies, composition theory, film theory, and other dense material to grateful graduate students and colleagues upon her death).1 Matthew Kozusko’s essay elegantly demonstrates the kind of scholarship that can emerge from such an admixture. O’Dair also considers the ethics that inspired and grounded Desmet’s work in appropriation and adaptation, an interest the latter shared with Lisa Starks and Alexa Joubin, both of whom reflect upon character and how Shakespeare in performance enables or disables us from paying those kindly debts. Joubin’s essay also testifies to Christy’s love of travel and interest in world Shakespeares; Starks’s, to Christy’s interest in Judaica and social justice. Stephen O’Neill and Richard Finkelstein extend Desmet’s innovative, ongoing interest in non-professional YouTube Shakespeare, an archive under-investigated and underestimated until scholars such as Christy Desmet and Ayanna Thompson began to take it, and its creators, seriously. (Christy’s interest in YouTube was to me extraordinary—when we flagged, usually in mid-afternoon, Christy always had an animal video at the ready; at first I rolled my eyes but by 2017 I was regularly re-sharing them on social media and “collecting” them for her.) Peter Holland and Darlena Ciraulo follow this example of showing us the value of unconsidered trifles by offering witty and thoughtful readings of “trailers” for Shakespeare films and plays on the one hand, and Shakespearean references in Batman comics, on the other, while Katherine Scheil overtly extends Desmet’s most recent 221

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work on commonplacing and quotation to examine a phenomenon I call “Fakespeare”—the misplaced attribution of old saws, proverbs, platitudes, and all manner of Polonius-like pieces of advice to “Shakespeare” in global social media. (Forthcoming work from Philip Gilreath, the last early modern PhD student to have worked directly, and traveled with, “the Desmet and Iyengar double-act,” as we were apparently known, similarly examines a particular example of World Fakespeare: a Chinese proverb widely attributed to Shakespeare by English Language Learners in a series of first-year writing classes.) Jonathan Baldo plays with a different aspect of Desmet’s recent work, in which “alien Shakespeares” extend from the page into and around real life. The game of “handy-dandy” reminds us that to watch, to write, and to enact Shakespeare is also serious play (and young children are indeed very serious when they play, as anyone who has inadvertently won a game of Candyland with a pre-schooler can testify). Anne Williams’ beautiful essay convincingly uses Hamlet to argue that Walpole appropriated Shakespeare in his novel, his house, and even his life: Shakespeare made and unmade the man. What’s left? Well, Desmet’s influence in Composition Studies and e-Portfolio cannot be reasonably represented in this particular volume—for that, you have to consult the open-access collection dedicated to her, ePortfolios@edu: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and Everything In-Between, edited by Mary Ann Dellinger and D. Alexis Hart.2 David Schiller, Christy’s widower, is completing their coauthored book on Kenneth Burke with another Burke scholar. What’s left is Christy as editor. Williams prefaces her essay with an account of her work with Desmet as coeditor of a scholarly collection and coauthor of its introduction, a collaborative role likewise cherished by Robert Sawyer, twice, and by others since.3 But where Christy herself felt her work had made the most difference to Shakespeare studies was in the publication, first, of Shakespeare and Appropriation, coedited with Sawyer, and then the foundation, with me, of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Here is the story of the journal’s birth, the principles that we developed, its struggles to survive, and its persistence. Like Christy, B&L is a scrappy fighter. In 1999, Christy Desmet and her then-PhD student Robert Sawyer published the ground-breaking volume Shakespeare and Appropriation, which defined and legitimized a new field in Shakespeare studies—the study of Shakespearean adaptations, appropriations, off-shoots, riffs, remixes, mashups, remediations—all the playful liberties that readers, writers, performers, actors, and other creators take with Shakespeare’s plays, poems, characters, words, and biography. Shax and App (Christy’s nickname for the book, and for the field) argued that such adaptations could be worthy objects of scholarly study and that these objects could themselves transform the ways in

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which we read and perform Shakespeare, notably by drawing attention to historically under-appreciated aspects of Shakespearean performance, rhetoric, characterization, and plot. Desmet and Sawyer followed Shax and App with a companion volume, Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare (2001). I was at that time a new assistant professor at the University of Georgia (UGA), Christy my senior colleague. I popped into her office with a routine enquiry and she proudly gestured towards the proofs of Shax and App on her desk: “Look!” I arrogantly suggested that one volume wasn’t enough: “You should found a journal.” For good measure, I suggested that such a periodical be called Shakespeherian Rags, with a hat-tip to Terence Hawkes, whom I’d never met but who was an old friend of Christy and Robert’s, and an indirect allusion to Persse McGarrigle, the hapless graduate student in David Lodge’s classic academic novel Small World (1984), who blurts out impulsively that he is writing about “the influence of T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare” and then makes a good case for doing so. Christy, as was typical of her, carefully pondered the idea privately for several years, before suddenly startling me in 2004 with the follow-up, “You’re right: we should found a journal, and it should be online, and we should use ”—electronic markup and management application, an in-housecreated immersive online writing environment that allowed students and instructors to create, mark up, review, and archive streamlined and elegant online writing portfolios—“and our first issue should be on Robert’s and my Shakespeare Association seminar, Shakespeare in the South, and we’ll dedicate it to [a former colleague] and keep it a surprise!” (That part did not work out so well: our erstwhile colleague was mortally offended at having been left out of the loop, a lapse of judgement on Christy’s and my part that I regret to this day.) The journal, the open-access, open-source, online, multimedia, scholarly periodical Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (B&L), went on to win the “Best New Journal” award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2007 and innovated not only in its content (it was the first scholarly journal devoted to the study of Shakespeare’s afterlives) but also in its form and platform, the former by graphic designer Bill Reeves of the University of Georgia Printing Department and the latter by academic professional and environmentalist Ron Balthazor. It was and still is the first online scholarly humanities periodical to integrate rich multimedia including image, video, and sound, printable dynamic pdfs, and deep electronic “markup” to allow future indexing and classification. The journal includes long-form, densely-annotated and xml-tagged multimedia articles as well as shorter pieces in sections on “Appropriations in Performance,” “Digital Appropriations,” “Book Reviews,” and (since 2018) “Notes,” edited by section-editors (faculty at other institutions or, in the early years, graduate

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students at UGA). B&L has an international readership and is indexed in the World Shakespeare Bibliography, the MLA International Bibliography, and other databases, and articles are frequently reprinted by Gale/Cengage. The degree of B&L’s innovation can be measured by the fact that even a decade later, the inclusion of multimedia in online humanities journals is still unusual, and the depth and richness of our xml archive and its powerful potential searching and sorting abilities is still unmatched. We initially used emma, along with a hacked version of jEdit, a programmer’s text editor, to collect, tag, design, publish, and archive B&L; from 2011 or so we used jEdit and a custom-designed Symfony php framework (I don’t know what that phrase means except to say that it allowed Ron to write a series of applications that let us publish a beautiful on-screen journal with embedded images and video, a text-only pdf for readers to print out, and a “back end” of source material for an archive. This is still very difficult, if not impossible, for most academic journals to achieve). The journal thus contains a rich trove of metadata for future scholars as well as a present (and by now, historic) resource. What we didn’t anticipate, however, was that the very topic of Shakespearean adaptation would draw in hitherto-underrepresented groups in Shakespeare Studies—contingent faculty, independent scholars, scholars at teachingintensive institutions, women scholars, and scholars of color. Christy and I were both committed to mentoring and publishing these kinds of scholars as well as Early Career Researchers and from very early on developed several practices to accommodate the faculty whom Sharon O’Dair and Tim Francisco’s recent collection dubs “the 99%”: those who lack the research funds, sabbaticals, small classes, well-funded libraries, and the ability to teach within their fields of expertise.4 Christy was particularly committed to the precariat because of her own “survivor’s guilt” on the one hand and her responsibilities to the instructors she supervised in the first-year writing program on the other. She described her cohort to me as “the forgotten lost generation” of academics, those who graduated in the 1980s after what we might call the GI “bust,” and could tell me who had landed where—who, after decades of adjuncting, achieved full-time status at a community college; who rose through the administrative ranks; and who left the profession. Her position as director of first-year writing put her in an uncomfortable middle management role between department head and those who conduct by some estimates “75 percent of instruction in U.S. universities,” the contingent faculty, temporary instructors, part-time instructors, graduate students, and untenured instructors whose hard-won expertise remains unrewarded on three levels and whose labor and skills usually remain unrecognized by their institutions, by the profession for which they trained so tenaciously, and by the structures of late capitalism in the West.5 As Anne Allison and Charlie Piot summarize, “precarious laborers

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[are] often without the time (or means) to produce the type of article that will be accepted by [a scholarly] journal.”6 We learnt by trial and error about encouraging and nurturing early career, contingent, minoritized, and precarious scholars—and when and how we reached the limits of what we could do under the constraints of late capitalism. Our very first issue, “Shakespeare in the South,” grew out of a Shakespeare Association of America seminar with senior scholars, including the aforementioned late eminence grise Terence Hawkes, whose imprimatur gave us instant gravitas and sound political credentials. At the same time, we included essays by seven early career scholars, two of whom had contingent status. Our topics and our approach quickly drew authors from all over the world, including those from former Eastern European nations and developing nations who lacked the scholarly infrastructure (well-stocked libraries, computer access, electronic databases, digital bibliographies) of the United States or Western Europe. Figure 12.1 a table showing the numbers of untenured authors we have published over the past fifteen years, subdivided to exclude assistant professors (ASTPs) and those on permanent tracks. My intention is not to create an “Olympics of Oppression” hereby separating ASTPs, since I still remember that feeling of precarity during those probationary years. At the same time, however, I want to acknowledge that the precarity of an ASTP (until their final year) differs measurably from that of graduate students and contingent faculty and independent scholars, not least because of the financial security of a tenure-track position.​ Few studies exist to quantify the unpaid labor that goes into producing a standard, peer-reviewed scholarly article. As Lauren Bridges writes about freelance editors, It has become normalised within the publishing industry, and among editors, to pursue a meaningful career at almost any cost. Unpaid work has become the backbone of the industry where almost everyone starts out as an intern. Furthermore, it appears that the “push” out of full-time work towards flexible arrangements is almost inevitable at some point during one’s career where women, in particular, have come to accept a certain level of precarity in their work. And the creative industries have come to depend on these flexible workers.7

A comparative study from 2011 found that humanities academics in the United States spent about fifteen hours a week on research when classes were in session, and twenty-four hours a week on research when classes were not (and I’ll add that many of us in the United States are considered “off contract” when classes are not in session, and budgeted as nine- or ten-month

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Figure 12.1  Untenured and Precarious Authors, 2005–20. Source: By Sujata Iyengar, 2020.

employees, so that twenty-four hours a week is all unpaid labor even for those with permanent faculty positions).8 A recent mathematical model (2020) suggests that university faculty work 142 percent of a standard US work week, especially when teaching multiple new or unique courses, or when we have an excessive teaching responsibility (as is usually the case with contingent faculty, our so-called Freeway Flyers).9 How can a freeway flyer teaching five courses a semester at three different institutions carve out time to produce a research article? I’m a tenured full professor, and the model I quote above estimates that I have only sixtynine hours a year to devote to paid research.10 The study recommends that institutions should . . . view [a contract] as an agreement with the faculty by the institution to acquire a maximum number of working hours per contract year. An employment contract should not be viewed or treated as an all-access pass to control every hour of each faculty member’s time year-round.

This recommendation is of course even truer for the precariat. My hypothetical freeway flyer would have zero hours to spend on her research. And yet without those all-important peer-reviewed journal articles, precarious faculty are even less likely to secure permanent positions, and to be even more bereft of scholarly community.

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We can’t fix this problem ourselves, and, as I’ll go on to discuss, the journal has itself been precarious. But foregrounding teaching responsibilities ourselves—including our responsibilities to our graduate students—helped us form more progressive publishing practices. From writing pedagogy, we took the importance of writing as a process and the importance of peer-review as a collaborative practice, rather than a final, evaluative, authoritative assessment from an all-knowing or all-perfect master. We therefore began by requiring detailed readers’ reports that offered suggestions for revision, rather than dismissive or curt rejections, offering generous resubmission policies that took account of the fact that most faculty have limited research and writing time; and working with authors both to revise their essays in light of peerreviewers’ anonymized comments and to secure hard-to-find sources or even to pay image permissions where authors’ institutions lacked resources to do so. These processes mean that we sometimes “fire” reviewers for harshness or impatience; we found ourselves soliciting reviewers who, perhaps lacking PhD students of their own, are actually eager to respond to the work of other scholars rather than burnt out. I’ll add that regularly refreshing the pool of reviewers in this way has also allowed us to keep up with current thinking about inclusivity. It’s easier to write short things than long things. So we also included sections of the journal where we published short, thesis-driven articles, just 2,000–4,000 words, most recently the “Notes” section, where we hope researchers can investigate a topic in a couple of 1,000 words, and then if they wish to revisit the topic at greater length in a book manuscript or in a longer article for another journal. We have also just revised our word length for regular articles down to 5,000 words, both to accommodate changing reading practices and to make it easier for faculty to convert conference papers or teaching materials. It’s easier to write with a buddy. And it’s easier to write about what you have to teach (as Griffith and Altenay’s study suggests). So we encourage faculty to submit pedagogical essays, and rather than cordoning these off in a “practice” or “teaching” section, we include this work alongside traditional archival and critical scholarship. We also support collaborative and coauthored work, with peers or with students, and we work with coauthors to encourage ethical practices. Ongoing and regular feedback, sometimes leading to three or even four drafts of an article, is time-consuming, however, and none of the editors receives any release time to manage the journal. The journal is itself precarious. We have no endowment. Until 2019, we had server space in the English Department, which paid for CrossRef membership; that award expired in 2020, when the person who maintained that server and offered us tech support retired. We therefore moved to the UGA Libraries, with server space

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and a reliable platform, where, however, we could not reproduce our distinctive multimedia interface nor pdf text generation. We obtained a renewable stipend from our Humanities Center for a graduate student managing editor, but not enough to pay for all the hours we need, so we also rely on graduate students and uncompensated precariat volunteers. In 2021 we gratefully moved to our current home at the Arizona Center for Medieval Studies, with the professional editorial services of Managing Editor Geoffrey Way. When I have asked for more support, a dean suggested we should start charging authors a review fee to publish with us; this would obviously hamper early career and untenured researchers, and I don’t believe we could strong-arm senior scholars to paying to publish with us in order to subsidize untenured scholars. We did add, however, a Wikipedia-style “Donate” button. So our greatest weakness is that we are no quicker than—and at points of personal crisis for the editors (notably miscarriage, childbirth, cancer, heart attacks, family illness) we have been slower than—other scholarly print journals, which also imposes a hardship on untenured or early career scholars in particular. I can’t help but see the journal’s situation as emblematic of the profession as a whole and of precarity. There is work, no end of work, and there are qualified persons to do it, and there is money, and moreover, there is a need for qualified and experienced editors nationwide to curate and fact-check the information in which we currently drown. But what there isn’t—as yet—is the political will to divert that money away from tax breaks for corporate behemoths (including academic publishing conglomerates) in ways that would make academic thriving possible again for both those who are, like me, chronically overworked and those who are also overworked, but precariously under-employed and underpaid. Such a transformation of the profession would fittingly synthesize Christy’s intense intellectual curiosity, her fierce advocacy for graduate students and contingent faculty, and her generous, generative scholarship.

NOTES 1. Academic convention serves me poorly in a piece such as this. I try to refer to “Desmet” when discussing Christy Desmet’s scholarly work, and “Christy” when I discuss our personal friendship or our work together on Borrowers and Lenders, but I can’t always compartmentalize. 2. ePortfolios@edu: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and Everything In-Between, edited by Mary Ann Dellinger and D. Alexis Hart (Fort Collins and Boulder: The WAC Clearing House/University Press of Colorado, 2020), https://wac​ .colostate​.edu​/books​/practice​/portfolios/.

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3. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, eds., Shakespeare and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 1999); Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, eds., Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Christy Desmet and Anne Williams, eds., Shakespearean Gothic (Aberystwyth: University of Wales Press, 2009); Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey, eds., Shakespeare/ Not Shakespeare (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2017); Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson, eds., Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). 4. Sharon O’Dair and Tim Francisco, eds. Shakespeare and the “99%”: Literary Studies, The Profession, and the Production of Inequity (New York and London: Palgrave, 2019). 5. Christopher Kelty, Anne Allison, Charlie Piot, Ali Kenner, and Timothy Elfenbein, “Beyond Copyright and Technology: What Open Access Can Tell Us about Precarity, Authority, Innovation, and Automation in the University Today.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 29, no. 2 (2014), https://journal​.culanth​.org​/index​.php​/ca​ /article​/view​/ca29​.2​.02​/287. 6. Kelty et al., op. cit. 7. Lauren E. Bridges, “Flexible as Freedom? The Dynamics of Creative Industry Work and the Case Study of the Editor in Publishing,” New Media & Society, vol. 20, no. 4, 2018, pp. 1303–1319. doi: 10.1177/1461444816688920. 8. Peter James Bentley and Kyvik Svein. “Academic Work from a Comparative Perspective: A Survey of Faculty Working Time across 13 Countries.” Higher Education, vol. 63, no. 4, April 2012, pp. 529–547. 9. Andrew S. Griffith and Zeynep Altinay, “A Framework to Assess Higher Education Faculty Workload in U.S. Universities,” Innovations in Education and Teaching International, vol. 57, no. 6, 2020, pp. 691–700. doi: 10.1080/1470 3297.2020.1786432 10. Griffith and Altinay, op. cit.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bentley, Peter James, and Kyvik Svein. “Academic Work from a Comparative Perspective: A Survey of Faculty Working Time across 13 Countries.” Higher Education, vol. 63, no. 4, April 2012, 529–547. Bridges, Lauren E. “Flexible as Freedom? The Dynamics of Creative Industry Work and the Case Study of the Editor in Publishing.” New Media & Society, vol. 20, no. 4, 2018, 303–1319. doi: 10.1177/1461444816688920. Dellinger, Mary Ann, and D. Alexis Hart, eds. ePortfolios@edu: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and Everything In-Between. Fort Collins and Boulder: The WAC Clearing House/University Press of Colorado, 2020, https://wac​.colostate​ .edu​/books​/practice​/portfolios/. Desmet, Christy, and Robert Sawyer, eds. Shakespeare and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 1999.

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Desmet, Christy, and Robert Sawyer, eds. Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Desmet, Christy, and Anne Williams, eds. Shakespearean Gothic. Aberystwyth: University of Wales Press, 2009. Desmet, Christy, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey, eds. Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2017. Desmet, Christy, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson, eds. Shakespeare and Global Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. Griffith, Andrew S., and Zeynep Altinay. “A Framework to Assess Higher Education Faculty Workload in U.S. Universities.” Innovations in Education and Teaching International, vol. 57, no. 6, 2020. 691–700. doi: 10.1080/14703297.2020.1786432 Kelty, Christopher, Anne Allison, Charlie Piot, Ali Kenner, and Timothy Elfenbein. “Beyond Copyright and Technology: What Open Access Can Tell Us about Precarity, Authority, Innovation, and Automation in the University Today.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 29, no. 2 (2014), https://journal​.culanth​.org​/index​.php​ /ca​/article​/view​/ca29​.2​.02​/287. O’Dair, Sharon, and Tim Francisco, eds. Shakespeare and the “99%”: Literary Studies, The Profession, and the Production of Inequity. New York and London: Palgrave, 2019.

Index

Adelman, Janet, 42 Adorno, Theodor W., 117 Allott, Robert, 49 Anglo-Scots Union Commission, 28 Aristotle, 127, 133–34, 201, 203 Arnaudo, Marco, 73 Auld Alliance, 27 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3 Baldo, Jonathan, 4, 222 Banks, Fiona, 131 Barker, Martin, 74 Barrie, J. M., 55 Barthes, Roland, 78 Batman, 6, 71–85, 97, 221 Bell, Lake, 95 Belsey, Catherine, 200 Benedict, Ruth, 171 Benjamin, Harry, 171 Benjamin, Walter, 112, 118–21 Berger, Arthur Asa, 77 Berger, James, 206 Bernard-Donals, Michael, 147 Blake, Madge, 78 Blake, William, 25 Bodenhan, John, 49 Bogost, Ian, 4, 181–82 Boito, Arrigo, 52 Bolter, Jay David, 3 Bornstein, Kate, 172

Braidott, Rosa, 188 Brewster, Paul, 15 Bristol, Michael, 2, 77, 201–3 Brooker, Will, 83–84 Bullough, Bonnie, 174 Bullough, Vern L., 174 Bulman, J. C., 150 Burge, Stuart, 98 Burke, Kenneth, 201, 222 Burzynska, Katarzyna, 179, 187–88 Butler, Judith, 173 Bysshe, Edward, 50 Caird, John, 164 Cameron, Ed, 43 Carlei, Carlo, 99 Carpaccio, Vittore, 157 Cartelli, Thomas, 208–9 Casey, Jim, 6 The Castle of Otronto: A Gothic Story. See Walpole, Horace Chiang, Howard, 172 Christopher, Brandon, 76 Ciraulo, Darlena, 6, 221 Cole, William, 36–37 Cowden Clark, Mary, 51 Cox Miles, Catherin, 171 Craig, Yvonne, 79 Crichton, Michael, 179 Crosby, Joseph, 51, 64 231

232

Culler, Jonathan, 200 Currie, Gregory, 133–35 Daly, Melanie, 61 Danziger, Heinz, 150 Darling, Benjamin, 51 da Vinci, Leonardo, 179, 187–88 de Cervantes, Miguel, 82 de Grazia, Margreta, 64, 76 de’Medici, Marie, 26–27 Desmet, Christy, 1–11 Detective Comics, 73 Dexter, John, 98 Diaz, Cameron, 94 Dionne, Craig, 185, 207 Disraeli, Benjamin, 149 Djawadi, Ramin, 186 Dodd, William, 134 Dollimore, Jonathan, 200 Dorsen, Annie, 186–87 Dozier, William, 71 du Duffand, Marquise, 35 Dugdale, Sir William, 44 Eco, Umberto, 185 Edmondson, Adrian, 108 Elizabethan, 2, 17, 75 Erasmus, Desiderius, 185 Essiedu, Paapa, 107 Evans, Maurice, 82 Facebook, 6, 49, 52, 109 Favard, Florent, 189 Fazel, Valerie, M., 4, 63, 77 Fellowes, Julian, 131 Fielding, Henry, 50 Fiennes, Joseph, 169 Fiennes, Ralph, 102 Finger, Bill, 73 Fingestein, Peter, 41 Finkelstein, Richard, 6, 221 Foakes, R. A., 19, 21 Folger Shakespeare, 182 Fool, 18 Ford, John, 180

Index

Fosse, Bob, 151 French, Andrew, 151 French, Emma, 94 Freud, Sigmund, 5, 36, 40–41 Galloway, Bruce, 27 Garber, Marjorie, 38, 52, 55, 183 Garrick, David, 38 Garson, Greer, 101 Geddes, Louise, 4, 63, 77 George I, 40 Gielgud, Sir John, 80, 190 Gildon, Charles, 50 Giles Eccardt, John, 44 Gillespie, Tarleton, 186 The Globe Theatre, 24, 80, 107, 152–53, 164 Godwin, Simon, 107 Goldsmith, Oliver, 50 Goodman, Henry, 151–52 Goody, Alex, 186 Gordin, Jacob, 174 Gray, Thomas, 40 Grayson, Dick, 71–85 Griffith, Elizabeth, 51 Griggs, Yvonne, 3 Grigley, Joseph, 135 Grusin, Richard, 3 Habbick, Victor, 188 Halberstam, Jack, 172 Halliwell-Phillipps, James O., 19 Handy-Dandy, 5 Haraway, Donna, 188 Hartley, Andrew, 134 Hawkes, Terry, xi, 223, 225 Hayles, Katherine, 180 Heidegger, Martin, 117 Henderson, Diana E., 2 Henri IV, 26–27 Henry VII, 17 Henry VIII, 17 Herthum, Louis, 183 Herzog, Anna, 7, 147 Hiddleston, Tom, 108–9

Index

Hill, Wayne F., 52 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 171 Hodgdon, Barbara, 2, 72, 112, 117 Hoffman, Michael, 104 Holland, Peter, 6, 207, 209, 221 Holocaust, 145–58 Hopkins, Anthony, 179, 188 Houghton Hall, 41 Huang, Alexa, 3 Hunt, Chris, 146 Hutcheon, Linda, 3 Irving, Henry, 149 Isherwood, Anne, 51 Iyengar, Sujata, 2, 128, 199, 205 Jacobean, 2, 5, 16 Jacobson, Miriam, 8 James I, 26 Jenkins, Henry, 84 Jess-Cooke, Carolyn, 206–7 Johnson, Samuel, 50 Johnston, George, 51 Jones, C. B., 51 Joon-gi, Lee, 7, 166–70 Joubin, Alexa Alice, 7, 221 Joughin, John, 209 Jourdan, Gabrielle, 151–52 Joy, Lisa, 179 Juhasz, Alexandra, 111 Jules and Monty, 112–24 Junger, Gil, 99 Kane, Bob, 73 Kate Minola, 112–24 Kaufman, Steve, 84 Kemp, Sawyer, 173 Kent, 18, 21 Kerr, Deborah, 101 Ketton-Cremer, H. V., 41 Keyishian, Harry, 203–4 The King and the Clown, 7, 166–74 The King is Alive, 8, 199–211 Kinsey, Alfred, 171 Kirwan, Peter, 60

Klett, Elizabeth, 173 Kline, Kevin, 105 Knights, L. C., 136, 201 Kolb, Laura, 2 Kozusko, Matthew, 7, 221 Kristeva, Julia, 3 Kurosawa, Akira, 7, 165 Lacan, Jacques, 43 LaFontaine, Don, 95 Lanier, Doug, 6 Lapotaire, Jane, 149 Lee, Jr., Maurice, 26 Levering, Kristian, 8, 205 Levin, Harry, 23 Levinas, Emmanuel L., 7, 145–58 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 114 Lewis, W. S., 40 Lichtenstein, Roy, 84 Loper, Natalie, 6 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 93 Lothian, Alexis, 172 Lough, Robin, 146 Lucas, George, 93 Luscombe, Chris, 108 Lyons, Siobhan, 187 Lyttelton, Charles, 44 Maccoy, Peter, 78–79 Magnus, Laury, 158 Malinowska, Anna, 84 Mankiewicz, Herman J., 101 Marcus, Leah, 27 Márcus, Zoltán, 52, 62 Marlowe, Christopher, 106 McDowell, Roddy, 82 Mead, Margaret, 171 Medhurst, Andy, 80, 95 Michelangelo, 188 Miller, Jonathan, 146–58 Milton, John, 158 Mittel, Jason, 180 Money, John, 171 Mori, Masahiro, 187 Morton, Timothy, 85

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234

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 107 Muller, Heiner, 186 Munby, Jonathan, 146–48, 152–58 Murray, Timothy, 169 Napier, Alan, 80 Nashe, Thomas, 191 Newmar, Julie, 81 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 133 Nolan, Jonathan, 179 Nothing Much to Do, 112–24 Nunn, Trevor, 105, 146–48, 151–58 O’Dair, Sharon, 8, 221, 224 Oldys, William, 50 Olivier, Laurence, 97–99, 149 O’Neill, Stephen, 7, 8, 52, 64, 221 Orff, Carl, 107 Ottchen, Cynthia J., 52 Paltrow, Gwyneth, 106, 169 Parker, Oliver, 95 Pearson, Roberta E., 73 Pechter, Edward, 201–2 Pennington, Michael, 107 Picasso, Pablo, 60 Pinterest, 49, 52, 63 Pirandello, Luigi, 118 Pittman, L. Monique, 156 Plowright, Joan, 150 Plumb, J. H., 40 Poole, Joshua, 49 Pope, Alexander, 43, 50 Pryce, Jonathan, 152–53 Purnell, Louise, 149 Quintilian, 20 Racine, Jean, 37–38 Radford, Michael, 8, 145, 147, 153, 155–58 Reid, Malcolm, 150 Reinhard, Kenneth, 24 Reinhard Lupton, Julia, 24 Rhodes, Neil, 49 Rich, Adrienne, 172

Index

Richardson, Samuel, 50 Rivlin, Elizabeth, 3 Rowe, Katherine, 208–9 Rowe, Nicholas, 50 Rumbold, Kate, 51, 63 Rylance, Mark, 164 Saber, Peter, 40 Sanchez, Melissa E., 7 Sanders, Julie, 3 Sawyer, Robert, xi, 222 Scheil, Katherine, 5, 221 Semple, Jr., Lorenzo, 81 Shakespeare, William: 1 Henry IV, 82–83; 2 Henry IV, 135, 185–86; 3 Henry VI, 75, 82, 127; As You Like It, 73, 80, 82, 163, 165, 190; Cleopatra, 101; Comedy of Errors, 82; Coriolanus, 102, 108; Cymbeline, 19, 163, 204; Hamlet, 1, 5, 35–45, 75, 81–83, 99, 101, 107–8, 130–31, 135, 138, 166, 180, 186, 190, 209, 222; Henry IV, 17; Henry V, 17, 98; Julius Caesar, 75, 80–82, 101, 108, 192; King Lear, 5, 15–30, 104, 180, 185, 188, 192, 206–9; Macbeth, 75, 80, 82–83, 101, 127, 131, 138, 165; Measure for Measure, 42; The Merchant of Venice, 7–8, 82, 145–58; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 51–52, 83, 163, 173; Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 42, 82, 104–5, 186; Much Ado About Nothing, 103, 116, 119–20; Othello, 75, 96, 98–99, 127, 182, 200; Richard II, 82–83, 93, 107; Richard III, 82, 101, 107; Romeo and Juliet, 52, 76, 81–83, 99, 113–15, 120, 131–32, 169, 179, 183, 190; The Taming of the Shrew, 109, 121–23, 166–67; The Tempest, 182–83, 185; Titus Andronicus, 101–2; Twelfth Night, 17, 82–83, 105, 107, 108, 163–67, 173; Two Gentlemen of Verona, 19, 57; Venus and Adonis, 19 Shakespeare in Love, 95, 105, 106, 137, 169

Index

Shelley, Mary, 180 Shinji, Kimura, 164 Sichel, John, 146 Simon, Bennett, 18 Skura, Meredith, 113 Sleep No More, 131 Smith, Bruce, 23 Snyder, Susan, 200 Spenser, Edmund, 19 Spigel, Lynn, 84 Sprang, Dick, 74 Stallybrass, Peter, 200 Starks, Lisa, 7, 221 Star Wars, 93 Stein, Gertrude, 180 Strawberry Hill House, 5, 35–45 Taylor, Gary, 23, 26 Taymor, Julie, 101–2, 174 Tennant, David, 107 Terman, Lewis, 171 Terry, Michelle, 174 Theobald, Lewis, 50 Thiselton Dyer, T. F., 19 Thornton Burnett, Michael, 156, 158 Throne of Blood, 7, 165–66, 173–74 Tracy, Ann B., 36 Twitter, 5, 49, 52, 100 Uricchio, William, 73

van Dyke, Henry Jackson, 55 Verdi, Giuseppe, 52 Viscott, David, 60 Voltaire, 37 Walpole, Catherine, 44 Walpole, Horace, 5, 35–45, 50, 222 Walpole, Sir Robert, 39–45 Walton, William, 107 Ward, Burt, 71 Warhol, Andy, 84 Warner, Deborah, 173 Warnock, Mary, 151 Wartenberg, Thomas E., 74 Wayne, Bruce, 6, 71–85 Webster, Margaret, 80, 83 Welles, Orson, 80 Wertham, Frederic, 80 West, Adam, 71, 81, 83–85 Westworld, 8, 179–93 Whedon, Joss, 103–4 Williams, Anne, 5, 222 Winckler, Reto, 189 Wood, Evan Rachel, 183 Woolf, Virginia, 76 Wooten, John, 44 Worthen, W. B., 182 Yeats, W. B., 105 Yost, Michelle K., 53

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About the Editor and Contributors

Jonathan Baldo is professor of English at the Eastman School of Music, the University of Rochester. He is the author of Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England (2012) and The Unmasking of Drama (1996). His essays on Shakespeare have appeared in a wide range of essay collections and journals, including Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare: A Journal of the British Shakespeare Association, Borrowers and Lenders, Criticism, and Modern Language Quarterly. He is coeditor, with Isabel Karremann, of Forms of Faith: Literary Form and Religious Conflict in Shakespeare’s England (2017) and of the forthcoming Memory and Affect in Shakespeare’s England (2022). Darlena Ciraulo is professor of English at the University of Central Missouri where she specializes in early modern British literature and Shakespeare. Her work on Shakespeare and appropriation has appeared in Philological Quarterly, Philosophy and Literature, Multicultural Shakespeare, and Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Her passion for visual culture has led to appropriation research on Shakespeare, art, and film; she has written on Shakespeare in Hollywood (2018), Shakespeare in Western films (2017), and botanical illustration in Romeo and Juliet (2015). Her research on Shakespeare in cartoons and comics is forthcoming. She is also working on a book-length project that explores appropriations of Shakespeare’s sonnets in the nineteenth century. Richard Finkelstein is professor emeritus at SUNY-Geneseo and retired dean of arts and sciences and professor of English at the University of Mary Washington. A friend of Christy Desmet for over thirty years, he has written 237

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About the Editor and Contributors

on Shakespeare and the transition to Protestantism in early modern England, and on relationships between Roman philosophy and Renaissance drama. With an interest in appropriations of Shakespeare, he has also published on Disney’s use of The Tempest and 1 Henry IV. Peter Holland is McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He was editor of Shakespeare Survey for nineteen years and is co-general editor for Oxford Shakespeare Topics, Arden Shakespeare in the Theatre and the Arden Shakespeare 4th Series. Major Shakespeare editions include A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Coriolanus. He is the author of over 150 articles and book chapters on Shakespeare, Garrick, pantomime and other topics. His most recent books are Shakespeare and Geek Culture (coedited with Andrew Hartley) and Shakespeare and Forgetting (2021). He is chair of the International Shakespeare Association. Sujata Iyengar, professor of English at the University of Georgia, cofounded Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation with the late Christy Desmet in 2005 and coedited it with her until Desmet’s death in 2018; she now coedits the journal with Matthew Kozusko and Louise Geddes. With Desmet, she coauthored essays on the poetics of xml (2009), social media Shakespeares (2012), and theories of adaptation (2015), and coedited (with their colleague Miriam Jacobson) Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (2020). Iyengar’s single-authored and solo editing projects include Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color and Race in Early Modern England (2005), Shakespeare’s Medical Language (2011), Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (2015), and Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory (forthcoming). She is currently working on “Shakespeare and the Art of the Book,” an examination of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Shakespearean artists’ books and of innovations in book form as aesthetic, critical, and editorial appropriations of Shakespearean texts. Alexa Alice Joubin is professor of English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University in Washington, DC, where she cofounded and codirects the Digital Humanities Institute. She is the author of Shakespeare and East Asia (2021), coauthor of Race (with Martin Orkin, 2018), and coeditor of Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (2014). She is general coeditor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook, and held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Global Shakespeare Studies at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Warwick in the UK. Matthew Kozusko is professor of English at Ursinus College, where he teaches Shakespeare and early modern drama. His principal research interest

About the Editor and Contributors

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is in Shakespeare and questions of performance, theater history, and appropriation. He is editor of The Two Gentlemen of Verona (2014) and coeditor of Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage (2010) and has published articles in Shakespeare Survey, Early Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin, Borrowers & Lenders, and numerous collections. He is general editor for Borrowers & Lenders: the Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation and series editor for Shakespeare and the Stage. Sharon O’Dair is Professor Emerita at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. She coedited The Production of English Renaissance Culture (1994), is author of Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars (2000), edited “Shakespeareans in the Tempest: Lives and Afterlives of Katrina” a special issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (2010), and co-edited Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity (2019) She has published over sixty essays on Shakespeare, literary theory, critical methodology, and the profession of English studies—in literary magazines such as Michigan Quarterly Review; The Massachusetts Review; New Orleans Review; and The Baffler; in journals such as Shakespeare; Shakespeare Survey; Shakespeare Studies; Textual Practice; and New Literary History; and in edited volumes such as Digital Shakespeare: Redefining Scholarship and Practice; Elemental Ecocriticism; Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination; and Shakespeare/Sex: Contemporary Readings in Gender and Sexuality. Stephen O’Neill is associate professor in English at Maynooth University, Ireland. He is the author of Shakespeare and YouTube (2014), Staging Ireland: Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (2007) and editor of Broadcast Your Shakespeare (2018). He has published widely on adapted Shakespeare, especially in digital cultures, with recent work including an article on Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel Hamnet in the journal Shakespeare. He is coeditor of The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation (2022). His new work is focused on eco-critical approaches to literature, with a project on the literary life of trees in early modern Ireland. Robert Sawyer is professor of English at East Tennessee State University, where he teaches Shakespeare, Victorian Literature, and Literary Criticism. Author of Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare (2003), he is coeditor of Shakespeare and Appropriation (1999), and Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare (2001). His two most recent books are Marlowe and Shakespeare: The Critical Rivalry, published in 2017, and his work Shakespeare Between the World Wars, published in 2019.

240

About the Editor and Contributors

Katherine Scheil is professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Her books include the monographs Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway (2018), She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America (2012), and The Taste of the Town: Shakespearian Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Century Theatre (2003); and the essay collections Shakespeare & Biography (with Graham Holderness, 2020); Shakespeare & Stratford (2019); and Shakespeare/Adaptation/Modern Drama (with Randall Martin, 2011). Two of her new projects include a cultural history of women in Stratford, and a study of the history of Shakespeare’s family in biofiction, called Father Shakespeare. Lisa S. Starks is professor of English at the University of South Florida. She has published many articles and book chapters on Shakespeare and related topics. She is editor of the book collection Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theater (2020); author of the monograph Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid (2014); and coeditor, with Courtney Lehmann, of two book collection on Shakespeare and film (2002). Currently, she’s working on a new monograph entitled Shakespeare, Levinas, and Adaptation. Anne Williams is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Georgia. She has published numerous essays on Romantic, Gothic, and feminist subjects and two books: Prophetic Strain: The Greater Lyric in the Eighteenth Century and Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. She edited Three Vampire Tales: The Vampyre, Carmilla and Dracula. With Christy Desmet she coedited Shakespearean Gothic. She has held grants from the NEH, the ACLS, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Humanities Research Center. She is presently writing a psychobiography of Horace Walpole.